Alas, the archives don’t tell us much more than that the robot was built by Robert Wolfe and that the pictures were taken in 1960, so it’s impossible (even with the help of the interwebs) to figure out just why TV actor Mike Connors was pictured in an attempt to outdraw the mechanical marshal (perhaps it was to publicize Connors then-current cop drama, Tightrope). Crichton famously took Brynner’s character in The Magnificent Seven as his visual inspiration for The Gunslinger—but Wolfe’s “pistol-shooting robot” looks awfully familiar, too.

"Pistol shooting robot invented by Robert Wolfe."

"TV actor, Mike Connors, trying to outdraw pistol-shooting robot."

"Robot equipped with fast-draw invention shoots it out with live gunner."

Life Photo Archive [Google]

Though he preferred to keep this struggle out of the spotlight, Crichton's recent novel Next did include a subplot about a cancer survivor whose genes are harvested by an evil biotech company.

Many of Crichton's novels were made into movies, though none were as successful as Jurassic Park. One of the trademarks of Crichton's style is clean prose, fast pacing, and impeccably-researched biotech speculation. A former doctor, Crichton's first novel Andromeda Strain actually has several pages of bibliographic notes.

He also delved into politics with some novels, dealing with a sexual harassment case in Disclosure that was so strange that it might as well have been science fiction. And in Airframe, he explored how an airline accident is misinterpreted by scandal-loving media.

Crichton brought a realism to biotech science fiction that hadn't existed before he began writing in the early 1970s, and his influence lives on in scifi-inflected genome thrillers like Species and medical detective franchises like House.

Michael Crichton Dies [via ET]

A common theme in Crichton's work is that science is evil, and tampering with the forces of nature will get your face bitten off, writes Brotherton on his blog:

The theme of much of Crichton’s work is that of Frankenstein: playing god brings destruction. This is the message of Jurassic Park and Prey, for starters. There are related themes in books like Sphere, which indicates that there are things that humankind is better off not knowing... When a writer devotes so much time to pointing out the great arrogance and hubris of scientists and how it always brings doom, well, I think that sucks. We don’t have enough positive examples of scientists in books and movies.

And yet in the course of criticizing science, Crichton makes fundamental scientific errors, Brotherton points out. Most amusingly, he thinks "chaos theory" means every complex system will automatically break down — which means the space shuttle shouldn't be able to fly. And of course, Crichton has been lecturing whoever will listen about the "hoax" of global warming, disparaging the work of real climate scientists.

Brotherton links to a fascinating deconstruction of the bad science in Crichton's global warming hoax book, State Of Fear, at RealClimate.org: Crichton dredges up the myth that all scientists believed in the 1970s we were on the verge of an ice age. And in an appendix, Crichton compares the study of global warming to the 19th century academic study of eugenics: both were supported by foundations and had academic support, so ipso facto they must be equally valid. Right? Meanwhile, over at Nanotechnology Now, Chris Phoenix deconstructs the weird science in Crichton's fear-nanotechnology opus Prey, including the idea that atoms can pass through glass. (In which case, lightbulbs wouldn't work all that well.)

[Mike Brotherton]

A&E's version of Andromeda flails around like a coked-up otter, especially in the first half hour or so. There's a satellite! And it crashes! And two pesky teens take it into a small town, where everyone dies horribly, much like you'd expect — and then, with no warning, we're suddenly lurched into trying to humanize the series' entire cast, in perfunctory, throwaway scenes.

Benjamin Bratt from Law And Order has a crazy ex and a teenage son with a moped. He wants moped boy to go stay with his sister. What will happen to moped boy? And some guy is a right-wing jerk, but it's okay because we later find out he's gay. But Will from Will And Grace is not gay, but is a hard-driving reporter with a substance abuse problem. Moped Boy is angry! We also meet the president of the United States, who drawls about how you have to throw the dice when you're hunting possum, because otherwise you'll be holding 'em when you want to be folding 'em. And Benjamin Bratt is secretly in love with one of his fellow epidemiologists, but Moped Boy thinks Benjamin Bratt is a know-it-all.

Actually, we see a lot of Moped Boy in the first half hour of the first episode, but then he's pretty much never seen again. He's symptomatic of the show's problem, which is that it has a humongous cast of characters — way more than the original novel or Robert Wise movie — and they're all completely one-dimensional, except for the movie's lurching stabs at making them compelling. By the time we get back to the virus killing everybody, we've sort of lost the thread thinking about Moped Boy and his failure to realize that Benjamin Bratt really does know everything. I had started to think Moped Boy was a major character, and wondered where he had gone.

So yeah, the new series follows the book and the movie — to some extent. There's an alien virus on that thar crashed satellite, and it's nothing like anything we've seen before. And it causes people to die instantly from blood clotting, or else (in a handful of cases) to go berzerk. And our five scientists go into a super-fancy underground bunker to figure out how to stop it.

But the new version has to get fancy, throwing in every bit of new tech you can think of — the virus comes down wrapped in a nanotech shield of "Bucky Balls" — and the super-mutating virus is like "stem cells" because it can transform itself and adapt to anything. And there's a whole complicated backstory about how the virus came from a wormhole — and maybe it came from the future! — because the army has a secret ebil project, Project Scoop, that Will from Will and Grace is investigating. It gets more and more complicated — the Bucky Balls are a code from the future — and we leave behind a lot of the classic simplicity of the book and 1971 movie.

That's the other problem with this version of Andromeda — the virus is built up to be such an incredible super-organism that mutates like five or six times (instead of, I think, three times in the book) and infects birds and rats. About three hours in, I started to wonder why everybody wasn't dead yet. Will from Will and Grace was running around the contagion zone for hours and hours, including one scene where he prays, and no infected birds or airborne radioactive strains do away with him. (We were hoping after a while.) Maybe Will and Moped Boy will get caught in a disaster together!

Yet for all that, we did enjoy the new miniseries. And parts of it were fun to watch while tipsy from all those Wiscon parties. Plus there's very little else to watch on TV right now, until the Lost finale and the return of Sci Fi's Friday night lineup. Bottom line: If you think of it as "Mansquito with an A-list cast" (and the cast did a great job with what they were given) then you'll probably enjoy it a lot. Just don't compare it too much to Michael Crichton's best novel, or Robert Wise's taut medical thriller.

The Andromeda Strain was one of my favorite novels, long before I had any idea who this Crichton guy was. And the 1970s movie was one of the few adaptations that wasn't a letdown. And yet I'm still cautiously optimistic that this new version could improve on them both, based on the cast and crew. In particular, Benjamin Bratt is always fun to watch, and so are Daniel Dae Kim and Andre Braugher. I can live with Ricky Schroder. The Scotts produced the miniseries, but it's directed by Mikael Salomon, who's done a lot of TV directing and was the cinematographer on The Abyss. I'll avoid commenting on the fact that Ridley Scott is putting his name on Andromeda after swearing that science fiction was dead. Here's how A&E describes the plot of their version:

A U.S. satellite crash-lands near a small town in Utah, unleashing a deadly plague that kills virtually everyone except two survivors - an old man and an infant, who may provide clues to immunizing the population. As the military attempts to quarantine the area, a team of highly specialized scientists are assembled to find a cure and stop the spread of the alien pathogen, code-named Andromeda.

• 
  
• The plot is pretty basic: tourists visit a theme park and interact with realistic, lifelike androids. Of course, something goes wrong and they start murdering everyone, which makes it hard to run a business.
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• In the sequel, FutureWorld, the park is reopened after they've spent $1 billion dollars in safety improvements. They invite reporters (played by Peter Fonda and Blythe Danner) to come check the place out and vouch for the place. Whoops, something goes wrong. Again. Only this time, the demented theme park owner is trying to duplicate world leaders in cloned android form. There is nothing like an evil Walt Disney.
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• Yul Brynner's final film west FutureWorld, where he appeared again as the Gunslinger in a semi-dream sequence.
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• In the final sequence of FutureWorld, one of the dying clones tells the head scientist "They're the wrong ones!" as Fonda and Danner leave the facility. They were supposed to be replaced by evil clones who would give Delos a rave review, but they were outsmarted by the real thing. Fonda turns around and flips the scientist the bird.
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• The television show, Beyond WestWorld, was about the security chief in Delos trying to stop the head scientist from using the robots to take over the world. That probably wasn't in the job description. The show featured plots like this, "Quaid (the scientist) gets his hands on some uranium, and John (the security chief) and Pamela (Connie Sellecca!) must find another android who is hiding in a rock band." Why this was canceled after only five episodes, we'll never know.
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• Michael Crichton was inspired to make this film after visiting Disneyland and seeing the animatronic figures on Pirates of the Caribbean, so you can now blame that attraction for at least five movies: WestWorld, FutureWorld, and all the the Johnny Depp Pirates movies.
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• This was the first movie to use digitized 2D computer graphics in a film, and the sequel FutureWorld was the first movie to use 3D graphics. In fact, in FutureWorld, the 3D hand you see on screen belongs to Edwin Catmull, the co-founder and president of Pixar and of Walt Disney Animation Studios.
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• The theme park in the film is actually called Delos, and was meant to be the ultimate vacation destination. Visitors could visit WestWorld, MedievalWorld or RomanWorld and actually have sex with the androids, who were programmed to be receptive to all sexual advances. All this pleasure only cost $1000 a day.
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• Yul Brynner's Gunslinger character is an homage to the character Chris he played in The Magnificent Seven, and he even wears the same outfit.
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• John Carpenter has said that the Gunslinger was an inspiration for the Michael Myers character in Halloween, and it sure seems like The Terminator owes a lot to this relentless killing machine as well..
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• The Brynner-Bot has his face burned off by acid at one point, which also destroys his visual circuits. However, he has infrared backups, and spends the rest of the film chasing the main character while faceless. Trust us, it's cool.
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• Not really trivial... but doesn't James Brolin look a lot like Christian Bale in this flick?

Apparently star Andre Braugher isn't a big fan of the novel, "Crichton's book doesn't hold up to the test of time and so not much happens. When you go back to 1968 and read that book it's anti-climactic, period, so this is a re-telling of the story with the same premise." Let's hope fans of the novel aren't rankled too much by that. As long as he's nitpicking, he might as well say that the 1971 film based on the same novel doesn't hold up that well either. What's going to make their version so much better?

He's very stingy with the details, and basically only tells us that he's playing the military man who is brought in to deal with the situation, while Benjamin Bratt plays the "hot-headed scientist" who is trying to track down the virus. Does Benjamin Bratt have any roles where he isn't hot-headed? According to Braugher, the film will have some elements of Sphere in it (please dear god, let him mean the novel and not the awful movie version), and promises that the virus won't be benign as it is in the novel, but will be "malignant and on the loose."

Hear that folks? It's another "rampant virus on the loose" sci fi tale. Steel yourselves, and think about investing in a hazmat suit.

Braugher on Strain [Bloody Disgusting]

Famous names: Michael Crichton, Yul Brynner, Richard Benjamin, James Brolin, Majel Barrett

Crunchy goodness: 2

Ripoff: Two decades later, with better special effects and a better director at the helm, writer Crichton ripped himself off with Jurassic Park, another tale of an amusement park gone terribly wrong. Apparently CGI raptors make more compelling bad guys than Yul Brynner's cowboy bot.

Life lesson: The robots will rise up and kill you. How many times do we have to tell you that before you LISTEN?

Stunt casting: Yul Brynner, AKA Hottie McHotterson of the 1960s, played countless cowboys in Western flicks in a rather robotic manner - casting him here as a robot cowboy is both satiric and appropos.

Movie Gadget Friday: Robot Gunslinger from Westworld