Truck Wars Taken to Whole New Level

We know that Toyota has declared war on 'Merican truck culture yet again, but the Japanese automotive dreadnought's latest salvo is notable for its evocation of a Fermi Paradox-by-way-of-Independence Day variation. The set-up: A pair of nasty-looking alien starships converge on little planet Earth and, after powering-up their jagged red death ray, mercilessly obliterate our Big Blue Marble in space. Fragments of our former home scatter into the void. Atop one, the sole survivor of the apocalypse, a Toyota Tacoma and its driver, who gazes in awestruck wonder at the Earth's destroyers, before driving off.

Cool! From our POV, a definite advance over the much-discussed Tacoma World of Warcraft spot, which was just plain goofy.

No obvious evidence that aliens were summoned by GM in a tragic case of competitive blowback.

And just a quick primer on the whole Fermi thing: Enrico Fermi, the noted physicist, once wondered aloud why, if life should theoretically be abundant in the universe we haven't seen any yet, besides ourselves. Some have opined that any truly smart life form would realize that all the others are an eventual threat and set about laying them to waste. Blah blah blah... but you get the idea.

Nixon Defeats Kennedy! Um... Er... Not?

Matt Weiner, who made his name as part of David Chase’s crackerjack writing team on The Sopranos, has got himself a cult hit, if not exactly a ratings winner, with his Golden Age-of-advertising series, Mad Men, on AMC. Production design is a HUGE part of what makes the show a hoot to watch, but what’s got our attention is Weiner’s insistence that his Madison Avenue ad agency set—with the Brylcreemed and Brooks Brothersed gents arrayed malevolently in offices around a buffonted and bullet-bra’ed secretarial pool—is a “science fiction” environment (watch the clip above for the reference, and watch to the end, and enjoy—and thanks to AMC for giving us the code so we can freely post this revelation). We thought we detected a tip of the fedora in MW's comment, beyond its obvious throwback metaphorical implications as far as the sexual-politics wayback machine is concerned. That the first season takes place in 1960, with the Nixon-Kennedy presidential race being run, gave us additional hope that Weiner would throw the audience for a Bikini Atoll-by-way-of-Philip K. Dick loop and commence an alternative history of the ’60s, with Nixon winning and Camelot never emerging and GOD KNOWS WHAT ELSE!!! (Like, for example, the entire Apollo program actually happened and we still opened up China). All viewed through the lens of advertising. Now that would’ve been some bombshell SF, babydoll hepcat. Sadly, it did not come to pass. JFK won. Which only leads us to wonder: Will Weiner arrange to have the fictitious Sterling Cooper agency involved in faking the Moon landing? Time, and a gimlet or three, will tell...

Memo to Hollywood: Give the people what they want! And yes, that's more than a smoke and a drink.

Trek XI

Our humble entry in the title sweepstakes for J.J. Abrams' probably upcoming $120 mil addition to the increasingly troublingly lame Star Trek franchise:

Star Trek: Exhausted

Catchy, doncha think?

First off, what we must grapple with is that, regardless of his professed devotion to SF, Abrams made his name in a small-box version of the horror genre. Then he put Jen Garner in wigs. Then he went to work on his study in serial bafflement, Lost, which got off to a rousing start but has since degenerated into a show that has to be aggressively TiVO-ized and fast-forwarded to be enjoyed.

Now we hear that casting will visit the original series crew, in a younger incarnation. Kirk's in. Spock's in. Uhura. Chekov, for the love of god. What we seem to be forgetting here is that a dead franchise was revived in '87 via The Next Generation precisely because Trek evolved. What leaking out of Abrams' set at the moment are strong implications of dreary regression. Memo to Paramount: No more Kirk! No more Spock! We don't need no stinkin' Klingons!

Something new and dark (and not Deep Space Nine dark, more Alien Resurrection dark) and weird and deeply effed up would be preferable. Boldest possible move: Depict a post-TNG universe in which Starfleet has gone completely Spartan and imposed military values throughout the galaxy. The Enterprise and a whole new crew find themselves hunting down rebels, who are allied with the Borg.

Not the Harald Belker Lexus, but Close

The Aptera Motors website is gradually, um, picking up speed. The rad new car they have for pre-order should be making cinematic appearances shortly, perhaps with L.A.’s on-loan-from-the-22nd-century Caltrans HQ as a background. Resembling a roadgoing Cessna, this alleged 230-mpg diesel-electric-hybrid-three-wheeler, sculpted from composites, insists that it’s personal transportation for the future. We’re thinking that it splits the difference between Minority Report’s insane, automated maglev freeways and the moody, spacefaring electric-plug-in culture of Gattaca. Less overall design than the former (Apteras are specifically intended to service commuters, who will not be driving their cars up the sides of high-rise buildings), more oomph than the latter (in which the Honda Insight-looking rides managed to resemble a fleet of large vacuum cleaners meandering among genetically superior, sensually attired astronauts). We have calls in to Harald Belker, who designed the Minority Report Lexus and is also responsible for several Batmobile iterations, for his thoughts on whether Aptera has prospects in Hollywood, beyond the celebrity-driveway circuit.

E-Bomb in P-Back

Douglas Beason’s The E-Bomb: How America’s New Directed Energy Weapons Will Change the Way Future Wars Will Be Fought is out in paperback. For the modest outlay of $16, you can read all about the U.S. military’s ongoing campaign to develop real-life phasers, disruptors, and blasters. These directed energy (DE) weapons constitute a rebuttal of pop-cult sci-fi’s recent preoccupation with good old-fashioned projectile-based armaments (so much more gritty and metaphorically connected to what civilians think combat is actually like). Our personal favorite DE weap—let’s just go ahead and call it our “mascot”—is the “pain ray,” a nasty microwave device that can heat up advancing enemy soldiers’ skin, forcing them to flee screaming to their field rations of aloe vera gel. Think of it as a vicious tanning bed.

Is Kerry Conran the P.T. Anderson of Sci-Fi?

Flawed though it may have been, Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow was, well… Good golly! It was crazy awesome! It wasn’t flawed at all! It was a work of pure genius. So naturally, visionary director Kerry Conran has vanished from sight. After all, it’s not every day that a complete unknown re-invents a cinematic form. With visual technology of his own devising. And then gets Gwyneth Paltrow attached. So where is he? Last we heard, he’d been kicked off the trapped-in-turnaround John Carter of Mars project at Paramount Disney. Tips to his whereabouts are welcome. Unless he’s retreated to his giant underground lab in the Detroit area to finish building his robot army and plot revenge.

Re-Imagining Roulette

Battlestar Galactica. The Bionic Woman. The televised sci-fi hootenanny that was the 1970s seems to have become an inexhaustible resource for today’s aspiring show-runners. Which leads us to speculate: What’s next?

We’ve laid odds.

20-1: Space: 1999. Such a natural, it seems, though limited in its re-imagining potential because it was just so friggin’ good to begin with. Well, one climbs the mountain because it’s there. Obviously, the title needs work, given the awkward associations with the Prince catalog. And, um, of course the fact that we didn’t have a moonbase in 1999. We had the Y2K scare! No dang moonbase, though…

10-1: Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. Erin Gray as Col. Wilma Deering was hot in 1979 and, as far as we can tell, is still hot three decades later. We’re seeing her as some kind of admiral or battle-fleet grand pooh-bah. As the re-imagined Col. Deering, none other than…that’s right, Claudia Black, small-screen sci-fi’s answer to Ava Gardner.

2-1: The Man Woman from Atlantis. This one has the distinct possibly of, yes, a bikini maneuver. Dirk Benedict saw Starbuck gender-flipped for the re-imagined BSG. Let’s do likewise here. We’re thinking Jolene Blalock, who should have wrapped the direct-to-DVD Starship Troopers: Marauder by now and can definitely carry the wardrobe.

The Olympics of Whack: Strieber Versus Pinchbeck, Round 1

Author and dope fiend altered-consciousness guru Daniel Pinchbeck has run afoul of alien-abduction enthusiast Whitley Strieber, just as the latter’s new novel, 2012: The War for Souls, has landed in bookstores. Both Strieber and Pinchbeck are working some of the same deeply weird territory. Strieber argues that alien visitors walk among us and will be revealed in 2012. Pinchbeck insist several centuries of rational progress will be undone—in 2012!—when Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl stages a comeback (psychedelic drugs will help us all get down with this) . Both have posted equally deranged blog accounts of their snit (Pinchbeck here; Strieber here), which occurred this month on the radio show that Strieber hosts. Pinchbeck’s is less humane but more entertaining. Here’s a tidbit: “I told Strieber that I thought he had been manipulated by alien entities that do not have the best interests of the human species at heart.”

Honestly, Dan, have they ever? We all know that Strieber’s “visitors” are responsible for the subprime mortgage meltdown and Barry Bonds.

FOLLOW UP: Pinchbeck has hit Hollywood, and hit it hard. Michael Mann will reportedly be producing a movie, based on Pinchbeck’s 2006 book, Return of Quetzalcoatl. Our sources at the LA Times, where there’s a profile of Pinchbeck in the works, say it’s scheduled for release in 2009.

Is There a Statute of Good Taste on Re-Imaginings?

It saddens us to relay this information, but Variety is reporting that Doug Liman will be producing an oh-so-gritty-and-presumably-ironic rework of—brace yourselves—Knight Rider for NBC. Back-door TV movie pilot to be followed by full-fledged series in fall 2008. Details are sketchy, but we’re assuming an extremely significant product-placement opportunity here for the new K.I.T.T., most likely in the form of a talking Chevy Volt squaring off against the very best petroleum-chugging, smog-spewing, axis-of-evil set of wheels the Iranians have on hand (perhaps the Khodro Samand LX with the fatwa package?). The burning question: Who will voice the dashboard? Given Liman’s track record, we figure even money between Vince Vaughn and Angelina Jolie. Expect overwhelming CGI, and of course Transformer-esque vehicle battles tweaked for the small box.

NASA Mission Uses Technology Perfected by ABC during the Carter Administration

Who knew that the recently launched Dawn asteroid probe’s ion-drive engines use technology that NASA reverse-engineered from Star Wars? We’re not kidding—the “TIE” in TIE fighter stands for “twin ion engine.” Actually, the design was developed by Nazi rocket scientist, UFO booster, and ultra-nationalist German right-winger Hermann Oberth (so there, don’t you wish George Lucas had thought it up?). Dawn has three of these babies, but still takes four days to accelerate from 0-60 mph, scarcely enough to keep Luke from blowing up the Death Star, much less redefining the future of interstellar travel. Devotees of the 1979 Andy Griffith vehicle Salvage 1, whose number may not even include Griffith himself, will recall that this gradual-acceleration gambit (called the “Trans-Linear Vector Principle,” and we dare the brain trust at JPL to do any better) was what enabled a fortune-hunting junkyard owner to journey from Earth to the Moon in order to recover the priceless artifacts that the Apollo astronauts left behind, such as Alan Shepard’s golf balls.

Now We Know What Really Happened to Starbuck

Yeah, it was on network air, and yeah, some of the line-readings set a new standard for clunkiness, and yeah, it’s sad that original bionic babe Lindsey Wagner is shilling Sleep Number beds at 3 a.m., but the debut of Bionic Woman, NBC’s new distaff cyborg noir, was actually pretty tasty fare. Worth noting that David Eick, fresh off a cult hit but ratings dud with Battlestar Galactica, carried premier night with the 18-49 demo, according to the L.A. Times. Also good to know that BSG’s Katee Sackhoff (BW’s psychopathic beta launch) can chew the scenery just as ruthlessly in stormy Vancouver San Francisco as on a nuked, Cylon-occupied Vancouver Caprica. Whoa Nellie! Is there an actress in all of sci-fidom who can stand her ground against this blonde bundle of ham? Maybe Claudia Black.

Best line of the episode:

Will (supergenius son-of-Frankenstein boyfriend, following first bionic sex) to Jaime (better, stronger, faster and flushed from first bionic orgasm): “You’re hardwired for specialized warfare!”

Let’s give it a chance and see what develops in the show’s frozen mountaintop lairs and cobalt-lit underground labs. Drinking game to play while watching: Toss back a shot every time a cast member from BSG slips into the frame.