Positive Review: The Muppet Movie (1979)

Muppets never get old.

The original movies -- The Muppet Movie, The Great Muppet Caper, and The Muppets Take Manhattan -- remain entertaining regardless of age.

If you’re looking for goofy, ridiculous, clean fun, you can’t do better. The Muppets are absurdity at its finest. People who take themselves too seriously need not apply.

You can split hairs over which old-school Muppet movie is the strongest, but the award for best Muppet bad guy definitely goes to the first -- The Muppet Movie’s Doc Hopper, played superbly by the late Charles Durning.

Consider Kermit’s goals in the movie. He wants to become a famous performer so he can make people happy.

Doc Hopper wants Kermit to become his mascot to sell french-fried frog legs.

So we have an intersection of motivations. Doc Hopper would indeed grant part of Kermit’s wish. He’ll make him a famous performer, but it would be a perversion of why Kermit wants to perform.

EARTHS IN SPACE Episode One Teaser

EARTHS IN SPACE vol. 1 Where Are the Little Green Men? is now available on Amazon, eBookpie, and Copia.

The e-book contains Episode One: "Liberty or Death" and Episode Two: "The End of an Earth."

You like free samples, right? Well, here's the beginning.

All text copyright Daniel R. Sherrier. Do not reproduce without permission.

TEASER

The forest was just like any old forest, until an archer in a spacesuit appeared.

The individual transitioned from invisible to transparent to solid in half a second. No one was around to witness this marvel—which was a shame; she was the only archer in a spacesuit this world had ever seen.

Be nice to retail employees

I was once a human bull’s-eye.

During breaks from high school and college, I worked at Target. I started as a cashier, and when that became boring and monotonous, I switched to the “Guest Services” desk, a.k.a. the refund counter.

That was not monotonous.

Some people had valid receipts. Some had expired receipts. Some were shocked and appalled to learn they even needed a receipt to get their money back.

Some requested simple exchanges. Some brought back entire baskets of duplicate wedding gifts, spread out among a good dozen or so gift receipts.

Some were excited to learn I could look up their receipts by swiping their credit card. Some failed to realize that if they discarded the tags, I’d have no barcode to scan.

Then there was the week after Christmas.

Earths in Space: The Theme

I’ve already laid out the premise of my upcoming e-book series, EARTHS IN SPACE.

Again, there are no aliens, but the universe is full of people. Other Earths are out there. Unique individuals populate each one, and they make unique decisions, leading to unique civilizations.

A team of explorers seeks to travel to as many Earths as possible, and adventurous science fiction fun ensues. (Much more fiction than science, I admit. I seem to have left my Ph.D. in a previous life.)

Okay, so underneath all that, what’s it really about?

It reflects the learning process to some extent.

For example, as you grew from a small child to an older child, you probably realized that Big Bird is actually a guy in a costume. (Sorry if I’ve ruined anything for you.)

So you figure out that there are no kindly giant yellow birds who sing about their ABCs, but at the same time, this whole new intricate world of Muppet puppetry opens up. One bit of magic goes away, and new possibilities emerge.

In my fictional universe, you’ll find no Martians exist, but you don’t need Martians when you’ve got countless worlds worth of humanity to explore. Accept that there are no little green men and realize that fascinating people are more numerous than you ever suspected.

There’s nothing more liberating than education, whether you’re learning about yourself or the world around you. Generally, knowing more is always preferable. Not everything you find will be wonderful, however, but it’s the key to figuring out how to make things better.

How do you learn? You explore. See what is and what isn’t.

And my characters get to have crazy sci-fi fun as they do it.

Positive Review: Uncanny X-Men #172 & 173

Welcome to the first installment of POSITIVE REVIEWS.

I hate to speak ill of other people’s hard work, so you’ll only find me pointing out the good stuff, whether it’s movies, books, television, etc.

But let’s start in the wonderful world of comic books, with UNCANNY X-MEN #172 & 173. (There will be SPOILERS, but these books did come out in 1983.)

There’s a lot going on in these two issues, which primarily serve as a follow-up to the excellent WOLVERINE limited series by Chris Claremont and Frank Miller.

So it continues that story, continues the evolution of Storm (prepare to see her as you’ve never seen her before -- with a mohawk!), teases the mystery of Madelyne Pryor a bit more (yes, Cyclops, dating an exact look-alike of your dead ex sounds like a swell idea and can’t possibly hurt the poor girl in any conceivable way), and establishes Rogue as one of the X-Men.

It’s all good and fun. This is Claremont at the peak of his writing, and the art by Paul Smith is smooth and clean, with a nice flow to it. Frank Miller’s a tough act to follow, but Smith does a superb job.

Where these issues really excel, however, are with the Rogue bits.

Adventures in Makeup

I have been makeup-free since January 2005.

I had a lot of fun acting in plays in high school and college, but I always dreaded the makeup.

The final time I had to endure the wretched stuff (well, only wretched when it’s on me) was the final time I acted in a play, Gilbert & Sullivan’s Ruddigore at the College of William & Mary.

I knew when I auditioned that would be my last time acting. It was my senior year of college—I had my fun for several years, and it was time to focus on some other areas.

There’d be much to miss about acting. Not the makeup, though. But I figured I could tolerate a little bit one last time.

They cast me as a bust. A marble, white bust -- a head statute that, through the magic of Gilbert & Sullivan, came to life. And was very, very white. Ghostly white. My shower and I spent good quality time together after each show.

Incidentally, I was the town drunk in earlier scenes, obligated to drink far too much awful-tasting iced tea shortly before being smothered in the white makeup and hairspray and stuffed in a box to hide everything below my neck. Oh, and for one number, I and several guys had to do the grapevine on a platform six feet above the stage, without a railing. Good thing I stopped while I was ahead.

Anyway, that white makeup wasn’t as bad as the blue makeup from my sophomore year of high school.

That one-act play was called “The Girl Who Was Asked to Turn Blue,” and my character was part of a utopian society of blue people (not the Smurfs, another one) trying to convince this girl to join us in our collective.

So, on top of all the usual adolescent anxieties 15-year-olds deal with, this play gave me a new one as I returned to school each morning: “My face isn’t still blue anywhere, is it?”

Luckily, most plays only required a minimal level of makeup, and in high school, some of the girls seemed to take bizarre pleasure in making up us guys. So at least I didn’t have to know how the stuff worked. I just had to sit there and take it.

College was different. Not only were we expected to apply our makeup ourselves, but we had to go out and buy our own.

Yes, my higher education made me the slightly embarrassed owner of makeup.

So picture this: myself and a car full of college boys being taken to Target and heading straight into the cosmetics aisle.

An upperclassman picked everything out for us (with uncanny speed and accuracy), and then the cashiers faced a sudden surge of young guys individually purchasing makeup, and only makeup.

Shortly later, we learned how to put it all on without turning into clowns. I remember little at this point, except that the eye-liner was particularly nefarious.

Then I had to smuggle it all into my dorm room.

Makeup certainly had an unfortunate but unavoidable presence during my performance days. In fact, it occasionally got too much credit.

For a production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest my senior year of high school, I was one of the bad guys, so I decided to be stereotypically evil and grow a goatee.

This prompted one of the freshman girls to say, “I like your beard. Is that real, or is it painted on?”

Look! Cover!

Cue the theme music, if I had any:

It's coming!

"I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?"

I work at a community newspaper that covers my old hometown and my old schools. So now, I get to observe it all from a completely different angle. But I wind up missing a lot of the little stuff.

Last year, I was reminded of a particular day toward the end of my senior year of high school.

A good friend of mine had been complaining for some time that I always wore solid, plain T-shirts of subdued colors, like black or gray or blue. No colorful design, no bright brand name, just a functional, monochromatic shirt, and a quiet monochrome at that. (The center of attention was not my favorite place to be.)

So, for my 18th birthday, he gave me a present: a black T-shirt with a message in tall, white letters.

It said, “I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?”

He said I had to wear it just one day. So, wanting to be a good sport, I complied.

I walked into the school commons the next morning with that uncharacteristic pick-up line T-shirt, and, in stereotypical teenage fashion, I felt like everyone was staring at me. My friends found it highly amusing. I just wanted to get through the day, be seen by as few people as possible, fulfill my obligation, and never touch the shirt again.

During one class, we were reading or doing a worksheet in complete silence, and out of the blue, the teacher started giggling. I looked up and realized she was laughing at me.

And that was merely the first class of the day.

I soon encountered a minor kink in my “be seen by as few people as possible” plan—we had an assembly that day. A school-wide assembly.

The younger students were seated in the rising bleachers on both sides of the gym, but all of us seniors were directed to chairs right in the middle of the floor, with three grade levels looking down at us, plus teachers and some visitors to the school.

Yeah, I felt a tad exposed. I crossed my arms and hoped this little shindig would be short.

I was happy to learn that part of the assembly would involve a slideshow. To run a successful slideshow, something else needed to happen: you needed to dim the lights.

I welcomed the darkness. That would be a few minutes in which no one would be able to see me and my silly “I lost my phone number. Can I have yours?” message.

They dimmed the lights and began the slideshow. I relaxed and uncrossed my arms. Then I looked down.

The darn shirt glowed in the dark.

I re-crossed my arms, and fortunately, most eyes were on the slideshow anyway.

So how was I reminded of this swell day?

I was looking through the newspaper archives for a little retrospective item. While seeking tidbits for a “10 years ago” slot, I came across an article about the school celebrating its 10th anniversary with a big assembly.

This bewildered me initially. I knew that was the spring of my senior year, so I must have been there, but I could not for the life of me remember attending an assembly about the school’s 10th anniversary.

Then it hit me.

“Oh,” I realized, “so that’s what that assembly was about.”

The 2001 article made no mention of glow-in-the-dark gag gifts.

The Blurb

So what's this EARTHS IN SPACE all about? Here are the bare-bones basics:


***

There are no aliens, but the universe is full of people. Other Earths are out there. Some are younger, and some are older. Unique individuals populate them all, and they make unique decisions, leading to unique civilizations. Amena Wharry wants to visit each one. She has no idea what she’s getting into. She can’t wait to find out.

Volume 1: Where Are the Little Green Men? contains the first two novellas in this episodic science fiction series. Amena and her space-faring team of explorers learn that life out there is much like life here, and just as unusual. In the first episode, "Liberty or Death," the team faces a group of hi-tech tyrants who pretend to be gods. Then, in "The End of an Earth," they travel to a world that has less time than they think.

EARTHS IN SPACE. They’re already out there. You just haven’t found them yet.

****


Coming soon!

Who am I?

Who am I?

Two! Four! Six! Ohhh, wait, this isn’t a musical.

I’m Daniel Sherrier. I write stuff real good. There’s even evidence.

Team Venture Productions decided to perform my full-length play, SUPER!, in Chicago’s Gorilla Tango Theatre in 2008.

Blowout Theatre included my short play, “Sweet Dreams,” in their inaugural Night of One-Acts in 2011.

Chameleon Theatre Circle’s New Play Contest decided my children’s play, “The Numerous Numbers and the Magical Plus Sign,” was fit to win Best Play in the Theatre for Youth category in 2006. They even gave it a staged reading in Minnesota, which means I’ve been performed in Minnesota even though I’ve never stepped foot in Minnesota.

My television pilot script SELFLESS earned me a spot in the 2011 Taliesin Nexus Filmmakers Workshop in Los Angeles.

Another television pilot script of mine, RIP, was a semifinalist in the 2011 PAGE International Screenwriting Competition, so it ranked somewhere between 11th and 25th out of 313 or so entries in its category.

RIP was also a finalist in the TVWriter.com People’s Pilot competition in 2010, and a television concept, THE NEW WORLD, achieved the same distinction in the same contest in 2006.

I also have a collection of Virginia Press Association awards. Last year, I came in third place in my division for Column Writing. I was even placed on the Virginia School Board Association’s Media Honor Roll in 2010.

So why brag? Because I have e-books coming out soon!

I’ll be launching a series of episodic novellas in the near future. The first book is currently being formatted, and then it will be sent off to your favorite digital bookstores.

It will be low in price, high in fun, and loaded with the daily recommended value of science fiction excitement.

So, look for EARTHS IN SPACE vol. 1: Where Are the Little Green Men? -- coming soon to an electronic device near you!

I shall tease it in the next post, and later I’ll post an excerpt, which makes this a tease of a tease of a tease.

What else can you expect on this blog? General randomness. Maybe some columns. Definitely plenty of shameless self-promotion. But I’ll make sure to plug other good stuff I come across, too.

Welcome. Now don’t go anywhere, unless it’s to Facebook, where you should like me.