Rebels of Mars

A Modern-Day Dejah Thoris

Characters:  Muggers, Muggee, Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman

Muggee:  Help!  Help!  I'm being mugged by public school graduates!

Mugger #1:  We're high school drop-outs.

Muggee:  How can anyone tell the difference?

Mugger #2:  Shut up and give us your money.  We want to buy the latest video game, "Kung Fu Atomic Warrior versus Grand Theft Auto Thief."  None of us have played it, but we're impressed in advance by all the hype.  None of us have much critical acumen, you know.

Mugger #3:  Hey, what's that sound?

Mugger #4:  Sounds like a '67 Camero with dual exhausts.

Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman (roaring up and jumping out of her '67 Camero):  All right, 85-IQ nitwits who are so impulsive you can't see two seconds into the future, take a hike!

Mugger #1:  Oh yeah?  And how do you plan on making us, little girl?

Pioneer Woman:  With this!  (whips out high-capacity .40 caliber semi-automatic pistol)  Now move your little pinheads out of here pronto or your future kids will cease to exist!

Mugger #2:  Yikes!  I see you have one of those illegal high-capacity magazines, the ones the government has banned to give a boost to crime!

Pioneer Woman:  You're right about the second and wrong about the first!  Words in a book don't make it law, envious socialist knucklehead!   And what you're looking at right here are 18 rounds of Glaser Safety Slugs, frangible ammo that will explode inside of you, making horrible and fatal wounds, but won't exit to injure innocent bystanders!

Mugger #3:  This isn't fair!  Victims aren't supposed to be able to defend themselves!  How the heck do you expect us criminals to make a living if victims can fight back?

Pioneer Woman:  Know what handguns were called in the 19th century?

Muggers (chorus):  The what century?

Pioneer Woman:  Forget what century, government school morons!  Only right now matters!  Guns were called "equalizers" because they made the weakest women equal to the strongest man!  And that is why all of you are going to run right now!

Muggers (chorus):  Run!  Run away!  (exeunt, pell-mell)

Muggee:  Golly!  I've just had an epiphany!  I've just ceased being an emotion-driven anti-gun liberal with superficial thought processes!

Pioneer Woman:  Ever heard that old saying?  A conservative is a liberal who's been mugged?

Muggee:  Gosh!  You sure aren't anything like those anti-gun feminists I saw in the Million Mom March.  Although, actually, I don't think there were anywhere near a million moms there.

Pioneer Woman:  I used to be like that, thinking I was a victim, always feeling sorry for myself, blaming everything on men and society, reading Stalinist goofballs like Betty Friedan.  Then one day I realized that whenever the government gets involved in anything, and the personal becomes the political, conflict is sure to follow as sure as bloat and incompetence follows government bureaucracy!

Muggee:  Wow!  Tell me more, Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman!

Pioneer Woman:  I used to be Modern American Female, scared of firearms, unable to change a tire or even find the oil dipstick!  But not anymore!  My very own great-grandma was an American Pioneer Woman, shooting Comanches and even putting worms on hooks!  Strong, brave, resilient but still feminine, the way an American woman used to be!  And can be again!

Muggee:  Woo hoo!  A modern-day Dejah Thoris!

Pioneer Woman:  That's right, former wimp!  I realized my software had been corrupted, so I rebooted it and rebooted it and turned myself into MODERN-DAY AMERICAN PIONEER WOMAN!

Muggee:  Doublepluswow!  I think I'm in love!

Pioneer Woman:  Get in line!  There're about 300 men ahead of you!  When a woman can be feminine but handle firearms, or even parallel park, she'll have scads of men at her command!

Muggee:  You are amazing, Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman!

Pioneer Woman:  That's because I gave up all that feminist nonsense causing so much trouble between men and women!  When the government gets out of their relationships, they fall into their proper place!  Why, back in his day Mark Twain wrote a woman could travel the entire US by herself and the roughest of men wouldn't bother her!  That's the kind of society we can have again if the government would just get the hell out of the way!

Muggee:  I'm convinced!  I'm a changed man! Where's the nearest gun store?

Pioneer Woman:  That way, ex-dweeb!  Say, it sure looks like your biceps are getting bigger already!

Muggee:  Wow!  I think they are, too!  Thank you, Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman!

Pioneer Woman:  Think nothing of, ex-dork!  Now I'm off to change some more minds!

Muggee:  Yay for men and women who know the way things should be!

(Next episode, Modern-Day American Pioneer Woman takes on the unshaven-armpit denizens of NOW and exiles all of them to a Greek island.)

Written by Bob Wallace, who ain't Politically Correct at all.

Steamboy on DVD

watch some clips

GREATest Fight on Sci Film

Bob's (see post below) RIGHT!

You young whippersnappers can keep your fancy-boy, newfangled CGI, the hardest-hitting, non-stop, hammer and tongs (or tentacles) fight in a sci-fi filmdom is in old-timey George Pal's WAR OF THE WORLDS!

It starts as the Martians begin "moving out of the ditch," and just as they do, it's,  "FIRE!"   The Korean War vintage US Army hits them with everything they have in their inventory; tanks, rockets, machine guns, bazookas, field artillary.  You name it, they try it on those squiddly Martian Invaders.  Woah! they must have emptied the California National Guard Armoury of ordinance.  But it's to no avail because the BEM's machines have fforce ffields  of "protective blisters" made from some kind of advanced martian radio-magnetism technology and none of the shells can penetrate through them.  DARN!

And then it's the dirty, three-lensed, Martian's turn ...  and they unleash the Hells of Mars on Earth!

First they come out blasting away with that constantly cycling, green pulse ray that explodes everything it touches into flying flinders and then they use the sparkly death ray to shatter matter on the molecular level and finally, and worst of all, they start firing away with what Gene Barry calls a "SKELETON BEAM!"  That microwaves everyone in range!  NOFAIR!

The sound from this battle was soo horrific, and terrible, and dog-gone good that they are STILL using parts of it in movies and teevee today exactly as it was in the fifties.  And the LOOK of the fight from War of the Worlds.... , we-ell,  just flip this old film on, crank the DOLBY 10.1 up and compare it to file footage from an actual  WWII ship to ship nightbattle in the Pacific theater with the heavy guns thundering and the pom-poms and tracers lightening up the sky and you'll know just why it's so good and how close George Pal got it.  Bravo! 

And remember, keep watching the skies ...

posted by Tom Novak who could have put up a review of Spielberg's War of the Worlds ... but didn't.

Space Hero Ultraman

If you're not a fan of those wonderfully awful Japanese monster movies where a guy in a Godzilla suit knocked over toy cars that had TONKA written on the side, then you won't like Ultraman. I used to blaze home after school as a kid so I could watch this goofy thing. He had something I'd never seen before, sort of a chop-socky hand weapon where a energy beam would come out of the ege of his palm. Even today, this thing still has a kind of charm to it, even for an adult.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who even remembers Johnny Socko and his Giant Robot.

Space Hero Tobor the 8th Man

It's "robot" spelled backward, of course. When I was a kid I used to watch Tobor the 8th Man. I don't remember that much about it, except that I was a big fan. Apparently lots of other kids were, too, since the program was such a big hit it wiped out the competition. Tobor was some guy, a cop I think, who had gotten killed, so his brain was put into an atomic-powered robot who had an arsenal of really cool weapons as he battled villains with names like Saucer Lips. I seem to remember it was only on for a year or so, but I watched it religiously.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who still sings, "To-BOR!, the EIGHTH Man!!" while in the shower.

Space Beastie -- the Gardinel

One of my favorite writers is the late Manly Wade Wellman, he of horror tales from the Ozarks -- a place where I have spent a lot of time. One of the many monsters that he created is the Gardinel:

"They look some way like a shed or cabin, snug and rightly made, except the open door might could be a mouth, the two little windows could be eyes. Never you'll see one on the main roads or near towns; only back in the thicketty places, by high trails among tall ridges, and they show themselves there when it rains and storms and a lone farer hopes to come to a house to shelter him. ... The few that's lucky enough to have gone into a gardinel and win out again... tell that inside it's pinky-walled and dippy-floored, with on the floor all the skulls and bones of those who never did win-out; and from the floor and walls come spouting rivers of wet juice that stings. ... and all at once you know that inside a gradinel is like a stomach."--"Why They're Named That" 1963 also see "Come Into My Parlor" 1949.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who sez, yep, you can come into my parlor any time you want.

Better than a Supercar

When I was a kid I used to watch Commando Cody, who had gone off the air long before I encountered him. What I remember most vividly is him fiddling with the dials on his chestplate, then running down the steps outside a building, extending his arms and going WHOOSH into the air. A flying man. Of course, when The Rocketeer came out I was having 'gasms. If I had my choice between a Supercar, and Commando Cody and that way-cool helmet of his, it'd be no choice.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who wants wings, too.

Crimson Force tonight on Sci Fi

UPDATE ::  Hokay - so I was way off in the guessing the plot... it was the rapacious corporations that were all to blame for everything.  I should have known that.  My bad. And I admit that I wandered off a few times during the show and missed a lot of the important exposition and I'm not exactly sure what was happening in the first 35 minutes anyay - and I was watching then.  I think the writers wandered off a few times more than I did.  But all in all it was pretty decent.  Almost like a Barsoomian Pellucidar at one point but with way too many  tatoos and face-jewelry (on the space babe  - yuck!  'course she was the bad guy.) . 

Those big, death-ray, pole-axe looking can openers that the Martians used as guns were nifty.

MARS will be featured on the sci fi channel tonight, saturday June 4, at 9 pm EST,  in an original film entitled :: Crimson Force

Around here we're uncharacteristically happy with the Sci Fi Channel lately.  They will be showing Firefly (the series) soon and their last original film effort - the one with the 42 foot tall mummy chasing a very cute blond chick around- was really good. So the way I figure it, that makes up for the twelve-in-a-row pieces of shi uhhh - I mean, the last few original films they aired that weren't quite up to B movie quality ( yeah, some of those  stinkerooos made Robot Monster look like Casablanca in comparison ) but who's counting?

Apparently Crimson Force is about these peace-corps-like astronauts going to Mars to find new energy sources because (presumably) the wasteful whitemen of Planet Earth have depleted them all to use to (presumably) get filthy rich and suppress the other people of Planet Earth... or something.  Okay, maybe I'm not real sure what the plot of Crimson Force is all about but I'm watching anyway. With crossed fingers and toes.  Hopefully, the goody two-shoe, peace-corps-like astronauts will meet up with the gigantic bat-spider from The Angry Red Planet and it teaches them what suppression really is while it suppresses all the blood out of them through their necks!  That would be cool. 

posted by Tom Novak, who cannot guarantee that in tonight's photoplay Mars will be angry- or even red.

Space Babe Caroline Munro

Gorgeous space babe, Caroline Munro never played Dejah Thoris but she did play Dian the Beautiful.  Compare the B/W publicity still of her from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad movie to the original cover art  of  Dian fr0m All-Story's first publication of At the Earth's Core along with the cheesecake photo of Caroline from the movie At The Earth's Core - she's the perfect image of a  Burroughs' Heroine.

posted by Tom Novak who's got Dejah View, all over again.

Edgar Rice Burroughs Taught Me All I Needed to Know

I never needed any self-help books about men being from Mars and women from Venus, or how I learned everything I needed to know in kindergarten. All I ever needed was Edgar Rice Burroughs, whom I encountered when I was 11.

Burroughs, who isn't really that well-known anymore, is most  remembered as the creator of Tarzan (who in the books spoke as if he was quoting Shakespeare, a far cry from the "me Tarzan, you Jane" in the movies). But in his day ERB (as he is commonly known) was as popular as Stephen King is now, and was, and still is, hugely influential. Carl Sagan, for example, credited him with interesting him in space exploration and science.

Writers such as F. Paul Wilson, Philip José Farmer and John Norman have been influenced by Burroughs' novels about Tarzan, Barsoom (Mars), Pellucidar (the inhabited interior of the Earth) and Venus.  Wally Conger is an ERB fan, as are Tom Novak and Tom Ender.

Perhaps the first thing I noticed about Burroughs is that, much like Robert Heinlein, none of his women characters are victims. And he was writing in the early 1900s. Were he alive today, I suspect he would hold Stalinist fruitcakes like Betty Friedan and Andrea Dworkin in contempt. Such whiney, self-pitying women, who think everything would be just fine if society was destroyed (and men's characters, too) and remade according to the crackpot fantasies infesting their heads, can't even begin to compare with a brave, smart, resourceful woman like Tavia in A Fighting Man of Mars, who hacked off the arms of a couple of 15-feet-tall six-armed Martian apes.

Not only were Burroughs' women not victims, they were handy not only with swords but also with pistols, although they were "radium" pistols, a weapon whose workings still puzzle me. Dejah Thoris, the Princess of Mars, once skewered a villain several times, then kicked his worthless carcass over a cliff. Maybe Barsoomian females did give birth by laying eggs, but they were no chickens.

Yet, Burroughs' women were still feminine. There was no competition with men, and each sex got along just fine with the other. The main reason, I'm sure, is that the Barsoomian State didn't interfere in the relationships between the sexes, and so they fell into the natural, proper ones.

At 11 I was immensely impressed by these saber-wielding, pistol-blasting heroines. I suspect a lot of guys were, and are. A woman I know wrote one article about how she was planning on shooting a pistol for the first time, and got 300 emails from guys willing to instruct her. So, girls, if you want to be popular, become proficient with a firearm. Learning to hurl a dagger is not such a bad idea, either. Men will get on their knees and salaam before you the way Wayne and Garth did before Alice Cooper.

Neither were the women always beautiful, the way they invariably are in the movies. Tavia was described as "boyish," and in the long run the hero, Tan Hadron, preferred her to the beautiful but haughty and shallow Sanoma Tora. Although, to be honest, on the covers of most of the books the physiques of both the men and women look as if they've been inflated with an air hose. But then, the publishers were trying to sell copies to boys in their early teens.

The second thing I learned is that I was being conned in school. The Warlord of Mars was the Earthman John Carter, a southerner from Virginia who had fought in the Civil War (don't ask me how he got on Mars). Hey, wait a minute – I had been taught in school the South was an ignoble, maybe even evil society that fought a long, bloody war to defend slavery. Yet Carter was a noble and honorable man, protector of the oppressed, upholder of justice. Carter was always against slavery and oppression. Who was I supposed to believe? What I was taught in the government-run prison/school I despised, or a writer who bought me fascination and awe?

Burroughs, like Hemingway, was originally from the heavily residential Oak Park, a medium-sized suburb stuck right up against Chicago. I've been there several times. Apparently he found a better area to write about than the one he was from.

The third thing I learned is that maybe kings and queens are better than democracy. Barsoom was ruled – and ruled justly – by John Carter and Dejah Thoris. They barely appeared to rule at all. I really don't remember a list of laws in any of Burroughs' novels, other than the simple ones we all know – you don't murder, you don't steal. Otherwise, you could do as you pleased.

But there's not a word in any of his novels about mob rule. Most of them read as if they could have been partly based on Hans-Hermann Hoppe's Democracy: the God that Failed.

In fact, Burroughs doesn't have a good word to say about mobs. In The Gods of Mars he does a hatchet-job on the blind fanatical mobs that fall for that combination of the State, corrupt religion, and Big Business.

What else? There are at least two kinds of villains. The least bad are the sniveling, back-stabbing, lying cowards who are just great at running their mouths but have nothing to back it up. I guess junior high existed during Burroughs' school years, too.

The worst villains, however, are those who want to conquer and rule the world. Burroughs portrayed such people as practically insane with the lust for power. They're the ones who wanted to impose a State on all of Barsoom, and con armies into fighting for them. And in Burroughs' worlds, they always failed, just as in do in our world, although often at a horrendous cost in slaughter and destruction and misery.

Burroughs' worlds are not a libertarian paradise. His novels are basically for boys 11 to 14 years old. They're filled with sword fights and big apes with fangs (and big spiders with fangs, too). But there's not a good word in any of his novels for the State, or for politics, or for politicians, or corrupt religion. There is, however, true love between men and women as one of the highest values, and the desire for justice and freedom.

Burroughs wasn't the most stylish writer in the world. His style was workman-like more than anything else. But he could tell a heck of a story, a far better one than current writers who are far more stylish than he was. If I had my way, I'd close down the government schools, salt the ground (and pepper the teachers), then open up private ones and create a better world by teaching my hero, ERB.

Posted by Bob Wallace, who still gets a chubby thinking about Dejah Thoris.