“Star Trek,” Season Two: Four Episodes (Desilu Studios/Norway Productions, 1967)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s “feature” at the Vintage Sci-Fi screening (http://sdvsf.org/) was a group of four episodes from the second season (1967-1968) of the original Star Trek which the proprietor picked because they were the highest-rated episodes from the season on imdb.com: “Amok Time” (September 15, 1967); “Mirror, Mirror” (October 6, 1967); “Journey to Babel” (November 16, 1967); and “The Trouble with Tribbles” (December 29, 1967). I must confess I can’t be critically objective about the original Star Trek because the series was too much a part of my childhood; my mom, my brother and I would watch them together on our old black-and-white TV (which makes it weird to see them in color, especially the rich, vibrant colors of the CBS Home Video Blu-Ray restorations) and we even had pet names for them — “Mirror, Mirror” we referred to as “the bearded-Spock episode.” I also saw “Amok Time” at a Star Trek convention in San Francisco in 1976 to which my brother took me (though on the last night I played hooky to go to the Cento Cedar Theatre to see a revival of Alfred Hitchcock’s first talkie, the 1929 Blackmail) and at which Harlan Ellison was the guest star (and naturally they also showed “The City on the Edge of Forever,” the great episode Ellison wrote for the first season of Star Trek). Ellison, who takes as much glee in puncturing people’s illusions in person as he does in his stories, recalled that when he first showed his Star Trek script to William Shatner, Shatner counted the lines his character, Captain James T. Kirk, got, and also the number Leonard Nimoy got as Mr. Spock: he insisted that he have more lines than Nimoy because “I can’t compete with those ears.” 

“Amok Time” was the only episode of the original Star Trek that took place on Spock’s home planet, Vulcan — whose backstory was largely created, not by Gene Roddenberry or any of his writers,but by Nimoy himself. In his prospectus for Star Trek Roddenberry had called Spock’s home planet “Vulcanis” and had made its inhabitants inherently logical and emotionless; it was Nimoy, writing a backstory for his character, who came up with the idea that Vulcans had once been as emotional as humans, they had nearly destroyed their planet in wars and it was to keep the peace and prevent any future conflicts that Vulcans had learned the discipline of logic as a guide to all (or almost all) their actions. Roddenberry incorporated Nimoy’s concept of Vulcan into his prospectus and his writers — in “Amok Time” the script was by Theodore “Tad” Sturgeon, one of the best science-fiction writers of the era — ran with it big-time, concocting various reasons for Spock to lose his veneer of logic and become more … well, human. In “Amok Time” Spock suddenly starts behaving erratically and losing his cool all over the Enterprise, and Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley, who starting in the second series got opening-titles credits alongside Shatner and Nimoy) notices that his heart rate, blood pressure and other vital signs have sparked way up even for a Vulcan. Spock demands that Kirk give him immediate shore leave on Vulcan, and Kirk defies a direct order from Starfleet Command to do so. 

It turns out that Spock is literally in heat: it seems that one of the few things Vulcans do that isn’t logical is select their mates. During his childhood Spock was committed in an arranged marriage with T’Pring (Arlene Martel) in a ceremony he describes as “less than a marriage, but more than a betrothal,” and now he’s being driven by sexual desire and needs to go back to Vulcan to consummate his marriage. It also turns out that Vulcans have an elaborate and surprisingly primitive ritual called “kunat kalipifi” (I’m totally guessing at the spelling here) by which the woman in this coupling can either accept or reject her husband, and if she rejects him she gets to pick another man to fight her fiancé and she gets awarded to the winner. The ceremony is officiated by T’Pau, a member of the High Council that rules Vulcan (“I had no idea Spock’s family was this important!” Kirk says) and the only person who ever turned down an appointment to the High Council of the United Federation of Planets. T’Pau is played, in one of the strongest and most vividly etched performances in Star Trek history, by Celia Lovsky, the wife (by then the widow) of Peter Lorre. The ceremony takes place on a weird sort of blasted heath in the middle of a mountain range with two stone bridges providing the only access — given that we’ve been led to believe that Vulcan is a highly developed planet the sheer primitiveness of the setting is a surprise — and T’Pring picks Captain Kirk as her champion to duel Spock. They duel with the traditionally specified weapons, the lirpa (a sort of jousting stick with a hammer at one end and a scythe-like blade on the other) and the an hung (a woven cord with which one of the opponents can strangle the other). Kirk agrees to participate in the duel even though T’Pau offers to let him out of it since he’s not a Vulcan, and it’s only in the middle of the fight that T’Pau informs him that the duel is to the death. 

McCoy saves his two superior officers from having to kill each other by sneaking an injection into Kirk — he says it’s an oxygen booster to compensate for the thin Vulcan air (this episode was made during the run-up to the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, when there was a lot of concern about how the athletes would fare in Mexico City’s thin air, so Sturgeon may have been referencing that controversy) but it’s really a tranquilizer that, once it takes effect, will make Kirk seem dead. Eventually it turns out that the whole thing was worked out logically by T’Pring, who during Spock’s long absence from Vulcan had fallen in love with someone else, Stonn (Lawrence Montaigne), and had worked out that if Spock killed Kirk, he’d be so upset at what he’d done he’d insist on being punished for it, and he’d leave her to be with Stonn; and if Kirk killed Spock, he wouldn’t want her and so she could be with Stonn. “Amok Time” is one of the best early Star Trek episodes, though it also created a major inconsistency that was shown up when “Journey to Babel” was shown later in the evening: if this elaborate ceremony is how Vulcans mate and marry, just how did Spock’s parents, Vulcan diplomat Sarek (Mark Lenard, who’d earlier played the Romulan starship captain on “Balance of Terror” in season one and thereby had already been fitted with the long, pointy ears shared by both Romulans and Vulcans) and his Earthling wife Amanda (Jane Wyatt, the veteran actress who’d played Bette Davis’s sister in Marked Woman three decades earlier), get together?

Next up on the Vintage Sci-Fi program was “Mirror, Mirror,” in which a landing party from the Enterprise that beamed down to a peaceful planet in an attempt to arrange for mining rights to their dilithium crystals (a key element in the Enterprise’s propulsion system) gets scrambled in an ion storm in space and lands in a mirror-image Enterprise in a parallel universe, in which they’re ruled not by a Federation but an Empire (the reference to Kirk having ambitions to be a “Caesar” suggests that the big difference between this parallel Earth and the one we know is that in parallel Earth the Roman Empire never fell) and officers in Starfleet get promotions by murdering each other. It’s also established that the policies of this Empire are so harsh and brutal the Nazis look like Boy Scouts by comparison; in this universe, if the wimpy pacifists of that planet won’t give them the dilithium crystals the Enterprise will simply exterminate the entire population with phasers and come in to take them. While I was disappointed that writer Jerome Bixby didn’t show more of the parallel-universe Kirk aboard our Enterprise — there’s just one scene in which Spock notices immediately that there’s something “off” about the people who just beamed up and has them taken into custody — for the most part this was a cool episode, with the parallel version of Spock wearing a tasteful beard and Kirk having a live-in girlfriend (Barbara Luna) in his quarters. The parallel Kirk also has a device called the “Tantalus Machine” he looted from some other planet with which he can instantly kill anyone he wants to get rid of just by focusing a TV monitor on them and pushing a button. (The parallel Enterprise officers also get way cooler uniforms than the ones we know.) There’s one scene in which Sulu (George Takei) starts chatting up Lieutenant Uhura (Nichelle Nichols) and practically demands she have sex with him then and there on the bridge — and I couldn’t help but joke, “In this parallel universe George Takei is straight.” 

After that the next episode was “Journey to Babel,” written by Dorothy C. Fontana — she was billed just as “D. C. Fontana” because she knew she wouldn’t get hired for science-fiction and action-adventure shows if people knew she was a woman (she was part of the 2016 ConDor science-fiction convention’s 50^th anniversary tribute to Star Trek and her reminiscences of working with Gene Roddenberry were fascinating), a trick later played by Harry Potter creator Janice Rowling — in which the Enterprise is supposed to transport a group of diplomats to a Federation council on a planet that’s been nicknamed “Babel” because it’s gathering a whole bunch of people (or beings) from various planets, including some with hostilities towards each other. Spock’s parents Sarek and Amanda are among the honored guests, but the hostility between Spock and his dad is palpable and only gets overcome when Sarek has a heart attack on board (he’s had three previous ones but has kept that secret even from his wife, but that’s why he’s retiring at age 102, young for a Vulcan) and Dr. McCoy has to do an operation — and needs Spock as a blood donor. At the same time there’s intrigue on board the Enterprise: one of the diplomats is murdered and Sarek is the prime suspect since they were seen arguing before the other being died — and another alien’s forehead horn turns out to be a fake. 

Also the Enterprise is attacked by a ship they don’t recognize as anything either from the Federation or their normal enemies, the Klingons and the Romulans, and though the parallel wouldn’t have occurred to anyone in 1967 it does look (as Charles said) like a giant fidget-spinner in space. It turns out that the attacking starship is from Orion, as is the disguised alien, and the purpose is so the Orions can loot a sparsely populated planet that’s applying for Federation membership to protect its natural resources that the Orions want to be able to strip-mine. The best aspects of this show are the insights it gives into Spock’s relationship with his parents — there’s an especially moving speech for Amanda in which she recalls how the other Vulcan kids bullied Spock for being half-human — and one nice speech for Amanda when she gets tired of hearing Sarek and Spock argue over whether it would be more logical for Spock to go ahead with the operation as Sarek’s blood donor or for him to command the Enterprise since Kirk has been incapacitated by an attack from the disguised Orion. “I’m sick to death of logic!” Amanda laments — a feeling I was starting to share. I was struck by the fact that when these shows were new and I was watching them as a teenager I thought Spock was by far the coolest character and wished it were he, not Kirk, commanding the Enterprise; now the relentlessness of Vulcan logic just seems annoying to me and I can better understand the continual exasperation of the human characters over the way Spock treats them and approaches every situation.

The final show on the Vintage Sci-Fi program of Star Trek episodes was “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which “made” the career of its writer, David Gerrold (much the way placing the song “Crazy” with Patsy Cline “made” the career of its writer, Willie Nelson) and got nominated for a Hugo Award for best TV script. (The other three nominees were also Star Trek episodes, and Gerrold lost to Harlan Ellison for “The City on the Edge of Forever.”) Gerrold wrote two books on the original Star Trek, one a history of the entire series and one a memoir of how he came to write “The Trouble with Tribbles” and what they went through while filming the episode, and the most poignant part of his book was when he quoted a memo he’d written at the time the script for “Tribbles” was evolving and he suggested that the character of Cyrano Jones — played in the final version by Stanley Adams as an unscrupulous money-grubbing trader — instead become a befuddled old man who didn’t realize how much trouble his Tribbles would cause on a space station or a starship. “What a role for Boris Karloff,” Gerrold wrote in his memo — and in the book he regretted he didn’t follow up on the idea because it would have given the great Karloff a chance to appear on Star Trek. I regret that, too, but “The Trouble with Tribbles” remains one of the great, legendary Star Trek episodes, unusual in its comic flair (though both Robert Justman, associate producer for season two, and Fred Freiberger, producer for season three, disliked it because they found it was too funny, and Freiberger turned down Gerrold’s offer to write a sequel for season three) and the overall charm. According to imdb.com, 500 prop Tribbles were made for the show and the sound a Tribble makes was a combination of a dove’s coo and an owl’s screech, along with air being let out of a pinched balloon. Only a few of the Tribbles moved or could make noise — mostly they just get held by human characters and petted as they make That Sound — and of course the trouble with Tribbles is that “they’re born pregnant, which seems to be an excellent time-saver,” as Dr. McCoy explains in the exposition. 

The intrigue concerns a world called “Sherman’s Planet” which both the Federation and the Klingons want, and the secret to the successful development of Sherman’s Planet is a hybridized strain of wheat called quadrotriticale (a variation of the original real-life triticale developed by “Green Revolution” scientists in 1960’s Canada). The Federation has send a large shipment of quadrotriticale to a space station run by Larry (Whit Bissell, the villain in the original I Was a Teenage Werewolf), where both the Enterprise crew and crew members from a Klingon vessel are enjoying — more or less — a shore leave that turns into a bar fight (I think David Gerrold must have been having a lot of fun with this: “Let’s do a barroom brawl in a science-fiction show!”) when engineer James Montgomery Scott (James Doohan) gets riled by a Klingon’s insults to the Enterprise. Also one of the delights of this show is the prissiness of Nilz Baris (William Schallert), a Federation official sent there to preserve the quadrotriticale and make sure it gets to Sherman’s Planet safely — only it turns out the grain has been poisoned by Baris’s assistant Koloth (William Campbell), who’s really a Klingon spy in disguise and is “outed” as such when Kirk learns that Tribbles and Klingons don’t like each other, and every time a Tribble comes into contact with a Klingon its dove’s coo turns into an owl’s screech. “The Trouble with Tribbles” instantly became a fan favorite from the time it aired and remains one today — and Gerrold’s other writings are refreshingly light by sci-fi standards in much the same way — and it’s a welcome opportunity for everyone connected with Star Trek to let their hair down a bit, even though (like the movie Forbidden Planet) it would have been better if Boris Karloff had been in it …

Robinson Crusoe on Mars (Aubrey Schenck Productions/Paramount, 1964)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night’s Mars film screening at Golden Hill (http://marsmovieguide.com/) was an intriguing double bill of two films with the same basic plot, but made 51 years apart: Robinson Crusoe on Mars (1964) and The Martian (2015). I’ve already commented on The Martian in these pages after Charles and I watched it together on DVD (https://moviemagg.blogspot.com/2016/02/the-martian-20th-century-fox-tsg.html) but I’d never seen Robinson Crusoe on Mars and I’d long been curious about it. I first heard of it from Stuart M. Kaminsky’s book on director Don Siegel, for which he interviewed not only Siegel but quite a few friends — and one of them was Byron Haskin, who’d worked with Siegel at Warner Bros. in the late 1930’s (Haskin was director of their special-effects department while Siegel was in charge of montage, and together they came up with the incredible scene from the 1939 all-star gangster film The Roaring Twenties in which, to illustrate the stock market crash of 1929, ticker-tape machines literally melt on top of Wall Street), then became a director and specialized in science-fiction films, including George Pal’s spectacular adaptation of H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1953) and the immediate follow-up, Conquest of Space (1954). Haskin told Kaminsky that he’d made another science-fiction film he thought was better than The War of the Worlds, Robinson Crusoe on Mars, but the risible title (insisted on by the distributor, Paramount) had, Haskin felt, driven people away from the box office instead of attracting them. So I finally got to see Robinson Crusoe on Mars 35 years after reading its director’s encomium — and I’m afraid I disagree. 

I sometimes say of a film that fails to realize its potential that there was a better movie in that premise than the one that actually got made — only in this case the better movie on that premise actually did get made, and the proprietor of the Mars movie screenings did Byron Haskin and his writers, Ib Melchior (the great Heldentenor Lauritz Melchior’s son) and John C. Higgins no favors by showing The Martian right after it and letting us see all the things its director, Ridley Scott, and writers, novelist Andy Weir (who actually wrote it for serial publication online, and this time around that was very apparent in the number of crises he inserted so he could do the usual cliffhangers) and adapter/screenwriter Drew Goddard, got right that Haskin, Melchior Söhn and Higgins got wrong. Not that Robinson Crusoe on Mars is a bad movie; it’s just not a great film — and sorry, Byron, I don’t think it’s better than The War of the Worlds. Robinson Crusoe on Mars is 110 minutes long — about half an hour longer than the typical science-fiction film of the time — and I was actually nodding off through much of the first part as U.S. astronaut Christopher “Kit” Draper (Paul Mantee) gets stranded on Mars after the ship being commanded by its only other crew member, Col. Dan McReady (Adam West, two years before his star-making role on the Batman TV series but just as stuffily and self-consciously “heroic” here), crashes. McReady is killed — though the sheer psychological weight of Draper’s isolation causes him to have an hallucination that McReady has returned — and Draper has to figure out ways to survive on the Martian surface until the year or so it will take for Earth and Mars to be close enough in space for the next Mars spaceship to launch and send a crew that can rescue him. The big problems Draper has to solve to survive on Mars are the absence of oxygen, water, and food. Fortunately, he figures out how to use a combustible yellow rock he finds on Mars — he explains it contains its own oxygen, like solid rocket fuel — both for heat and to extract the oxygen so he can breathe. He also finds a stream of fresh water in which grow an odd sort of native plant — the only indigenous form of life we see on these writers’ version of Mars — whose bulbs pop open and reveal a red substance that looks like a miniature hot dog and which both humans and simians (Draper’s only companion is Mona, who I assumed was supposed to be a chimpanzee but was identified in the cast list as “The Woolly Monkey” and who, like Lassie, was cast Transgender: the on-screen monkey was male even though the animal in the story was supposed to be female) can consume safely. 

Though Byron Haskin fought the studio over the title, the two stories are close enough (even if only in broad outline) that Draper finds his Friday and even names him such in honor of Daniel DeFoe’s famous novel — only Friday is actually a slave from a planet orbiting Ainilam, the middle star of the three in the “belt” of the constellation Orion. It seems that the people in charge of this world have sent a work force of slaves to strip-mine Mars, and once the mine is played out the slaves are simply killed. Friday (Victor Lundin in the only other significant human role) is an escaped slave who has thick bracelets on each arm that send back homing signals to his owners. At first Draper thinks Friday is mute, but eventually he starts speaking in an alien language (according to imdb.com, Lundin developed his own language for the character and based it on Mayan) and soon Draper is able to teach him some basic English and also learn a few of Friday’s own words. Unfortunately, the aliens who brought Friday and his fellow slaves to Mars send four attack vehicles (recycled from the Martian spacecraft that flew to Earth in The War of the Worlds, made by the same director for the same studio) that home in on Friday’s slave bracelets (which give a shock to Draper’s arms whenever he tries to remove them) and regularly bomb where the signals tell them Draper and Friday are. As if that weren’t enough, Mars is also under attack by meteorites like the one that drove the U.S. spaceship off course and onto the Martian surface — and in one of the film’s most spectacular scenes, one such meteorite deposits chips of black ash all over Our Heroes. (The effects crew coated the actors with honey to get the flakes to stick to them.) There’s one thing Robinson Crusoe on Mars does quite well: it successfully creates an air of strangeness, convincing us that we’re really on another planet on which the natural laws of Earth we take for granted simply don’t apply (though neither this film nor The Martian bothered to do much with the fact that the gravity on Mars is only about three-fifths what it is on Earth). Death Valley “played” Mars in the film, and apparently the sky there was so bright that the sky registered white, not blue, on the Technicolor film being used —which made it easy for Paramount’s long-time special effects head, Farciot Edouart, to patch in a red sky — though the red sky seemed to have been the result of some very obvious process work. Indeed, though both Edouart and former Warners’ effects chief Haskin were involved, the effects in Robinson Crusoe on Mars were surprisingly lame — the “spaceship” that transports Draper and McReady to Mars becomes a cartoon every time it’s obliged to fly, and there are not only some quite obvious process shots but some clips that are repeated so often you want to say hello to them, just like in an Ed Wood movie. 

Also, the biggest difference plot-wise between Robinson Crusoe on Mars and The Martian is that Robinson Crusoe on Mars stays on Mars throughout its entire running time. There aren’t the continual cut-backs between the surviving astronaut on Mars and the frantic efforts of NASA, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the rest of America’s scientific infrastructure back on Earth to get him home safely — and while one could argue that Haskin’s film gains over Scott’s by being more obsessive over the astronaut’s isolation by not cutting away from him and his struggles, it also means we get tired of watching him all alone out there (at least until he encounters Friday) trundling around the same Death Valley locations that are meant to represent Mars. The two films also offer an interesting contrast in their lead actors: Paul Mantee is a considerably darker personality than Matt Damon (and to my mind he’s also considerably sexier — and both films offer plenty of shirtless views of their male stars, while The Martian as a “post-Code” movie shows Damon totally nude, though not alas full-frontal!) and a better actor, but he really doesn’t have the sort of personal charm Damon was able to use to get us to like his stranded Mars protagonist and thereby identify with his struggle. (Gee, a recent movie in which we feel more of an emotional connection with the leading character than we did in the one made on the same premise over a half-century earlier! I guess it had to happen sometime … ) I thought it was a pity Paul Mantee came along after the film noir cycle had petered out, since I suspect that would have been the right niche for him if he’d been about 15 to 20 years older; he’s a darkly romantic “type” who in this film doesn’t get the chance to play either darkness or romance. I also wondered why I spent a good deal of Robinson Crusoe on Mars thinking of the Burton Lane-E. Y. Harburg song “How Are Things in Glocca Morra?” from Finian’s Rainbow — and then I realized it was because the main theme of Van Cleave’s musical score (his full name was Nathan Van Cleave, but he dropped the first name from his credit) sounded an awful lot like it!

Midsomer Murders: “The Glitch” (Bentley Productions, ITV, American Public Television, 2009)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My main “feature” last night was an oddball rerun of a 2009 episode of Midsomer Murders (the odd spelling of the title is because it’s actually a series about law enforcement in Midsomer County in central England) called “The Glitch,” in which the dramatis personae — aside from series regulars Tom Barnaby (John Nettles) and Ben Jones (Jason Hughes), the lead detectives for the Midsomer County police — are George Jeffers (David Haig), a computer scientist at the local university who developed the concept of “kernel computing” (which basically means, at least as explained in Michael Russell’s script, means making chips out of ever-larger sheets of silicon so the chips will be baked together and automatically connected instead of having to be cut up and then reconnected electronically — an imdb.com “Trivia” contributor says this is B.S. but it sounds impressive); and Clinton Finn (played by an actor who I’m assuming is British from his name — Nigel Whitmey — but who speaks with a reasonably convincing American accent even though nothing in Russell’s script specifies that the character is American), head of an American computer company called SoftEarth which has bought the rights to Jeffers’ invention and plans to use it to create a new system for air traffic control. Only Jeffers has figured out a “glitch” in his system that involves two contradictory instructions sent to a binary chip at the same time that would essentially paralyze it, and he’s worried that if this is used for air traffic control it could lead to planes crashing and people getting killed. So he’s determined to stop the development of his own technology even though this is going to cost SoftEarth millions and also lead to the end of plans for a new science building the university Jeffers teaches at is hoping to build with a multi-million pound donation from SoftEarth. There’s also a bicycle race going on in Midsomer County that a lot of the people in the movie are preparing for, and a mysterious assailant who’s sneaking up to owners of sports cars and drenching them and their vehicles in red paint spiked with glue, which makes it considerably harder to get off.

It’s one of those surprisingly placid British mystery stories that runs about 95 minutes (it was originally shown in two parts on the British commercial channel, though blessedly KPBS ran the two episodes back-to-back); the murder — of Jeffers’ current girlfriend, Helen Ward, who’s run down while riding Jeffers’ bicycle and wearing his coat — doesn’t occur until the show is half an hour long, and the denouement in which the killer’s identity is revealed (it was an old man who used to work at the local college as a porter while his son got a scholarship there and ultimately became its dean) seems surprisingly beside the point. Along the way we learn that Clinton Finn is having simultaneous affairs with Jeffers’ immediately previous wife (for someone as unprepossessing as Jeffers it’s a surprise that he’s had three wives and quite a few girlfriends in between!) Melanie (Joanna Ross) and his in-house publicity director, Helen Markham (Lucy Brown) — at one point Clinton, the rotter, asks Helen to lie for him to give him an alibi for the killing, and her price for doing so is that he dump Melanie. Eventually another person gets killed — Daniel Snape (Philip Jackson), an auto repair garage owner who takes care of Clinton Finn’s collection of rare sports cars and who’s also the go-to guy for the red-paint thrower’s victims when they need their cars stripped of the additional paint — and the red-paint assailant turns out to be George’s and Melanie’s son Tom (James Musgrove), who’s doing it to get back at Clinton for fucking his mom. He’s also a pretty typical alienated youth who when he gets back from a red-paint attack goes to his room and blasts punk rock on his boom box (though this show was made and set in 2009 the music Tom Jeffers is listening to sounds like it came from the late 1970’s, the era of the Sex Pistols and the early Clash), though in some ways he’s the most appealing character in the show (certainly he’s the cutest, and I usually don’t like ’em that young!) and I wish there’d been more of him. Like a lot of British mysteries this one is quiet, relatively non-violent (we don’t actually see either of the killings being committed) and with that odd aura of gentility with which British writers and filmmakers tell stories of criminal violence and sexual shenanigans.

Gwen Stefani’s You Make Me Feel Like Christmas (NBC-TV, aired December 12, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago, on December 12, NBC presented yet another one of their hour-long specials of Christmas music, though regrettably dragged down with quite a few unfunny “comedy” bits. This one was called You Make It Feel Like Christmas and featured Gwen Stefani, a singer I’ve long liked but have never really followed that well. I know she started with an alternative rock band called No Doubt and she’s defined on her Wikipedia page as “an American singer, songwriter, fashion designer, actress, and television personality.” She has a lovely voice, unusually pure for someone who started as an alt-rocker, and after a long marriage with Gavin Rossdale of the band Bush she recently broke up with him and took up with … Miranda Lambert’s ex, Blake Shelton. Just how this unsexy and mediocre country singer has been able to get two women singer-songwriters of far more attractiveness, charisma and talent to fall in love with him is a mystery to me; the Shelton-Stefani coupling was celebrated on this show by a duet on the title song (which Stefani said she wrote herself and Shelton liked so much he wanted to record it, though it’s credited on the Wikipedia page for the album to both of them along with Justin Tranter and Michael Busbee, Stefani’s usual writing partners) at the end of which they locked lips. 

The Gwen Stefani Christmas special was actually mostly good from her perspective — her voice is in excellent shape, able to handle both the traditional holiday material and her originals — but like so many other music programs these days it was way overproduced. Perhaps this is one of those respects in which my 64 years are showing, as was the fact that I came of age musically in the 1960’s, in which the top bands, with a few exceptions (like Jimi Hendrix and the Who), did very little on stage themselves. In San Francisco the spectacular visuals were provided not by the bands themselves but by light-show artists who projected colored lights, often with effects created by dyed oils, and ironically in order to see the light shows the producers had to keep the house lights so dim you couldn’t even see the band. As my tastes branched out and reached back into the past, I tended to gravitate towards singers like Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Carmen McRae and Frank Sinatra who hadn’t needed big productions to surround them: they made an effect just by standing up in front of the band and singing their hearts out. I think that’s given me a prejudice against artists who feel they need a big production behind them to “wow” audiences; perhaps unfairly, when I see a show, a music video or a TV clip like that I think, “What’s the matter? Don’t you trust your own voice to make an impact without putting on a three-ring circus act behind you?” (In the case of Pink, one artist of today I like but would like better without all that production crap, the “circus” bit is literally true: the last time I saw her on TV, on the 45^th annual American Music Awards from November 19, she and the Cirque du Soleil wanna-bes in her chorus were shown literally scaling the walls of the Marriott Hotel, inside of which the main part of the show was taking place.) 

The whole vogue for big productions in rock and pop concerts started in the 1980’s, when music videos became popular and audiences started wanting to see their favorite artists the way they saw them on MTV. Between them, Michael Jackson and Madonna were the artists who did the most to bring the world of music videos to the live stage, and while they were able to do it in ways that actually added to the appeal of their shows, all too many who’ve tried it since have just looked grotesque. I still can’t believe how Beyoncé, whose true talents are as a straightforward soul singer in the tradition of Dinah Washington and Diana Ross (the latter of whom she played, more or less, in the film Dreamgirls — she also portrayed Etta James in Cadillac Records and turned in the best performance of anyone in that film who was supposed to be playing a real-life star), has surrounded herself with these ridiculous productions that just make her look grotesque — I suspect even Busby Berkeley, if he’d had a chance to see Beyoncé’s recent videos, would have told her, “Girl, don’t you think you’re overdoing it just a little?” Getting back to Gwen Stefani’s Christmas special, she opened with an O.K. version of “Jingle Bells” that as a swing version was hardly in a league with Ella Fitzgerald’s (nor did anyone expect it would be) but would have been perfectly acceptable if she hadn’t surrounded herself with so many choristers cavorting around her it was difficult to spot her in the crowd — a recurring problem with this show. After that Stefani sang a quite haunting song called “When I Was a Little Girl” — it’s on her holiday album that the show was promoting (the main sponsor was Target, with whom Stefani has worked before, giving them an early exclusive on her last album) and, though it has little to do with the season, it’s still a great song and indicative of the straightforward singing she does best. Then she did a duet on “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” — I’m not sure who her partner was (it was a man and it didn’t look like Blake Shelton) but at least they lit more of a fire under this inherently sexy song (“The fire is slowly dying/But, my dear, we’re still goodbye-ing/And since we’ve no place to go/Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow”) than the Pentatonix a cappella group had done in their remarkably unsexy version from their own special six days earlier. After that came one of the dreary “comedy” sketches that dragged down the energy level of this program in the guise of warming it up — set at the North Pole and featuring little-person actor Ed Lee as (what else?) a wise-guy elf. 

Then Stefani did Eartha Kitt’s early-1950’s hit “Santa Baby,” and her rendition compared to Kitt’s original about the way her “Jingle Bells” did to Ella’s: Stefani has none of Kitt’s ability to suggest sexiness with her voice alone, but she phrased the song well and savored its openly materialistic lyrics. Then came an original called “Under the Christmas Lights” and the Stefani-Shelton duet on “You Make Me Feel Like Christmas,” after which she brought on another duet partner, Ne-Yo, for George Michael’s “Last Christmas” (a largely forgotten song which got revived big-time last year because George Michael died just before the Christmas season). Based on his name, I keep thinking Ne-Yo is a rapper and suddenly realizing he’s actually a neo-soul singer with a quite high, lovely and pure voice, though I wish he didn’t copy Michael Jackson’s stage moves so blatantly. Still, “Last Christmas” is a great song and Stefani and Ne-Yo did it justice. After that Stefani did the song “My Gift Is You” that she had performed two weeks earlier on the Christmas at Rockefeller Center program, also on NBC, a nice piece of original material even if the “all I want for Christmas is you” theme has been done to death by several generations of lyric writers. Then she did what was by far the most moving song on the program, “Christmas Eve,” a lovely and intensely moving song that went back to the Black gospel roots of all rock (and jazz, and blues, and rap), that though it seems intended to be a song about a human lover would also work as gospel, as an appeal to Jesus on the day celebrated as that of his birth. Significantly, Stefani had enough confidence in this material to leave the choristers and the elaborate production out of it and just sing her heart out — and when she sequenced the You Make Me Feel Like Christmas CD she wisely put it last because nothing could follow it. 

Alas, on her show she wasn’t quite so smart; she put “Christmas Eve” just before a commercial break, and when she returned she did yet another of those unfunny “comedy” sketches in which she played a bad elf who was drinking and playing hooky on the job, and trying to get her “good elf” colleague to do the same. Then she closed the show with “White Christmas,” and my hope when she announced that song was that she’d do it simply and straightforwardly the way Bing Crosby did in the 1942 version from the film Holiday Inn that made it the greatest hit of his career and the biggest-selling record of all time. No-o-o-o-o: she did it in a gloppy arrangement that managed to combine the worst elements of rock, jazz and modern-day dance-pop, and out came the chorus line again, along with vistas by the show’s director that took the camera into the flies and put Stefani in the center of a Berkeley-esque kaleidoscope effect with her choristers. No, I had never wanted to see what Holiday Inn would have looked like if Busby Berkeley had directed it, and the sheer overwhelming tastelessness of this last number put a damper on the program as a whole and really took the edge off Stefani’s performance of “Christmas Eve.” Gwen Stefani’s You Make Me Feel Like Christmas special was the sort of bad program that could have been great if Stefani had just sung her heart out on holiday material (both her own and the traditional Christmas songbook — judging from the effect she made on the gospel-tinged original “Christmas Eve,” hearing her sing some of the traditional sacred Christmas songs might have been quite compelling!) and trusted her songs and her voice to make an effect without all the horrible “production” and those God-awful “comedy” bits. Still, the show was good enough to make me want to buy the album, which after all was the whole point.

The Story of Mankind (Cambridge Productions/Warner Bros., 1957)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Charles and I watched one of the downright weirdest movies ever made, The Story of Mankind (“Are you sure we have time for it all?” Charles joked when I announced the title), a 1957 Warner Bros. production by producer-director-co-writer Irwin Allen, who previously had made only documentaries but who would become a major force in the movie business in the mid-1970’s when he specialized in disaster movies with all-star casts and turned out two back-to-back blockbuster hits, The Poseidon Adventure and The Towering Inferno. (Though disaster movies have been made before, it was these two films that established “disaster” as a movie genre.) The Story of Mankind — this project, anyway — began life as a pop world-history book by Dutch author Henrik Willem Van Loon, first published in 1922 and which I remember reading in junior high school (before junior high school got renamed with that awful appellation “middle school”), which became famous not only because Van Loon was able to tell a reasonable approximation of the story of mankind in one slim volume but also because of the clever little drawings with which he illustrated it. (I remember one called “Propaganda” which showed a line of people marching off a cliff, obviously induced to do so by some dictator’s propaganda.)

For some reason Irwin Allen decided there was a movie in Van Loon’s book, and what he and screenwriter Charles Bennett (best known for the six Alfred Hitchcock films he worked on between 1934 and 1940 — indeed I’ve argued in these pages that Bennett was to Hitchcock what Robert Riskin was to Frank Capra, or Dudley Nichols to John Ford) came up with was a framing story in which humankind has invented the “super H-bomb” (I think it was pretty much the same as the “solarbonite bomb” that figured prominently in Ed Wood’s messterpiece Plan Nine from Outer Space), not knowing that its use will mean the immediate destruction of Earth as a viable human habitat. So a “Celestial Tribunal” headed by “High Judge” (i.e., God) Cedric Hardwicke has been called to determine whether humanity should be allowed to destroy itself with the super H-bomb or whether the celestial tribunal should intervene and destroy the bomb before it can be used, thereby sparing humanity indefinitely. The two representatives who appear as attorneys for both sides — “The Spirit of Man” (Ronald Colman, surprisingly dignified and impressive in what turned out to be his final film), arguing on the side of humanity’s existence; and “Mr. Scratch’ (Vincent Price), a.k.a. the Devil (the same pseudonym used for the Devil in William Dieterle’s 1941 film All That Money Can Buy, a.k.a. The Devil and Daniel Webster, in which Walter Huston played him), arguing for our destruction — are allowed to cite various incidents from human history to argue that humans are either good or evil. The trial kicks off with Pharoah Khufu of Egypt (John Carradine) — who has a bone to pick with Mr. Scratch because the latter promised him immortality (I couldn’t help but joke, “And all I got to do was be in terrible horror movies, just like you!”) — who according to the script consigned a million human souls to the Devil by forcing them to build the Great Pyramid. The Spirit of Man cites Moses (Francis X. Bushman) as a counter-example of someone good who came out of ancient Egypt. It goes on pretty much like that from there, with Price denouncing the ancient Greeks and Romans as warmongers and Colman citing the beauty of the art and culture they created as well as the ways they extended scientific knowledge.

Some of the sketches provided to illustrate various parts of human history are pretty risible — Groucho, Chico and Harpo Marx all appear but not in the same scene; instead Chico plays a monk who tries to talk Christopher Columbus (Anthony Dexter) out of his mad plan to try to reach the Indies by sailing west instead of East; Groucho is Peter Minuit, skillfully swindling an Indian out of Manhattan Island for $24 (he’s one of the few stars in this film who actually got to play pretty close to his normal typecasting); and Harpo is Sir Isaac Newton, playing his harp in an apple orchard (his song is Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer,” actually written over a century after Newton’s time, and I couldn’t help but wish that a giant ape had come on and picked him and his instrument up as he played) when an apple falls on his head and gives him the idea for the theory of gravity. (This is Harpo’s only color film, so we finally get to see his famous wig the red color it was on stage rather than the “blonde” it looked like in the Marx Brothers’ joint movies.) Peter Lorre makes a quite good Emperor Nero (and Allen and Bennett blessedly avoid letting us hear him attempt to sing) even though he seems to have been patterning his performance on Emil Jannings’ in the 1924 German-Italian co-production of Quo Vadis? (I’ve never seen that movie, but I have seen how Jannings posed as Nero in the stills), but Virginia Mayo as Cleopatra (I’m not making this up, you know!) and Helmut Dantine as Mark Antony seem to be the warmup act for the Liz Taylor-Richard Burton misfire on the same story. The film earned the usual critical brickbats for casting 42-year-old Hedy Lamarr as 19-year-old Joan of Arc (and they had her wear her hair close-cropped as usual in Joan of Arc movies even though contemporary art depicts the real one as having long brown hair), but she’s actually one of the better cast members even though the brevity of the “turns” means it’s unfair to compare the performances here to actors playing the same roles in full-length features about their historical characters.

Agnes Moorehead is surprisingly good as Queen Elizabeth I, though the script for her sequence — William Shakespeare (Reginald Gardiner) reads her a bit of his patriotic poetry and this inspires her to resist and ultimately defeat the Spanish Armada instead of surrendering to it — is preposterous. The French Revolution sequence suffers from the dippy casting of dumb-blonde Marie Wilson as Marie Antoinette, though Franklin Pangborn is marvelous as the Marquis de Varennes — and of course Allen and Bennett couldn’t resist having her say, “Let ’em eat cake,” though that’s been pretty well debunked now (it was a long-standing urban legend about clueless royals and had first appeared in print a century before Marie Antoinette’s time). There’s also the unlikely casting of Dennis Hopper as Napoleon (with Marie Windsor as an appropriately slatternly Josephine), and a final montage sequence of Adolf Hitler, alternately represented by sound recordings of the real one and film clips with Bobby Watson (repeating the role he’d played in To Be or Not to Be and quite a few other World War II-era movies, when he’d been Hollywood’s go-to guy for Der Führer) shown over a backdrop of shots from Leni Riefenstahl’s dark masterpiece Triumph of the Will. That’s hardly the only use of stock footage in this film; we also get clips from Land of the Pharoahs, Helen of Troy, King Richard and the Crusaders, Captain Horatio Hornblower and, I suspect, John Ford’s The Searchers to represent the cruelty with which the Anglo-American settlers repressed and wiped out the Native Americans. (Oddly, this movie is one of the most blatantly pro-Native films turned out by Hollywood before the early 1970’s, when movies like Little Big Man and, later, Dances with Wolves made pro-Native Westerns fashionable; when Vincent Price made the point that the white Europeans in America wiped out the Indians and enslaved the Blacks for a workforce, I joked, “He sounds like Howard Zinn.”)

The Story of Mankind is one of those film projects that seems to have been misbegotten from the get-go — according to an imdb.com “Trivia” poster, when Ronald Colman was asked if the project were based on a book, he said, “Yes, but they are using only the notes on the dust jacket” — one wonders who Irwin Allen and the “suits” at Warners who green-lighted it thought the audience was going to be. And yet it’s good enough it didn’t really deserve the designation it got from the Medved brothers as one of The 50 Worst Films of All Time in their book of that title. Most of whatever quality it has comes from the lead actors, Ronald Colman and Vincent Price; Colman tackles his nearly impossible assignment with grace, dignity and a quite sense of commitment (I can think of quite a few major stars whose last films were considerably worse than this one!), and Price goes into the “camp” mode that was his default setting whenever he had to cope with an especially ridiculous and clichéd script — though there are moments here that evoke memories of the finest performance he ever gave, as Oscar Wilde in his 1977 one-man stage show Diversions and Delights. (I hate to keep mentioning this play, which doesn’t seem ever to have been recorded or filmed and is therefore lost, but I was lucky enough to get to see it and it was magnificent, a daunting challenge to which Price fully and vividly rose. Though he spent decades making increasingly wretched horror films that wasted his talents, Vincent Price could act.) Hardwicke’s presence as the divine judge of the celestial court is also welcome — it’s interesting that at least three of the actors here played major roles in Universal horror films in the early 1940’s (Price in The Invisible Man Returns, Hardwicke in The Ghost of Frankenstein and Carradine in The Mummy’s Ghost) — and overall The Story of Mankind is a compelling movie in its sheer weirdness, even if it’s not “good” in any lasting artistic sense and one can see why one contemporary critic said that if Price’s character had waited a bit longer, he could have cited the movie The Story of Mankind as one more piece of evidence arguing for our destruction.

Rogue One: A “Star Wars” Story (Lucasfilm, Allison Shearmur Productions, Black Hangar Studios, Walt Disney Studios, 2016)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I ran Rogue One, the last DVD I bought at Vons and one I was interested in because it takes place in the Star Wars universe but is a free-standing story and not part of the endless “saga” that began way back in 1977 with the film that was then simply called Star Wars but is now officially known as Star Wars, Episode 4: A New Hope. I must confess that New Hope remains the only Star Wars film I’ve seen except for this one — when it came out in 1977 I liked it enough to see it three times but I didn’t go nuts about it the way a lot of people did, and I missed the immediate sequelae, The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi, because when they came out I was with my then-girlfriend Cat and she had hated the first one so much she wasn’t at all interested in the sequel. (Both of us were militant atheists then — we’ve since mellowed out a good deal on the concept of God and the possibility of His/Her/Its existence — and whereas I’d read the obvious religious metaphor of “The Force” as annoying but not disqualifying, she was so put off by it she couldn’t stand the entire movie — but then I don’t think Cat likes science fiction that much as a genre: she also hated 2001: A Space Odyssey and I’d regard that as one of the two greatest movies ever made, Citizen Kane being the other.) Neither Charles nor I were all that interested in the three “prequels” that started coming out in the 1990’s, and so far we’ve bypassed The Phantom Menace or whatever it was called — the one that was supposed to pick up the story after Return of the Jedi ended — and the upcoming episode, The Last Jedi, isn’t exactly on our must-see list either. Charles and I had watched Mark Hamill on Stephen Colbert’s late-night show last week and, while he spent most of his time there savoring the irony that he was there to promote a movie he couldn’t talk about (George Lucas and the mavens at Lucasfilm and Disney having decreed they wanted nothing out about the film’s plot until it’s actually released December 15), he said that he didn’t particularly like science fiction as a genre when he was offered the lead in the first Star Wars back in the 1970’s but he took the part anyway because he was attracted to the humor in it. 

Alas, as the Star Wars saga has continued, spun off and grown prequelae, sequelae and spin-offs like Rogue One it’s taken on a grim seriousness and the moments of levity that livened up the first film have become just silly. About the only laughs in Rogue One come from the robot — excuse me, “’droid” — K-2SO (Alan Tudyk), and he’s just doing a lamer version of the prissy act the original C-3PO did 40 years ago. It took me a while to realize it, but Rogue One is basically a ripoff of World War II commando movies in general and The Guns of Navarone in particular — the bad guys have a super-weapon and the good guys have to send in a commando team to blow it up. That’s about all the plot there is, though there’s an admixture of King Solomon’s Mines in that the lead character is a young woman, Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones), who in the opening scene has to hide out from the Empire’s own commando squad, led by Orson Krennick (a quite nice villainous performance by Ben Mendelson, even though he seems to be channeling Raymond Massey as well as Peter Cushing, who was actually in the first Star Wars in a similar role), which is there to kidnap her father, Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen, the actor who had the hopeless task of playing the villain in the re-remake of the James Bond story Casino Royale, a part previously played by Peter Lorre and Orson Welles!). Galen is a former Imperial scientist who had come close to perfecting the Death Star when he fled with his wife Lyra (Valerie Kane, who bears an unfortunate resemblance to a young Mick Jagger in drag) and became a farmer on a remote planet. Not remote enough, as Krennick’s squad finds him, kidnaps him and takes him back to Empire Central to force him to complete his work on the Death Star. Jyn gets away — her mom is presumably killed, since we never see her again — and she’s raised by rebel leader Saw Guerera (an almost unrecognizable Forest Whitaker, a first-rate actor ill-used as usual: Bird, for which he should have won an Academy Award, and The Last King of Scotland, for which he did, are his only truly great films). Naturally she wants to join the rebellion against the Empire and also to see her father again, so she ends up on the planet where the rebellion against the Empire is headquartered, where she encounters Senator Pamlo (Sharon Duncan-Brewster), political leader of the rebels. 

One of the ironies is that before this film was released, various radical-Right nut-cases in the U.S. decided that this movie was a propaganda piece against Donald Trump and even alleged that just before it was released, the actors were called back for reshoots of additional scenes quickly written after the election result to make the film even more anti-Trump than it was originally. The irony is not only that the film isn’t particularly anti-Trump — the closest it gets is an early scene in which Krennick says that they need Galen Erso back because his weapon will bring peace to the universe, and when Lyra says, “You’re confusing peace with terror,” Krennick says, “Well, you have to start somewhere” — but Senator Pamlo (the only female principal besides Jyn) is clearly an unflattering portrait of Hillary Clinton, anxious to appease the Empire and settle the war while Jyn’s foster-dad Saw Guerera is the Bernie Sanders-esque voice of progressive militancy who arranges for Jyn to fly with captain Cassian Andor (Diego Luna) and a crew of rebel hard-liners aboard a stolen Imperial cargo ship to the planet where the Death Star is being built and destroy both the weapon itself and the plans for it. (One annoying aspect of the Star Wars saga is the ugly names Lucas and his writers have come up with for their characters; as a New Yorker critic noted when one of the later episodes came out, if you’re going to create a universe you have to name everyone and everything in it, and as a linguistics professor in his day job J. R. R. Tolkien had a professional advantage over George Lucas in this department: if you want a name for absolute evil, the New Yorker critic argued, “Mordor” works a lot better than “Sith.”) The original rebel headquarters are destroyed by an Imperial force wielding an early version of the Death Star — it can’t yet blow up an entire planet but it can take out a giant fortress, which for some reason, like all the rebel headquarters in this movie, looks like a Mayan temple: at one point, when this film made one of its repeated and annoying cut-backs from one confusing location to another, Charles joked, “Meanwhile, back at Chichen Itza” — but the commandos get away successfully and eventually, after a lot of boring exposition occasionally livened up by some surprisingly dull “action” scenes, the rebels blow up the original Death Star and Jyn gets the obligatory King Solomon’s Mines reunion scene with her dad just as he’s dying. 

There are cameo appearances by Carrie Fisher and also by Darth Vader, who still speaks with the voice of James Earl Jones (Jones gets a special credit in the final roll) but seems far less imposing and intimidating this time around — Charles was disappointed at how brief Fisher’s cameo was, but I pointed out that Lucas probably has enough outtakes on her he can keep putting her in new Star Wars movies even now that she’s dead (much the way Marlon Brando was still playing Superman’s father, Jor-El, a decade after he died via leftover clips) — and overall Rogue One struck me as being in that middle ground of moviemaking, not good enough to be great but not bad enough to be camp, either (though I suspect the Rifftrax, formerly Mystery Science Theatre 3000, crew could have a good time with it) and hardly the sort of film the hard-core Star Wars devotees would want from the franchise. The script was written by Chris Weitz (director of New Moon, the second film in the Twilight series and, I thought, the best of them) and Tony Gilroy (who for once kept his penchant for jaw-dropping, neck-snapping “reversals” in check) from a story by John Knoll and Gary Whitta (his last name looks like that of a Star Wars character) based on the characters created by George Lucas. The director was Gareth Edwards, whose two previous features, the low-budget indie Monsters and the latest reboot of Godzilla, are, like Rogue One, movies that take a potentially compelling idea and fall short of its potential, but still manage to entertain. But the really big problems with Rogue One are the sense that we’ve seen it all before and the awful, mind-numbing seriousness with which it’s made, almost totally lacking the enlivening bits of campy humor that made the original Star Wars so much fun.

A Very Pentatonix Christmas (NBC-TV, December 6, 2017)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

I watched an alternately moving and frustrating Christmas show on NBC called A Very Pentatonix Christmas — moving when the Pentatonickers were actually singing, frustrating when they were doing just about anything else. My hope that the show would be just an hour (less commercials) of engaging a cappella singing from Pentatonix were dashed early on, when they not only announced several guest stars — some of whom, like Jennifer Hudson and country singer Brett Eldridge (who’d appeared along with Pentatonix on last week’s Christmas at Rockefeller Center show), belonged on a music program, while others (Jay Leno, Conan O’Brien, Kermit the Frog and his evil doppelganger Konstantin) didn’t. The desperately unfunny Kermit/Konstantin sequence, apparently repeated from a previous year’s Pentatonix Christmas special (did someone actually think this was good?), was by far the most excruciating and oppressive segment of this often annoying program. It was more or less redeemed by some lovely singing, though Pentatonix still frustrates the hell out of me because of those damned drum-machine effects that ruin just about everything they sing. (As I’ve noted about them before, I originally thought they were cheating on the a cappella promise and using a real drum machine; later I found out it’s really one of the Pentatonickers vocally imitating a drum machine, but that didn’t make me like the sound any better.) 

They began with an O.K. medley of “Deck the Halls” and “Let It Snow! Let It Snow! Let It Snow!” (“Let it Snow!”³ was also the song they performed on Christmas at Rockefeller Center) and did a short chorus of “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” with Kermit the Frog (whoever’s voicing him now has the inflections of Jim Henson down perfectly), then did “The Little Drummer Boy” reasonably effectively (though for some reason they left out the “Mary nodded/The ox and lamb kept time/I played my drum for him/I played my very best for him” chorus) and did a quite creatively arranged “take” on “Jingle Bells” before dragging out yet another unmusical and unfunny “guest star.” She was Darcy Lynn Farmer (at least that’s the best job I can do right now in deciphering my own notes — my handwriting has got so bad I could go to Congress and write the Republican tax bill!), the winner of the most recent season of America’s Got Talent! (a thoroughly horrible “reality” show I’ve joked should be called America’s Got Plenty of People Willing to Embarrass the Hell Out of Themselves to Get on Television!). She’s a 13-year-old “singer” (quotes definitely merited) and ventriloquist who, along with her dummy Petunia (who looks like the Velveteen Bunny), did an awful parody lyric to “O Tannenbaum” called “O Easter Egg.” (I’d like to reopen Devil’s Island to incarcerate the writer who actually thought this crap was entertaining.) 

Then there was another lame video segment in which computer-animated versions of the Pentatonickers and others did an almost as awful song called “Crusty the Snowman” (unlike Frosty, Crusty doesn’t melt — well, he does but then a sudden cold snap turns him into ice and he survives in that state — I warned you this wasn’t funny!). After that came the high point of the show: Jennifer Hudson in her current slimmed-down state joined Pentatonix for a searing gospel rendition of the old white hymn “How Great Thou Art” which, at least for the first chorus, outpointed even Mahalia Jackson (who sang it superbly but was handicapped by an Abbey Rents arrangement from a white orchestra and choir) on this song. Then they kicked in that damned drum-machine effect and the mood was weakened, if not spoiled completely. Next up came a version of “Carol of the Bells” and then Brett Eldredge joined Pentatonix for “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas” — for which one of the Pentatonickers played piano. They closed the show with a cover of John Lennon’s “Imagine” — if they had wanted to represent Lennon on a Christmas-themed show, why not “Happy Xmas (War Is Over)”? — which was absolutely beautiful for the first chorus until, you guessed it, they started up that damned (simulated) drum machine again! The only music heard after that was a brief orchestral snatch of “Silent Night” over the closing credits. I like Pentatonix but I would like them a lot better if they stopped doing the drum-machine effects, and by chance earlier that morning I’d heard an old record by the granddaddies of their act, the Mills Brothers (who were billed as “Four Boys and a Guitar” — the guitar was the only “real” instrument they used; everything else you heard on the records was the Mills Brothers simulating instruments in the ways Bobby McFerrin was considered so innovative for doing in the late 1980’s), which put the whole Pentatonix phenomenon in badly-needed historical perspective.