I just found a new record to add to our collection.  Spaced Out Disco, released in 1978 by The Galactic Force Band, includes danceable versions of movie themes from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Star Trek, 2001, and Star Wars.

I seriously need to own this.  Too bad my birthday is 11 months away….

Here is the Theme From Star Trek from the B side of the record:

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3.0 (2 people)

It’s that time of year again.

Time to set out the holiday decorations, sip egg nog, and to feverishly await the arrival of Christmas Day.  Forget Santa Claus, stockings, and presents… Christmas Day is all about our annual viewing of The Star Wars Holiday Special.

You’ve never heard of The Star Wars Holiday Special (1978)?  This made-for-TV special features appearances by Harvey Korman, Diahann Carroll, Jefferson Starship, *and* all of your favorite Star Wars characters.  And the dialogue is spoken almost entirely in Wookie.  For the full scoop on the movie you can read my Star Wars Holiday Special review or watch the movie for yourself.

This year I created a Star Wars Holiday Special Countdown Widget because I just can’t wait until Christmas Day.  Feel free to display the widget on your own blog if you are so inspired.

Happy Life Day!

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3.4

It is Wednesday once again.

Arthur Dent from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy may have had a difficult time getting the hang of Thursdays, but I find Wednesday to be the most annoying day of the week.

Being as it is no closer to the beginning of the week then it is to the end, Wednesday is caught in a kind of distressing limbo. Thursday is traditionally my busiest work day of the week, but I always seem to feel a bit relieved once Thursday rolls around. Thursday is *almost* Friday, which means the weekend is that much closer.

And so, I shall endeavor to bring a bit of joy to this otherwise dull and soulless day of the week. And I can think of no better way than with a bit of disco.

Happy Wednesday, everyone.

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2.5

Want to know why the seventies were the coolest decade ever?

Pet rocks.

Leisure Suits.

Andy Gibb.

And, to top it all off, the veritable Maraschino cherry on our luscious seventies sundae - the Polaroid Camera.

Some of my favorite photos from the decade were taken on instant film with a Polaroid camera. Here is a great example of such a picture, submitted by Phyllis Fletcher:

Thanks to Phyllis for submitting this great photo of her with her Mom at a Polaroid sales display, ca. 1978. The picture is a part of the Save Polaroid photo pool on Flickr.

If you are dying to share your seventies photos, feel free to drop me a line at rollerblog @ gmail dot com.

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2.5

I’m a sucker for a good zombie movie. So when a friend loaned us a copy of George Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) we popped some popcorn, opened a bottle of wine, and settled in for an evening of guns, gore, and zombie goodness. The movie begins where George Romero’s 1968 Night of the Living Dead leaves off, the morning after an attack by zombies (albeit inexplicably ten years later).

Our story begins in the WGON studios, where television journalists are trying to make sense of the plague of flesh-eating zombies that seems to have taken over the entire country. Francis and Stephen, two studio employees, decide to flee the city in the station’s helicopter. They are joined in their escape by Roger and Peter, who have been battling the undead in the city’s urban areas.

En route to the wilderness, our heroes stop on the rooftop of a shopping mall to refuel and to take stock. They discover a cache of food in an emergency shelter near the top of the building, and ultimately decide to stay in the mall and live off of the limitless supplies in the stores below. Unfortunately, the mall is overrun with zombies.

Ah, the mall. The scenes in the mall are definitely the highlight of the movie. The parallel between the mindless greed of consumers (for material goods) and the mindless greed of zombies (for human flesh) is not a subtle one. And it is pretty funny to see the undead lurching about the mall, as if they were just going about business as usual, while fountains happily gurgle and cheerful elevator music continues to play in the background.

And so, our hapless heroes devise a plan to block the entrances to the building and embark on a zombie hunting spree. Once cleared of zombies, the mall becomes their personal sanctuary. So they eat, drink, and make merry (well, as merry as one can be in a world that has been overrun by flesh-eating ghouls).

Like any good horror movie, however, this respite is only a temporary one. But I am not going to ruin the ending for you. You’ll just have to watch the movie for yourself to discover what happens when zombies attack the shopping mall.

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2.5

And now for more adventures of… Battlestar Galactica!

Tonight we settled down to watch the next episodes in the original 1978 series, The Planet of the Lost Gods (Part I and II). In these episodes:

• The evil Baltar returns in his very own basestar with his new Cylon sidekick, Lucifer. Baltar hatches a devious plan capture one of the Battlestar Galactica pilots and entrap the rest of the humans.

• The entire fleet of fighter pilots is struck down with a mysterious illness, with the exception of Starbuck and Apollo. A group of newly trained fighter pilots, consisting entirely of women, is called upon to fly a dangerous mission in their stead.

• The lady fighter pilots run around in tight fighter jumpsuits while managing to maintain impeccable hair. And they blow up a good number of Cylon ships.

• Adama commands the Battlestar Galactica to enter into an endless void to escape detection from the Cylon fleet. They emerge on the other side to find the legendary planet Kobol, the planet where human life supposedly originated.

• Apollo and Serena get married. At the ceremony they wear the BEST OUTFITS EVER.

• Apollo and Serena do a lot of kissing. Then they enter the tomb of the Ninth Lord of Kobol, Indiana Jones-style (but, of course, this was before Indiana Jones).

• The episode ends by hastily killing off one of the show’s main characters. Who bites the dust? You’ll just have to watch for yourself!

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2.5

Image from the SciFiPedia

I admit it. I’ve never watched Battlestar Galactica.

I know. It is somewhat shocking, being that I am a bit of a Sci-Fi nut.

So I decided it was time to remedy this lapse. I’ve never watched the version currently airing on the Sci-Fi channel or the original 1978-1979 Battlestar Galactica series, so we are beginning with the original series.

So far we have watched the pilot, Saga of a Star World. What have I learned? Cylons are bad. People are good. Well, most people (Count Baltar, who betrays the human colonies to the Cylons, and Sire Uri from the Council of Twelve aren’t very good people). I also learned that the pilot episode is extremely long. I wasn’t prepared for a 148-minute episode that was really more like a movie. By the time we were 60 minutes in, however, we were hopelessly sucked into the show and none of us went to bed on time.

I am looking forward to the rest of the season. The next episode in the queue is entitled Lost Planet of the Gods. Should be a good time.

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2.5

There are good movies, there are bad movies, and there are movies that can only be described as “So Bad It’s Good“. And then there are movies that are so bad that they are, well, really bad. The 1978 film Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band falls into that latter category.

Image found here

I didn’t know too much about the Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band movie prior to watching it. All I knew is that it featured Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees in a tribute to the 1967 Beatles album of the same name. That sounded promising. I like the Beatles. I like the seventies. What’s not to like?

As it turns out, quite a lot. I’m not a big fan of musicals, and this movie is better described as a musical set to a series of Beatles cover songs. Except for the narration by George Burns (who also sings a version of the Beatles songs “I’m Fixing a Hole”), there is pretty much no dialog in the entire film. The story is told via a rapid succession of Beatles songs, which are strung together in a failed attempt create a cohesive narrative.

The “plot” of the movie follows three brothers (played by the Bee Gees) and their best friend, Billy Shears (Peter Frampton), who form the Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band in the sleepy town of Heartland. One day the band is discovered by a record company in L.A., and they are whisked off to the big city in a hot air balloon to seek their fame and fortune. Meanwhile, the nefarious Mean Mr. Mustard wreaks havoc back home and makes off with the band’s legendary instruments. Upon hearing of the town’s demise by Billy’s lovesick girlfriend (surprise! her name is Strawberry Fields), the band members embark on a mission to retrieve their missing instruments and return order to Heartland.

Image found here

But wait - there’s more! The movie also features cameos a’plenty, including appearances by Steve Martin as Dr. Maxwell Edison (complete with a silver hammer), Alice Cooper as Reverend Sun, Aerosmith as the Future Villain Band, Billy Preston as Sgt. Pepper, and Earth Wind and Fire as… Earth Wind and Fire. With all this super seventies star power, it’s hard to imagine a movie could go wrong. But, as I have learned from the Star Wars Holiday Special, cameos from famous stars do not necessarily a good movie make.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band is so bad that it is listed as #76 in VH1’s 100 Greatest Shocking Moments in Rock & Roll. I have a pretty high tolerance for bad campy movies (Xanadu, anyone?) but even I had a hard getting all the way through this one.

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2.5

“You really ought to check out Quark,” my husband told me the other day. “You know, for your blog.” Quark, huh? Never heard of it.

And what exactly is Quark? A subatomic particle? A type of soft cheese? The name of the family dog in Honey I Shrunk the Kids? A rather bizarre-looking character from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine?

Turns out that Quark is also the name of a deliciously cheesy short-lived television show that aired in 1978. Complete with a diabolical villain named Zorgon the Malevolent and a laugh track, the show deliberately poked fun at science fiction classics such as Star Trek, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and even Star Wars.

Starring Richard Benjamin as Commander Adam Quark, the show recounts the thrilling adventures of an interstellar garbage scow that roams the galaxy in the year 2222. The cast also features twin sisters Cyb and Patricia Barnstable as The Bettys (scantily-clad clones), Tim Thomerson as a Gene/Jean the Transmute (a humanoid with male and female chromosomes), and Richard Kelton as Ficus Pandorata the Vegeton (he looks like a human but - surprise! - he reproduces by pollination).

Unfortunately, Quark has not been released to DVD. However entire episodes (and more!) are available for download on the unofficial Quark Home page, as well as a petition for the official release onto DVD.

Tags 1978 . Quark . Richard Benjamin . Zorgon the Malevolent . The Bettys . Gene/Jean . Ficus Pandorata . seventies . 1970s . 70s

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2.5

As we left our heroes last week, Captain Hogthrob had just ordered the Swinetrek’s biannual inspection.

And so begins the sixth episode of Pigs in Space, a recurring sketch on The Muppet Show in the late 1970s. Who couldn’t love a show featuring the antics of Captain Link Hogthrob, First Mate Piggy, and Dr. Julius Strangepork as they travel the far reaches of the galaxy on board their fabulous spacecraft The Swinetrek.

In the episode “Inspection” (1978), Fozzie the Bear has determined to insinuate himself into every Muppet Show sketch because his mother is in the audience. So, naturally, he steals Miss Piggy’s outfit, puts on a blonde wig, and impersonates her on the show. Hijinks ensue.

Tags 1978 . Pigs in Space . The Muppet Show

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2.5