(1) JOURNEY PLANET. Issue 95 of Journey Planet celebrates a century of “Mel Brooks”. Here are a few highlights from the table of contents:

• The Spy Who Came in Through the Phone Booth: How Get Smart Influenced a Generation, by Julie Barrett
• Mel Brooks and The Producers, by Daniel M. Kimmel
• Blazing Saddles, An Appreciation of Mel Brooks, Richard Pryor, and Cleavon Little (with Special Guest Star Louis Gossett, Jr.), by Chris Barkley
• History of the World, Part I Retrospective and Part II Comparison, by Jean Martin
• “King of Broadway”—Mel Brooks’s Musicals, by Laura Frankos
• How the Schwartz Binds Us Together: A Beginner’s Yiddish Primer, by Valerie Estelle Frankel

(2) CINEMATIC COUNTING HOUSE. Deadline reports: “Box Office: ‘Toy Story 5’ $70M No. 1., ‘Supergirl’ Tanks With $38M Opening”.

Toy Story 5 reigned supreme in its second weekend, not just in the U.S. with $70M, but around the world with a $159.1M WW take, rising the Disney/Pixar pic’s cume to $585M. Stateside, the Andrew Stanton movie is less than $3M from hitting the three-century mark.

Toy Story 5‘s second weekend hold of -56% is spot on with that of Incredibles 2‘s. Incredibles 2 holds the record for the best opening of an animated film, and Toy Story 5 is second, so that ease isn’t bad at all. Imax screens contributed $900K around the world for a $24M haul for the large format exhibitor.

Meanwhile, Warner Bros/DC Studios’ Supergirl became even more challenged over night with a $10.7M Saturday (-41% from Friday/previews), which is turning into a $38M domestic opening. Again, that isn’t the lowest 3-day start for a DC title, but it’s not good for a cosmo-hopping movie that cost $170M-$186M net before global spend. Supergirl‘s stateside start is lower than Disney/Marvel’s lowest, The Marvels ($46.1M) and it’s God awful close to DC disaster, Joker: Folie a Deux ($37.6M). Worldwide was horribly low with a $68M launch….

(3) TIPTREE WINS A HUGO. Joel Miller remembers “The Man Who Didn’t Exist: James Tiptree Jr.” at Transmissions from Tomorrow.

… Years before Tiptree’s mask slipped, she wrote a story about, in her own words, “that fantastic misdirected adoration one is sometimes struck by for actors or public figures.” In it, the main character hides her real, unacceptable self and operates a more lovable identity out into the world to be loved and adored at a distance. Until someone finds the original her.

She called it “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”. It won the Hugo Award in 1973. It’s been called the first cyberpunk story and William Gibson cited it as an inspiration for Neuromancer….

…Tiptree opens her novella with fiery mockery addressing you, the reader, calling out your ignorance and privilege. Our narrator turns your attention to P. Burke (Philadelphia Burke), describing her as “the ugly of the world”, a “tall monument to pituitary dystrophy”, a body so far outside society’s standards that people are disgusted and look away. Early on, Burke tries to end her life on a park bench, and the narrator points out that nobody around her bothers to look. You, the reader, would rather not look too, the narrator needles. You’d rather hear about the cool future city, wouldn’t you?

That’s when a corporation recruits the desperate and depressed Burke. You see, in the future direct advertising has been banned, so corporations sell through influencers instead (and remember, this was in 1973)! Corporations grow flawless human bodies, pilot them remotely, and turn them loose to model their products and lifestyle for millions of watching consumers. Burke gets wired into a capsule in a back room and learns to run one of these bodies from a distance….

(4) NEVER SEMPER FI WHEN IT COMES TO FILMING TOLKIEN. “Every LOTR and Hobbit Movie Ranked By Book Accuracy” – CBR.com thought you’d like to know.

… When discussing these many different iterations of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, a natural point of comparison is their accuracy — or lack thereof — to the novels. A faithful adaptation does not necessarily equate to a quality film, because changes to a story’s plot, setting, or characters can sometimes be beneficial to accommodate a new medium. However, remaining true to the source material is an important factor for many fans, so which film based on Tolkien’s legendarium remained closest to its inspiration?…

It’s definitely not the animated Return of the King –

The Return of the King Cartoon Ignored Most of Tolkien’s Novel

In 1980, Arthur Rankin Jr. and Jules Bass chose to adapt The Lord of the Rings as a follow-up to their animated The Hobbit film from a few years prior. However, fearing that audiences would not be interested in watching an entire trilogy, they skipped straight to The Return of the King. Adapting the final third of The Lord of the Rings in isolation led to a messy and heavily abridged narrative.

The animated The Return of the King omitted a long list of characters, including but not limited to Legolas, Gimli, Éomer, Faramir, and the Dead Men of Dunharrow. It also had a lighter, more childish tone than the novel, falling more in line with The Hobbit. The film skimmed over the Battle of the Pelennor Fields and completely skipped the Battle of the Black Gate. It instead filled its runtime with musical numbers, including some by the Orcs, which lessened their already minimal intimidation factor.

(5) LOVE WAVES? Space Daily goes on the record: “In 1977, Ann Druyan recorded an hour of her brainwaves and heartbeat just two days after she and Carl Sagan agreed to marry, and NASA pressed that compressed minute onto Voyager’s Golden Record as a private love letter now more than 25 billion kilometres from Earth”.

The Voyager Golden Record is usually described as a message from Earth to the unknown. That is true, but it is also incomplete. Tucked inside its catalogue of greetings, music, animal sounds, human voices and scientific diagrams is something far more intimate: a compressed recording of Ann Druyan’s brainwaves and heartbeat, made in 1977, shortly after she and Carl Sagan had decided to marry.

It was not labelled as a love letter by NASA. Officially, it belonged to the Record’s human “life signs”, a small biological trace among the sounds selected to portray life on Earth. But the timing changed its meaning. Druyan later described being newly in love while her nervous and cardiac signals were recorded. A message intended to represent the species had accidentally, or perhaps inevitably, made room for one person’s private interior life…

… NASA’s Voyager Golden Record overview describes the object plainly: each Voyager spacecraft, launched in 1977, carries a 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record containing sounds and images chosen to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. The records were not designed for radio transmission. They are physical objects attached to the spacecraft, time capsules for any distant finder capable of recovering and decoding them….

… The Smithsonian Magazine account of the Record notes that Druyan had proposed recording a person’s brain waves in the hope that some future intelligence, millions of years later, might be able to decode the thoughts behind them. Druyan became the subject. During an hour-long session at New York University Medical Center, she was connected to an EEG and meditated on prepared themes.

The themes were not trivial. They included the history of Earth, human civilisation, the problems facing humanity and the experience of love. The hour of biological signal was compressed into a minute-long audio segment for the record. That technical compression matters. The Golden Record is not carrying a readable diary, a spoken confession, or a transcript of thought. It is carrying a transformed physiological trace.

Still, the circumstances give the trace its emotional charge. Smithsonian notes that Druyan and Sagan had become engaged just days before, and that “a love story may very well be documented” in her neurological signs. Other retellings, drawing on Druyan’s later description, place the recording two days after the call in which she and Sagan agreed to marry. Either way, the central fact holds: the biological recording was made while she was thinking about the world and about newly recognised love….

(6) ANN BLYTH (1927-2026). Actress Ann Blyth died June 24 reports the New York Times.

[She was] an actress from Hollywood’s Golden Age who earned an Oscar nomination for playing the ungrateful, manipulative, altogether evil teenage daughter to Joan Crawford’s self-sacrificing mother in the 1945 film “Mildred Pierce”… She was 98.

[Her] comedies included “Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid” (1948), a romantic fantasy in which she and William Powell played the title roles.

Ms. Blyth made musicals as well, including “Kismet” (1955), a Broadway adaptation, with Howard Keel. 

Though she stopped making features in 1957, she appeared … as a guest on television shows; on “The Twilight Zone” in 1964, she played a secretly immortal movie star. 

(7) TODAY’S BIRTHDAY.

[Written by Paul Weimer.]

June 28, 1946 — Robert Asprin. (Died 2008.)

By Paul Weimer: Another early book in my SFF reading, and one of my early engagements with science fiction and fantasy as humor (the other being Douglas Adams, Pratchett would wait a while).  I came across Another Fine Myth somewhere…and fell immediately into Skeeve’s story, of a wizard’s apprentice who winds up connection to a Demon (dimensional traveler) who has lost his magic powers. Skeeve and Aahz make a fine pair and the early books are laugh out loud funny. I think the books eventually peter out but the early ones are memorable and fun. There was also a brief graphic novel adaptation of the early part of book one that notably diverges from the book. 

Phule’s Company, too, is a lot of fun, with a dipshit rich son trying to reform a foreign legion, with his butler (in Wooster and Jeeves fashion) trying to help keep it all together. Hilarity does ensue. 

And then there is Thieves World. Asprin helped create the greatest of the 1980’s shared world anthology series and I ate them all up with a spoon. The city of Sanctuary and the Vulgar Unicorn, and all of the characters we met, from One-Thumb the Bartender to the Prince, were wrestled into shape (or written by) Asprin.  I bought the box D&D set of the module set in the city and poured over its maps, descriptions, character bios. Sanctuary as a city, thanks to Asprin, has influenced and made a mark on every fantasy city I’ve ever run (the Maze in Sanctuary, for example, seems to have new incarnations in every city I have characters visit. The idea of an alliance between a powerful city official and the head of the courtesans, long before Sin City, is another idea I’ve used).  And just the sheer density of powerful characters doing their thing, unconcerned by low level adventurers and their problems, is a theme I like time and again. 

He died in 2008, and sadly never got to meet him.  Requiescat in pace. 

Bob Asprin in 1993. Photo by Sharon72015

(8) COMICS SECTION.

• Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal knows it’s all about the name.
• Brewster Rockit has a heroic quest.
• Dustin is worried for a reason.
• Free Range puns about a protest.
• Jump Start foresees the future of maps.
• Loose Parts needs ambition.
• Reality Check tries variations of a joke.
• Thatababy builds a monument. How many can you name?

(9) ALL ABOARD! The New York Post admires the way “Minions and ‘slime monster’ take over Carney’s in West Hollywood”.

An iconic West Hollywood restaurant has been taken over by a massive “slime monster” as part of the promotion for the upcoming animated movie “Minions and Monsters” from Illumination.

Drivers heading down Sunset Boulevard will get more than an eyeful as they pass the 50-year-old Carney’s Train to see the whole place has been taken over by the creature named Irene.

The 80ft creation almost completely covers it and is filled with tons of little yellow Minion characters along with 14 animatronic eyeballs that move around and watch you, bringing the creature to life, according to an Instagram message from the fabricating team over at Monster City Studios….

(10) WHAT’S GOT YOUR TONGUE? [Item by Steven French.] Forget Duolingo, let’s all learn Minionese! “Bello! Why gen Alpha subconsciously speaks the language of the Minions” – the Guardian explains.

I was four years old when Despicable Me was released in cinemas and the banana-coloured, overall-clad Minions took the world by storm. By the time I was seven, my siblings and I were using The Official Minion Manual to teach ourselves Minionese.

Minionese is, of course, the made-up language spoken by Kevin, Stuart, Bob and company, which consists of a combination of melodic gibberish and variations on genuine vocabulary from a diverse array of world languages. When the Minions shout “kanpai” (“cheers” in Japanese) or “para tú!” (a variation on the Spanish “para ti”), it might remind you of how gen Alpha slang, which primarily consists of nonsensical words such as “cap” and “mogging”, also draws on world languages. Consider the Bulgarian scat origins of “skibidi”, for example.

In anticipation of the forthcoming Minions & Monsters movie, which for the very first time includes a 15-minute sequence spoken entirely in Minionese, join me in breaking down the parallels between Minionese and gen Alpha slang. Next time you hear a minion shout “bello” on the big screen, appreciate how what Illumination originally intended as an endearing comedic tool has grown to embody a trend of embedding sociolinguistic diversity in the youth vernacular….

(11) TALE OF THE SECOND THUMB. BGR says“Roger Ebert Reviewed This Sci-Fi Classic Twice – To Give It A Perfect Score The Second Time”.

Even after his passing, the word of renowned film critic Roger Ebert is still law to some fans. His cutting breakdowns of some of Hollywood’s biggest hits and misses have stood the test of time, but there were the rarest of instances when even he himself acknowledged a film needed a rewatch to get a final rating. One such classic was Ridley Scott’s tech-noir masterpiece from 1982 (a great year for sci-fi), “Blade Runner.” The adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s short sci-fi tale, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” was met with a mixed reception upon its initial release, eventually becoming the staple of science fiction it’s now considered to be. For Ebert, though, “Blade Runner” just wasn’t checking all the boxes the first time around, and it took a creative alteration from the director to change his mind.

In his initial review, Ebert gave “Blade Runner” only 3 stars, praising the film for its incredible set design and world-building but faltering in its handling of the story unfolding within it. “The movie’s weakness,” according to Ebert, “is that it allows the special effects technology to overwhelm its story.” He also called the villains (including the legendary Batty played by Rutger Hauer) “standard issue,” and that “the movie isn’t really interested in these people — or creatures.” In the end, though, Ebert wasn’t the only one unhappy with the film’s theatrical release, and it wasn’t until some time later that a now-legendary alteration by the director led to “Blade Runner” getting a bit two thumbs up from the longtime critic….

(12) THE ORIGINAL SERIES V. STRANGE NEW WORLDS. CBR.com claims “Star Trek Officially Fixed a 53-Year-Old Captain Pike Continuity Problem”.

…There is a “real-world” reason Pike seems like a different guy between The Original Series‘ “The Menagerie” and Strange New Worlds. Along with the actors in the role, many different writers are telling his story. Yet within the narrative, it all boils down to Pike’s most fateful moment in Star Trek: Discovery Season 2, literally. He witnessed his fate and realized he could not avoid it, which considerably changed his perspective and demeanor….

… The time Pike spent on Star Trek: Discovery had an impact on him: from discovering a lost human “colony” to Admiral Cornwell telling him he was the best of Starfleet. His mission that season was to prevent a situation that resulted in the death of all life in the galaxy. When he touched a Klingon time crystal to see his fate, he was horrified.

Even though he had a chance to escape it, he chose instead to save everyone rather than himself. Only, this revelation again sent Pike into disillusionment about his role in Starfleet. When he tried to change his fate, he discovered that his choice sent Starfleet into an even worse conflict.

Sentencing himself to a lifetime of pain in that strangely sadistic black wheelchair prevented two different catastrophes. His journey of acceptance for that future is a recurring theme in Strange New Worlds. However, instead of falling into despair, Pike gained a new appreciation for life and his “job” as the commanding officer of the USS Enterprise….

[Thanks to SF Concatenation’s Jonathan Cowie, Chris Barkley, Mark Roth-Whitworth, Kathy Sullivan, Steven French, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, John King Tarpinian, and Cat Eldridge for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Daniel Dern.]