"Now boarding..."

I'm going to Mars.

Okay, not actually me, that would be a bit of a miracle, but my name is.

NASA has introduced a program that allows people to submit their names for the upcoming Mars 2020 mission.  The submissions* will be etched onto a microchip that will be on the Mars 2020 rover when it lands on Mars.

It's a fun idea, and I applaud NASA for the insight displayed in creating this opportunity.

For those of us who will never leave the planet, never have an asteroid or a crater named after them, and never set foot on another world, it's a cool little piece of personal involvement in space exploration.

However, I was saddened to see that I'd missed a couple of other opportunities to participate.  Given the distances involved, I feel that it's going to take a lot more than 300 million NASA frequent flyer points to even get off the ground, let alone qualify for a seat upgrade.

- Sid

* The submitted names are vetted before addition to the list, presumably to avoid Bart Simpson sneaking I.P. Freely or Mike Rotch onto the chip.

The Final Frontier.

“I wanted to do a Western. Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion – obviously after other people – that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space. I wanted to make a film about the frontier. Not the wonder of it or the glamour of it: I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was." 

Peter Hyams on Outland

Every now and then, the Space Channel loses sight of its mandate.  I just can't get it to make sense - in my mind, if you're a science fiction and fantasy specialty channel, you show science fiction and fantasy content.

In spite of this obvious corollary, they have a well-established habit of showing movies that have NOTHING to do with science fiction or fantasy: Jaws, The A Team, Dead Calm, Treasure Island, and so on.  This actually puzzles me quite a bit - is it because of budgetary reasons or some kind of unfortunate contract for package purchasing of programming?  It's certainly not lack of more appropriate content existing.

The most recent example of this odd predilection is their showing of The Magnificent Seven, in the form of the 2016 remake of the classic 1960 western, which was in turn based on the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai.  The 2016 version has a good cast and does an acceptable job of reworking the original, but with the best will in the world, it's certainly not science fiction.

 

What makes this an even stranger programming decision is the fact that there actually is a science fiction remake of the 1960s version:  the 1980 cult classic Battle Beyond the Stars, produced by Roger Corman, the king of B-movies.  Admittedly, calling Battle Beyond the Stars a B-movie is generous, it's probably a C+ at best, or maybe even a D, but it has the minor cachet of featuring Robert Vaughn, one of the actors from the original western version, playing essentially the same role as 20 years earlier.

The idea of remaking westerns as science fiction films is not as odd as it sounds.  It's easy to see the parallels between the Wild West and the colonization of outer space:  an unexplored frontier full of unknown dangers and potential riches, plagued by extended travel times, limited communications, enforced isolation and, in some situations, the perils of an indifference to civilized laws and strictures in the interests of money.

One of the best examples of this comparison would have to be Outland, a deliberate reimagining of High Noon, the classic 1952 Gary Cooper film.*  Outland, a 1981 release from writer/director Peter Hyams, features Sean Connery as Federal District Marshal William T. O'Niel**, who is charged with keeping the peace on an isolated mining colony on Io, Jupiter's fifth moon.  As in High Noon, O'Niel is abandoned by friends, family and colleagues and left to fight on his own when a corrupt mining administrator sends for hired killers to eliminate him.

Joss Whedon's space opera series Firefly owes a similar debt to the past - part of his inspiration for the concept came from John Ford's 1939 movie Stagecoach and its ensemble cast, as well as the situation facing Confederate soldiers following their loss in the United States Civil War.

All that aside, if they just had to show something with a Western feel to it for some reason, Space could have shown Westworld, this doesn't have to be complicated. Or Cowboys versus Aliens. Or, if they were really desperate, Wild Wild West.

Okay, I was bluffing - if Wild Wild West is my only other choice, Magnificent Seven it is. After all, have you ever noticed how much the exploration of the West is like the colonization of outer space...?

- Sid

* And the film's gritty art direction is heavily influenced by Alien, to the point where people sometimes think that the two movies are somehow in the same timeline.

** Or O'Neil, the name tag on his uniform actually changes from shot to shot. 

Two by two.

As a bit of a collector, the prospect of owning a piece of original comic artwork is certainly an attractive one, but I've never quite been able to justify the cost to myself.  (Although I've been very tempted by some Jack Kirby pages.)

This is apparently not a problem for everyone. The recent sale by online auction house Heritage Auctions of Egyptian Queen, an original 1969 painting by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta, set a new record for comic book artwork* with a final price of 5.4 million dollars.

Yes - 5.4 MILLION.**  Now, to give this some perspective, we're talking about a painting that was produced for the cover of a comics magazine that featured black and white stories about zombies, monsters and vampires, and sold for 50 cents a copy.

 

In saying that, I don't mean to denigrate Frazetta's talent as an artist, but you have to admit that it does sound like a lot of money, even in the world of artificially inflated comic book art pricing

On the other hand, maybe this is history starting to make its decision about this kind of artwork.

After all, what is the role of realistic figurative illustration in the modern era?  Given that it doesn't seem to have a place in the altermodern art world of conceptual abstraction and surrealism, it may well be that if Da Vinci or Michelangelo were alive today, they might have ended up following their interest in light and the human anatomy into the comic book industry, and could easily have followed the same path as Frank Frazetta.

Frazetta, who passed away in 2010, is a legendary figure in the world of fantasy artwork.  Born in 1928, he began formal art training at the Brooklyn Academy of Fine Arts at the age of 8, where he was taught by Italian artist Michele Falanga.

Following his time at the Academy, Frazetta worked on a variety of comic books and daily strips, and after doing some movie poster work in the early 1960s, came to sudden notoriety for the epic covers that he created for the Lancer editions of the Conan the Barbarian stories published in the late 1960s and early 70s.  His cover painting for the 1966 edition of Conan the Adventurer put an unforgettable face on the Robert E. Howard's grim barbarian hero, and firmly established his career as a leading fantasy artist.  His subsequent work for posters, book covers and album artwork was equally well received - apparently so well received that someone decided that his original painting of Egyptian Queen was worth $5.4 million.

When I mentioned this to Karli, she pointed out that this was an auction, so really, there were actually TWO bidders who decided that this painting was worth that much money.  Who knows, this may just be the way that popular culture makes the transition to fine art - two people at a time.

- Sid

* Frazetta's work also held the previous record of $1.79 million for the sale of his original painting of Death Dealer 6 in May of last year.

** This is a little deceptive.  The actual sale price was $4.5 million, but winning bidders also pay an premium to the auction house, which in this case brought the payment up to $5.4 million.