The Old School Otaku Lounge

Got a lot of Philip K. Dick books here: Flow My Tears The Policeman Said, The Simulacra, Dr. Bloodmoney, The Penultimate Truth, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, The Book of Philip K. Dick, A Maze of Death, Galactic Pot-Healer, Eye In The Sky, Clans of the Alphane Moon, The World Jones Made, The Unteleported Man, as well as many Scifi mags like Fantastic Universe that his stories appeared in. No time to read them. Too many books, too many authors: Richard Matheson, Robert E. Howard, Dean Koontz, Frank Belknap Long, JRR Tolkein, CS Lewis, Roger Zelazny, Seabury Quinn, HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and a hundred others, old and new. Also magazines both scifi and horror going back to the mid 1950s. No more time to read them...

Plus all the eBooks and audio books I've acquired...

Got another lifetime??

Has anyone seen the Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode of "Project Moonbase"? I have it on DVD. When I first watched it, the opening credits caught my eye that Heinlein wrote the script for it! Not only is the movie terrible, but it is so unabashedly misogynistic. The astronaut pilot, Commander Breiteis, is a woman, and oh my cow, she's a girl, LOL! A girl flying space ships? LOL! Even her commanding officer threatens to bend her over his knee and paddle her butt. Her subordinates belittle her, too! On top of it all, at the end of the movie, she and the hunky man guy get stranded on the moon, so the wonderfully intelligent SPACOM administration decides, "Oh hell, let's just make a base on the moon. Why not?" Then they order the two to get married to prevent any -gasp- SCANDALOUS rumors about them possibly having nothing to do all day in their dumb space ship but boink each other, and Breiteis insists that her future husband receive a promotion so that he will outrank her. So really, the movie ends with a huge advancement of civilization that a moon base will be established, but for women? OMG women driving space ships? LOL! They can't even drive cars because women are soooo stupid! Ah-ree-hee-hee!

Average for the time period. I was reading a bunch of Space Adventure and Space War comics the other day. The attitudes were the same. I look on this stuff as period pieces so I don't judge them too harshly. Now if it was attitudes from people or countries in the here and now...that's different. But I'm trying hard to keep politics out of the discussions on this board...

Yes, you're right. I guess it's just a product of its generation. I guess you could call it "period SF" since it represents the social mores of the time in which it was produced. That episode of MST3K is rather famous (or infamous) for belittling women in general. It just surprised me to see that the story was written by Heinlein. I know a lot of his works have been made into shows, ranging from motion pictures like Starship Troopers to cartoons like Red Planet.

If you want some insight into what authors thought when they were writing their books, best show to have watched was "Prisoners of Gravity" from the early 1990s. Some episodes are up on YouTube. Here is the fansite link:

http://www.teddog.com/pog/video

They had an impressive list of authors: Harlan Ellison, Alan Moore, Douglas Adams, Jack Kirby, Robert Sawyer, Ray Bradbury and many others. The show was on for 5 years. No DVD set is planned. The earliest episodes were not broadcast on Space Channel but some are up on You Tube. It was a rather unique show...

greg wrote:Yes, you're right. I guess it's just a product of its generation. I guess you could call it "period SF" since it represents the social mores of the time in which it was produced. That episode of MST3K is rather famous (or infamous) for belittling women in general. It just surprised me to see that the story was written by Heinlein. I know a lot of his works have been made into shows, ranging from motion pictures like Starship Troopers to cartoons like Red Planet.

The PROJECT MOONBASE MST3K is a season one episode, isn't it? One of the few I haven't seen. I don't know how closely it hews to anything Heinlein wrote - I'm sure it went through a few drafts after he was done with it. He wrote the screenplay for DESTINATION MOON as well, and that one is a remarkably dull picture. The cartoon they made for RED PLANET has almost nothing to do with the original book - it's astonishingly terrible in almost every way, poorly animated, nonsensical story, bad character & mechanical design, how it got made is anybody's guess. I think the most successful adaptation of his work was the Donald Sutherland PUPPET MASTERS, and even it went through some pretty drastic changes from the original (though on the whole the changes worked).

Certainly Heinlein was no misogynist. The mores and attitudes of a man raised in the 20's and 30's are going to come through in his fiction, and out-dated female characters are certainly present in his work from the 40s and 50s. But in later works the female characters changed from being the "helpful girlfriend" or the "shrewish wife" (Heinlein's first marriage didn't end well) to coming into their own as capable protagonists in their own right. I mean, one of his later books is about a man who becomes a woman. And it's a terrible, terrible book, but Bob was at least in there trying to figure things out.

SF in general still has a lot of problems dealing with the ladies; from the serial groping of guys like Asimov to today's controversy involving some editorial content in the bulletin of the industry magazine SFWA. Authors may probe the boundaries of time and space in their fiction, but in dealing with the opposite sex down here on Earth they still have their problems.

Yes, it's a season one episode.

To be fair, it's possible (and highly likely) that just as with today, the execs kept butting in and forcing rewrites to their whimseys. It's possible that Heinlein was against all the dumb misogyny, but they kept demanding rewrites and maybe even had someone sneak revisions in before they shot the film.

I know a guy who worked on the original project for the Dungeons & Dragons movie. He's the guy responsible for Jeremy Irons being in it. This was before LOTR, and the phoney Hollywood exec asshats didn't understand fantasy as a genre, so they were trying to dick around with it so much. Eventually, he quit. They will push writers around because they are so convinced that they know what we viewers really want to watch. That's why most often, it is so insulting to our collective intelligence.

Wow, we saw that Dungeons & Dragons movie in a theater. People actually got dressed up for the premiere. I felt really bad for them, that movie was world-class terrible. I mean Ed Wood bad.

Yeah, he said that the bigshots wanted to put a black rapper guy in the movie to appeal to the "urban market." He was gonna be the comic releif and say how much he didn't believe what was going on. My friend was like, "You don't get it. This is D&D. He was serious about having it turn into a real fantasy movie, since there really hadn't been any since the '80s (maybe with Willow? "Traitor child, I must despise you now!"). He basically rage quit because nobody was taking it seriously. I've never seen the movie, though. I may get the DVD if there's a Rifftrax for it!

Reading the Star Carrier sci-fi novels by Ian Douglas.