Disney Owns Miracleman, Rest of Marvel

update, erik b. sums up what probably lies ahead: not a lot of Mickey Mouse/superhero crossovers, "More likely you'll see a Marvel section of your local Disney store (if any of you actually go in them)" 

update 2,   Some possibilities from Atlantic's Daniel Indiviglio:

Expect to see a Spider-Man character walking around Walt Disney World ... new theme park rides and rollercoasters based on Marvel characters 

... some Pixar-assisted animated movies based on Marvel characters. I wouldn't be surprised to see a Marvel story made into a 3-D movie before too long. On the call Disney mentioned that the Pixar staff was excited about the acquisition.

***

Stan: "I love both companies." Article estimates Ike Perlmutter's take at $1.5 billion, eleven years after he bought the place; nothing on what Stan does or doesn't get.

From the article, it sounds like Marvel is already pretty licensed up:

For example, Sony Corp.’s Columbia Pictures is developing the next three “Spider-Man” sequels, starting with “Spider-Man 4” set for a May 2011 release. News Corp.’s 20th Century Fox has the long-term movie rights to the “X-Men,” “Fantastic Four,” “Silver Surfer” and “Daredevil” franchises.

Both studios maintain those rights in perpetuity unless they fail to make more movies.

Separately, Viacom Inc.’s Paramount Pictures has a five-picture distribution deal for Marvel-made movies, the first of which will be “Iron Man 2,” set for release next May. Paramount said it expects to continue working with Marvel and Disney.

General Electric Co.’s Universal Studios has an attraction called Marvel Super Hero Island in Orlando, Fla., that will stay in existence as long as Universal wants to keep it there and follows the contract terms, Universal said.

But Disney says it had to deal with Pixar and its licenses, the implication presumably being that things turned out okay.

(Via Benen)

And Vom Marlowe Too

Vom Marlowe, a frequent commenter here and a fine writer in her own right, has agreed to join us as a blogger here on HU. Some of you may possibly remember her as one of the contributors to the Gay Utopia: her trans/slash/spy story is here.

So give her a warm welcome to the blog, y'all.

Wiki Trek: "Paradise Syndrome"

Kirk loses his memory and marries an Indian princess. Spock does his second mindmeld on Kirk in 3 episodes, by Mem Alpha's count. The site also says:

• The obelisk was built especially for this episode.
• The lake featured in this episode is the Franklin Reservoir above Los Angeles. It has been featured in hundreds of westerns and police shows, but is most famous as the fishin' hole in the opening credits for The Andy Griffith Show.
• Other than the street sword fight in "All Our Yesterdays", this was the only episode with outdoor shooting in the entire third season.
• Uhura is not on the bridge in this episode, but stock footage from "And the Children Shall Lead" places her there for a moment.
• During the first attempt to deflect the asteroid a rare top shot of the Enterprise is shown.

A lousy episode unless you enjoy seeing Shatner making an ass of himself. It’s a ham display, and not the familiar, herky-jerky hamminess Shatner fell into when trying to goose a line. Here we see Shatner's special mode, in which he would physically try to overwhelm whatever emotion he had to put across, bring his whole body into it. In this episode he has to convey Kirk’s deep happiness at being an Indian god and marrying the Indian princess in a beautiful forest, so he squeezes his eyes shut and swings his arms wide while swiveling. He puts a lot of force into the squeezing and beaming; I think his face goes red. The moment isn’t so much fake as unreal. A fine distinction, of course, but watching him you don’t feel like Shatner is trying to shortcut his way to his goal. He’s just deeply misguided. Very few people could make such a mistake and then pursue it at such white heat.

The Indian princess is played by Sabrina Scharf. “Born Sandra Mae Trentman in Delphos, Ohio,” per Mem Alpha, and IMDB says she was a bunny at the Playboy Club in NYC. No birth year.

 

She was a late '60s/early '70s type exemplified by Ali MacGraw: long straight black hair, wholesome features. Barbara Hershey was another. Don't think Angelina Jolie today would qualify, too facially exotic. The earlier type was more like a lush, wholesome blonde but with the hair somehow gone black.

Scharf's credits start in 1965 with a role on Gidget (“Penelope Peterson”). Her Star Trek role was her 10^th in 3 years, including a couple of movie parts. The movies have really dreadful period titles: The Virgin President (“President’s Girlfriend”) and the very hard-bitten Dead Heat on a Merry-Go-Round. The credit line for the second film, per IMDB, is “Girl in bed with James Coburn.” In 1969 she was in Easy Rider as Sarah, possibly not a large role. (update,  In Comments, Joe S. Walker says this: "Sabrina Scharf was the female lead in "Hell's Angels On Wheels", a 1967 American International effort starring Jack Nicholson. It's been a long time since I saw "Easy Rider" but as I recall Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper spend some time in a commune where she's one of the leading spirits, and she questions why they want to go back out into the bad wide world.")

Also in 1969  she married Bob Schiller, who had been doing fine as a comedy writer since the 1950s and would do even better in the 1970s, thanks to Norman Lear. Scharf had a dozen more roles, mainly tv, after the marriage, then her credits stop in 1975. Mem Alpha says that at some point she entered politics and even became a state senator, but that's all it says. Googling turns up a bunch of little show-biz items that also mention her being a state senator but say nothing about party, period served, etc. Damn.

The episode shows off her legs a bit, and they're not just long but toned. Nowadays being toned is standard for actors/actresses. Back then it wasn’t, even for cheesecake.

The jealous lug, b. 1934, Stanislaus County, Calif., had 50 parts by IMDB’s count, started in 1957, ended in 1983 with a Quincy. Mem Alpha: “Solari died of cancer in 1991 at the age of 56. A popular acting coach and theater director, Solari once had a theater named after him. It has since been renamed.” Jesus.

 

 

The old chief. His name was Richard Hale, b. 1892 in Rogersville, Tenn. IMDB lists 130 credits, earliest None Shall Escape (1944, his role was "Rabbi David Levin"), latest a Police Woman ep (1978, ep was titled "Sons"). The site dug up some photos from very, very early in his career; at least I assume they're for/from theater work.

              

"Blind Man," "Soothsayer," "King Chandra," "Chief Xolic," "Gaunt Man." He was in the Night Gallery pilot. Mem Alpha says, “He was often cast in the role of a Native American, and as such, made guest appearances on seveal television Westerns, including Bonanza, Cheyenne, Gunsmoke, Rawhide, and Wagon Train. He has also appeared in several episodes of Perry Mason.”

… There’s a movie called The Explosive Generation, from 1961, William Shatner as a sex ed teacher with a turbulent classroom. Tag: “They look like kids -- but they want love like adults!” Trailer here, though Shatner just sticks his hands in his jacket pockets and registers concern.

Reviewing the Reviews: Bottomless Belly Button

While corresponding with a prominent comics blogger recently, our discussion drifted towards the imminent release of The Best American Comics Criticism of the 21st Century. He made the suggestion that it might become “a yearly thing, in the style of Houghton Mifflin's Best American series, tracking the 21st century as it moves forward”. Now I don’t think this rumor is accurate in any way (not least because there are no other sources backing this claim up) but I was incredulous for an entirely different reason. Quite simply, there simply isn’t enough good comics criticism to fill a book on an annual basis. You might be able to fill a book once every 5-10 years but certainly not more often than that.

Now I’ve been know to write some reviews in my lifetime so I’m essentially lumping myself in that pool of mediocrity called “comics criticism”. I’m approaching this, however, from the perspective of a person who is a reader first and foremost – a reader who is just about lazy enough to want to rely on the hard work and intelligence of others for a deeper understanding of comics.

In this spirit, I decided to make a short analysis of the reviews available for one of the “big” books from 2008 – Dash Shaw’s Bottomless Belly Button (BBB). There’s nothing remotely scientific about the following survey. I’m merely trying to reproduce the experience of a reader trying to find out more about a comic after having read it. From the perspective of an occasional comics reviewer, such an exercise is not without its benefits as the articles I’ve encountered mirror the deficiencies in my own writing.

I’ve chosen BBB quite deliberately. As one of the “biggest” and most talked about books of 2008, one would expect a reasonable amount of quality reviews around which to crystallize readers’ thoughts. I hardly expect a critic to devote acres of space to ascertain the merits of an insignificant work but this label simply doesn’t apply to BBB.

It has to be said that most comic reviews and articles aren’t written with needs such as my own in mind. Rather, they’re aimed at readers in search of much more basic guidance: to read or not to read; to buy or not to buy.

Most readers aren’t interested in the inner mechanics of comics or the layers upon layers of meaning an artist imbues his work with. In other words, the very things a good cartoonist wrestles with on a daily basis. Most aren’t even interested in well argued, detailed essays debating the merits of a work. To most readers, comics are momentary diversions hardly deserving of this the kind of attention. Another group of readers find reviews entirely useless, preferring to rely on their own brilliance to pierce any semblance of a veil. Needless to say, this blog entry is not meant for persons such as these.

The web is perceived (not entirely without reason) as the province of ephemera directed at short attention spans. That the vast majority of reviews of BBB amount to little more than a short description and recommendation should come as no surprise. I count among these the reviews at Boing Boing, Comic Book Galaxy, Comic Mix, Entertainment Weekly, Fiction Writers Review, The Guardian, the Hip Librarians Book Blog, infibeam and The Stranger. There are a series of blurbs at the Fantagraphics website as well as at Publishers Weekly. The review at Comic Book Bin goes into more detail but is once again mainly descriptive with the faint whiff of opinion thrown in for good measure. In short, the web is replete with choices in this category. I’ve merely chosen a small representative sample from a wide variety of sources. Perhaps this reflects, in part, the lack of money attached to this activity - this lack of money discouraging the use of more resources in terms of time and effort.

The well known New York Magazine article on Dash Shaw is little more than a puff piece containing some background information on the author. The extent of its adulation is easily captured in the following quote:

"Yet that disparity between the roughness of the art and the maturity of the story—not for children! the book’s spine reads, alongside Shaw-penned faces of crying tots—lends Shaw’s work an emotional jolt that’s sometimes absent from the work of other graphic novelists, even those as acclaimed as Ware and Clowes."

On second thoughts, perhaps it’s not so much adulation as clutching at straws.

Well argued negativity is also in very short supply. An article at the Inkwell bookstore has some embryonic antagonism in relation to BBB but does so in passing while reviewing Ariel Schrag’s Likwise. The writer at Fiction Circus uses his review of BBB to launch into a tirade against simplicity and “humble line art” among alternative cartoonists. Seth, Alison Bechdel and “maybe everyone at Topshelf” are brought up in defense of his case. He writes:


“My problem is with how the boring "cartooning" style is privileged as artistic and honest in comics, the same way Hemingway's writing style used to be in literature. The same way, arguably, that literature now privileges boring "realistic" subject matter. Unfortunately, in Bottomless Bellybutton, Mr. Shaw is guilty of drawing in a boring style…”

And later:

“It is a credit to the modest, weirdly involving art and writing in Bottomless Bellybutton that, despite all these problems, I didn't realize it wasn't very good until I was about halfway through.”

The entire experience is not unlike wandering through the arguments of a petulant child.

The New York Times is not much better. Here’s exhibit A:

”Though there's plenty to enjoy in "Bottomless Belly Button" - realistic dialogue, an emotional connection to the characters, some wonderful flourishes in the layout - it seems wrong to delve too far into those elements before pointing out another major ingredient: nudity. The book's spine has a "not for children" label and a drawing of six young faces overlaid with X's - quite appropriate, because some of the interior illustrations merit a triple-X rating. The images run from the mundane to the racy to the positively, well, graphic. Perhaps the use of nudity is a budding trend in graphic novels.”

I understand the limitations imposed by writing about comics for a mainstream publication – the need for evangelical zeal and a sensitivity for reader’s of a more puritanical nature – but this reads too much like a blast from the “Comic aren’t for kids anymore!” past. I imagined a nun at the keyboard before the writer started proclaiming a fondness for the decompression used by Brian Michael Bendis in Ultimate Spider-Man. I can’t imagine a nun liking Ultimate Spider-Man. I certainly can’t conceive of any nun labeling Y: The Last Man “exquisite” as the NYT writer does. Nuns have better taste than that. The less said of this travesty of a review the better.

Which brings us to Derik Badman who makes a valiant effort at analyzing some of Shaw’s techniques but gets bogged down in the somewhat repetitive mechanics of the book. Badman’s entry reads like a series of notes prepared for a more comprehensive article and it really never pretends to be much more than this. I suspect that a longer and more thorough piece might have emerged in a more encouraging critical environment.


The single best article on BBB available on-line is in all likelihood one of the least read - Charles Hatfield’s article at Thought Balloonists. This isn’t even Hatfield at the top of his game – it’s merely a long entry for his blog, written with some degree of thought and planning of course but not with the rigor of one of his academic articles or published reviews. It’s a clear, methodical discussion of the themes, mechanics and deficiencies of BBB. Hatfield has been doing this for years and it shows even in the most casual of his writings.

And that’s it.

One good review of BBB out of dozens – a sad testament to the state of comics criticism by any measure. For the sake of comparison, I urge you to do the most basic search for reviews of any prominent work of literary fiction - a recent one if need be if only to give a small edge to comics-related reviews (Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel Inherent Vice for instance). Even in a critical scene notorious for incestuous relationships and glad-handing the difference in quality is sobering. Comics criticism has a long, long way to go – certainly before it satisfies my most basic needs as a reader.

Ng Suat Tong Dons Utilitarian Garb

I'm very pleased to announce that comics critic Ng Suat Tong will shortly be blogging with us here at HU. Suat has done a lot of writing on comics, both for the Comics Journal and more recently for the Comics Reporter. (You can read one of recent essays here. )

Welcome aboard, Suat!

Music For Middle-Brow Snobs:The Old Gospel Ship

Here's the playlist for this week.

1. Country Gentlemen — Where No Cabins Fall (Calling My Children Home)
2. Aborted — Odious Emanation (Slaughtered & Apparatus: A Methodical Overture)
3. Vader — Testimony (The Ultimate Incantation)
4. Enslaved — Heimdallr (The Forest Is My Throne)
5. Satyricon — The Forest Is My Throne (The Forest Is My Throne)
6. Drudkh — The Distant Cry of Cranes (Microcosmos)
7. Six Organs of Admittance — Invitation to the SR for Supper (Six Organs of Admittance)
8. Sian Alice Group — White (Troubled, Shaken, Etc.)
9. St. Vincent — Just the Same But Brand New (Actor)
10. Mandy Moore — Everblue (Amanda Leigh)
11. Ciara — I Don't Remember (Fantasy Ride)
12. Ruby Vass — The Old Gospel Ship (Southern Journey vol. 4, Brethren, We Meet Again)

Download: The Old Gospel Ship.

Album titles are in parentheses so you can purchase the whole thing if you like a song and feel so inclined. Also, if you enjoy the set (or loathe it), do let me know in comments. Middle-brow snobs thrive on positive reinforcement.

The Ambitious Colonel; or, Wiki Trek

A British colonel under the Raj fell captive to mountain tribes. When he tried to escape, he fell down a mountain ravine and was crippled for life. Villagers carried him to their hut, where they fed him scraps and kept him alive in a basket.

Years later a visiting group of British officials discovered the colonel. They were astonished by all aspects of his story, but especially by what he had done during his captivity. The man had begged and scrounged the stems of local fruit and knotted them together to form tiny busts of characters from Dickens. Seventy-four of these characters stood in a row on the shelf above the colonel's basket, and he was on the lookout for likely stems from which he could form particular characters he still had in mind. One end of his basket had been slashed open so that he could reach over and sort stems into small mounds according to their size and manageability.

It was the colonel's ambition to model every character Dickens had ever invented, and he was desperate for his visitors to fill the gaps in his memory of the novelist's work. The officials were taken aback.

"My God, man," one asked at last, "but why? Why fashion a miniature bust of fruit stems for every character that Dickens ever invented?"

The colonel lay in his basket and thought for a moment, then for another moment. Then he gave his answer. "I like to keep busy," he said.

People Still Hate Me

A while back there was a large blogosphere feeding frenzy when I (A) expressed dislike of 100 Bullets and (B) mistook Dave Johnson for Eduardo Risso in the course of dissing a cover. Anyway, Dave Johnson himself just found the critique, and stopped by to tell me I'm an idiot. If you share his opinion, or just want to see some trollish bad behavior from various parties, the back and forth starts here.

Kennedy's lasting achievement

I followed the news back in the 1970s, and I remember that then-President Carter proposed a system of government health insurance that would cover everyone but just for top-dollar health needs -- prolonged hospitalization, etc.  Don't know what the proposal's kick-in point would have been, what dollar figure. The idea was that no one would have to go bankrupt because of health costs, but they might still be paying a lot to the family doctor or the pharmaceutical companies. 

Kennedy and Carter were circling around each other because Carter sucked at being president and Kennedy thought he might take the job from him. When Carter pushed for catastrophic care, Kennedy pushed for universal care. A lot of Democrats laughed at Carter's proposal as warmed-over Republicanism. What a silly name too -- "catastrophic" health care insurance, boy, that must be some lousy insurance.

Too bad we don't have catastrophic care now. But Carter's proposal died, as usually happened with Carter proposals, and Kennedy's proposal got nowhere, as was very frequently proving the case for liberal proposals during the late 1970s. And soon enough we had Reagan, and now people are still going bankrupt because of their hospital bills.

I guess Kennedy did a lot behind the scenes to advance good causes. Legislative work is highly technical and also tends to have incremental ends. Judging somebody's value at the work isn't possible unless you have a lot of knowledge and a nuanced sense of what counts as a worthwhile result. People who know Congress have said for decades that Kennedy did good work and accomplished worthwhile things. Okay, fine.

But in the late 197os we had a chance to take a step forward, and Kennedy got in the way instead of making it happen. It's too bad.

Bound to Blog: Wonder Woman #14

I'm actually doing a bit of catch-up here; I'll have at least three and maybe four Bound to Blog posts up this week. Starting with:



Yep, it's just like the teaser says: Wonder Woman in Shamrock Land. And while I love that cover — complete with bizarre scale variations, weird amorphous clover blob, bright yellow background, and a guy cut off at the waist in the best spirit of constructivist design — the story isn't maybe as good as it might be. Part of it is the villain— the well-dressed cropped guy on the cover there. He's called the Gentlemen Villain or something, and he's so bland that I can't even remember his name even though I just read the thing. He performs all the usual Marston villainy (forcing women to serve him, throwing around grenades — Marston loves grenades) but it feels pretty rote — perhaps in part because it's mostly just in the interest of stealing stuff. I've seen some writing on this series that's suggested that Marston was freed up by the end of the war...but there's definitely something to be said for evil Nazis as enemies.

Or, you know, maybe Marston just wasn't feeling all that inspired. Or maybe leprechauns just don't hold that much appeal for me. I don't know. I even felt like a lot fo the art wasn't really all that exciting, especially compared to Peter's ravishing work last issue.

Not that the book doesn't have its moments. This is a great panel.



Marston definitely joins R. Crumb in having a thing for piggy-back rides. I assume it's the masochistic implications that make it appealing for both of them; getting a piggyback is infantilizing and polymorphously (rather than explicitly sexually) intimate. WW emphasizes the mother/child aspect by calling him "funny boy" too. Their expressions are both priceless; Steve looks like his eyebrows are going to attain independent lift-off, and WW looks genuinely cranky.

Here's a queasy moment as WW flirts with a leprechaun who has captured her:



Ick.


I like the fact that this looks more like Steve is being showered with bubbles than like he's being buried alive:




I love the scribbly halo of WW's lasso in this one:




And here's the valentine day's card. Steve has an opportunity to make WW kiss him since she's trussed up in the lasso...and oh, she wishes he would...but he's just too galant. It's both romantic and fetishistic, innocent and winkingly kinky, in a way that reminds me of a certain amount of shojo:




This is a bizarre bit: are the Irish especially well known for throwing bricks? Or is this just something Marston made up?




And this is probably the best panel in the issue; I love the designs on the wall there, and the way the Princess Elaine looks impossibly diminutive. The white curved lines of the couch are really nice too; the ones to the right of Elaine almost seem like motion lines, actualy, giving the whole panel a sort of fantastical energy and motion.




The enormous bee as design element here is pretty great:




And the weird inky shadows here are very nicely done; it gives it almost a noirish feel, which is unusual for Peter (I wonder if he used a different assistant on this one or something?)




Oh, man, I'd almost forgotten the flying pigs. That pig looks so happy....




Men! They hate roses and make you sew!




Also... this is an oddly suggestive panel.



The way WW is arched with her arms thorwn back, and the energizing effects of the motion lines... And then you've got those weird veiny, phallic trees beneath her — we've definitely wandered out of Leprechaunland for a moment and into a Freudian dreamscape. And, of course, in the next panel, the excess of passion has given her amnesia. (I can't actually remember if she's gotten amnesia before, but it seems like a natural kink for Marston, fitting in nicely with the mind control and the dominance (fetishizing the obliteration of personality and the sense of control.))

So yeah, there's a lot of individual things that work great; just overall it doesn't quite fit together as well as it might. Thinking about it a little more, I think that maybe the Irish mythology just isn't as well integrated as the Greek myths he sometimes uses, or as the more fantastic mole men or seal men or whatever settings. He seems to mostly see the Irish myths as an opportuniy for slapstick, maybe; in any case, it doesn't jibe with his cosmic gender interests the way Mars and Venus and so forth do. The loss of the war setting also makes the whole thing seem a little directionless; instead of an epic battle between good and evil, it’s just some thieving schmo wandering around doing bad. I think the WW run really benefits from having the contrast between Marston’s set-in-stone binary crankitude and his scattershot, anything goes scripting (much the way that Peter’s art has a tension between extreme stiffness and extreme fluidity.) Marston’s ideology is certainly still present here (there’s a lot of mention of loving submission,) but it never solidifies thematically the way it does in many of the issues. But so it goes; they can’t all be gems, I guess. Hopefully Marston and Peter’ll be back on their game next issue.

Wiki Trek: "Elaan of Troyius"

Some production facts from Mem Alpha, just because they interest me:

... Similarly to "The Corbomite Maneuver", this episode was filmed early in the season, but aired much later because of the many, newly created special effect shots which took lot of time to be filmed and added in post-production.

... more costume changes than any other TOS character with the exception of Barbara Anderson (Lenore Karidian) in "The Conscience of the King." Guest star France Nuyen's costumes are far more revealing, however: the purple halter top, the silver flowered thing on black mesh, the orange dress, and the blue wedding gown with no sides.

This episode marks the first appearance of the Matt Jefferies-designed Klingon ship ... The new emblem of the Klingon Empire is seen on the model ...

War vessel. Like people say, Matt Jefferies did great work. He designed the Enterprise and the bridge, both of which are magnificent, then followed himself with the Klingons' war ship, also a triumph. The ship is oddly beautiful: kind of scary and off looking, like an alien warship should be, but in subtle ways, and at the same time it draws the eye: the ship is uncomfortable to look at but also pleasing to look at. I think it outclasses everything else about the old-series Klingons: the make-up, the dumb names ("Klingon" itself is kind of dumb). In fact I'd say it was better than the show's Vulcan stuff, even better than Mr. Spock's ears. The Klingon ship is old Star Trek's best go at representing alienness, a pretty fundamental mission for the series. 

Shatner's enemy.  MemAlpha mentioned France Nuyen's outfits. She was born 1939, Marseilles; original name: France-Nguyen Van-Nga. The wig is copied off the cover painting of a science fiction magazine from a good ways back.

Per Wiki, Nuyen's father was Vietnamese, mother was a French gypsy. When she was a teen somebody photographed her on the beach and she became a starlet.

In 1958 Nuyen and Bill Shatner starred in the Broadway adaptation of a hit novel, The World of Suzie Wong. Shatner says the play was sold out for months in advance because of mass theater parties booked from out of town. He claims that the result was a disaster because Nuyen was incompetent and impossible, a temperamental brat, somebody who couldn't be trusted even to deliver her lines or do what the stage directions said.

The play would just fall apart, night after night, and Shatner had to stay alive up there somehow. So he began bending his lines; he twisted their delivery, sent the emphasis where it wasn't expected. That way he could give the audience something to pay attention to. This is the origin story for the famous Shatner delivery, the crosswire rat-a-tat-tat everyone parodies. ("Man ... was meant ... to try," and on "to" his voice goes up, and on "try" it goes down, throws the word away.)  He learned those tricks so he could survive France Nuyen. Sources: Up Till Now and Neal Pollack's comments during Shatner's Comedy Central roast, though I don't advise watching the roast unless you're some kind of moron. ( update, Not Neal Pollack. It was Kevin Pollak. )

Eyerolling.  In “Elaan,” Nuyen is just fine. Every big scene has got her in it, she has to carry the episode, and she comes thru. Moues, eye rolling, bellowing, cooing: she puts some life into the business, and it's not just noise, there's a performance. Some people you are really happy to see when you're watching old Trek, and she's one of them. (This effect, I mean brightening at the sight of competence, gets stronger if you're watching a lot of episodes in a row. Now that I'm a few weeks into doing this rundown, I have to remind myself that I'm not really a James Doohan fan, that I'm just very grateful whenever he shows up.)

Nuyen was a reg on St. Elsewhere, got a master’s in clinical psych in 1986 and started counseling battered women, women inmates. After three years someone gave her a “Woman of the Year” award. 

Ambassador, others.  The green ambassador (Petri), b. 1930, NYC. Wiki says he did a lot of “summer stock and repertory companies,” then Shakespeare on Broadway, first movie was The Robe (1953), played Caligula.

Mem Alpha: “After recovering from a drug addiction and a career-ruining jail sentence, Robinson returned to acting on television in the late 1960s, … Besides TOS, other TV series on which he has made guest appearances include Mannix, Bewitched, The Wild Wild West, Kolchak: The Night Stalker (with fellow TOS guest actor John Fiedler), The Waltons, Barney Miller (with another TOS guest star, Lee Meriwether), and Murder, She Wrote.” Movie parts listed for 1970s to ’90s. In 1997-2000, hosted Beyond Bizarre for the Discovery Channel.

 Orange shoulders.  Big alien flunky, b. 1937, NYC. Married to the woman who played the pretty historian who falls for Khan, 1962-70, had a kid. First credits mentioned are movies in 1964, including Taggart, in which he starred. Last role was in Quantum Leap, decades later.

 During 1960s, Mem Alpha says, “guest appearances on such television series as The Virginian, Mannix, and Mission: Impossible, as well as Fantasy Island …”

 

Black redshirt. He has a couple of lines, pops up in a couple of scenes, though he doesn’t get to do anything useful. Was also Greg Morris’s stunt double on Mission: Impossible.

 Did a lot of small parts over the years, latest being a judge on Boston Legal.

 

Swamp Thing.  Alien bodyguard #1. He was born 1938, started as stunt double on Lost in Space in 1965, would eventually have speaking part on the ’70s Battlestar Galactica.

He was the guy in the Swamp Thing costume in Swamp Thing, The Return of Swamp Thing, and the Swamp Thing tv series. Mem Apha mentions movie credits in ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, in most cases decently budgeted films.

 

Viewscreen role. The Klingon, b. 1922. Mem Alpha: “Guest appearances on numerous television series, includingGunsmoke, Rawhide, The Untouchables, Wagon Train, Bonanza, The Virginian, and Gene Roddenberry's The Lieutenant. … last appearance was in the 1972 pilot movie for the short-lived series The Delphi Bureau …”

Only known appearance:  The other alien bodyguard, another soul killed by Star Trek's wig deptartment: