Musings

Y'all are in luck ("good" or "bad" luck is your call)...I forgot to do a column ahead of time and now it's too late to get anything serious prepared. So here is one of my semi-regular ramblings of thoughts....

R.I.P.

I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Pauline Kael whose film criticism I so enjoyed. I discovered her work while a college student and had a great time looking up her various movie reviews in her book collections. Kael had a way of describing movies in completely original terms, keying onto the underlying feelings behind actors, genres, situations...sure, she could be petty or inconsistent but who cared when the writing was so good? It's a reminder of how pathetic movie criticism has become today -- one step away from studio press releases.

Romantic heartthrob Troy Donohue also passed away very recently...of course, Mr. Donohue was 1/2 of the inspiration behind the Phil Hartman-voiced Troy McClure on The Simpsons, the other 1/2 being Doug McClure. I think Doug McClure was the stiff that Universal ran out in production after production in the '60s and '70s because Lew Wasserman's wife insisted he would be a star.

DVDs

Two of my favorite sci-fi programs are being lovingly restored. The first is of course Star Trek, where the DVD collection is now into the third season. The new transfers (from 35mm prints, not 16mm) are so good you can practically see the makeup on the actors and the stitching in the captain's toupee. (Also check out the dental improvements on the leading men in the first few episodes as they gradually got work done.) 35 years later the show still holds up in its best episodes as gripping television, and the mediocre ones have great entertainment value due to their iconic characters. Look for the fact that James Doohan never shows the camera his right hand since it is missing a finger (shot off in WWII).

A friend of mine loves the second season episodes in particular where five billion people have been killed by Nomad or something or other and then at the end it comes down to a corny joke between Spock and Bones. Wait a minute, what about the five billion dead people -- ?!

The other series is Robotech, a mid-'80s animated series cobbled together from three separate Japanese programs to fulfill U.S. syndication length requirements. (See www.robotech.com.) The DVDs are unfortunately just the broadcast versions without any remixing or clean-up work but the commentary on one of the bonus discs (for people buying the multi-DVD box sets) explains why: the show was hastily edited on videotape and there aren't any original film masters for the U.S. versions of the episodes.

Compared with other '80s afterschool cartoons Robotech was War and Peace -- a multi-generational odyssey where human beings were the focus, not goofy talking robots. It's a little embarrassing to hear the company (Harmony Gold) distance itself from the original Japanese productions, claiming that Robotech is an original production simply utilizing "Japanese source animation"...that's a laugher, considering that 95% of the Robotech storytelling is still the Japanese direction, characters, situations, etc. It's not as if Harmony Gold took a bunch of cels and re-ordered them from scratch. Fans of the series should check out a variety of websites (look them up at any search engine) explaining the original Japanese storylines, especially the Southern Cross segment (the second series used in Robotech). Apparently Southern Cross did not even take place on Earth in the Japanese version, which explains a lot of the inconsistencies in Robotech.

One of the major plusses for the Robotech versions, however, is the music score largely by Arlon Ober with themes by Ulpio Minucci. I've written about this before -- pretty dynamic stuff. Hopefully the 2CD soundtrack set will be reissued soon at the show's official website.

Goblin

Finally, I'm proud to say I've been bitten by the "Goblin" bug -- the gripping Italian horror music composed by the band mostly for Dario Argento features like Suspiria and Tenebre. I saw the restored Deep Red (Profondo Rosso) DVD, the first film scored by the band, which was not so much a rock band as a group of trained musicians composing together -- what a great score! A lot of their work is in the spirit of "Tubular Bells" used in The Exorcist but with the obsessive creepiness dialed up a notch. The murder music is like Dirty Harry on acid.

The new DVD is a bizarre experience as it switches from Italian with English subtitles to poorly dubbed/looped English. Apparently the footage initially cut for the American market only existed in Italian so the DVD producers elected to cut back and forth between languages. One benefit is that it's easy to tell what the "cut scenes" are. (You could always tell what was added in the television version of Star Trek: The Motion Picture because all of the sudden there wasn't any looping or foley.)

More tomorrow!

MailBag@filmscoremonthly.com