An evil corporation on Pluto has a stranglehold on the economy and freedoms of mankind. But The Doctor, Leela and K-9 foment rebellion! Surprise, the creep in charge is an alien!
This is a less gonzo episode than the past few and that’s welcome. It’s perfectly serviceable and apart from K-9’s errant laser beam there’s not much groanworthy special effects. The characters are standard but fun, especially the smug tax collector who reminds me of a greedy pompous Fred Willard who really loves his job. Apparently the writer of this episode really had a grudge with taxation.
You’d think an episode called the Sun Makers would have more focus on the artificial suns around Pluto. But really it seems just a way to justify the typical English grey skies when the characters are outdoors.
Some unethical scientists do some kind of sciencey-scan on an unusual, possibly alien, skull. This ‘activates’ the skull which slowly transforms the lady scientist into a gold, gorgon-like woman and summons beasties reminiscent of H.P. Lovecraft’s From Beyond…I think so that it can manifest into it’s previous gestalt form and do some bad things to the universe. Luckily, old local Mrs. Tyler is a disciple of the ‘old religion’ AKA witchcraft and knows some tricks, and she teams up with our heroes.
This is one that probably could have been done in 2 episodes, especially considering The Doctor and Leela don’t do much until the climax. As usual it’s a mix of occult and space/time gobbledygook. The most mad of the mad doctors has a bad accent but the other doctors are less hammy. Overall, another germ of an interesting concept, left out so long that it becomes stale, and tentatively kicked down the hall a bit.
It all started in the late 90’s, I made a character for a superhero roleplaying game I was playing. That was Rhinosferatu, the vampire rhino
He was such a hit I started thinking about what other animal superheroes and villains I could make using punny portmanteaus. Some worked! Boomerangutan, Cardinal Sin, Dupligator, Earthquack… Others, not so much (Dire Rhea?)
Naturally, I started drawing all these characters, studying character design by buying a lot of old Super Goof, Mighty Mouse and Baby Huey comics.
When the opportunity arose, I created a mini-comic, “The Ominous Origin of Rhinosferatu” that was published in a local anthology
Rhinosferatu Page 3
This led to another, longer comic with a wider array of characters in a book called “Mega Fauna”
“Eye Eye Eye” written by Ian Boothby
Once I became a storyboard artist, I used Storyboard Pro to make a rough opening titles sequence for a proposed cartoon
Suffice it to say that anthropomorphic animal super heroes have been a bit part of my life for a very long time. I love the designs, the mash-ups, and the puns.
The WWFJ has been pitched before in different formats, but some real life ordeals that have come up lately made me realize that the way I deal (or not deal) with real people could use some work. And so with that angle I have re-adjusted the pitch to include the character of Wally Zoo, who likes to lose himself in a fantasy world. I hope that with this series I can tie the good clean fun of comic superheroes into a project with heart that can help others — and myself — work through some personal difficulties.
I saw Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I liked most of it, but as a critic and as a Ghostbusters fan there was some stuff that rubbed me the wrong way, and so I’ve come to the internet to write it down.
Michael Reaves has strong feelings about Ghostbusters: Afterlife
The ghost plot is a rehash of the first film, so not much original here and an overabundance of member-berries for old nerds like me. So if that is something you’re looking for, they got you covered – everything from Slimer 2.0 to Stay Puft 2.0 to “who you gonna call” and “are you a god?” I did like the Evo Shandor stuff and mossssst of it worked. I really liked that J.K. Simmons only got one line but the Evo in a box thing was a bit confusing, and I don’t understand why the terror dogs were just sitting around on the sidelines while Gozer was getting smoked by particle throwers.
The sudden deus ex machina of the original Ghostbusters was another strength and weakness. I mean, we all want to see those characters again and what they are up to, but showing up so suddenly to take agency away from the other characters legitimately took me out of the story. It kind of ruined the movie to be perfectly honest? That said, I thought their characters were on point and well-scripted. And I still have mixed feelings about CG-resurrection of Harold Ramis, which I thought they milked about 40% too much in the final scenes. But there were tears, so yeah, they got me.
Also, why, OH WHY did Egon lead Phoebe to release Vinz Clortho from the ghost trap? Didn’t that put them all in terribly deadly danger? I guess maybe it was part of his master plan but jeez, if you can move chess pieces and lamps, how about a pencil on a piece of paper?
The Elmer Bernstein music cues, identical to the original, brought back many memories, what with the original Ghostbusters being one of my most-watched films of all time, and I liked the design of Slimer, er, I mean MUNCHER and how well the animators pulled off its facial features.
Perhaps the thing Ghostbusters: Afterlife was most successful at was getting me to want to watch the original again, as well as The Real Ghostbusters cartoon…especially the “Egon’s Ghost” episode, which is excellent.
What other Real Ghostbusters episodes are excellent, since I have you here? Sounds like a great time to make a top 6 list!
Collect Call of Cathulhu, not just because they fight Cthulhu, but a well-crafted story by Michael Reaves.
Mr. Sandman, Dream Me A Dream One of the entities that causes people to fall asleep and dream goes rogue and tries to put the whole world to sleep so there will be no more wars or conflict. Dreams come to life and IT’S WHACKED!
Ragnarok and Roll – a jilted lover tries to bring about the end of the world, written by J. Michael Straczynski
When Hallowe-en Was Forever: Samhain, the spirit of Hallowe’en, stops the clocks so that Hallowe’en will last forever. Written by J. Michael Straczynski
Slimer, is That You? Egon and Slimer have their brains swapped, with hilarious results.
and of course Egon’s Ghost, in which an accident ends up sending Egon to the netherworld. The guys have to go in and rescue him. Includes a terror dog!
Honorable mentions: Knock Knock; The Boogieman Cometh; Night Game; The Thing in Mrs. Faversham’s Attic; Citizen Ghost; and Take Two – the crew is called to California to help make the Ghostbusters Movie
Here’s a weird one – a virus that transmits through eye lightning gives people a silver fuzz on their face and hands and they become mind-controlled by the viral “nucleus” which looks like a prawn. Even the Doctor becomes infected but Leela is immune because she’s all instinct, whereas the virus needs intelligence. Seems like a backhanded compliment to me.
At a space hospital, we are introduced to K-9 the robot dog and the Doctor and Leela are cloned, and their clones shrink down Fantastic Voyage style to take care of the prawn monster inside the original Doctor. But the prawn uses the same size-changing technology to embiggen itself and now the invisible enemy is very very visible. And makes bad decisions. The professor is a fun character. The story starts out strong but kind of fizzles out. Clever use of some cool-looking visors to hide infection and the Doctor’s ridiculously long scarf is used as a tether in this episode.
Partway through the season, the Doctor regenerates for the very first time, and we enter the Patrick Troughton era. This is an exemplary Who episode, even though the original films were lost and this story was reconstructed in 2016 using the original audio and animation (re-finessed in 2020, which is actually the year that the story is set).
An Earth colony on the planet Vulcan is terrorized by Daleks after an overzealous scientist reanimates them from an inert space capsule. The scientist sounds like a muppet performed by Terry Jones. The new Doctor seems a bit queer (not gay but acting erratically) and emotionally distant from his companions, and the story gets intensely dark by episode 6.
The animation is quite limited, you can hear a lot of action happening in the audio, especially during the climax, but it is not reflected in the animation. This limitation of the human characters is actually offset by doing away with the limits of the daleks on a practical set. Instead of having the few dalek models moving about with cardboard cutout of a dalek crowd behind them, it’s like these guys were designed to be made into 3-D models and replicated in this environment. So that at least works better than the original!
In which I learned about the Schermuly pistol rocket apparatus (see below).
Horror At Fang Rock is probably the Who episode I’ve seen the most times, and therefor have the most memories of, with the possible exception of “Unearthly Child.” It’s also one of the most suited to a Call of Cthulhu RPG adventure – a few people in a lighthouse are victimized by an alien blob that is trying to call its fleet of spaceships to decimate the planet.
Interesting and well portrayed cast of characters, but don’t get too attached to anyone. e. Includes the folksy old-timer who believes in sea monsters, who, to the actors credit, becomes the monster, after a fashion. Castaways include sleazy stock broker reminiscent of Carter Burke in Aliens, and the high-strung secretary who provides more than enough screaming and fainting spells until her inevitable demise.
Leela does some fine companioning in this episode, unlike previous eps her ideas and actions are not pooh-poohed by the Doctor and all the men. She’s in control and in her element, fighting monsters. This is also the episode where her eyes change colour, because actor Louise Jameson was tired of wearing brown contact lenses for the character, so they wrote a bit into the script where she was blinded, but when she recovered her eyes became blue. Why they would care what colour her eyes were when the character was introduced is beyond me.
All in all a fun, spooky bottle episode that could serve as a great introduction to Doctor Who for folks who like period horror.
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