RIP "Mr. Wizard"

An icon of my youth has passed on. Don Herbert, star of "Watch Mr. Wizard" in the 1950s and '60s died June 12 from bone cancer. He was 89.

I can't say that watching Mr. Wizard perform science experiments in his kitchen-like set, always with a young assistant, inspired me to become a scientist. But it did help give me a respect for the scientific method, for the idea that we can learn about how our world works. His enthusiasm, his interest in showing us that science is not just a guy in a lab but an understanding of how everyday things operate, helped make me into an inquiring, thinking person.

Clearly, his show struck a nerve with many of my generation. It even became a running gag on the Jim Henson series Dinosaurs: "We're gonna need a new Timmy!"

In our current era, when science is under attack even within our own government, we could use a Mr. Wizard again.

It Was 30 Years Ago,Today, Luke and Leia Taught the Band to Play

I didn't see Star Wars on its opening day. I forget why, but something else was on my schedule. I saw it the next day and stood in line for something like two hours in Times Square for the privilege.

Star Wars opened in New York City at the Astor Plaza theater, on 44th Street, just off Broadway. It was part of a then fairly new entertainment complex. The entrance was at ground level...and on the second floor there was a huge Broadway theater, the Uris (now renamed the George Gershwin--I saw Annie there some years later). The Astor Plaza was in the basement...and it was huge. At the time, it was still a one-screen theater, so you can imagine what it felt like to see that opening scene of the ships coming in over your heads on such a viewing surface.

In those days, theaters still had "continuous showings," admitting audience members throughout the screening, so it was possible to sit through two screenings for one ticket (which I did). Star Wars ran at the Astor Plaza for more than a year, not finally closing there until July of 1978. In that time, I probably saw the film another seven or eight times. That makes me a piker--I know people who saw it at least twice a week in the first summer.

Using Tragedy for Political Purposes

I knew it was going to happen, I just hoped it would take more than 24 hours. I was wrong.

The Internet and the world's newspapers are already swamped with garbage like this posting on "California Conservative", arguing that the killings at Virginia Tech could have been prevented (or at least mitigated) if the students there were permitted to carry firearms to class. Money quote:

Today, a lone gunman killed more than 30 young men and women. The wrath of millions of Americans should be directed upon the political party, legislature, and university administrators that made it possible. Hundreds more will die tomorrow at the hands of armed gunmen who prey on disarmed Americans.

And then there's this, in the same vein, from today's Philadelphia Inquirer:

The killings on the Virginia Tech campus, the worst such rampage in our history, might have been mitigated if just one member of the faculty or a student had the means to return fire.

I have owned guns for decades. On rare occasions, I have had to "show" one of my guns to people with bad intentions. Not surprisingly, they changed their plans to take my money and do me harm. The Virginia Tech killings confirm the value of empowering ordinary citizens to carry concealed weapons.

So, in the opinion of these writers, and others espousing the same nonsense, the situation would have been so much better if, instead of one young man with a loaded gun there had been 20 or more of them, all pulling their weapons. Want to bet what would have happened?

Sure--one of the students might have killed Cho Seung-Hui; but I'd wager that one or more of them would have also killed or wounded several other students or instructors in the ensuing melee...particularly if the initial shot didn't take Cho out immediately.

Not to mention the capacity for even more tragedies before and after. If every time an individual has a beef with somebody else, he has deadly force ready and available at a moment's notice, how often will that deadly force be called upon? Imagine two student bodies, both armed to the teeth, confronting each other at a hotly contested basketball game, for instance, between long-time rivals. I've seen fist-fights break out at such events over a stare, a bumping, an overheard comment. What would it be like if one or more of the offended parties could regularly brandish a handgun instead of his knuckles?

And this doesn't even begin to deal with the increased likelihood of suicide: Students despondent over bad grades, ruined romances, and even more trivial matters have been known to turn to overdoses, hangings, and other methods when all looks black. How much easier it would be to simply pull out the gun in the nightstand in the dorm room.

The rest of the world is appalled by the US insistence on a "gun in every home" culture. In Philadelphia, there have already been more than 100 homicides with guns in 2007; in Blacksburg, VA, 33 people are dead from shootings in one day. In all of Great Britain, there were fewer than 50 deaths (both deliberate and accidental) from firearms in all of 2006. Yet the anti-gun-control forces in this country will insist that stringent measures like those in the United Kingdom don't work (handguns are completely banned from private ownership there).

Tell that to the 26,000 students of Virginia Tech today. Go ahead; I dare you.

The Prestige: Compare and Contrast

Intrigued by the trailers for the movie version, I picked up Christopher Priest's The Prestige last fall. (In part, that was because I was fairly certain I wouldn't get to see the film in theaters, given my busy schedule at the time.) The book lived up to all my expectations--it was mysterious, moody, adventurous, and (at least to my layman's eyes), historically accurate...save, of course, for the science-fictional aspects involving Nikola Tesla's work.

The rivalry between these two 19th-Century stage illusionists and its effects not only on them but on their modern-day descendants is presented in a pair of diaries, offering the viewpoint of each of them and jumping in time not only in their stories but into the lives of the descendants as well.

The movie (which I saw on DVD this past weekend) jettisons the modern-day portions of the story and alters certain aspects of the 19th-Century events. There's a certain loss in removing the modern "wraparound"...especially as it eliminates the sense that this great feud has continued for another 100 years, long after its originators have passed on. But I can see the reasons for that choice by screenwriters Jonathan and Christopher Nolan (the latter also directed)--as a film, the story is far more compact without the modern extension.

The film keeps both its big "secrets"--as to the manner in which each magician performs his master illusion--until the very end, while the novel reveals them about two-thirds of the way through. That's because, again, there's a deeper mystery in the modern part of the story, that ties the feud up very neatly.

At first, I thought I'd need a spoiler warning in order to discuss some important differences between the two versions of the story, but I've decided that's unnecessary. Suffice to say that the novel's version of Robert Angier's (Hugh Jackman) illusion is "spookier" (especially as it relates to how things go wrong when Borden (Christopher Bale) interferes), but the film's version is decidedly more horrifying.

Priest, I think, manages to avoid having his reader choose one or the other of his protagonists as "the hero". Both men do things that are, at times, despicable, understandable, and admirable. But the film seems to make Borden the more heroic, in the end, although it teases us by showing more of Angier's struggles than of Borden's.

I recommend both the book and the movie to anyone with an interest in stage illusion and historical fiction.

52 #42

This post can be viewed as a follow-up to the previous one. In reviewing the two Shazam series currently running, I mentioned how the sense of whimsy and light-hearted adventure was missing from one and seemed submerged in the other.

The most recent issue of DC's 52 makes it clear, at least to me, that there is no longer any room for light-hearted adventure anywhere in the DC Universe as currently configured. What other reason can there be for killing off Ralph Dibny, the Elongated Man? (If killing off his wife, Sue, in Identity Crisis weren't enough of a downer.)

Ralph was the superhero who could look at a simple jewel heist as a big deal, to whom solving a mystery was a kick, not a mission. He was the last vestige of the Silver Age sensibility in the DCU. And now he's gone. In an era when even a wacko idea like Detective Chimp is being used for dark and conspiratorial plots, DC has truly lost something irreplaceable.

Up 'til now, I've generally enjoyed 52--but this has put a damper on my enthusiasm. I was really hoping the Dibny storyline was intended to reinvigorate the character and make him see that life--a fun, involved life--could continue even without his beloved wife. If the "Lost in Space" storyline concludes similarly to this one, I'll know the DCU I grew up with has died.

Shazam! Shazam! Shazam....

...with apologies to Gomer Pyle.

Two very different takes on the classic Captain Marvel are currently being published by DC Comics. The first, currently up to the fifth issue of a 12-issue run, is The Trials of Shazam!, in which Freddy Freeman--now apparently of college age--must undergo a series of tests to be re-gifted with the powers of the gods and heroes and take his place as the new Captain Marvel...who, apparently will just be called Shazam, now.

I presume that last bit is to allow DC to actually have a character who uses the name by which they have marketed the Marvel Family for the past 40 years or so.

If this series, by Judd Winick and Howard Porter, were about any other character, I'd call it a terrific idea, as Freddy meets the current human incarnations of the various "Shazam" donees. (So far, he's met Solomon as a female tattoo artist and Achilles as a never-dying soldier.) But the whole thing is just too dark and too angsty for the Marvel Family, who have always had a touch of whimsy in even their biggest battles.

And the art--ignoring the bad drawing in so many places, why is this done in this semi-painted style anyway? It's, again, inappropriate for the nature of these characters (at least as they've been portrayed in the past) and wildly inconsistent besides.

It appears DC has decided, yet again, that the way to make Captain Marvel (excuse me, Shazam) work in the modern era is turn him into every other dark and conflicted hero. To quote the great Rocket J. Squirrel, "but that trick never works!"

The second series, which has just begun its four-issue run, is Shazam! The Monster Society of Evil! This one is written and drawn by Jeff Smith, of Bone fame...and I had high hopes for it. Certainly, we have here, at least, an art style appropriate to the character. And Smith is good at injecting whimsical moments into the story, as evidenced by the scene with Cap and the hot-dog man.

But I question the need to re-tell, one more time, Cap's origin, complete with making Billy Batson's life even more miserable than at any time in the past. And I don't think the idea of Cap having a "past life" that he doesn't completely recall works either. Neither does the insertion of metaphysical concepts like magic working differently at the Rock of Eternity, or the (spoiler warning) literal "footprints" Billy accidentally leaves on the world, setting up the crisis for the rest of the story.

I'll continue to follow both of these tales--the first because, as I said, if it were any other character, it would be a great idea; the second, because I think Smith can still pull this off, if he doesn't let the need for modern complexity overcome the character's natural simplicity.

Exterminate--You Silly English Kuhniggit!

I must thank Andrew Sullivan, of all people, for bringing this to my attention: