Pilot's Log

This NPR Interview is about how Hollywood's business model has morphed with the downfall of Box Office and physical home video product (tapes & DVDs).

As ps238principal noted earlier this week, Hollywood is making more Reboots and Sequels than ever, proving that even more important than a successful movie is to a studio is the brand that it generates. Original ideas are far riskier and difficult to market than known quantities, no matter who is cast in the central roles on screen, who writes the script, who directs, etc.

FTR, I was too young for my parents to let me watch the TV series on its initial run back in the Seventies. And since I've never had cable, and it wasn't broadly syndicated, I've never actually seen it. So I never cared to see the movie, if I had ever found it on DVD.

Starship Troopers had an in-name-only sequel. Then again, I've always considered that franchise an in-name-only adaptation which missed some of the main points of the novel version.

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No. Time is something I can handle fairly well on my own now.

Hey.

Once again Dad does something that effects me without consulting me about it in detail. He replaced the light fixture that is directly above my head in my office.

My complaints about the old one:
1) The wiring was going bad (it's probably fifty years old!)
2) It used incandescent bulbs, because it was enclosed using flourescent squiggle coils would be unsafe in it
3) It was too small and limited and didn't light up the space enough.

So what does he do?
1) He gets an even SMALLER new unit
2) Which is also enclosed so we still need to use incandescent bulbs
3) Reuses the old wiring.

With the light fixture on the office is rather dim--at Four P.M. Working overnight here is going to be tough.

Hey.

If I didn't mention it before...my mother's hometown hero during WW2 was the flying ace Francis Gabreski. I've been interested in him since we visited his family's grocery in the Seventies (on the occasion of being in that town for the funeral of my maternal grandmother) and afterward receiving an autographed picture of him.

Well, part of his story was how, because he was the son of Polish immigrants, he was able to take exchange duty with one of the Polish exile squadrons in the Royal Air Force in the time between the entry of the U.S. into the war and the establishment of regular American combat units in Britain.

The plane he flew on his missions with the RAF was a Spitfire Mark IX, serial number BS410. He had good luck in surviving his missions against enemy fighters but never got to shoot down an enemy with it either. After his tour was over, BS410 was reassigned to another pilot, who was brought down in France and captured. Gabreski took his education in air combat from the Poles to the 56th Fighter Group of the Eighth Air Force and wrecked 31 German planes under the guns of his P-47 Thunderbolt.

The crash site for the Spitfire was found and excavated in recent years. Pieces of the plane were collected.

Some of these pieces are being included in the brand-new build of a Spitfire that will have the serial number BS410.

I don't know whether I should consider that to be a tribute or a disservice to history.

( Posted On YouTube )

Americans and other Westerners know Genesis Climber Mospeada as one of the three shows that made up the import/translation saga Robotech in the middle 1980s...one of the sparks for anime fandom outside Japan. What many anime fans and even a great number of Robotech fans are unaware of is the fact that Mospeada was popular enough in Japan to have the Tatsunoko studio make this tribute video after the show's run. It's mostly a compilation of music videos based on the series, but it also includes new material. Love Live Alive isn't listed in the usual catalogs of OAVs because they generally don't bother with including music video sets.

Belmont/Yellow Dancer/Lancer's destiny after the series has been a point of controversy among Robotech fans because the novelizations took one direction, the comics took another and the role-playing game took yet another. None of them really agree and that's where everybody has problems. Harmony Gold is trying yet again to make a sequel series to Robotech (after two failures and a close call) so perhaps we'll get an answer someday.

Meanwhile, this is all there is.

FP