Fatherhood in Sci-fi

Having been a father for nigh on 10 months now and discussing the impending fatherhood of a friend, I’ve come to the realisation that there are not many good dad’s in sci-fi.
You see, often when I’m faced with a new challenge in my life, I like to look to my idols in the science fiction world to see how they handle it. For instance, when cooking for myself was becoming in issue as I advanced through my teens, Captain Sisko of Deep Space Nine was a brilliant example. I always carry a screwdriver and make sure to leave my droids outside of bars. So naturally, when my wife was expecting, I turned to my normal array of science fiction TV and film for advice.

Oh dear…

So I began with Star Trek. There’s actually no fathers at all there, except for Kirk, who stayed away from his son until forced to meet him when Khan stole the Genesis device. Ok, no help there.

Ok, The Next Generation must be more help? Picard, no children, hates kids. Riker? Had an imaginary son and mainly tried to teach him the trombone. Worf? Oh, right, packs the kid off to his grandparents or if he can’t get away with that, pretty much leaves it to Troi. Data? Built his own daughter and has no emotions. Oh and had her working in a bar!

Let’s move on to DS9! Sisko! Brilliant! Sisko seems on the surface to be a good example. Until you factor in he’s dragged Jake to a backwater run down space station where the only schooling opportunity is a class of mixed ages run by a botanist?! No disrespect to botanists or their field, but he’s not getting a well-rounded education there. Plus it shuts down after a year! After being blown up! Still Sisko persists with keeping his son, now without any school, wandering around an increasingly dangerous space station as the area degenerates into a war zone. Finally, Sisko conceives a second child and promptly ups and leaves to be a prophet and live in a wormhole, abandoning both children. I guess there’s O’Brien, but… well his wife and kids are so annoying, I can’t. I just can’t!

Voyager has one father, Tuvok, who’s probably great, but we never get to see any actual parenting. And again, Enterprise has no active father. I think Phlox has children, but they’re not seen.

Forget Trek then, let’s move onto other areas…

How about Star Wars? Hm, actually, I don’t need to think too hard about this one do I? Me and my son would be happier not chopping limbs off…

It’s not going well so far is it? What about the Buffyverse? Well, Buffy’s dad left his family, her surrogate father, Giles, well I guess he’s pretty ok, but there was the time he drugged her so she lost her Slayer powers and locked her in a house with a vampire. And Angel? Well, he managed to lose his son in a hell dimension with his worst enemy.

Batman! Right, ok his Dad was shot and killed in front of him, causing severe emotional trauma. But Alfred was like his second father from then? And he’s… pretty much let Bruce’s trauma overwhelm him to the point he dresses like a bat and risks his life nightly fighting crime. Bruce’s own son is encouraged to follow the same path while fighting his upbringing as a cold blooded killer with a superiority complex. Not to mention Batman’s taken on three other kids and encouraged them all to wallow in their pain and grief to such an extent that they also feel the need to embark on a suicidal quest for justice while wearing silly costumes. I hate to say it, but Batman sucks! As a dad at least.

Superman? Sure, his biological father put his newborn child in an experimental rocket and blasted him into space, which I think is grounds for a referral to Social Services, but what about Jonathan Kent? He’s good right? Actually, he is! There’s pretty much no problem with Pa Kent! Except DC keep insisting on retconning Superman’s history to kill the poor guy off earlier and earlier.

Right, we have one good father! Surely, I can find more? Otherwise I’ll have to raise my child using my own judgement and common sense! My search continues…

Some thoughts on Disney buying Star Wars

So, there’s going to be a new Star Wars Trilogy. The 3^rd trilogy, making a trilogy of trilogy’s you might say. And it’s going to be made by Disney. This is pretty huge news and understandably causing some mixed reactions amongst Star Wars fans.

I’m thinking this is probably a good thing. There, I said it. But wait! I have reasons!

The first reason! I actually quite liked the prequels. Yes, they were caught up in quite a political storyline, but like many stories, they’re a product of their time and we’re in an age where everything is politicised to some degree. It might not be the most entertaining thing to watch in a movie of course, but we are now several years on and new movies will have new writers and reflect their take on our times.

Which neatly brings me onto new writers. No Lucas! Imagine! Given how everyone complained he’d ruined Star Wars with the prequels, surely this is a good thing? Though I don’t think he ruined anything, I do think new movies will benefit from new writers and directors. Joss Whedon’s name has already been thrown into the mix and I do think he’d have a pretty interesting take on Star Wars. But there’s a huge number of skilled writers out there in Hollywood who could bring some fresh new thinking to Star Wars.

If you’re a fan of The Clone Wars series, then you’ll see how well Star Wars is still working. Different writers, new story ideas and a wide array of characters, it’s a pretty good series.

It’s Disney! Disney are pretty hot on making kids films. Ok, not always successfully, but sometimes successfully, And Star Wars films are films for kids. The sense of awe and wonder of alien worlds, old Jedi Knights and the youngster who finds his way into a whole new world of the Force and an important role in a galaxy-wide battle for freedom. That’s perfect for Disney.

Ok, I’m saying a lot about new writers and new stories, a new take on Star Wars. However, you also need to maintain a certain respect for the original source. I think Disney can do that. The recent Muppets film I think stands as a brilliant example of making a new relevant film that maintains a good respect for the original series. Actually, the Muppets is pretty much an hour and a half love letter to The Muppet Show. I think we’re at a point now where the writers and directors around now are the ones who grew up with Star Wars and will come in respectful of the original trilogy.

Actually, you know what’s also good about Disney buying Star Wars? Crossovers! Next time there’s a Toy Story movie, we should see Harrison Ford voicing a Han Solo figure! I’m actually really excited about this idea!

Most of all, Star Wars is a pretty defining set of movies for a child to see. Regardless of the opinions of guys in their 30’s and 40’s who will staunchly resist anything different to that original trilogy, kids in the next 10 years are going to love this new set of Disney made Star Wars movies. And that’s good, it’s their childhood and they deserve to have those movies made in their day. 2015 means my little boy will be 3 or 4, just about old enough to sit through a movie. So this will be his trilogy and I’ll be able to take him to see brand new Star Wars. Regardless of whether I like them or not, he probably will and to me that makes this news good.

Top Ten Nerdy Moments Part 2

For my final top five, I've thought long and hard. And on occaision had to have a little cry! Not really, it's only stuff that's embarassing to my future children. Bless them. Still, it's not as if there's a big list of my nerdy activities preserved for all time on the internet... oops!

Anyway, on with the list!

5) Making a Star Wars fan film. Sadly, never finished, but definitely involved in the making. Started many years ago, we had costumes and lightsabers and special effects courtesy of our director. See here for the website!

4)Been given a Sonic Screwdriver as a present and then used it in day to day tasks. When I started my current job, my girlfriend presented me with a toy Sonic Screwdriver as a good luck gift. I have since used it remarkably often for light and often as a pen, thanks to the ink nib end. It’s gotta be quite nerdy to be at horse racing and start filling in your betting slips with a sonic screwdriver quite casually.

3) My awesome mug. Everyone (by which I mean every nerd) decorates his workspace with a few awesome bits. I have a Millennium Falcon model and a Captain Picard figure upon my desk at work. But for many, many years, I have had a mug for my coffee. It’s a Star Trek mug. It has the next gen title logo and the Klingon symbol upon it. And it’s a ‘tumble-not’ mug. I believe that’s what they were called. I originally bought this when I was about 17-18 and it’s been with me ever since. I’ve taken it from job to job now, and it’s amused many co-workers. It’s lost the little pad from the bottom and there’s a chip out of it, but dammit I used this mug in sixth form! It’s an unusual shape as well, hence the ‘tumble-not’ sobriquet, as it widens outwards to the base from about halfway down. You can see these mugs on Deep Space Nine, when people have a coffee at the replimat. As far as I know, you can’t get these things anymore, at least not easily. So I rate this as worthy of my nerd top ten by virtue of its rarity, unusual shape that corresponds with in show props and the inordinate amount of pride I have in using this mug for more years than is hygienically advisable!

2)Appearing on TV for being involved in making a Star Wars fan film. Yep, an actual TV show, on Channel 5! They came out, interviewed the 3 if us involved. So I appeared on national TV, dressed as a Jedi, wielding a lightsaber. An interesting subplot to that tale, I’d just started dating a young lady about the airdate of that programme. In fact our first date was to be 2 days after it’s transmission. Except that they’d given us the wrong date. After I’d got everyone I knew and this lovely lady I wanted to date to watch. So that was not massively impressive. Fortunately it was shown the following week and the lady in question was clearly so impressed she’s marrying me next year. So if you’re ever unsure how to woo a girl, try getting on Channel 5 for making a sci-fi fan film! I’ve had 100% success rate with it!

1) Proposed on the entrance to the Torchwood Three Hub. Yep, in Cardiff, by the tower at the entrance to the Millennium Centre. Where the lift is. Where the TARDIS landed in Boom Town and Utopia. That was the spot where I asked my girlfriend to marry me. And she said yes! Which is quite unlikely, as when you read this list you’ll see it’s a frakkin miracle I’ve ever even kissed a girl!!

So, that's what I've done with my first 30 years. What can I do for the next 30? Well, I recieved an early birthday present from work this morning, a PC keyboard, with Klingon characters on the keys!! That's a good start...

Top Ten Nerd Moments in Life. Part 1

With my impending 30^th (5 more days and I’ll finally shut up about it!!!) I’ve found myself in a reflective mood. And as I look back over my 3 decades upon this earth, I find, un-surprisingly, I’ve racked up a few moments of serious nerdiness. I have nerded it up big time! So for this blog, I thought it might be fun to make a little top ten of my nerdiest moments ever. A few of these I did with friends, you’ll see the names Nathan, Nick and Will crop up more than once. Both of those guys would have some pretty awesome top tens of their own!

So for the top ten, I had to think pretty hard. I can list off a lot of nerdy things I do, but I needed ones that would be unusual. To nerds anyway, almost everything I do is unusual to a lot of people. So playing Dungeons and Dragons is nerdy maybe, but will not make the list by virtue of not being unusually nerdy enough. Being in Britain, people are a bit more reserved, so if many other people do do any of these things, they probably wouldn’t admit it. So I’m generally basing these on whether they’re out of the ordinary for people I know of. I wouldn’t claim them to be unique, just unusual. But each thing is certainly a treasured memory in my life as a nerd.

Here's the first half of the top ten.

I said it might be fun! No promises. In fact, any fun experienced is purely coincidental!

10) Meeting Christopher Lee! Not just meeting him, but queuing up a fire escape stairway with some really irritating girls to meet him. For hours! But this is a guy who was a movie legend before he played Count Dooku and Sauruman! And he has just as scary a voice in real life! Got a signed video copy of Attack of the Clones from it!

And as a side note, the irritating girls were stood behind me and Nick and Will. I’m not calling Nick and Will irritating girls!

9) Making stop motion animation films with Star Trek action figures. Yep, this would have been me about fourteen or fifteen, using the animation feature on the family camcorder. Initially starting with the kitchen worktop and a background from a weetabix box, (back when they did their Next Generation cards promotion) to culminating in my home made shuttlebay set and me and Nathan almost burning down the garage using fire to simulate phaser hits. And if my parents ever read this, that will clear up any remaining curiosity about that very odd Saturday afternoon. I hope my parents don’t read this, I think they’re better off thinking I’m a nerd without knowing the extent.

8) Going to see films in costume. Yeah, due to the Star Wars fan film (see later in the list) I’m involved with, there were three of us with Jedi robes. So we went to see Attack of the Clones dressed as Jedi. Got in the local paper and the Odeon were so impressed by us they gave us free T-Shirts and beer! We did the same for Revenge of the Sith, but to less fanfare and no free stuff. But go further back to the release of Star Trek First Contact, and the local cinema at the time were treated to me arriving in my Starfleet uniform! Early DS9/Voyager style in services gold. I wasn’t the only one doing so, there were three others in uniform too, and we all got in the local paper again! Yep, the local paper loves it’s nerds! Or loves going ‘hey, look at the nerds!!’.

Marvellous addendum to the Star Wars tale, a less nerdy friend was joining us for Revenge of the Sith. At work, he’d mentioned to his colleagues he was off to see it with some guys who were pretty into it. One of his colleagues held up the local paper which was re-running the picture of me, Nick and Will from Attack of the Clones, and said, ‘they’re probably not as into it as these freaks!’. To which my poor friend had to admit that those freaks were us!

7) Recorded audio clips of episodes of the Next Generation to try to create my own answer machine message with Captain Picard. Yep, hours spent with videos of Next Gen and a dictaphone to try and assemble a message from bits of dialogue, that I then played into the answer machine to use as an outgoing message. Oddly my parents didn’t want incoming calls to be greeted by Captain Picard’s voice advising them to contact Commander Riker instead. I know, but it’s really hard to find appropriate dialogue to use!

6)Learning Klingon. Yep, I got the Klingon dictionary, the Klingon language CD’s and even a copy of Hamlet in Klingon. I know there’s a lot of guys who try their hand at learning Klingon, but it’s still a really nerdy thing to do. It’s probably even nerdier if you succeed, but sadly linguistics is not a strong area for me. I can remember how to say, ‘yes’, ‘what do you want?’ ‘stop!’ and ‘where is the bathroom?’ but that’s about as much as I can remember. Though even when I was working on it, I couldn’t remember much more, though I could count to ten.

There we have it, the first 5 of my top ten. Yeah, I look pretty cool now! Well obviously I don't. Some things that didn't make the top ten though...

Nightmares about the Borg and/or Daleks. Pretty nerdy to dream about these things for sure, but I rejected them from the list on the basis that they're involuntary. I couldn't choose whether or not to dream about these things. Had my parents dressed me up in Star Trek uniform onesies when I was a baby, I wouldn't count that as it wasn't my choice.

Creating a Star Trek Desktop theme for my Dad's laptop. It very nearly made it in. You can find Trek-based desktop themes all over the place these day, but this one was all drawn and made from scratch with no internet access! Hell, it was in the early nineties, the internet was not widespread. In fact I only got net access in 1997 I think.

I shall post the top 5 in the next couple of day. Yep, they get worse...

Coming to terms with Star Wars

I was sat at work today, a little bit bored, trying to retrieve data from a broken flash drive. (I failed, it’s lost forever, condemned to a hellish non-existence in an untouchable electronic limbo, 1 GB in size enclosed within 10cm of cheap plastic) when all of a sudden I realised I had come to terms with Star Wars.

That probably sounds like a pretty odd thing to say, (I get that a lot) but it seems the most fitting phrase.

See, like many people, Star Wars has had a biiiiig impact in my life. I’ve watched the films many many times. I’ve queued outside cinema’s dressed as a jedi, I’ve been on National TV in a feature about a Star Wars fanfilm I was involved with making. Read the books, sampled the merchandise, you get the picture, I am a bit of a nerd about Star Wars.

Unlike many of the die-hard Star Wars fans, I didn’t get angry about the prequels. I didn’t think they were that bad really. In fact, Revenge of the Sith was positively brilliant. Overall the prequel trilogy wasn’t as great as the original, but could it ever be? Without getting too much into a long examination of it, the original set a pretty high standard to reach, and benefits from being looked at with a great deal of nostalgia. The prequels had to live up to that standard, impress people who’d grown up yet still be a kid’s type film and live up to everyone’s imagined version of the story they’d been creating in their heads since they saw the originals. See, that’s a long time to be cultivating your own ideas of how Anakin became Darth Vader, so is the movie ever going to be able to live up to that? I, like many others spent so many years dreaming up the various events that could have surrounded Anakin’s fall to the dark side and the histories of the other characters. We yearned for these stories to be told. And when they were and the crashing waves of anger and disappointment then arrived, it kind of marred the experience a bit. I should have taken the view that ultimately, it was Lucas’s world and characters and he was free to take this story in whichever direction he wanted. After all, it seemed a little odd the way most people reacted, as if he’d personally insulted them by not making the film they’d imagined. Like George Lucas was contracted to create the stories we’d personally expected, rather than the story he wanted to tell/wanted to sell more toys with.

Obviously only a small number reacted in this way, but the media being what it is, this was given a much magnified amount of coverage. I guess rabid nerds baying for Lucas’s blood is more interesting than nerds shrugging and saying ‘it was ok, not quite what I’d imagined.’

So to a young impressionable Star Wars fan, this was confusing. I was seeing examples of these extreme reactions, all through the media and negative reviews. I honestly thought I was doing it wrong! Had I missed the point of the originals? Did I not 'get' Star Wars?

So after some time worrying about this, I began to over-analyse the films a bit. Well, a lot. I'd look for inconsistencies, lines of dialogue that weren't right, anything that I could sit back and say to myself 'aha! That's what I was missing, this proved it's terrible! I shall go and set fire to George Lucas immediately!' but I never could.

Eventually I reasoned that I couldn't see it because I hadn't 'connected' the 2 trilogies yet. Maybe they didn't feel like the same series to me? Then the originals were released on DVD, and the brilliant clean-up on the picture and the little additions really tied it in with the prequels for me. The once Revenge of the Sith was out, I really did feel like it was six films not two trilogies. And I still couldn't get angry or upset when watching Episodes 1, 2 and 3!

So when the Clone Wars animated movie came out last year, my default reaction was to get excited. Then I saw a trailer. Man, they made me think of Shrek! (it's something in the walk) And I thought, I really don't think I am going to enjoy this.

So I just didn't go see it. Still haven't. Is it some sort of cowardly hiding from disappointment? Am I afraid to become the angry militant fan who wants Lucas's beard?

Nope, I'm just really not too fussed. It might be good, it might be bad, it's Lucas's stories to tell, if he thinks he's got tales then I'm not going to object to him telling them.

TAnd today I realised why that is. It's because I've come to terms with Star Wars. For me, it's those six films. For me, regardless of what other people think. Hey, if I enjoyed the prequels that's fine. Well, I still didn't like Jar-Jar much. And to be honest I stray to the skip button for some of the Naboo scenes in Attack of the Clones. But generally, I'm more than with the six films as is. That's not to say I'll never watch future Star Wars projects, and if I like them I may revise this. But if I don't that's fine, they can't be to everyone's taste and I've got these six here.

It's like a bizarre calm inner peace. About Star Wars.

It's also a good example of why you should not worry about what everyone else thinks and formulate your own opinions, but I was young and stupid. I will be interested to see, when viewed as six films in order by new viewers with no pre-conceptions of Star Wars, will the prequels be judged the same way?

I won't mind either way!

Actually, is this inner peace, or just apathy???