The Crotchety Old Fan

Here’s the second installament of our journey through the pulp magazines.
Still a couple of glitches in there – a few abrupt transitions on the musical score, a couple of clunky video cuts, but all in all I think the quality level is improved over V1., N1, the pilot episode.
This episode is also fairly brief – [...]

For quite some time now I have known about Raumpatrouille, a German television series, from 1966.
Germany’s own Star Trek.
I think I happened across it while doing a search for Space Patrol things and a Youtube Video purportedly showing free form dance of the future popped up.
Rather than being yet another Youtube mashup, this clip turned [...]

Via TLTSNBN and a fan who will not be named here either unless I get permission to do so (a fan who another unnamed participant in the list recommends for a Greatest For Life Award, and I heartily agree) has found what is perhaps the greatest write up of fifties fandom ever published in a [...]

Captain Video was the first – the very first – science fiction television show. It premiered on June 27th, 1949. Sixty years ago, on the DuMont Television Network.
I recently found the following Public Service Announcement (on www.archive.org) that was aired during a commercial break in the show. Given the current and on-going [...]

Seems I have some folks encouraging me to be crotchety. (And I shall oblige.) They’re sending me links to blogs and other things wherein misguided (read – young) individuals not only misuse SciFi – the epithet – but do so gleefully, deliberately and with intent to CHANGE its common usage.
Repeat after me:  Change is bad [...]

Over on John Ottinger’s place, (the home of the Book Review Blog Linkup Meme), John has posted Part 1 of his Living in the Blogosphere roundup.
Living in the Blogosphere poses a question to SF/F/H bloggers and then posts their answers.
This time around, John asked:  If you could live in an SF/Fantasy/Horror world, in which one [...]

According to IO9, SF didn’t really penetrate our cultural awareness until it hit television.
They mention television of the past in passing in this introductory piece to a week’s worth of SF (and other genres) on the babble box.  As usual, however, the focus is on current day and, as usual, their contentions are woefully historically [...]

Nick Mamatas – also known as the Nihilistic Kid in his Livejournal incarnation – is one of those contemporary renaissance men you hear about but rarely meet; editor, writer, subverter of higher education, multiple award nominee (in multiple genres), multiple translatee and champion of the Creative Commons.
Nick has several well-received novels under his belt (Northern [...]

Winchell Chung, well known for his gaming, (particularly Ogre) artwork, his work on bringing mathematical certitude to space map illustration and his collecting and cataloging of nifty (and often obscure) information and imagery related to spaceships, space drives, spacesuits and lots of other spacey stuff, sent along a pic of a Buck Rogers trading card [...]

I just finished watching the Worlds Fair (1933) promo for Buck Rogers and the Tiger Men of Mars (via Marooned & Youtube) and I just couldn’t help noticing the resemblance -

of the Tiger Men’s leader to Groucho Marx.
Talk about genre-bending – how about a Marx Brothers meets Buck Rogers steampunk adventure based on A Night [...]