Ming the Merciless

There's a lovely bit as well where, so this is, again, John finds this all quite emotional and difficult and he starts crying and Arnie just turns and says, what's wrong with his eyes or what's wrong with your eyes? And Joe John says, no, nothing, nothing, nothing.

And it reminded me of one of my favourite scenes in the film Flash Gordon, where you've got Ming and his daughter are talking about Dale Arden.

Aurora.

Aurora, yeah.

water is leaking from her

eyes.

And Ming the Merciless says, It's what they call tears.

It's a sign of their weakness.

When I was a kid and used to go to the Saturday matinees and everything like that, everybody wanted to be Buster Crabbe or Flash Gordon or Tom Mix or something like that.

I always wanted to be Ming the Merciless.

I never wanted to be the hero.

I always wanted to be the villain.

You know, a series serial.

And they put a different movie in, and I thought, "What the frig is going on?" So now I have to remember in my memory what happens with Flash Gordon, Imp- and Emperor Ming and Queen Azura.

Uh, I re- I remember that Queen Azura, uh, they took her brooch off of her body and were able to go to the clay caves and free the clay people.

[laughs] Am I demented or what?

I think they were very boisterous.

No one really gave the Cowboys much chance, and if they saw, uh, Ming the Merciless's pre-game interview, [laughs] I don't think he gave them much chance either.

[laughs]

And the Sharks prevailed ultimately, and as I said, will now be riding on the coattails of Trindall's shoulder against the Sydney Roosters.

... is the, uh, bankruptcy value recovery artist here, shall we say.

Yeah, didn't he give himself a nickname? Was it, uh, Ming the Merciless?

Yes, after the villain in the Flash Gordon comic series, and he called himself that because of how merciless he was to all the, uh, employees of these companies that he would slash and burn and get rid of.

So Ken realizes right away that this Sigaloff guy is bad news, but he's got this close to 19% equity position in Handy Dan.

or Flash Gordon or Tom Mix or something like that.

I always wanted to be Ming the Merciless.

Character-wise, I always did identify with the villains.

I never wanted to be the hero.

Boom tish.

But really- This is the closest Moonbase Alpha gets to Ming the Merciless and his- Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Spot on.

Spot on.

Ming the Merciless.

With his

brain-sucking computer.

Mm-hmm

... and then, you know, he's Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, and the head brewer in Strange Brew.

It's, the credits that he's got, uh, yeah, it's great.

It's great stuff.

But I think that you can say a lot with pictures and therefore use fewer words.

There used to be Flash Gordon and the Emperor Ming was some kind of a big little book that my uncle had in the 1930s and I found them in the 1950s.

And they were actually small books like this and like that.

But it was the art.