Review: 'The Empire Strikes Back: The Original Topps Trading Card Series Volume Two'

Spending over ten million bucks on a sci-fi fantasy for kids was a huge gamble in a cinematic era defined by gritty Earth-bound dramas, but as we all knew a week after its release, Star Wars paid off in a big way. So did the equally risky Topps trading card series devoted to George Lucas’s universe of sand and steel, and when he produced its sequel, another Topps series was inevitable. Just as Empire Strikes Back improved on the original Star Wars in a number of ways, Topps’ new cards were a step up too. The images on them covered the most visually accomplished episode more completely than the first series covered Star Wars. They were less repetitious and more eclectic with comic-booky illustrations and Ralph McQuarrie’s enchanting production paintings mingling with the usual promo and production photos, which include outtake scenes and behind-the-scenes moments. The quality of the images was also finer than the grainy, blurry shots on the first Star Wars cards.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 201

The Date: April 18

The Movie: Shadow of a Doubt (1943)

What Is It?: Hitchcock named this disturbing story of a beloved uncle who turns out to be not-so-great as his favorite of his own films. Teresa Wright and Joseph Cotton are brilliant as a niece/uncle team with a pretty strange bond.

Why Today?: The railway station in the film’s climax was one of the few structures to survive the earthquake of April 18, 1906.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 200

The Date: April 17

The Movie: Dracula’s Daughter (1936)

What Is It?: As cinema’s first memorable female monster, Gloria Holden battles through a homophobic script to command Lambert Hillyer’s effectively gloomy visuals with her imposing presence.

Why Today?: Today is Bat Appreciation Day

The Latest Bonus Specs on the 'Monkees' Blu-ray Box

OK, so it's disappointing that the "Monkees Complete Series" Blu-ray set, which was originally supposed to be released last January before being bumped up to late this April, has been delayed once again to June 27, but it sounds like Andrew Sandoval and John Hughes have been hard at work adding more content to this set. They recently appeared on the "Zilch" podcast to express their embarrassment over the delays, assure us that this is the last one, and go into greater detail about what we can expect from the set. You can listen to the full podcast here, but this is the gist of the bonus content:

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 199

The Date: April 16

The Movie: Creature from the Black Lagoon (1954)

What Is It?: Last hoorah of Universal’s golden age of monster movies or first hoorah for the new age of sci-fi terrors? Who cares when the creature design and underwater photography are so beautiful?

Why Today?: The Devonian Era that saw the birth of gill men started 416 million years ago and today is 4/16.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 198

The Date: April 15

The Movie: A Night to Remember (1958)

What Is It?: The one and only Titanic movie worth watching is a superb adaptation of Walter Lord’s excellent book about the ocean liner disaster. Director Roy Ward Baker would ultimately make his name as a horror movie maker, but he doesn't need a single vampire or zombie in this most horrific and beautifully made film.

Why Today?: On this day in 1912, the Titanic sinks.

Review: 'Time and a Word: The Yes Story'

Like the proggy/poppy group it documents, Time and a Word: The Yes Story is a bit schizo. Martin Popoff’s book is part straight-forward timeline, part oral history. Generally dry and purely informational by nature, time lines are almost never interesting to read. Chatty, gossipy, and a bit hard to trust, oral histories are almost always great fun. That means—like Yes’s discography (sorry, I’ll stop comparing the book to the band)—Time and a Word is enjoyable in fits, but it also lacks the authorial insight and details that would truly make it “The Yes Story.”

We readers learn the basic beats of the band’s career: the comings and goings of its multitudinous members, the record releases and the receptions to those records from both critics and band members, the splits and reunions right up to 2015. What we don’t learn is much about the people in the band. Jon Anderson’s spirituality gets discussed quite a bit, but only because it was so relevant to the music he wrote, and this is really a book about music not people. Rick Wakeman, the most flamboyant member of the group by some degree, has no problem exuding his personality regardless of what he’s talking about. Otherwise, a bunch of guys who critics have often criticized as being faceless music-bots do not get humanized in any meaningful way. Because those guys aren’t particularly gossipy, the oral history portions often fail to fill in the gaps, particularly when dealing with inter-band conflicts. That Popoff’s writing can be very lively, which is evident from his personal assessments of the albums the Yes Men made in and outside of the group, makes one wish he’d tapped into that energy more when explaining the history. Time and a Word could have used a lot more of that kind of liveliness and insight. As it stands, it kind of reads like box set liner notes.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 197

The Date: April 14

The Movie: Black Sunday (1960)

What Is It?: Mario Bava guts Nikolai Gogol’s story “Viy” and fills the cavity with nightmares, torture, spiked masks, spurting blood, spiders, crypts, and two Barbara Steeles: one sweet and pure and the other a resurrected vampire/witch who wants to exsanguinate the good one. Double Steeles means double fun.

Why Today?: On this day in 1935, the Black Sunday dust storm swept the American Midwest.

Review: 'Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics-The Complete Series Volume One: 1969-1970'

In the classic “Mirror, Mirror” episode of “Star Trek”, Captain Kirk, Uhura, Scotty, and Bones get zapped onto a parallel-universe Enterprise where Spock is a sadistic monster with a Van Dyke beard, Chekov attempts to assassinate Kirk, and Sulu is a horny creep with a weird scar and comb-over. OK, the characters who appeared in the “Star Trek” comic strip that ran in UK magazines from 1969-1973 weren’t as far-removed from their better-known counterparts as the “Mirror, Mirror” villains were, but they definitely weren’t TV’s Kirk, Spock, Sulu, etc. Spock was a much more bellicose dude than the logical and peaceful chap on CBS’s series. Kirk was sometimes called “Kurt.” In early strips, Uhura and Sulu tend to get sidelined in favor of a Red Shirt named Bailey who’d only appeared in one episode of the TV series. That series had its share of nutty episodes, but they didn’t suck nitrous oxide the way stories in the UK comics did. A typical tale finds Kirk getting imprisoned in a zoo by a giant mantis before playing soccer on The Planet of the Apes.

The UK “Star Trek” strips were kind of like Marvel’s Star Wars comics, which rocketed away from the canon in similar fashion, and like those crazy Star Wars books, the “Star Trek” strips are fun because they are so goofy, so wrong. They are also painted beautifully with the characters regularly resembling their screen incarnations very closely, which was rarely true of Marvel’s Star Wars.

IDW gathers nearly 90 strips in Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics-The Complete Series Volume One: 1969-1970. IDW’s great strength has always been its fidelity to the original comics it reprints, and I’ve often praised the publisher’s grainy, comic-like paper stock and refusal to recolor. However, fidelity is the undoing of half of The Classic UK Comics Volume One. These comics were originally published as two-page spreads in various magazines, and a magazine is much easier to spread out than a hardcover book. Because IDW copies that magazine format so closely, a lot of image and text gets lost in the crease. This problem evaporates half way through the book when a variation in the original layout appears. Unfortunately, this is also when original artist Harry F. Lindfield disappears, and with it goes the flawless likenesses of the characters. Fortunately, the parallel-universe shenanigans are still goofy fun to read, which will hopefully continue to be the case when IDW publishes volume two.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 196

The Date: April 13

The Movie: Help! (1965)

What Is It?: The Beatles make the most of a dopey and rather racist script by demanding location shoots in the Austrian Alps so they could go skiing and the Bahamas so they could go sunbathing. They get stoned and sing some very good songs… in color!

Why Today?: On this day in 1965, The Beatles record “Help!”