Review: John Williams's 'Jaws: (Music From the Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)' "Blood in the Water" Vinyl

It was fifty years ago that a certain movie swam up to make people afraid to go in the water and movie execs afraid to not end their blockbusters with a big explosion. Jaws altered the face of cinema in many ways, some great and some not so great, but I'm pretty sure everyone agrees that at least one element of the film is unassailable: that John Williams score (okay, the dialog, acting, and directing are unassailable too). 

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Ghost of an Idea: Hauntology, Folk Horror and the Spectre of Nostalgia'

As a place for me to babble about my favorite rock music and horror movies of a century that only exists in the rearview, Psychobabble is nostalgic by definition. So a book like Ghost of an Idea, which ostensibly studies and derides the tendency of the horror film to look back with both fear and longing, probably isn't aimed at me. Nor is the almost willfully dense academic voice that dominates the first third of the book. 

Review: Bruce Vilanch's 'It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time'

Bruce Vilanch is the scribe behind such widely reviled pop-cultural specimens as The Star Wars Holiday Special, The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, and Can't Stop the Music, starring the Village People. That Vilanch didn't toss himself out of the nearest fifth floor window sometime in the early eighties could be a consequence of his mythical acceleration-powder intake or his equally legendary propensity for self-deprecation. 

Since Vilanch dispels the myth that he was some sort of incorrigible coke receptacle in his new book It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time, and goes above and beyond to remind us of his self-deprecating sense of humor, we can assume that the latter is responsible for him still being with us. One must surely need a prodigious ability to laugh at oneself to take a full-on wallow in their greatest failures for two hundred pages, which is basically what Vilanch does in It Seemed Like a Bad Idea. He takes us on a tour through the terrible variety shows, awful feature films, and crappy stage performances he wrote, mostly as an excuse to drop a lot of corny jokes one might expect from the guy who wrote that alien cooking show Chewbacca's wife loves to watch.

Review: 'Star Wars: Complete Locations'

Perhaps more so than any other world-building enterprise, the never-ending Star Wars saga is largely dependent on its worlds, some of which aren't even deserts. Sure, you're likely to spend most of your time getting sand in your boots on Tattooine or Jakku or Jedha (that sand gets everywhere!), but you can also freeze your Tauntaun-straddling butt off on Hoth. You can slop around in the mud of Dagobah. You can even get all metropolitan on Cloud City or Coruscant. And if there's a location to be located in the Star Wars universe, it can likely be located in Star Wars: Complete Locations. 

Review: 'Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1'

As we've recently seen right here on Psychobabble, the Star Wars universe continues to pump out more and more stuff, often at the expense of the original trilogy's sense of whimsy and fun. That's why S.T. Bende and Iris Compiet's new book Star Wars Bestiary Vol. 1 is such a breath of fresh, Endor-scented air. This book is all fun and whimsy, a pseudo-space zoologist's (plus robot buddy) star-field book logging all the weird beasties populating Tattooine, Hoth, Dagobah, Jakku, Mandalore, and all those other far-flung locales. 

Review: 'Star Wars Encyclopedia'

Once nothing more than a single extremely, extremely popular space-fantasy flick, Star Wars soon expanded into a line of Marvel comics, then a funky TV holiday special, then a sequel, and then another sequel. Read-along records and Dixie cups aside, that basically brings us to 1983. Over the following four decades, what it means to be Star Wars would continue to swell, ultimately encompassing eight more feature films, numerous cartoons and live-action TV series, countless comics, novel series, and games, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It's only a matter of time before Guerra de las Galaxias: La Telenovela debuts.

Review: 'Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films'

Like horror, science fiction is a genre that can be tricky to define. Frankenstein is certainly a horror movie, but with the pseudo-scientific creation of flat-top Boris, it can also be classified as science-fiction. Bride of Frankenstein, in which Dr. Pretorius creates creatures in a way more in line with "black magic," doesn't bother so much with the pseudo science. Whatever. They both qualify as science fiction in Fantastic Planets, Forbidden Zones, and Lost Continents: The 100 Greatest Science-Fiction Films even though Douglas Brode goes to some lengths to define the science-fiction film as any that makes some attempt to explain its weirdness scientifically. 

Review: 'The Future Is Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982'

Even though pretty much everyone loved it, Star Wars became an easy go-to villain for every dreary movie critic who'd come to complain that it ruined cinematic art by making special effects and bottom line far more important than story, complex themes, and characterizations. Nevertheless, it took a few years for the influence of George Lucas's film to really ripen. Aside from a few stray extravaganzas like Superman, Alien, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars influence was mostly manifest in grade-Z schlockers like Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars in the years immediately following the summer of '77. 

Review: 'Return of the Jedi: A Visual Archive'

Return of the Jedi has its flaws, but you can't say that the final episode of the original Star Wars trilogy doesn't look fab. The creatures! The costumes! The colors! Not to mention the tie-in merchandise. Perhaps of all the Star Wars films, Return of the Jedi best lends itself to one of those visual archive type books filled with photos and pasted-in ephemera. Star Wars is a much better film, but it's a bit too drab. Empire is even better, but its winter-wear costumes aren't as groovy and it's very light in the creature department. What Return of the Jedi lacks in storytelling and acting, it makes up for with squid heads, fish heads, speeder bikes, and golden bikinis. 

Review: 'A Disturbance in the Force: How and Why the Star Wars Holiday Special Happened'

For years, it seemed like some sort of weird dream. Yet I could remember every detail of staying up late at the age of four at my grandmother's house to watch the first piece of Star Wars visual entertainment since Star Wars. I could remember sitting right in front of the screen in a wood paneled den and the names of every member of Chewbacca's family and their UFO-shaped house in the trees and dozing off while struggling to remain awake and the creepy sensation of listening to Princess Leia sing that gross song. If my grandma and I hadn't spent the next few years laughing over the names "Lumpy" and "Itchy," I might have concluded that none of it had really happened, because there was no Internet to remind us that The Star Wars Holiday Special really did air on November 17, 1978, on CBS. George Lucas certainly wasn't going to remind us. 

Review: 'The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies'

We are living through very Duney times. The last thing I reviewed here on Psychobabble was Max Evry's oral history A Masterpiece in Disarray. The latest is Ryan Britt's The Spice Must Flow: The Story of Dune from Cult Novels to Visionary Sci-Fi Movies. This is a very different worm from Evry's hulkingly exhaustive 500-page dive into David Lynch's bizarre adaptation of Frank Herbert's sci-fi franchise. Britt delivers only half the page count but sets his blue-within-blue eyes across a more complete vista, reminding us that Lynch's film is only one stop along a hero's journey that began in the early sixties when Frank Herbert, a struggling writer with a debt to the IRS looming over his head, conceived a far off galaxy in which royal houses squabble over control of a sandy drug empire. Dune World was published as a magazine serial in 1963, fleshed out for the more pithily titled novel in 1965, and further expanded for a series of literary sequels. Then came Alejandro Jodorowsky's doomed aborted attempt to adapt it into a film, Lynch's doomed unaborted attempt to adapt it into a film, John Harrison's TV miniseries for the Sci-Fi channel, and Dennis Villeneuve's ongoing big-screen remake series.

Despite wielding a hefty influence on such whiz-bang entertainment as Star Wars, Dune in all its iterations has a reputation for being fairly dense, serious stuff, but Britt goes out of his way to give the property's history a light telling to re-emphasize how once you boil Dune down, it's still a story of heroes and villains and giant worms in outer space. After setting the tone with an extended discussion of Herbert's facial hair, the author blazes along all of the major stops on Dune Avenue, including its influence on its much more eager-to-please kid brother, Star Wars. 

If all you want to learn about is Lynch's film, which despite its rep as a turkey has a pretty sizable cult following and gains extra curiosity simply because it was made by our greatest living filmmaker, A Masterpiece in Disarray is the book to get. But even though Britt only devotes 28 pages to that which Evry devoted 500, we still learn a few new things via Britt's interviews with Kyle MacLachlan and Alicia Witt. And, of course, if you have a more sweeping interest in Dune, Britt earns his keep by discussing matters such as the miniseries and the remake franchise that aren't among Evry's main focal points. And if you're pressed for time, Britt's book is quicker to digest than Evry's, even if it isn't likely to leaving you feeling as satisfied.

Review: 'E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial' 40th Anniversary Soundtrack

His scores for Star Wars and Raiders of the Lost Ark may have yielded more instantly recognizable themes, but John Williams composed some of his loveliest melodies and most varied arrangements when scoring E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. The stirring theme used to euphoric effect when Elliott and his alien companion take flight on a bike, is the most famous and Williamsy number, but the eerie, unresolved main theme, the sparse harp arpeggios that color Elliott's budding friendship with E.T., and the rippling piano piece that introduces the closing credits may be the composer's most enchantingly pretty and atypically reserved music. Despite its reputation for being saccharine, E.T. is actually fairly dark and surprisingly poetic, and Williams reflects those tones with the foreboding piece that accompanies the extraterrestrials' late-night botany hunt in the woods, the eerie drones heard inside their spacecraft, and an ominous theme that shudders as a team of mysterious scientists invade Elliott's home.

Review: 'Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination'

From this past October 4 through May the 4th of 2023, The Science Museum in London is running an exhibition called Science Fiction: Voyage to the Edge of Imagination. Those who might cry "blasphemy!" at the idea of a serious science museum paying tribute to a world of made-up monoliths and wookiees hasn't been paying very close attention to sci-fi for the past two-hundred years. Ever since Mary Shelley published Frankenstein, the genre has been raising serious questions about the role science plays in our lives, using fantastical scenarios as a means to discuss touchy topics, and inspiring the next generation of astrophysicists, paleontologists, and biologists. 

Review: 'E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial- The Ultimate Visual History'

Because it didn't spawn an endless series of sequels and spin-offs, because its tie-in merchandise didn't dig itself into the ongoing pop-cultural consciousness with complete success, it's easy to forget what a phenomenon E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial was upon its release in 1982. It outgrossed Steven Spielberg's own previous blockbusters and his buddy George Lucas's Star Wars films (which, needless to say, had no issues in the sequel, spin-off, or merch departments). "E.T. phone home" became a catch phrase of "May the force be with you" or "Where's the beef?" ubiquity. Most kids didn't completely kit out their bedrooms with E.T. stuff the way they did with Star Wars toys, posters, and bed sheets, but most of us had an E.T. doll or two. I know I did.

Review: 'The Masters of the Universe Book'

In the early eighties, Kenner's line of Star Wars 3 ¾-inch figures dominated toy store shelves, leaving its competitor Mattel lagging behind and scheming to catch up. The only way to compete with George Lucas's weird wookiees, jawas, and yodas was to get weirder, bigger, and all-around zanier. The braniacs at Mattel inflated their figures to a whopping 5½ inches, pumped their plastic muscles to asinine proportions, oversaturated them with candy colors, and gave them daffy names like Stinkor, Clamp Champ, Buzz-Off, Two Bad, Webstor (not to be confused with the character Emmanuel Lewis originated), and, for the leader of the gang, He-Man. 

Review: 'The Monster Collection' Blu-ray

There have been a lot of documentaries about the special effects whizzes who gave birth to the creatures that populate Star Wars, Alien, An American Werewolf in London, Jurassic Park, and other monster movies. The point of most is to simply celebrate the work of Fangoria cover boys such as Rick Baker, Dennis Muren, Greg Nicotero, Steve Johnson, Chris Walas, and Phil Tippett. Gilles Penso and Alexandre Poncet's 2015 doc The Frankenstein Complex has a bit more of a point than that, though it takes some time to reveal itself. 

Initially, the film carries along like most others of its sort, introducing you to its cast of behind-the-scenes stars and showing new and vintage footage of how they work their magic whether illustrating, sculpting maquettes and puppets, fashioning costumes, stop-motion animating, or building animatronics. When the story reaches the mid-eighties and James Cameron's The Abyss, we meet the antagonist that really Frankensteins this film to life: CGI. Former SFX superstars such as Stan Winston and Phil Tippett soon find their practical work blending with computer generated effects that tend to steal their thunder even though Tippett's ethereal fiber-optics in The Abyss and Winston's ingenious devices in Terminator 2 and astounding full-size animatronic T. Rex in Jurassic Park are easily as impressive as those films' computer-generated innovations. Winston responded by immediately adapting to the changing scene. Tippett fell into depression. As is always the case with the monsters these men made, the cool designs are what draw in viewers, but it is the human, emotional element that makes The Frankenstein Complex more profoundly engaging.

Penso and Poncet clearly recognized this and zoomed further in on Tippet's struggle when they made Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters in 2019. The film goes deeper into the filmmaker's work on the Star Wars trilogy, Dragonslayer, Robocop, and Starship Troopers than The Frankenstein Complex does while also spotlighting more of Tippett's personal depth than that earlier film did. He also had dark times as a young loner and as a filmmaker out to sea after the end of the original Star Wars trilogy. He experienced brighter times when he met his future-wife Jules Roman, who would run Tippett's own special effects studio. Mad Dreams and Monsters shows that Tippett did bounce back and adapt in a CG world and continued to work throughout the twenty-first century on major films such as the Twilight movies while also pursuing a more inscrutably personal vision with his Mad God shorts series. 

Dopplegänger Releasing is now bundling The Frankenstein Complex and Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters into a deluxe package titled The Monster Collection. The bonus material alone will keep you busy for the better part of a day. There's an hour long documentary about the making of The Frankenstein Complex and a supplemental piece for Mad Dreams and Monsters that is actually longer than the feature. It shows Tippett and friends working on the holographic chess game for The Force Awakens, tours his collection of tauntauns, dinosaurs, and robocops, and plenty more. There are also even closer looks at his creature collection, additional interviews and conversations, audio commentaries, bonus interviews, galleries, and best of all, a selection of Tippett's short films. The Monster Collection is nothing less than a crash course in the art of practical special effects and a subtle yet righteous plea for the preservation of that art.

Review: 'Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars'

No film's history has been sifted through more often than Star Wars'. After phenomenally thorough tromps through force-lore by the likes of Michael Kiminski, John Phillip Peecher, Alan Arnold, and J.W. Rinzler, it’s unrealistic to expect that any chronicler would find anything new to say about George Lucas’s phenomenon. At least Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman take a novel approach by presenting their Star Wars study as an oral history. I really loved their book in this format about Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, so I was looking forward to reading their Secrets of the Force: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized, Oral History of Star Wars even though I wasn’t certain I would learn anything new from it.

Review: 'The Art of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge'

The Star Wars movies have always been a lot like amusement park rides with their dizzying flights through asteroid fields and high-speed races on speeder bikes. So when Disney gobbled up the franchise in 2012, it was just a matter of time before the mega-corporation built some sort of Star Wars land in its theme parks. Indeed, the Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge section of Disneyland and Disney World opened to the public in 2019. Little did the Mouse know that there was a pandemic lurking right around the corner that might cut into attendance.

For those of us not dopey enough to risk exposing ourselves to crowds of maskless tourists in Bermuda shorts, The Art of Star Wars Galaxy's Edge should scratch the itch to check out Galaxy's Edge a little. The book is a tour through the theme park section via production illustrations and paintings. The work inside this book is not too different from what artists created to conceptualize the films that inspired the park. There are paintings of fanciful new aliens, spaceships, and environments intended to remind you of such familiar Star Wars territories as Yavin 4 and the Mos Eisley Cantina. As is always the case with books of this sort, there are ideas that didn't come to fruition, such as a cool alien aquarium that would have been the centerpiece of the Galaxy's Edge cantina. It would have been nice if the book included a few actual photos of the rides and concessions developed from the art to get some idea of how they were realized, but I guess there's no substitute for seeing this stuff in person. Just be sure to get your vaccines first, kids.

Review: 'The Art of Star Wars: The Mandalorian'

We fans have a notoriously tough time rallying around any live action Star Wars product that isn’t the original trilogy. Who can blame us? The prequel trilogy was a turgid gasbag. The sequel trilogy got off to a lively and well received start with The Force Awakens, but it began to divide fans as it became clear that the filmmakers were just winging it, and the whole thing ended on a fatuous note with The Rise of Skywalker. Rogue One was a good yarn but too dour to truly love. Solo was dumb.