Alley Of The Damned

Or, How To Say "Damnation Alley" Without Saying "Damnation Alley"

I know Roger Zelazny is no longer with us in the flesh, so he can't sue directly, it's just that he might have an estate bristling with litigious South Canadian lawyers, all itching to reduce copyright transgressors to penury.

     Also, I like pretending to be clever.

     Well, we need an appropriate click-baity image to lure in the passers-by.  Art!

     This is entirely relevant, as I hope to prove later on.  Trust me, I have an honest face.
     "What brought this upon the unfortunate world?" I hear you querulously quibble.  O I thought you'd never ask!

     Well, last night I re-watched "Damnation Alley", the sockbuster 1977 film that is cheesily entertaining fun, and cross-checked it with the Trivia page for the film on IMDB.

     O my.

     There are, as I so noted in my Notebook, so many profound differences that it's no surprise Ol' Rog hated the film.  Not enough to get his name taken off it, mind (probably $$$ involved).  Then I had the brilliant idea to compare and contrast the two.  It's easy enough to get pictures from the film, not so much for the novel, so I may just use book covers.  So let Ol' Rog's Blood Pressure Booster get going.

FILM: Lieutenant Tanner, USAF.  Stiff, starched, SAC Missileman.  Art!

NOVEL: Hell's Angel, criminal, murderer, going to be in jail for a very long time.  Art!

FILM: Tanner, Denton, Perry and Keegan all leave the 123rd AFB at Tipton, California, to travel across the entirety of South Canada, in the hopes of reaching Albany, New York, as this is the only place that they ever received radio comms from after The War.  Art!

NOVEL: Tanner is 'recruited' (i.e. his life sentence in prison will be pardoned and expunged) to drive from Orange County, California, which is one of only two pockets of surviving civilisation in the whole of South Canada, to Boston, the other survivors enclave.  This is due to his hanging out with biker gangs in the wilderness and knowing the route.  He and two other vehicles (Conrad's initial guesstimation for the minimum number needed) are to carry a serum to the plague that is running rife in Boston; otherwise their entire population will die.  No pressure, then.  Art!

FILM:  Set two years after The War.  Art!

Dodgy superimposed scorpions added-in when the animatronic ones were rubbish

NOVEL: Set thirty years after The War.  Yes, there are mutants and giant scorpions in the novel, too, except thirty years is a more reasonable timeframe for insects to grow to gargantuan proportions.  Conrad wonder what they exist on, as surely the area-square rule means mutant monsters like these will need immense amounts of food daily? and good luck finding edibles in an irradiated wasteland in both film and novel.  Art!

FILM: Almost no other survivors along Alley of the Damned.  The surviving crew meet a handful of irradiated loonwaffles with guns and that's about it.  Art!

     The film credits them as "Mountain Men".  Hmmmm not sure about that.  Art!

Distinct lack of mountains.  Or even hills.

NOVEL: As ever in a post-apocalyptic world, Hom. Sap. is it's own worst enemy, with marauding gangs infesting the Alley, as well as a couple of pocket-sized police states-cum-dictatorships.  One supposes casting that would increase the budget to unacceptable levels.  Art!

FILM: The Nuclear Family (sorry, couldn't resist) makes it to Albany, all four of them surviving mechanical failure, mountain men and gigantic flooding.  Art!

NOVEL: Surprise!  Only Hell Tanner makes it through alive.  Boston is saved.  Art!

FILM: Twinkly lights in the sky.  These were added in post-production and took simply ages to manage, even if they look laughably simple nowadays, and considerably delayed the release of the film.  Art!

NOVEL: There are ferocious winds girdling the globe that begin at 150 yards and prevent all forms of flight.  Not only that, there are storms that dump thousands of tons of rubble and dirt and miscellaneous rubbish onto the ground below, making travel extra-specially dangerous.  No lights in the sky.

     You may be wondering about the "Judge Dredd" clickbait-y picture we used at the top of this Intro.  As well you might.  The thing is, Pat Mills and Kevin O'Neill have admitted/confessed/homaged that "The Cursed Earth" was directly inspired by DA.  Which is another story for a different day.

STAND UP FOR QUEENIE!

Ah, Twitter - which I refuse to call by any other name, as the lesser stinkwort's aroma is unaffected by nomenclature - is proving to be a source of content and laughs both.

     Just to fill you in on a little background, Chipmunk Cheeks likes to come across as an Alpha Male, who goes bare-chested horse-riding and shoots bears and the like, although he doubtless has a brace of helicopter gunships covering his stringy behind in the latter example.  To this end some of his minions have been playing up this image.  Art!

     As others pointed out, Peter The Average was a desk-jockey and an administrative pen-pusher.  A bit Beta, frankly.  Art!

     Here's the rebuttal as posted by the formidable Lazerpig.  Read 'em and seep, Dimya.

"City In The Sky"

Sinister plans are afoot in the humble coastal town of New Eucla.  Plans so sinister you could call them eeeeevil <twirls moustache ends like a Victorian vaudeville villain>.

     Aha! he realised, his mind flashing back to his earlier conversation outside The Sanctuary with young Barakan.  Giant snakes, eh?  Perhaps not snakes, say rather lizards-with-extensively-atrophied- limbs.

     He tried to recall what Billy had told him about life in the outback.  The young man’s grandfather had relocated from Adelaide after the Little Crash, setting up a farm, raising crops and livestock.  It hadn’t been easy; Nathan Barakan had been a social worker with limited experience of practical farming, helped only by others from the city who foresaw a looming disaster.  Come the Big Crash, his perceived actions had undergone an alteration, from pipe-dream to cold practicality.  The “Townies” from Adelaide had been grateful for help and advice from the earlier decampers.  Nathan’s son, Billy’s father, had grown up in the outback and relearnt the skills and talents needed to survive there.  He’d told Billy of  strange creatures he’d seen, mutations created by fall-out that died out without any other witnesses, descriptions of others that thrived: camels with six legs; dingoes much cleverer than any wild dog ought to be; giant snakes that walked upright; the infamous Hunting Spiders; giant ants with a toxic bite.

     Obviously the Doctor isn't plotting anything evil, just being a tad Machiavellian.

"The War Illustrated"

Remember, gentle reader, that this publication was putting across the complete fiction that D-Day was only the first of several such landings, which is partly why this pivotal event and aftermath was downplayed in TWI.  Art!

     It's a dramatic headline if not quite accurate.  You see, the Teuton defences in Normandy were sub-par when compared to those around the Pas De Calais, where the Teutons expected the Allies to storm ashore.  Rather than take the short, heavily-defended and problematic route, the Allies treacherously took the longer, far easier route.  So the only time they attacked the Atlantic Wall was from behind, when they had the Teutons on the trot months later.

     As Von Runstedt pointed out to anyone who would listen - which didn't include any of the ones who should have listened - once your line of defences has been breached, the rest of it becomes redundant.  Ooops.

So Long, Snow

What a disgustrous day Monday was!  After having the landscape greatly improved by a sheet of snow, at least before it got all slushy and grey, what did the next day bring?

     Rain.  Art!

          This is the before picture.  I'm not going to bother taking another, just use your imagination and see all the snow melting away thanks to a pervasive pall of precipitation.  Today, in mockery, the weather has been brilliantly blue and sunny, which just goes to show you why our climate has deterred potential colonisers for about a millennia*.

Finally -

One has been avoiding coverage of Pumpkinhead of late, as he tends to monopolise the news thanks to the multitude of criminal and civil cases being waged against him.  I did see a web item that caused a sly snigger to distort my lips and will append it here.  Art!

     You can file this under "Imaginative editor goes overboard', or even 'Fake news', because Donald Buck has no friends.  Not a one.  He has acquaintances until they've stopped being useful, in which case they become "Ronald Giuliani?  I may have stood near him once, never met the guy.'

     And with that we, and Rudy, are done.

*  The Channel also helps.