As we were preparing for our episode this week, Tom made a passing comment about the lead actors in the 1974 TV Show being a stereotypical blond/brunette duo, at which point I couldn’t unsee it.

Indeed, TV Tropes has an entry, Hair-Contrast Duo, which notes the following:

The fair-haired partner is the “good“ one: younger, bright, hopeful, enthusiastic, naïve, helpful, innocent, tends to follow the rules.

The dark-haired partner is the “bad“ one: older, moody, testy, serious, cynical, often relishes in Angst and their Dark and Troubled Past, tends to break the rules and snap.

That more or less comports with the more optimistic, blond-haired Virdon and the more realistic brunette, Burke (and yes, I had to look up those names).

The entry does not focus on a time-period, and indeed most of the listed examples are more contemporary.

Still, while not time-bound as a trope, there is no denying that there were a lot of Hair Duos in the 60s, 70s, and 80s (not to mention, a lot of hair in general, often feathered).

Here are just some that Tom and I thought of.

From the 1960s:

From the 1970s:

From the 1980s:

And, no doubt, many, many more.

Any favorite Hair Duos we missed?

As Tom and Steven have discussed on Ancient Geeks, 1968’s Planet of the Apes spawned one of the first, if not the first, geek movie franchises. Not only did the original film spawn 4 sequels, but it also led to a short-lived live-action TV show and a Saturday morning cartoon. On top of that, it inspired comics, toys, and other merchandise, all in the 1970s. (And, of course, the Tim Burton 2001 remake was a fully rebooted series of four movies, 2011-2024).

Here are some notes and items of interest from this week’s episode of Ancient Geeks.

This Week in Geekery

Tom has been Giant-Size Marvel comics, like this one:

SLT noted the new Firestorm series.

A reminder of the character’s 1978 debut.

Soundtrack (If We Could Afford It)

Tom’s choice was Dr. Zaisu singing “My Way,” which sadly does not exist.

SLT’s.

Alternatively.

Research Notes

The first episode of the TV show, entitled “Escape from Tomorrow,” can be found on Daily Motion.

The rest are on YouTube.

A mini-documentary (a very positive/nostalgic take).

The cartoon. The whole series can be found here.

Interesting documentary from Golden Flicker (Although they get the USA thing wrong).

Brazilian POTA. It’s not quite Turkish Star Trek, but it’s close!

Don Adams and Don Rickles: POTA meets 70s variety comedy (?).

Sonny and Cher (1973)

Even SNL (1993!)

Other info

• A repository of the 1970s Marvel Comics.

• Also: Marvel Comics adaptation of the first two movies (1975-1976).

• Hunter’s Planet of the Apes Archive.

• Sean Egan’s Planet of the Apes: The Complete History

• Variety: 7 Crazy ‘Planet of the Apes’ Moments You Won’t Believe.

• Run-down of the 1990s Malibu Graphics comics that continued the original movies.

Merch

Tom’s choice:

SLT’s choice:

The popularity of the original series of five Planet of the Apes movies meant there would be more than just a chain of sequels. In this episode, we talk about the POTA spin-offs of the 70s, including a short-lived TV series, a cartoon series that was definitely not written for children, and a series of black and white magazines from Marvel Comics.

Plus, we talk about the enduring appeal of the original series of movies. Beyond nostalgia, what has made the POTA films a lasting part of popular culture? And, if we could rewind to the late Sixties and early Seventies, what might have been a better path for the sequels, after the first movie?

Apes listening to country music! Bland 70s TV! Blond and brunette action duos! More marooned astronauts! A surprisingly good comics series! Other, very wacky comics! The inevitable merchandise! Missed opportunities! The omnipresent Roddy McDowall! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack, where we post daily. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

Soundtrack Selections!

Tom’s soundtrack choice:

SLT’s Soundtrack choice:

Background Material

Ebert’s review: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

The movie is incompetently made, which is something of a surprise considering that it was directed by an old and good hand, J. Lee (“The Guns of Navarone”) Thompson. Transitions are ragged, a lot of the dialog is inaudible and the rest is listless, and the apes spend a lot of time sitting around discussing abstractions. The battle footage looks cheap. And the story is painfully thin.

“Battle” looks like the last gap of a dying series, a movie made simply to wring the dollars out of any remaining ape fans.

From Moria Reviews: Battle for the Planet of the Apes.

there seems to be an entire film missing in between Conquest and Battle for the Planet of the Apes – Conquest ended with the apes planning revolution, this begins with the revolution over and peace with the humans established, not to mention an entire nuclear war having occurred in the interim. All of these elements have been thrown together in a disjointed clutter, one that is resolved in only a rudimentary way in the end.

100%!!

The trailer:

John Landis’ thoughts:

Merch!

Tom’s choices.

The puzzle.

The Banks.

The belt.

The trashcan:

Tom:

SLT:

His Lawgiver:

Check out those goggles!

In this type of fiction, it’s often ambiguous exactly how the relationship between science and fantasy works, or how it even got started. But the ambiguity is part of the fun:

• Is the science so futuristic and incomprehensible, in the way that quantum mechanics baffles the human mind, appearing to be magic? (This is the old Clarkian dictum about sufficiently advanced science being indistinguishable from magic.)

• Is “magic” the product of scientific principles reaching a point where mere words and gestures, the mechanics of spellcasting, can re-shape reality?

• Has science re-discovered magic, in the way that the ancient use of white willow bark as a pain reliever led to aspirin?

• Did magic just burst into the world suddenly, forcing science and magic to co-exist?

• Are psionics real, but they just seem magical to the unenlightened?

Authors have played with all these possibilities, and others, over the course of many decades of this sub-genres existence. Whatever the method, the effect is the same: a sense of strangeness and unpredictability, of losing some of your familiar signposts about what to expect. In other words, far future science fantasy can escape the tired tropes of both science fiction and fantasy. Instead, the reader can explore a landscape populated with humans, non-human sentients, creatures, technologies, geographies, and other mise-en-scène elements that can feel new, mystifying, and intriguing.

It’s hard, though, to explain this type of the specifics any further without getting into the specifics of particular short stories and novels. There is really only one place to start, the most iconic fiction in this sub-genre.

Jack Vance’s Dying Earth stories

The most famous example of FFSF is Jack Vance’s Dying Earth series. It’s also my favorite, after multiple re-reads of the stories. Vance depicts Earth in its final days, under a red and dimming sun, where the inhabitants pursue their private, petty concerns without regard to their impending doom. Or, perhaps, because they can’t do anything about the impending end of the world, there’s nothing left but to indulge in decadent pursuits.

Science and magic are fused in Vance’s quasi-medieval world, their relationship never explained. Spellcraft follows the rules that Dungeons & Dragons later copied: you memorize a magical formula, and then forget it when you cast the spell, requiring you to re-memorize it if you want to use that incantation again. In generations past, minds greater than contemporary sorcerers devised these spells, and then some of their knowledge was lost, or just misplaced in a way that they can be re-discovered. The greatest magicians are those who have compiled and mastered the largest grimoires of spells.

While that all sounds very fantasy-ish, Vance also adds hints that these inventions were quasi-scientific. The exact nature, however, remains a mystery. There are also clearly scientific survivals in Vance’s future, such as synthetic humanoids, air cars, and other machines. Again, how they work, why they’ve survived, and how easy it is to manufacture them (if possible at all) are also unanswered questions.

Vance was one of the great wordsmiths of the classic age of science fiction, so he uses names and words to capture the decadence of the Dying Earth. Spells are not blandly named like Invisibility or Magic Missile, but given more rococo monikers, like The Excellent Prismatic Spray and Phandaal’s Mantle of Stealth.

He populates these stories with the sorts of arrogant, conniving, foolish, treacherous, and self-important characters that might also populate the works of Chaucer or Rabelais. He also has a similar penchant for bringing low these rogues, braggarts, and other flawed people, comedically, tragically, or sometimes both ways. The wry, Canterbury-esque tone, along with the medieval appearance of the Dying Earth, creates a kind of double vision, as if you’re looking at the past and the future simultaneously.

At the same time that elements of the Dying Earth might seem familiar, Vance uses FFSF to make the future seem more than a little bizarre. For example, so much time has passed between now and the Dying Earth that the world has new flora and fauna, including non-human but intelligent creatures like the deodand, the grue, and the twk-man (again, what wonderful names). Whether these emerged from the natural process of evolution, or were engineered into being, is left unexplained. Both are possible, in the Dying Earth.

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If you’ve never read the Dying Earth tales, do yourself a favor and track down at least two of the short stories, “Mazirian The Magician” and “Liane The Wayfarer” (usually as part of a Vance anthology). They’re both excellent introductions to the Dying Earth, and what makes these tales magical (though what magic is, as I’ve said, is very unclear).

Clark Ashton Smith’s Zothique stories

Clark Ashton Smith was one of the “Big Three” authors published in Weird Tales, alongside H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard. He wrote several stories in a far future that seem, superficially, similar to the Dying Earth, and might have been the inspiration for Vance. Sorcerers and magic? Check. A dimming sun? Check. Decadence? Double check.

But there are important differences, particularly in tone. While many tragic and violent events occur in the Dying Earth stories, the tales are also tinged with wry, even light-hearted elements. It’s easy to laugh at characters like Cugel the Clever, particularly when they plunge headlong into disaster.

Not so much hilarity in the Zothique stories, which are more horrific than the Dying Earth. One of the tales centers on two necromancers, who create a horde of undead servitors, whom they abuse in unspeakable ways. Another protagonist is a grave robber who comes to a particularly nasty end. These are not loveable rogues like Vance’s Cugel the Clever. Smith’s characters are the slaves of base urges like ambition, greed, and revenge, leading them to perform loathsome acts. When they receive their just deserts, it feels more like the end of a Lovecraft tale than a Vance story.

Smith also shared Lovecraft’s tendency towards ornate language. (Smith was an autodidact gifted with a photographic memory. He absorbed the dictionary, making it easy to pull obscure words out of his head.) Lovecraft’s polysyllabic indulgences often seem out of place and distracting, within the context of the stories themselves. Seriously, how many people, even in doom-haunted Arkham of the 1920s, would credibly words like cyclopean (a favorite of his), lucubration, and bachtrachian in daily conversation? In contrast, in the far future of Zothique, you can imagine the inhabitants of the far future growing tired with the plainness of ordinary speech, preferring out of sheer boredom to use a more baroque vocabulary.

Smith’s Zothique stories are now easily available, in electronic form. In fact, there’s at least one anthology of all his written works. You can sample them very cheaply, not just Zothique, but also stories written in his other settings. He’s an underappreciated writer, capable of keeping you guessing where the story is going until the very end. (A great example is his great non-Zothique story, “The Seven Geases.”)

Fred Saberhagen’s Empire Earth series

In these novels, the exact relationship between science and magic is more clear than in the Dying Earth or Zothique. The eruption of magic into the world was behind the apocalypse that ruined Earth, while simultaneously introducing sorcery, demons, elementals, and other fantastical elements into the ruined world. While science and technology were overwhelmed, they haven’t completely vanished. The first book centers on a quest to find one of these survivals. It’s an adventure tale, instead of a comedy of errors or a ghastly horror tale.

The Empire Earth trilogy follows a familiar trajectory for a fantasy quest. However, throughout most of the series, it’s very unclear throughout what exactly is fantasy, and what is science. Who and what is Orcus, the god-like chief adversary? Who and what is Ardneh, the equally god-like patron of the goody guys? Is another ally a mutant, a spirit, or something else?

By the end of the trilogy, Saberhagen gives answers to most of these questions. The quest runs on two parallel tracks, one to overthrow an oppressive empire, another to solve the mystery of what happened to “the Changeling Earth.” In that sense, the Empire Earth series feels different from the Dying Earth or Zothique, which were content to leave questions unanswered.

But that doesn’t stop Saberhagen from inventing some very original and vivid characters, creatures, and situations. There’s actually a fourth book, Ardneh’s Sword, that continues the story, but its set centuries after the events in the original trilogy.

Michael Moorcock’s Hawkmoon series

It should be no surprise that the patron saint of weird, wonderful, and original fantasy, Michael Moorcock, also wrote a series of weird, wonderful, and original FFSF novels. All the trappings of fantasy exist, but again, it’s anyone’s guess whether some of them are actually super-science.

These books are set in a future Europe, dominated by the Dark Empire of Granbretan, a thinly veiled version of a renewed, expansionist British Empire. The insane rulers of Granbretan, who wear grotesque animal masks to emphasize their demented natures, use super-science that appears magical as one of their tools of oppression. They use one device to implant a jewel in the forehead of the hero, Dorian Hawkmoon, to turn him into their agent. He’s supposed to undermine the independent state of Kamarg (i.e., the Camargue in Southern France), and its ruler, Count Brass.

One of the most important elements in the series is the Runestaff, a powerful artifact that has immense influence over the fate of the world. It’s unclear, from the beginning, what exactly the Runestaff is. A magical artifact? Another bit of super-science? Without giving anything away, it does become clear, through the books, that magic does have some presence in Dorian Hawkmoon’s world.

At the very least, since it is part of Moorcock’s Multiverse, this world co-exists and sometimes overlaps with the author’s other worlds, those of Elric, Corum, and Erekosë, to name the most noteworthy ones, which are full of magic. Because Moorcock enjoyed playing with all the toys in his toybox, Hawkmoon meets these other manifestations of the Eternal Champion at moments across the different series. Hawkmoon’s world has the most actual science, however, with ornithopters, laser rifles, and cross-dimensional portals.

Role-playing games

Far future science fantasy (FFSF) also has a surprising currency in role-playing games. These go far beyond the classic D&D module, Expedition to the Barrier Peaks, in which adventuring bands of fighters, magic-users, rogues, and clerics tried not to blow their heads off with blasters, or run afoul of killer robots, while exploring the wreck of a spaceship.

One of the most successful contemporary examples is Numenera. Set in a world a billion (!) years in the future, humanity endures in the remnants of multiple past civilizations. Player characters go through the same process of fighting strange creatures, looting ancient ruins, and discovering powerful artifacts that is familiar to anyone who has played D&D and its fantasy brethren.

However, the creatures may be evolved descendants of today’s animals, machines, cyborgs, aliens, or something so futuristic as to be incomprehensible. The ruins may be buildings, warrens, the innards of vast devices, or any other bizarre setting that millions upon millions of years might produce. The artifacts aren’t magical, but they might as well be, given how advanced the science behind them, and how unreproduceable they are to the adventurers.

Numenera does a good job of fitting a super-scientific future into the clothing of fantasy RPG conventions. My only problem with the game is the time scale. In a billion years — that’s billion with a B, not a “mere” million — would anything be comprehensible to 21st century role-players? Would recognizable humans, as we know them now, still exist?

Still, it’s one of the best examples of FFSF in the role-playing hobby, with lots of supplements and other support material. Unfortunately, while there is also a computer version of the game, it isn’t very good.

Not surprisingly, there are also RPG adaptations of the Dying Earth and Empire of the East. Both appear in the catalog of Goodman Games, a company that is dedicated both to re-creating the vibe of early role-playing games, from the 70s in particular, but also the written works which inspired them. These are very loving tributes to these stories, but the Dying Earth publications really stand out. They do the dry but necessary job of providing game mechanics that morph their core rules system, Dungeon Crawl Classics, into a vehicle for re-creating Vance’s world. More importantly, through the rulebooks and the adventures, the authors capture the weirdness, dry humor, and love of language that are essentially Vancian.

There’s also a Dying Earth RPG from Pelgrane Press. However, I haven’t read it, or played it, so I can’t give it a thumbs up or thumbs down. Either way, it’s clear from the volume of material that someone at Pelgrane really loved Vance’s stories, too.

But wait, there’s more!

Any longstanding sub-genre like FFSF is going to have many entries in its catalog. For example:

• Gene Wolfe’s New Sun series is set in the far future, in a society with archaic overtones that feel more Byzantine than medieval European. It, too, hides science fiction elements like aliens and advanced technology behind the outward forms of fantasy.

• Hiero’s Journey and its sequel, The Unforsaken Hiero, are post-apocalyptic novels in which psychic powers play the role of magic.

• The massively popular game setting Warhammer 40,000 is the direct descendant of the fantasy-based Warhammer line, with many elements slightly re-cast in science fantasy terms. In the far future of Warhammer 40K, where of course there is only war, there are still demons, chaos gods, space elves, space orks, and magic-like psychic powers. The flavor is more Zothique than Dying Earth, more horror than whimsy.

• The cartoon series Thundarr The Barbarian is sword and sorcery set on earth shattered after an apocalypse. Magicians and vampires co-exist with mutants and laser swords. Oh, and there’s a man-beast named Ookla the Mok.

As I said at the beginning, there’s a lot more FFSF than you might first realize. It’s also a highly diverse sub-genre, with many different takes on the same rough idea. Its power to wreck the artificial wall between genres, and then reconstruct fantastic fiction into something marvelous, is what gives FFSF its long-term appeal.

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The fifth and final movie of the original Planet of the Apes raised expectations. It’s going to be the last movie...and the title says that there will be a battle for the entire planet...and there are apes and mutants fighting on the movie poster. Great Cornelius’ ghost! Bring on the battle!

What the movie delivered was a bit smaller. Battle of the Planet of the Apes picked up just a few years after Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. In the interim, a lot has happened. And hasn’t happened. But what will happen, in the infant ape/human civilization, riven by tensions within, and facing new threats from without?

Fractious apes! Subjugated humans! Bored mutants! Radioactive ruins! A not-so-magic school bus! Songwriter and TV personality Paul Williams! Epic levels of incuriosity! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack, where we post daily. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

Image by Tony Hoffarth*

As noted in this week’s podcast, Tom and I both are alums of the University of California, Irvine. Indeed, it is where we first met, close to forty years ago, when Tom was a Ph.D. student, and I was an undergrad.

At the time, the campus was fairly young. The campus was celebrating its 25th anniversary—but we won’t do the math since then!

Still, even at the time it had grown into a version of its original plan, built in a circle around Aldrich Park, with its distinctive brutalist/modern architecture.

Here’s what the place looks like these days:

Versus what it looked like roughly when they filmed Conquest:

Some background on the campus and its design can be found via the following links:

• Via PBS: Terraforming the Irvine Ranch and the Construction of UC Irvine. (Some great photos in that piece!—including the one above)

• University of California, Irvine (UCI), Long Range Development Plan, Irvine, CA

• Via Calisphere: Early Campus Photograph Albums

It is not hard to see why the campus, especially in its early stages with its not-yet-green and wooded spaces, would appeal to the filmmakers of Conquest as Ape Central as part of The City (we won’t even try to explain why UCI plus Century City was supposed to be part of a modern NYC, as the other films specifically imply).

Here are some movie-specific links.

• Orange Coast Magazine (2014): UC Irvine as Backdrop for “Apes”

• UC Irvine Libraries: UCI at the Movies

• Via Reddit: “Conquest of the Planet of the Apes” & “Unfrosted: The Pop-Tart Story” both filmed using UC Irvine’s brutalist architecture.

• Via Hunter’s Planet of the Apes Archive: Conquest of the Planet of the Apes Filming Locations by Lori

The rest of this post is just a few visuals.

Here’s a shot of the Engineering Tower:

And how it looked back in 1969-1970:

Here’s the School of the Humanities (https://www.humanities.uci.edu/school-humanities-history), where Tom and I first met.

Some shots from my brief visit to campus back in May. Unfortunately, I did not have time to get to Social Science Plaza.

I did spy the Gateway Center.

And the library.

As well as the admin building

*Hoffrath has an entire album of 70s film locations, including an extensive collection from Escape, Battle, and Conquest. And of additional Ancient Geeks interest, Duel as well as the oft-referenced Soylent Green (among other films and television shows).

Tom’s soundtrack choice: T.Rex., “Children of the Revolution”

SLT’s choices:

REM’s, “It’s the End of the World as We Know it (And I Feel Fine)”

And Peter Gabriel’s “Shock the Monkey”:

The spoilerific trailer that Tom mentioned:

I mean, why not just show a huge chunk of the end of the film?

Here’s a video with filming location info, both Century City and UCI:

Here’s a link to a video taken at the time of filming that SLT mentioned in the podcast: click.

So many turtlenecks:

A trip down the Severn Darden memory lane via the Scott Rollins Film and TV Trivia Blog.

The pet statue that establishes the year all the dogs and cats died.

Peter the Anteater, the forgotten pet option:

For fun, via the NCAA, Here’s the true story about how UC Irvine got the nickname ‘Anteaters’.

More UCI-specific stuff in a PodNotes edition coming this Thursday.

Ever wonder how we went from the swinging Sixties and Seventies to the brutal oppression of apes over humans? Conquest of the Planet of the Apes tells that story. The child of Cornelius and Zira, whom we saw as a newborn in the last movie, is now all grown up now. He doesn’t like what he sees, in a world where apes are enslaved, humans are decadent, the architecture is brutal, and turtlenecks are all the rage. As you might expect from the title, the status quo is about to endure a hammer blow!

Plus, since this movie was filmed in part on the campus of our alma mater, we have a lot to say about the Southern California locations where this was filmed. Was this the first dystopia set in a suburb? If so, where are all the fast food restaurants?

Heavy-handed allegory! Animal cruelty! Animals who get cruel right back at the humans! Ape disobedience statistics! Shopping malls! Hordes of apes in jumpsuits left over from a lousy TV show! Retcons of the history of the future! The third role for the producer’s wife! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. Check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack, where we post daily. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

There are some truths in that description, and some exaggerations. Coffee table books might be all the things the detractors say, and still serve a very useful purpose. However, the best of them achieve far more than just providing some colorful clippings.

One of those accomplishments is encapsulating the things we enjoy about the topics of these books. They’re a vehicle for reverie about the things we revere. Simultaneously, they also communicate, to an audience unfamiliar with the topic, the reasons why we fell in love with them.

Take, for example, this collection of essays, The Conan Swordbook, written by classic writers of heroic fantasy, such as Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, P. Schuyler Miller, and the editor, L. Sprague de Camp. I’ve owned since my teens, and I’ve kept it because of the incisive and diverse takes on Howard’s creation found inside. But does it capture why I became a fan of Conan, or sword and sorcery in general? Not so much.

In contrast, let’s take a look at another book about heroic fantasy, Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History. Open it to any page, and you can see what initially grabbed people about D&D, and sustained their excitement: the visuals.

Shown on the left are the covers from some of the classic adventure modules from D&D’s early years, such as the Giants trilogy, the infamous Tomb of Horrors, and ubiquitous introductory adventure, The Village Of Hommlet. Shown on the right isadditional art from Dave Trampier and Dave Sutherland, whose works graced both the exteriors and interiors of many TSR publications. All of these images conveyed the promise of high adventure, derring deeds, and awful enemies. You can’t really understand the appeal of the D&D product line without seeing them, even if D&D, at its heart, depended on theater of the mind.

The book also provides brief historical notes about the game. They’re not as comprehensive, by far, as Jon Petersen’s Playing At The World, a detailed history of D&D’s inception and early evolution. Even though Petersen contributed to both volumes, Dungeons & Dragons Art & Arcana: A Visual History accomplishes something that Playing At The World did not. It’s the book you can resist picking up and feeling a thrill of anticipation before cracking it open, which is exactly the sensation felt by generations a role-playing game aficionados.

Cover art is important throughout the history of science fiction, fantasy, horror, and all things geek. Take, for example, Frank M. Robinson’s Science Fiction of the 20th Century: An Illustrated History. It’s a chronicle of the genre through the lens of book and magazine covers – again, what grabbed geeks young and old (such as myself) by their overactive imaginations and pulled them into their pages. Artists like Kelly Freas, George Barr, Michael Whelan, Leo and Diane Dillon, and others were responsible for attracting readers nearly as much as a familiar author’s name on the cover.

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And by no means does the size of a book, or the number of pictures inside, diminish the opportunity to provide a scholarly look into a particular topic. Steve Ryfle and Ed Godziszewski’s kaiju-sized Godzilla: The First 70 Years provides essential details about the Big G, across multiple generations of the Toho franchise.

Coffee table tomes can also be a gateway into books, movies, comics, or games with which you are not familiar. As someone who also loves film noir, I always happily recommend Eddie Muller’s Dark City as an introduction to people new to the genre (or style, or whatever you want to call it). It is a mosaic of themes, directors, writers, stars, and individual movies. If you ever find yourself wandering the dark streets of noir, it’s an essential roadmap.

The same is also true of Ron Goulart’s Cheap Thrills, which is a great introduction to the pulps. And again, the covers are essential to understanding the appeal to a reading audience. Detective fiction, weird tales, Westerns, high adventure, “spicy” stories – Goulart covers all the sub-genres, and conveys through both pictures and words what made them irresistible to readers who spotted them at the newsstand.

And, finally, there are the books that specialize in a particular kind of visual. Maps are a critical part of science fiction and fantasy. In fact, it’s often hard to imagine any substantive fantasy novels, or series of stories, that don’t include maps. From the scale of an entire world, such as Middle Earth, the Young Kingdoms, or Earthsea, to a single city, such as Arkham or Lankhmar, maps are an essential part of the genre. My favorite compendium of maps is The Atlas Of Fantasy, which has the added virtue of a light-hearted Tim Kirk cover.

That’s not to say that coffee table books aren’t just plain cool, which is, on its own, justification enough for owning these volumes. If I have a few minutes of free time between tasks, I’ll pick up one for a quick, concentrated dose of something I enjoy, from Star Trek (for example, Bjo Trimble’s Star Trek Concordance) to the great fantasy illustrators (compiled in art books like Taschen’s Masterpieces of Fantasy Art).

Perusing these pages certainly can be a much healthier and more satisfying way to pass a short interval of time than, say, being the passive recipient of whatever algorithm-driven content gushes out of a social media stream. Coffee table books are a far less random and far more reliable path into things we enjoy, as well as the things we might enjoy.

All pictures are from my own copies of these books, with copyrights duly acknowledged.

Tom’s soundtrack choice:

SLTs:

SLT noted the Tomatometer and IMDB ratings for the franchise. Here they are.

Here’s the trailer (which is basically a summary of the movie, to include a huge number of key scenes!):

Here’s the intro of the movie with its TV movie feel, semi-wacky beach scene, and a helicopter!

The James B. Sikking sighting:

And Temu Gene Hackman:

Plus, Cornelius’ bathroom!

Of course there would be more sequels after Beneath The Planet Of The Apes, even though it was designed to be the last. In fact, the chief purpose of Escape From The Planet Of The Apes was to make more sequels possible. World ended? Just go back in time before it was ended!

Come back with us to that time when Cornelius and Zira (plus unnamed baby) crash land on 1970s, and then get mistreated. And then turned into beloved celebrities. And then mistreated again.

The calmest evil scientist you’ll ever meet! Boring scientists! The lowest of low budgets! Fashion shows! Cocktail parties! Chimp makeup! Presidential commissions! An implausible gorilla suit! The most convenient space-time warp ever conceived! Plying a pregnant ape with alcohol! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. Check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

A thread on Blue Sky a few weeks ago made me think back to our Ancient Geeks episode (only episode 15!) on geeky variety show content from the 1970s. If you missed it, it can be found here.

It made me remember a bunch of links that I had, but was not yet doing the ShowNotes substack posts, and made me think that it might be fun to go back and share some of that information, and maybe let some people who were unaware that the episode exists.

So, here we go.

Here is the timeline of the shows we mentioned and discussed on the podcast.

• 1976, October 29: Paul Lynde Halloween Special

  • Genre elements: Witchiepoo (Billie Hayes) and the Wicked Witch of the West (Margaret Hamilton)

• 1977

  • September 13: Richard Pryor Show: “Star Wars Bar” (recycled Cantina aliens)

  • September 23: Donny and Marie Show Star Wars episode

  • December 19: Bob Hope “Scar Wars”

• 1978

  • 1978 SCI Awards.

  • November 17: Star Wars Holiday Special.

    • Esquire: The Star Wars Holiday Special Is a Brilliant Disaster. That’s Why Disney Shouldn’t Erase It From History.

    • Via Stacker, A brief history of the infamously terrible ‘Star Wars Holiday Special’

      The “Star Wars Holiday Special” drew in roughly 13 million viewers nationwide, failing to rate among Nielsen’s Top 10 for the night and losing out to shows including “The Love Boat” and a Pearl Harbor miniseries called “Pearl.” Nielsen data further shows that the largely plotless special hemorrhaged ratings about an hour into the show and immediately following Boba Fett’s debut.

• 1979

  • January 18 Legend of the Superheroes, Episode 1 (“The Challenge”)

  • January 25, Episode 2 (“The Roast”)

    • Some background: Legends of the Superheroes

    • Mark Evanier: https://www.newsfromme.com/2010/12/12/todays-video-link-295/

    • Some clips (mercifully, the whole thing is not online to my knowledge).

• 1980, February 28, Mark Hamill on The Muppet Show.

Some Bonus (?) Material

Nimoy: Ballad of Bilbo Baggins:

Nimoy: I Walk the Line:

Before reading Kill The Dead, the only works by Tanith Lee I had read were short stories. Now that I’ve read one of her novels, I’m keen on reading more of her longer fiction. That, in the proverbial nutshell, is the short version of my recommendation.

Here’s the slightly longer version:

Lee is an author that has been on the fringes of my awareness for a long time. A well-respected author who received praise from fellow authors, it’s strange that I haven’t read more of her work before. Of course, time being a finite resource, you can’t read everything. A recent HumbleBundle sale of ebooks by her was a good opportunity to dive more deeply.

The protagonist of Kill The Dead is Parl Dro, a ghost hunter. No, not one of the ninnies you see in sketchy “documentary” TV shows, running around (allegedly) haunted houses wearing night vision goggles. Dro is a renowned exorcist in a fantasy world plagued by the undead. In fact, ghosts are practically the only supernatural element in this novel. Sure, there are occasional mentions of magic, and one of the characters is, purportedly a witch. But you don’t see any hexes, spells, or other manifestations of witchcraft or sorcery.

Just ghosts. A lot of ghosts. There is even a rumored city full of ghosts, which is Parl Dro’s ultimate mission, to find it and send its residents to their eternal rest.

Ghosts are malign entities, feeding off the energy of the living to whom they attach themselves. They play on the love, nostalgia, and denial of their hosts, giving them reasons to accept this unnatural and destructive symbiosis. Therefore, exorcising these vampiric entities is a necessity — even if, sometimes, people are unwilling to see the apparitions of their departed loved ones sent into the great beyond. Parl Dro is fighting the good fight, but he’s not always welcome where he’s needed.

It’s a great premise. Even more, it’s an original premise. Which is saying something, in a genre that frequently recycles the same tropes ad infinitum.

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During his quest, Parl Dro gains a companion, Myal Lemyal, a bard with a checkered past. Lemyal is also seeking Ghyste Mortua, the city of the dead, for a very different reason. Their motives, frequently at cross-purposes, fuels much of the drama in this book. They’re a compelling duo: as was the case with Fritz Leiber’s Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, it’s more interesting when the two main characters aren’t always in agreement. Not as contrived as a buddy cop story, the relationship between these two men grows more interesting throughout the book.

There are shocking revelations, plenty of ghosts, and sometimes very emotionally affecting moments. There are also plot twists, but nothing that strains credulity too far. In fact, some events that seem improbable at first, later turn out to be completely sensical.

One more tidbit, in case you still need convincing to read this book: Lee modeled the hard-edge main character, Parl Dro, after Paul Darrow, the actor who played Avon on the British science fiction series Blake’s 7. Parl Dro shares Avon’s acid wit, along with his sometimes reluctant virtue buried beneath his outward cynicism.

Kill The Dead is also a brisk read, running to about 160 pages in the ePub version I have. Especially in an age rife with too much bloated fantasy, featuring far less interesting ideas and characters, it’s a book that’s easy for me to recommend.

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It has become a running bit on the podcast for me to notice smoking (in spaaaaace!). It started with Planet of the Apes and the disconsonant (at least to my contemporary eyes) of Colonel George Taylor having a smoke in a small, pressurized space capsule right after having been revived from cryogenic sleep. Here’s a clip: click.

The smoking continued planetside. He might have been able to escape the apes if his lung capacity hadn’t been diminished from smoking!

And, of course, there’s Alien:

Even in the POTA comics.

The latest entry was Dark Star:

In some ways, these instances (and others) are just artifacts of the time in which they were made. One aspect of looking back through the veil of time to my youth is to remember that smoking used to be a ubiquitous part of American life. I did not come from a family of smokers (thankfully!), but I remember there being ashtrays in our home, and we had neighbors and family members aplenty who partook.

Indeed, smoking has gone through a substantial evolution in my lifetime.

When I was watching TOS reruns, it is possible I saw this commercial:

And I vividly remember this one (and the jingle):

As a youth, and indeed until high school, restaurants had smoking and non-smoking sections. This was even true on airlines when I first started flying in the early 1980s (although as much as I remember smoke in restaurants, I can’t specifically remember it on planes, although I remember ashtrays in airline seating, some of which persisted well after smoking was utterly banned from flights).

I know when I started graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin in 1990, smoking had only just been banned inside campus buildings, to the consternation of some of the older faculty, who were accustomed to smoking in their offices.

Speaking of smoking in the office, my wife and I are re-watching Mad Men. My word.

So.

Much.

Smoking.

And from an era where ads like the following had only just been banned.

In terms of making art that is ostensibly about the future, trying to figure out what will persist into the future and what won’t, creates a bit of a challenge. As I noted on one of our episodes, there was a conscious choice not to have the crew of the Enterprise light up. See CBR: Star Trek Was Ahead of Its Time in a Very Surprising Way.

Without any doubt, seeing the bridge crew having a smoke would make one think about the mid-twentieth century, and not the twenty-third century, when watching reruns. Although amusingly, in The Wrath of Khan, there are “No Smoking” signs on the bridge.

Interestingly, smoking does pop up here and again on Trek, but almost always as something a bad guy/problematic character does. This is a reflection of the evolution of social norms on the subject.

Here are some examples.

Ambassador Saint John Talbot in Star Trek V (not a bad guy, per se, but clearly the smoking is to code him as at least degraded).

The Chameloid, Martia, in Star Trek VI:

Captain Vadic in season three of Picard:

And the opposite from Star Trek IV:

And here’s a Star Wars example for good measure.

Roddenberry’s vision of a healthier, smoke-free future is to be contrasted with Isaac Asimov’s inclusion of future-smoking in I, Robot.

A melancholy example of smoking from our journey into the past would be Rod Serling. His cigarette was so ubiquitous as almost to be seen as a permanent part of his hand. And the tragic reality is that his intense smoking habit was a central contribution to his untimely death at the age of 50.

Along those lines, it is worth noting that Leonard Nimoy died of complications from COPD, which was linked to his smoking habit earlier in life.

An example that I do not recall if I noted in our podcast, but that falls outside of anachronisms or even the bad-guy-coding of smoking is Rachel from Bade Runner.

While I think that smoking in this case is partially a visual way of communicating the mysteriousness of the character, it is also a classic film noir style element. The movie was also set in the near future (and really, the past relative when I am writing this), so it was less of an anachronism. Plus, the LA of Blade Runner is dirty, gritty, and plain unhealthy, so the smoking fits right in.

At any rate, it does bump me a bit when I see casual smoking in science fiction, especially in settings that are obviously already atmosphere-controlled (like Taylor’s spaceship in Planet of the Apes), work-related environments (like in Alien). I suppose I have been conditioned to be less surprised if rogue/bad-guy-coded characters partake, or if the context is something like a bar or some similar environment.

Allow me to conclude with a picture of Dr. Zaius actor, Maurice Evans, having a smoke. Nothing says “this stuff is addictive” like being in that mask and still needing a toke!

We wrap up our series in which we look at the first movies of directors who later made the classics of geek cinema. In this episode, we discuss John Carpenter’s student film, later expanded for theatrical release, Dark Star. It’s a low budget science fiction dark comedy in which a burned-out crew flies from planet to planet, destroying any that they deem “unstable.” Of course, nothing’s more unstable than these space cadets.

Carpenter made Dark Star as the anti-2001, anti-Star Trek. It’s also the first effort of a director who wanted to make great B-movies.

But it’s more than John Carpenter this episode! Dark Star was a collaboration between him and Dan O’Bannon, who later wrote the script for Alien, as well as other familiar geek films.

How much of John Carpenter’s directorial style can you see in this movie that also guided the production of The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, They Live, and other films? What did we think of the movie, then and now?

Finally, we wrap up this mini-series comparing the three first films of Lucas, Spielberg, and Carpenter.

Talking bombs! Beach balls! Phenomenology! Muffin trays! Slapstick humor! Mental decay! It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Also, check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack! And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.

[Warning: The focus of this review involves a quasi-spoiler. I don’t give away any details, but I do describe the overall shape of the end of the first season. I also describe the contours of a couple of episodes, again without any essential information.]

Given the many positive reviews around Widow’s Bay, I decided to take the plunge into the icy Atlantic waters enclosing the island and watch the series. The premise — a Lovecraftian story with touches of Parks and Recreation-style humor — seemed promising, especially since I’m a fan of Mythos-style horror.

I emerged on the other side entertained, but not bowled over. Based on what it was trying to accomplish, I’ve seen better, and perhaps that colors my opinion of it, versus someone who is encountering a Lovecraftian tale for the first time. But I have seen a lot better.

Lately, I’ve had another Lovecraftian movie, Five Million Years To Earth, on my mind. The film doesn’t feature Cthulhu, Arkham, or Miskatonic University, but it does have the same structure, tone, and impact of a Mythos tale. Set in post-war London, workers digging an extension to the London Underground uncover something unexpected. The protagonist, a scientist, is brought in to investigate. And then strange things start to happen… On the surface, it seems more science fiction than supernatural horror, but dig a little deeper and you find that it’s one of the most Lovecraftian movies around.1

Five Million Years To Earth also has something that Widow’s Bay lacks: a resolution. Sure, both Widow’s Bay and Five Million Years To Earth have plenty of revelations. But Widow’s Bay only has a partial resolution to the crisis on the island, no doubt to allow the show to continue as a streaming series. However, it’s not unfair to compare the two.

The original British title of Five Million Years To Earth is Quatermass And The Pit, which is also the title of the six-episode BBC limited series on which it was based. Professor Bernard Quatermass, a scientist often working for the British government, is an early version of Fox Mulder and Carl Kolchak, the determined investigator who keeps stumbling into weird and horrifying situations. The other Quatermass series and movies also have a Lovecraftian feel, particularly The Quatermass XPeriment, which has an unforgettable ending that definitely plays on Mythos tropes.

An even better comparison would be Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In each season, Buffy and her friends faced a different Big Bad — the Master, Angelus, the Mayor — whom they eventually brought to heel by the end of that story arc. The show continued, with the same perils posed by the continued existence of the Hellmouth, including the next Big Bad.

That’s not exactly how Widow’s Bay plays out. Episode by episode, we learn more about what’s wrong with the island on which it’s set. There are many excellent moments along the way: for example, an episode centered on Patricia, the socially awkward aide to the mayor, was one of my favorites. The characters face many hard choices, and make them in spite of painful consequences. But it doesn’t quite reach the closure that an individual season of Buffy did.

If you’ve seen the show, you might think that I’m being unfair. The problem of the Hellmouth isn’t resolved in Buffy until the very end of the series, after seven seasons. Should we expect Widow’s Bay’s version of the Hellmouth to be wrapped up in its first season? No, but there should be a bit more of a denouement than we got.

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My other problem with the show is the tone. There are lots of great examples of horror comedies from which to learn. Buffy is one of them, a show that was filled with a lot of humor in the face of the horror. It managed to stay equipoised between them, with the horror never making it impossible to laugh again at the jokes, and the jokes never undermining the ability of the horrors to be frightening. Ditto for An American Werewolf In London, Theatre of Blood, and other examples.

Widow’s Bay doesn’t achieve that balance. From episode to episode, the tone changes wildly. One in particular, a flashback to the early history of the island, provides some essential backstory, but it’s an unrelentingly dark piece of the island’s history. It’s hard to come back from that trip into the past to the quirky inhabitants of Widow’s Bay. Another episode fully embraces a particular strain of horror movie that is also hard to leaven with humor.2 It does, to a very limited extent. To its credit, given this type of horror story, it doesn’t push the jokes any further.

The tonal shifts were jarring enough to put distance between me and the show. What is it really trying to accomplish? Is it Parks & Rec blended with Lovecraft, or full-on horror?

It’s not that the show doesn’t have many virtues. Both Matthew Rhys and Stephen Root, two extremely reliable actors, are terrific. (I’ve been a fan of Rhys since The Americans, in which he played a conflicted Soviet spy.) Kate O’Flynn is equally good, maybe even better, as Patricia, part of Widow’s Bay’s version of the Scooby Gang in Buffy. Stephen Root is, as always, fun to watch. The script and direction often conjure some genuinely scary moments, while capturing the Lovecraftian vibe of creeping doom. The characters are written sympathetically, so it’s easy to identify with them. As I said earlier, the revelations are dropped neatly across the span of ten episodes, with disturbing and even heartbreaking implications.

Unfortunately, this is one of those cases where the whole does not exceed the sum of its parts. As a streaming show, it needs to leave some door open for future seasons. However, I fear it might suffer the fate of other series that resist bringing some closure to a season: when canceled, the show just stops without a real ending, or it forces a rushed, unsatisfying conclusion.

P.S. This week, because of all these Widow’s Bay-related ruminations roiling around in my head, I watched the original six-part TV series version of Quatermass and the Pit. If you’re a fan of British science fiction shows, I can’t recommend it enough.

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This week, with our episode about Duel, Tom and I have produced and posted 79 episodes of Ancient Geeks (this week’s episode number is actually #77, but adding in episode #0 and one special episode (Superman), we get to 79). Good nerds and geeks know that 79 is the number of broadcast episodes of the original Star Trek, and that reminded me of some thoughts I have had about modern season lengths.

When we were young geeks, TV worked far differently than it does now. Back in our day, shows came out each fall and ran until the end of spring, with at least two dozen, and often more, episodes per season.

In the contemporary era, shows drop on streaming services throughout the year, sometimes weekly, sometimes all at once, and seasons are quite a bit shorter! And we can’t even be guaranteed a show will be back a year later (I’m looking at you, Pluribus and House of the Dragon!).

To provide a direct example, TOS’s first season had 29 episodes while SNW’s had only 10.

Is this lack of episodes a problem? Maybe the problem is a lack of room to breathe? Maybe we just need more episodes per season? This has been a feeling of mine for a while, and one I have seen replicated online. However, I have come to decide that while I would have liked longer seasons, the number of episodes is really more nostalgia for the way TV used to work than a needed feature of a quality TV program.

Before I explain my conclusions, let’s go inside some numbers and also note a few examples.

Looking at all of Trek, it is rather obvious that there are two distinct eras. It seems quite likely that we will never see the old ways returning. Prodigy came the closest to recapturing the old ways, but it is worth noting that it was a half-hour cartoon, so 20 episodes of it were equivalent to 10 episodes of SNW.

It is pretty striking that we used to get 24 hour-long shows in a season, and now we get 10.

Acknowledging that more feels better or, at least, that more gives a show more canvas to work with, how big a problem (if, indeed, it is a problem) that these seasons are shorter?

For comparison, I picked out some other examples of shows, both older and newer, as a basis for discussion.

The BSG comparisons are interesting insofar as they show the evolution from network TV to cable (and the early stages of the prestige TV era). But even the rebooted BSG had what we would call long seasons compared to our current moment.

The standouts, to me, are Blake's 7 and Firefly. Further, The Pitt (my only non-genre example) has some lessons as well.

We have already reviewed the first two seasons of Blake's 7 on the podcast (here and here). What is immediately noteworthy is that this show from 1978 had season lengths (or, to be proper from a British POV, series) along the same lines as DISCO and not that far off from PIC, LD, and SNW. And yet, the show is considered a classic, which provides a hit that shorter seasons can be just fine.

More significantly, Firefly had a mere 14 episodes (and later a movie), and it, too, is considered a classic. It is also one of the most lamented prematurely canceled series of all time.

These two examples demonstrate that the issue simply isn’t the number of episodes.

I think both Blake’s 7 and Firefly demonstrate one key need that all great shows have: interesting characters whom the audience really want to see in action. And, both shows put those characters in compelling contexts (even when they were not deeply developed, which was very much the case with Blake’s 7).

I would note that Blake’s 7 didn’t do a great job with its supporting cast (alas, Jenna, for example, was never given much to do, and Gan never was much more than a gentle giant). But it did give us Blake, Avon, and, to a lesser degree, Vila.

Firefly gave us an intriguing crew of clear characters whose interactions were compelling regardless of whatever else was going on.

I am more of an apologist for DISCO than is the case for a lot of people, but I still can barely name the bridge crew on that show, and it never seemed like the show cared (except for that one seeming understanding by the writers of the problem when Pike took command in season two and did a roll call on the bridge).

One of the things I liked about Picard was that there were some characters who could have been interesting to explore, specifically Laris (who was criminally underutilized), Rios, and Elnor (although I have to admit I had to remind myself of the names of the latter two). I would have loved to have seen more Hugh and Seven of Nine. One of the standouts in season three, for all its TNG nostalgia, was Captain Shaw.

Conversely, Breaking Bad’s first season was cut short and ran only seven episodes. Yet by the time Walt and Jesse found themselves in a confrontation with Tuco in a junk yard at the end of a brief seven hours, who wasn’t hooked by the characters, the setting, and the overall narrative?

Indeed, is it not a key enduring reason we love TOS that it gave up Kirk, Spock, and Bones? Aren’t they why I would watch Spectre of the Gun, The Empath, or even Spock’s Brain?

Character is king. It is the main thing that draws me to Doctor Who, to note another recent show I have written about. And to mention things that we have criticized on the podcast of late, why we weren’t as pleased with THX-1138 or Temple of Doom.

Or, to take a deeper cut, I was very much intrigued by Elric of Melinobné as a character, but the lack of full development was also part of my disappointment in those stories as a whole.

I bring up The Pitt for at least three reasons. First, it is a standout in the current era of TV for its length of season. Fifteen episodes is a luxurious span these days! Another throw-back that the show has going for it is that it appears to be consistently returning on an regualr annual schedule. Above all else, and to themes above, characters drive that show, and it feels grounded in the world in which the stories reside.

While, ultimately, I prefer 15+ episodes a season over 10, I don’t think that season-length is as important as it may feel at times. What we need, first and foremost, are interesting characters we care about and who are embedded in an interesting time and place.

I will note that 10-episode seasons don’t leave as much room as I would like for character development. But it isn’t impossible, as many examples above demonstrate.

Note: tables generated by Claude. And I would note that Claude initially made a mistake on Prodigy, counting only 10 episodes per season. I had to ask it to correct the error.

Tom’s soundtrack choice:

Steven’s:

Spielberg discusses his shot choices:

Here are some of the shots we noted in our conversation:

Bonus clip, Gene Dynarski as Izzy Mandelbaum, Jr.:

And shots from TNG/TOS:

We continue our series about the first movies made by directors who later made the classics of geek cinema. In this episode, we discuss Duel, a TV movie made by a very young Steven Spielberg. Starring Dennis Weaver, it’s a deadly cat-and-mouse conflict between an average Joe in a Plymouth Valiant and the driver of the most monstrous of trucks.

In this early effort, what elements of Spielberg’s style can you see that would later appear in Close Encounters, Raiders Of The Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and other films? What did we think of this movie, then and now? (The short version: we thought it was terrific.)

Terrifying commutes! Impressive camerawork! The lovable snake lady! A demon semi from Hell (maybe)! Chekhov’s radiator hose! “McCloud!” It’s all here.

Ancient Geeks is a podcast about two geeks of a certain age re-visiting their youth. We were there when things like science fiction, fantasy, Tolkien, Star Trek, Star Wars, D&D, Marvel and DC comics, Doctor Who, and many, many other threads of modern geek culture were still on the fringes of popular culture. We were geeks before it was chic!

For feedback, contact someancientgeeks@gmail.com. You can also find us on Facebook, Reddit, and Bluesky. Also, check out the Ancient Geeks blog on Substack! And if you like what you hear, please tell a friend. Also, we always appreciate a review on the podcast platform of your choice.