Princess Amira
Katt Leya got cake for days
Cherokee D Ass
Pop culturephiles take note: as of the early 2010s, the stealth superspeedboat in “The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage,” is still on the Disney lot, ready to use in future projects.
“The 100 Lives of Black Jack Savage” was a 1991 Disney series where a ghost pirate from the 18th Century, together with a modern day Wall Street slickster and degenerate, discover they have to save 100 lives or else Satan will drag the pair to Hell for eternity. To help them do this, an inventor on the island builds them a superspeed boat for stealth missions in the Caribbean. An early member of the cast was Roma Downey, just before her breakthrough in “Touched by an Angel.” Though the TV movie was popular, the show only lasted a single season.
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One of the more famous rumors and myths is that the pilot episode of SeaQuest predicted the Florida Marlins winning the World Series. Teenage supergenius Lucas (played by Johnathan Brandis), who invented a way to communicate with dolphins, was a big time fan of the Marlins. As a recent expansion team, they debuted the same year as the Arizona Diamondbacks, in 1993. As a joke, they said the Marlins were world series winners, but for the wrong year, 2010. The Marlins actually won the World Series in 1997 and 2003.
Fun fact: Johnathan Brandis was the runner-up to Hayden Christiansen for the role of young Anakin Skywalker. Christiansen, at the time, was something of an indie darling for his acting, which many people might find surprising today.
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In the 1980s, military magazines had full color illustrations of concept art of weaponry, exotic airplanes, space lasers, and arctic sub bases used by the Russians, usually painted by Edward L. Cooper or Brian MacMullen, which tended to feature scenic, empty, idealized country locations, as opposed to the actual gritty urban conflicts that war planners disliked thinking about.
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TheLukhnod Elektronika was a Soviet-era 1980s copy of the Milton-Bradley BigTrak, a six-wheeled space-looking craft that could be programmed to move and then execute up to 16 preprogrammed instructions. Some kitbashing hobbyists have created an app that does the same on the computer chip.
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PDPs are enormous computer units created by the Digital Corporation released in the 60s, that were sold mostly to scientists and engineers, with runs of under 800 units being popular. The PDP-1 was the center of the absolute prehistory of the hacker subculture as it emerged at MIT, and the first video game ever (Spacewar) ran on one.
Fun fact: the man who managed the PDP has a weird comics connection, as he is the father of Astro City author, Kurt Busiek, who was a vice president at Digital in the 70s.
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Styx’s “Come Sail Away” has a third-verse turn where it turns out the song was about being abducted by aliens.
I thought that they were angels but to my surprise
They climbed aboard their starship and headed for the skies
Singing, come sail away come sail awayBy the way, “Walk the Dinosaur” was about atomic war and human extinction. Listen to it again.
Songs also about alien abduction: “I Ran” by Flock of Seagulls
Absolutely correct, and the cover for the album makes that totally clear.
Here’s the lyrics where the twist is alien abduction:
A cloud appears above your head
A beam of light comes shining down on you
Shining down on you
The cloud is moving nearer still
Aurora borealis comes in view
Aurora comes in viewAnd I ran, I ran so far away
I just ran, I ran all night and day
I couldn’t get awayReached out a hand to touch your face
You’re slowly disappearing from my view
‘Pearing from my view
Reached out a hand to try again
I’m floating in a beam of light with you
A beam of light with you
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The Brooke Shields doll, 1982.
In the 1990s, DC Comics, trailing behind Marvel in most respects, got the license to make short lived AD&D comics based on 2nd Edition settings like Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance and so on (like many licensed books, this was a work job for over the hill authors like Elliot S Maggin). The one licensed comic series that really lived up to the potential was the Spelljammer series, based on AD&D’s most bonkers and original setting, a series set in space that works according to Aristotlean physics, with breathable air and even wind in space (which is flammable due to the phlogiston and luminferous ether), solar systems that are crystal spheres, living creatures in space like pods of gigantic whales, star dragons, and even planets that are on the back of gigantic turtles.
Written by Barbara Kesel, the 1990-1991 Spelljammer is interesting in that it’s one of the few series built around a morally conflicted, ethically gray antihero you don’t fully trust and who lies about their past, in the prestige TV mold. There are many characters like this, but I am hard pressed to think of a female one a series is built around, and certainly before 1990.
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