POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Welcome To The Zany World Of 1970s Sci-Fi Art
By Dan Brown I lived through the 1970s so you don’t have to, kids! But seriously. Regardless of how old you are, you should check out the art book Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, which was published this summer. It will have special resonance if you are a Gen Xer like me who remembers the paperback and magazine covers of old. If you were a fan of writers Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, or Michael Moorcock, you’ll grok this hefty collection of paintings. But even if you have no memories of the Me Decade, you can still learn a lot about today’s science-fiction aesthetic because many of these images still linger in the public imagination. Keep in mind this was a time when painters and illustrators had to summon depictions of spaceships, astronauts and aliens largely from whole cloth i.e. their minds. The artists represented here did have the benefit of the work done in the early decades of the century, but the genre wasn’t as ubiquitous then as it is today. There was no internet repository they could summon with a few taps on the keyboard. Nor flashy video games And yes, I got this book because it has huge nostalgia appeal for me. Born in the 1960s, I grew up in the 1970s. It was a magic time because that’s when I got my first taste of sci-fi literature. Editor Adam Rowe wisely divides the artistic output from the decade into understandable sections like spaceships, alien life, and landscapes. He then subdivides each of these broad categories into themes that recurred throughout the decade – UFOs, space cats, robots, et cetera. Individual artists – think John Berkey, Angus McKie, Boris Vallejo, and others – likewise get their own spotlight page or two. This allows Rowe to present a 222-page showcase that gives even newbie readers an accurate feel for the times. You might be wondering about movie posters, since this was the decade that saw Star Wars create an overnight explosion in interest for space fantasy. One subsection, titled Star Wars before Star Wars, collects the works that presaged George Lucas’ saga, including hairy creatures that look an awful lot like wookies and four-legged walking tanks originated by Syd Mead. There’s also strong representation of paintings originally done as covers for such Warren publications as Creepy. In short, this is a delightful volume. It provides a look at the body of work that serves as a bridge between the art of old and the art of today. It all went down in the 1970s. I can only hope it finds an audience among younger readers who haven’t been exposed to these pictures before, and provides compelling evidence that no one requires AI help to dream up lively visions of days to come. It’s also a nice companion piece for the art books that reproduce early Dungeons & Dragons art from roughly the same period. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Give Doctor Who A Rest
By Dan Brown I haven’t watched Doctor Who on the regular in a long time. And I don’t believe there should be any new episodes of the venerable BBC series for a long time, either. That’s to help guarantee the viability of the program far into the future. Why am I saying this? You may have heard Doctor Who is at a crossroads. Showrunner Russell T. Davies has exited the series, and the rights to produce the show have been put out to tender. My feeling is, for the Doctor to survive, the character needs to go away for several years. Maybe even decades. It last aired on Disney+ in May, 2025. Although it was a staple of my childhood pop-culture diet, I haven’t been a regular viewer for ages. I think the BBC needs to send a message to fans: You’ve been taking the long-running show and its title character for granted. In a world with seemingly unlimited sci-fi content, Doctor Who has been getting, with its built-in generational audience, the short end of the proverbial stick. It needs to go fallow. Doctor Who aired for the first time in 1963, and made a generation of British children jump behind their living-room couches with its weird mix of rubber monsters, cliffhanger endings, and bargain-basement special effects. It eventually came to North America, where kids like me – watching on public broadcaster TVOntario – were enchanted, many of us becoming fans for decades. And yes, it has gone on hiatus before – notably from 1989 to 2005. Then it got a new lease on life with Davies at the helm. But lately, it feels more like background noise than compelling appointment viewing, whatever that might mean in the age of streaming services. I admit, I’m one of those boring, middle-age fogies whose first Doctor was played by Tom Baker. And in my view, he’s never been surpassed. Honestly, I couldn’t tell you who the last couple Doctors were, and I’m a Disney+ subscriber! (That’s the conceit of the show, that the Doctor regenerates every so often into a new body.) So let’s put it on the shelf for, say, a decade, and give fans a chance to miss the ever-quipping Time Lord. The character has stood the test of time before, I’m not worried Doctor Who will be forgotten. Besides, in our streaming reality, many programs take years between seasons to come back into our living rooms anyway. As smarter people than me -- like science-fiction writer Mark Shainblum -- have pointed out, the premise of the show is “inherently self-refreshing,” meaning each new actor who takes on the role represents an opportunity for the production team to set off in a new direction anywhere in this or any other universe. I think this was true in the show’s early days, but the Doctor isn’t in an environment anymore where his competition is other network productions. Now his competition is TikTok and YouTube. Besides, there are plenty of precedents for franchises that went on hiatus (imposed or voluntary) and came back stronger, built for the long run: Star Trek, Star Wars, Battlestar Galactica. Even Marvel Studios is producing fewer superhero movies and shows now. Speaking of Marvel, the worst thing the BBC could do is go on making Doctor Who content just for the sake of making Doctor Who content. I am open to one slight variation on the hiatus though: I hear an animated Doctor Who series may be in the works. If true, I could get behind that – so long as Tom Baker returns as the voice of the character! He’s still kickin, so The Fourth Doctor: The Animated Series sounds good to me! Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Disclosure Day better be a CE3K sequel
By Dan Brown They say there are too damn many sequels. I don’t agree – in at least one case. If Disclosure Day isn’t a sequel to Close Encounters of the Third Kind, I’m gonna be pissed. The new Steven Spielberg-directed motion picture about aliens is set to land in theatres on June 12, and I so want it to be the second part of 1977’s Close Encounters. CE3K was the first Spielberg movie I saw in a movie theatre. It blew my nine-year-old brain. Although UFOs were a big deal in the 1970s, it was about more than that: The mystery of the unknown, obsession, belonging, asserting the right of the individual to leave their family. I was sold. So I’ll take a Close Encounters sequel any way I can get it. It doesn’t even have to be a particularly great movie! You may be wondering: How come Dan doesn’t know if Disclosure Day is a sequel or not? You would think, since its debut is only a few days away, I – along with the general public – would understand that much about the plot. But the team behind Disclosure Day is being cagey. No one has said it’s a direct sequel to Close Encounters. However, we do know from the trailers it’s about aliens coming to Earth in flying saucers. And some people connected with the film have been dropping enticing hints. “There are definitely questions posed by Close Encounters that are answered in Disclosure Day,” Emily Blunt told the movie magazine Empire. Blunt, by the way, has been getting positive advance notices for her performance as a TV weather girl who gets up in an unraveling conspiracy. Also, there’s at least two shots in the Disclosure Day trailer that evoke Close Encounters. One has a UFO emerging from a bank of clouds hat, to me, looks like an homage to the climax of CE3K, when the giant mothership descends in full view on Devil’s Tower in Wyoming. There’s also a white house in the woods that looks an awful lot like the one where the little boy gets abducted in Close Encounters. Some are speculating that Disclosure Day is a spiritual sequel – in the same way 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial was a spiritual sequel to Close Encounters itself. But that’s not enough for me. You may recall how Star Wars hit theatres about six months before Close Encounters back in the 1970s. I was so jazzed by the combination of these two event movies in close proximity, the combined impact literally changed my life. But looking back, I realize just CE3K on its own would have been a game-changer for me. It sparked my imagination. The characters were so compelling. It made me fall deeper in love with movies. It felt plausible. And it made me . . . optimistic. The message that aliens were here to help us, not hurt us, ran counter to every other alien flick I’d seen by that point. I see more movies at home these days than in the theatres. But a Spielberg film about aliens is a premise I'm not able to resist – and if it’s a sequel, my prayers will have been answered. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Welcome to the Age of the Spiritual Sequel
Welcome to the age of the spiritual sequel By Dan Brown There’s been much discussion in recent days about the trailer for the new Steven Spielberg film Disclosure Day. Spielberg is being cagey about the new film’s relationship to his 1977 UFO classic Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Is Disclosure Day a sequel to Close Encounters? Is it a standalone film? The online debate rages on. Of course, there is one other possibility: It could be set in the same world, but not directly follow the events of Close Encounters. In other words, it could be a spiritual sequel. Which wouldn’t be surprising, since this is the age of the spiritual sequel. There appear to be more and more of them all the time. When the mockumentary series The Paper debuted last year, many reviewers pointed out how it was set in the same world as The Office. It even shared at least one character with its predecessor series. The Creed trilogy follows the six Rocky movies, but the central character is not Balboa himself, but the son of his frenemy Apollo Creed. The Texas college comedy Everybody Wants Some takes place in 1980, four years after Dazed and Confused, which is set in 1976 on the last day of high school. But EWS focuses on a different set of students; you don’t need to have seen the original to understand it. And the Exorcist, which stars Scarlett Johannson, is set for release a year from this March and is not a remake of or direct sequel to the 1973 horror classic, although it is set in the same imaginative universe. Spiritual sequels – which in television were always called spinoffs – make a lot of sense. Pretty much every sequel you can think of has already been made, so billing a movie as a spiritual successor gives studio marketing departments a way to promote a motion picture while also giving directors and producers creative room to manoeuvre. Are they better than direct sequels or prequels? There may be too little information at this point to make a definitive conclusion on that question. It’s probably much harder for filmmakers to capture the “flavour” of a popular motion picture while also creating a story that can stand on its own for those viewers who have no knowledge or memory of the first one. One suspects we are going to see even more of them – look at the Star Wars movies and shows all set in the same galaxy. Having a consistent milieu makes it easier for storytellers to find a launching point they can exploit, a logical entry point into a setting that already feels familiar to fans. Me, I have reason to believe Disclosure Day may be more of a direct sequel to Close Encounters than we’ve been led to believe. When a new trailer dropped during the Super Bowl, there were at least two images that look mighty familiar to me, including a spaceship shrouded in clouds and an isolated white house situated perfectly for an alien abduction. We’ll all find out for sure on June 12, when Spielberg's latest lands in theatres. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
The Man Who Asked If God was an Astronaut
By Dan Brown Earlier this month, Erich von Daniken died. Even though you may not know the author’s name, you are living in the world he helped to create. Simply put, this paperback writer did more than any other single person to popularize the notion that alien beings visited Earth in this planet’s distant past. He did more than Stanley Kubrick, more than Jack Kirby, more than any other artist or scientist to make that belief into a mainstream one. What was once a controversial theory is now part of the daily TV schedule, as evidenced by shows like History Channel’s Ancient Aliens series. In 1968, von Daniken published the pulpy Chariots of the Gods?. It argued that there’s evidence in ancient art and architecture of advanced beings coming to this planet to help our ancestors perform feats of engineering they couldn’t have possibly accomplished themselves, such as building the pyramids. As least one mid-1970s paperback edition of the book came with the tagline, Was God an astronaut? It was followed by many sequels, including Gods From Outer Space and The Gold of the Gods. The initial volume caused a sensation. You have to keep in mind that in the 1970s, a lot of disillusioned people were searching for meaning, and rejected the answers provided by the institutions of the day, such as the Christian church. Some folks joined cults. Some signed up for EST courses. Yet others started to believe ancient carvings and structures were proof that little green men had landed on Earth thousands of years ago, gifting us technology beyond our primitive understanding that eventually allowed humanity to flourish. Naturally, von Daniken’s claims were discounted as pseudoscientific nonsense. Figures like astronomer and TV host Carl Sagan led the charge to debunk Chariots of the Gods?, but it was too late – the idea got traction, and is still an attractive one to many. Whether you think von Daniken is full of bunk or not, you can’t deny his influence: Ancient Aliens, to name just one offshoot of his books, has been running on the History Channel since 2009 and shows no signs of being cancelled anytime soon. There aren’t many series on the small screen that boast the same kind of staying power. Nineteen sixty-eight was the same year Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey debuted. Not only did the film depict the alien monolith appearing in prehistoric Africa, it also shows the extraterrestrial black slab providing the evolutionary spark that allowed hominids to make the transition from frightened ape to spacefaring species. When comic creator Jack Kirby returned to Marvel Comics in the 1970s, one of the titles he drew and wrote was The Eternals, which went one step further than von Daniken, portraying those ancient aliens as still living here. Chariots of the Gods? was also the inspiration for the Leonard Nimoy-hosted In Search of . . ., which set forth metaphysical, supernatural, and extraterrestrial explanations for mysteries from human history. The 1970s original then spawned a modern version in 2019. If the 1970s were about anything, they were about ancient aliens, Bigfoot, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle. People were looking for answers. Just like they are today. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
Alien: Romulus Comic Short, but Intriguing
How the Alien: Romulus comic fills in Alien franchise story gaps and more reasons to read the comic explained in columnist's Dan Brown's comic book review.
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