Some Old Robot

I actually mentioned Elektro the robot at some point in the distant past on here; it honestly wasn't an inspired post, so I'll let it remain anonymous.

Elektro was rather hilarious, because he was designed to do several rather... oddball things, such as inflating balloons.



The other major purpose of the mouthpiece? Smoking.



Yes, probably the most distinctive feature of this "technological marvel"* was being a bad role model.

No references to retro robots are truly complete without mentioning Elektro. Elektro, and this guy.



Truly, he is the pinnacle of robot design.**

-Signing off.

*Technically, he was only a remote-controlled dummy, and while he inspired at least some comic book robots and helped usher in the idea of robots being a potential part of society, he was really just a relatively complicated remotely controlled device that is exceeded in complexity by numerous modern children's toys, e.g. anything made by WowWee-and heck, more impressive similar feats of engineering were achieved long before then.

**Obviously, I'm being facetious, but I do love that little guy.

Golden Age Comics Are Insane...

...often even in a good way.

Take Air Fighters Comics.
One of Air Fighters' regular features was Airboy, a story about a young orphan boy who takes a plane designed and built by a monk (inspired by a vision) and uses it to fight a one-boy battle against meanies of all sorts.

Air Fighters also has the first and most notable comic character called the Heap. Yes, this was his first appearance ever. Forget that loser from the Spawn comics, this guy is a terror.

The Heap is an unholy vampiric terror spawned from the remains of a WWI German fighter ace and the vegetation of a swamp. He also...

...um, loves hearing spoken German. (And before you ask, yes these two screenshots are from the very same story.)

Did I forget to mention that the Heap actually first showed up in somebody else's feature?

But who really cares? I mean, they're just some guys in special split planes who fight Nazis. Nothing exciting about that, is there? Though one of them is a big Polish mute guy who taps Morse code on his own head to communicate...

Then there's the Iron Ace, who oozes awesomeness. How awesome is he?

He defeats a bomber with a tractor. And he wears a suit of medieval armor while flying a fighter plane.

And that plane is pretty awesome itself. In fact, like a great bullet...

...er, never mind. What you don't get from looking at these panels? The plane normally resembles a normal one, but was modified by a crazy French scientist to have magic indestructible extending/retracting armor.

There's also Keen Detective Funnies.

The main thing that got my attention about Keen Detective Funnies? The Eye.

Who is the Eye, you may ask? Is he just some regular guy detective? Heck no.

He's a great fiery eye that flies in the sky.

Here's the thing about the Eye. He's omniscient and can be anywhere, which means that you'll never know when he's watching you...

(True fact: This involved a grave robbing story, in which somebody noticed a stolen grave-robbed ring. I do not lie. Not about crazy old comics, anyway.)

So you never know when the ol' Eye will just gracelessly barge in on your criminal activities without warning.

I am probably going to shout "This is your day of reckoning, Pickles!" and variants on said statement at people randomly for the rest of my life.

And the Eye apparently does this for no reason other than satisfaction in a job well done...

...or something like that, I guess...

All comics are public domain stuff. More information can be found at Public Domain Super Heroes, and free CBR files can be found at Golden Age Comics Downloads. (CBR information and downloads can be found here.)

-Signing off.

Lessons You Can Learn From Videogames

Pac-Man: Performance enhancement is good. (Power pills.)

Defender: Human beings can withstand giant energy and missile blasts if you merely set the difficulty level to easy. (Atari version only.)

Vanguard: It's simple to engineer a starship with multiple lives. (Atari Vanguard handbook. There's actual story dialogue to this effect in the booklet.) Also, Kemlus snakes are slow-witted.

Yars' Revenge: Being in an exploding starship will turn houseflies into incredible superbeings. (Incidentally, I love that old comic. The art's nicer than it has any right to be.)

The Empire Strikes Back (Parker Bros.): There's actually a reason the big walker that fell down blew up in the movie. (An open bomb hatch, if you're wondering.)

Platypus: A creaking antique fighter can defeat the armies of a huge industrialized nation. (Then again, movies and cartoons will teach you this kind of stuff too.)

-Signing off.

Cheesy Sci-Fi Movie Review: Assignment Outer Space

Also known as "Space Men," "Assignment Outer Space" is an unusual old science fiction film directed by Antonio Margheriti, AKA Anthony Dawson, famous (or infamous) for films such as Battle of the Worlds. (Never seen that one, but any movie with the line "I have one advantage over all of you. Calculus!" must be pretty entertaining.)

This movie, like some others, is in the public domain, and is worth checking out (if you're tolerant of slower old movies) because it represents an achievement (if this page is to believed): "Less than 30.000 US$ [US$ 30,000], and it was completed in 20 days, including the special effects."

Watching the movie, it was fairly easy to dismiss it as simply being a rather more thoughtful science fiction flick. It featured space travel portrayed in relatively realistic fashion, the only things that appear odd now (other than the cheap effects) being things that newer ideas have rendered obsolete (e.g., use of a fueling cable-spacecraft couldn't dock in the film). The most insane and impossible thing in the film is an invisible forcefield that vaporizes things, but it's the only part of the film that feels "truly" impossible, and even that is a relatively small order of magnitude harder to believe than the rest. (There is some weird technobabble here and there, but that's forgivable.)

The character Al (spacesuit number X15) was a somewhat older black guy, and my sister positively adored him. He was certainly a striking character; probably the only one with his head screwed on straight.

Not really much to say about it, because it's not actually that crazy a movie. Either you'll be pleasantly surprised by it because it's actually a halfway decent movie, or you'll hate it because it's dull as can be.

-Signing off.

Greatly Belated Book Reviews: Atlantis: The Antediluvian World

This book, incidentally, is now record holder for oldest book I've reviewed, unless you count my vague allusions to old Arthurian mythology, which I don't, especially since none of that is actually reviews.

If you've read anything modern that takes the existence of Atlantis seriously...

...this book, by Ignatius Donnelly, probably started it all.

Note that I am not approaching this particularly as either a skeptic or a believer. Skepticism and wild belief alike are not conducive to discovery and learning. (My sister, when I related various things I was reading about, basically threw fits and shouted about how "Atlantis is a story made up by Plato!!1!")

The edition of the book that I read was the 1949 edition. In effect, it was long after the time of geology in its infancy, but still before plate tectonics became the primary explanation of many mysteries of the geological record.

That said, no matter how crazy Donnelly's theories got (and they were actually not that crazy), he had nothing on the editor of the 1949 edition.

First off, this editor, Egerton Sykes, thought the Hörbiger theory was totally rock solid scientific fact.

If you've never heard of this theory and are too lazy to follow the link, I'll summarize the basic tenets of this theory, originally put forward by an engineer with no formal learning in advanced physics:

1. The world is made of ice.
2. No, seriously, that's the theory.
3. Celestial bodies are made of ice.
4. Yes. The moon is ice. This is why it's so crackly.
5. The solar system was created when a big star exploded because a smaller, waterlogged star fell into it.
6. This theory came to him in a "vision" after the creator of the theory concluded that the moon was made of ice because it looks crackly.
7. Gravity stops somewhere outside of Neptune's orbit.
8. The Earth once had a different moon, and when it melted away, it was replaced by the current one. (This is the primary application of the "World Ice Theory" as pertains to the editor's interpretation of Donnelly's book.)
9. I am not making this up.

By the way, this theory was immensely popular in Nazi Germany, especially since it had been created by a good and patriotic German engineer/businessman rather than a Jew (it was considered an acceptable alternative to the Theory of Relativity-and I'm still not making this up).

Another theory forwarded by Sykes was the idea that some guys sacrificed offerings by stinging them with jellyfish and then feeding them live and paralyzed to giant squids.

Did this guy read a lot of comic books or something?

Anyway, Donnelly's theories were reasonably well-founded on the science, history, and archaeology of his day. For instance, then-recent soundings of the floor of the Atlantic indicated that the area where Atlantis would more or less have been (based on Plato's story and on Donnelly's other research) was considerably higher than most of the Atlantic's ocean floor. This is actually still entirely true.

He also suggests that the Mayans, the Aztecs, the Toltecs, the pre-conquest Peruvians (typically erroneously called the Inca or Incans-this would, by the way, be like calling the Egyptians Pharaohnians), the Egyptians (speak of the devil), the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, the Chaldeans (i.e. the ancient Mesopotamian civilization), the Aryans (keep in mind that this is the anthropological Aryans, who were the originators of the Indo-European language group and the founders of the Hindu religion, and not the Nazi propaganda Aryans), the Celts, the Etruscans, the Turanians (forebears of the Mongolian peoples, and by extension the Chinese, Koreans, and Japanese), the Mound Builders, the Basques, and basically anybody who's ever had something resembling civilization were actually descended from or took their traditions and technology from the Atlanteans.

He goes on to suggest that the Greek mythology of the gods was a somewhat corrupted history of Atlantis, and that this is corroborated by things such as the idea that heaven and the dead were in the west in all European cultures, often explicitly about where Atlantis would have been.

He suggests that the Deluge stories of all peoples were all accounts of peoples who had escaped the destruction of Atlantis and assumed themselves the only survivors.

He analyzes the etymology of the name, connecting it with as far-reaching things as Aztlan (of Aztec mythology) and Olympus. (Those are not actually as far apart as they appear to be.)

He suggests that the Atlanteans were the first island people to become a world power, colonizing America, Europe, and the Mediterranean, and possibly trading as far as Pacific or Indian Ocean coasts, further suggesting that ancient Egypt's status as a nation that had seemingly come out of nowhere fully formed and then gradually decayed until its destruction proved that it was the last surviving colony. (A lot of Egypt's most impressive achievements were pretty early in its history.)

He basically says all sorts of crazy things. One of his claims is that an Atlantean invented gunpowder. (He equated this Atlantean with Zeus because of Zeus's Cyclops-forged thunderbolts.) According to Wikipedia, gunpowder was invented in China, so I guess that's out...

Obviously, the book itself doesn't really hold together. (The book also got on my sister's nerves because the author happily said "obviously," "the only conclusion we can draw," etc. He attributed numerous legends of large creatures, including the Cyclops, the Hekatoncheires [hundred-handed giants], and a creature called Oannes which supposedly came from the sea and taught the Babylonians everything they knew, to ships. How would someone mistake a boat for a land-going giant, exactly?) The research is too old, and too much has changed since then. Anyone looking for something useful on Atlantis that takes the story seriously ought to go to a newer source of some kind, preferably a scholarly one instead of one that says "by the author of this book which is compared to the theories of Erich von Daaniken."

It's really fired up my imagination, though.

-Signing off.