Starlog

I am Dave Gonzalez and you can follow me on Letterboxd and Blue Skies DA7E.

You can also hear me on the Starlog podcast.

I wasn't here last week, but that was the week we had Matt Patches.

I forgot.

So one time.

To listen to Matt Patches and I discuss whether or not you would kill a robot in a boy's skin.

Check it out on the Starlog podcast.

Or if you just listen to the newest episode, we have Pulitzer Prize winning author Daniel Krauss on to talk about the sixth Nick.

It's eight o'clock in wonderful Plumas County, where once again city police have refused to confirm or deny more of those mysterious lights in the sky sighting by local residents.

It's-- Depending on where you went, the budget for this film was either 13 million, uh, as Cinefantastique put it, 16 million in one issue of Starlog, or 22 million, which they said in the next issue of Starlog.

I tend to think of it as being the larger number.

We're gonna meet Otis, our first human character here, played by Vernon Washington.

And he was very appreciative of Nick Castle working with them.

I think he said it was a 38-day shoot, but they ended up going five or six days over.

And I think he told Starlog that to him it was confusing because sometimes the way a scene is shot would determine how it had to be played.

And if you read the script, you got the impression on how a scene should be played.

I literally had a black and white picture.

I think I saw it in, uh, Starlog Magazine, and I used that as a reference and I drew it.

And I was just thinking as I held it in my hand, that's 42 years ago.

Did I ever think when I was drawing this when I was 17 that one day not only would I meet the guy that played Short Round, but I actually have his contact information and his cell number on my cell phone.

I would also probably put the Enterprise D in there in some fashion because I too had a model of it.

And I remember researching what color they painted because I was buying those Starlog magazines.

They had Starlog magazines that they put out at the end of the season that gave like episode recaps, kind of like my original compendium book.

And they talked about how they built the model and what color they painted it.

And it was not actually like white-ish or gray-ish like the original Enterprise.

I have that picture there.

I have the greatest American hero from the Starlog magazine like there.

I have my grandma and grandpa loved patsy klein and i was at the and i do too and i was at the used record store and they had a big thing that says in person patsy klein and it's from 1962 and i was like oh cool so it's a picture of her you know it's a reprint of it but it's really neat so it's in a frame and everything and the wife even goes that does look

cool

Michael Jackson? Nope.

Henson told Starlog, we thought of several people, but by far the one that was most exciting to us was David Bowie.

And Jim's reasoning for this was understandable.

Because he told Entertainment Tonight that he wanted two characters of flesh and bone in the middle of all these artificial characters.

makes sense it absolutely does and that's fascinating because uh it It brings up one of my favorite issues of studying film, right? And I want to get back to Superman in a second, because I know you've probably got an example of what people don't know about putting that film together.

But, you know, you grow up reading Famous Monsters magazines and Starlog or whatever the heck is going on, right? And you'll see these these sort of rumors or fun factoids repeated that probably are complete BS.

Right.

And I'm curious if if you come across a lot of those, like contrary to popular belief, you know, I like I believe it's true that Buddy Epson was poisoned by the by the Tin Man makeup.

Almost instantly, almost instantly, a number of very interesting things happened.

The first thing that happened was that the editors of Starlog magazine called me and said, we're getting a lot of heat all of a sudden from James Cameron and Gail Ann Hurd.

And I said, on what grounds? Well, what had happened was they had interviewed Cameron prior to the film's release.

And Cameron had been his usual, I've never met the man, but I gather that he has an ego that makes mine look minuscule by comparison.

And that in the course of his interview, someone had said to him, where did you get the basic inception for Terminator? And his response was, oh, I ripped off a couple of Outer Limits segments.

When the Starlog interview went to print, that exchange had been deleted, thanks to pressure from Hemdale Films.

But Harlan had worked for Starlog in the past, so someone slipped him a copy of the original transcript.

The next piece of proof popped into place when Harlan got a call from an old friend, screenwriter Tracy Torme.