Remembering Outerscope II

Kids who were born in early-to-mid 1970s probably remember a show called Vegetable Soup. The show, which started in 1975, was produced by the Bureau of Mass Communications of the New York State Education Department for PBS (although it also, somewhat unusually, ran concurrently on NBC), with the stated goal of helping children "counter the negative, destructive effects of racial prejudice and racial isolation and to reinforce and dramatize the positive, life-enhancing value of human diversity."¹ Now, more than 50 years later, when there seems to be a concerted effort to deny the value of such diversity, it seems to me that the message of Vegetable Soup is more important than ever, but if I were to talk about the series as a whole, I'd need to write a full research paper (as, indeed, has already been done elsewhere). So I need to narrow my focus a bit....

High Q

Most people who know me know that I love game shows. Besides celebrating the occasional game show anniversary, I've shared board games, videos of games that I've hosted, and the occasional studio taping or audition that I've gone to. Whenever I've discussed the topic, I've fairly consistently said that I've never actually been a contestant on a game show.

Well, that's not technically true....

Let me tell you about High Q.

Game Show Board Games: Hollywood Squares (1986 edition)

In honor of the 60th anniversary of the premiere of The Hollywood Squares (its first episode aired on NBC on October 17th, 1966), I'm doing something I haven't had occasion to do for a while: feature the board game version of a classic game show.

"Thrilling 30" Springer (2013)

It has often been said that The Transformers: The Movie cribbed liberally from concepts used in Star Wars. Although it's not the case that everything can be connected one-to-one between the two movies, it's really not a huge stretch. For some examples, Unicron is the Death Star, Hot Rod is Luke Skywalker, and Arcee is Princess Leia. By this analogy, Springer is pretty obviously Han Solo. At the very least, scriptwriter Ron Friedman had one of actor Harrison Ford's roles explicitly in mind. A draft of the movie script actually calls Springer "a very muscular and bantering 'Indiana Jones' type" (go to page 14, bottom of the page, to see the quote).

Studio Series Sweep (2021)

I haven't exactly been kind to Scourge in the past few months. Despite being one of the most prominent of the new characters created for The Transformers: The Movie, I find that he was never given much of a personality. In my review of Scourge's Titans Return figure, I blamed some of that on his being given command of a group of identical troops, called "the Sweeps." But while I find Scourge's personality rather forgettable, the toys he's been given in recent years have been interesting takes on the movie's character model. So, given that Scourge's Studio Series toy was given a redeco (and slight remold) as a Sweep, this seems an opportunity to redress the balance.

The Hard Life... Lives, Plural... of Professor Martin Stein: A Follow-Up

A lifetime ago...  more than 17 years, as it happens, I wrote a trio of posts about the then-history of Firestorm, arguably my favorite super-hero, specifically through the lens of Professor Martin Stein, who for much of Firestorm's history was one-half of the composite character. I observed that Stein had really been put through the ringer, and indeed when I was writing in 2009, it wasn't entirely clear what was going on with the character. I later learned that this was more or less the reality for the writers, as well. DC's publishers really didn't know what to do with the "old guy" (as they sometimes derogatorily referred to Professor Stein, despite the character having been consistently middle-aged at the most). Now that Firestorm is back on comic book shelves again, and selling extremely well by all indications, it seemed that it was time for a follow-up. While I'll try to avoid significant spoilers for the current series, be warned, I consider anything more than a few years old to be fair game.

Generations Selects Cyclonus & Nightstick (2022)

As was the case with both Scourge and Galvatron, Cyclonus was created when Unicron changed an existing Decepticon's body into a new warrior, but the identity of the Decepticon who became Cyclonus has been the source of debate for many years. Was he previously Skywarp, which would be consistent with Scourge's transformation from Thundercracker, or was he in fact Bombshell, who was the first and most prominent of the two Decepticons seen being reformatted into Cyclonus-like forms in The Transformers: The Movie?¹ Perhaps it doesn't really matter, since (like Scourge) Cyclonus' antecedent is generally assumed to have been dead prior to reformatting, and the subject was never brought up again until self-conscious fan-oriented fiction came along.²