“Tote dat barge. Lift dat bale….” You’re not foolin anybody ya know. You’re in bed watching the Series! Otherwise thus far known as the Great Mets Massacree. Drink plenty of fluids. (NO. Not those kinds of fluids they only dehydrate.) Get lots of rest and watch a lot of baseball. You’ll be better in no time.
Well… I’m not all that enthused about the World Series this year…
How-some-ever for any of you who may wish to check out our “Monster Smash” Halloweeny story of a couple years back – Just click on this pix to whisk you back in time to Doc Bunz’ Lab-or-a-tory, when the Robot on the grease rack began to rise – and Suddenly…
DARPA probably wants to make giant robots as an alternative to battle tanks. Tanks have heavy armor to keep such things as fuel tanks from exploding. Giant robots would be designed to be faster and more mobile. Any armor would have to be light weight and focused about core components. The rest of the robot perhaps constructed with something like duraluminium, light and tough, easy to repair but hardly immune to damage.
In place of armor, the wiring for the beast would likely by polyphase distributed wiring, so that a few lucky shots would not take it out totally. Similar to some fighter plane designs.
One difference from fighter plane designs, that would be incorporated on heavy land based robots — is a form of fuel that simply will not burn. Urea would do that perfectly. NH2(CO)NH2 + H2O ==> 2[NH3] + CO2.
Shoot all the holes that you like in a tank holding solution of urea, and it might leak, but would never burn or explode. Furthermore, any leaking could be reduced by internal baffle-work of fuel tanks, such as modern race cars use.
By a number of methods, ammonia could be extracted from the urea solution. This ammonia could be directly burned or used as a source for hydrogen fuel cells.
For space operation a molten salt thorium reactor, developed for the Air force in the 1960’s (but shelved because it yielded up no weapon grade materials) could in various ways use hydrogen as a propellant. A brief high thrust mode by merely directly heating it to 1000 C. Or a long distance thrust mode, by ion particle acceleration.
It would have been nice to have some giant robots around the failed nuclear reactors in Japan. Although it was impossible to provide the emergency workers there with enough radiation shielding to protect them, and still allow them to move, that wouldn’t be the case with a giant robot. Of some worthiness of note, their brave and selfless acts hosing down the exposed nuclear core, kept half of Asia from being layered in several hundred tons of trans-uranium isotopes. More such isotopes, from these peaceful machines, than would ever come from devices of war.
For whomever may be interested, our new November Calendar is uploaded… “The Farce Awakens!” Celebrating that time long ago in a Galaxy far away, though close enough to line up for the Box Office…
Click on Katz here to take you to the download page directly…
I was gonna pass on the new movies, still am, actually. I wasn’t that happy with the last three. Besides, going to movies at my time of life involves blocking out most of one of my days off—and, also, why don’t they put intermissions in two-and-a-half-hour movies anymore?
Hey, “Star Wars” was something entirely new and unprecedented back then… like if the old “Captain Video” TV serials had been done with good writers who were kept provided with all sorts of illegal pharmaceuticals, plus an unlimited budget, the latest Special Effects and battle scenes of spacefighters dogfighting at about the speed of WWI Sopwiths… It blew me away at the time! But now, yes, we have all become jaded by the glitz and glamorous eye-candy of the Big Screen, and derive more satisfaction from the oddball but at least original ramblings of our favorite Webcomix…
I don’t know about “jaded,” ’cause I don’t go that much at all…and I’m not overly fond of the movies in that vein that I have seen (on TV). As for “Star Wars,” well, some of the cultish worship that’s sprung up around the movies is just too much—last time, maybe this time, too, “Star Wars” tent cities sprung up around theaters.
I enjoyed the first three—the first one is the only movie I’ve seen *at* the movies three times (twice in the original run, once in its rerelease). But the next three, less so.
So I’ll leave theater release of these to those guys who broke off from the Protestants to follow the Ways of the Jedi…
Back in 77, I was visiting my folks, when my younger sister and some of her friends were making plans to go the movies… somehow I got invited along – so I went with ’em, with no clue as to what we were to see or anything at all about it… As far as I can recall, I’d never heard of Star Wars up until that afternoon when we walked into the theater…
I recognized when the Flash Gordon crawl came across the screen – I’d watched many of the old Buster Crabbe serials… Followed by the “Blockade Runner” I recall thinking, “Now that’s a big space ship model!” Only seconds later to be followed by the much larger Star Cruiser… Watching this in the theater, it seemed to fill the whole width of the screen – and it had that wonderful visual trick in its design… The thing just seemed to keep going and going overhead – an amazingly large and detailed model – for a second you thought finally the stern had panned onto the screen, only to realize that this was just some sort of docking bay in it’s belly and that there was more of the huge thing yet to come!!
Though Lucas liberally borrowed from “The Hidden Fortress” and “633 Squadron”, he put together a magical flick! True there were bits of clumsy dialog and sometimes not the best acting – often when someone was trying to say more dialog than they had time for, when they really should have been doing something else, like running away or dodging zap gun blasts… but the rough spots passed by quickly and the actors would be on to something new and exciting… All in all a it was a fun romp! …And the 2nd movie was even a little bit better – with more adept directing, those clunky bits of dialog were gone…
It seems that no one one was really quite certain what Lucas had done, – if you look at other SciFi flicks like “The Last Starfighter” They hadn’t a clue!! and even Lucas, when he got around to trying it a third time seemed to have lost his focus… The Death Star was recycled, Darth Vader turned out to be Uncle Fester, and somehow the plot had gotten infested by Teddy Bears… Perhaps it was a good thing that he pulled the plug at that point…
As for the Prequels, by the time they came along, I was too old to really care one way or the other about them… I think that’s the thing – for those of us who are old enough to have seen the first SW flick for the first time, it was a Magical Moment, but the Magic isn’t coming back for us, no matter who produces the next one or the one after… Back in 77 it was something like we’d never seen before! a Scifi flick that moved at a pace faster than a crawl! It didn’t have to totally make sense, there was plenty of screaming an’ blasting and running around and it was all great fun! But if you’re old enough to remember all that, then we’re too old to go see the next one – that is, unless you take your kids and perhaps they’ll experience the magic for themselves…
Star Wars changed the world. Sci-fi movies are divided into two categories – those that came before SW and those that came after. It was the beginning of the big block-buster trend for movies out of Hollywood and an enormous victory for the sci-fi/fantasy fans of the world. Look at the list of the top 25 big, blockbuster money-making movies. Except for the odd one like Titanic (a little girl fantasy) they’re all sci-fi/fantasies.
And as I recall, most critics of the day panned it. Some of them have published follow-up stories to their old reviews. Most all of them go along the lines of “Well I sure screwed the pooch on that one.”
Now here we are almost 40 years later. Is there a kid in America who doesn’t know what Star Wars is? Doesn’t know Darth Vader or C3PIO?
I think back to when I was 19 and I can’t remember anything from 40 years before (1937) that was still THIS prominent in the popular conscience. I had heard the name Buck Rogers but I knew nothing about it or any of the characters. I was a bit more familiar with Flash Gordon because a local kids TV show used to show the serial episodes in the afternoons. But it’s viewer-ship was very limited.
No. My hat is off to Mr. Lucas. Love him or think he’s a bad dialog-writing dork. He changed the world. And how many men in a given field can say that?
There may have been a pre-Star Wars science fiction adventure movie produced by Japanese film people that had a few of the movie elements, fighting royals and enhanced weapons that inspired Lucas to generate his own very grand vision. Check and see if I’m right. It’s worth the look.
Oh that’s no question. Lucas has said many times that he was inspired by many Japanese films. R2D2 and C3PO were based on characters from a Kurosawa movie – The Hidden Fortress.
There’s also a little robot in the Captain Harlock Manga & early Anime that looks like R2D2 if he had stubby arms & legs instead of wheels… (Or perhaps it was in Space Cruiser Yamato – I’m not certain – both were created by Leiji Matsumoto)…
The Attack on the Death Star is largely lifted from “633 Squadron” a movie about a British Mosquito squadron’s attack down a Norwegian fiord to blow up a German rocket fuel factory… This incident never really happened in WWII though it is somewhat reminiscent of the attacks on the heavy water plants in Norway… It’s been a long time since I watched “633 Squadron” but as I recall, Lucas even duplicated the pilot types, like theres the fat pilot and the Biggs type that gets blown up and so on…
The awards ceremony at the end was also lifted from “Hidden Fortress” along with the inspiration for the bickering robots being based upon the two wretched peasant characters and other bits…
Tatooine was very much like Flash Gordon’s Mongo, with many strange cultures all mixed together with no apparent rational…
Though I suppose, it isn’t so much how much Lucas “Borrowed” as how he put it all together to make it work…
I took a look at “The Hidden Fortress” based on this theory—and, really, other than having two comic characters tag along with the heroes and the princess, I can’t see any other similarities.
That aside, “The Hidden Fortress” is a great movie. Mifune is one of those actors who can steal a scene by just being in it, and the plot really moves along.
With “Hidden Fortress”, I think it was more a matter of concept – Both movies revolve around the rescue of a head-strong Princess… Both are told from the viewpoint of the lowest, least significant characters… For Fortress it was the two wretched Peasants, while for SW it was as seen from the Droid’s viewpoint…
Minoru Chiaki & Kamatari Fujiwara played the two peasants – both were regulars in Kurosawa’s stock company, though they usually played supporting characters…
Minoru Chiaki is Possibly best remembered as the bemused Priest, one of the three men who sat under the Rashomon gate, in Kurosawa’s first internationally recognized movie – and as Heihachi Hayashida, the woodcutter Samurai of the “Seven Samurai” and the first of them to die…
Other than his Peasant roll in “Hidden Fortress, Kamatari Fujiwara is probably best remembered as Manzo the samurai hating farmer in the Seven Samurai…
It was a minor point to the Star Wars movies, and it certainly didn’t take away from the adventure and enjoyment of the experience, but was I the only one that felt that the white ceramic like armor of the warrior clones should have offered a bit more protection from hand held ray guns? That it might take rifle type weapons to be effective against them.
When I first saw the clone army guys, I mistook them for being re-built human — cyborgs. That or robots. The super intelligent gold translator robot (or I thought cyborg) made that a possibility. Also, the heroes seemed to not think so much as twice about shooting them. Who would if they were actually robots.
The indifference to any rebel concern for the clones might be a side effect of indifference of the empire to them — or even life in general. Besides that, if the clones survived, as in Vader’s case with the lava river, they could always be recycled. Maybe their armor gave them that much of an edge. But certainly our heroes making use of a ship’s bulkhead for cover would be better than any portable armor.
I suppose the normal use of the clones would be in large troop transport drop offs. A line of ceramic armored troops would offer cover for those that followed them. A very traditional way of war. Fox hole type war was a recent method for us. With an endless supply of clones, who they didn’t much fellowship with, the empire may have stuck with older methods — as much as with the light saber being similar to a traditional metal saber. Even our General Patton of WW II, aside from being a tank commander also took pride in developing his own version of a saber — ideal (perhaps) for horse mounted combat.
The “armor” (huge air quotes here) of the Stormtroopers has been a running joke for about 40 years now. It never seems to offer any protection from anything at all. This meme reached it’s ridiculous peak with Return of the Jedi when an entire “Legion” of the emperors “finest troops” were wiped out by belligerent teddy-bears with sticks and rocks.
In all of the 6 Star Wars movies I have never once seen anyone be saved by his armor. Anybody?… Anyone?… Bueller?… Visit Television Tropes and Idioms if you want to have a real ball with the subject of worthless movie and TV armor.
If you buy the mythology of the sequels / prequels, aren’t the storm troopers all just clones of this one guy, and wouldn’t they all look alike, and isn’t the armor just there to conceal that?
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Now for a li’l Rainy Day Fun with Bunz & Katz…
I’ve been a li’l under the weather myself – spent a few days in bed, with a case of the Flimsies… now guess it’s time to get to work on the Calendar…
“Tote dat barge. Lift dat bale….” You’re not foolin anybody ya know. You’re in bed watching the Series! Otherwise thus far known as the Great Mets Massacree. Drink plenty of fluids. (NO. Not those kinds of fluids they only dehydrate.) Get lots of rest and watch a lot of baseball. You’ll be better in no time.
Well… I’m not all that enthused about the World Series this year…
How-some-ever for any of you who may wish to check out our “Monster Smash” Halloweeny story of a couple years back – Just click on this pix to whisk you back in time to Doc Bunz’ Lab-or-a-tory, when the Robot on the grease rack began to rise – and Suddenly…
Imagine how it’d hurt if the giant robot had noticed her…
Probably wouldn’t hurt at all after the first 10th of a second…
Pssst! It’s just a recycled cardboard cutout!
DARPA probably wants to make giant robots as an alternative to battle tanks. Tanks have heavy armor to keep such things as fuel tanks from exploding. Giant robots would be designed to be faster and more mobile. Any armor would have to be light weight and focused about core components. The rest of the robot perhaps constructed with something like duraluminium, light and tough, easy to repair but hardly immune to damage.
In place of armor, the wiring for the beast would likely by polyphase distributed wiring, so that a few lucky shots would not take it out totally. Similar to some fighter plane designs.
One difference from fighter plane designs, that would be incorporated on heavy land based robots — is a form of fuel that simply will not burn. Urea would do that perfectly. NH2(CO)NH2 + H2O ==> 2[NH3] + CO2.
Shoot all the holes that you like in a tank holding solution of urea, and it might leak, but would never burn or explode. Furthermore, any leaking could be reduced by internal baffle-work of fuel tanks, such as modern race cars use.
By a number of methods, ammonia could be extracted from the urea solution. This ammonia could be directly burned or used as a source for hydrogen fuel cells.
For space operation a molten salt thorium reactor, developed for the Air force in the 1960’s (but shelved because it yielded up no weapon grade materials) could in various ways use hydrogen as a propellant. A brief high thrust mode by merely directly heating it to 1000 C. Or a long distance thrust mode, by ion particle acceleration.
It would have been nice to have some giant robots around the failed nuclear reactors in Japan. Although it was impossible to provide the emergency workers there with enough radiation shielding to protect them, and still allow them to move, that wouldn’t be the case with a giant robot. Of some worthiness of note, their brave and selfless acts hosing down the exposed nuclear core, kept half of Asia from being layered in several hundred tons of trans-uranium isotopes. More such isotopes, from these peaceful machines, than would ever come from devices of war.
Believe me, if I saw one of these critters approaching me, i would begin producing urea in copious amounts!
I think DARPA would go for the mechs from Armored Trooper V.O.T.O.M.S.
Moderately armored, moderately armed, but very fast and maneuverable.
http://orig09.deviantart.net/f555/f/2015/167/6/b/amanda_s_votom_by_kaeto1-d8xknlw.jpg
For whomever may be interested, our new November Calendar is uploaded… “The Farce Awakens!” Celebrating that time long ago in a Galaxy far away, though close enough to line up for the Box Office…
Click on Katz here to take you to the download page directly…
I was gonna pass on the new movies, still am, actually. I wasn’t that happy with the last three. Besides, going to movies at my time of life involves blocking out most of one of my days off—and, also, why don’t they put intermissions in two-and-a-half-hour movies anymore?
I might catch’em on video later.
I was 19 when Star Wars (no number) premiered in ’77. Now I’m 58. Just don’t see them through the same eyes anymore.
Hey, “Star Wars” was something entirely new and unprecedented back then… like if the old “Captain Video” TV serials had been done with good writers who were kept provided with all sorts of illegal pharmaceuticals, plus an unlimited budget, the latest Special Effects and battle scenes of spacefighters dogfighting at about the speed of WWI Sopwiths… It blew me away at the time! But now, yes, we have all become jaded by the glitz and glamorous eye-candy of the Big Screen, and derive more satisfaction from the oddball but at least original ramblings of our favorite Webcomix…
I don’t know about “jaded,” ’cause I don’t go that much at all…and I’m not overly fond of the movies in that vein that I have seen (on TV). As for “Star Wars,” well, some of the cultish worship that’s sprung up around the movies is just too much—last time, maybe this time, too, “Star Wars” tent cities sprung up around theaters.
I enjoyed the first three—the first one is the only movie I’ve seen *at* the movies three times (twice in the original run, once in its rerelease). But the next three, less so.
So I’ll leave theater release of these to those guys who broke off from the Protestants to follow the Ways of the Jedi…
Back in 77, I was visiting my folks, when my younger sister and some of her friends were making plans to go the movies… somehow I got invited along – so I went with ’em, with no clue as to what we were to see or anything at all about it… As far as I can recall, I’d never heard of Star Wars up until that afternoon when we walked into the theater…
I recognized when the Flash Gordon crawl came across the screen – I’d watched many of the old Buster Crabbe serials… Followed by the “Blockade Runner” I recall thinking, “Now that’s a big space ship model!” Only seconds later to be followed by the much larger Star Cruiser… Watching this in the theater, it seemed to fill the whole width of the screen – and it had that wonderful visual trick in its design… The thing just seemed to keep going and going overhead – an amazingly large and detailed model – for a second you thought finally the stern had panned onto the screen, only to realize that this was just some sort of docking bay in it’s belly and that there was more of the huge thing yet to come!!
Though Lucas liberally borrowed from “The Hidden Fortress” and “633 Squadron”, he put together a magical flick! True there were bits of clumsy dialog and sometimes not the best acting – often when someone was trying to say more dialog than they had time for, when they really should have been doing something else, like running away or dodging zap gun blasts… but the rough spots passed by quickly and the actors would be on to something new and exciting… All in all a it was a fun romp! …And the 2nd movie was even a little bit better – with more adept directing, those clunky bits of dialog were gone…
It seems that no one one was really quite certain what Lucas had done, – if you look at other SciFi flicks like “The Last Starfighter” They hadn’t a clue!! and even Lucas, when he got around to trying it a third time seemed to have lost his focus… The Death Star was recycled, Darth Vader turned out to be Uncle Fester, and somehow the plot had gotten infested by Teddy Bears… Perhaps it was a good thing that he pulled the plug at that point…
As for the Prequels, by the time they came along, I was too old to really care one way or the other about them… I think that’s the thing – for those of us who are old enough to have seen the first SW flick for the first time, it was a Magical Moment, but the Magic isn’t coming back for us, no matter who produces the next one or the one after… Back in 77 it was something like we’d never seen before! a Scifi flick that moved at a pace faster than a crawl! It didn’t have to totally make sense, there was plenty of screaming an’ blasting and running around and it was all great fun! But if you’re old enough to remember all that, then we’re too old to go see the next one – that is, unless you take your kids and perhaps they’ll experience the magic for themselves…
You should write movie reviews.
Star Wars changed the world. Sci-fi movies are divided into two categories – those that came before SW and those that came after. It was the beginning of the big block-buster trend for movies out of Hollywood and an enormous victory for the sci-fi/fantasy fans of the world. Look at the list of the top 25 big, blockbuster money-making movies. Except for the odd one like Titanic (a little girl fantasy) they’re all sci-fi/fantasies.
And as I recall, most critics of the day panned it. Some of them have published follow-up stories to their old reviews. Most all of them go along the lines of “Well I sure screwed the pooch on that one.”
Now here we are almost 40 years later. Is there a kid in America who doesn’t know what Star Wars is? Doesn’t know Darth Vader or C3PIO?
I think back to when I was 19 and I can’t remember anything from 40 years before (1937) that was still THIS prominent in the popular conscience. I had heard the name Buck Rogers but I knew nothing about it or any of the characters. I was a bit more familiar with Flash Gordon because a local kids TV show used to show the serial episodes in the afternoons. But it’s viewer-ship was very limited.
No. My hat is off to Mr. Lucas. Love him or think he’s a bad dialog-writing dork. He changed the world. And how many men in a given field can say that?
There may have been a pre-Star Wars science fiction adventure movie produced by Japanese film people that had a few of the movie elements, fighting royals and enhanced weapons that inspired Lucas to generate his own very grand vision. Check and see if I’m right. It’s worth the look.
Oh that’s no question. Lucas has said many times that he was inspired by many Japanese films. R2D2 and C3PO were based on characters from a Kurosawa movie – The Hidden Fortress.
There’s also a little robot in the Captain Harlock Manga & early Anime that looks like R2D2 if he had stubby arms & legs instead of wheels… (Or perhaps it was in Space Cruiser Yamato – I’m not certain – both were created by Leiji Matsumoto)…
The Attack on the Death Star is largely lifted from “633 Squadron” a movie about a British Mosquito squadron’s attack down a Norwegian fiord to blow up a German rocket fuel factory… This incident never really happened in WWII though it is somewhat reminiscent of the attacks on the heavy water plants in Norway… It’s been a long time since I watched “633 Squadron” but as I recall, Lucas even duplicated the pilot types, like theres the fat pilot and the Biggs type that gets blown up and so on…
The awards ceremony at the end was also lifted from “Hidden Fortress” along with the inspiration for the bickering robots being based upon the two wretched peasant characters and other bits…
Tatooine was very much like Flash Gordon’s Mongo, with many strange cultures all mixed together with no apparent rational…
Though I suppose, it isn’t so much how much Lucas “Borrowed” as how he put it all together to make it work…
I took a look at “The Hidden Fortress” based on this theory—and, really, other than having two comic characters tag along with the heroes and the princess, I can’t see any other similarities.
That aside, “The Hidden Fortress” is a great movie. Mifune is one of those actors who can steal a scene by just being in it, and the plot really moves along.
With “Hidden Fortress”, I think it was more a matter of concept – Both movies revolve around the rescue of a head-strong Princess… Both are told from the viewpoint of the lowest, least significant characters… For Fortress it was the two wretched Peasants, while for SW it was as seen from the Droid’s viewpoint…
Minoru Chiaki & Kamatari Fujiwara played the two peasants – both were regulars in Kurosawa’s stock company, though they usually played supporting characters…
Minoru Chiaki is Possibly best remembered as the bemused Priest, one of the three men who sat under the Rashomon gate, in Kurosawa’s first internationally recognized movie – and as Heihachi Hayashida, the woodcutter Samurai of the “Seven Samurai” and the first of them to die…
Other than his Peasant roll in “Hidden Fortress, Kamatari Fujiwara is probably best remembered as Manzo the samurai hating farmer in the Seven Samurai…
It was a minor point to the Star Wars movies, and it certainly didn’t take away from the adventure and enjoyment of the experience, but was I the only one that felt that the white ceramic like armor of the warrior clones should have offered a bit more protection from hand held ray guns? That it might take rifle type weapons to be effective against them.
When I first saw the clone army guys, I mistook them for being re-built human — cyborgs. That or robots. The super intelligent gold translator robot (or I thought cyborg) made that a possibility. Also, the heroes seemed to not think so much as twice about shooting them. Who would if they were actually robots.
The indifference to any rebel concern for the clones might be a side effect of indifference of the empire to them — or even life in general. Besides that, if the clones survived, as in Vader’s case with the lava river, they could always be recycled. Maybe their armor gave them that much of an edge. But certainly our heroes making use of a ship’s bulkhead for cover would be better than any portable armor.
I suppose the normal use of the clones would be in large troop transport drop offs. A line of ceramic armored troops would offer cover for those that followed them. A very traditional way of war. Fox hole type war was a recent method for us. With an endless supply of clones, who they didn’t much fellowship with, the empire may have stuck with older methods — as much as with the light saber being similar to a traditional metal saber. Even our General Patton of WW II, aside from being a tank commander also took pride in developing his own version of a saber — ideal (perhaps) for horse mounted combat.
The “armor” (huge air quotes here) of the Stormtroopers has been a running joke for about 40 years now. It never seems to offer any protection from anything at all. This meme reached it’s ridiculous peak with Return of the Jedi when an entire “Legion” of the emperors “finest troops” were wiped out by belligerent teddy-bears with sticks and rocks.
In all of the 6 Star Wars movies I have never once seen anyone be saved by his armor. Anybody?… Anyone?… Bueller?… Visit Television Tropes and Idioms if you want to have a real ball with the subject of worthless movie and TV armor.
If you buy the mythology of the sequels / prequels, aren’t the storm troopers all just clones of this one guy, and wouldn’t they all look alike, and isn’t the armor just there to conceal that?