I recently attended a Nilbog show at Cinefamily and wrote about it. Cecy was there to capture some photos of the band.

We also recorded our first podcast in almost two years. It’s a Halloween themed special in two parts. It’s actually just one constant flow of music, if you download the two parts and play them back to back.

Enjoy!

The electrifying conclusion of The Story of The Black Hole!

Reinhardt begins to plunge the Cygnus into the black hole, taking the surviving Palomino crew with it.

Disenfranchised robot B.O.B. teams up with the good guys to help lead them to safety.

Battle ensues, while a meteor shower bombards the Cygnus.

Our heroes narrowly escape a giant meteor while sprinting across a catwalk (this looks more impressive on the big screen).

The Palomino crew makes it to an escape pod, minus Old Bob, who is mortally wounded fighting Maximilian.

The Cygnus enters the black hole. The escape pod is also sucked in.

Reinhardt and Maximilian do the anti-gravity dance.

The Palomino crew makes it safely through to the other side, after being subjected to some psychedelic 2001 action (not pictured).

Maximilian is stranded on a peak in…hell? Westwood? We may never know…

Upon zooming in, we see that Reinhardt has somehow become fused with Maximilian. He is imprisoned forever inside….Maximilian’s Shell! (I couldn’t make this up, people.)

Well, that does it for The Story of The Black Hole. Thank you for indulging me in this trip down memory lane.

I will be taking requests for the next set of illustrations. If it was a sci-fi or adventure film released between 1979 and 1983, I probably have some drawings of it…

All characters copyright 1979 Walt Disney Productions. Artwork copyright 1979, 2011 Ryan Orvis.

The Palomino hurtles through space, with our trusty crew of character actors on board. Also joining them is one very heroic and very effeminate robot named V.I.N.C.E.N.T. (Roddy McDowall).

The ship’s captain is Robert Forster, who would go on to greater fame and fortune as the star of Alligator and Vigilante. (I blame my sister for the inaccurate depiction of the Palomino’s design in this drawing.)

The Palomino encounters a lost vessel called The Cygnus, floating precariously close to a giant black hole in space! The smaller ship is forced to land on the Cygnus.

The captain of the Cygnus is Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell), a (SPOILER!) mad scientist who has turned his crew into mindless sentries and worker drones.
Also on board is an older model robot similar to Vincent, named B.O.B. (Slim Pickens).
I don’t know why Robert Forster is shooting at them in this picture.

Reinhardt has a robot henchman named Maximilian. He is a total badass.

Reinhardt wants to pilot the Cygnus into the Black Hole because he cray-cray. The Palomino crew is like “screw this.”

Cowardly Ernest Borgnine tries to escape in the Palomino, and is shot down. I don’t have a picture for this, so here’s another exterior shot of the Palomino (R.I.P.).

Maximilian prevents Yvette Mimieux and Anthony Perkins from leaving the control room.

Things end badly for Tony Perkins.

I think this one is more of a montage than an actual scene. Here we see Vincent taking out some stormtroopers, I mean “sentries,” as the Palomino crew flee below. Notice how I have helpfully labelled the crew members.

NEXT: What will become of the surviving Palomino crew? Will Maximilian finally come out of his “shell”? Find out in the exciting conclusion of The Black Hole!

All characters copyright 1979 Walt Disney Productions. Artwork copyright 1979 and 2011 Ryan Orvis.

I was four years old when I saw The Black Hole.

Apparently Disney had decided to cash in on the success of Star Wars by crafting their own cute talking robot space adventure. Theaters throughout the U.S. booked the film, and chain stores throughout the U.S. stocked the merch. The stage was set for Disney to move effortlessly into the realm of live action blockbusters.

It didn’t quite work out that way. The Black Hole did have talking robots, and it did have amazing special effects for its time. It even had a strong cast (Maximilian Schell, Ernest Borgnine, Anthony Perkins, and Roddy McDowall for starters). Yet for some reason, the filmmakers opted to explore thematic territory that we would nowadays refer to as “hard sci-fi.” The plot was borrowed heavily from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and infused with elements from 2001: A Space Odyssey and Silent Running. It featured violence and death, and ended on a darkly surreal note that was confusing to parents and upsetting to children.

Ernest Borgnine.

The Black Hole wasn’t exactly a flop, but it failed to capture the imaginations and pocketbooks of America, and Disney backed off in its attempts to usurp Lucasfilm.

Like many kids, my sister and I went to see the film during its opening week. We returned from the theater in tears. I couldn’t process whether I liked the movie or not. All I knew was that I was upset, but couldn’t stop thinking about it. Eventually we stopped crying, and began the cathartic mission of drawing all the memorable scenes from the film.

I recently found, organized and scanned all the Black Hole drawings we made as kids. I’m not sure how many days we worked on them, but they were created on several different types of paper, using a combination of crayons and ink pens. Amazingly, they pretty much explain the plot of the movie, although it comes across as much more violent and action-packed than it really is.

One of the talking robots was Old B.O.B., as voiced by Peckinpah favorite Slim Pickens.

In the years since I was first traumatized by The Black Hole, I’ve grown to appreciate it as a flawed science fiction masterpiece, and as a snapshot of the time before the PG-13 rating and CGI changed the genre forever. I also have a soft spot for the movie because I taught myself to read by following along to a Black Hole storybook that came with a 45 rpm record.

Sadly, my sister Ginger passed away a few years later, so I am unable to get her thoughts on the experience. I also am not 100% sure how many of these drawings were hers. I think the majority were mine, because even at that age I was a pretty big nerd, and it’s the sort of thing I would do. Ginger also helped me draw scenes from other movies like Blade Runner and The Dark Crystal, so her work may pop up in future entries.

NEXT: Stay tuned for the Story of The Black Hole!

(Characters copyright 1979 by Disney. Artwork copyright 1979, 2011 by Ryan Orvis.)

I’m proud to announce a new feature on this blog: 1980s science fiction movie art, as drawn by myself, when I was a child!

Recently I traveled to the remote woodlands of Northeast Ohio, where I found an archive comprised of every drawing I ever did from the time I first picked up a crayon. Most of this art is horrendous even by the standards by which we judge the art of a child. However, I was discovering the magic of motion pictures during a time before the PG-13 rating existed. This meant I was exposed not only to mainstream features like the Star Wars trilogy and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but also to titles that have since taken on cult status. I’m talking about The Black Hole, Flash Gordon, Tron, Clash of the Titans, The Dark Crystal, Blade Runner, and even Krull!

After returning from the theater, I would spend the next few days indoors, drawing what I had seen to the best of my ability. As a result, I have stacks of paper with crude interpretations of these beloved sci-fi classics.

I also developed an obsession with Jaws, not to mention the lesser works of author Peter Benchley (The Deep, The Island) and unrelated yet similar epics (Orca: The Killer Whale) via limited television broadcasts.

To compound matters, the local television stations in Cleveland had yet to be taken over by reality shows and home shopping garbage. Instead, we had Big Chuck and Little John, Superhost, Elvira, The Ghoul, and Skull Theater playing bizarre grindhouse movies 24/7 on channels 43 and 61. Between the ages of 5 and 10 I watched numerous screenings of The Car, The Green Slime, Kiss of the Tarantula, Frogs, Don’t Look in the Basement, Children Shouldn’t Play With Dead Things, and Deathdream. There are very few drawings of these films, but one or two did manage to slip through.

I have begun the monotonous task of scanning these illustrations into the computer, and plan to share some of them with you, along with my current thoughts on the movies in question. My hope is that I can corner the market where film criticism and child psychology meet. I would say that I hope to reveal something about myself, except I think it’s pretty obvious that I was simply doomed to be a huge nerd from birth.

Stay tuned for some nuggets from the vaults!

(All art copyright 2011 Ryan Orvis. I do not claim ownership of the films or characters portrayed.)

British television has become an obsession of mine lately. This probably dates back to my childhood, when I would spend hours strangling the rabbit ears on my father’s TV set, desperately trying to tune in Doctor Who on PBS. Nowadays almost every obscure overseas program can be either rented, streamed or downloaded. You can say the floodgates have been opened.

I finally got around to watching some of the latest Doctor Who episodes. I wasn’t that impressed with the Smith/Gillan/Moffat lineup of the last series, but figured I should give them a fighting chance. Well, I hate to be “that guy,” but the show is really cheesy and is starting to embarrass me as a Doctor Who fan. Every scene is played for maximum melodrama or innuendo, often at the same time. Matt Smith portrays the Doctor as an arrogant douchebag who no longer has to think about solutions to a problem – he just automatically knows things. Magic! Karen Gillan is cute, but the character is annoying at best. Steven Moffat has done some great work, but his quality control is all over the map. The Christopher Eccleston Doctor was a nice reboot, and many of the David Tennant episodes were good, but this new series does not even hold up to lightweight sci-fi standards.

In true grumpy old man fashion, I’ve continued my retreat into the history of British science fiction/horror television. Sure, many of these “television plays” were slow moving and old fashioned, and many did not speak to younger generations with much savvy; but damn was the writing good. At their best, they were genuinely disturbing without the aid of sophisticated special effects. At their worst, they have a cool retro look and vibe that is often enough to make me overlook the occasionally hokey dialogue or inappropriate casting choice.

I was a late-comer to the Quatermass world. Recently I watched and enjoyed the Hammer version of Quatermass and the Pit on the recommendation of my friend Caleb. While searching for more TV shows in the vein of classic Doctor Who, I stumbled upon the fourth and final entry in the Quatermass saga. This was a four-part series filmed for television in the late 70s. Although dated in some ways, it was surprisingly dark and seemed like a logical progression from the tone of Quatermass and the Pit. I’m now determined to seek out writer Nigel Kneale‘s other works in the genre, including the earlier Quatermass stories and two horror entries, Beasts and The Stone Tape. It also turns out that Kneale wrote the script for the 1989 TV version of The Woman in Black, one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen.

Quatermass was a huge influence on many of the filmmakers I grew up watching, including John Carpenter and John Landis. It seems to have been less of an influence on newer science fiction and horror writers. I could be wrong about that, but from what I can tell, this brand of slowly-creeping-up-on-you terror from beyond just doesn’t exist anymore. It’s all flash and zazz nowadays. The classic style of British horror seems to be reserved for older, nerdy gentlemen such as myself, which isn’t such a bad thing I guess.

On a positive note, I really enjoyed the recent show Psychoville written and starring two members of the League of Gentlemen, Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton. These guys have managed to blend an understanding of classic genre elements with a contemporary sense of humor. Interestingly, League member Mark Gatiss has gone in the other direction, working with Steven Moffat on trendy reboots of Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who. Not to write off Gatiss completely: in addition to bearing an uncanny physical resemblance to yours truly, he also knows a hell of a lot more about British television than I do. Respect. I did enjoy the Moffat/Gatiss version of Sherlock, although it was obviously geared toward a much more attention span-challenged set of viewers. The fairly recent show Inspector George Gently, which takes place in the mid 1960s, moves slow enough for my feeble brain to absorb all the details and is my current preference in U.K. detective serials.

I’ve been enjoying the films of Sergio Corbucci, Enzo Castellari and Jean Rollin that are available on Netflix streaming. Also watching a lot of British TV shows old and new: George Gently, The Omega Factor, Doc Martin, etc.

Sloan and Swervedriver were both great as usual. I think I’ve seen enough of the old favorites lately; time for some new bands to step up to the plate.

Speaking of which, I interviewed my friend Steve’s band The Library is on Fire and my friend Tim’s band The Archive. Friday night I’m going to see Magic Mirror, Exploding Flowers and DJ Tami at Casey’s Irish Pub. It’s gonna be a beer-soaked evening of psychedelic madness, if I have anything to say about it!

I’ve managed to see some really great shows lately. Urge Overkill was last week. Sloan and Swervedriver each play in June, so I couldn’t be happier.

I’m obsessed with Psychoville, the new show from Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton of League of Gentlemen. Why isn’t this available legally in the U.S.? Stupid Limeys. Just kidding!

Film-wise, I’ve been enjoying the work of Enzo G. Castellari. His films are laughably bad at times and quite brilliant at others. At his best, he is a master of combining striking visuals with dissonant music. He’s directed films in several classic genres including spaghetti western, giallo, Italian crime or “Poliziotteschi”, post-apocalyptic sci-fi, and even Jaws rip-offs. I love how he uses the same character actors in many of his films. His most famous work is probably Inglorious Bastards, due to the remake. I haven’t watched that one yet, because frankly I’m tired of World War II. I finally watched Saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers, so I’m done.

A chance trip to the liquor store yielded the latest issue of Horror Hound, which is all about the greatest year in horror films, 1981. Totally worth the newsstand price.

Well, today is The Rapture. I’m off to crack open a beer and watch the ascension! Catch you heathens later.

I also interviewed Ian Parton from The Go! Team over at The Neighborhood.

Come sit on Uncle Merle's lap.