Geekklesia

  Oh, my.  I'm actually giddy with anticipation.  I just received word that a character that I'd considered nigh-legendary in the sub-sub-genre of speculative fiction, that of the Weird Western, has been rebooted.  I speak, of course, of none other than Six-Gun Gorilla . Regular readers of the stuff I throw up on this virtual wall will recall that I have a short list of characters that I would love to see rebooted .  As of now, what I have written about are radio characters, like Chandu the Magician, Rocky Jordan and the lead characters from the Ghost Corps.  I never expected that Six-Gun Gorilla would get a reboot in the form of a comic, because, while I loved the idea, I thought he was such a niche figure that almost no one else would be interested in him.  In my mind, he would remain a lone pioneering figure, back when the idea of the Weird Western had not been fully articulated as it is now. The plot is simple. An old west miner has a pe...

I love bad genre fiction. I enjoy movies like National Treasure and the Mummy franchise, as well as the subpar movies based on comic books and other big-budget, low-rent script CGI-fests. I also like the purple prose of stories from the pulp era of the 1930's and '40's that are long on action and short on logic. By all rights, this shouldn't be the case. My degree is in film and television production, and I enjoyed classes in film and television criticism.  But I still loves me some low-brow entertainment. Why is that so? That's a valid question and one I really couldn't answer exactly until after the premiere of the third Mummy movie with Brendan Fraser.  Then, someone who I don't normally agree with actually helped me crystallize my thinking. To be clear, I don't agree with his conclusions, but in modifying his approach, I came up with the following theory: we were wired to enjoy a little visual junk food every now and again. My theory is ...

While the previous entries in this series were specific characters in their own right, I am featuring a character that I am not totally in love with mostly because I like the series he's featured in and would love to see the series rebooted. The Ghost Corps is a group of 'free-lance diplomatic' operatives (translation: spies) at work in the Orient in the years between the World Wars. The radio series focused on an agent, KC Smith and his aide, Mohammed Ali, who were stationed in Egypt (the series places them variously in Cairo and Alexandria). Smith is identified as an American who had also served for a time in the French Foreign Legion and was a master of disguise and languages. Ali is a stalwart friend who possesses skills as varied as swordsmanship and ventriloquism. Together, they made a formidable team. I could see Smith and Ali interacting very easily with the other characters mentioned in this series of posts. In fact, as I've mentioned before, on...

Chandu the Magician is another Old Time Radio (OTR) character I'd like to see rebooted. I reviewed the series sometime ago, and it is still at the top of my favorites list. Frank Chandler is an American who goes off to study esoterica at the feet of a yogi in India for about ten years, where he assumes the alternate name of 'Chandu'. He returns to visit his sister, Dorothy Regent and her children. Dorothy's husband, the eminent scientist Robert Regent, was lost at sea before the war (this would be WWII). Frank, displaying a few parlor tricks he picked up in India, entertains the children, but eventually, the family discovers that Robert may be still alive after all. As they travel to Egypt to track down clues to Robert's whereabouts, Dorothy and her children become more and more aware of Frank's occult powers, and his ability the missing scientist.  The adventure series was dense with secret societies, dark magic, mad science, lost civilizations, mysteri...

As I pointed out in my review of the OTR series , Rocky Jordan is an American expatriate restaurateur from St. Louis, now the owner and operator of the Cafe Tambourine within the native quarter in Cairo, "within sight of the Mosque Sultan Hassan." The series was highly reminiscent of the film Casablanca , with actor Jack Moyles playing the part of Rocky Jordan, who can be described as perhaps "a poor man's Rick Blaine." But I'm not sure that characterization is actually fair.  Rocky Jordan, while similar in many respects to Bogart's Rick Blaine, was a different character. The radio series made Rocky a much more well-rounded character than what appeared in Casablanca : we learn that Rocky is from St. Louis, but for some unspecified reason, he cna never go back; at one time, he operated a version of the Cafe Tambourine in Istanbul before settling in Cairo; he has a reputation for somehow being implicated in murder cases; he has a love-hate relationshi...