Legion of Super Heroes: Trials

Did I say in my review of Unnatural Alliances that there were no episodes in the Legion animated series that were straight up bad? I must have forgotten Trials. Gah, what the fuck was this abortion?

I always forget about this one. It must be some kind of defense mechanism.

This episode opens with young Zyx, the Mxyztplkian type kid from the first season episode Child's Play He was a petulant brat in that one, but at least he was an entertaining one. I wish I could say the same here. Boring and annoying is not an endearing combination.

He's being stripped of his powers by a bunch of rejects from Gallifrey

when suddenly Mordru shows up. I like Mordru as a villain, but his design for the series just doesn't work for me. (Though he does get some bonus points for saying "In the name of Yog-Sothoth, I will have my revenge.")

He was also stripped of his powers for trafficing in dark magic, but rather than undergo the trial that would remove the power-nullifying mystical bands, he sought out the Lamentation Pentacle, an artifact that gives him tremendous powers. He beats up the High Council, but one of them teleports Zyx away before he is overcome. We fade out with an image of Mordu's head hovering about their citadel, which is a cool visual, marred only by that WB logo.

Zyx appears on board the Legion Cruiser, laments that he's been sent to these losers, and Credits.

They land on the planet and the guy specifically vulnerable to magic offers to lead the delaying action against the evil wizard. Zyx mentions the trial to get his powers back and they decide to split the team. One Legionnaire will accompany Zyx and the others will join Superman against Mordru. Superman-X is the last one to say "Not it!" so he gets stuck with the kid.

Superman: We'll split up. I'll lead the team against Mordru and try to delay him, while one of you helps Zyx. Volunteers?
Star Boy: I'm no babysitter.
Bouncing Boy: I'd rather fight the evil wizard.
Phantom Girl: Uh, I've been to the city before, so...
Timber Wolf: I say give it to the new guy.
Kell-El: What? Hey!
Superman: Done.
Kell-El: I hate you guys

I'm done with bitching about X's inconsistent characterization at this point, so let's just move on. Zyx waves his hand over the bands and a projection of the White Witch begs him to get the plans for the Death Star to Obi-Wan gives him directions to his first trial, "the Cave of Lore" on the other side of the "Swamp Sea."

"Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi. You're my only hope."

You know, I'm seldom embarrassed about watching and writing about kiddie cartoons, but hearing dialogue like that just makes me wince. Those two take off and a bunch of skeletons, gargoyles and orcs attack the other Legionnaires.

I like this fight scene. My favorite moment has to be when Superman is dropped to all fours from the impact of a magical mace, so he kneecaps a bunch of guys with his heat vision. I'm not sure why animated suits of plate armor explode when he does this, but it's still cool.

Meanwhile, in the swamp sea, the two most annoying characters in the show talk, until a monster shows up and eats Kell.

And there was much rejoicing.

Zyx notices the swamp monster is just trying to protect its egg sac, so he saves the eggs from a falling tree and the White Witch pops up like Clippy the Office Assistant and tells him that he has completed the first trial.

"It looks like you're trying to get your magical powers back. Would you like help?"

Meanwhile, Mordru shows up. Superman lances him with a blast of heat vision, bowls him over and goes to remove the amulet, but is shocked off by its energies. Mordru then takes out the Legion with one burst of magical energy, petrifying Superman, aging Timber Wolf and throwing a bunch of frogs at Phantom Girl.

Cut to the two stooges making small talk. Zyx tries to teach Kell a counterspell, but gives up, declaring Kell "a special type of idiot". No arguments here. They arrive at second trial, which is a stupid riddle out of a Dungeons & Dragons module. (I suppose it was that or a chessboard trap.)

Zyx gets his powers back, they teleports to Mordru, who turns the captured Legionnaires into monsters who attack Kell and Zyx. Kell holds them off as Zyx deals with Mordru.  Brief fight, then Kell tries the counterspell that Zyx taught him and this time it works. The Legionnaires are freed and restored to normal and everybody dogpiles Mordru.

They seal him with beams from the citadel, and then Star Boy entombs him in the center of the planet, which was a cool nod to comics continuity.

Zyx gets his ridiculous hat back and we end the episode with the Elders telling everyone how awesome Kell was. Blech.

From the Comments Section: Some Zelazny News

From the comments, for folks who don't read them, a little bit of Zelazny news.

The first is that Chris Kovacs has published an essay "Fallen Books and Other Subtle Clues in Zelazny's A NIGHT IN THE LONESOME OCTOBER." in the December issue of the New York Review of Science Fiction. In it he discusses who each character is and provides support for his analysis and concludes with a discovery about who Snuff is really based on.

And Chris DeVito has posted a link to Howard Jones talking about his love for the Amber Books. The comments to the piece are generally worth reading too.

Roger Zelazny Book Review: Elegy for Angels and Dogs

This is an interesting footnote in the history of Roger Zelazny's stories., a sequel to a Zelazny story, written by another author, Walter Jon Williams.

I first learned of the existence of Elegy from Walter Jon Williams' afterword in Lord of the Fantastic,  and it seemed so improbable that I couldn't be sure that it wasn't some kind of weird joke. I loved The Graveyard Heart but a sequel seemed so unnecessary that I could scarcely fathom its existence. And while it was called a sequel, I figured that it would be some kind of "set in the world of the Graveyard Heart" type bullshit that had so disappointed me as a kid. When somebody advertised a Star Wars story, I expected it to feature Han and Luke and Leia, not be about a day in the life of a random stormtrooper. So, I was rather surprised and somewhat delighted to find that it was in fact a direct sequel, even featuring some returning characters.

At his blog, the author talks about how the story came about. It's really kind of interesting. It was part of the Tor SF Double series, which featured short works by established authors, followed by sequels written by newer writers specifically for the series. It's a pretty cool idea and one which I'd been previously unfamiliar. It's pretty good, and it reads like a Zelazny story. Unfortunately, the story it reads like is Changeling.

We're saddled with a loathsome prick of a protagonist and he brings down what would otherwise be a superb story. From his interview to join the Set. The Doyenne is the first speaker and Lamoral is the second.

"Can you give it up? The family, the traditions, all dozen or so of your castles?"

"All twenty-three to be precise. And no, I have no intention of giving it all up."

"You'll have to."

"I think not. After all, I'll have to resign and produce and heir at some point."

She fixed her legendary scowl on him. Lamoral avoided being intimidated. "For a member of the Party Set, there is no other existence. There is no choice in the matter. Any occupation outside the Set becomes irrelevant - one's family ties crumble away, one's specialized knowledge becomes obsolete, one's occupation ceases to exist."

Lamoral gave her a practiced smile. "I like to think of my occupation as timeless."

"You'll see," she said darkly. By which Lamoral took it to mean he'd been accepted.

As he knew he would, even if he'd spent his interview gnawing on human bones. The Party Set, a nouveau media aristocracy, would have happily slit a thousand throats for a hint of validation from the Lanadadel, and both he and the Doyenne knew it.

"You'll have to take my brother Alexander as well," he said.

"I hardly think so. More than one member of a family is quite-"

He gave her his most charming smile. "He'll just get into trouble without me to look after him. No, it's both of us, I'm afraid."

He's fantastically unctuous and I kept expecting him to get his comeuppance, but the more I read, the more I realized that the reader was expected to admire this glib Mary Sue. Everyone else in the story certainly did.

The complex and nuanced Doyenne of The Graveyard Heart is reduced to the role of mere adversary, and an ineffectual one at that. Mary Maude Mullen didn't do the research about how many castles he had? That's bullshit.

And it might be reasonable to conclude that I didn't like the story but that's actually not the case, because beneath those two problems there's a really good story here. I liked the concepts Williams explored in Lethe and he shows the same vivid imagination here. Augmented reality spectacles foresaw similar smartphone apps twenty years in advance. Eurydike Ichimonji-Apostolidis is a fascinating and compelling character, marred only by her interest in Lamoral We even get a mention of Diane Demetrios, who had a very small part in the first story as Moore's first wife. That's some fine continuity porn right there, and I think it's because of the author's love and respect for the source material that I can't bring myself to dislike it, no matter how much I hate Lamoral.

We open on a Set party on a facility orbiting Uranus, the "castrated Creator", a turn of phrase that evoked Zelazny for me. The participants return to their cold sleep and on awakening, they learn two things. The first is that there has been a system-wide war and they have been asleep longer than intended because of it, and the other is that the most hated member of the Set, who is surprisingly not Lamoral, but a man who went by the alias of Cao Cao, failed to awaken because a saline solution had been substituted for the enzyme prep shot that would allow him to survive the freezing process.

There's a bit of a murder mystery, but that's almost incidental, for this is a work where the enjoyment is more in the telling than the tale. Lamoral schemes to usurp control of the Set from the Doyenne, but there's little tension there, not only because I hate him and want him to fail, but because the Doyenne as so amazingly incompetent. That bit I quoted above, where he runs circles around her, is characteristic of every time they interact. Her Investment Intelligence lost millions in the Crash of 2130? "My own I.I. did very well in that, by the way," Lamoral smugly informs her.

At the end of the story, we shift gears and get a climax atop a mountain peak that channels both This Mortal Mountain and Corwin and Brand's confrontation in the box canyon in The Courts of Chaos. We also get a last minute twist that grows logically out of both events in this story and alludes to speculation in the early part of The Graveyard Heart.
 
Though I can't recommend it wholeheartedly, it makes an interesting coda to The Graveyard Heart and after reading this and Lethe, I'm eager to read more from Walter Jon Williams.

The Hills, they are alive! Sing-along Sound of Music

On Sunday, Jen, Lily, Oma and I all went to a Sing-along Sound of Music at the State Theater. If you're not familiar, it's kind of like a Rocky Horror at the midnight movies. You yell at the screen and wave your props and generally enjoy yourself in a community environment. There are costumes too. A woman dressed her kids as marionettes. I think she won the prize, which was a DVD of the movie, which is kind of cheesy, as the people attending these things almost certainly already have a copy of their own.  There was also a guy in a Nazi uniform, which I felt was in rather questionable taste.

There was an emcee, but she was pretty bad. A five minute introduction would have been fine, a fifteen minute one would have been tolerable, and the THIRTY-FIVE minute one we got was entirely too long.

There's no point in summarizing the plot of the movie, since it's so well known, so I'll instead offer my observations on the movie and the event.  It's the Sound of Music on the big screen with karaoke style lyrics for the songs. Evidently they use a DVD or BluRay rather than a film, but I don't know the actual mechanics of it. Lily loves the movie, but she got pretty antsy. In retrospect, I think watching it the night before to get her hyped about it was the wrong move, because that's almost seven hours of Sound of Music in 24 hours.

I like Sound of Music. Angela Cartwright, who plays Brigitta may have been my very first crush as a little kid, in her role as Penny in Lost in Space,

so I've always been fondly disposed towards the her and consequently the movie. I like musicals anyway, but this helped cement it.

Something that struck me about the movie on this movie is how closely it parallels Disney's Little Mermaid prequel, which is another favorite around here (and I ask you, how can the Disney karaoke game have more songs from Cars than The Little Mermaid?! It's a travesty, I tell you!) The mother dies and the grieving father of a large brood banishes all music from his kingdom.

Captain Von Trappe was an interesting guy in real life too, though the Sound of Music takes a few liberties with his biography.

The imdb triva section for the film notes that some of the kids had growth spurts during filming, and that the filmmakers tried their best to hide this (by having the kid who played Friedrich, who grew half a foot in height during production, film without shoes and having Liesl stand on a box to make her seem taller) but I noticed it when they were lined up on stage near the end of the movie, when Max is approached by Zeller. They had been lined up by height at the beginning of the movie and I thought that if they did that again, that they would have to line up in an entirely different order.

I think my favorite character was the Baroness.

Not that one!

There she is! Eleanor Parker as Baroness Schraeder.

The instructions were to hiss when the Baroness showed up on screen, but I always liked her. She's not a bad person. Wikipedia's summary suggests that she's jealous of Maria, and while that's technically correct, I think it's misleading. She recognizes Maria as disruptive influence on her household, because her fiancee has feelings for her, and tells her about these concerns. I don't think it was her specific intent to get Maria to leave as she did, though I don't think she was displeased with the outcome either.

She was the stepmom, and that can't be an easy position to be in, but she made the best of it, and she really seemed to sincerely love the Captain and he her. When Maria returns, and she's talking to Captain Von Trappe on the balcony, they both know it's over. She's talking about what to get him as a wedding present, and he cuts her off and tells her that going throuh with the marriage would be unfair to them both. She accepts this with as much dignity as she can muster, packs her little bags and returns to Vienna, wishing them well.

You don't find that as much in modern romance movies, where it seems that if one of the lead characters starts in a relationship,  but later leaves his or her partner order to be with the other lead character, that original partner always turns out to be some kind of irredeemable monster in order to justify that choice. It was a painful decision for her, but she did the right thing. She loved Von Trappe, but he loved Maria more, and as the song says, "There ain't no good guy, there ain't no bad guy, There's only you and me and we just disagree." Of course, in a movie with actual Nazi's, you don't need to create artificial villains out of people just living and loving as people do.

Also, I see that this was one of Parker's last major roles and that she is still alive. Go her!

I also like the Reverend Mother. This is probably my favorite exchange in the movie, and I'm an atheist.

Maria: I left... I was frightened... I was confused. I felt, I've never felt that way before, I couldn't stay. I knew that here I'd be away from it. I'd be safe... I can't face him again... Oh, there were times when we would look at each other. Oh, Mother, I could hardly breathe... That's what's been torturing me. I was there on God's errand. To have asked for his love would have been wrong. I couldn't stay, I just couldn't. I'm ready at this moment to take my vows. Please help me.

Reverend Mother: Maria, the love of a man and a woman is holy too. You have a great capacity to love. What you must find out is how God wants you to spend your love.

Maria: But I pledged my life to God. I pledged my life to his service.

Reverend Mother: My daughter, if you love this man, it doesn't mean you love God less. No, you must find out and you must go back.

Maria: Oh, Mother, you can't ask me to do that. Please let me stay, I beg of you.

Reverend Mother: Maria, these walls were not built to shut out problems. You have to face them. You have to live the life you were born to live.

Christopher Plummer disliked the movie for a long time. He eventually came to accept it with what I thought was a classy statement. "I was a bit bored with the character. Although we worked hard enough to make him interesting, it was a bit like flogging a dead horse. And the subject matter is not mine. I mean, it can’t appeal to every person in the world...The world has seen (The Sound of Music) so many times. And there’s a whole new generation every year—poor kids—that have to sit through it. But it was a very well-made movie, and it’s a family movie and we haven't seen a family movie, I don't think, on that scale for ages. I don’t mind that. It just happened to be not my particular cup of tea."

I was aware of his distaste for the movie when I saw it this most recent time. I was thinking of it during the scene where Maria has returned the Abbey and the kids had gone down to it to try to talk to her. Now they're back at the mansion and he's trying to get them to admit where they were. So he's mercilessly taunting his kids with this giant smirk on his face, and it's absolutely the most animated he gets for the entire movie. I have to assume that Plummer was channeling a little of his frustration with filming in this scene.

"Stuffed yourself with thousands of delicious berries?"

"Okay, let me see them..."

"Yes, Liesl, I am quite happy with myself. Thanks for noticing."

Roger Zelazny Casting Call: Mandor

I've always liked Mandor. At first he treats Merlin like a younger brother of whom he is fond but not particularly impressed, and it's nice to see that not everyone from Amber to Chaos is wowed by this allegedly precocious wunderkind. Also, he's got a neat Trump:

I held it before me and put the others away, studying the blue eyes and the young, hard, slightly sharp features beneath a mass of pure white hair. He  was dressed all in black, save for a bit of white collar and sleeve showing beneath the glossy tight-fitting jacket. He held three dark steel balls in his gloved hand.

For the role, I think I'd like to go with Jude Law.

A good-looking fella, certainly, but he's also a talented actor, a combination that is less common in cinema than you might expect. A look at his filmography shows he's versatile, and I think he's got the both the menace

Her face grew flushed and beads of perspiration appeared upon her brow. Her eyes were still unfocused, but they brimmed with tears. A thin line of blood trickled down her chin. Mandor extended a clenched fist and opened it, revealing another metal ball. He held this one about ten inches before her brow, then released it. It hung in the air.

"Let the doors of pain be opened," he said, and he flicked it lightly with a fingertip.

Immediately, the small sphere began to move. It passed about her head in a slow ellipse, coming close to her temples on each orbit. She began to wail.

"Silence!" he said. "Suffer in silence!"

and the sense of subdued spectacle

"If one of your relatives strolls by, should I introduce  myself as a Lord of Chaos?"

"I thought you were also a Lord of Deception."

"Of course," he said, and he clapped his hands and vanished.

one finds in Mandor.