#guys can i be real i have such a crush on beulah

[blowflyfag]

RINGSIDE WRESTLING : JANUARY 1997

ECW tag mayhem!

GORDY & DREAMER VS ELIMINATORS

By George Napolitano 

[The ECW tag team of Terry Gordy and Tommy Dreamer was in the mood for a little EXTREME violence. Well, they had come to the ring place and they had signed to fight the right opponents (The Eliminators)!]

Tommy Dreamer has had quite a few problems since joining ECW, but most of his troubles had stemmed from the fact that he was a longer and had no one to help him in time of need. Sure he’s managed to spend time with both Beulah and Kimona Wanalaya, but when it was time to fight his battles inside the ring Tommy had no one to watch his back. Now however, Tommy shouldn’t have a fear in the world as he has two of the roughest, toughest, meanest men in the sport in his corner: “Dr. Death” Steve Williams and former Freebird, Terry “Bam Bam” Gordy. With Williams and Gordy around, the Eliminators, Brian Lee and everyone else in ECW better be very careful. 

[Power-bomb–Gordy-style!]

[Gordy uses his brute strength to topple his foe.]

[Naturally, there were chair shots outside the ring.]

“I’ve only been in ECW for a while but I see that there are quite a few men around here who think that they are really tough,” said Williams. “Well, where I come from you have to make your reputation inside the ring. You can talk big and bad, but you better be able to back it up in the ring. Right now, me and Bam Bam are here to help Tommy Dreamer in his battles with the Eliminators and Brian Lee. Once we straighten that out we are going after Raven and his crew. I’ve been watching this Raven ever since I got here and he really thinks he is something else. Well, he better not cross paths with me or Bam Bam or he’s going to have to pay a huge price.”

[Dreamer has that gagging feeling.]

“Tell him about Shane Douglas, too,” added Terry Gordy. 

“He’s another one who’s really stuck on himself.” said Steve Williams. “He struts around like he’s God’s gift or something and I’ve heard that he’s even said a few thing about us. Well he’s going to kiss that belt of his good-bye if he ever gets in our way!” 

For the past several years Williams and Gordy have not been seen in the States as they have concentrated all of their time and energy to wrestling in Japan. There they are two of the top stars in the Orient and they are constantly in demand. Now that the two stars are back in the States and wrestling in ECW, the knowledgeable East Coast fans are in for quite a treat.

“I’ve had a few different partners in my day, but none of them were ever quite as tough or possessed as much wrestling knowledge as Steve Williams and Terry Gordy.” said Tommy Dreamer. “They are simply phenomenal. I’ve learned more just being around them the last few weeks than I’ve ever learned in all the years I’ve been wrestling. Having Gordy and Williams around all I have to do now is concentrate on my opponent as I know that they will be there to watch my back if anyone tries to interfere.”

[Beulah McGillicuddy kept a close eye on Dreamer throughout the match.]

[Gordy uses his size and strength to his advantage.]

[Dreamer gets a face full o’ guard rail.]

It’s going to be interesting to see what happens in ECW now that Terry Gordy and Steve Williams have joined the ranks. Both are proven champions and , with them in the fold, the balance of power could very well change in the coming months. 

[Gordy goes for the pin, but Eliminator teamwork breaks it up.]

[mst3kproject]

K02: Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars

Like Invaders from the Deep, this movie is made out of four episodes of a TV series starring creepy puppets – in this case, the series is Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons and as far as I can tell from descriptions of it, it’s Stingray in Space.  This does not inspire optimism.  Furthermore, Revenge was presented as a sequel to a previous Captain Scarlet compilation movie, so I expect to have even less idea what the hell is going on.

The first episode that became part of the film is #19, Shadow of Fear.  The organization Spectrum (which is pretty much Mighty Jack except they have a helicarrier instead of a submarine-jet) is trying to get a probe to Mars to spy on the shape-shifting Mysterons.  They’re on the brink of success when one of their astronomers is revealed as a Mysteron agent, who has sabotaged their radio antenna!  Then it’s #12, Lunarville 7, in which the Moon colony secedes from Earth and declares itself self-governing.  Captain Scarlet and some of his colourful buddies then head to the Moon to ask them what’s going on up there.  Naturally it’s a Mysteron plot.  In #18, Crater 101, I am astonished to see they actually continue this storyline, as the characters go back to the Moon to do something about the base the Mysterons were building there.  Then it’s time for #20, Dangerous Rendezvous, in which we finally get the backstory we really should have started out with.

The four episodes were a roller-coaster of emotions, although not in the ‘I laughed, I cried’ sort of way.  My hopes started out at rock-bottom and Shadow of Fear did nothing to raise them – it was mostly people sitting at desks while timers ticked down. By the time the episode was over I was gritting my teeth, prepared for another hour and a half of this ordeal.

Lunarville 7 and Crater 101 turned out to be much better, though! Stuff actually happened in these episodes and the stories they told were connected.  I began to hope that having sat through the tedium of Shadow of Fear, I would be rewarded with something approximating a satisfying conclusion.  The final episode, unfortunately, is all over the place.  It starts out looking like it’s going to be a Riding-With-Death-like tale of getting a scientist and his discovery to a secret destination. Then it’s suddenly about a Mysteron plot to destroy Spectrum’s helicarrier.  Then it’s Backstory Time, and finally it’s about a booby trap.  At the end, nothing is concluded really, Captain Scarlet’s vaunted indestructibility is never important, and neither the jet pilot ‘Angels’ nor the mysterious Captain Black ever do a damned thing.

(That may be an unfair statement – I watched the four episodes separately, and each one begins with the exposition about Captain Scarlet being bulletproof and introducing the characters, including the Angels and Captain Black.  If the movie version never showed this, then I never would have noticed anything was missing. On the other hand, if they kept stuff like the bit where Colonel White explains the duties of the Angels to their guest, then I sure would have wondered why they never did anything.)

Even with my very limited experience of both, I can tell why Captain Scarlet is much more popular online than Stingray. There’s an attempt tell an overarching story, with every episode tying in to the main Mysteron threat even when the problems-of-the-week don’t have much to do with each other.  The sets, props, and puppets are much better-made, and some of them are very entertaining in themselves – I’m a big fan of the bouncing MoonMobile, and the colourful Mysteron bases look like something out of Gamera vs Guiron.  This extends to the puppets, which are much more realistic, but unfortunately don’t have a better range of motion than their Stingray counterparts.  They look like Barbie and Ken dolls, and can move about as much.

The alien landscapes we see are very nice – the Moon looks appropriately desolate and gray, although I could almost hear Tom Servo having a fit about how the dust is behaving in what is supposedly a vacuum. There’s also a few bits of reasonably accurate space science.  The lunar tractor getting stuck in the dust is a nice nod to something NASA worried quite a lot about in the 60’s.  They had no idea what the actual properties of moon dust would be, and there was every reason to fear that any landing craft would just sink right into it and vanish. Revenge also notes and occasionally makes use of concepts like microgravity and speed-of-light transmission delays.  The latter is a big plot point in Shadow of Fear, when the folks at Spectrum have to wait to find out if the Mysterons have destroyed their probe.  This recalls the breathless moments at NASA that we see in National Geographic documentaries, when the technicians know a lander has either touched down or exploded half an hour ago but they won’t know until the signal arrives.

The most obvious place where they did something wrong science-wise was in using the exact same colour of dirt for scenes set on the Moon as for Mars.  Quite a bit of Mars is dark basalt, but that’s not what you want to see in a movie.  We hadn’t yet landed anything on Mars in 1967, but Mars has been the Red Planet since the dawn of time.  You can see it’s red when you spot it in the sky, and it’s definitely orange through a telescope or even binoculars.  In shots from space the Mars of Captain Scarlet is red, but on the surface it’s jarringly gray.

One way in which Captain Scarlet improves vastly on Stingray is that we never actually see a Mysteron who isn’t in human form.  Where the various underwater humanoids of Stingray were just yellow people, the Mysterons are a faceless, threatening force, much like the Moon People of Twelve to the Moon. It makes them seem much more frightening and powerful.  Furthermore, they have an actual motivation, although we have to wait until the very end to find out what it is.  The first human mission to Mars fired a missile at one of their bases when the commander mistook a camera turret for a gun – hence the Mysterons want their titular revenge.  It’s very simplistic, but it’s a hell of a lot better than ‘that’s just what aliens do.’

This makes the Mysterons into a slightly different manifestation of 60’s xenophobia than the various underwater peoples of Stingray were.  The fact that their tactic is taking over people and infiltrating humanity already makes them an allegory for communists, and the dialogue takes this a little further by repeatedly referring to the situation as a ‘war of nerves’.  Does that remind anybody else of the US and the USSR each waiting for the other to blink?  There’s also an actual reason why Earth and Mars can’t reach a peaceful settlement – the Mysterons don’t want humanity’s apologies, they want our destruction. They cannot be reasoned with because they are not reasonable, at least by human standards.  Their minds work in a fundamentally different way.  Like the people who’ve been taken over by Beulah in It Conquered the World, once a Mysteron victim is infested, they must be destroyed.

Revenge of the Mysterons from Mars also did a much better job of choosing episodes to turn into a movie.  The Shadow of Fear stuff is very much out of place, but the three episodes that follow are connected through the thread of the Mysteron outpost on the Moon and the ‘pulsator’ Captain Scarlet stole from it.  The problem is that this story doesn’t actually resolve anything.  The humans are in the exact same position at the end as they are at the beginning – they can’t talk to the Mysterons and can only carry on with being constantly on guard and terrified of infiltration.  An evil plan has been thwarted but neither side has gained ground.  Between that and the general lack of direction in Dangerous Rendezvous, it’s just frustrating.

That might still have been okay – there are plenty of war stories that are about a single battle won and lost, but those are stories in which we care about the characters and their relationships.  Unfortunately, as in Invaders from the Deep, the characters have almost nothing to them.  Captain Scarlet is brave and determined, and Captain Blue is slightly more cautious. Other than that, there’s not much to go on.  We never see Scarlet and Blue in any context except their Spectrum work, so we don’t know if they’re actually friends.  We never even find out their real names.  Spectrum head Colonel White has even less to him than the guy in charge of Marineville, since the latter had a daughter he loved and an implied backstory in that he was an amputee.  Lieutenant Green is sort of vaguely ethnic but not too ethnic, you don’t want to scare people.  Lunar engineer Linda Nolan seems like she has a bit of a crush on Captain Scarlet, and he might reciprocate, but we never see her again.

In a lot of ways, Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons is an improvement on Stingray, but almost all those ways are a direct result of how much money they had available for the production.  In terms of characterization, writing, and direction, all the same problems remain… except one.  Where Stingray often seemed kind of lazy, Captain Scarlet definitely comes across as a project people cared about and wanted to make the best they possibly could.  They didn’t succeed, or I wouldn’t be here talking about it, but I can give then points for trying.