San Diego Comic-Con Special Edition 2019

C E L E B R AT I N G T H E 5 0 TH S A N D I E G O C O M I C - C O N THE DARK KNIGHT TURNS 80 | THE TWILIGHT ZONE FOREVER

S P E C I A L E D I T I O N | J U LY 2 0 1 9 | D E N O F G E E K . C O M

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THEY'RE BACK! ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER AND LINDA HAMILTON REUNITE TO RETURN THE FRANCHISE TO GLORY DEN OF GEEK

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JOIN FRIENDS OF GEEK!

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p BURTON’S BATMAN AT 30 Ever dance with the devil in the pale moonlight? We revisit Tim Burton’s Caped Crusader classic. PG. 46

IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES (BATMAN TOP); COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES (TERMINATOR: DARK FATE); NICKELODEON (SPONGEBOB); GREG CAPULLO/DC COMICS (BATMAN COMIC); GABRIEL OLSEN/GETTY IMAGES (SDCC)

CONTENTS

ARY T H E A N N IV E R S

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS: 20 YEARS LATER… If nautical nonsense be something you wish, check out this retrospective. PG. 28

IS S U E

THE DARK KNIGHT TURNS 80 Key figures from Batman history weigh in on the enduring legacy of the World’s Greatest Detective. PG. 14

50 YEARS OF SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON TERMINATOR: DARK FATE

What’s next for the Terminator franchise? We have exclusive interviews with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Gabriel Luna, Mackenzie Davis, and director Tim Miller. PG. 36

WE’VE GOT YOU COVERED AT SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON

FB.COM/DENOFGEEKUS

Like all superhero origin stories, SDCC had humble beginnings and became a force to be reckoned with. PG. 62

@DENOFGEEKUS

@DENOFGEEK

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LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

PRINT EDITOR Chris Longo Assistant Print Editors Alec Bojalad, Kayti Burt, Mike Cecchini, David Crow, Nick Harley, John Saavedra

Listen to what our favorite stories have been telling us. BY MIKE CECCHINI IN AUGUST 1970, WHAT WOULD eventually become San Diego ComicCon was born. Things were a little different back then. Comic books sold in much higher numbers than they do today. Superheroes weren’t the subjects of big budget movies. There was no “peak TV,” but Star Trek and The Twilight Zone were still omnipresent thanks to syndicated reruns, beaming parables of tolerance and cautionary tales about unchecked power into millions of American homes night after night.

The entertainment landscape has evolved since 1970, but what hasn’t changed is how genre fiction holds a mirror to the events of the day. Rod Serling’s Twilight Zone offered 30-minute denouncements of topical issues like injustice, racial intolerance, and the paranoia of McCarthyism. Star Trek has always dreamed of a multicultural future where nations work together to explore the stars in the spirit of friendship and cooperation. And then, of course, there are the X-Men, Marvel’s superheroic proxies for any number of real world marginalized groups and the prejudices they face.

It’s time we heed the warnings of the stories that we love and that make gatherings like SDCC possible. What8 DEN OF GEEK

ever side of the immigration debate you fall on, the conditions at CBP and ICE detention centers are inhumane and unacceptable. The circumstances of a person’s arrival don’t justify family separations, overcrowding, or detention without trial. There is indeed a crisis at the border, and it is one of the government’s making.

If you saw this happening in a blockbuster trailer unveiled in Hall H, you’d wonder how the heroes will come to the rescue. If you read it in a comic, you’d expect Captain America to stand up and put an end to the cruelty. If it was a mission in a video game, you’d put dozens of hours in to free the prisoners. So what can we do?

RAICES, the Refugee and Immigrant Center for Education and Legal Services, is a Texas-based organization working to assist separated families and those who have found themselves lost and imprisoned on their journey to the United States. The American Civil Liberties Union continues to fight for the rights of the vulnerable in this country. As you enjoy everything SDCC has to offer, please consider taking a moment to visit their websites and learn about their missions.

Raicestexas.org Aclu.org

Design and Illustration Hannah Kneisley, Jessica Koynock Copy Editor Sarah Litt

DENOFGEEK.COM CEO Jennifer Bartner-Indeck PUBLISHER Matthew Sullivan-Pond Editor-in-Chief Mike Cecchini Deputy Editor Chris Longo Associate Editors Alec Bojalad, Kayti Burt, David Crow, Don Kaye, John Saavedra, Tony Sokol Social Media Manager Brian Berman Advertising Director Adam McDonnell Advertising Executive Andres Ball CONTACT US 109 West 38th Street Rm 1202 New York, New York 10018 SPONSORSHIP msullivan@denofgeek.com

IMAGE CREDITS: BRIAN BOWEN SMITH / PARAMOUNT (COVER); GETTY IMAGES (SERLING AND UHURA); MARVEL— COURTESY OF THE JACK KIRBY MUSEUM (CAPTAIN AMERICA COVER)

TOMORROW IS YESTERDAY

Creative Directors Lucy Quintanilla, Joshua Moore

The adventure that took the world by storm continues!

A wild careen through a D&D railroad murder mystery

The endearingly off-kilter graphic novels from #1 bestselling creators the McElroys and Carey Pietsch

theadventurezonecomic.com DEN OF GEEK 9

BOOKS & COMICS THE BEST IN COMICS PG. 12 • THE DARK KNIGHT REMAINS PG. 14

THE SUMMER BOOK GUIDE VELOCITY WEAPON (THE PROTECTORATE) Megan E. O’Keefe (Orbit) NOW AVAILABLE

Velocity Weapon begins with Sgt. Sanda Greeve waking up in her evacuation pod to find her leg has been amputated, she has been saved by an enemy spaceship, and she has missed more than two centuries of time. The last thing Sanda remembers? An attack by rebel forces, a memory from a war that ended 230 years prior, wiping out both sides. With only the ship’s A.I.—known as The Light of Berossus, or Bero for short—as a companion, Sanda must solve the mystery of what happened to her.

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BY KAYTI BURT

THE BECKONING SHADOW

Katharyn Blair (Katherine Tegen Books) NOW AVAILABLE

Teenage runaway Vesper is a Harbinger, someone with the awesome and terrifying ability to make your worst fears a reality.

When Vesper earns a spot in the Tournament of the Unraveling, whose winner gets the opportunity to change one detail of their past (and a $1 million cash prize), she thinks all of her problems are solved. Then she falls for her trainer Sam, a former MMA fighter with his own tragic past, making her plan of winning the “unraveling” prize for herself more emotionally complicated.

THIS IS HOW YOU LOSE THE TIME WAR Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Saga Press) OUT JULY 16

This novella, co-written by two of speculative fiction’s most exciting authors, follows two time-traveling agents, Red and Blue, from warring futures fighting an unending war across space and time. When Red and Blue begin to exchange letters, what begins as a way to taunt each other turns into something far more romantic, putting the two women, and their respective futures, at risk.

THE ADVENTURE ZONE: MURDER ON THE ROCKPORT LIMITED!

FURTHER READING

Justin, Travis, Griffin, and Clint McElroy and Carey Pietsch (First Second) OUT JULY 16

FINALE

by Stephanie Garber Flatiron Books OUT NOW

From the family that brought us the wildly popular tabletop RPG comedy podcast “The Adventure Zone” (with art from Carey Pietsch), comes the second in a graphic novel series concerning the continuing adventures of hero-adjacents Taako, Magnus, and Merle. Whether you’re one of the tens of millions who have listened to the podcast or not, this graphic novel featuring a D&D railroad murder mystery storyline is a hell of a good time.

THE DRAGON REPUBLIC

R.F. Kuang (Harper Voyager) OUT AUGUST 6

The Poppy War, a Chinese history inspired fantasy, was one of the most celebrated debuts of 2018. R.F. Kuang is back with the sequel, The Dragon Republic, which follows shaman and warrior Rin after the end of the Third Poppy War. Addicted to opium and hiding from vengeful god Phoenix, Rin has one goal: revenge against the traitorous Empress who sold out her country. The mission brings her into the orbit of the Dragon Warlord, who may be her one chance to take out the Empress.

MAGIC FOR LIARS

Sarah Gailey (Tor Books) NOW AVAILABLE

Sarah Gailey weaves a tale of magic and mystery in Magic for Liars, the story of a private investigator, Ivy Gamble, who is hired to solve a murder at the magical academy where her sister, Tabitha, happens to teach. Ivy and Tabitha are estranged, having grown apart when Tabitha began developing magical abilities. Now they are forced to interact again as Ivy travels to the Osthorne Academy for Young Mages to investigate the murder of one of Tabitha’s fellow teachers.

BTTM FDRS Ezra Clayton Daniels & Ben Passmore (Fantagraphics) NOW AVAILABLE

Afrofuturist graphic novel BTTM FDRS combines horror and humor to tell a satirical tale around the themes of cultural appropriation and gentrification. The story is set in the “Bottomyards,” a once thriving working-class neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side. It follows Darla, a black, unemployed art school student and Cynthia, her white, upper-class best friend.

When Cynthia and Darla move into the neighborhood looking for cheap rent and “authenticity,” respectively, they find something deadly.

DARK SHORES

by Danielle L. Jensen Tor Teen OUT NOW RECURSION

by Blake Crouch Crown OUT NOW VINTAGE 1954

by Antoine Laurain Gallic Books OUT NOW WICKED FOX

by Kat Cho G.P. Putnam’s Sons Books for Young Readers OUT NOW THE REDEMPTION OF TIME: A THREE-BODY PROBLEM NOVEL

by Baoshu & Translated

by Ken Liu Tor Books OUT NOW FAN THE FAME

by Anna Priemaza Harper Teen AUGUST 20 A SONG FOR A NEW DAY

by Sarah Pinkser Berkley SEPTEMBER 10 THE TESTAMENTS: A NOVEL

by Margaret Atwood Nan A. Talese SEPTEMBER 10

THE DEN OF GEEK BOOK CLUB featuring book giveaways and exclusive author interviews. Find us on GoodReads.com.

DEN OF GEEK 11

BOOKS & COMICS

BEST GRAPHIC ALBUM - NEW My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies, by Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips (Image)

THE BEST IN COMICS We pick our favorites to win the 2019 Eisner Awards.

BY JIM DANDY

BEST LIMITED SERIES

BEST CONTINUING SERIES

Batman: White Knight,

Batman, by Tom King et al.

Eternity Girl, by Magdalene

Black Hammer: Age of Doom, by Jeff Lemire, Dean

by Sean Murphy (DC)

Visaggio and Sonny Liew (Vertigo/DC)

Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles,

by Mark Russell, Mike Feehan, and Mark Morales (DC)

Mister Miracle, by Tom King and Mitch Gerads (DC)

X-Men: Grand Design: Second Genesis, by Ed Piskor (Marvel)

Mister Miracle is beautiful, ambiguous, thoughtful, and methodical. It’s a masterpiece of form and function that uses bizarre Jack Kirby characters to tell a real story about mental health, parenthood, work, relationships, and love. And it doubles as a love letter to comics history.

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(DC)

Ormston, and Rich Tommaso (Dark Horse)

Gasolina, by Sean

Mackiewicz and Niko Walter (Skybound/Image)

Giant Days, by John Allison,

Max Sarin, and Julia Madrigal (BOOM! Box)

The Immortal Hulk, by Al

Ewing, Joe Bennett, and Ruy José (Marvel)

Runaways, by Rainbow

Rowell and Kris Anka (Marvel) Lemire’s Black Hammer combines the surreal eeriness of his indie work with his wonderful ability to build fascinating superhero universes. Ormston and Tommaso help make Lemire’s creator-owned world of heroes and villains so rich and beautiful that it’s hard to pass Black Hammer up.

BEST NEW SERIES Bitter Root, by David Walker, Chuck Brown, and Sanford Greene (Image) Crowded, by Christopher Sebela, Ro Stein, and Ted Brandt (Image)

Gideon Falls, by Jeff Lemire

and Andrea Sorrentino (Image)

Isola, by Brenden Fletcher and Karl Kerschl (Image)

Man-Eaters, by Chelsea

Cain, Lia Miternique, and Kate Niemczyk (Image)

Skyward, by Joe

Henderson and Lee Garbett (Image) Bitter Root is so much fun. This story of a family of monster hunters living through the Harlem Renaissance – dealing with family drama and supernatural stuff along the way – proves Sandford Greene is one of the best artists working in comics today.

Snagglepuss

BEST SINGLE ISSUE/ ONE SHOT Peter Parker: The Spectacular Spider-Man #310,

by Chip Zdarsky (Marvel)

The last issue cuts to the core of why this character has endured for so long. It’s an absolutely beautiful book about how the world views Spider-Man, and one almost guaranteed to bring a tear to the eye.

BEST WRITER Mark Russell, Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles, Green Lantern/Huckleberry Hound, Lex Luthor/Porky Pig (DC); Lone Ranger (Dynamite) The fact that we got a comic book where pink catamount Snagglepuss, his best friend Huckleberry Hound, and Huck’s secret lover Quickdraw McGraw examined the dawn of the gay rights movement in America is unbelievable.

IMAGE CREDIT: DC ENTERTAINMENT (MITCH GERADS, MISTER MIRACLE; BEN CALDWELL, SNAGGLEPUSS)

Mister Miracle

My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies is of the same ridiculously high quality we’ve come to expect out of Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips, and it will almost certainly win.

BOOTH #2701

THE BEST IN SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY Join us for book giveaways, freebies, and in-booth signings with SEANAN MCGUIRE, LAUREN SHIPPEN, S. L. HUANG, CORY DOCTOROW, PAUL CORNELL, TOCHI ONYEBUCHI, and SDCC Spotlight authors SHERRILYN KENYON, CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, ANNALEE NEWITZ, SARAH GAILEY, and more!

TOCHI ONYEBUCHI

SHERRILYN KENYON

SEANAN MCGUIRE

ins an W ilk : Jonath Credit Photo

Photo Credit: Beckett Gladney

SARAH GAILEY

ANNALEE NEWITZ

TOR PRESENTS

ams : Jon S Credit Photo

Photo Credit: Ben Arons

CHARLIE JANE ANDERS

Photo Credit: Liza Hippler

and : Ra j An Credit Photo

Photo Credit: Sarah Deragon

AND CHECK OUT YOUR FAVORITE AUTHORS AT THEIR PANELS

MAGIC X MAYHEM IN SF&F

Thursday | 10:00-11:00 a.m. | Room: 28DE CHARLIE JANE ANDERS, ANNALEE NEWITZ, SARAH GAILEY, ANNALEE NEWITZ, S. L. HUANG, AND SEANAN MCGUIRE; MODERATED BY TOCHI ONYEBUCHI

LAUREN SHIPPEN

THE FANTASTIC FLAVORS OF FANTASY Friday | 11:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m. | Room: 25ABC LAUREN SHIPPEN AND SHERRILYN KENYON

CALLING ALL BOOK LOVERS:

A SNEAK PEEK AT NEW BOOKS FROM TOR, TOR TEEN, AND TOR.COM PUBLISHING Friday | 8:00-9:00 p.m. | Room: 25ABC EVERY ATTENDEE WILL LEAVE WITH A BOOK IN HAND!

PLUS!

W ith any purchase a hardcover or trade paperback in our booth, get a free tote bag* celebrating ROBERT JORDAN’S

FOLLOW TOR BOOKS

never-before-published first novel, WARRIOR OF THE ALTAII !

GET FREE EXCERPTS when you sign up for the free Tor/Forge monthly newsletter GET UPDATES about Tor/Forge authors when you sign up for Author Updates tor-forge.com

*while supplies last

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Dark Knight THE

k Knight The world’s greatest creators on why Batman still matters after 80 years.

BY JOHN SAAVEDRA

T ALL BEGAN WITH TWO SHOTS IN THE DARK, pearls spilling onto the blood-soaked cement.

No, it started when the bat crashed through the window. Actually, it was when the boy fell into the cave. Maybe it was that hostile takeover at Apex Chemicals? Dozens of stories have shaped the legend of the Batman over his 80-year history, tales that have made the Caped Crusader arguably the most iconic character in comic book history, rivaled only by Superman.

When Bill Finger and Bob Kane put pen and pencil to paper for 1939’s Detective Comics #27, they had no way of knowing that they were creating a new American myth that would captivate readers and movie audiences for decades to come. They certainly didn’t expect their first Batman adventure, “The Case of the Chemical Syndicate,” to spawn 973 more issues of Detective Comics, let alone become a blockbuster franchise featuring movies, TV series, video games, and McDonald’s Happy Meal toys.

But what bigger testament to the long-lasting appeal of Batman than Detective Comics #1000, written and drawn by

REMAINS

some of the best creators in the business? The giant-sized, 96-page issue featured stories by legends such as Dennis O’Neil and Neal Adams as well as the current custodians of the Bat-mythos: Tom King, Peter J. Tomasi, and Scott Snyder.

And that’s not even including the excellent covers by Bruce Timm, Frank Miller, Jock, and others.

Batman is only the second DC superhero to reach such a massive milestone, the other being the Man of Steel. What is it about this story of a man hellbent on avenging the death of his parents night after night that has kept it at the forefront of pop culture?

“I think what makes him deeply enduring is that it’s a really primal folk tale,” says Scott Snyder, who’s been writing Batman stories since 2011. “It’s a story about a boy who loses everything and turns that loss into fuel to make sure that what happened to him never happens to anybody else.”

While most of us aren’t billionaire playboys with the resources to fight crime on a global (and sometimes cosmic) level, we understand pain, both emotional and physical, and a need to rise above it, even if we can’t always do that.

We sympathize with Bruce’s biggest regret—if only he hadn’t made his parents take him to see that Zorro movie; if only he hadn’t been scared at the opera; if only he’d been braver and faster as the thug pulled the trigger. For Bruce, his crusade to stop evildoers comes down to replaying that single fateful moment over and over again and making possible a different outcome.

Yet, Batman perseveres despite all of this pain, which is why people flock to the character, according to Snyder.

“It’s a story of triumph over your worst fears, worst tragedy, and about taking your loss and turning it into a win,” Snyder says. “There’s just this kind of power to him that speaks to our own potential, the human potential, even when we’re challenged by things that seem insurmountably horrible.”

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animated role. But when he read the script, the character clicked. Conroy recognized this story. “They were absolutely right to cast a theater actor, especially one with a classical background, because this is Shakespeare. They’re doing high drama. Batman is Achilles. He’s Orestes. He’s Hamlet.”

The tragic Greek character Orestes, in particular, was on Conroy’s mind when playing Batman. He’d performed several plays as Orestes, a son who avenges his father’s murder and goes mad because of it. By the end of the story, Orestes has gone through hell and back because of his thirst for vengeance. Naturally, Conroy brought that familiarity with Orestes to his portrayal of Batman.

“He’s a Homeric hero,” Conroy says of the Caped Crusader. “I think of it often when I’m doing Batman because Orestes is haunted by the Furies. He descends into hell. He comes back. He’s resurrected at the end, and I think so often, this is a very Orestial-like journey that Bruce Wayne goes on. His Furies are the memory of his parents’ murder. It haunts him through his life. It transformed him.”

IMAGE CREDIT: LEINIL YU/DC COMICS (OPENING PAGE); GREG CAPULLO/DC COMICS (LEFT); LEE WEEKS/DC COMICS (RIGHT)

Snyder has spent the better part of a decade showcasing Batman as a symbol of hope for the citizens of Gotham, putting him through the ringer, reopening old wounds while also making new ones—the writer even killed the hero off at one point—just so that he can pick himself up again and keep fighting.

But the character isn’t driven solely by tragedy. Who could hang with a downer like that for 80 years?

“There are the fun elements, of course, that are similar to James Bond, like the gadgets, the cars, the planes, and just the cool factor of his costume,” Snyder says.

According to Batman: The Animated Series voice actor Kevin Conroy, the classically trained actor who was immortalized as the voice of Batman in the ‘90s cartoon, the Caped Crusader is a modern retelling of myths and stories humans have been passing down for thousands of years.

“He’s such a theatrical character,” says Conroy, admitting he was at first hesitant to audition for the part.

At the time, he was a theater actor who’d never done an

Dark Knight Dark Knig the best costume motif in comics. Nothing comes close.

He’s dark, sexy, and broody. It’s really intoxicating and compelling in a way that almost no other in comics can come close to it.”

He also admires the durability of the character through the different eras of comics, from the Golden Age to the sillier ‘50s and ‘60s stories of the Comics Code era, to the darker takes we’re more accustomed to today.

“It is amazing to me how flexible he is as a character.

That you could have something as silly as the Adam West show or the old ‘50s comics and then you have stuff like Neal Adams and Frank Miller, and what we did. Even more extreme, [Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s graphic novel] Arkham Asylum and things like that. And yet, they’re all kind of the same character. It’s like that character can encompass all of those different things. He can do space aliens and serial killers, you know? Yet, it kind of works.”

This flexibility has allowed plenty of writers and artists to experiment with the Dark Knight, creating different versions of the character over the years. There really isn’t a definitive take on Batman. You can love the Batusi, Bat-Mite, or Mr. Freeze’s cool party and still be right on the money about the Caped Crusader. The guy has done it all.

“It’s almost like he’s a force of nature, in which stories can happen around him, and there’s something primordial, maybe, about the character and the way he looks, as well,” says veteran Batman artist Jock, who most recently worked on a seven-part miniseries with Snyder called The Batman Who Laughs. “You could put Batman in a new pose, and he’d still flourish, and I think those kinds of characters are very rare.”

Peter J. Tomasi, who is currently writing Detective Comics, puts it best: “He’s a character who can work across all genres.

Somehow, he can simply fit into every story, be it a war story, a Western, a love story, a comedic angle, sci-fi, horror, fantasy, you name it, and of course any detective story you can possibly imagine.”

Superheroes won’t always be at the top of our pop culture food chain. It’s inevitable that many of the characters we love today will fade with future generations, just as the Shadow, Doc Savage, and the Scarlet Pimpernel did. Will we still be talking about Batman in another 80 years? We may eventually embrace new forms of familiar myths, becoming obsessed with new idols. But only a fool would bet against a character who’s survived as long as Batman has. Remember, the Batman always wins.

There’s just this kind of power to him that speaks to our own potential, the human potential, even when we’re challenged by things that seem insurmountably horrible.

Conroy calls Batman a “classic character.” Like Orestes before him, Batman has become the protagonist of our very own mythology.

“He’s come out of such a fire and instead of letting life crush him, he turns that metamorphosis into something even greater than himself,” Conroy says. “They’ve been telling that story for thousands of years in different cultures, and this is our culture’s way of telling those stories, and I think they’re just as valid.”

Bruce Timm, who co-created Batman: The Animated Series and designed the show’s iconic Art Deco aesthetic, is unsurprisingly most taken by Batman’s look.

“I just think Batman looks great,” Timm says. “He’s got

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TELEVISION SPONGEBOB: 20 YEARS LATER... PG. 28 • THE TWILIGHT ZONE FOREVER PG. 32

deals with moral dilemmas and morality, and ultimately offers hope. It gives commentary on our society, framed in a way that you can get through to various types. And it’s never dystopian. There’s always good there, and it’s just a matter of making the hard choices to do the right thing.

You’re directing the first two episodes of Picard. Why is Jean-Luc Picard such a popular character?

A conversation with Hanelle Culpepper, one of a next generation of Star Trek directors.

BY KAYTI BURT WHEN STAR TREK: PICARD PREMIERES later this year, Hanelle Culpepper will become the first female filmmaker to launch a new Star Trek series in the franchise’s half-century history. Culpepper, who has directed two episodes of Star Trek: Discovery, as well as episodes of shows like The Flash, Supergirl, Gotham, and Counterpart, told us more about working in the world of Trek.

Q&A

What was your personal relationship with Star Trek before you were hired to work on Star Trek: Discovery? hanelle culpepper: I watched Star Trek: The Next Generation.

That was the one that converted me. I was a Star Wars fan for quite some time, and I still enjoy Star Wars. When it came down to Star Wars fans versus the Trekkies, I was on the Star Wars side... until I saw Star Trek: The Next Generation, and just 20 DEN OF GEEK

absolutely loved it. I loved Picard, and loved Number One, and loved Data.

That’s what converted me. And the new movies, too. I’ve just really enjoyed the new Star Trek movies more than I enjoyed the new Star Wars movies. It slowly won me over. So yeah, I was a huge fan when I went in for this job.

Are there certain narrative elements that make a story a Star Trek story?

I feel like it’s always about challenging boundaries and challenging norms. It

What can the industry do better to support directors from underrepresented communities?

The industry should reframe how they discuss directors from those communities. Our descriptor is often used as a qualifier and any opportunities are framed around being given because of that descriptor, not talent. That fosters animosity. And we need to change how the agents speak, too. They can’t tell a client they didn’t get the job because it went to a director of color, or woman director, etc. Whatever reason they would tell their male clients why a job went to another male, should be the same reason they tell their clients why a job went to a woman or person of color. Let’s frame the conversation around talent and creativity, not just gender and race.

IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES AND CBS ALL ACCESS (TOP); LAUREN HURT (CULPEPPER)

ENGAGE!

First of all, he’s hot. He was definitely a hot captain. With that accent and just the regalness with which he carries himself, and the ability to always make those hard choices and fight for them with all honesty and sincerity.

I have read a lot of comments, actually, about how the character has helped a lot of people personally. I think there is a lot in him that fills some sort of need for people. He brings the perfect combination of qualities we want out of our role models.

PLAY MORE. SPEND LESS. save 15% ON YOUR STAY USE VP#625626 BOOK NOW @ REDROOF.COM @utahimecosplay photo @mykeshooter DEN OF GEEK 21

Topper

TELEVISION

Beyond Coulson Clark Gregg talks about creating a new character for the sixth season of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. BY MICHAEL AHR CLARK GREGG HAS BEEN PLAYING Agent Phillip J. Coulson for a decade now: five years in various Avengers movies and Marvel One-Shots and five years on ABC’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. Throughout season six, however, we’ve come to enjoy Gregg’s performance as a new, less scrupulous character named Sarge, whose role has evolved from that of an outright antagonist from another world to an adversary with a common enemy.

Gregg admits that there were clues that Coulson would pay the ultimate price for his deal with Ghost Rider in season four, necessitating either his departure from the show or a change in his role. “It wasn’t until I got there that day and started to get fitted for the gear that would set up the flaming skull transition that I said,

‘You know, it occurs to me that there are implications to the mortality of anyone who plays Ghost Rider.’ And they were like, ‘Yes, there are.’ And I said, ‘Oh, okay, maybe we should talk about that!’ And they really didn’t, and I’m glad they didn’t,” Gregg says.

Some still might not count Coulson out altogether, and Gregg acknowledges that it was hard to leave his much beloved character behind despite the advance warning he had.

“We learned on Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. some time ago that everything’s on the table at all times,” he says. “Yet I don’t think I was prepared to basically shed everything but the guy’s skin to play a very different, much darker character whose name is apparently Sarge.”

By this point, Gregg has had time to adjust to the new character and

Winston James Francis (Jaco), Brooke Williams (Snowflake), Clark Gregg (Sarge), and Matt O’Leary (Pax) are on a mission in Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D season six.

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PHOTO CREDITS: MARVEL TV/ABC

Clark Gregg’s new character, Sarge, is not the nice guy Phil Coulson was.

learn about Sarge along with the audience. “He has a completely different story, and I didn’t know it,” he says. “At a certain point, it starts to become clear that he has real gaps in his memory... so that’s very hard to make sense of. And at the same time, he has a lot of emotional entanglements. A moral compass — all of that was gone, and this guy was delightfully free of anything but rabid, fierce dedication to taking on these creatures… who seem to be paving the way for some kind of creator to come down. He seems maniacally bent on destroying them and whoever the creator is.”

Although Sarge is the leader of his small band of world-hopping hunters, he’s definitely no Director Coulson.

“I think standard-issue Phil Coulson would find Sarge’s methods — [as well as the] way that he is maybe using some of the same quiet notes but really ruling through fear — to be antithetical to his leadership style,” Gregg says. “That would have been a great death match: Sarge versus Coulson. I have to say my money would be on Sarge!”

That being said, Sarge does have some vulnerabilities, including his own curiosity about why members of the S.H.I.E.L.D. team recognize his face. “He starts, in a way that’s eerily reminiscent of Phil Coulson season one, to be on a little bit of a mystery mission himself to find out why this is happening, and at a certain point that puts him in an uncomfortable alliance with S.H.I.E.L.D. And that’s when season six gets really dangerous and interesting.”

In the end, however, Gregg is looking forward to the final battle almost as much as fans of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “The reunion of this person, who looks like Coulson but [who] really isn’t with the S.H.I.E.L.D. team, to confront the most out-there, terrifying threat that I think we’ve ever seen — and that’s saying something at this point in season six — is going to really pay off like something we’ve never seen before.”

DEN OF GEEK 23

TELEVISION

Counting Your Chickens Robot Chicken is celebrating 200 episodes of stop motion pop culture parody. BY AARON SAGERS FOR SOME PEOPLE, GETTING OLDER means putting away childish things.

For Seth Green, not only did he not put away his toys, he put them to work.

The result became Robot Chicken, the stop motion sketch comedy show he created with Matthew Senreich.

Originating as Sweet J Presents on Sony’s Screenblast.com in 2001, Robot Chicken debuted on Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim in February 2005, just weeks after Green’s 31st birthday. The show combined toys and claymation figures to comment on modern popular culture and nostalgically lampoon both the classics and the obscure. Now, 14 years later, the series is about to celebrate its 10th season, 200th episode, and make a triumphant return to SDCC. Meanwhile, Green, known for his work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Family Guy, and his recent live-action feature directorial debut, Changeland, continues to executive produce, write, direct, and contribute his voice to the show.

“When we first started the show, it was based on private musings or 24 DEN OF GEEK

water cooler conversations amongst my friends,” says Green. “We didn’t anticipate that millions of people experienced the same pop culture and asked the same deconstructed questions on it.”

It took a trip to SDCC for Green to realize the popularity of the show.

He didn’t appreciate that people were paying close attention until there was a room of 3,000 people waiting for the Robot Chicken crew.

Throughout the run of the series, Green and Senreich enlisted famous friends to lend their voices, even getting George Lucas to appear as himself in a sketch that depicted him avoiding a mob of fans. The show has also oddly been prescient, casting Mark Hamill as the voice of killer doll Chucky in 2005 – long before he was cast in this year’s Child’s Play re-imagining.

Though the voices are a critical element of Robot Chicken, the stop motion animation is the signature of the sketch show, and over the last 15 years, Green says both the technology

and the comedy has evolved. While the show still relies on stop motion animation to tell jokes within the parody space, the structure is constantly transforming to reflect the current “shape of comedy.”

“Comedy evolves every year, and especially every 10 years,” Green says.

“So we just try to keep bringing in new voices and younger writers to give us that perspective.”

And Green teases that the 200th episode itself will have a different shape. While not wishing to reveal what the format is, he says, “we attempted something that we’ve never attempted.”

“We’ve consistently made a case for the show being canceled,” he says, referring to a running gag of an Adult Swim executive choosing to end the show, or offering them a chance at renewal during season finales. “[But] I was really excited about the 200th episode, and we went out of our way to write something that was different than any of the other season finales that we had written.”

Additionally, Green says to expect guest stars including Sam Elliott, Fabio, and David Lynch.

The upcoming tenth season will address Aquaman’s recent high profile success, thanks to last year’s Jason Momoa-starring movie. While Robot Chicken’s Aquaman (voiced by Green) is typically a silly punchline character from Super Friends, this will feature the new buff, badass King of Atlantis.

After 14 years, 10 seasons, 11 specials, and 200 episodes, one of Green’s favorite sketches involves, appropriately, chickens. But not the robot kind.

“We did this Law & Order parody with just a bunch of squawking chickens and the whole point was that Law & Order is such a tried and true format … that you could have characters speaking gibberish and it would still be as dramatically effective as a wholly produced episode of Law & Order.”

“I’ve always liked that sketch,” says Green. “It just cracks me up when I watch it.”

PHOTO CREDITS: ADULT SWIM

Topper

TELEVISION

REIGNITING A FRANCHISE

Netflix takes viewers back to Thra for The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

BY CHRIS CUMMINS LIKE MOST WORKS THAT ARE ahead of their time, The Dark Crystal was initially met with confusion upon its release in December 1982. Co-directed

by Jim Henson and Frank Oz, the film was a shocking experience for families who expected Muppet-esque warmth and were instead thrust into the dark fantasy world of Thra. For this was a picture that dealt with adult themes like genocide and featured one of the decade’s most notorious sources of nightmare fodder in the form of the Skeksis, the movie’s ultracreepy villains.

Although moderately successful upon release, the movie was hardly the cultural touchstone Henson was hoping for. The Dark Crystal had long been a passion project for him, and even though it underperformed, he was unwilling to abandon the fantasy genre.

Naturally, a film as weird as The Dark Crystal, complete with its all-puppet cast and sometimes unsettling set-pieces, was destined for cult status. Recent years have seen the release of comics, novels, and toys that expand the saga’s universe. As great as these tie-ins are, they can’t quite recapture the magic of the original, live action Dark Crystal. However, the wait for such wonderment will be over on Aug. 30, when the 10-part series The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance premieres on Netflix. A prequel to the original film, it’s set in a time when Gelfling culture was thriving and chronicles the adventures of Rian, Brea, and Deet, new characters tasked with fighting the Skeksis in the hope 26 DEN OF GEEK

of saving their civilization.

Executive producer Lisa Henson explains that the new series builds upon her father’s original work by expanding the universe of The Dark Crystal, one that has possibilities far beyond these 10 episodes. “It feels like a classic fantasy world where you’re aware of its history,” she says. “In that sense it’s a little bit like a Middle-earth or Narnia, you feel like this is a place that you could visit, revisit, and see different parts of it and different places in time.”

Indeed, Age of Resistance aims to provide some backstory for Thra and its inhabitants, but it will do so by navigating around the pitfalls that have cursed so many other prequels.

Director Louis Leterrier (The IncredNew character Brea consults an ancient tome in Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance.

IMAGE CREDIT: NETFLIX

The Skeksis return to create more chaos in Thra in the 10-part series.

ible Hulk, Clash of the Titans) cites the original Dark Crystal as one of the works that first captured his imagination and made him want to tell stories for a living. “Forever I’ve carried this movie in my heart,” he says wistfully.

His fondness for the source material resulted in his taking up “respect the fans” as his mantra during the series’ two-year production period.

This unwillingness to change Thra’s aesthetic meant doing Age of Resistance as a CGI-heavy production was never a serious option.

“My very first instinct was that you’re not going to go back to the world of The Dark Crystal and change it up,” Leterrier says. “You can enhance it, do stuff that Jim Henson would have done—add tongues, winks, things to enhance the expression of some of the

puppets and help wide shots—but don’t do it without puppets, otherwise it’s not The Dark Crystal.”

Henson adds: “We have a really nice balance going with the majority of the character performances all done in puppetry. I think people will be surprised by how dynamic the show feels because you might have a preconception that puppets can’t do very much compared to animated characters.”

She also mentions that there will be some post-production CGI tweaking done to remove visible puppeteers who were operating several large-scale characters and other minor changes, but essentially the project remains “pure puppetry.”

Voiceovers from the likes of Taron Egerton, Anya Taylor-Joy, Mark Hamill, Helena Bonham Carter, Simon

Pegg, Natalie Dormer, Gugu MbathaRaw, and Andy Samberg gives Age of Resistance some real star power, enhancing its appeal to those who may not be familiar with the 1982 film.

Fans of the franchise will be thrilled to learn that Brian Froud, the designer and illustrator who helped create the look of the original, has returned for this production, joined by his wife Wendy (whom he met and married during the production of The Dark Crystal) and their artist son Toby. The trio’s involvement is another example of legacy contributors helping to shape the saga’s future while maintaining visual continuity between both projects.

“All three Frouds were the lead design team [on Age of Resistance], and it was just fantastic to have that connection to the past,” Henson says. “They remain extremely innovative and edgy as a group of artists even today. They were constantly surprising us and amazing us with what they were doing on behalf of the series.”

“MY VERY FIRST INSTINCT WAS THAT YOU’RE NOT GOING TO GO BACK TO THE WORLD OF THE DARK CRYSTAL AND CHANGE IT UP” Both Henson and Leterrier hope this new series is just the start of many new Dark Crystal projects, citing the limitless story potential of this epic world. “I’m just the torch carrier,” Leterrier states, “I’m one of hopefully many directors who will continue exploring Thra for many years to come.”

Ultimately though, Leterrier is humbled by the project.

“It’s not Louis Leterrier’s The Dark Crystal. It’s Jim Henson’s The Dark Crystal,” says the director. “I’m just a director. I’m happy to be the director and pay homage to the incredible artist Jim Henson was.”

DEN OF GEEK 27

BY NICK HARLEY

When Game of Thrones ended earlier this year, pop culture pundits not only mourned the end of a monumental hit, but also the perceived death of the monoculture – omnipresent pieces of pop culture that feel like most of the population is engaging with. And while it’s true that creating brand-new worldwide blockbusters in the age of streaming, social video, and Peak TV seems increasingly unlikely, the death knell for monocultural television hasn’t quite rung. Need proof? Ask anyone between the ages of six and 26 about SpongeBob SquarePants, then stand back and listen to the barrage of quotes, favorite gags, and beloved episodes. Then marvel at the fact that after two decades on television, SpongeBob is still cruising, full steam ahead.

Celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, SpongeBob SquarePants is a comedic touchstone for a generation, spawning 244 episodes and counting, two feature-length films (with a third on the way), a Tony-winning Broadway show, global merchandise sales north of $13 billion, an upcoming spinoff series, and enough memes to power its 28 DEN OF GEEK

own corner of the internet. Naïve, sweet, and optimistic, yet deeply bizarre and character-driven, SpongeBob SquarePants appeals to innocent children, mischievous teens, nostalgic 20-somethings, and parents enjoying time with their kids. Nickelodeon has released over 100 programs since SpongeBob’s first episode on May 1, 1999, and while most of those series have come and gone, the absorbent, yellow, porous pop culture icon perseveres.

“It just has gotten into people’s lives. Everybody’s got a story about some fun SpongeBob moment they’ve had, or some episode that they love, or some SpongeBob joke that they’ve been doing with their best friend every day for years,” Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob, says while reflecting on his gig for the past 20 years. “It’s pretty great.

We’re definitely aware of the unusualness of it, and that it’s just an incredible opportunity.”

The longevity of the series isn’t lost on the show’s voice actors. In the age of the gig economy and the increased scarcity of long-term jobs, the cast of SpongeBob knows

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY LUCY QUINTANTANILLA.

After two decades, SpongeBob SquarePants is as big and beloved as ever.

that they’re in rare waters. “When I was in acting school studying theater, we didn’t have a chapter on how to handle the 20th year of a character,” says Bill Fagerbakke, the voice of SpongeBob’s best friend and partner in nautical nonsense, Patrick Star. “That phenomenon is not lost on me.”

For Rodger Bumpass, who voices SpongeBob’s pretentious and cynical neighbor Squidward Tentacles, the line between where he ends and where the character of Squidward begins has started to blur. “It becomes a second skin. I used to say that he was my alter ego. As the years have gone on, I have become more Squidward, so I shoo people off my front lawn a lot more than I used to,” Bumpass says with a laugh. “It really is a very interesting thing and quite unique. With the possible exception of The Simpsons, we’re pretty much up there, as far as longevity for animation, and it’s a very honored position to occupy.”

SpongeBob has ebbed and flowed through the life of writer and story editor Doug Lawrence, who professionally goes by the name Mr. Lawrence, but it’s always remained a constant. Lawrence voices misunderstood villain Plankton and a plethora of other supporting characters, and while he’s always been an integral voice on the series, he’s left the show as a writer and come back - a rarity in the industry.

“Usually, you don’t get the opportunity to keep going back

to a show that’s still there,” he says. “That rarely happens.

After a while you start to count on it. You start to worry that you’re counting on it too much to be there. We sort of feel an ownership or a responsibility to make sure that the shows are still quality and really funny and that they have a surprise in them or two, so it doesn’t get stale. It’s a hard thing to make a show keep having sparks flying out of it and I think we’re still able to achieve that.”

There’s a lot you can credit SpongeBob’s success to: its use of character archetypes grounded in classic forms like commedia dell’arte and the works of Shakespeare, its penchant for broader slapstick and physical comedy that harkens back to duos like Laurel and Hardy, and its clever peppering of highbrow references, surrealist flights of fancy, and continued experimentation. However, ask the cast and crew of the series, and they’ll agree that it all comes back to creator Stephen Hillenburg, who tragically passed away at the age of 57 in November 2018 following a lengthy battle with ALS. “I never really met anybody like him, and I’m sure I never will,” Kenny says. “He was super smart and intensely interested in a lot of different things. Whether it was surfing, oceanography, earth science, animation, or comedy. He was just this amazing stew of stuff that he liked.

SpongeBob, I think, was this lightning in a bottle, where he just synthesized a bunch of his interests into one bit.”

DEN OF GEEK 29

A former marine biology teacher, Hillenburg created SpongeBob back in 1989 as a character in a comic titled The Intertidal Zone, intended to teach children about the diversity of the intertidal pools. Hillenburg eventually moved into television and worked on Nickelodeon’s Rocko’s Modern Life. When that series ended, Hillenburg and several co-workers on Rocko’s, including Lawrence, got the opportunity to pitch a new series to Nick’s top brass. “We were all trying to get pilots going around the same time,” Lawrence remembers. “This is the only one out of all of us that actually got made.”

The cast fondly recalls Hillenburg as a creator focused on character, with a strong sense of what the show was and wasn’t. They credit him with having a knack for hiring the right people, for imbuing SpongeBob with his own sense of optimism and hope, and deeply caring about not only the comedy, but the integrity of the show. The cast describes the upcoming third SpongeBob film, The SpongeBob Movie: It’s a Wonderful Sponge, as a loving, feature-length tribute to Hillenburg.

The sentiment of respect and admiration shown to Hillenburg spreads throughout the whole cast. Since episode one, the voice actors have recorded as an ensemble, and their deep knowledge of not only their own characters, but of the others, has made them operate like a tight, improvisational jazz group, still capable of being blown away when a member of the band grabs the spotlight for a virtuosic solo.

Speaking about his colleagues, Fagerbakke says, “[Tom Kenny is] just one in a million and every session we have, I thank my lucky stars that he was cast as SpongeBob. Rodger Bumpass is so hilarious, Clancy Brown [Mr. Krabs], so funny, Mary Jo Catlett [Mrs. Puff], and Carolyn Lawrence [Sandy Cheeks], they’re so wonderful at what they do, they bring so much humor, and Lori Alan [Pearl Krabs] and everyone. Doug Lawrence, wow, I mean, look at that vibrant character in Plankton and what that means to the show.”

Credit the vision, the craft, and the care, but at the end of the day, the goofy goober at the center of this landmark animated series is the ever-endearing hook.

SpongeBob is both who we all are – capable of being silly, neurotic, over-confident, and a little annoying at times – and who we aspire to be: kind-hearted, selfless, happygo-lucky, and innocent. Broadcast in over 50 languages, SpongeBob is a rare character that cannot be lost in translation or the evolution of pop culture. Why? Because at the end of the day, he still makes us smile.

“It’s neat to know that all these different people with different cultures and different experiences all over the globe, they find something in SpongeBob and his world that’s identifiable to them,” says Kenny. “There’s something that people glom onto, regardless of their hugely heterogeneous life experience and ways of life.

I guess that’s a testament to Steve Hillenburg, but in a bigger sense, a testament to comedy and silliness and laughter.”

SpongeBob is a rare character that cannot be lost in translation or the evolution of pop culture.”

30 DEN OF GEEK

IMAGE CREDITS: NICKELODEON (SPONGEBOB), PHOTO BY MICHAEL OLSEN ON UNSPLASH (OCEAN)

The SpongeBob voice cast in character as their animated counterparts for the live-action anniversary special.

A IS BORN

1 ) SPONGEBOY, ME BOB!

2) CLAWING THEIR WAY TO THE TOP

After beginning life as part of the educational comic The Intertidal Zone, creator Stephen Hillenburg and his team of collaborators began preparing SpongeBob for his very own animated series in 1997. Initially, Hillenburg named the character SpongeBoy, but he was forced to change the name when it was discovered that “SpongeBoy” was copyrighted by a mop company.

Still, the name wouldn’t completely disappear: in the first season episode “Squeaky Boots,” Mr. Krabs calls SpongeBob “SpongeBoy, me bob!,” a reference to his original name. Here you can see early concept art for “SpongeBoy” alongside an early rendering of Squidward.

Hillenburg was said to be incredibly specific when it came down to what he did and didn’t want in regards to the series, everything from the comedy down to the design. For instance, when designing Mr. Krabs (rumored to be based on a former boss of Hillenburg’s), a significant amount of time was spent getting the character’s claws just right. As you can see in the concept art above, Hillenburg wanted the claws to be based on boxing gloves, and though they should act and sound hard, he didn’t want them to appear too sharp. This attention to detail was one of Hillenburg’s hallmarks.

DEN OF GEEK 31

32 DEN OF GEEK

can say, ‘Oh, he was a writer.’ That’s sufficiently an honored position for me.”

Fast-forward decades after his death and TV Guide wrote, “Serling’s legacy continues to grow. His television and cinematic works have reached cult status—enlivening a new interest in one of the great early writers of American television.”

My dad also said in that final interview, “I’d like to write

BY ANNE SERLING something that my peers, my colleagues, my fellow writers It feels nothing short of staggering that The Twilight Zone would find a source of respect. I think I’d rather win, for is about to celebrate its 60th anniversary. And no one would example, a Writer’s Guild award than almost anything on have been more surprised (or humbled) than my father. earth.”

The show has been in constant syndication all of these Thirty-eight years later, in 2013, the Writer’s Guild decades with marathons on the Syfy Channel twice a voted The Twilight Zone as one of the three best television year, a 1983 Twilight Zone movie, and a U.S. postal stamp. shows ever written. “No show in the history of television There have also been numerous stage productions, books has lingered in the imagination quite like Rod Serling’s and graphic novels, action figures, calendars, cards, video anthology series, which could function both as a science games, T-shirts, hats, bobbleheads, lunch boxes, a pinball fiction chiller and an issues-driven examination of human machine, and even a theme park attraction—to name a behavior and moral complexities, with climactic twists.” few. There have been three remakes of the show; the most When I am asked why I think my dad is still remembered recent being Jordan Peele’s on CBS All Access. after all these years, I think the answer is fairly simple.

Writing was what my father believed in, what he was He dealt with the human condition, and while times passionate about, what he thought had a chance to save change, people (sadly) don’t. We are still battling so many society. In 1968, when the country was in the midst of the of the same issues my dad was so vocal, disheartened, and divisiveness and turmoil of the civil rights and anti-war enraged about. The same things he battled 60 years ago— movements that were tearing it apart, my dad ended a racism, mob mentality, scapegoating, paranoia, isolation— speech at the Library of Congress in Washington by saying, are still here. Our current politics have exacerbated these “So long as men and women write what they want, then divisive issues, leaving many to agree that we are quite all of the other freedoms—all of them—will remain intact. literally living in The Twilight Zone. And to that, my dad And it is then that writing becomes an act of conscience, a would be deeply saddened and, I imagine, nothing short of weapon of truth, an article of faith.” apoplectic. He believed we could do better.

My father felt that radio, television, and film ought to On July 7, 1975, memorial services were held for my father be “vehicles of social criticism” and that writers “should in California and Upstate New York. On the West Coast, my menace the public’s conscience.” In the early days he had to father’s close friend, Dick Berg, said in his eulogy: “Where constantly battle sponsor and network censorship—those his peers may have anguished over the creative process, who didn’t want to be associated with anything that might Rod woke up every day saying, ‘Let me tell you a story.’ be perceived as offensive. He felt that “the greatest evil This was his badge, his thrust, his passkey into our lives. of our time was prejudice” and he tried to address this in He was eternally the new boy on the block trying to join much of his work, but his plots were often changed and in our games. And he penetrated the circle by regaling us watered down. Even a character’s race and religion were with those many fragments of his Jewish imagination… altered so as not to offend a certain demographic. He often intellectual stories, fantastic stories, hilarious stories, spoke out against these restrictions and said, “I think that stories of social content, even one-liners about man’s it’s criminal that we are not permitted to make dramatic lunacy. However, they were always seen through his prism, note of social evils that exist, of controversial themes becoming never less than his stories. And because he came as they are inherent in our to us with love… seeking our society. “ love… we invariably let him tell My father was interviewed us a story. And how much richer “SO LONG AS MEN for the last time shortly before we are for it.”

AND WOMEN WRITE his death in 1975. He was Anne Serling is the author of AS I quoted as saying that he felt WHAT THEY WANT, KNEW HIM: My Dad Rod Serling, his writing was “momentarily THEN ALL OF THE OTHER which won the The Killer Nashville adequate.” And, when asked Silver Falchion Award for best what he wanted people to say FREEDOMS—ALL OF memoir/ Biography in 2015. The about him a hundred years adaptations she wrote of two of THEM—WILL from then, he responded, “I her father’s teleplays appear in the don’t care that they’re not able anthology The Twilight Zone: The REMAIN INTACT.” to quote any single line that Original Stories. Currently she is at I’ve written. But just that they work on a novel: AFTERSHOCKS. — R O D SE R LI NG

“In His Absence”

DEN OF GEEK 33

On stage,

A classic enters

The Twilight Zone stage play was adapted by Anne Washburn and directed by Olivier Award-winner Richard Jones – and concluded its London run on June 1.

A NE W dimension Who wouldn’t want to be a fly on the wall of the fifth dimension; a casual observer of the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition? In London, a recent stage adaptation of The Twilight Zone peeled back the curtain on the landmark television series by adapting its timeless stories and interweaving them into a suspenseful and unique theatrical experience.

After a sold-out 2018 run at the Almeida Theatre, the show earned a transfer to London’s Ambassadors Theatre in the prestigious West End in early 2019. Producer Ron Fogelman considers the production’s early success in London promising. After all, the anthology series only came to British television in the ‘80s, nearly two decades after it premiered in the U.S. “In America, The Twilight Zone is considered the Old Testament,” Fogelman says. “It’s the most influential television show, I think, in the history of TV for so many reasons. It never achieved the same status here as it rightfully had in America.”

In an era where intellectual property is mined like gold by producers, The Twilight Zone is tightly guarded. It took Fogelman, a diehard fan with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of the original series, nearly three years to convince CBS to grant him the rights to use The Twilight Zone brand for a stage adaptation.

“We really wanted to create something that had purpose for the stage,” Fogelman says. “This is really about storytelling. This is not about trying to cash in on a brand.”

After courting the blessing of the estates of Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling and screenwriters Charles Beaumont and Richard Matheson, Fogelman turned to critically acclaimed American playwright Anne Washburn and Olivier award-winning director Richard Jones to adapt the stories for the stage.

Ultimately they decided on eight original Twilight Zone 34 DEN OF GEEK

stories: “And When The Sky Was Opened,” “Eye of the Beholder,” “Will The Real Martian Please Stand Up?,” ‘’Little Lost Girl,” “The Long Morrow,” “Nightmare as a Child,” “Perchance to Dream,” and “The Shelter.”

Instead of running off episodes like a TV marathon, they interweaved the eight stories, adding a level of suspense even for Twilight Zone superfans. The sets and props are all practical and lo-fi. As Fogelman put it, they wanted an “anti-CGI production.” It’s all tied together by narration from Rod Serling himself, using audio from the original episodes.

“It felt crucial that he be there because he created the whole show and engineered so many of the episodes,” Washburn says. “A huge part of what has made the show last is the gravitas he brings to it. Both in terms of how he supervised it and his presence. There’s something about him which is simultaneously exciting and gray.

He has both moral heft and something kind of weird and saturnine.”

The stories selected for The Twilight Zone play reflect the frightening reality that history will repeat itself as long as we let it. For the stage production, the burden of legacy is light only because the words of Rod Serling feel eerily relevant in 2019. Where the play will stand on its own is if it lets audiences view the material through a new dimension.

“Doing the stage version allows us to delve deeper into what the actual themes of each of the episodes are,” says actor Alisha Bailey. “And you can do that with theater, you

PREVIOUS PAGE IMAGE CREDIT: PAUL VOLKMER ON UNSPLASH (SPACE). HULTON ARCHIVE / GETTY IMAGES

BY CHRIS LONGO

Speed reviews How does Jordan Peele’s Twilight Zone reboot stack up? Here’s the spoiler-free lowdown from our critics.

THE COMEDIAN

THE WUNDERKIND

The Twilight Zone reboot gets off to a fast start with a Kumail Nanjianistarring tale about comedic oversharing.

This kid president concept comes across as a mostly painful parody rather than as savvy political commentary.

NIGHTMARE AT 30,000 FEET

SIX DEGREES OF FREEDOM

“Nightmare at 30,000 Feet” brings an old classic into the 21st century with the help of a popular podcaster.

The series breaks away from social commentary in crafting a mysterious sci-fi yarn.

IMAGE CREDIT: MATT CROCKETT (PLAY). ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANNAH KNEISLEY

REPLAY

want to give the audience a sense of what the stories are about. And I think the sound, lighting, even the set design, lends itself to giving the audience that experience.”

Adds Washburn: “For the Americans who are visiting and watching, I hope it’s a different way of considering it.

I feel it both captured a huge part of what the American psyche is and then it also, in a little way, created the American psyche.”

While the play ended its London run in June, the producing team is working to bring the show stateside.

“We have always seen this as a show that can evolve,” Fogelman says. “So we’re already working on ideas for the U.S. version. We’ve had so many approaches and there’s no question that the U.S. is very much in the cards.”

Based on their ticket sales data for the Almeida run, 48 percent of the people who attended that play were first-timers to the theater, which indicates a healthy mix of Twilight Zone fans, traditional theatergoers, and a new generation ready to carry on the series’ legacy.

“If we’ve achieved anything it will be sending a whole new generation to the original episodes,” Fogelman says.

“Replay” has some strong ideas embedded in its quirky tale of a magic video recorder, but suffers from emphasizing social commentary at the expense of storytelling.

A TRAVELER This Christmastime hour in Iglaak, Alaska presents intriguing concepts that are rare to television, but can’t quite stick the landing.

NOT ALL MEN The premise of the episode pulls directly from the #MeToo movement and lands a big twist fairly well.

POINT OF ORIGIN “Point of Origin” dips into an intriguing premise but ends before we can figure out exactly how to feel about it.

THE BLUE SCORPION One of the reboot’s best episodes tackles gun culture with an interesting, inspired take.

BLURRYMAN “Blurryman” is a brilliant, metatextual piece of science fiction that almost single-handedly justifies this new Twilight Zone’s existence.

Terminator: Dark Fate creates a new future for the franchise.

BY DO N K AYE

Linda Hamilton returns to the Terminator series with a bang for the first time in 28 years.

DEN OF GEEK 37

IF there is any film franchise potentially in need of hitting the reset button, it’s the Terminator series. Launched back in 1984 with The Terminator, a low-budget cult classic sci-fi thriller, and continued in 1991 with Terminator 2: Judgment Day, one of the most spectacular and groundbreaking action blockbusters of all time, the franchise sent itself down several different and twisting narrative roads over the course of three more movies and an acclaimed but shortlived TV show.

But now a new film, Terminator: Dark Fate (out Nov. 1), is taking a different tack. The story threads pursued in Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Terminator Salvation, and Terminator Genisys have been jettisoned in favor of a direct sequel to writer/director James Cameron’s first two films.

The contorted continuity that plagued the later entries is, appropriately for a tale about the future, a thing of the past.

What makes this instantly compelling is the return of two key personnel who have been long missing: Cameron, who reacquired the rights to his signature franchise and decided to take an active role in conceiving the story and producing the film, and Linda Hamilton, who played Sarah Connor in the original two movies and returns as the series’ heart and soul for the first time in 28 years.

Of course, the iconic star of the series, Arnold Schwarzenegger, is back as well, while the movie introduces a fresh cast including Mackenzie Davis (Blade Runner 2049),

Arnold Schwarzenegger has been playing various T-800s for 35 years, but in Dark Fate he is at last reunited with Linda Hamilton and James Cameron.

Gabriel Luna (Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.), and Natalia Reyes. The director is Tim Miller, who made his directorial debut in 2016 with Deadpool after working for years as a visual effects specialist.

Miller came on board after meeting producer David Ellison, who was behind the previous attempt to reboot the franchise with Terminator Genisys. “Even despite Genisys not playing as well as expected, he didn’t want to give up,” says Miller. “He still wanted to take another bite of the apple and he thought I might be a good candidate to help because The Terminator was a very formative movie for me. I have a great affection for the franchise and really wanted to see it come back in a big way.”

It was Hamilton’s return as Sarah Connor—who in the original movie was the target of the first Terminator played

by Schwarzenegger—that most drew Miller toward Dark

I TRAINED MY ASS OFF FOR THE FILM. WHEN YOU GET TO MY AGE, YOU HAVE TO TRAIN TWICE AS MUCH TO GET THE SAME RESULT AS YOU DID 20 YEARS AGO. — ARNOLD SCHWARZENEGGER

Fate. “For me, it was never the story of John Connor, it was always the story of Sarah Connor, and nobody could play that character like Linda could,” he says. “So if Linda would ever come back to check on her again, that would be the best of all possible worlds. And that is, of course, what happened.”

Hamilton explains why she decided to once again return to the Terminator universe and Sarah Connor’s seemingly endless battle to stop the onslaught of an ominous future.

“The fact that so many years have passed for the character of Sarah Connor intrigued me,” Hamilton says via email. “Certainly, events have marked her. I wanted to explore that… who is she NOW?” The actress says that she was “extremely hesitant” to return at first. “The first two films had such a complete arc for the character, and I only wanted to participate in this

project if there was something new and challenging to play,” she says, adding that Sarah is in a dark place when we meet her in the new film. “She is a wild thing still, but her mission has changed. The years have not treated her kindly.

She is bitter, near-broken, and very much alone.”

Regarding Hamilton’s absence from the saga for all these years, Miller muses, “I think that she felt like she said what she needed to say about that character and revisiting the well in some lesser form was not of interest to her. I wouldn’t say it took a little convincing because I honestly think that she wouldn’t have engaged in the conversation if she didn’t want to or didn’t have some hope that it would work out. Linda is very decisive, and all the factors aligned for her that now was the time to do it.”

For Schwarzenegger, it seemed like no time had passed at all when he reunited with his old sparring partner.

DEN OF GEEK 39

Mackenzie Davis plays a human/robot hybrid named Grace, a new heroine for the series.

It’s also her second synthetic role after Blade Runner 2049.

Gabriel Luna plays Rev-9, a new highly advanced Terminator that director Tim Miller describes as “essentially a T-800 and T-1000 together.”

“[Linda]’s always fun to work with and she’s just as intense now as she was when we did Terminator 2. She’s very adamant about the way she handles the weapons, the action, and all that.”

The legendary actor adds, “She’s a very strong woman and I think that one thing that always comes up is that, in all of these movies, the women are always kind of the leaders and they have the strong upper hand and are very heroic.

Cameron writes that very well. Feminine but also hard, it’s a great combination.”

If Schwarzenegger was impressed by Hamilton even after working with her before, the newcomers to the cast were even more awed. “She really resonates a type of cool toughness and is incredible to be around,” says Mackenzie Davis. “But she’s also the sweetest woman and so full of love. She does have this warrior’s exterior, and I imagine being in these movies has really shaped part of her. She’s tough and cool and she does seem like she could survive in the apocalypse but she’s also extremely loving. I got to work with her pretty much every single day for six months, and it was such a lovely experience.”

While plot details remain as secretive as Cyberdyne’s research and development wing, the story revolves around a woman named Dani Ramos (Reyes), who becomes the

target of a new liquid metal Terminator (Luna) sent from the future to kill her for reasons yet to be revealed. Dani falls under the protection of an android/human hybrid known as Grace (Davis) and ultimately is aided by both Sarah and the T-800 (Schwarzenegger) in her quest to stay alive.

Davis says her enigmatic character is a noble warrior.

“It was intimidating to play her. It’s a very athletic role and one I never really thought I would play or, if I did play it, not execute. I think she’s an interesting addition to the Terminator canon. She is working in service of the future and that’s a cool sort of mantle to carry.”

Davis’ character is described by Miller as an “augment”—a human who has been “enhanced” to fight the machines more effectively. “Mackenzie is a revelation and what a badass she is,” says Miller. “She’s faster than normal.

She’s stronger than normal. You give her a set of futuristic weapons, and she is a force to be reckoned with. [Augments] are the shock troops in the future war. But they feel pain.

They feel emotion. It’s a messy process; it’s imperfect; it’s not shiny and clean, but she’s fucking tough as nails.”

As for Dani, the woman that Grace and Sarah are determined to protect, Miller says, “Natalia is just wonderful all around. She brings a lot of emotion to this movie. The idea with Dani is you want to have this person, like with Sarah Connor, who comes from a background you would never expect someone to come from to then become one of the most important people in the future. I don’t want to tell you what Dani becomes, but I will tell you that she’s very much akin to the way Linda handled [the first movie].”

From what we can ascertain of the story based on the relatively small amount of footage we’ve seen, Davis, Hamilton, Reyes, and Schwarzenegger must square off against Luna’s Rev-9, an advanced Terminator that consists of a traditional solid endoskeleton surrounded by a “skin” of mimetic poly-alloy. What makes this machine especially dangerous is its ability to separate these two components into two, fully autonomous Terminator units.

“It’s essentially a T-800 and a T-1000 together,” says Miller, who notes that he wanted to keep the film’s action and visual effects on the same gritty level as the first two films. “I think that the DNA of Terminator is very grounded. It’s not space battles… I didn’t want to make a Terminator that was so powerful that you can’t fight it off with guns. I didn’t want to make a Terminator that could shoot ray blasts out of its hands or turn things into molten lava. All of that stuff, while visually spectacular, just doesn’t feel like a Terminator movie. We tried very hard to make Gabriel as formidable as possible while also keeping him and the action grounded.”

While much of that is no doubt achieved through CG, Luna says he marveled at the amount of work done on the set in-camera, and tells us that he had to get himself into top shape for the physical action scenes that are still part of the framework of any Terminator film: “Arnold laid the template and then Robert [Patrick] was this other version,”

DEN OF GEEK 41

By reprising Sarah Connor, Linda Hamilton steps back into the shoes of an icon. “The fact that so many years have passed for the character of Sarah Connor intrigued me... who is she NOW?�

IMAGE CREDIT: COURTESY OF PARAMOUNT PICTURES

says the actor. “I wanted to be the perfect hybrid of that. The But Miller maintains that the standard set by the powers of the character kind of lent itself to that anyway— franchise itself did not put any undue pressure on to be the perfect hybrid between the T-800 and the T-1000.

Terminator: Dark Fate. “It’s pretty hard to raise the bar on So I gained 14 pounds of muscle and I had never done that things like Avengers: Endgame or Avatar, or things like that,” before.” he explains. “Everybody likes a good spectacle but I think it Luna also earned the respect and approval of the man doesn’t have quite the same impact as it did when you saw who laid the groundwork for every Terminator since 1984. that first liquid metal man in Terminator 2. I like action and “He’s a hard-working guy and takes the role seriously I like spectacle, but I’m not like, ‘Oh my God, I have to do because he’s young and very agile and in good physical something I’ve never seen before.’” condition,” Schwarzenegger says about the new cyborg It was not about staging the biggest, most over-the-top on the scene. “He was willing to train really hard to action scenes possible for the filmmaker, but creating build his body and do all the stuff that he needed to do.” sequences that advanced the characters and story: “That Schwarzenegger adds that he pushed himself in the gym is one of the big things I learned about working with Jim as well to get back into T-800 form: “I trained my ass off for Cameron. Here’s a guy who approaches it from character the film. When you get to my age, you have to train twice as first and then does an action scene, and the action scenes much to get the same result as you did 20 years ago.” always seem to support the character so well. That’s one of Even though Luna is literally half Schwarzenegger’s the things I love best about his movies.” age, he said he had to up his own workout game once Although Terminator: Dark Fate essentially plays out as if the celebrated action star the three films after Terminator showed up on the set. “If 2 don’t exist, Miller insists I wasn’t inspired already, that the new movie stays true which I already was, his to the continuity and canon TO BE PART OF encouragement, his knowledge, established in the first two THE CONTINUATION and everything he could share movies.

OF THAT STORY with me just left a super strong “I don’t feel like I’m changing THAT I WATCHED imprint and became part of my the mythology,” he says. “I WITH MY JAW ON life,” says Luna. “Now it’s just think it’s a continuation of the THE FLOOR WHEN what it’s all about. The training cause and effect that [James hurts in the beginning, but you Cameron] set up in the other I WAS 12 YEARS keep on going and eventually it Terminator movies—which is OLD IS JUST stops hurting.” simply if you make a change INDESCRIBABLE. As for the T-800 himself, in the past, it will change the Schwarzenegger suggests the future. So you have to expect cyborg is pretty much the that what happened before, — GABRIEL LUNA same T-800 you saw in the or the history that Sarah had other movies, but Miller hints been told of the future, was at something a little different: “This version of Arnold is going to change. I don’t look at it as changing mythology. I something that Jim has been thinking about for a long look at it as the natural outcome of the set of rules that Jim time,” teases the director. “I think it’s a really great way for established in the first two movies.” him to come back to the franchise. I understood the other As for how this movie picks up the story where it left off movies and the way they handled him, but I didn’t want to at the end of Terminator 2, one of the stars of both is clear do that again. I really thought that the way to do something about it. It was Hamilton whose Sarah Connor memorably unique for this film was to have Arnold’s backstory and said, “the unknown future rolls toward us” at the end of the the way he interacts with the rest of the characters be second film. Now Hamilton explains, “This film is a direct something we hadn’t seen from that character before… but sequel to Judgment Day, but many years have passed. The I also think it has the expected amount of Arnold kicking story and timeline track very well.” ass.”

Perhaps the most exciting thing, however, is the “Arnold kicking ass” was a cornerstone of The Terminator anticipation of seeing Linda Hamilton and Arnold and Terminator 2: Judgment Day with the latter film in Schwarzenegger once again fighting together for that particular setting a benchmark for action, stunts, and unknown future. “One day I had them both looking down spectacular set-pieces that almost every high-stakes action the sights of long guns aimed at me,” says Gabriel Luna. movie since has aimed to match or exceed. “I would say “And I’m looking at both of them, thinking, ‘Holy fuck, this [this movie] is huge action-wise,” says Schwarzenegger, is a Terminator movie you’re in right now.’ To be part of the who certainly knows his way around the genre. “I was very continuation of that story that I watched with my jaw on the satisfied with the ideas and the big action that this movie floor when I was 12 years old is just indescribable.” has. It’s really wild.”

DEN OF GEEK 43

FILM

THE LONG SHADOW OF BATMAN PG. 46 • SPAWN AND RE-SPAWN PG. 52

What were the challenges in adapting this half of the novel?

It directly mirrors the events from their childhood in the book.

Do you feel more of a need to reimagine events?

COMING HOME TO PENNYWISE

Andy Muschietti on digging up the past, and Pennywise’s origins, in It Chapter Two.

BY DAVID CROW WHEN WE CATCH UP WITH ANDY MUSCHIETTI, THE DIRECTOR IS deep in It Chapter Two post-production. Despite having spent all day in-studio, listening to composer Benjamin Wallfisch’s new score of Derry-centric terror be recorded, he is audibly giddy about returning to that town in Maine with the monster living beneath. But then, Derry has that effect on folks. For years, Muschietti has obsessed about Stephen King’s town, Pennywise the Dancing Clown, and what facing It as an adult really means. Now and then.

Q&A

44 DEN OF GEEK

In the novel, Pennywise is described as much crueler and angrier. Are you and Bill [Skarsgård] taking him darker?

Is he less childlike this time?

He still keeps that childlike façade, because he still has to lure children to him, but he definitely has a side that is more vindictive.

You are expanding on Mike in a big way, as he’s the one who stayed behind. How has that affected him and is he more than a good-natured librarian?

The difference from the book is that in this movie, Mike has quite a bit more purpose in finding the key to kill Pennywise. It’s not about just doing

PHOTO CREDITS: WARNER BROS. ENTERTAINMENT INC.

Pennywise: A leaner, meaner clown in It Chapter Two.

ANDY MUSCHIETTI: There’s a lot of re-imagining. The story takes turns that are not in the book that I think people will appreciate, and even Stephen King appreciates—I should say that. But no, I think the challenge probably was instrumenting the flashbacks in a way that would still make the story move forward. When I made the first one, I knew that the second one, if I made it, would have that dialogue between the two timelines the way it is in the book.

Our challenge, when we started talking about how the second movie would go, was I knew that there were going to be flashbacks, but those flashbacks had to be integrated in each of the Losers’ journeys as part of the plot, the character moments. That was the challenge, and we managed to basically give them a very specific function in the drama.

research, finding out about It and the history. It’s more orientated toward finding the weapon or the key to It. So when we find Mike in the story, he’s more like a guy at the end of a rope.

A little desperate, because he’s run out of choices and he made a decision that will affect each one of the Losers, but from his perspective, it’s the only way… He interviewed every person in town that had an exchange or an event with It, no matter what or how old they are. When he came to a dead end, he went further. He came in contact with this community of natives that don’t live in Derry anymore, because they were wise… he starts drawing knowledge from their experience and he even goes into psychoactive experiences, and all of this takes a toll on him.

The original Losers’ Club (from left): Ben (Jeremy Ray Taylor), Eddie (Jack Dylan Grazer), Beverly (Sophia Lillis), Stanley (Wyatt Oleff), Bill (Jaeden Martell), Richie (Finn Wolfhard), and Mike (Chosen Jacobs).

To contrast that, how important is the success the rest of the Losers’ Club enjoys outside of Derry?

Does it feel like they’ve made a Faustian deal?

Yeah, it is, but the pact dies very soon.

They are summoned back to Derry and this is where the movie gets interesting.

In the book, as amazing as the book is, there’s really not a lot of reasons why they should stay in Derry. They could go back to their lives and just enjoy whatever they were doing in fucking New York or Nebraska. Of course they were broken on a deeper level. All of these characters were damaged and they had to face something that they were repressing, but they could actually turn their backs on Mike and go back to their hometown. In this movie… once they decide that they don’t want to be there, there’s an event that changes their mind.

I mean, they have no choice, actually.

How do you view James McAvoy’s Bill? In developing him as an author, were you taking any notes from knowing Stephen King?

Yes! We play with that a little bit.

Stephen King created Bill Denbrough as an alter-ego of himself, and it is no different in the movie. There’s some curious traits about Stephen that are translated into the portrayal of Bill, both for a little bit of levity, but also character construction, and we make fun of that a

The adult Losers return to a Derry they can never really leave, including (from left) Richie (Bill Hader), Beverly (Jessica Chastain), Bill (James McAvoy), Eddie (James Ransone), Mike (Isaiah Mustafa), and Ben (Jay Ryan).

bit. He’s a bestselling author that made his jump into the movies, and he’s now writing scripts, but he has a little bit of a problem with the endings, which is great character-wise, because that gives a lot for jokes, but also it’s a character that has problems with endings because he can’t find an ending for his own life.

How deeply are you exploring Pennywise? Will we learn his full origin in this movie?

We’ll learn something about Pennywise in this movie that we didn’t know before. There’s something very cryptic in the book. Everything that relates to Pennywise and Bob Gray is very cryptic, and it’s like that for a reason… We don’t know exactly what he is, where he comes from, or how Bob Gray is related. Was Bob Gray a real person? Is he incarnated in that thing because Bob Gray played a clown? He knew it attracted children, so that was a perfect bait?

We saw the Deadlights in the last movie. Is there a chance we could get a little more cosmic?

I tried to avoid the Macroverse in the first movie because the moment that you go to the other side [of the universe] and change the perspective of the storytelling, it becomes a different kind of movie. It becomes a fantasy movie or some sort of hybrid with a fantasy movie, and I didn’t want to go there on the first one.

I want to keep it relatively contained in the second one. I still believe in the same idea of keeping the perspective of our human characters and not jumping to the other side, because the moment you jump to the other side, you’re revealing things that are actually not cool to reveal if you want to maintain the tension and uncertainty. So expect a little bit of the other side.

It Chapter Two opens on Sept. 6.

DEN OF GEEK 45

THE LONG SHADOW OF

BATMAN Tim Burton’s Batman remains a singular blockbuster creation 30 years on.

by David Crow

46 DEN OF GEEK

T

HE TRUISM THAT ALL PRESS IS GOOD PRESS WAS

tested early and relentlessly during the production of Tim Burton’s Batman. In 1989, before the internet and superhero movie saturation, getting your quirky action movie hyped on the front page of The Wall Street Journal should have been a gift. But with a headline reading “Batman Fans Fear The Joke’s on Them in Hollywood Epic,” no producer was laughing eight months before the launch of an expensive gambit.

Such was the painful birth of Batman. While hardly the original big budgeted superhero movie, it would go on to become one of the most influential. As the first of its kind to forego an origin story and to expressly target an adult audience over the demands of strictly being a “family picture,” Batman deserves as much credit as Richard Donner’s Superman: The Movie for providing a foundational basis to its genre. Between these diametrically opposed poles, a new type of movie that would come to define 21st century cinema emerged. Yet there will never be another superhero movie quite like Batman, a fidgety and even transgressive blockbuster that still stands apart from (and above most) of its descendants. One made all the more compelling because it did something heretical by modern standards: it ignored fans in order to chase its own creative demons.

three days after hearing a pitch. Guber and Jon Peters’ Guber-Peters Company then negotiated a deal with Warner Bros., because its vice chairman Frank Wells was flabbergasted to learn that DC Comics had signed away the movie rights to a potentially lucrative intellectual property.

(Wells would tellingly go on to do amazing work at Disney.)

Yet even with Batman safely back home, WB struggled with what exactly a Batman movie should look like. By the time Hamm came aboard as screenwriter in 1986, he said WB had already commissioned and abandoned both a 1930s-set noir Batman film and a Batman comedy. However, the one that likely came closest to fruition was Ivan Reitman’s attempt that would have presumably lost the comedic trappings… but with Bill Murray as Batman.

OUT OF THE FUNNY PAGES

Three decades after Batman became one of the highest-grossing movies ever, it’s easy to forget what the world was like before Michael Keaton hissed, “I’m Batman.” In the 1980s, Batman comics were in the midst of a gritty aesthetic shift that would redefine the character. But when Sam Hamm began writing his first draft of the Batman script, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns had only published a few issues. For most, the character’s popular image remained the campy crime fighter of Adam West’s Batman TV series from the 1960s.

It was in this context that Bat-fan Michael Uslan broke into Hollywood. A newly minted lawyer who took more pride in teaching a graduate course on comic books at Indiana University than his law degree, the fledgling producer spent a decade pursuing a Batman movie after getting the rights from DC Comics. Many of those years, however, involved the rejection of his dark and brooding dream adaptation. In 2009, Uslan told an audience (that included this writer) about a United Artists executive who’d said that a Batman and Robin movie could never work because Robin and Marian flopped at the box office and “Robin has to be in the title.”

In earnest, the idea of returning to Bob Kane and Bill Finger’s original vision of a dark avenger of the night lacked appeal throughout Hollywood, even after Superman proved a man could fly in 1978. Well, most of it. Peter Guber took a shine to Uslan’s concept of a dark superhero movie and signed a contract with Uslan’s Batfilm Productions Inc. just

Tim Burton was under 30 when he made the superhero epic.

Prior to Reitman, WB tapped Tom Mankiewicz to write the screenplay. As the man most responsible for the final draft of Superman: The Movie, Mankiewicz was Hollywood royalty, having also written several James Bond movies in the ‘70s. He was hired to pen multiple drafts of Batman between 1981 and ’83, working with Reitman, and he adapted heavily from Steve Englehart and Marshall Rogers’ late ‘70s Detective Comics run where Batman dealt with dirty politicians and dying love interests.

Long before Burton famously had the Joker kill Bruce Wayne’s parents, Mankiewicz’s scripts essentially did the same by beginning with street thug Joe Chill murdering Thomas and Martha Wayne at the behest of the Joker— who, in turn, is a gangster working for corrupt politician Rupert Thorne. Yet what’s most striking is how much this take resembles Superman: The Movie by way of a Roger Moore-era 007 flick. While Christopher Nolan would also borrow from Donner’s template for Batman Begins, Mankiewicz much more clearly mimics that Superman script with bizarre twists. The film would’ve begun with Bruce Wayne as a child who, after seeing his parents

DEN OF GEEK 47

gunned down in the second scene, immediately begins to train his body and mind to be a superhero (by the age of 10 he’s already built a hologram). The movie would have also spent as much time developing Bruce’s apparently Herculean lothario prowess as it did his martial arts skills.

Mankiewicz’s script bears greatest similarity to many of the most popular superhero movies of today: a pretty standard origin story that imitates Donner with an underwhelming set of villains. The creative forces that would make Batman something dangerous had yet to arrive.

48 DEN OF GEEK

IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY IMAGES (ALL)

JUST A NUT IN A SUIT

Perhaps the most unsung hero in Batman’s genesis is a former Warner Bros. executive named Bonni Lee. A vice president in WB’s feature division at that time, Lee seemed to have a remarkable eye for talent, bringing Burton to Warners and Michael Keaton’s Batman has been described as eventually to the Dark Knight. having “crazy eyes.”

When Burton first caught Lee’s Maybe for good reason attention, the eccentric young given that suit weighed over 70 pounds. filmmaker didn’t have a feature to his name. He’d actually gone to school for animation, attending CalArts at the same time as Brad Bird (Incredibles, RataKeaton’s hero descends out of the shadows and onto two touille), John Lasseter (Toy Story, Pixar itself ), and Chris muggers, attacking them like a revenant, is more vampiric Buck (Frozen). Burton was part of the generation who’d than anything he’s ever made… and Burton directed a vamrevitalized Walt Disney Animation Studios but failed pire movie in 2012. to ever quite fit in at Disney, even as he directed several “I thought it was really the right thing [to do],” Burton short films there, including “Vincent” and “Frankenweesaid in the 2005 documentary Shadow of the Bat as to why he nie.” His bosses agreed they were both brilliant and also was ready to jump from quirky comedies to mega-budgeted agreed that Burton should be fired because there was no superhero movies. “Of just taking it a bit more seriously, way Disney could ever market them. (A decade later, they exploring the psychology of it. It felt like new territory for would release the Burton-produced The Nightmare Before that kind of movie at the time.”

Christmas.) In the interim, Lee saw “Vincent” at a festival It also required a rethinking of what a superhero movie and loved it so much that she shared it with Paul Reubens, could be, one that was miles away from what had been seen who was producing his starring vehicle, Pee-wee’s Big before or since. Owing a great deal to German ExpressionAdventure. He agreed to meet Burton. The success of that ism and film noir, Burton returned to the early 20th century movie gave way to Beetlejuice and WB greenlit Batman soon stylings that inspired Kane and Finger’s Batman. after. He was 28.

“The idea that interested us most was to go back to the Burton had never been a comic book guy. Growing up original Bob Kane notion, and we thought that was the as a somewhat disaffected youth, he preferred creating his version that would give us the most entry into the story we own characters to reading about costumed adventurers. wanted to tell,” Hamm said in Shadow of the Bat. “To kind Nevertheless, the iconography of Batman inspired his of go dark and misterioso meant we could also say we are imagination more than any other superhero, particularly going back to the roots of the character.” how Kane first drew him as a masked wraith of almost Hamm came aboard the project as an unapologetic Batsupernatural quality. The opening scene of Batman, where man fan… also at the guidance of Bonni Lee. Noticing one

of Mankiewicz’s Batman scripts in her office, Hamm spent months begging anyone at WB who would listen for a crack at adapting the Dark Knight, and it was Lee who facilitated his first meeting with Burton.

In a recent Back Issue interview for Batman’s 30th anniversary, Hamm recalled Burton saying, “The weird thing about Bruce Wayne is he’s this incredibly rich guy, but all he wants to do is put on a suit and beat up petty crooks. Why is that?”

Hamm’s answer was, “That’s the picture. That’s the mystery.”

in a suit” whose secrets were unearthed for the audience

by Vicki Vale. As Vicki discovers why the twitchy Bruce Wayne twitches so, we likewise learn what his proverbial “Rosebud” is: two dead and forgotten parents in an alley.

By existing during a period where studios ignored passionate adult fans, instead of trying to placate them, a space was created for Burton and Hamm’s more radical idea. A unique stylist and a fan of a different era of comics had the freedom to reinvent superheroes in a non-formulaic way.

Guber best described in 2005 how the film evolved after Burton came aboard: “What he baked into the process was the most important element in a film. He built risk into it. He said, ‘I’m going to take this to another place where there is not a lot of certainty. I’m going to give you variety.’ And that scares people.”

Keaton’s Batman is always gazing, surveying his rotting domain and happy with the shadow he casts. He is the proverbial devil dancing in his own moonlight.”

THE MORE IT SCARES THEM

Consequently, Batman became a story about a myth, a legend, a ghoul that everyone in Gotham is talking about.

This, for the record, is how the character was introduced in Detective Comics #27, but it is also an excuse to add the type of creative flourishes that no producer would dare allow a modern director to indulge with these characters. Prior to 1989’s movie, Gotham City was just a scuzzier New York City. It was Burton and Hamm’s flights of creative fancy that turned it into a Gothic hellscape in which the spires of crooked skyscrapers blotted out the sun while entangling atop each other.

It was “as if hell erupted through the sidewalks and kept on growing,” Hamm wrote in the first paragraph of his script, and Burton realized that vision by way of a sprawling urban decay reminiscent of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) in which the Art Deco city of tomorrow became a dystopian fate for humanity. Some of these impulses ironically brought Batman closer to the comics’ roots—Hamm’s idea of a permanently grinning Joker is a lift from Paul Leni’s The Man Who Laughs (1928), which was also the movie that inspired Finger to create the Joker—and others took it further from the source.

The result was an anachronistic vision of post-war noir and pre-war architecture festering together. Consider how the Joker’s unmasking scene in a surgeon’s chair is taken right out of the Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall noir, Dark Passage. These classical affectations spread beyond this movie as Gotham soon became synonymous with an Art Deco Hell in comics and cartoons.

The narrative similarly broke convention by electing to tell Batman’s story from an external point-of-view. While much more sophisticated in Hamm’s earlier drafts, the plan was always to have Batman be, in Hamm’s words, “just a nut

Batman’s biggest risk was the casting of Michael Keaton as Bruce Wayne. While news that Jack Nicholson would play the Joker was met with the same industry fanfare of Marlon Brando elevating Superman, the casting of Burton’s Beetlejuice had the opposite reaction.

“At first I thought it was a joke,” Uslan said in Shadow of the Bat. While still a producer on the project, he was also a self-described fanboy who had flashes of Adam West dancing before his eyes. “‘Yeah, Mr. Mom as Batman.’” It became front page news around the world, and on more than just The Wall Street Journal, as letters of complaint arrived at Warners by the thousands.

“There was no internet, no computers back then,” Uslan told Back Issue. “This came over conventional press. I thought they were going to surround Warner Bros. with torches and pitchforks. That’s really what it came down to.”

Burton and his studio had considered other actors. WB was interested in more traditional leading men of the day, including Harrison Ford, Tom Selleck, Kevin Costner, Dennis Quaid, and particularly Mel Gibson. Burton, for his part, had circled back to Bill Murray before deciding to go with his Beetlejuice leading man, a choice that, in retrospect, seems ingenious.

While Keaton was primarily known for comedies at the time, he also had what Burton aptly described as “crazy eyes.” When Keaton’s distracted take on Bruce Wayne suddenly grows still, his gaze hollows out, and there is something otherworldly in his unhinged presence. Most recall the moment when Bruce has a flash of madness in front of the Joker, and Keaton goes as big as Nicholson by shouting, “You want to get nuts? C’mon let’s get nuts!” But more impressive is the way Bruce slowly transforms from introvert to apparition with nary a word.

DEN OF GEEK 49

As Uslan often recounts, Burton assuaged his fears by saying, “I don’t exactly know how to put a serious actor into a Batman costume without getting inadvertent laughs from the audience… [but I do] know with Michael Keaton, you could create a portrayal of this driven and consumed Bruce Wayne and audiences would go, ‘Yeah, yeah, he could do that.’”

Thus Keaton’s Batman is a creature of compulsion and an unnerving departure from the comics. He goes out at night in order to beat criminals with his bare hands. He doesn’t save the victims of muggers; their pain gives him permission to release his own. There is no bigger plan here about “saving Gotham.”

By contrast, Nicholson was welcomed with open arms.

Likely the flashiest performance in superhero movie history, it was the part everyone thought Nicholson was born to play. Uslan and Kane both claimed they took home a publicity photo of the actor in The Shining, circa 1980, and colored it with whiteout and red and green markers.

Yet no one thought Nicholson would do the film, even after negotiations began. In fact, the actor vacillated long enough that WB signed Tim Curry to a handsome pay-orplay deal. After hearing this, Nicholson quickly agreed to a price point that included backend residuals on Batman and its sequels, and Curry was paid not to play the Joker.

Nicholson seemed to thrill at the idea of becoming the Clown Prince of Crime, which was beefed up and rewritten for his own distinct brand of scenery-chewing.

During the Shadow of the Bat doc, Nicholson said, “My early experience told me from working for an audience full of children, the more you scare them, the more they like it… because that was my response to the Joker. I mean, after all, this is a hateful occurrence, this man, if you looked at it literally.”

The result is one of the great screen villains and a showcase for one of the great movie stars of the late 20th century.

While not nearly as immersive or terrifying as Heath Ledger’s arguably even more iconic terrorist-turned-supervillain in The Dark Knight, Nicholson’s is the closest we’ve come to the comic book Joker: a narcissistic psychopath out for a laugh and self-aggrandizement. Like Nicholson’s Jack Torrance, his Joker is a malevolent presence who invites audiences to thrill at the sight of an axe swing or murderous joy-buzzer.

The final lead’s casting turned out to be the most last-minute. While Sean Young (Blade Runner, Stripes) was originally hired to play Vicki Vale, the actress was forced to exit one week before cameras rolled after sustaining a horseback riding injury (for a scene that would soon be cut). As a result, Kim Basinger was cast and flown to the film’s British sets at Pinewood Studios, all in the same day.

Best known at the time for The Natural, Basinger had a life-changing experience on Batman. In 2005, she compared her first day on set to being Alice walking through the Looking Glass. “I remember the first day I walked on the set, and I said, ‘This is not a movie, this is an experience, this is a phenomenon.’” She was not wrong.

The result was an anachronistic vision of post-war noir and pre-war architecture festering together.”

THE DEVIL IN THE PALE MOONLIGHT

The impact Batman continues to leave on popular culture transcends its production and 126-minute runtime. It spawned the modern studio hype machine, building off the blockbuster model pioneered by Jaws and Star Wars, and became one of the highest-grossing movies ever at that time via the media hurricane publicists dubbed “Batmania.”

The cacophony of success became so loud that it still often overshadows how good a movie it actually is.

Heightened by Burton’s fairytale-like imagination, Batman is an operatic and unusual blockbuster about damaged people who do not become less damaged simply because their misery finds company. Bruce, the Joker, and even Vicki are all oddballs who have an allergic reaction to culturally accepted normalcy. The Joker redecorates everything

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orderly and respectable in his own garish image, and Batman is not that different, stamping his sigil on every object in his Batcave and only resting easily when he sleeps upside down like a rodent. (Lucky for him, Vicki “likes bats.”)

When Batman says the Joker is psychotic, she reminds him that “some people would say the same thing about you.”

The hero’s response is a deflection: “What people?” Hardly a denial.

These themes would be more richly explored in Burton’s Batman Returns, but they’re present enough to underline a chilling sense of despair when Michael Gough’s Alfred Pennyworth remarks, “I have no wish to spend my few remaining years grieving over the loss of old friends or their sons.” Bruce again has no answer, because there is nothing happy to say about his life. He’s a sick man who has no desire to see himself cured.

This quirk of personality provides enough of a psychological underpinning to the proceedings to let Burton have fun with the material. On one level, Burton is further refining his satire of yuppies in Beetlejuice to a sharper point, poking at the materialism and greed of the Reagan The Joker’s Years. The Joker’s early victims permanent grin are supermodels and anyone in inspired by the German who dabbles in perfumes and Expressionist cologne—turning the vanity of movie, The Man his age into a tasteless punchline.

Who Laughs (1927). That film By the end of the film though, he also inspired the is a famous murderer, gangster, original comic and terrorist. Yet he also prombook Joker. ises to toss out $20 million in cash to anyone who turns up downtown at midnight. For his efforts, thousands of Americans appear ready to die laughing for their money.

Burton would develop these satirical sensibilities with greater sophistication in his next few films, but they’re present here, as is an unfiltered Gothic and Expressionist revelry. The two biggest creative assets to this are Anton Furst and Danny Elfman. The former was the brilliant production designer and the other an untested composer, and both have as much to do with defining Batman’s identity as the director. Furst is the one who built about five blocks of urban nightmare behind Pinewood Studios for the picture.

It won him an Oscar and is chiefly responsible for our image of Batman’s world to this day.

It also inspired Elfman’s score, which embraced the curdled grandeur of crumbling Art Deco. When he was hired

as Burton’s continued musical collaborator, there was some doubt, not least of all from producer Jon Peters, who wanted something Wagnerian. Yet when Elfman began playing “The Batman March” during a tense workshop, it changed the direction of the picture. Together the music, set-design, and overarching vision mesh into a film that remains timeless 30 years on. It’s an anachronistic

Neverland of squalor where 1970s clunkers clash with ‘40s fedoras and ‘80s gowns; where technology is out of the past, and the music rises like an aria.

The end of the film, where Basinger’s Vicki is alone on an empty street—but not lonely—illustrates the visual and aural decadence of the piece with all the comfort of a storybook. Above her, the Bat-Signal shines bright and “The Batman March” murmurs on a hopeful flute. She ultimately disappears among Furst’s enormous sets and Elfman’s triumphant crescendo (complete with church bells), and the camera rises on a mythic image of a living gargoyle gazing into the night. Keaton’s Batman is always gazing, surveying his rotting domain and happy with the shadow he casts. He is the proverbial devil dancing in his own moonlight.

DEN OF GEEK 51

52 DEN OF GEEK

SPAWN Q&A

AND

RE- SPAWN Todd McFarlane on what it’s like to bring Spawn from the page to the big screen... again.

T

BY ROSIE KNIGHT Todd McFarlane is one of the most influential comics creators of the last 30 years.

As a vital part of the team that founded Image Comics in 1992, he changed the shape of the industry forever. The creator-owned publisher also became the home of McFarlane’s flagship creation, Spawn, and now almost three decades later, the writer and artist is trying his hand at directing with an R-rated Spawn movie from Blumhouse Productions. We spoke with McFarlane about creating, directing, and why the time is right for a new Spawn movie.

Looking back 27 years to when you created Al Simmons, did you ever think that there’d be a time when you’d be directing a Spawn movie?

TODD MCFARLANE: Well, even back in the ‘90s, we had the Tim Burton Batman movie and the Superman movies with Christopher Reeve, so the possibilities were there. Obviously, it was a long shot, but for me when we started Image Comics there were four pillars that I was aiming for. One was to do Spawn toys, one was to do video games, one was to do television, and then one was to do a movie. I got lucky that I was able to touch all four of those, although the toy one I ended up doing on my own. But I felt that if you could touch those four areas and put those pillars on a strong foundation of a solid storyline and character, then just like in real architecture,

you could build a skyscraper on one foundation.

There were always goals, but you have to be somewhat realistic. I got lucky because when Spawn first came out it went to the top of the charts. And whenever you have anything that gets to the top of any chart—I don’t care what business you’re in—then people start paying attention, asking questions, and inquiring about opportunities. When people saw Image and Spawn were at the top, then the phone starts to ring and people go, “Oh my gosh, it’s outselling X-Men and Superman and Batman.” So they just made some leaps in logic. “Oh, Spawn’s selling more than Batman, it must be better than Batman.” Which wasn’t true obviously, but it was good fortune for me that the phone was ringing in the first place.

Why is the time right for a gritty, horror-drenched Spawn movie?

Enough time has passed since the first movie that came out in 1997, so at that point you could either do a retelling of it or you DEN OF GEEK 53

In the current superhero movie landscape, what are some of the challenges of bringing Spawn to the big screen?

If you take a step back and you look at the success of the Venom movie and Aquaman—and to some degree even Captain Marvel—when you see the number of dollars that are being brought in overseas, that’s the key to the success of these films. When I see that Aquaman is doing $700-800 million overseas, the reality is that there aren’t a lot of stores overseas that sell American comic books. So that means that the vast majority of viewers in Aquaman’s case have probably never ever had an Aquaman comic book in their hands. So what they were going for was, “Ah, that looked like a cool trailer, and it looks like it might be a fun ride, I’m going to go for it.” I have to do the same thing.

Ultimately, once we get into production and we make a movie, the trailer is going to do all the talking for us. Globally, people are going to either go to YouTube, watch the trailer, and make a quick decision on whether it’s something that they think they will enjoy for their $10 or not. They’ll go, “Oh, I don’t know what Spawn is, but that looks pretty wicked.” Or they’re going to go, “Eh, I watched it. Not my thing.”

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The cover for Spawn’s historical 300th issue riffs on Todd McFarlane’s iconic cover for The Amazing Spider-Man #300

I have to make sure that I’m acknowledging the average moviegoer because if you get too geeky, then to me, you can potentially alienate a certain group if you don’t have 10 years of films behind you like the MCU. They’ve now built that geek [recognition] and people will go for the ride. You say “Marvel” and everybody jumps on board. I’m not going to have that luxury, so I need to just go into a standalone single movie and answer “is this worth your $10 today?”

For you personally, what’s the biggest drive to make the Spawn movie?

Just getting it out of my body so that I don’t go to the top of the mountains and just scream naked and become a serial killer if I don’t. I have to get it out in some form at some point, and then once you do that, just stepping back and seeing whether it was self-serving or whether there’s an audience that will go for the ride with you. I’ve been very fortunate in my career that, almost at the very beginning of nearly everything I do, I’m trying to entertain myself first. Part of that is because, especially in comic books, it can be a very lonely occupation. You sit in a room for 10 hours by yourself [with] your thoughts, and if you’re not doing stuff that excites you, then I think it shows on the page.

So I’m hoping that the same sort of attitude happens with Spawn where I just say, “I’m a little bit older, I’m a little bit more mature. I’m looking for something a little more sophisticated.”

I’m not saying that PG-13 superhero movies are bad, and quite the contrary, they’re awesome. I think there’s enough diet there for people to feast off. Why would I add another one to that smorgasbord?

You’re about to hit a milestone with Spawn #301, which will make it the longest running independent comic book series. How does that feel?

I’ve got a panel at San Diego Comic-Con this year and the message is, “Forget Todd, forget Image, forget Spawn, even to some extent forget comic books.” What Spawn #301 represents to me is just that you can come up with an idea, you can start the idea, and 30 years later you could still be in control of that idea. On any level, I don’t care what medium or what business or what industry. That’s the idea that I’m hoping to get up on that stage and inspire in people.

ARTIST CREDITS: SPAWN #300 MAIN SPLASH COVER: PENCILS AND INKS BY GREG CAPULLO, COLORS BY FCO PLASCENCIA, SPAWN #300 SPIDER-MAN VARIANT: PENCILS, INKS, AND COLORS BY TODD MCFARLANE

could do a reinvention of it.

Either way, anybody who is 20 years old wasn’t even on the planet then when the last movie came out. So there’s a gap there where people wouldn’t necessarily be comparing it directly.

I’m 30 years older now, and so the things that appeal to me as a 50-year-old are not necessarily the same things that appealed to me when I was 20 years old.

Given that I’m still driving this character called Spawn, for my own entertainment I can’t go back and do something that essentially the first movie did. It was a PG-13 comic book action movie, and it hit all the marks. So if people want that version, go watch that movie.

I’m acknowledging that the vast majority of the people who are still following Spawn are now much older because they started a decade or two decades ago. Now they’re adults, so give them an adult movie.

When people ask, “Why are you still evolving Spawn?” it’s because Todd McFarlane is still the guy writing the stories, and I would’ve gone creatively insane if I was still writing the same stories that essentially felt like issues one through five.

SPONSORED CONTENT

Why The Muppet Movie Endures

The Muppet Movie will return to theaters for two days in July for its 40th anniversary. BY CHRIS CUMMINS

“M

ore entertaining than humanly possible!”

Those words, emblazoned atop the poster for The Muppet Movie, were a tongue-in-cheek reminder of how the film would be unlike anything audiences had seen before.

And indeed it was. In many ways, the Muppets’ first cinematic outing was the culmination of Jim Henson’s desire to bring the art of puppetry to audiences on a scale that had never been previously attempted.

By the time of the film’s release in summer 1979, the Muppets were already stars in their own right thanks to frequent television appearances (including on Sesame Street, Saturday Night Live and, of course, The Muppet Show). Yet the prospect of their own feature still seemed like a dicey one.

Concerns ranging from the practical to the technical reared their ugly heads. Then there was the issue of whether audiences would be willing to pay to see Kermit the Frog and company on the big screen when they were used to getting them for free on TV. But in the end, creativity prevailed: The Muppet Movie was a critical and financial triumph.

his Schwinn. Achieving all of this would be a remarkable feat in and of itself, but Henson, Frank Oz, and director James Frawley weren’t content to stop there.

They wanted the film to be nothing short of a call to arms for viewers to embrace their own creative spirit.

The songs of The Muppet Movie (written by Paul Williams and Kenneth Ascher) share a corresponding mindset.

Much has been written about how “The Rainbow Connection” has the Pavlovian ability to bring members of Generation X to tears instantly. While it is no doubt a powerful song–and a rightful contemporary standard–there are two other tracks on the film’s

THE MUPPET MOVIE WILL SCREEN IN MORE THAN 700 MOVIE THEATERS NATIONWIDE ON THURSDAY, JULY 25, AND TUESDAY, JULY 30 AT 12:30 P.M. AND 7 P.M. (LOCAL TIME) EACH DAY. PHOTO CREDITS: FATHOM EVENTS / DISNEY

VISIT FATHOMEVENTS.COM FOR MORE INFO. Forty years after its initial release, The Muppet Movie remains the definitive cinematic outing for these characters because it manages to accomplish so much in its brief 95-minute runtime. It’s an origin story, a road movie, a romance, a comedic romp, a Western, and a musical – narratively skipping through each genre as gracefully as Kermit rides

soundtrack that feel more urgent when viewed from a 2019 point of view: “I’m Going to Go Back There Someday” and “Finale: The Magic Store.”

The former is sung by Gonzo, as it appears that he and his friends’ dreams of getting to Hollywood to make the big time have come to an end. Looking up at the stars and

yearning to be among them, he belts out the film’s most sincere lyrics.

“There’s not a word yet for old friends who’ve just met. Part heaven, part space, or have I found my place?” he plaintively asks. At this point, the movie reveals what it is truly about: the importance of finding one’s tribe.

These oddball characters have all been brought together by Kermit’s desire to entertain, one that becomes a shared ideal and unifier. The message here is simply that no matter your background, you can find your chosen family.

In “Finale: The Magic Store,” the Muppets’ dreams have come true and yet there is still much work to be done. “Keep believing, keep pretending, we’ve done just what we’ve set out to do,” Kermit states. There’s still truth to this declaration, especially in a time where negativity reigns. With The Muppet Movie, Henson and his colleagues aimed to encourage others to pursue their passions. Four decades on, the film’s fans have taken its message to heart and done just that, as will generations of lovers and dreamers to come.

PRESENTED BY

DEN OF GEEK 55

GAMES

PARANOID ANROID PG. 56 • GAMING’S GREAT ANTI-REVENGE STORY PG. 58

PARANOID ANDROID

The impact of Google Stadia could extend far beyond gaming. BY MATTHEW BYRD FEAR OF THE FUTURE IS FEAR OF the unknown, and when it comes to gaming, there’s no bigger unknown than Google Stadia. However, those who fear Google Stadia the most aren’t concerned with questions about its game lineup, its latency, or its

56 DEN OF GEEK

subscription fee. No, they’re scared of the dystopian implications of Google’s new cloud gaming service.

Google Stadia promises to offer subscribers high-end console gaming without the console. Instead, users stream games from Google’s

data centers, and the power of this technology has many convinced that it’s the future of gaming. In fact, Sony, Microsoft, and others are already working on competing cloud services.

Cloud gaming may be the future, but in the present, it first has to overcome the legal challenges to net neutrality. In the United States, laws requiring internet service providers to treat all online data equally, without favoring certain services over others or charging a higher fee for them, were rolled back in 2018. That means that ISPs could theoretically chop the internet into content “packages,” similar to what cable providers offer.

IMAGE CREDIT: GETTY / JUSTIN SULLIVAN

Attendees tested Google Stadia at GDC 2019.

Some ISPs have said they wouldn’t do that, but in 2014, Comcast attempted to charge Netflix a fee to use its network due to the popularity of the streaming service and the amount of data it consumed. The two media giants eventually reached an agreement after the FCC stepped in, but without net neutrality laws, who’s to stop ISPs from charging companies and consumers additional fees for specific services?

Netflix’s 4K streaming uses about 3-7GB of data an hour. Early reports indicate that Google Stadia 4K

streaming could use up to 15GB an hour. Even ISPs that don’t currently enforce data caps will surely be tempted to use that figure to justify

“CLOUD GAMING MAY BE THE FUTURE, BUT IN THE PRESENT, IT FIRST HAS TO OVERCOME THE LEGAL CHALLENGES TO NET NEUTRALITY.” Google vice president and general manager Phil Harrison shows the new Stadia controller.

separating certain internet services into premium packages. If you don’t believe that’s the case, you haven’t been paying attention to the history of capitalism.

In fact, the only future to fear more than one where Stadia leads to paying more for internet services that offer less is the one where Google expands its own ISP to solve a problem it helped create.

Google’s internet service (known as Fiber) is currently only available in fewer than 20 cities due largely to fiber wire infrastructure requirements and political pushback. Many have said that Google started Fiber in an effort to disrupt the industry and the almost unchecked practices of ISPs. In some Fiber cities, like Austin and Atlanta, Google has already forced ISPs such as AT&T to lower their prices and improve their services.

With Stadia, Google is poking the ISP bear in another way. Should the ISPs poke back with premium packages and data throttling, Google could elect to begin a new initiative designed to get Google-branded internet into more homes, Fiber or not. You can see the tagline now: “Google Internet: No Caps, No Throttling, Unlimited Gaming.”

But would that also mean Google throttling competing services in order to highlight its own?

In a world where Google already offers a growing phone service, the world’s most popular search engine, the world’s most popular browser, and an advanced AI program, the idea of the tech giant becoming the most popular internet provider triggers visions of a digital empire many already refer to as “Skynet.”

Google Stadia may not equal a world overrun by killer robots, but it could very well be the service that forces ISPs to reveal the extent of their greed. Once that happens, consumers may be forced to choose which corporate giant stands above us all.

DEN OF GEEK 57

GAMES

Series protagonist Ryo Hazuki enjoys some time off at the arcade.

GAMING’S GREAT ANTI-REVENGE STORY THE UPCOMING RELEASE OF Shenmue III is a divisive one. It’s an appropriate reaction to the longgestating next installment in an action-adventure franchise whose blend of quirky thrills and indifference to action has captured – and chased away – players since 1999.

Shenmue is an epic saga about a young man named Ryo Hazuki who sets out to avenge the murder of his father. Along the way, Hazuki must uncover the truth behind dark family secrets, embrace his destiny, carry some crates, look for sailors, take care 58 DEN OF GEEK

of his cat, and visit the arcade. Yes, for a tale of revenge, Shenmue is an uncharacteristically monotonous game.

Monotony can be enjoyable if you’re visiting the same bar with the same friends, but Shenmue wasn’t billed as a night of comfort and familiarity. The first game was hyped as something that the gaming world had never seen before.

Instead, a typical day in the game sees you wake up in your home and slowly make your way into town.

Manage to survive an army of loading screens and you will likely need to ask locals for directions through stilted

dialogue sequences. If you’re lucky, you’ll arrive at your objective in time.

More often than not, you’ll need to kill time by hanging out or going to sleep and waiting for the next day. For a game that starts off with a thrilling sequence that promises an actionpacked narrative adventure, Shenmue proves to be remarkably light on action, narrative, and adventure.

Some defend Shenmue’s gameplay as a hardcore experience that doesn’t cater to the masses. In reality, it’s much more likely that the Shenmue team was forced to slow the gameplay down

IMAGE CREDIT: DEEP SILVER

The controversial Shenmue used life’s “boring” moments to demystify the revenge hero. BY MATTHEW BYRD

to a crawl simply because nobody knew how to pace an open-world game featuring hundreds of unique locations and characters that the player could interact with at any time.

“SHENMUE NOT ONLY PERFECTLY CAPTURES THE FALLACY OF REVENGE BUT SHOWS HOW GAMES CAN CAPTURE THE ESSENCE OF THE HUMAN EXPERIENCE.” Yet, there is something beautiful about Shenmue’s repetitive and dry gameplay. Through its depiction of everyday monotony, Shenmue not only perfectly captures the fallacy of revenge but shows how games can capture the essence of the human experience. Ryo Hazuki’s cold dish of revenge is served with a side of humble pie. He’s not as great a fighter as he thinks he is, he doesn’t know that much about his target – he’s barely a fully-functioning adult.

Unlike most action heroes, he’s also burdened with basic human needs. He needs to eat, sleep, and find ways to make money. The real hurdles in Ryo’s way are the things that most of us deal with on a daily basis.

It’s not exactly romantic, but that’s the point. Shenmue dares to ask, “What if the horrors of revenge are shown through the lens of someone who must learn what life is about once the thrill of payback is gone?”

Even Shenmue’s action takes a cynical approach to romanticizing revenge. The game’s combat system is a modified take on the Virtua Fighter formula, turning each sequence into a side-scrolling brawler akin to most fighting games. This means your stage is limited and your only option is violence. There’s a perverse joy in being able to break through all the monotony with some good old-fashioned fisticuffs, but these sequences highlight how limited your

worldview is when forced to reduce your ambitions to beating up bad guys.

The same is true of the game’s QTE sections, which only allow you to react.

Shenmue trains you to recognize scenes of violence and chaos as rewards for putting up with the “boring” moments, but its action is usually easier than the little slices of life it forces you to endure, solve, and overcome. Besides, there are few fights and chase sequences in Shenmue that aren’t done better in other titles. It’s all the ordinary moments in between that make them feel special.

It’s not a perfect experience. Yet, it’s

impossible to deny Shenmue’s most captivating message: We as humans should take comfort in day-to-day life rather than cursing it when it interferes with a goal whose completion will ultimately put us back on the path of daily existence.

We cheer for the heroes in revenge films because they seek justice and harbor a fire nothing can quench.

Shenmue shows us that life’s greatest heroes are sometimes those who have mastered the art of simply being.

The third chapter in the Shenmue series releases on Nov. 19 for PlayStation 4 and PC.

Ryo shows off his martial arts skills in Shenmue III.

In Shenmue III, Ryo journeys through China in search of his father’s killer, main villain Lan Di.

DEN OF GEEK 59

CULTURE 50 YEARS OF SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON PG. 62

GOT VLIX?

The wild backstory behind the rarest commercially-released Star Wars figure.

BY BRIAN VOLK-WEISS, CREATOR OF THE TOYS THAT MADE US LET’S START WITH THE ELEPHANT in the room: no, I don’t have one. Yet. Vlix Oncard is the rarest action figure ever commercially released.

That’s the sort of thing one learns when doing a deep dive into the research required when starting production on my series, The Toys That Made Us. I know—I can hear some of you out there yelling, “No, rocket-firing Boba Fett is the rarest action figure ever produced!” Well, the major caveat here is the words “commercially released.” Poor springloaded Boba never made it to the store shelves, but Vlix actually did. How did he manage that? And also, who the #@&! is Vlix?

Vlix was a minor character in the 1980s Star Wars spin-off cartoon Droids. Debuting on ABC in 1985, it ran for only one season of 13 episodes before being canceled. It chronicled the adventures of R2-D2 and C-3PO prior to the events of the first Star Wars film, and featured a theme song

by Stewart Copeland of The Police.

Incidentally, this is one of the only Star Wars theme songs with lyrics: “Steppin’ softly in a danger zone No weapon in my hand It’s just this brain, designed by man…”

My research had led me into my very own, and very expensive, “danger zone.” Whatever gene makes people susceptible to the temptation of collecting, I definitely possess it. The 60 DEN OF GEEK

more I learned about Vlix, the greater the chances were of me coming to think no collection would be complete without him.

But first, let’s establish the myth behind the plastic: Vlix is a native of the planet Annoo, which makes him a member of the Annoo-dat Blue species. He is rotund and bald, a blue male humanoid who appears to be wearing an ascot, and he worked as an enforcer for the infamous Fromm

A VLIX FIGURE OUT OF ITS ORIGINAL PACKAGING CAN COMMAND A PRICE BETWEEN $5,000 AND $20,000.

Gang. His last name was never established in the series, so “Oncard” is an inside joke among collectors about the fact that it is almost impossible to find a Vlix action figure still affixed to the cardboard he was packaged in—something commonly referred to as still being “on card.”

How Vlix came to be the rarest commercially released action figure ever is an interesting tale involving minor corporate intrigue, Brazilians, and a fire.

Kenner had the exclusive contract to produce all Star Wars-related toys,

including Droids. Unfortunately for them, the show was canceled before they managed to release the Vlix action figure. They had, however, already spent the money to create the molds from which Vlix would be cast. Even for Kenner, this was no small expenditure, and in an effort to recoup at least some of their cost, they sold these molds to a Brazilian toy company called Glasslite.

Founded in the 1960s in Sao Paulo, Glasslite achieved great success by manufacturing and distributing toys in Brazil based on successful American television shows, among them The A-Team, Knight Rider, and Thundercats, before closing their doors in 2002.

In 1987, Glasslite used the molds to produce a small number of Vlix action figures (thought to be around 2,000) and got them to store shelves by the time Droids aired in Brazil in early 1988. The problem was Lucasfilm had no idea that Kenner had sold them to Glasslite. Once they realized Vlix was hitting South American store shelves, they protested and ordered the figures immediately recalled and destroyed.

But by that time some (no one knows exactly how many) had already been sold. It is rumored that a warehouse fire then further depleted the bald and blue-green headcount. Finding one on the card… well, you’ll probably have better luck finding a potted baby Sarlacc.

Vlix didn’t mean very much for about 20 years, but then toy collecting became a big thing. Today, a Vlix figure out of its original packaging can command a price between $5,000 and $20,000. One still in its packaging (i.e. “on card”) can fetch between $45,000 to $60,000. Not too bad for a fellow who only appeared in a few episodes

IMAGE CREDIT: GUS LOPEZ (VLIX), UNSPLASH (BACKGROUNDS)

Vlix Oncard was a minor character from the Star Wars spinoff cartoon Droids.

The bald, blue male humanoid lives on in infamy as the holy grail of rare Star Wars action figures.

of what was considered a failed cartoon.

When The Toys That Made Us was greenlit, I had heard of, but knew very little about, Vlix. One of the pleasures of producing a program like Toys is the in-depth research you get to do as part of your work. Already a huge Star Wars fan, I jumped into the task with joy and became obsessed with Vlix and his story as soon as I learned all the details. When we delivered our first cut of the “Star Wars” episode to Netflix it was about 2 ½ hours long— including a five-minute segment about

Vlix! When the first round of notes came back from our wonderful executive Nat Grouille, he said (correctly) that the episode was far too long—we needed to get our run time under an hour.

“Why can’t we do a two-hour episode?” I asked—this was Star Wars, after all! Nat said we were making the show for all fans, not just the hardcore ones, and there was plenty of fat to cut—for example, he felt certain the world didn’t need a five-minute sequence on Vlix.

I took the news hard. Poor Vlix had barely made it to the stores back in the ‘80s, then been recalled, of all things, and now he was being cut from our episode. How many indignities did this poor Annoo-dat have to endure?

Nat was right, of course, and we lost my beloved Vlix segment (don’t worry, it’ll be on the upcoming Blu-ray). But as a result, Vlix, and my enthusiasm for him, had become a running joke around the office. So much so that the wrap gift for season one of Toys was a magnet of the show’s logo accompanied by Vlix (as was our Star Wars Celebration 2019 pin).

Since then, “Vlix” has become shorthand at our production company Nacelle for anything in an episode of any series we produce which is good but needs to be cut in order to make the show work as a whole. I regularly hear editors, producers, and showrunners casually referring to these necessary sacrifices in the name of tightening as a “Vlix”—and I’m certain some of them don’t even know the origin of the term.

So, why don’t I have a Vlix of my own? Not for lack of trying. There was an auction last year where I fully intended to get one, but the date got mixed up on my calendar and I missed it. But this may not be the end of the world; instead of 3 ¾ inches of plastic to be kept locked away in a safe, I can buy a really nice car, or half a year of college for my kids, or all the other Star Wars figures and vehicles ever made (not all “on the card” of course). Outlook may have kept me out of a Stewart Copeland song, because for some of us, toy collecting is a real danger zone.

“I wouldn’t care but it’s a dangerous affair Cause I’m in trouble again, trouble again In trouble, in trouble, in trouble.”

If you haven’t heard the Droids theme, make sure you check it out – it’s very special, in a blue milk kind of way!

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With an average of more than 134,000 attendees every Con this decade, San Diego Comic-Con remains the ultimate destination for nerd culture. 2015 had the highest attendance at more than 167,000.

POP CULTURE

BY AARON SAGERS

SAN DIEGO COMIC-CON, CELEBRATING ITS 50TH ANNIVERSARY THIS YEAR, WENT FROM HOTEL BASEMENT TO THE MECCA OF ALL COMIC CONVENTIONS. 62 DEN OF GEEK

IMAGE CREDIT: GABRIEL OLSEN/GETTY IMAGES

W

hether you know it best as San Diego Comic-Con, Comic-Con, or SDCC, for more than 130,000 people annually, ComicCon International: San Diego is the show for fandom. There were cons held before SDCC (New York Comicon, 1964), and there are larger ones (Comiket in Japan, with more than half a million attendees), but the San Diego-based nonprofit event, celebrating its 50th, is The Con. Each year, San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter is overtaken by fans celebrating pop culture, an entertainment industry seeking to generate buzz, and media outlets from all over the world covering it. The city also benefits financially: the event produced a $147 million regional impact during fiscal year 2018, according to the San Diego Convention Center Corporation research.

“It is the start of the geek year, essentially, where we learn about everything we look forward to that is coming out for the next 12 months,” says Kevin Smith, director of Jay and Silent Bob Reboot. “Some cultures have Year of the Rabbit, Year of the Chicken, and the year of the geek always begins at Comic-Con.” He adds it’s almost a religious experience, saying, “We head down there in the belief that they’re going to show us things, we’re going to see things that are going to hold us over for an entire year and make us excited—and faith is always rewarded at Comic-Con.” “It is the Super Bowl of nerd-dom, the crown jewel of nerd and geek culture,” says actress Felicia Day, who created The Guild and Geek & Sundry—and is author of the recently announced book, Embrace Your Weird: Face Your Fears and Unleash Creativity.

“I’ve gone to Super Bowls, and I could tell you that the San Diego Comic-Con is bigger than the Super Bowl,” adds Todd McFarlane, creator of Spawn and co-founder of Image Comics. “That’s a one-day event, and everybody gets excited and mills around the stadium, [but] we’ve been here for days and days, and that street in front of the Convention Center never thins out.”

“It’s a bit of a throwback to carnivals that came through your local town, and P.T. Barnum,” says Bruce Campbell, Comic-Con favorite and host of Travel Channel’s Ripley’s Believe It or Not!.

DC co-publisher Dan DiDio adds, “It’s a cultural stop point, it’s what you hear, it’s what people talk about, and it’s the Holy Grail of conventions.”

“It’s somewhere like Mardi Gras, or Burning Man,” says Rob Salkowitz, author of Comic-Con and the Business of Pop Culture. “Or, topically, like a Gay Pride parade that started out as a [subcultural] thing, and now, not everybody who goes to Gay Pride parade is gay, but everybody that’s there is there to celebrate the culture.”

But the show had far more humble beginnings.

March, which saw roughly 100 attendees, and was to raise funds for and interest in a larger convention. This was followed by the three-day Golden State Comic-Con in August, which attracted 300 attendees. Before it became SDCC in 1973 and Comic-Con International: San Diego (CCI) in 1995, it was also San Diego’s West Coast Comic Convention. As the Con grew from hotel basement to arena, to the San Diego Convention Center, some of the original nerds behind it included Detroit Triple-Fan Fairs organizer Shel Dorf, publisher Ken Krueger, comic shop owner Richard Alf, sci-fi writer Greg Bear, and businessman Mike Towry.

In those early days, not many movies were promoted at the Con, with one slightly notable exception being Star Wars in 1976, where stills were shown for the upcoming movie. The panel, titled “The Star Wars: A Prevue,” also sold a now-rare poster by Star Wars comic artist Howard Chaykin for $1.75. So, a precedent was set early on for sneak peeks and con-exclusive merchandise.

Things began to shift in the mid-1980s. Salkowitz says that as some of the bigger East Coast cons began to falter, SDCC became the place for the industry to get together. Artists and editors would connect, then fans would show up for talent, and there was a sense of intimacy.

McFarlane—who is celebrating Spawn’s 300th issue at the event—remembers his first Comic-Con in the late ‘70s when he traveled with his father from Alberta, Canada with hopes of having his portfolio reviewed by Jim Shooter.

“There was a big long line, and I patiently waited, knowing that I probably wasn’t going to get there—until [Shooter] did what all human beings do. So I followed him into the bathroom and pretended to take a pee next to him…

He went to wash his hands, and on the way out, I went, ‘Mr. Shooter, is there any way I could show you some of my

COMIC CON-CEPTION What would eventually become SDCC started in 1970 with the one-day Golden State Comic Minicon, held in DEN OF GEEK 63

artwork,’ and he stopped, graciously enough, and took a SDCC in 1995 to support Mallrats with a screening at the look at my artwork and gave me a bunch of pointers.”

Horton Plaza mall.

DC Co-Publisher/CCO Jim Lee’s first Comic-Con was “We didn’t have a panel or anything like that [but] I in 1987, where he joined artists Whilce Portacio and Scott remember Peter David, Joe Quesada, Jimmy Palmiotti were Williams. He said it was just comic book creators, dealers, at my screening, and I was so incredibly impressed,” he and fans back then, and he’d spend his days working on says. “After the screening, [Smith’s Mallrats producer] Scott commissions.

Mosier and I approached all the artists that were at the “At night, you were drawing in the hotel room to finish screening and asked them if they would do our opening up your commission list, and there were different fan clubs credit sequence [a montage of comic book covers], which that would just kind of wander in, hang out, and you’d didn’t exist at this point.” basically draw till two or three in the morning, go back to When Smith returned to the Con in 1996, he had attracted the convention, distribute the sketches that you did, and a following and packed his panel room. then draw some more.”

“The person in charge was just like, ‘Who are you? Why Lee even got invited to a secret 70th birthday party for did this happen?,’” he says. “That was when I felt like I had Jack Kirby during his first year at the show. arrived at Comic-Con.” “I saw Frank Miller come in, and Steve Rude, and all Once Hollywood came in, Salkowitz says the Con became these gigantic names in the comic a hub for media, which led to people book business, who I didn’t know at wanting to be there just to be there, all—and then Jack Kirby comes in, because it looks like a cool place to everyone applauds, celebrates him, be. With the advent of social media and then over the course of the night in the mid-00s, it became a place for people were just coming up to him fan influencers. and talking to him,” Lee says. “He “It was this rolling snowball of was super approachable, and I saw different stuff that picked up traction an opportunity when literally there over the years and has become so was no one around him, just walked tightly interwoven,” says Salkowitz. up and introduced myself, and told Known most famously for his work him how much his work meant to in the Evil Dead movies, Campbell’s me. You can’t beat that for a first first appearance at SDCC came Comic-Con experience.” around 15 to 20 years ago, even In 1988, the first Will Eisner Comic though he’d been doing cons for — actr es s F e l i c i a Da y Industry Awards were held. Known years prior. simply as the “Eisner Awards,” and “The thing that struck me about named after the comic book legend and creator of The Spirit, San Diego was the enormity of it; there’s nothing that’s that Salkowitz said these helped to “institutionally solidify” the size,” he says, adding the studios “wised up” and started Con within the fan community. bringing actors to the show because it’s a perfect place to sell a product.

“You come to this show because every journalist on the entire planet is there, and you do those roundtable blitzes The proximity to Hollywood made SDCC a logical place for where you do 10 roundtables with 10 people in an hour, and movies to generate buzz. you walk out of there, you’ve hit a hundred markets.”

“By the end of the ‘90s, you had 45,000 to 50,000 people going there, so when the media world ripened to the idea of comic movies, and it became a do or die thing for the movies to win their first weekend,” Salkowitz says.

In the early days, around 1980, the arrival of a celebrity “Activating the hardcore fans and the influencers and such as Adam West caused a stir. And the appearance getting them to spread the word about it was a huge deal for of Alan Moore and Jack Kirby at the same SDCC in 1985 Hollywood marketing.” (as documented in a Jackie Estrada photo, in which the Films that made a footprint at the Con in those days perspective makes Moore look like a literal giant) remains included The Rocketeer in 1991 and Bram Stoker’s Dracula in an epic moment.

1992. The Phantom Menace, Blade, and The Matrix arrived in The booths on the show floor got bigger and more 1998, the first X-Men movie had an incredible impact in ’99, elaborate, contributing to the event’s eye candy factor. But and Lord of the Rings arrived in 2000. in terms of reputation and spectacle, Comic-Con entered “The heyday for me was somewhere in between when it a new era when Hall H opened as a 6,500-seat venue after was slowly kind of transforming into what it is today, when Ballroom 20 was deemed too small for the blockbuster a celebrity or an actor showing up was like a huge deal presentations (Batman Begins had the honor of hosting the because it just didn’t happen,” says Lee. first movie panel in Hall H, but without Christopher Nolan Smith also arrived during that era, first appearing at or Christian Bale in attendance).

It is the Super Bowl of nerddom, the crown jewel of nerd and geek culture.

HOLLYWOOD INVADES

THE HALL H SPECTACLE

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IMAGE CREDIT: KEVIN WINTER/GETTY IMAGES

Tom Hiddleston made a surprise appearance in full Loki regalia in 2013. Playing Loki at his post-Avengers biggest, he turned all of Hall H into his willing minions. These are happy tidings.

Marvel Studios arrived in Hall H in 2007 to tout Iron Man and The Incredible Hulk. The Avengers assembled on stage in 2010, and Tom Hiddleston appeared in character as Loki in 2013. It was announced Batman would battle Superman on the big screen in 2013, and J.J. Abrams took everyone to a surprise Star Wars concert in 2015. Television started taking over Hall H with Lost in 2009, then there was Dexter, The Walking Dead, Game of Thrones, Stranger Things.

“One of the ones I really remember is when Scott Pilgrim took over San Diego and he was everywhere,” says DiDio, referring to the Edgar Wright-directed film, Scott Pilgrim vs.

The World. After the 2010 panel, Wright walked all of Hall H to the Balboa Theater for an early screening of the film, followed by a concert.

“I’m not much a Hall H guy; I’m a back-bin guy, and I go to the opposite end of the floor,” DiDio adds. “But I was like, ‘Okay now this has gotten crazier than I had even imagined’.”

The Twilight Saga arrived in 2008 and stuck around until 2012. This opened up the Con to broader fandoms, and the Hall H crowd felt even bigger, somehow, and the Con had to begin issuing wristbands, and discouraged camping out overnight.

“Those years, that was a big turning point for the fan demographic because it was bringing a lot of young women to Comic-Con,” says Salkowitz.

PEAK GEEK The Con was entirely sold out two weeks before the show

in 2008. In 2009—during a recession—it sold out four months in advance. In 2010, the four-day passes were gone in November—eight months ahead of time. Now, it isn’t surprising if the show is sold out within a couple hours.

This year, all badges sold out during open registration in 72 minutes.

Looking back on 2007-09, Day calls it a “sweet time” because commercial and grassroots endeavors co-existed, the iPhone was introduced, and people were starting to be “a little bit more open with their geekiness.”

“I think Comic-Con really made my career,” she says of her first year at the Con when she was promoting The Guild.

“I remember standing outside the doors and handing out bookmarks for my web show, so I was a busker, in essence, for my first San Diego Comic-Con,” she recalls. “I was an actor on some drama shows but not big enough to be a star of any kind, and was just part of the Joss Whedonverse— which was a great place to be—but The Guild really put me over the top and it was the grassroots support from people I met at Comic-Con that really put us on the map.”

As the Con expanded, so did the surrealism of the affair. Salkowitz says he realized the event reached “escape velocity” from baseline nerd culture and was now tied into the mainstream entertainment business when an entourage descended an escalator on the way to a limo, only to encounter Paris Hilton surrounded by paparazzi.

“The fact that Paris Hilton has any use for Comic-Con, and that Comic-Con has any use for Paris Hilton, that made me think of this in a completely different way,” Salkowitz says.

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Gal Gadot and Jason Momoa greet DC fans as one-third of the Justice League in summer 2017.

BEYOND THE CON Today, the San Diego Convention Center is maxed out on capacity and the event has sprawled to include satellite events. And while attendance peaked in 2015 at around 170,000, the numbers now hover above 130,000—although Salkowitz says he thinks it must be more than 200,000 when considering people who travel to San Diego without even entering the Con. Although Day thinks it has shifted back (which seems to coincide with some studios scaling down Hall H presence), Day says she witnessed a turning point around 2013/2014 when the Con got big and the parties became the focal point.

Along with that, she says the time coincided with “offcampus events” that didn’t require an event pass, such as Zachary Levi’s Nerd HQ, which she called an inspiration for 66 DEN OF GEEK

her own Geek & Sundry fan events in San Diego.

“It is basically an entire city event now,” says DiDio. And, to his point, for Batman’s 80th anniversary, DC is celebrating beyond the walls of the convention center.

Batman is the first inductee into the Character Hall of Fame at the forthcoming Comic-Con Museum in Balboa Park.

Among many other activities, the company is also hosting interactive activations, such as a VR experience at the iFLY indoor skydiving experience where participants will feel like they are the Caped Crusader soaring through Gotham City—but under the influence of Scarecrow’s fear toxin.

Meanwhile, “every carnival had a sideshow,” says Campbell, referring to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not! Car Lot activation in nearby Petco Park, which will include “human car washes,” a pinball arcade, and bizarro cars on display.

“You got the main tent, but then the truth is the cool show was off to the side, so I guess that’s us; we’re the cool show off to the side.”

THERE CAN ONLY BE ONE Even if you’re the sideshow at San Diego Comic-Con, everyone is part of the main event.

As the 50th SDCC unfolds, Felicia Day says there can only be one Super Bowl of nerd-dom, despite countless other conventions on the landscape which serve the fans and entertainment industry. But San Diego remains the big show.

“It really is sort of like the one representative day that ‘regular’ people can see from the outside, and I don’t think anything will ever supplant that.”

“This is a pilgrimage,” says Campbell. “It’s the mother of all conventions, and it’s got a lot of children.”

IMAGE CREDIT: MIKE COPPOLA/GETTY IMAGES

“Almost my very favorite night ever was the night after we did our Dr. Horrible panel in 2009, and we all went dancing and walking around downtown,” adds Day. “Joss [Whedon] would just go down the line and talk to people who were waiting in the Hall H line, and that’s what I love about Comic-Con: That lack of barriers between fan and creator because everyone feeds off each other.”

DiDio shared a story about comic writer, editor, and Wolverine co-creator, Len Wein (who passed away in 2017), in which Hugh Jackman hunted him down to thank him for creating the character that made him famous and successful: “The fact that these older creators that just thought that they were getting a paycheck, not realizing that this stuff was going to have such a lasting effect, were being appreciated for what they did? I think that’s my most surreal stuff.”

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