RoBoTNiK

It's the twenty-fourth* of May,
The Queen's birthday!
If you don't give us a holiday,
We'll all run away!



Happy Victoria Day! Or, as Canadians of more republican sympathies call it, "May Two-Four." *Even though this year the actual May Two-Four has been annexed by Memorial Day weekend and so is being observed on May One-Nine instead. Confusing.

Perhaps some of you have noticed me piping up in the comment pages of your LiveJournals recently and surmised that the school year must be over. It's true, this is the time of year I go from being grossly overmatched by my duties to just mostly overmatched. In that spirit, I'd thought I might write up a bunch of Alternate Queen Victorias to mark the day. But I'm out of practice, and inspiration eludes me. So I throw it open to you, my clever friends. Alternate / Eliptonical / Secret / Weird Victorias. What springs to mind?

If that question doesn't grab you, here's another one. How might you go about illuminating / eliptonizing / secret historicizing the War of 1812? There's no shortage of Napoleonic weirdness, but I don't know if I've ever seen anything on North America's 1812. Any suggestion on books to check out or promising historical nuggets to begin with? Just something I'm playing with in my head.

Tags: Koschei the Deathless; Dudley Manlove; the Gipper; eat your heart out, Edmund Morris.

We talked about the Reagan years in one of my classes this week. That’s all the excuse I need, really, to recycle this post of mine from the week Reagan died (and I got my PhD): the Ronald Reagan alternate history film festival. (Oh, and speaking of deceased American icons: did you hear about Captain America?)

The Ronald Reagan Alternate History Film Festival

Read the rest of this entry »

Cross-posted from Old is the New New. Comments welcome.

There's new content on robmacdougall.org today. I note this because a) I basically always note it, and b) it's the kind of silliness (alternate Deep Throats) that I would normally post over here. But this time it's, like, historical, you know? I also have something new on Cliopatria, part of a group discussion of Barry Gewen's essay “Forget the Founding Fathers” in this Sunday's New York Times.

This one is for editswlonghair and chrislehrich to share. I don't know if they've ever gamed together, but I know they both dig the essential elements of this mashup. It was a long, cold drive home, so I'm not working too hard on this. Just like at a retro Chinese restaurant: take one pulp standby from column A, one from column B, rip off Hite*, and it basically writes itself:

( Read more... )

The Ronald Reagan Memorial Film Festival
Check your local listings.


Murder Out of Space
1940. Ronald Reagan, Eddie Foy, Lya Lys. Director: Max Castle. 1½ stars.

The fourth in a series of B-movies starring Ronald Reagan as Secret Service agent Brass Bancroft. After Bancroft's "T-Men" raid a counterfeit ring operating out of Innsmouth, Massachusetts, he is reassigned to the "Green Deltas," a secret squad of government agents fighting fifth columnists from beyond the stars. There, Brass foils a plot by a Siberian sorceror named Koschei the Deathless to steal the Inertia Projector, a device that banishes extra-dimensional irruptions and incursions. Forgettable in the 1940s, Murder Out of Space gained notoriety in the 1980s because of parallels between the Inertia Projector and President Reagan's controversial Sorcerous Defense Initiative, designed to protect the nation from entities out of space and time. "The Sorcerous Defense Initiative has been labelled Star Wars," Reagan said in 1985. "But it isn't about war. It is about peace. If you will pardon my stealing a film line: Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn."


House of Meese
(aka The Terrortastic House of Meese, aka The Frightatious House of Meese, aka Dr. Gipper's 3-D House of Meese)
1954. Bela Lugosi, Ronald Reagan, Tor Johnson. Director: Edward Wood, Jr. ½ star.

After their car breaks down during an unconvincing thunderstorm, a young couple (played by B-movie stalwarts Ronald Reagan and Nancy Davis) seeks shelter in a seemingly abandoned white mansion at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Shrieking and running away from the mansion's monstrous geriatric denizens ensues. Some genuinely frightening villains do not redeem this otherwise by-the-numbers Ed Wood stinker. "The President," played by Bela Lugosi, is barely seen. Lugosi, drug-addled and close to death during filming, munches on jelly beans and makes a couple of good speeches, but it's hard to believe he's entirely aware of the idiocy going on around him. The House of Meese really belongs to his diabolical minions, including a haughty, blood-sucking "First Lady" (Vampira), the sinister "Michael Deaver" (Dudley Manlove), and Tor Johnson as the lumbering "Ed Meese." A goofy introduction by the psychic Criswell (as the First Lady's astrological adviser) alerts us that this story is set in the far-off future year of 1984, and the plot does involve some claptrap about using flying saucers to shoot down missiles or vice versa, but otherwise it's your basic cross between Assisted-Living Dracula and Manos, Hands of Fate.


Bedtime for Gonzo
1969. Peter Fonda, Jack Nicholson, Ronald Reagan. D: Dennis Hopper. 2 stars.

This bizarre, hypnotic slice of late 1960s psychedelia, loosely based on a short story by Philip K. Dick, features Peter Fonda as "the Gipper," an amnesiac biker driving across a post-apocalyptic California with a slightly sinister chimpanzee named Gonzo (Jack Nicholson). It is a surreal desert mindscape where ketchup is a vegetable and trees cause acid rain. Reading road signs, the hexagrams of the I Ching, and patterns in Gonzo's stool, the Gipper discovers traces of a strange alternate reality in which he himself seems to have been a movie actor who became governor of California and later president of the United States. (Footage of Fonda as "the Gipper" is spliced with stock footage of Ronald Reagan throughout. Reagan was of course the real governor of California when this film was made. Nancy Reagan used her own political clout to block the film's release and destroy almost all copies, but it is rumored that Ronald Reagan himself enjoyed the film immensely.) The trippy special effects are dated, but the final peyote trip in which the Gipper discovers his own part in the nuclear armageddon that destroyed his world remains powerful. He falls to his knees on a rocky beach while Gonzo the chimp shrieks, "You maniac! You blew it up! Damn you! God damn you to hell!"


Sandanisto Y El Demonio Azul Contra Los Contras
(aka Sandanisto and The Blue Demon Versus The Contras)
1986. Santo, Alejandro Cruz, Roxana Bellini. Director: Alfonso Corona Blake. 2 stars.

¡Los Yanquis Maldecido están viniendo! ¡Los Yanquis Maldecido están viniendo! ¡Ay-ay-ay! ¡Es una invasión de los luchan comandos de la robusteza de los Estados Unidos! ¡Conducido por los consejeros malvados de "NSC," Juan "El Piledriver" Poindextro, y Oliver "El Norte" Norte, el Contras desea a nuestras mujeres! ¡Funcionan sin la sanción! ¡Venden los brazos a Irán! ¡Los medios de la "Boland Amendment" nada! ¡Pararán en nada! ¡La llamada sale! ¿Quién puede ahorrarnos? ¡Solamente los héroes de lucha, Sandanisto (Santo) y el Demonio Azul (Alejandro Cruz), los amos del "círculo ajustado"! ¡La aclamación como Sandanisto y el demonio azul luchan legiones de los goons de CIA y de los barones vampiros de la droga de Medellin! ¡El grito de asombro como "el Norte" sujeta a Demonio Azul a la "Desfibradora" temida! ¡La emoción como Sandanisto aborda a gringos locos con una tapa-cuerda Frankensteiner! ¡Viva el Demonio Azul! ¡Viva Sandanisto! ¡Lucha para los niños! ¡Lucha para la libertad! ¡Lucha para Nicaragua!

Edit: English translation now available in comments, below.

You Talking To Me?
1989. Jack Lemmon, Anthony Michael Hall, Molly Ringwald. Director: John Hughes. 3½ stars.
This odd and underrated film marked a transition between director John Hughes' teen comedies in the 1980s and his more family-oriented films in the 1990s. Jack Lemmon is brilliant as "Ronald Reagan," an outgoing president who strikes up an unusual friendship with "John Hinckley" (Anthony Michael Hall), the needy and twitchy young man who once tried to assassinate Reagan in order to impress a girl. Although initially wary, the two film buffs bond over a shared love of the movies and thin grasp of reality. Hinckley introduces Reagan to Taxi Driver; Reagan shows Hinckley The Sound of Music and Ghostbusters. The president, secretly wiser and more capable than he appears, engineers a romance between Hinckley and "Jodie Foster" (Molly Ringwald), the serious-minded actress who has stolen the boy's heart. But the real chemistry in this sweet though never saccharine buddy picture is the May-December friendship between Hall and Lemmon. The president teaches the would-be assassin he can make friends just by being himself; the young man teaches the president that it's wrong to have the CIA sell AIDS-laced crack to ghetto children in order to fund Latin American death squads. Or something like that.

Let's see, we've riffed on Canada being cold, on Canada being peaceful and nice, and on Canadians being indistinguishable from Americans. This final alternate takes off from Canada's newly emerging image as a pot-smoking, gay-marrying, wife-swapping Babylon North. It's also a tribute to Pierre Trudeau, Canada's Prime Minister and Philosopher King from 1968 to 1984. Some of the Canadiana in this one is going to be pretty obscure for our American friends, I fear. But everyone mentioned by name here is in fact Canadian.

( Read more... )

(This is Alternate Canada #2. #1 is here.)

"Canada should have enjoyed the culture of the French, the government of the English, and the know-how of the USA. Instead, it ended up with the government of the French, the know-how of the English, and the culture of the USA."
—John Robert Colombo, Canada's keeper of random historical trivia and weird-ass Fortean stuff

This is probably going to be the longest of these alternates, since it doesn't employ any fun history-benders like zombies, time travel, or nanotech—just that old chestnut of alternate history, the South winning the American Civil War. Which is not to say that what follows is at all plausible. Or desirable. Just a fever dream brought on by the heat, and by the fact that the-South-wins alternates rarely have much to say about how such a change might affect the rest of the world. In this alternate, Canada gets Colombo's formula "right," with a little help from the Confederacy. The moral is, be careful what you wish for Colombo, ya dodgy old kook.

"He shall have dominion from sea to sea and from the river unto the ends of the earth."
—Psalm 72:8, the source of Canada's official name ("The Dominion of Canada") and national motto ("From Sea to Sea")

When Robert E. Lee outfoxes the Union Army ( Read more... )

Here's the original pitch for my space pulp Red Madness game, described here.

[Insert Your PCs Name Here] Vs. The Red Madness! will be a tale of thrilling pulp adventure, but set in the Amazing Stories future rather than the Doc Savage past. Welcome to the World of Tomorrow! Ether zeppelins and rocket planes traverse the solar system! Jetpacks and heli-cars whiz around the gleaming cities of tomorrow! Exo-archaeologists race to find the secrets of the Exploded Planet! Bug-eyed monsters plot their conquest of the Earth! Exclamation points are outrageously over-used! Think Indiana Jones in space. Think Gernsback with Nazis. Think Phantom Menace without Jar Jar. Now grab your turbo-pistols, snap on your big bubble space helmet, and rocket to adventure in the Astounding year of 1963!

Huh? This game is set in 1963? Well, yes, the year is 1963, but this is 1963 as imagined in the science fiction of, say, 1936. So even though there are rayguns and bug-eyed monsters, the feel should very much be “classic” pulp. The technology is all weird science World of Tomorrow stuff, but socio-culturally, this world still looks and feels like the 1920s and 1930s. And all the character types that would work for a classic pulp game should translate handily. The dashing young aviatrix becomes a dashing young rocket-plane pilot (a rocketrix?). The two-fisted archaeologist becomes a two-fisted exo-archaeologist. The English lord raised by apes in Africa becomes an English lord raised by blue-skinned savages in the jungles of Venus. The giggling mad scientist becomes—well, she's still a giggling mad scientist, but she has a lot more to giggle about now...

We’ll be using the new Adventure! RPG system for our game. Despite the shift in setting, the rules and the tone and “feel” of the game will be very much the same. I’ll come up with stats for ray-guns and space vehicles, but other than that, I don’t foresee having to change any of the rules.

What follows is a short handout describing the world of tomorrow, what I’m calling the Astounding! Age of Adventure. It describes the recent history of the world we’ll be gaming in and then has a brief discussion of science in the Astounding Age. You don’t need to study it at great length, but if you like this sort of thing (I do, that’s why I wrote it!) it should help you to imagine your character and get into the spirit of the game.

Here are some things that are great about James Bond movies: the suits, the drinks, the stunts, the cars, the hubcaps of the cars, the men, the women, the posters, the weather, the music, the sex, the life. Here are some things that are not so great about James Bond movies: James Bond movies.
—the excellent Anthony Lane, in an excellent James Bond retrospective, which alas I cannot link to online, in the New Yorker a few weeks ago

Die Another Day, the 20th James Bond movie, comes out this weekend. In honor of my favorite superspy and his Dorian Gray-like longevity (While Connery, Moore, Brosnan et al must thicken and age, James Bond himself stays eternally spry...), I feel like playing a little Ken Hite. Let's do like Sex Mob, ring a few variations on the James Bond theme, and transfer 007 into several different centuries.

( 1587: On Her Majesties' Sorcerous Service )

( 1777: The Man with the Golden Musket )

( 1887: From Calcutta with Love )

( 1977: License to Funk )

( 2007: You Only Rave Twice )

OK, maybe that last one is kind of lame. Tell you what: just crank Moby's remix of the 007 theme and toss some shit together involving nanobots and cyberspace. That's all any of the real James Bond producers are gonna do, anyway.

Hope you enjoyed. Please feel free to play along at home by sending in your own ideas for Alternate 007s.

Next time: Alternate Buffys. No, wait—Alternate Elvises. Oh, no, even better—Alternate Popeyes! (Look out, Hite.)