Do You Feel Lucky, Atompunk?

Ha!  I Take It You See What I Did There

You know, that quote from "Dirty Harry" combined with a rose-tinted view of the future from the perspective of the late Forties and Fifties?  

Both atomy and punky

     There is a little cross-over if you're willing to work with me here. Don't forget that Ol' Clint (O he'd shoot me if he heard me calling him that!) got his breaks in black and white sci-fi horror films, "Revenge of the Creature" (given how the Creature got treated, it was quite entitled to a bit of revenge) and of course "Tatantula", where he's the jet pilot who zooms in to blast the repellent giant arachnid into a charcoal roast.  Art?

Trust me, that's Clint

     You couldn't do that nowadays.  O no.  You'd have environmental groups and ecologists and entomologists all bleating that "We need to understand it -" and of course some campaigners with placards loudly stating that it was all a hoax (until they got eaten, ho ho!) and day trippers trying to get selfies without getting webbed and gobbled up -

     Where were we?  O yes.  Art?

All we need now are some marshmallows, silver foil and a few potatoes!

     Incidentally, this is the film where Clint formed a life-long friendship with the sultry Mara Corday - you know, the woman Art has a major crush on.  Go on, Art.

Art is jealous

     By the time "Tarantula" came out some of the shine had come off Atompunk, since we had fission reactors, if no fusion ones yet, though we did have fusion bombs, and one of these puppies - stop mooning, Art, and give us some pictures -

     - given that it had a yield of 3.8 megatons, would make anything it hit, and several square miles around it, promptly go away.  This was a bit of a downer on the bright, cheery, boundlessly optimistic future that had been imagined, full of atom-powered family cars, atomic trains and energy so cheap the electricity company would pay you to use it*.
     Let's have another positive atompunk picture, to go out on a positive note.  Art?

Nuclear-powered trains - what's not to like!

     Didn't we do a rather excoriating item on an extremely daft South Canadian television series about a gigantic nuclear-powered train?


I Do Apologise

Conrad cordially detests authors who try the poseur and don't translate foreign speech they insert into their latest bleak, chilly navel-gazing novel about the love life of an angle-bracket.  It's not on!  You can understand military histories from 1920 having the odd quote in Latin or <shudders> Greek, as they were written by authors who had both these languages beaten into them at their bleak, chilly boarding schools, and they probably felt if they'd had to suffer them, then Why! you the reader can, too.  Art!

The Spode

     I didn't explain why Roderick Spode collapsed like a pudding when Bertie Wooster remembered to say "Eulalie" to his face, bowing and scraping away into the distance.

     The reason is - you're going to love this - that the Spode is actually a very talented designer and manufacturer of ladies lingerie (in Jeeves opinion and Conrad will bow to his superior judgement here).  Art?

     Naturally a big, brawling bruiser like the Spode wishes to keep his business as discreet as possible; trying to be the next Moseley whilst pondering about deniers and what kind of Mechlin lace to trim a garter belt with is a no-no in Fascist circles.  You never saw Herr Schickelgruber designing ladies underwear**!
     So there you have it.

Conrad Finds A Fellow Curmudgeon And Is Happy

The two do go together, you know.  I have recently come across a Youtube channel from The Critical Drinker, which I am NOT going to link to, as it has far too much swearing present.  TCD comes across as a loud, abrasive, drunken and curmudgeonly Glaswegian; this may be a persona, or it may be what he's really like, the jury is still out on that one.  Art?

"It was 06:47 and The Critical Drinker began consuming his breakfast."

     TCD does not approve of a lot of Hollywood films, and is not shy about letting the world know about it.  One he lambasted that I didn't realise existed was "Charlie's Angels" except I have a dim memory of seeing a trailer for it at the cinema last year, intermixed with a perfume advert IIRC.  Or it might have been for a completely different film,it made that little impact.  Art?

"Quiver in fear, miscreants!"
 - thought no miscreant ever.

     It was quite the flop and lost about £20 million, so you might call them <ahem> fallen angels.  The director fizzed and fumed about said lack of success, but she never seemed to have ever asked the question "Does the world want another Charlie's  Angels film?" because the answer was a resounding "No".  Just think, £30 million wasted on this when "The Goon" is simply begging to be made.

    Conrad noted a couple of Awards that the film garnered, which boggled him rather, until he read more closely.  Art?

     Very catty, ladies.  But true.

More Questionable Judgement

A couple of posts ago I mentioned an explosion of children's cartoon series in the Eighties, that took advantage of loosened advertising laws in order to flog cheap merchandised tat to children.  We looked at the bizarre "Toxic Avengers" spin-off cartoon, and now we have - "Robocop"!

     Yes, that's right, "Robocop", where you remember Alex Murphy being blasted apart by shotguns, and a rapist having his dangly bits shot off, and a guy gets poisoned by toxic waste (no, it doesn't make him super-strong, it disintegrates him) and Robocop kills the bad guy by knifing him in the neck with a data-probe - yeah,all that child- and family-friendly stuff!

Leon liquifies before your eyes

    Because you can't have any of that in modern children's cartoons, the cartoon Robocop was a kind of neutered titanium wimp, whose sole purpose in life was to chase the Evil Polluters, because everyone can get behind that as an ethos, right?

"Come quietly or there will be ... trouble."

     Quite how an incredibly violent and acid satire came to be bowdlerised as a kids cartoon - in fact it does have a parallel, which I shan't go into here.  Wait for tomorrow!

Finally -

Well, that's goodbye to my slipcase of P G Wodehouse, amongst the 24 books MY BEAUTIFUL BOOKS <sobs quietly> which are bagged-up and ready for the slaughterhouse - er - the charity shops in Royton.  That makes about 50 in the past fortnight or so.  You see?  You see?  I can be strong when I need to be -

     And with that we are done done done!

*  I exaggerate but slightly.

**  Though he may have worn some.