Nostalgia Time, 23 February 2015: Nightbreed, The Band Concert

Let's celebrate two pop culture anniversaries today: one turning 25 years old, and the other a sprightly 80.

25 years ago Clive Barker's dark fantasy film Nightbreed was released into American cinemas. The film was adapted from his own novel Cabal, and got pretty mercilessly cut and edited by Morgan Creek Productions before it saw released. A rediscovered director's cut has recently been released, and I look forward to checking it out. Even in its original compromised form I have always had a lot of time for Nightbreed. It's an imaginative, atmospheric movie with an early Danny Elfman score, some stunning prosthetic make-up work and an unexpectedly great turn by director David Cronenberg as the film's villain.

Some films you love because they're great. Some films you love because, despite all their flaws and compromises, you can see the great movie looking out from inside. Nightbreed is the second kind of film.

Nostalgia Time, 3 February 2015: In the Mouth of Madness, The Three Caballeros

It's Nostalgia Time, where we celebrate pop culture anniversaries like nobody's business. Today sees the anniversary of two films that probably couldn't be any further apart: John Carpenter's 1995 horror movie In the Mouth of Madness, which turns 20 today, and the Walt Disney animated film The Three Caballeros, which turns 70.

In the Mouth of Madness is a Lovecraft-inspired horror movie directed by cult favourite John Carpenter. Shot in Toronto on a budget of just $7 million dollars, it represented a fresh hit for the Carpenter, whose career had been slowly falling into the doldrums after a string of early smash hits including Halloween and The Thing. The film starred Sam Neill as insurance investigator John Trent, who is dispatched to investigate an author who has gone missing without filing a copy of his latest novel with his publisher. Once in the strange town of Hobb's End (previously thought to be fictional) Trent is sucked into a nightmarish apocalyptic world.

Nostalgia Time, 2 February 2015: The Lost World

Welcome to Nostalgia Time, an irregular celebration of all the pop culture anniversaries that strike my fancy. Today it's time to celebrate a pretty significant milestone: the 90th anniversary of Harry O. Hoyt's adventure film The Lost World, based on the novel by Arthur Conan Doyle. How old is this film now? For a better perspective, just keep in mind that when it was released into cinemas on 2 February 1925, Arthur Conan Doyle was still alive.

Doyle was a presence in the making of this film as well. In 1922 he brought test footage of the film's famous dinosaurs to a meeting of the Society of American Magicians, showcasing the pioneering stop-motion effects to audience that included Harry Houdini.

It is for Willis O'Brien's remarkable effects that the film is remembered today: it's a landmark achievement in film-making technology, and foreshadowed O'Brien's later work animating King Kong in 1933.

Highlander: The Final Dimension (1995)

On 27 January 1995 Highlander: The Final Dimension was released in American cinemas. It was the third film in a franchise that started back in 1986. Now the original Highlander was not a significant hit when it was released into cinemas. The fantasy adventure starred Christopher Lambert and Sean Connery as immortal swordsmen in 16th century Scotland and present-day New York. While the film only grossed $12 million dollars on its theatrical release, it became a cult hit on home video.
This led to a 1991 sequel, Highlander II: The Gathering. Lambert, Connery and director Russell Mulcahy were dragged back somewhat unwillingly via sequel clauses in their original contracts, and the sequel’s producers (who had no participation in the original film) diverted considerably from the established back story with a science fiction tale of global warming, time travel and alien planets. Mulcahy famously left the film’s premiere in disgust after 15 minutes, while Lambert unsuccessfully attempted to quit the film altogether while it was shooting. Highlander II made more money than Highlander, but it also cost more money: in the end both films sat as a curious movie franchise where neither instalment had actually turned a profit.

Nostalgia Time: 19 January 2015: Tremors

It's Nostalgia Time, my semi-regular but pretty frequent celebration of the pop culture anniversaries you should be observing each day. For Australians today might be worth observing for the 40th anniversary of youth radio network Triple J (originally Double J), but for proper cult film geeks today is best spent celebrating the 25th anniversary of one of the best pulp sci-fi movies of the last few decades: Tremors.

I think Tremors is the perfect cult film, because it's the kind of movie that got largely overlooked and dismissed upon release, but which has developed a keen fan following via home video and late night broadcasts. Don't get me wrong: the film earned money, but most people watched it and forgot it, without realising how fun it actually was. The first time I saw it was on an in-house video channel in a hotel while on holiday. I certainly didn't forget it, and when I finally bought a bluray player it was one of the first films I purchased.

Nostalgia Time 16 January 2015: Star Trek: Voyager, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

Welcome to Nostalgia Time, this blog's ongoing experiment in celebrating more pop culture anniversaries than any other website on the Internet. Today it's the 20th anniversary of two very well known TV shows: Star Trek: Voyager and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys.

Star Trek: Voyager premiered on the all-new (now defunct) United Paramount Network on 16 January 1995. It was the flagship series for the new broadcaster, and while the syndicated series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was still on the air (and halfway through its third season) it was Voyager that Paramount treated as the proper successor to its monster hit Star Trek: The Next Generation. To be honest, it seemed a more appropriate successor than DS9 anyway: bright where DS9 was moody, and optimistic where DS9 was cynical. It even used The Next Generation's sets, subtly re-built to look a bit fresher and more contemporary.

In practice the series was pretty uneven, with characters and elements that worked well and others that did not. To my mind one of the series' greatest strengths was its captain, Kathryn Janeway - played exceptionally well by Kate Mulgrew. When you're the fourth star of a Star Trek series it's difficult to find a way to chart your own course, and I think both Mulgrew and the writers managed that and made Janeway a subtlely distinctive and appealing character. Some of the other regular cast did not fare so well. Personally I found myself struggling to warm to the likes of Tuvok or Neelix.

Nostalgia Time 15 January 2015: Floating Clouds, Benny Hill, The Golem

Welcome to Nostalgia Time, a deliberately excessive observation of pop culture anniversaries. Today sees three anniversaries you might want to observe and share.

First up, today is the 60th anniversary of Mikio Naruse's Floating Clouds. It's probably the director's most widely acclaimed film; in 1995 a survey of Japanese film critics saw it named the third-best Japanese film of all time. It follows two lovers reunited after an affair in French Indochina, now unable to continue their romance because one of them is married. It's beautifully paced and shot, and stands up wonderfully well today. A lot of people experience classic Japanese film by watching Kurosawa, Ozu or Mizoguchi, but if you haven't seen any Naruse you're missing a trick.

Nostalgia Time 13 January 2015: Demon Knight

20 years ago today Universal Pictures attempted to expand a successful television anthology series into a motion picture franchise. Their attempt underperformed somewhat - it earned just $21 million from a budget of about $12 million.

It's a pity: Tales from the Crypt presents Demon Knight is a garish, pulpy horror film with great performances and a lot of well-played humour. There is a question of whether the Tales from the Crypt framing sequence harmed its chances. Would audiences go and see in the cinema something they'd previously been able to watch on television in the comfort of their own homes?

Tales from the Crypt had originated as a 1950s comic book, but in 1989 the television adaptation premiered on HBO. The series, a weekly anthology of pulp horror, was produced by a highly prestigious group of Hollywood producers and directors, including Richard Donner, David Giler, Walter Hill, Joel Silver and Robert Zemeckis. Through their industry connections the production team gathered an immensely talented group of actors and directors to appear in and helm the series’ various episodes. Directors included Richard Donner, John Frankenheimer, Tobe Hooper, Russell Mulcahy, Tom Hanks and Arnold Schwarzenegger. Actors included Dan Ackroyd, Beau Bridges, Kirk Douglas, Malcolm McDowell, Joe Pesci and Demi Moore.

Nostalgia Time: 6 January 2015

Last year I highlighted a bunch of anniversaries for pop culture-related characters, films and TV programmes. I figured it was worth continuing it this year, only in a more standardised column - so please enjoy Nostalgia Time, your semi-regular guide to the geek-related anniversaries of 2015.

Today is the 70th anniversary of the Warner Bros cartoon character Pepé Le Pew, who made his film debut on this day back in 1945. In Odor-able Kitty, a ginger cat attempts to turn the tables on his tormentors by disguising himself as a skunk and thus frighten away all of the bullies who make his life a living hell. Unfortunately his disguise attracts the attention of a French-accented amorous skunk named  Pepé Le Pew, who spends the six-minute short making unwanted romantic overtures towards the panicked cat.

It's an odd cartoon in the context of  Pepé's canon of animated shorts, because it's the only time that his attentions are directed towards a male character instead of a female. The remainder of his career, another fifteen shorts between 1947 and 1962, was spent harassing female cats (and one female dog).

The Fourth Doctor: 40 years on

On 28 December 1974 BBC1 broadcast the first episode of the Doctor Who serial "Robot", heralding the beginning of a record-breaking seven-year run for Tom Baker in the title role. Today is the 40th anniversary of his tenure as the Doctor, and he remains pretty much the most popular and definitive lead actor in the series' 51-year history.

David Tennant might have given Baker a run for his money, and certainly remains the iconic face of new Doctor Who, but when it comes to representing the franchise as a whole it's never going to be anybody but Tom Baker. Audience reactions to his cameo in last year's 50th anniversary special confirmed that beyond a doubt.

Now "Robot" was actually a fairly ordinary Doctor Who story, and not really one of the classic. In honour of the Fourth Doctor's 40th anniversary I wanted to highlight other stories; seven in fact, one from each of Tom Baker's seven seasons. Are these categorically the best? Who can say? Opinions will differ. All I want to say is that these are seven entertaining, wonderfully indicative examples of his time on the series.

Sega Saturn: 20 years on

Last week the Sega Saturn videogame console turned 20. The anniversary came and went without too much fanfare, and certainly the majority of videogaming websites seemed to fail to notice. That's not too great a surprise: I forgot the anniversary myself. I had dedicated a 20-post countdown of my favourite PlayStation games and neglected Sega's black plastic beast entirely.

Truth be told, it was hard being a Saturn owner in Australia. The most popular games were easy enough to find and purchase at the time, but the more obscure titles proved maddeningly difficult to track down. On top of that the console's best regarded titles were released at a point when the market had all-but abandoned the platform entirely. Attempts to track down Dragon Force or Panzer Dragoon Saga at the time proved fruitless, and while an after-market exists for these titles you can expect to pay as much as $800 for an English language copy of either title today.

The Little Mermaid: 25 years on

25 years ago today Walt Disney Pictures released The Little Mermaid. It was the company's 28th full-length animated feature, but also one of their most important. Disney had struggled to make the leap from the 1960s to the 1980s. During the 1970s the company relied on inexpensive family films and comparatively cheap animated features. By the end of the decade, however, that strategy seemed dead in the water. Star Wars had radically changed the film landscape, and while the other studios jumped at the chance to make more sophisticated and mature feature films Disney found itself stuck in a rut with rapidly declining box office.

Attempts to cash in on the new Hollywood aesthetic failed entirely, with The Black Hole, Tron, Return to Oz and several other live-action films all flopping to one degree or another. Attempts to revolutionise the studio's animated offerings resulted in the disastrously unsuccessful The Black Cauldron, which took years to make and was entirely dismissed by audiences worldwide. Two young animators, Ron Clements and John Musker, developed a much cheaper animated feature titled The Great Mouse Detective. When it turned a small profit Disney assigned them to a slightly more ambitious feature: The Little Mermaid.

Godzilla: 60 years on

Godzilla, the king of giant monsters, turns 60 years old today. It was on 3 November 1954 that Godzilla was released across Japan in all Toho cinemas. It was released, with some additional footage, in the USA two years later, and has since spawned numerous Japanese sequels and two American remakes.

The original Godzilla (or Gojira, to use its actual name) was inspired by the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 as well as the accidental irradiation of the Daigo Fukuryu Maru fishing boat during a US nuclear weapons test on Bikini Atoll on 1 March 1954. The horror of the atomic bomb understandably carried much weight in Japanese culture, and writer/director Ishiro Honda personified that horror in the shape of a giant mutated lizard.

Stargate: 20 years on

20 years ago today Roland Emmerich and Dean Devlin's glossy sci-fi epic Stargate opened in US cinemas. It was a pretty solid hit at the time, earning almost $200 million dollars against a comparatively modest $50 million dollar budget, and it established its creatives as a prominent force in Hollywood.

It's also got a pretty weird trajectory as a franchise, since MGM never managed to release a sequel into cinemas but did somehow manage to spin it off into four television shows. One of them, Stargate SG-1, even managed to outpace The X Files to become America's longest-running science fiction TV series.

It's a weird fate for a movie, since by now it's possibly the least well-known part of the whole enterprise. Well, okay, the cartoon Stargate Infinity is probably less well-known, but you get what I mean. This movie might have come first, but it's the TV franchise that's overwhelmingly the largest part of Stargate's pop culture footprint.

SimCity and Prince of Persia: 25 years on

Today marks the 25th anniversary of the renowned videogame SimCity, which was first released for Amiga and Apple computers on 3 October 1989. The game was initially developed by designer Will Wright in 1985, when he realised that he was enjoyed playing with the level generator of his current game, Raid on Bungeling Bay, that he was the game itself. This led him to explore the possibility of a game that simulated building an environment. It was a groundbreaking idea for a game: there was no enemy to defeat, and no real way to win or lose the game in conventional terms. Wright's original publisher, Brøderbund, refused to produce the game, leading Wright to sign up with the new company Maxis instead. The game's proposed title was Micropolis until it was renamed SimCity at the last minute.

Don't feel too sorry for Brøderbund over their missing out on SimCity. Also celebrating its 25th anniversary today is Jordan Mechner's Prince of Persia, released for the Apple II on the same day as SimCity. It was a side-scrolling action-adventure game that boasted incredibly fluid graphics, rotoscoped frame-by-frame from video footage of Mechner's younger brother. Like SimCity it was a huge hit and created an entire franchise that continues to today. Its reach into popular culture is arguably a little bigger than SimCity, which never had the benefit of an expensive Walt Disney movie adaptation. On the other hand, Prince of Persia didn't kick off an entire genre of videogame, which SimCity kind of did.

ER: 20 years on

It's quite difficult to get nostalgic about ER. This enormously popular and commercial successful NBC drama may be celebrating its 20th anniversary today, but it ran for 331 episodes over 15 seasons and only ended in April 2009. There simply hasn't been enough time to indulge in nostalgia.

It's still one of my favourite TV dramas. It was originally written in the 1970s as a feature film script by novelist and screenwriter Michael Crichton, who was a doctor before he turned to full-time writing. The script lay fallow for almost 20 years before Steven Spielberg showed interest in it. While developing the ER film, Crichton told Spielberg about the novel he was currently writing - a sci-fi thriller involving cloning dinosaurs. The notoriously fickle Spielberg jumped ship and bought the rights to Jurassic Park, but he didn't entirely abandon ER - he had his production company Amblin Entertainment turn it into a weekly drama instead.

ER certainly hit the ground running. It debuted one day after a rival medical drama, Chicago Hope (happy birthday, by the way), but despite critical expectations that ER would run second it instead completely dominated the 1994 television landscape. More than 19 million people watched the first season across America. The second and third seasons got 21 million viewers and the fourth an astounding 30 million. The most popular episode of all, Season 2's "Hell and High Water" - in which Dr Doug Ross saves a boy from drowning in a storm drain, was seen by more than 48 million people. It was the highest-rated TV episode since Dallas.

Why was this show so successful? Who do I continue to love it so much? There are a few reasons why.

Alien Nation: 25 years on

When Alien Nation was released in cinemas in 1988, it was a fairly ordinary near future sci-fi thriller with decent performances by James Caan and Mandy Patinkin but saddled with a by-the-numbers script and a lot of police action movie cliches. It sort of came and went: people watched it, some enjoyed it, nobody really cared.

For some reason 20th Century Fox did, because the following year they launched Alien Nation as a weekly TV drama. The cast changed, replacing Caan with Gary Graham and Patinkin with Eric Pierpoint, but the basic premise remained the same: an massive alien spacecraft crashed into California's Mojave Desert and it's population, spotty-headed extraterrestrials who were being transported as slaves, go on to become a large refugee population in the Los Angeles area. The series is set some years into a long process of integration, and follows two police detectives - one human, one alien - as they investigate crimes in a racially charged urban environment.

Thanks to writer/producer Kenneth Johnson, who re-developed the movie concept for television, Alien Nation remains one of the best US science fiction TV dramas of all time. The day-to-day plots might have been a bit hackneyed and stereotyped, but no one before or since has developed an alien race and culture in such an interesting fashion.

Goldfinger: 50 years on

The general wisdom is that sequels are never as good as the original film. There's an accepted law of diminishing returns that states that every time you revisit the well there's a little less creativity, a reduction of the originality. A little shine comes off each time.

Then there is the small group of sequels that actually manage to exceed the quality of their predecessors: The Godfather Part 2, The Empire Strikes Back, The Dark Knight, Toy Story 2. Sure, individual people are going to quibble over which ones are superior and which ones aren't, but generally speaking pretty much anybody can identify at least one sequel that was better.

The third film, though? No one says they're the best installment. No one holds Return of the Jedi above Star Wars, or The Godfather Part III over Part I, or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade over Raiders of the Lost Ark. I think I've identified one, though: Goldfinger, the third EON Productions James Bond adventure, which celebrates its 50th anniversary today.

Ashes of Time: 20 years on

20 years ago today Hong Kong moviegoers were presented with Ashes of Time, a long-gestating martial arts fantasy written and directed by Wong Kar-wai. At the time it was the most expensive Hong Kong film production ever staged. It had taken an inordinately long time to shoot, with Wong as good as holding his high profile cast captive in the Gobi Desert. The shoot was so long that the cast simultaneously used its sets and costumes to make a feature-length parody, The Eagle-Shooting Heroes, with another director, Jeffrey Lau. Post-production was so lengthy and difficult that halfway through Wong wrote, shot, edited and released an entirely unrelated film, Chungking Express.

When it was released 20 years ago, local critics were baffled by its obtuse plot and weird photography. Audiences, who had expected a crowd-pleasing adaptation of wuxia novel The Legend of the Condor Heroes, famously queued around the block demanding refunds. It ultimately lost its distributor HK$30 million dollars.

Ashes of Time almost killed Wong's career just when he was developing serious critical acclaim. Two decades later, however, and partly thanks to a 2006 re-edit by Wong, it is widely regarded as a Hong Kong classic: odd, mournful, near-impenetrable, and for many utterly unforgettable.

Muppet Babies: 30 years on

Back in 1984, when Frank Oz directed the third Muppet movie The Muppets Take Manhattan, it was immediately clear which part of the film audiences were going to like the most. A dream sequence saw Miss Piggy imagining growing up as a toddler with Kermit the Frog and all of the other major Muppet characters. It was just a whimsical musical number in the middle of the film, but everyone who worked on the sequence recognised its appeal - including Muppet creator and producer Jim Henson.

At the time Henson had already been bombarded with offers by American TV studios to produce an animated series based on his Muppet characters. He had always resisted, being fairly wary of the quality of such Saturday morning cartoons. With the Muppet Babies, however, he had an idea that intrigued him, and so he put together a deal with Marvel Productions and Japanese animation studio Toei to put together a series.