What is this I’m watching?
Is it speculative fiction?
A Gothic melodrama?
An all-star disaster flick?
A zombie horror movie?
A retro, 1950s throwback?
A metaphysical mind-trip?
Or just another shameless, post-“Star Wars” cash-grab?
Toss these seemingly disparate elements into Maximilian’s mixer, and you’ll be drinking deep from the craziest smoothie ever!
Join Roy Bjellquist and me tomorrow evening, as once again I will be the guest co-host for “Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner.” Roy and I will take the plunge into Walt Disney’s WTF intergalactic whirlpool, “The Black Hole” (1979).
“The Black Hole” is a product of Disney’s maddest fever dream ever, a barely sustainable period during which the studio repeatedly girded itself for an icy plunge into relevance, only to get cold feet and yank its creative team back from the brink. This is the same psychotic pattern that yielded such potentially bold gambits as “The Watcher in the Woods,” “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” “Tron,” “The Black Cauldron,” and “The Return to Oz.”
Too violent and scary for kids (to whom the films were marketed), and too compromised for adults, the result is a cabinet of curiosities full of freakish specimens that are neither fish nor fowl. Hard to believe, now that Disney owns the world, but there was actually a precarious decade or more when the studio was more off-the-charts than Hans Reinhardt’s “Cygnus.”
I hope you’ll join us for another lively discussion, in many ways launching off of last week’s autopsy of “Starcrash” (1978). John Barry wrote the music for both.
“Roy’s Tie-Dye Sci-Fi Corner” will be live-streamed this Friday at 7 p.m. EDT. For more information, follow the link.
https://www.facebook.com/events/649274212291005/
PLEASE NOTE: On Sunday, Roy’s guest will be Nick Tate, who will return to share more behind-the-scenes stories about his time on the classic TV series “Space: 1999.” Sunday’s show will air at a special time, 4 p.m. EDT.
