Category: Sci-Friday

Enjoy this Top Gun Star Wars Mash-up and other fun scifi stuff for Sci-Friday. Watching this reminded me of many hours soaking in some of those 80s classics with my butt parked in a sagging, dusty movie theater seat. Music and movies are cultural communication devices that we use to express ourselves.

Fun fact about ‘Highway to the Danger Zone.’ Even though it was sung by Kenny Loggins, it was written by Giorgio Moroder and oddly enough, his car mechanic. Tom Whitlock started writing songs at 15, and after some false starts he moved to California in 1983 to advance his music career.

When Jerry Bruckheimer reached out to Moroder for a song on Top Gun, his usual lyrical collaborators (Keith Forsey and Pete Bellote) weren’t around. Whitlock was still in the neighborhood, running errands and sleeping on the floor. His previous songwriting experience made him a natural for this pop classic. With the lyrics in place, Moroder and Bruckheimer called around to see who could sing the track and Kenny Loggins’ name came up. The rest is history.

One thing I took from the video is how music videos are mostly about editing. Jackson McKay took footage from seven different Star Wars’ movies (Episodes 4-9 and Rogue One) and cut action pieces together to create sequences and lets your brain fill in the blanks. Nice work!  I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

We made it through the week! Time for more fun scifi stuff – today we’ll pay tribute to an undersung hero of Star Wars: All Hail Gonk! Gonk droids, according to StarWars.Fandom were GNK power droids, an Industrial Automaton knockoff of the successful EG-6 power droid. The GNK power droid derives its name from the “gonk” sound it makes in Episode IV. The droid was originally called simply a “power droid,” but a newsgroup posting in 1993[5] led to the now-official name becoming quickly popular.

That’s the lore, but here’s the reality. Gonk was nothing more than two storage bins and some human legs hidden by dryer vent hose. The costume is so low-tech that you can build a Gonk with materials lying around the house. In real life, Gonk was played by two actors. Rusty Goffe is an English actor who played several characters in A New Hope, including Kabe, a Jawa, and a gonk droid. Before Star Wars, he was an Oompa Loompa in Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. After Star Wars, he appeared as a Dwarf in Flash Gordon. He also later worked with George Lucas on the 1988 film Willow, in which he had an uncredited role as a Nelwyn villager.

Gonk’s other actor was Jack Purvis, the only actor to be credited in all three of the original Star Wars films as a different character each time: In Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977), he played the Chief Jawa; in Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980), he played Chief Ugnaught; and in Star Wars: Episode VI – Return of the Jedi (1983), he played Teebo. When he wasn’t acting in Star Wars movies, Purvis was in movies like Willow, Labyrinth, and Brazil.

I hope you enjoy this Sci-Friday and dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years. Have a great weekend!

Here’s why you want to know more about the visual effects in Back to the Future. You might have asked yourself: how did they get the hoverboards to hover? Did they use CGI to make a DeLorean to fly? How many people were involved in helping Doc Brown achieve temporal displacement? Kick back and watch this Part 1 of 2 episode where VFXCool breaks down the visual effects used in making the Back to the Future trilogy.

This of course is near to my heart – I spent several teenage years as an utter BTTF nerd. I stopped counting how many times I’d re-watched the movies and re-read the silly novelizations. I still have an OUTATIME license plate somewhere in my closet and pictures of me next to the production DeLorean from Universal Studios. Robert Zemeckis is a genius storyteller, and he re-wrote the scifi genre in 1985 when he produced a silly movie about a lonely kid, a mad scientist and a funny looking car that only needed to reach 88Mph to take us to a new universe.

The deeper you go into the VFX history of Back to the Future, the more you learn. For example, Michael Fink was a small contributor to BTTF, but made a huge impact. “I was in the art department one day in a conversation with Robert Zemeckis, Larry Paull, and Todd Hallowell — who was an art director at that time, and we were talking about the Flux Capacitor — where would it go, how big, and what would be best for the story. Robert said ‘I just need a better name for this prop. An actor’s got to be able to say it, an actor can’t say these words and sell it. It needs a better name.’

“I had worked on China Syndrome  which is about a nuclear reactor melting down, and I had learned a little about nuclear energy.  I said, ‘In a nuclear reactor, there is a term called ‘neutron flux’. It could be…’  I got that far, and Robert and I both said at the same time, ‘flux capacitor.’  Robert said, ‘That’s it… flux capacitor!’  So that is how it got its name — Robert blending neutron flux and temporal field capacitor into ‘Flux Capacitor’.  It got named through that conversation about that device in the art department.”

So even though this Sci-Friday is about the visual effects in Back to the Future, something bears repeating. Scifi makes the right kids feel heard, and seen. That’s important for young people that feel like no one understands them. I’ll talk more about that later. In the meantime, have a great weekend, and watch out for that Biff Tannen. I hear he’s trouble.

I had some fun last week on Twitter with the release of a new Dune movie trailer. What would a bad fan theory of Dune be? I did a round-up of bad Dune fan theories on Twitter and collected them for Sci-Friday. Please enjoy these and feel free to add your own.

• The worm dies at the end
• For the ‘pain box’ scene, @RealChalamet researched mental torment by watching all five seasons of Mama June: From Not to Hot.
• The butler did it.
• Frodo and Bilbo have The Ring and they need to throw into Mt. Dune.
• They needed someone to act like a sexual predator for the role of the Baron, so they originally offered the role to Harvey Weinstein
• Dune’s promotional tie-ins include LASIK surgery renaming itself to lasgun surgery.
• Dune has a breakfast cereal coming out called Arrakis Flakes
• The original Dune script had Will Smith recording the title song at the end.
• Dune is really The Love Boat but in the desert
• To promote Dune, @RealChalamet will feel true spice agony during his appearance on Hot Ones #Dune #BadDuneFanTheories
• When we first meet Princess Irulan, she’s wearing a t-shirt that says ‘Atreides in the streets, Harkonnen in the sheets.’
• On Arakis, they play hockey but instead of ice all they have is sand and the worms eat everyone who tries to play.
• The Dune action figure playset comes with 100 lbs of sand you can bury your friends in!
• Will include ‘Scooby Doo’ guest appearances including the cast of Friends, BTS, and Ellen DeGeneres
• Cinnamon rebranded as ‘Melange,’ Starbucks quickly rebrands PSP drinks as ‘Arrkis Spice Lattes’
• Bene Gesserit is an anagram for ‘beer signer’ – use it to get 10% off your movie ticket purchase

So there you have it, a round-up of bad Dune fan theories that we can use to celebrate this classic scifi tale releasing into a larger movie epic. Will fans love it, or hate it? If they hate it, you may wish to make use of an emotional scifi crisis plan I originally created for the Rise of Skywalker. I hope you enjoy this dump of fun scifi stuff and take some time over the long holiday weekend to dive down the rabbit hole of every other Sci-Friday I’ve published in the past couple years.

Have a great weekend!

Some Fantasy / Sci-fi artwork for your Sci-Friday. No major themes or ideas, just good clean fun science fiction stuff. Words communicate ideas, but art communicates emotions. You’ll probably catch a few while looking at these:

Fantasy/Sci-fi Artworks

In the immortal words of Bob Ross, I tell people, ‘You can do this.’ And they write back and say, ‘You were right. I can do this. And now I believe I can do anything.’ If you’re learning how to make clouds, or write a story, or just build your life instead of watching it collapse, you’re my kind of people. This Fantasy / Sci-fi artwork is just part of the fun Science Fiction stuff we like to share at Inkican. I hope you enjoy this collection, and also that you have a great weekend. <3