Aucbvax.1559 fa.sf-lovers utzoo!duke!decvax!ucbvax!JPM@MIT-AI Mon Jun 8 11:14:59 1981 SF-LOVERS Digest V3 #144 SF-LOVERS AM Digest Monday, 8 Jun 1981 Volume 3 : Issue 144 Today's Topics: SF Fandom - DENVENTION and L-5, SF Books - Fantasticats, SF Movies - Raiders of the Lost Ark & Film query (The Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird) SF TV - Star Trek Guide & Rocky and Bullwinkle Guide, SF Topics - Children's TV (Winky Dink and You and Colonel Bleep and The Big World of Little Atom and Fireball XL-5) & Compu-fiction & Children's stories (The Three Investigators and Spaceship Under the Apple Tree and Here's the Plot,What's the Title) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- From: POURNE@MIT-MC Date: 06/04/81 03:27:43 Subject: DENVENTION and L-5 The L-5 Society will be having a big presence in the Denvention, with booth and parties and the like. OMNI will be working with us, as will some aerospace companies. Those who would like to help--we'll need people for the booths and for hospitality and for lotsa other stuff, such as assisting Rotlser who'll be doing badges for new recruits and decorating badges for old hands--and some authors who will autograph books ONLY at the L-5 table--and like that-- Anyway if you would like to help, make contact with Tom Morgan and Jane Campbell, 40 West Fair Ave., Littleton, COLO 80120, 303-797-8342 and offer services. For those tiny few who don't know what a Denvention is, it's the World Science Fiction Convention held over Labor day Weekend, in Denver. [ Specifically, Denvention will be held in the Denver Hilton from September 3 till September 7. Please see the Convention Calendar for specific details. -- Jim ] ------------------------------ From: LEOR@MIT-MC Date: 06/07/81 04:34:24 Subject: Purr-sonal reminiscence of purr-nicious feline in short story I may have read many stories involving cats (and their derivatives), but one really GOT me. It was called "Fluffy", by PKDick, from "Golden Man." If you're the type who KNOWS deep down that those damn hair-shedders are nothing more than demonic manifestations, you'll just LOVE this story... -leor ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 1036-EDT From: PDL at MIT-DMS (P. David Lebling) Subject: Smart Kittens -> Dumb Cats "Spacetime for Springers" by Fritz Leiber. Leiber has written a lot of "cat stuff." Another example is "Wanderer," whose heroine is Tigerishka, a felinoid star-traveller. ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 11:38:41-EDT From: cjh at CCA-UNIX (Chip Hitchcock) Subject: bch@berkeley's cat story In response to your message of Sun Jun 7 02:58:20 1981: is Fritz Leiber's "Space-Time for Springers"; it has been reprinted a couple of times. (Those of you who are continually looking for book printings of short stories are encouraged to get Contento's index.) I believe it is the first of a small group of stories dealing with a [kitten] named Gummitch (or something similar and equally improbable). Most of the later stories were undistinguished and have not been reprinted. I question the comparison of Terran cats with Kzinti; I feel that Kzinti were created by someone who doesn't like cats. There is no indication of actual playfulness in any of the Kzinti (beyond Speaker's fondness for having his ears scratched, which is a pretty slim analogy) and most cats have more patience than the Kzinti---in particular, Speaker's declaration that Louis Wu's challenge was excessively verbose ("A simple scream of rage is sufficient." Louis: "You scream and you leap. Great.") is far short of the elaborate formalities of Terran cats about to battle. ------------------------------ Date: 5 Jun 1981 2309-PDT From: Zellich at OFFICE-3 (Rich Zellich) Subject: Raiders of the Lost Ark Just caught a sneal of RotLA - it's a definite must-see. Maybe some of the effects could have been done a little better, but the whole things a gas - funnier 'n hell (and because it's supposed to be, not because it's so bad it's funny). ------------------------------ Date: 5 June 1981 2251-edt From: Paul Schauble Subject: Episode guides for Star Trek and Rocky & Bullwinkle One of the people who reads SF-Lovers over my shoulder asked about episode guides for Star Trek and for R & B. I think that if these don't exist, they should. Judging from the conversations recently, there are people out there who have the data handy. Anyone care to get those flying fingers in action and produce something we can FTP?? ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 0531-PDT (Sunday) From: Lauren at UCLA-SECURITY (Lauren Weinstein) Subject: misc. comments and a query Here we go... The program where you would draw on your television screen to "aid" characters was called "Winky Dink and You". Luckily, at the time the show aired, few people had color televisions, so the radiation risk was not as bad as it COULD have been. Still... not a great idea to play around so close to the screen. Probably almost as bad as using a modern "touch-with-your-finger" type CRT! Personally, I refuse to use color CRT terminals close-up for long periods... --- Remember Colonel Bleep? This was a "minimum animation" type cartoon, largely consisting of still frames. The Colonel (who was some sort of alien who always wore a fishbowl type space helmet) operated from "ZERO ZERO ISLAND". He had two "pals", -- Squeak, who was a puppet (and I believe often wore a cowboy hat), and Scratch, who was a caveman. This program is so obscure I can hardly remember it -- the only plot I can recall involved Squeak and Scratch having helmets locked on their heads that turned them into zombies of a sort -- the work of the Colonel's enemies. --- In this same era we come to two programs which occasionally bordered on SF. The first is "Spunky and Tadpole". This animation paired a boy (Spunky) with a bear (Tadpole). Don't ask me to explain it. I believe it was episodic. It also has faded deep into the mustier regions of my brain, where few dare to tread. The second show is "Herjay's Adventures of Tin Tin". Tin Tin was a boy who had a number of non-SF type adventures in his various episodic segments -- but one series of shows had him on a rocket to Mars. These shows were later re-edited (much to my surprise) into a feature length film, which actually runs on television occasionally. --- One program that lies on the boundary between entertainment and education involved a pair of (live action) boys who take a rowboat ride down a river in some basically metropolitan area. They pass through a tunnel, and when they come out the other side, discover they are millions of years back in time, and moving rapidly farther back as they move farther down the river. The show involved their seeing various animals at different stages of evolution as they moved deeper and deeper into the past with each episode. Eventually, in a somewhat unclear segment, they reach the "creation" of the Earth as a molten mass in the Big Bang. It is unclear what happens to them at this point (at least to my memory) -- but I believe there was some implication that they looped back around in cyclical time. --- Gee, here's one that's pretty obscure! How about "The Big World of Little Atom?" This animated program taught science facts in the guise of entertainment. Anyone remember? --- And now, a query. For years I have been trying to locate a print of a film/TV show that nobody but me seems to remember -- a bad sign to say the least! The film version was called "The Adventures of Mr. Wonderbird", I believe. It was later broken up into many episodes and aired on television under the name "The Shepherdess and the Chimneysweep". This was an animated feature, involving a shepherdess who was being held prisoner by a king. A chimneysweep was trying to rescue her, with the help of a strange bird -- Mr. Wonderbird. The element of this film that made it so fantastic was the technology that this king had at his disposal. He lived in a tremendous mechanized palace. He was continually dropping enemies down trap doors that would appear beneath them at the pull of a lever or the push of a button. He had a fantastic transportation system for getting around the castle, and a large robot which also was important to the plot. It has been years since I have seen it, but I remember it very fondly. Any information about where it might be hiding -- such as who produced it, would be appreciated. Even someone else verifying that THEY remember it would make me feel a bit better. Thanks much. [ Please send any information about this film directly to Lauren, not to SF-LOVERS. -- Jim ] --Lauren-- ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 (Sunday) 0637-EDT From: SHRAGE at WHARTON-10 (Jeffrey Shrager) Subject: The mechanics of Winky Dink Firstly, one was asked to purchase a special clear plastic mat that was taped to your TV screen and included a set of water soluble markers. W.D. was mainly a line drawn cartoon and on occasion the main character would say... "Ok, boys and girls, now, trace that door over there so that I can escape." Then they would pause for little jeffy to trace the door on his mat in erasable marker (or on the TV screen in indelible black marker if mommy hadn't bought a mat for him -- clearly the entire point of the show was to get the parents to buy these things) and after a reasonable interval the screen would shift and "lo and behold!" the door appeared on the once bare wall by virtue of its having been traced on the mat. This was actually quite clever on several counts...(1) the obvious cleverness of the design of the system, (2) the marketing strategy of providing an extra income to the program (who was, I'm sure, getting some percentage of the mat profits), (3) the writers didn't have to do much work... most of the show was pauses to draw and erase the mat. Another technique that I count as quite clever along the same lines as the Winky Dink mat is the little teaching machine that looks like a robot and houses an eight-track cassette. Now, I had always considered 8-t a useless pursuit until I saw this thing.... On t-1 they ask a question that has several possible solutions and then ask the listener to choose the correct solution from one of the "answer" buttons labeled A,B,C,D. How clever-- of course, the "answer buttons" were the track selectors and the track that had the right answer said "very good" and then played some music while all the other tracks were catching up with an error report and detail explanation of the correct answer. One of the neatest things about that is that, since 8-ts are continuous loops, you can do all sorts of clever q-a mapping from one tack to the next. Actually, I have to think about this some more to see whether it is really capable of having simultaneous questions on the different tracks. ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 (Sunday) 1904-EDT From: PLATTS at WHARTON-10 (Steve Platt) Subject: Compu-fiction In regards to the user-input fiction story... I seem to recall a similar device at the '64 World's Fair (NYC) using segmented motion pictures ("movies"). After every few minutes, (at a possible split in the plot,) the audience was allowed to vote on which course of action to take (binary choices). The trick was, rather than having 2^n movie segments, was to have the two courses after choice reconverge to a common next-decision. Thus, only 2*n movie segments were needed. -Steve ------------------------------ Date: 7 Jun 1981 0926-PDT (Sunday) From: Mark at UCLA-SECURITY (Mark Kampe) Subject: theme to Fireball XL-5 Mike Urban, knowing of my strange tastes and talents asked me to submit this to you - saying that you had been searching for it. I may have missed a final verse, but I am fairly certain that these are the first two verses of the fireball XL5 theme song. The person who relayed the question also gave me a bonus problem (far more difficult) that being the theme tune to "clutch cargo". I offer only an attempt at that. Now, without further adieu.... I wish I was a spa-a-ace man, I wish that you were too. We'd cruise around the universe, together, me and you. Chorus: Through a wonder-world of stardust, We'll zoom away to mah-ahrs.... My heart would be a fireball... (doo-doo-oo-doo) a fireball... And you would be my venus of the stah-ah-ahrs We'll take a trip to Jupiter, and maybe very soon, we'll cruise along the milkyway and land upon the moon Chorus Clutch Cargo, however, was a far more difficult problem. I remember the rhythm and harmony, but the melody was quite illusive (and of course I know it was instrumental). The rhythm was quite simple 4/4 - moderate _ _ _ _ _ | | | |_ |_ | | | | | O O O O O played on bongo like drums with the last two notes struck on a drum tuned about 1/4 higher than the first three The harmony was more an (american) indian like tune played on a wood flute. I have a pretty good memory of it, but I can't write music without a keyboard in front of me - but it might have been _ _ |_ _ _ _ _ _ |_ _ _ _ | |_ _ _ _ _ |_ |_ |_ | | |_ |_ | O | |_ _ |_ |_ | | | | | O | | | O |_ |_ |_ | | O O O O O O O O |_ O O O O My memory on the melody is not good, but I seem to recall that it was also played on a wood flute (about 1/2 octave lower) and that it started with the harmony and then danced around scales while keeping the same rhythm - but no bets on that. ---mark--- ------------------------------ Date: 17 May 1981 15:17-EDT From: "Kenneth W. Haase, Jr." Subject: The Three Investigators Ah! Fond remembrances! The Three Investigators were three high school kids (one an abnormally precocious one) who started their own detective agency based in the precocious ones uncles junkyard. They had Alfred Hitchcock as their more-or-less mentor, whom they hardly ever saw. It was a neat series with all kinds of "kids show up adults" scenes in it. Louis Slobdkin's stories about the "spaceship under the apple tree" also strike a familiar bell. It was about an alien boy who lands on a farm and becomes friends with a terran boy, joins the boy scouts etc; Fun reading. Does anyone out there remember a series of short stories about a group of boy scouts who find a time machine behind a rock fall and have a lot of fun traipsing through the ages with it. There are some really nice scenes in them, like life in an underwater farm, or an obnoxious boy-king's visit to the twentieth century.. Anybody remember who wrote them? Ken Haase ------------------------------ End of SF-LOVERS Digest *********************** ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.