Weekend flashback: boots on the bridge

I'm amazed at how difficult it is to find an image online of Uhura's boots.



Apparently all the screen-capture nerds were much more interested in the Mirror-Uhura, but they only show her from the waist up, so I had to resort to the action figure to show you the even better boots.




No wonder the bridge crew got all discombobulated.

Weekend flashback - the remiss edition

I was so crook yesterday I forgot all about this, so I'm glad I did my Googling for images earlier in the week.

When I was about 10, in the mid-70s, there was a big old picture palace about a mile away that still did the Saturday matinee sessions where we got one movie, then a couple of serials, and then another movie. We usually got a black and white classic adventure, then an old Western serial and a Space adventure serial, then a more recent movie. It was absolutely full of kids chucking lollies around the place, racing Jaffas down the aisles, and scaring each other about how some other time some kid died when someone up in the gallery dropped a drinkcan on their head. It was magic.

And that's where I first met Flash Gordon, long before I ever saw the camp 1980 movie remake.

The boots! That feather! That blunderbuss style raygun!
And Buster Crabbe before he got caught out in a peroxide rain.

Extra boots to make up for last week's lack.

Weekend flashback - more scifi but sadly no boots

The sculpted plastic posing pouch makes up for the lack of boots though, I think. And doesn't that yoga-toned Sting look fine?

I thought there would be gazillions of shots of this to choose from on the web, but no. A few very blurry screen captures, and this one, which is obviously a still shot taken during the film's production, as you can see the crew member off to the right.

mr tog and I recently rewatched the DVD of the original theatrical release of Dune and thoroughly enjoyed it yet again - we've seen it enough times now that it's one of those films we can talk over the top of as we wish, particularly about all the bits from the book we wished were there, yet we can shut up for the best bits.

It's a flawed but brilliant gem of a film. I think it's utterly incomprehensible unless you've read the book (and the 3-hour extended TV Alan Smithee version didn't improve that, it just ruined the rhythm of the original with the unbelievably dreadful storyboarded narrations , so no wonder Lynch took his directing credit off). The only people I know who really like it are all people who loved the novel enough to reread it at least once, so that they are utter Dune nerds.

Like most Dune nerds, I did actually enjoy seeing the cut scenes from the theatrical release in the Smithee version even though I hated the interpolated narratives and cheapness about special effects (eg Fremen eyes) in the restored scenes, but I so wish that the oft-mooted but never funded full 4-hour Director's Cut will one day soon appear.

Sigh.

Weekend flashback: more scifi shockers

It took some doing to try and come up with a more ridiculous scifi costume than last week's effort, but then I had the inevitable eventual "oh yeah, Barbarella!" moment.

The young Jane Fonda of course has an unfair advantage over a middle-aged Connery in the looking gorgeous in a flour-sack stakes, but even so!

However, the picture above fails to adequately display the sine qua non of bad scifi, the boots. As Barbarella had more and better boots than any scifi before or since, that's a shame. In fact, we can't be having with that at all.

Weekend flashback: 70s scifi boots

This is a shot from the 1974 John Boorman directed film Zardoz, which is apparently an achievement in the annals of bad cinema surpassed only by such dys-masterpieces as Attack of the Killer Tomatoes and the Ed Wood ouvre.

I have to admit, dressing the Connery in an orange nappy and fake ponytail seems likely to doom the film irredeemably - what were they thinking?

Rather like the boots though.