You Can Be Forgiven -
For thinking "Did I miss something?", since you are familiar with Romania as a rather bucolic backwater in Eastern Europe, that wasn't quite part of the Warsaw Pact, nor a Soviet satellite exactly, and which is possibly best known as having had a glut of building churches* since the Sinisters went toes-up. Not for being interplanetary imperialists. Let me bring the evidence. Art!
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| Zagon Central Spaceport |
"Zagon" is real, a part of Covasna county in <shudder> Transylvania, which as any fule no is in Romania. The thing is ... and Lo! we are back to "This Island Earth" again, the enemy are the <cue sinister theremin solo> - Zagons!
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| Rush hour in Zagon (Earth) |
Well it made me laugh, anyway. In reality Zagon (Earth) is the very definition of a bucolic backwater, with lots of greenery. Zagon (in the vicinity of Metaluna) is a comet, from whence the sinister Zagon scoutships launch their ceaseless meteorite attack on the near-helpless planet before them.
Here an aside. Technically, as astronomers will tell you, a 'meteorite' is the carcass of a meteor when it falls to earth. However, nobody ever explains where all these Zagon missiles come from, so it's quite feasible that they are meteorites that fell to earth (so to speak) on Zagon itself.
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| A Meteor |
Okay, enough waffley wibble, let's put up some pictures of these eeeeevil alien rascals. Art!
Here you can just see the Zagon scoutship propelling it's meteorite at the Metalunan spaceship. Don't worry, they get through unscathed. Next!
This sequence of pictures shows the Zagon scoutships casting-off after getting their missiles close enough to ensure an on-target impact, smoothly departing - the miniature work here is very well done, without any obvious wires or wobbling - and in the very bottom picture you can just make out the blurred outlines of two scoutships as they streak across the battered terrain of Metaluna. Please excuse the reflection of some fat biffer that got in the way.
Lastly, in this series of photos from TIE, I have to include the obligatory Bug-Eyed Monster, the 'Mutant' as everyone knows it. Art!
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| Mutant to port. OBVIOUSLY. |
In fact, when you hear Exeter introduce one of these homely creatures, he pronounces the word as "Mute-ant" and compares it to terrestrial insects, for a little clever word play. The one above has been given a severe bashing about the bonce, brain-bleeding the result. Incidentally, given that it has such an enormous amount of grey matter, it is remarkably stupid and fails to capture Ruth even when she falls over on a completely flat surface with nothing to trip her.
Here an aside. They had appropriate insectile legs made, which proved far too difficult to move in without falling apart, and with a deadline to hit and a budget to keep to, the producers opted for pants. Art!
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| A face only a mother could love. And even then only maybe. |
Righto, that's all the pictures you're going to get for today. QUELL YOUR EUPHORIA! Because tomorrow we're going to look at a few of the Gaping Plot Holes that exist for this film.
Of course, I could be overthinking this ...
Three Years Ago
Or, if you wish to be tasteless, "Flaming Shoesies" for Lo! we are come to another near-winner of the Darwin Awards, which was certified by that very website. Picture the scene: a South Canadian supermarket car park. Art!
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| You couldn't make it up |
Our un-named protagonist had run out of petrol, so he stopped off in Target to purchase a plastic gallon jug**.
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| Thus |
This he proceeded to fill with petrol. You know, there is a reason plastic petrol containers are designed that way, and not like a gallon jug. Hapless Harry (the news reports dignify him by omitting a name) found he couldn't get the petrol into his car's petrol tank thanks to the neck and a safety valve within the tank's opening.
Not to be outdone, Harry decides he is going to mould the jug's neck into a funnel shape, the better to pour it, and he's going to do this with - a lighter.
You can see where this is going, can't you?
A naked flame in immediate proximity to petrol is not a happy combination; Harry set himself alight and only survived because nearby shoppers threw him to the ground and rolled him about to extinguish the blaze. Art!
O howling irony - that's not Harry's car, it's one parked alongside him.
I shouldn't need to say this but - DO NOT TRY THIS AT HOME. Being dead means you can't read BOOJUM!
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| "Conrad! We object to your tasteless punnery at our expense." |
Conrad - Still Pretty Seethy
"Seethy" is now a word, because I say so. <long swear> Codeword can include some of the words they have done recently, "Seethy" is pretty small beer. For example:
"CHUTZPAH": Say what? This is something in Yiddish or Hebrew that the South Canadians use because their language lacks the phrase "brass neck" - ah yes, Yiddish. WHAT ARE WE EXPERTS IN EUROPEAN SUB-DIALECTS NOW? Such conceit smacks of brass neck to me. Art!
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| <temporarily lost for words> |
"FLAX": No! Not the plural of "Flak", which word itself is actually an acronym of "Fleigerabwehrkanone". Anti-aircraft gun in English. It is "a herbaceous plant or shrub that has blue flowers and is cultivated for it's seed and for the fibres of it's stems and which
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| <again struck dumb> |
"MINUTEST": O come on! When did you last hear this in conversation or read it in a book? Conrad bets this went out of use in the eighteenth century when horribly formal communications in Latin were also on the way out. In fact it probably went out of use slightly after the Bible was written. So there.
And one cannot end an episode of "Starry Trex" without one of those incredibly cheesy wah-wah-wah moments featuring -
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| Smirky Kirky |
- "Yo! Jimbo!"
* In the Cold War, they used to make useful hard currency by selling their latest Soviet military kit to the CIA. Discreetly, mind.
** None of that metric nonsense here.
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