The Black Hole

I proclaim the last 60 seconds of this episode to be The Best Outro We Have Ever Done.

/diminished

I did see this on home video when I was younger, and did not enjoy it. I hardly remember it, but this was a fun trip for me. Also, probably one of the more random commentaries

On the topic of random acronyms, Calvin and Hobbes had one

Oh man, Dragonslayer.  Now there's a movie worth commentary-ing. 
*puts it on 'curated' wishlist*

Airwolf!
Used to watch that when I was younger.

Probably just becuase of the nostalgia factor, having seen this many, many times when it played on HBO when I was a kid, but I thought the movie was pretty cool. Esp the giant sets, and the way they were free from people moving about, gave it that creepy, dreamlike quality.
And the score, to me, always seemed haunting IMO. You guys may know more about music perhaps because you know how to write and read music, but for someone who listened to this when he was like 6 it was pretty cool.
Didn't mind that it was played over certain scenes, like the blaster shootout.
And the ending to me was just for effect, didn't really matter if it was accurate. To me it was just cool way to show something that can only theorize still.  The Captain ended up becoming one with his creation.
If you guys have seen the movie Interstellar yet, it also has a similar improbable ending, but of course it's Nolan
so it will be praised, lol.

Oh, BTW, Vincent and BOB look completely different(Vincent has a round top and Bob has a 'Devo" style top) and have 2 completely functions. Vincent even says it when first meeting BOB.
And speaking of things like the dining room and the chandelier, thats all explained earlier when Borgnine was explaining how the guy bilked the tax payers into paying for the 'grandiose' ship. Just listening to the guy
speak you can tell that he would def have a captains setup like that. Not really fair comparing it to the ISS, lol,
when this was supposed to be more like Star Trek future.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't the gravity from the black hole make it necessary to use thrusters
to speed up and slow down when approaching the larger ship?

Last edited by mkeithddc (2015-01-29 10:27:32)

This is one of my favorite episodes ever. The very definition of "Friends in Your Head". Just you guys being silly and meandering about whilst some random silly film plays in the background. This should happen more often. You should pick films that none of you have seen. Well, I guess, BAD film none of you have seen.

Next up: Gigli!

For Invid:

I still get choked up by the opening theme of Star Blazers.

Last edited by Jp12x (2015-02-01 05:39:36)

Glad you guys did this one as I had been wanting to revisit it since forever.  Unlike Invid, I was not a smart fourth-grader in 1979, and I remember seeing both this and ST:TMP in the theater. All I remembered about The Black Hole though was (a) that the TV/teaser trailer with the voice-over and the green vector graphics scared the living bejeesus out of me as a kid for some reason. (In fact, I had a mild panic attack seeing the trailer again as an adult as a DVD extra on some 80's exploitation flick that Robert Forster was starring in.) and (b) that I cried when BOB died. 

Seeing it as an adult, holy mother of God what a mess.  But for everybody wondering where the story money went, just look at the credits: story by Jeb Rosebrook and Bob Barbash & Richard Landau, screenplay by Jeb Rosebrook and Gerry Day. I guess if they ever get that remake going it'll at least stop the world bitching about how they only ever remake good films and how much more useful it would be to remake bad ones. 

I do think the guys were being a little harsh on Mr internet tinfoil-hat douchebag though.  Now I haven't actually studied literature in almost 30 years, but two seconds of googling confirmed my intuition that there is a long and honorable tradition of Freudian psychoanalytic criticism with respect to Frankenstein-type monster stories.  So this guy is not coming out of left field or anything.  Of course one might claim that academic literary criticism is in actual fact empirically non-distinct from tinfoil-hat douchebaggery, but seeing as I work in a department that includes colleagues in English Literature, I'm sure I couldn't possibly comment.  It certainly pre-dates the internet though. 

And I'm not sure about falling into a black hole as a way to die.   A parachute not opening, that's a way to die. Getting caught in the gears of a combine. Having your nuts bit off by a Laplander, that's the way I wanna go.

My friend and I, for 4th grade art class, did a HUGE six foot long drawing of the "Argo" (Yamato) to be hung in the hallway. Good times.

This was a movie I have fond memories of from when I was a child, but with a different set of third act problems than say "Explorers" because this movie was from that era when children's films good be freakin' horrifying. I had an audio storybook of this movie on cassette that had a strong emphasis on the cute, floating robots and curiously omitted parts like the corpses of the murdered crew being turned into robot slaves.

Kinda reminds me of the children's film viewfinder I had that showed clips from the original "Alien" movie (and no, I'm not joking. This was a real kids toy and I had it when I was in single digits).