(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)

(A few thoughts from a continuing work relevant to creatives here).

Creativity cannot be separated from Freedom; it is the source of it and the result of it.  Share it, encourage it, understand it.

Creativity allows people to think in new ways that both liberates and maintains liberty. The creative can dream around problems, finding new solutions when none were apparent.  The creative are harder to constrain by despots, as they have the tools to out-think oppressors.  The hopeful tyrants cannot face down dreams they know nothing about.

The despot worries in his throne room, heart racing.  Someone is out there who can find solutions, communicate in new ways, invent new treasons.  The despot fears you and doesn’t even know your name.

Creativity strengthens the people that treasure it.  Society is stronger for the news ideas the creative people bring.  The imaginative see dead ideas and infuse them with new life, resurrecting the lost things of value. Creative people can see the foundations of society and connect them to their innovations, joining past and present, the new and the renewed.

A single shining inspiration in your mind and old ideas come alive, history is connected, and you can see how ancient thoughts and new dreams come together.  Centuries and aeons link together in new strengths and old wisdom.

Creativity strengthens relations among people allowing them to support each other.  The creative are open to new relations among people because they can dream.  The creative find new connections among people, building alliances that resist tyranny.  The creative discover new ways to understand others and cooperate in ways unforeseen.  A web of connections and associations and alliances makes people all the more resilient.

Those that create are your allies, and a single conversation can create a year’s worth of dreams.  A moment’s pause lets you see everyone new.  You reach out to make new friends easy.  What tyrant doesn’t fear a web of collaborators who can out-dream them?

Creativity should be encouraged and shared among people.  To arm people with creativity is to give them tools to find meaning and protect themselves and others.  To share with other people builds connections and camaraderie, creating alliances that maintain the society. The sharing and encouragement of creativity is a measure of the strength of society.

Once someone lifted you up and said you could create.  Now you can reach out to others, teach them to use their creativity.  Each person so encouraged is an ally and a beacon.  Connection spreads from the outstretched hand.

Creativity is the result of freedom.  Because new thoughts can come to mind, the unthinkable becomes possible.  As old ideas can be seen anew, the foundations of society are renewed.  Because new ideas are encouraged, society can change and evolve.  As people encourage creativity, alliances are built.

– Steve

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

Going back a bit, I mentioned that there are works where the audience remembers not the original but a later version, whether it is an adaptation or a sequel.  Among the works analyzed here at Lost in Translation, Frankenstein, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Superman: The Movie are perfect examples of the phenomenon.  Adding to this short list, Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior is the best known despite being a sequel to 1979’s Mad Max.  The first movie in the series, Mad Max, was a little-known film from Australia starring a then-unknown Mel Gibson.  The Road Warrior, released in 1981, had a bigger impact on film audiences.  While both movies featured the same actor as the same character in the same setting, The Road Warrior took the action into the post-apocalyptic wastes.

Mad Max, the original movie, showed Max, a Main Force Patrolman, similar to a highway patrol officer, takes on a gang.  The apocalypse hasn’t yet happened, but the signs of it coming were there.  The second movie was as pure an action movie as could be made, with just enough dialogue to establish the situation, told as a story by the young feral boy that rode with Max.  A settlement that grew around a gasoline refinery is under threat from Lord Humungus and needs someone to help them transport their gas and the survivors away before the assault begins.  Max finds the settlement and is pressured into helping.  The plan is to send out a semi rig with a tank trailer to run past Humungus’ gauntlet.  Once the rig leaves the settlement, the chase is on, not letting up until the end of the film.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, released in 1985, uses the same narrative frame as The Road Warrior, a young survivor of the events telling the tale as an adult.  Once again, Max is pulled into a situation beyond his control and his humanity has to reassert itself to help the child survivors of an airplane crash.  Beyond Thunderdome featured Tina Turner as Aunty Entity, co-ruler of Bartertown with designs on becoming the sole ruler, and had hits for her with the movie’s theme song, “We Don’t Need Another Hero (Thunderdome)” and “One of the Living“.

The Road Warrior breaks past the cult classic barrier to be known, by reputation and mood if nothing else, by general audiences.  The Reboot episode “Bad Bob” featured a Mad Max-style game, having the cartoon’s cast reboot into characters right out of the movie.  The Road Warrior has become shorthand whenever anyone needs to refer to a blasted post-apocalyptic wasteland filled with war bands fighting over scraps while the average person is trapped between a rock and a hard place.  Pop culture osmosis may have built up the movie into something bigger than it was originally, leading to a thirty-year gap before the next entry in the Mad Max franchise.

In 2015, Mad Max Fury Road was released.  Once again, Max, now played by Tom Hardy, gets swept into events.  He’s first taken captive by Immortan Joe’s War Boys to be used as a blood bag for a sick warrior named Nux.  When Immortan Joe’s top Imperator, Furiosa, goes rogue on a trip to Gastown, he realizes the she has taken his five “brides” and sends his War Boys to stop her.  Max is strapped on the front of Nux’s car, still connected to him to provide blood.  The chase begins, letting up enough to give the audience a chance to catch its collective breath.  Max slowly regains his humanity again and helps Furiosa and the “brides” escape from Immortan Joe to find Green Place.  Immortan Joe calls in two other warbands, led by the Bullet Farmer and by the People Eater.  There was more dialogue than in The Road Warrior, but the focus is on the action.

Fury Road keeps to several themes found in The Road Warrior, including survival, the fight against would-be tyrants, the need for family, and the dangers of ecological collapse.  The new film also adds the empowerment of women, with Furiosa an equal to Max throughout the film and the catalyst for the action.  Visually, Fury Road is lush, with the desert wastes beautiful and oppressive, as much a character as the cast.  The stunts start with what shown in The Road Warrior and amp up from there.  The Doof Warrior, played by iOTA, and the Doof Wagon bring in music for the action, being Immortan Joe’s flamethrowing guitarist and taiko drummers on a vehicle that’s essentially a high-speed mobile stage.

Helping to keep the feel is the core crew.  George Miller has been involved with the franchise from /Mad Max/, meaning Fury Road is more of a sequel.  Yet, because of the thirty-year gap and the change of actor as the eponymous character, the movie also works as a reboot.  Elements from The Road Warrior, which did set the tone for the franchise, appear.  At the same time, Fury Road is its own movie.  Yet, it keeps the themes, tone, and general feel.  Max is lost, physically and metaphorically, and needs to rediscover what it means to be human.  Fury Road is a perfect entry to the series, demonstrating everything that made The Road Warrior popular while detailing the setting.  The movie is a note-perfect reboot.

Apologies, but no post today.  I have been debating on doing fan-made adaptations, so expect a column about that in the coming month.  I’ll also remind everyone that Lost in Translation now has a Facebook page.

The Sixties were a time of upheaval of the status quo against the backdrop of the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.  Television was starting to come into its own as a medium, especially with colour technology becoming affordable.  007 made the jump from the books to the silver screen and audiences wanted more.  To help fill the demand, MGM worked with Ian Fleming to develop a TV series along the lines of the Bond movies, resulting in 1964’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  Fleming’s participation ended when a connection between the TV series and Goldfinger was discovered; Napoleon Solo was named after a character in Fleming’s novel, a gunsel that got on the wrong side of Bond.

Fleming’s touch remained.  U.N.C.L.E, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, is a multinational agency keeping the peace by working behind the scenes.  Alexander Waverly heads up the agency from its hidden base in New York City.  His top agents include suave American Napoleon Solo, played by Robert Vaughn, and dour Russian Illya Kuryakin, played by David McCallum.  The original plan was to have Vaughn be The Man from U.N.C.L.E. – it’s even in the name, Solo – but McCallum’s Illya worked well with Solo that they became a team in the series.  Solo would be the more visible of the two, taking a Bond-like approach to investigation, while Kuryakin took advantage of the distraction.  UNCLE had an opposite number, THRUSH, an agency bent on world domination.  Like UNCLE, THRUSH also recruited from around the world.  The difference between the two agencies is simple, their goals.  With competing goals, UNCLE and THRUSH clash often, with Solo and Kuryakin responsible for shutting down several seasons worth of plots.

The Man from U.N.C.L.E. had several advantages while filming.  MGM wanted to get its money worth out of its sets, so the studio allowed the series to reuse existing sets from other movies.  To add to the unusual for television look that the series had, action scenes had a personal touch as a camera man jumped into the middle, long before handheld cameras were available.  Ensuring that the series felt world-spanning, guest stars weren’t limited to just Hollywood.  The Man from U.N.C.L.E. became a weekly cinematic spy thriller, with a memorable theme tune by Jerry Goldsmith.  Rounding out the globetrotting spy series, the titles were always an Affair; the first episode was called “The Vulcan Affair”, setting the tone for the rest of the run.

In 2015, Warner Bros. released Guy Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E.  The fifty years between the original and the remake saw a number of changes in the world, including the fall of both the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.  The nature of terrorism changed; instead of trying to get a message out even just fundraising, today’s terrorists are driven by ideology to the point where fear is the only end to the means.  The likes of the Palestinian Liberation Organization and the Irish Republican Army have given way to Daesh.  At the same time, a black and white approach to fiction has been replaced with nuance and shades of grey; no one expects heroes to be shiny anymore.  Updating The Man from U.N.C.L.E. would mean losing much of what made the series work in the Sixties.

To Ritchie’s credit, he realized that and made the movie as a period piece, set in 1963.  He makes use of cinematic techniques of the era, including split screen montages, to cement the mood.  The opening credits cover history between the end of World War II and the beginning of the action in 1963, including the Cold War between the US and the USSR, the nuclear escalation between the two nations, the splitting of Germany between East and West, and the building of the Berlin Wall.  The plot starts with Solo, now played by Henry Cavill, crossing the border between West and East Berlin, entering the Soviet sector.  His goal, extract Gabby, played by Alicia Vikander, a mechanic whose biological father is a top nuclear researcher.  However, the KGB has sent someone to prevent Gabby’s extraction, Illya Kurakin, played by Armie Hammer.  The extraction is difficult; Illya is as good an agent as Solo, and is only lost while crossing over no-man’s land between the two Berlins.

Gabby’s father turns out to be a bigger problem than expected.  He’s disappeared, and both the CIA and the KGB want him found.  Both agencies bring their top agents together.  Kuryakin and Solo recognize each other and are ordered to put aside their differences to work together and Gabby.  The trail goes to Rome, Italy, where Gabby’s uncle and his wife have a shipping company.  Both CIA and KGB expect that Victoria, the wife, played by Elizabeth Debicki, is the force behind the operation involving a nuclear missile.  However, Gabby is already working for someone, a Mr. Waverly, played by High Grant, who is several steps ahead of both Solo and Kuryakin.

Ritchie’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. is more of an origins movie, though one that keeps the action going.  Many of the bits that made up the TV series didn’t appear, but since neither Solo nor Kuryakin were UNCLE agents, they couldn’t get to UNCLE HQ through Del Florio’s, nor could they use either the pen radios* nor the modified Walther P-38s** that appeared in the TV series.  Another missing element, though the people Victoria was working with were never mentioned, is THRUSH.  The movie also introduced backstories for both Solo and Kuryakin, something that never came up in the TV series.

That said, the movie did keep to the feel of the TV series.  While Hammer as Kuryakin worked for the Illya of the movie, Cavill’s Solo came from Vaughn’s portrayal.  The film avoided a gritty look while still keeping the approach of the TV series, a mix of serious and lightness.  Given the trend to make grim-and-gritty versions of older series, avoiding the temptation to do that with The Man from U.N.C.L.E. was a good move.  Solo and Kuryakin aren’t grim killers, nor do they traipse around, usually, and their portrayals in the movie reflected the teamwork seen in the original.

For those who have seen the original series, some of the twists, particularly involving Waverly, could be seen coming.  Given that the last episode was first run in 1968, it has been almost fifty years since a new episode*** and even a syndicated run is now limited to specialty channels.  The movie reintroduces the characters and the setting for new audiences, bringing them into the world of the 1963 UNCLE.  By the end of the movie, UNCLE is a new agency, with Waverly bringing in top agents from around the world, leaving room for further affairs.  The movie brings back the core of the original TV series with few missteps.

* The TV series began with a cigarette case radio, but changed to the pen radio after concerns about children wanting a toy based on the prop.
** Known as the P-38 UNCLE, the pistol used by UNCLE agents had an attachable stock, barrel extension, silencer, and telescopic sight, and was never available commercially.
*** Barring the reunion TV movie, The Return of the Man from U.N.C.L.E.: The Fifteen Years Later Affair in 1983.

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)

The Magical Girl Team Generator is released!  It actually looks like it was in pretty good shape, though like many of my generators I may probably want to tweak it later.

Writing it was educational, since magical girl teams have some interesting naming structures such as they are.  I had to extrapolate a lot as well.  Overall I think it worked.

Here’s a few examples:

• Attraction Succubi
• Change Dancers
• Charm Snipers
• Cute Dazzle
• Enchanting Correctors
• Enchantresses Of Charm
• Goddess Sweet
• Pirate Music Club
• Steel Glamour Correctors
• Succubus Mechaangels
• The Four Mermaids Of Power
• The Three Enchantresses Of Spectrum
• The Three Priesstesses Of Force
• Transforming Heart Crusaders
• Wonder Ladies

– Steve

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

Lost in Translation has looked at the difficulties inherent in adapting a television series to a movie before.  However, challenges exist to be met.  Let’s take a look at one of the challenges, expanding the audience to pull in more than just the core fandom.

Movies are expensive to make, with the 2015 Jem and the Holograms being an outlier at only US$5 million to make and today’s blockbusters regularly exceeding US$200 million.  An adaptation cannot afford to turn away potential audiences, but word of mouth by fans can also break a movie.  This is one reason why superhero movies start at the origin; while fans are well aware of how a character got his or her abilities, the average person might not.

Television deals with the problem of getting new viewers up to speed every week.  Continuity lockout harms a TV series, preventing new audiences from jumping into the show.  Streaming can help, with older episodes available on the network’s website, but that’s a recent technology.  In the past, streaming and even video tapes weren’t available to the general audience.  Television worked around that, with characters painted with broad strokes and creative use of opening credits.  With the broad strokes, characters can be described using short phrases, such as the angry guy, the jokester sidekick, and the long-suffering spouse, all of which is easy to portray in a two-minute clip.

Opening credits, though, can set up the situation faster.  While not in use as much today, the expository opening theme outright states what’s going on.  Classic examples of such opening credits include Gilligan’s Island, The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, and The Powerpuff Girls.  Handy, efficient, and not used much in film since the Sixties* as technology progressed enough to overlay titles on action sequences, allowing the film to get to the plot right away.

At the same time, if opening credits aren’t going to be used, how can a film get a new audience up to speed without having fans yawn at old information?  Time is limited in a film; few people will sit through a five hour movie.  For this analysis, let’s take a look at Mystery Science Theatre 3000.  MST3K had a ten year run with three different broadcasters, starting at KTMA in Minneapolis, then moving to Comedy Central and ending at the SciFi/SyFy Channel.  During its run, the show used an expository theme song to let audiences know what its premise was.  The opening theme was flexible enough to account for a cast change, going from Joel to Mike and even adjusting for a network required ongoing plot.  The short version – evil mad scientist inflicts terrible movies on a victim trapped on an orbiting station; the victim builds friends out of spare parts to help make fun of the terrible movies.

Mystery Science Theatre 3000: The Movie, released in 1996 and riffing on This Island Earth, didn’t make use of the opening theme the TV series had.  Instead, the movie opened in Deep 13 with Dr. Clayton Forrester, played by Trace Beaulieu outright telling the audience what will happen.  Normally, the adage is “Show, don’t tell,” but this time, the telling was just part of the equation.  It’s what is going on while Dr. F is telling the audience what to expect that shows what the movie will be about.  As Dr. F monologues, he’s walking through his lab, showing that he’s not all that effective at being an evil mad scientist.  Up on the movie-budget upgraded Satelite of Love, Mike Nelson, played by Michael J. Nelson, is in the middle of a 2001: A Space Odyssey parody, running on a giant hamster wheel with Gypsy(Jim Mallon) and Cambot observing when Tom Servo(Kevin Murphy) arrives to warn him about the latest nutty thing Crow T. Robot(Trace Beaulieu).  Crow, who has seen one too many World War II prison camp movies, has decided the best way to escape the SOL is to tunnel out.  In these two scenes alone, the situation is introduced, the characters are shown for they are, and the movie has started.  It took a little longer than the TV series’ opening credits, but here, the audience is brought into the movie, ready to put aside any suspension of disbelief and establishing the film as a comedy.

Given the nature of the series, MST3K has some extra challenges most TV shows don’t have.  Most shows use commercial breaks to generate revenue and drop in a minor cliffhanger.  When adapted, the show changes to match the format of the big screen, keeping the plot moving through the beat structure of film.  MST3K, though, used commercial breaks in part to have the characters react via skit to what they saw and in part to give the audience a respite from the featured movie**.  A feature film, though, doesn’t have real commercial breaks; audiences would riot.  MST3K: The Movie had to use other means to get to the skits, including a broken film and Mike and the bots just walking out of the theatre to find Servo’s interociter.  The result was the same, a break from the film to let the characters react to what they saw and a break for the movie audience from This Island Earth, a slow-paced film that had far too much telling and too little showing, with the alleged main character just along for the ride.

Of course, the movie wasn’t only for new audiences.  Long-time viewers could find in-jokes throughout the film, including the use of “Torgo’s Theme” from Manos, The Hands of Fate as Mike uses the external graspers.  The movie didn’t rely as much on callbacks as the TV show did, making it a good introduction to new viewers.  Any callbacks in the movie, such as “Torgo’s Theme” can give a veteran fan an in to circulate the tapes*** to a new fan.  Continuity is important, but a new viewer, especially watching the movie of the TV series, needs to be able to understand what’s going on without needing a ten-page synopsis of the show.

Other movies adapted from a TV series reviewed here at Lost in Translation made an effort to introduce the characters to a new audience.  Star Trek: The Motion Picture made sure that the audience knew that Kirk and McCoy were still friends, despite whatever had happened prior to the movie, and that Kirk and Spock were friends, but something happened to the latter before he rejoined the crew of the Enterprise.  Likewise, with Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie, the opening scenes establish who Eddy and Patsy are, two women who refuse to grow up, with Eddy rolling out of her car drunk after a fashion event.

Introducing the characters and situation isn’t a problem for just TV series adapted into film.  Other media have the same problem, letting the audience know what’s going on and who the main characters are.  With television, though, the medium is similar to film, both being visual, that it can be too easy to forget that the characters need to be re-introduced.  Failure to do so locks out a portion of the potential audience, leaving them outside and not watching.  Without the extra audience, the film could flop at the box office.

* There are exceptions, such as the entire 007 film run, and even Die Another Day turned the traditional Bond titles into a plot-relevant sequence.
** The series riffed on older B-movies, serials, and shorts, where the quality of the featured film was guaranteed to be bad but with hooks for the riffs.  Alien from L.A. was but one film, but represented the type of work found on MST3K, bad but watchable with people having fun with it.
*** The series encouraged fans to circulate tapes of the episodes because of the limited access early audiences had.  Not all cable companies carried Comedy Central at the time, and international audiences had to deal with a complex web of rights and licenses that the MST3K crew didn’t have to worry about.

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)

And here we go,The Magical Girl Team Generator is in beta.Inspired by everything from Shattered Starlight to my work on Her Eternal Moonlight, it’s a generator to create magical girl team names, which is kind of obvious.  Feedback is appreciated – getting the proper feel of names is a bit challenging.

Here’s a few examples:

• Bejeweled Soul Singers
• Candy Wand Sirens
• Crystal Sorcery Heroines
• Elemental Angels
• God Dress Ninjas
• Guardian Witches
• Rose Dracomoon Enchantresses
• Rose Travellers
• The Seven Dancers Of Action
• Ultimate Sparkle Mechacrusaders

– Steve

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com

(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com, www.SeventhSanctum.com, and Steve’s Tumblr)

Some thoughts for all the people out there that follow me for career and creative advice . . .

Improving our skills and abilities, learning new things, is something we all develop.  Most of us do it consciously, sometimes with a great deal of planning.  It may even obsess some of us as our jobs and lives require us to learn at a rapid pace. However there’s a shadow side to what we choose to become competent in – a choice to learn something means there’s a lot else we choose not to learn at that time.

Every choice to educate ourselves means we’re spending time and resources that aren’t used learn a different subject.  Each competency is paid for in not learning something else. For all you are good at, there’s a large amount of things you don’t know and can’t do, and you chose these “incompetencies” willingly or not.

We probably don’t look at learning as “choosing an incompetency” as a form of defense because there’ so much we don’t know and it scares us.  We’re taught to think only of being good (or acceptable) at something, not bad at something.  We’re taught not to admit failure or lack of ability because we seem weak, but to ignore it or pretend we’re good at everything.

But we have to accept the truth – choosing a competency is also choosing incompetencies. If we accept the we choose our ignorance and lack of ability, we can choose wisely.  If we’ve decided we can’t truly know or learn something, then we’re prepared for that gap in our lives.

We can develop that valuable competency of knowing what we don’t know – and why we don’t know it.

We can bring an innocent attitude to learning so those that know something we do not (that we may choose not to educate ourselves on) can teach us.

We can stop worrying about not knowing.  We’re all fools at one point, so let’s be fools consciously.

Exercise: List ten things you know nothing about that affect your life.  Why didn’t you learn them? What did you learn in their place?

– Steve

• www.StevenSavage.com
• www.InformoTron.com