The Future is Passe

A Facebook friend recently made me aware, through his status update, of a milestone about to pass unfulfilled. With only one day left in the year 2010 it would appear that we are NOT going to "make contact" as promised in the movie "2010: The Year We Make Contact" (1984). This realization made me think of other science-fiction movies that failed to predict the future before their settings became part of the past instead of the future.

Science-fiction tends to be speculative, and that's a good thing. It doesn't really try to "predict" the future, per se--just use the genre to tell a story that may or may not seem feasible in the real world. The "fiction" part of science-fiction allows for most any setting and plot lines the author/film-makers can imagine. The time frame can be any period in the past, present or future. The "science" aspect of science fiction frequently (but not always) tends to cause the setting to be in the future. Time travel stories/movies are a notable example. Usually the time machine apparatus is invented in the future ("The Terminator" (1984)), or the present ("Back to the Future" (1985)), and the protagonists of the story can then travel to any point in the past or future ("Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure" (1989)...).

Now, when a science-fiction story is set in the future, the author/film-makers can choose between a couple of different ways to express when the action is taking place. The first method is to simply describe it as "the future", "the near future", or the futuristic setting can simply be implied by the story itself without needing to state it outright. What makes this method effective is that no matter when the story is read (or the movie watched), it will always be taking place in "the future". The other method is to explicitly state the time that the story is taking place in. This gives a sense of just how far into the future the story is unfolding and gives a sense of relativity to the reader's/viewer's own refernce point in time. This is perfectly fine with a newly published book or a recently released movie, but poses a problem when reading older books or watching older movies. What was "the future" in the story might actually be "the past" by the time someone reads/watches it. With the possible exception of Nostradamus and other future predictors, no one really knows what the future is going to bring. This is what makes science-fiction such an interesting and wide-open genre. One can speculate any kind of future that one can imagine and make an interesting story out of it. Of course, when the time of that story actually comes to pass, the "predictions" made in a future-based story will almost always not reflect the present world's reality.

There are many examples of this paradox, and more are happening all the time. I haven't done any exhaustive research on this topic, but here are a few examples that come to mind from my own movie-watching experience. "2010: The Year We Make Contact" is a very topical example, because 2010 is about to expire with no contact (that I'm aware of) with a higher intelligence from "out there". Jupiter has not collapsed in on itself, and it's going to have to do it pretty quickly if it wants to beat Dick Clark ringing in 2011. Of course "2010" was the sequel to the better known "2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968). Both of these movies were based on Arthur C. Clarke books. As of tomorrow, the dates of both movies will be in the past. Clarke DID write two more books in his series, "2061: Odyssey Three" and "3001: The Final Odyssey". There's still quite a while before the book set in 2061 becomes dated, and 3001 is definitely going to be safe for some time.

Big Brother was watching us in the George Orwell novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" and a couple movies based on that novel. 1984 probably seemed pretty far in the future when Orwell wrote the book in 1949, but obviously it is now pretty far in the past. My interest in science-fiction really solidified in the early 1980s so I remember hearing about the movie version that was released in 1984. I have never read the book or seen the movies (though I probably should), but am somewhat familiar with the whole "Big Brother is watching" theme. While 1984 came and went without Orwell's dystopian predictions coming true, the idea of "Big Brother" really has become part of our collective conscience. Whenever there's fear of loss of personal freedom or privacy because of corrupt government, identity theft, internet security issues, and the like we tend to hear something about "Big Brother".

The "Terminator" franchise is based on time travel, so some of its problems with time catching up with it can be explained away, but when you get right down to it, Skynet was supposed to become self-aware in August of 1997. It wasn't long after this date that the computers declare war on humanity. This date can be adjusted as the series continues by saying that the heroics of the good guys in the movies (TV show, comics...) caused a delay in when Skynet finally went online. Now that's science-fiction at work! The original time traveling in "The Terminator" occurred when characters were sent back to 1984 from the year 2029, so there's still a little while before that becomes dated.

Another 1980s-based time travel series of movies is coming close to a time of reckoning itself. "Back to the Future" (1985) is pretty safe. In that movie, Doc Brown invents a time machine in the present (1985) and Marty McFly travels 30 years in the past to 1955. No problems there. But in the first sequel to the movie, "Back to the Future Part II" (1989), Marty and Doc Brown travel into the future. How far in the future? All the way to the year 2015. As of tomorrow, 2015 will only be four years off.

TV shows aren't exempt from these time problems either. I first started watching the original "Twilight Zone" (1959-64) back in the early 1980s, when the show was already 20 to 25 years old. I remember at least a couple episodes that took place in the 1980s. It was interesting to hear that (seeing as how I was actually living in the 1980s), but it obviously broke the mood of a story that was supposed to be taking place in the not-too-distant future instead of the present.

"Space: 1999" came out in the mid-1970s, so the year 1999 was pretty far away at the time. Of course, the show (as well as Prince's song "1999") is now more than a decade out of date. It is now almost twelve years after the show was set, and (last I knew) the Moon is still very much in orbit around the Earth. The whole millennium era (1999, 2000, 2001) has always been a tantalizing setting for science-fiction stories. The simple change of century and the simple amazing-ness of imagining a year called "Two Thousand" instead of "Nineteen-Whatever" just seem made for sci-fi. Well, at least it SEEMED like an appropriate setting for stories filmed or written many years before the actual year 2000. Strangely enough, the real world had a very sci-fi-esque potential problem as we actually approached the millennium--the Y2K Bug. That turned out to be nothing much, but had the potential of being a very effective science-fiction story come to life. A world that had allowed itself to become so dependent on computers and technology (cell phones, satellites, the internet...) suddenly finds itself plunged into a new Dark Age when all that technology suddenly and completely stops working.

The TV show "Lost in Space" premiered in 1965. The story was set in the year 1997. I'm sure 1997 seemed quite distant in 1965, but of course now it's even more dated than "Space: 1999". When they made a movie out of the show in 1998, they adjusted the setting to 2058. That ought to keep reality from catching up to the movie...for a while at least.

I suppose the next date to be concerned with is 2012. Not only does the ancient Mayan calendar predict that the world will end in 2012, Hollywood recently gave us a movie about the world ending in that year called..."2012" (2009). I haven't watched that Ronald Emmerich-directed, John Cusack-starring special effects bonanza, but probably should before 2012--just in case the world ends and I don't get a chance to watch it later. While I understand why the film-makers chose to name this movie after the year 2012, they could have easily avoided the problem of having an outdated premise in a couple years by using a title more like 2004's "The Day After Tomorrow". While I didn't find that one to be a very good movie, it does have an almost perfect, foolproof science-fiction name. The day after tomorrow indicates something in the VERY near future, yet it's a date which will never actually arrive in reality. The day after tomorrow will ALWAYS be in the future!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

Creation Convention--25 Years Later

Twenty-five years ago today (August 24, 1985) I attended what I believe was my first-ever Comic Book/Sci-Fi convention. If there had been any doubts that I was a certified geek, that day obliterated those doubts. I had read about these conventions in Starlog and other science-fiction magazines, but as a fifteen-year-old I wasn't able to actually attend any of these meccas for nerds.

All that changed when I received a brochure for the Creation Convention coming to Boston the weekend of August 24-25, 1985. This brochure came in the mail. What a quaint notion in this online-first world we're living in (especially so for comic book and science-fiction fans of today). I must have been on a mailing list because I also had a subscription to Starlog (courtesy of the meager earnings of my paper route).

I had a small group of three best friends in 1985. These same three guys remain my best friends to this very day. Two of them went to the convention with me. Actually, I should say that one friend and I accompanied the other friend. His mother drove us in to Boston so we could attend the convention. This friend pretty much HAD to go to this show, because Wendy and Richard Pini were going to be there. They were the husband and wife (or should I say wife and husband?) team that was responsible for the Elfquest comic book series (nowadays it would probably be classified as a graphic novel rather than a comic book). Elfquest was a HUGE thing with this particular friend, and he really wanted to meet his hero, and unrequited love interest, Wendy Pini--Elfquest's creator.

Two of my friends were big comic book fans. I read certain comics from time to time (Micronauts, Swamp Thing, Sgt. Rock, The Haunted Tank...), but never could really get all that into them for some reason. My big thing was movies and TV shows--especially science-fiction ones. This convention featured special guests that wouldn't seem all that "special" today, but who were pretty interesting at the time. If you had heard that there would be guests from Star Trek and Doctor Who, you might have visions of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (or at least Nichelle Nichols and Mark Lenard) from Star Trek and Tom Baker from Doctor Who. Well, it wasn't quite that cool. The Star Trek guest was Judson Scott. Who? Well, that name doesn't mean all that much today, but at the time he was reasonably well known as Khan's right-hand man in "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan" (1982). I believe he was the only member of Khan's followers who spoke any lines in the movie (could be mistaken on that one though). Mr. Scott had also recently been the star of his own short-lived Sci-Fi TV show on ABC, "The Phoenix" (1981-82), and was currently featured in the series "V". He hasn't done a heck of a lot recently.

The Doctor Who "star" was less familiar to me. His name was Mark Strickson, and he played the sidekick of the Peter Davison-era Doctor Who. Thanks to PBS I was a big fan of Doctor Who--but specifically the Tom Baker-era Doctor Who. I didn't really know any of the doctors that came either before or after Tom Baker. My friends and I certainly lined up to get autographs from these guests, even if they weren't exactly what we would have considered "A-Listers". Our friend who didn't make it to the convention was the biggest Doctor Who fan of the four of us, so we decided to get Mark Strickson's autograph for him. Our friend seemed a little perplexed when we gave him the photo the next day. This was not only because of the fact that he probably wasn't exactly sure who Mark Strickson was, but also because the personalization on the photo was a bit tough to read and appeared to say: "To Kurt, Love: Mark Strickson". You know, we had a great time at that convention in general, but that little quote specifically has actually managed to become part of our lives that we still use to this very day. It's become such a tradition between us it's almost hard to believe that its origins can be traced back to that moment when Mr. Strickson scribbled that personalization on that photo in 1985. Even today, that quote, "Love: Mark Strickson", is frequently used as the sign-off when we write e-mails to each other. I guess you never know which little moments will be special and stay with you for the rest of your life!

The rest of the convention was fun too. We enjoyed watching the costumed freaks walking around (there but for the grace of God I could have easily been one of those "freaks"). The tables of merchandise were a sight to behold for a teen at his first convention. Thousands of comic books, books, novels, manuals, movie blueprints, posters, movie props, toys, action figures and very expensive VHS tapes (this was 1985 of course and DVDs were still years away). A couple of us got our own "Buckaroo Banzai" ID badges that had our photos on them. I'm sure we checked out the old Star Trek blooper reels (from the original series of course, Star Trek: The Next Generation was still two years away) that were a mainstay of these conventions. Of course we sat through the talk/Q&A session from Wendy and Richard Pini. I believe there were a couple other semi-well-known comic book artists there too. And, one of the staples of a Creation Convention back then was the big, no-minimum-bid auction. One of my most exciting moments from that day was when I got into a bidding war for a communicator prop from the original Star Trek series. I thought at the time that it was actually used in the show, but now I'm pretty sure it was just a fan-made version. It was still pretty cool. Anyway, I had limited funds (as most of my money came from my modest paper route--I wouldn't get my first "real" job until September when I started working as a bar boy at the Cocke 'n Kettle restaurant) so the rapidly escalating bids for the communicator were starting to scare me. I was just about to give up when the gavel fell and I had won the bidding war at $55.00 (a king's ransom of money for me at the time). I still have that communicator and count it among my prized possessions.

The reason I remember the date of this convention is because within the past year, while visiting my parents, I found that very same brochure for the event that I received in the mail during the summer of 1985. What a neat item to behold after so many years. It's amazing to see how much has changed since those days. The brochure is a black and white job on paper typed out on a word processor (maybe even a typewriter?) with various photos of the guests and drawings of many science-fiction and comic book characters sprinkled throughout. It's nothing fancy, glossy or even professional-looking. I haven't been to a convention like this since the mid-1990s. At that time they really hadn't changed much since my first one in 1985 (and probably long before that too), but I'll be they are a completely different animal these days. Every company, movie, actor, comic book... has it's own website now. Everyone is online and has cell phones. Twitter, Facebook and other social networks are the preferred mode of communication. DVDs have replaced VHS tapes. a LOT more neat stuff is available (at a cheaper price too) and easy to find on DVD today compared to what was around then. It's much cheaper to dupe this stuff, rip it, share it, store it on computers or iPods... I can only imagine the madhouse that is Comic-Con these days. Now instead of being merely the realm of geeks and nerds, all kinds of stars, directors and producers make appearances to promote their latest movies/projects. It's all online (which didn't exist in 1985 of course) and it's everywhere. Like the brochure for the 1985 show, the convention itself seems positively quaint compared to today's mega-events.

Interestingly enough, it appears that Creation is still around and still promoting conventions. I don't know how directly this Creation Entertainment company is related to the old one that sent me that brochure all those years ago, but it's kind of nice to see the name still around out there today!

*For more on this convention, please read my follow up blog: Creation Convention Part II: Geeks on Parade. A lot of questions raised by this entry are answered in that one after more "evidence" was uncovered.

Love: Mark Strickson

Who is Monster Dad?

Who is Monster Dad, and why does he want us to read his thoughts? Good questions, and I hope to answer them with my first blog here.

"Monster Kid" is a term for kids who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s watching and enjoying horror and science-fiction movies. This was an era filled with these kinds of films--many of them tending to be of less than high quality (B-movies). While these films were being cranked out at an alarming rate to be screened at local theaters and drive-ins, there was also another phenomenon taking place that further influenced these children. Kids were being exposed to older monster movies--like the classic Universal films "Dracula" (1931), "Frankenstein" (1931), and "The Wolf Man" (1941), as well as their many sequels--on TV through late-night shows like Chiller Theatre. The combination of watching new movies at the theater and seeing older ones on late-night TV left a strong impression on many of these impressionable children. Sure, not all kids watched this kind of stuff, and not all of those that did were greatly affected by them--but many were. Before you simply dismiss these kids as future geeks, consider that writers like Steven King and directors like Steven Spielberg and George Lucas were Monster Kids back then. They may be geeks, but they're very successful geeks!

Growing up in the 1970s and 1980s was a different experience. The relative innocence of horror movies like "Attack of the Crab Monsters" (1957) and "Invasion of the Saucer Men" (1957) was replaced by the blood and gore of slasher movies like "Friday the 13th" (1980) and "A Nightmare on Elm Street" (1984). I suppose that the counter-culture of the late 1960s/early 1970s may have had something to do with this change in the idea of what horror was, but saying that to explain it would be too simple. There are many factors involved with the evolution of horror/Sci-Fi cinema that I don't even know, and trying to list and consider them all would easily fill up a blog of their own. So let's keep with the subject at hand.

I have frequently found myself wishing that I had grown up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and being somewhat jealous of those Monster Kids who did. I love many of the movies of the period and it would have been so cool to have been able to see and experience them when they were brand new. Even as a kid it always seemed like I was missing out on something while growing up two decades too late. It wasn't until later that I realized how lucky I actually was to have grown up when and where I did. As it turns out, there were a lot of horror/sci-fi shows on TV at the time that featured those very same (though now old) monster movies from the 1950s and 1960s.

I grew up in the small town of Uxbridge, Massachusetts. The 1970s/early 1980s was a time before cable came to town, and our television could barely pick up the signals from the Boston TV stations. Among these stations were great independent UHF channels like WSBK TV38 and WLVI Channel 56. Starting in the mid-1970s Channel 56 began regularly running a show called Creature Double Feature on Saturday afternoons. [Look for a blog on Creature Double Feature in the future.] Two horror/Sci-Fi movies would be shown at 1:00 and 2:30 PM every week. Through this great show (as well as the programming of many other Boston-area channels) I was able to experience many of the great (bad) movies that I felt I had missed out on by not being able to watch them at a theater when they were new. Without even realizing it I had become a Monster Kid myself! I suppose you could call people like me "Monster Kids: The Next Generation". Most likely a lot of the people responsible for what was put on the independent TV channels back then were folks who had grown up watching these same movies when they were kids. Throwing a couple public domain horror movies on was a cheap and effective way to fill up a few hours of programming. Nowadays it's much more cost effective to fill that time with paid programming (informercials). If the kids of today only knew what they were missing out on! Of course, many of the movies shown on Creature Double Feature weren't really that old at the time. I mean, a classic movie made in the 1950s, like "Creature from the Black Lagoon" (1954), would have been barely twenty years old in the 1970s and a more recent film like the Bigfoot-themed movie "Creature from Black Lake" (1976) would have only been a few years old when aired in the early 1980s. A show similar to Creature Double Feature today would most likely be showing stuff from the 1990s and early 2000s.

Of course kids today also have many more entertainment options than we had in the 1970s. Not only is cable television pretty much standard now, but we also have DVD and BluRay players (having already seen the era of the VCR come and go), DVRs, TiVo and video game systems that are light years better than the primitive Pong games of the 1970s and the Atari, Coleco and Nintendo systems of the 1980s. Add to this the virtually unlimited entertainment power of the internet and the fact that cell phones are ubiquitous and can do pretty much everything but make phone calls (oh yeah, they still do that--though it seems like it's the least popular feature on them in this age of texting, taking photos, downloading music and surfing the web on phones).

I'm beginning to digress here. Some of this stuff may become the basis of future blogs. But getting back to this one... Let's flash forward to the 2000s. I never really realized the lasting impact that Creature Double Feature had on me until a friend and I discovered a web site and message board dedicated to the show back in September 2006. It seems that a lot of other people who grew up in the Boston area had fond memories of watching the show too. I suddenly had a great feeling of nostalgia for those old days of black & white TVs, rabbit-ear antennas and snowy reception while watching crappy movies that nevertheless scared the crap out of me. Suddenly, memories of many of these movies returned to me and I had to see them again. It was a strange experience to see just how bad (and not very scary at all) many of these movies actually were. They were thrown together quickly and cheaply to turn a quick buck. The vast majority of them had miniscule budgets--and the terrible monster costumes and special effects reflected that fact. The funny thing was that, regardless of this lack of "quality", I still loved watching these movies even after all those years.

Another thing happened in the mid-2000s that has a lot to do with the Monster Dad moniker of this blog: I became a father for the first time in November of 2005. My poor (or lucky, depending on your point of view) daughter would have to grow up with a former Monster Kid as a dad. By now the reason for "Monster Dad" should be clear: 1.) I was a Monster Kid. 2.) If I have any say in the matter my daughter will also be a Monster Kid (at least to some extent). And 3.) For better or worse, I am now a Monster Dad!

It's a strange, and surprisingly complex, thing to be trying to instill a love of old monster movies into your kid--while making sure you don't turn her into a freak or scar her for life by showing her something that's too scary for her to see at her age. I want my daughter to grow up liking what she likes. I don't want to force any of my favorite movies and shows on her just because I liked them as a kid. At the same time, she's been very receptive to watching stuff that I think is cool. Perhaps she only feels sorry for me and is just humoring me, but I don't think that's the case.

I feel that, for a four-and-a-half year old girl, my daughter's interests are pretty well-rounded. My wife didn't want her to grow up in a world where she was only allowed to be interested in Disney Princesses, Barbies, dolls, ponies and the color pink. She does like all those things, but at the same time she also loves toy cars and trucks, fire engines, "Star Wars", Spiderman and bugs. She doesn't really see the differences between traditionally "boy" or "girl" stuff--she just likes what she likes.

Obviously I'm having some influence on her by exposing her to the stuff that I liked as a kid (and still like). I get excited about the thought of showing her something "new" that I grew up loving when I was young, but have to think about whether she's old enough for it. Like I said, many of those old 1950s and 1960s horror movies are really bad and not particularly scary, but to an imaginative child who's watching them with an open mind they can still be very effective! [My thoughts on the imagination of a child will most definitely be the subject of a future blog.] She is fine with some movies and shows, and others will just be too frightening for her. Trying to find the right balance without inducing nightmares isn't as easy as it seems like it might be.

Well, now you've got an idea of who Monster dad is. You can decide for yourself whether you want to read his thoughts or not. There will most likely be more than a few blogs here about the adventures and mis-adventures of being a Monster Dad, but that's not all you'll find.

I've never been too sure how I feel about blogs in general. As you can tell by my frame of reference I'm a bit older than many hip, young bloggers out there. When blogs first appeared, and were the hot internet thing for a while, I thought they were kind of dumb--just another example of how self-centered the world was becoming (future blog material here?). It seemed so egotistical to think that millions of people would want to read what you were thinking, just because you were thinking it. Obviously some people were better at blogging than others, and some people chose to write (or should I say "blog") about things that others found interesting. Whatever the case, blogging really took off (and I'm sure I don't need to be giving a history of blogs to someone reading a blog).

Political blogs seem to be very popular--though I have to admit that I don't really understand why. Part of the problem I have with blogs is the whole idea of how we, as humans, tend to believe what we read. Everyone has a right to their opinions, but the idea of getting your political news from a blogger (who has no need to be unbiased) seems a bit odd to me (the old codger that I am).

Of course there are blogs about all kinds of subjects--sports, movies, TV shows, parenting, fishing, golfing, celebrities... Pretty much anything that anyone is interested in can be blog fodder. I probably won't be doing much political blogging (though you never know...), but I do hope to write about a variety of topics. You can expect more about my parenting experiences, more about my love of old horror/Sci-Fi movies (probably some random movie reviews too), as well as my other interests (yes, I do have other interests), sports stuff, the horrors of home ownership, random thoughts on life... I guess this won't be a blog with a real focus. Whatever seems worth writing about will be what I write about. Hopefully that's a good enough reason to write a blog. We'll see.

Okay, let's get going...

By the way, I chose the url http://monsterdad69.blogspot.com/ (referencing the year I was born) because http://monsterdad.blogspot.com/ was already taken (by someone who has never even posted a blog on it in the two-plus years it's been up by the way!).