Though Mignola has drawn a million fight scenes for his most famous creation, Hellboy, I think some of his greatest fights can be found elsewhere. I love this action-packed cover Mignola drew for a Lobster Johnson comic because it contains all the most important ingredients of an awesome smackdown: a skeleton, a robot, a disembodied brain, and a scorpion. Really, it doesn't get better than that.

Mignola is also the creator of another brilliantly-named hero, the Amazing Screw-On Head, a robot head who fights giant monsters for President Lincoln in the nineteenth century. The comic, which won an Eisner Award, was made into an animated short featuring the voices of Paul Giamatti (as the Screw-On Head) and David Hyde Pierce (his arch-nemesis Emperor Zombie). Here you can see a great fight from the animated version of the comic book, right after Emperor Zombie raises a monster and the Screw-On Head fights it. Luckily, the Screw-On Head's sidekick Mr. Groin is there to help!

OK, the picture below isn't of a fight, but it demonstrates one of the reasons why Mignola is so great at composing fights. It's a picture of H.P. Lovecraft, his face defined by darkness rather than features. The backgrounds are complicated, murky, and evocative. And then there's the crowning glory, the tentacle snaking out of old H.P.'s pants. That is Mignola all over: a swirl of hyperbolic darkness, punctuated by a carefully-placed joke.

And no celebration of fight scenes would be complete without this great cover that Mignola drew back in 1990, for an Aliens vs. Predator comic book. Teeth! Stabbing! Darkness! Oh, yeah.

Boil them, fry them. Those are the suggestions that one of the good scientists makes when fighting the giant carrot in The Thing from Another World, the movie that John Carpenter's The Thing is loosely based on. In this early-1950s flick, based on a short story, a bunch of scientists accidentally thaw out an ancient blood-sucking alien which is mostly made of vegetable matter. (Carpenter dispensed with the veggie parts of his alien in The Thing.) Knowing it's a vegetable, the scientists first try to kill it by cooking — they literally light it on fire with kerosine. It gets away, but they finally fry it with electricity.

Keep them at bay with electrical fences. In Day of the Triffids, a British series (based on a book), a meteor blinds every human on the planet and releases shambling, human-eating plant people to munch on the defenseless primates. The blinded humans finally defeat the invaders by building a giant electrical fence which doesn't kill the buggers but at least keeps them far away.

Call Godzilla to help out. My personal favorite plant monster is Biollante, a giant mutant rose from the mid-1990s with teeth and special anti-nuclear powers whose terrifying tusky mouth is partly the result of an infusion of Godzilla DNA. When Biollante starts rampaging and squirting people with deadly sap, or grabbing them with vines (some of which have mouths on them!), Godzilla steps in to help. Or maybe he just steps in to step in. There's a giant fight, and finally Godzilla destroys Biollante with a thermonuclear blast from his breath weapon, which dissolves her into spores that go up into space.

Don't beat 'em — join 'em. You can't really beat the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, a string of movies (and a musical) about an evil, blood-drinking flower that wants to take over the world. In the 1960 Roger Corman flick, the plant eats Seymour, the main character, but somehow Seymour manages to defeat it once he's been consumed. In the early 1980s musical, however, the plant eats everybody in the cast and eventually does take over the world. And in the awesome 1980s version of the movie directed by Frank Oz, Seymour electrocutes the plant and gets away — but it's too late. He moves to the suburbs but as the film ends we see a little blood-drinking plant growing in his front yard. Frank Oz later made a shortlived animated spinoff of the movie, about a teenager and his human-eating plant.

As with the U.S. release, Cloverfield was subject to much pre-release marketing in Japan; in addition to the official manga, the cast and crew of the movie spent time in the country doing publicity, and Japan's own version of the internet - called "the internet" - was as full of viral marketing for the movie as the U.S.'s. Although it has to be seen whether Japanese audiences will get free party mixes with their DVD copies of the movie.

The only downside to the Japanese success of JJ Abrams' monster movie is for US critics who find themselves torn between wanting to make Beyonce versus Godzilla jokes and feeling the need for some semi-racist "those Japanese sure do like their monster movies walking around in highly-populated urban areas" reference.

Monster Japan bow for 'Cloverfield' [Variety]

I had thought The Ruins was going to be a pure supernatural horror flick, since it takes place in the ruins of some kind of Mayan (?) tomb in Mexico. A bunch of touristas from the U.S. get led there by evil natives who won't let them out. Trailers show a bunch of nice white kids being eaten up by black squirmy things — seemed like just another lameass horror movie using angry ancestral spirits as a way to demonstrate how yucky it is to go to Mexico on Spring Break and get worms or the runs.

But apparently the flick, according to Bloody Disgusting, is about an angry plant that eats people. Way cooler than angry spirits. And it seems the plant has "evolved" into this vicious human-eating state, much the way Shyamalan's plants have evolved that suicide-inducing toxin in The Happening. Now I'm actually vaguely intrigued by the movie, since it's high time plant monsters made a comeback. We cannot live on Triffids and Biollante alone.

Review of The Ruins [Bloody Disgusting]

I'm not sure what this is, but it looks like something out of Lovecraft.

The results of Ledermüller's work were collected into a three-volume set that would have been the eighteenth century equivalent of coffee table books. All three have recently been put online, and you can browse through them for free. Here are two pictures of plant life. The top one shows seeds sprouting, and the bottom shows mushrooms.


If you want to see more, check out the three volume set: Volume One (click "see digitalized document"), Volume Two, and Volume Three.

Recreational Microscopy [via BibliOdyssey]

"Ancient Superbeasts" from Reign of Fire
As you can see in our clip of the trailer from Reign of Fire, above, this movie looked really good in principle. A futuristic world invaded by dragons who squirt really cool fire, Matthew McConaughey is bald, Christian Bale is scruffy and sarcastic, the world is in ruins, and everybody is hiding out in bunkers. There's even a hint that there might be a dragons vs. helicopters moment. Unfortunately, it was about as goofy as Doomsday, but without all the ninjas and race cars and punk rock cannibals from Glasgow. Plus, the helicopters never fought the dragons, the way they did in D-War. Still, you take what you can get. This is the only movie you will ever see that combines dragon-slaying with crumbling, futuristic, post-apocalyptic London. Many points given just for trying.

Ghidorah AKA Monster Zero
Of course, Godzilla is probably the original science fiction dragon. The Big G squirts fire, is seriously spiny, and comes into town to stomp the shit out of everything (a very dragon move). He's also some kind of "ancient creature from beneath the sea" re-awakened by human meddling (in this case, atomic tests). But if you want to go full-on scifi dragon, you have to wait until Ghidorah the three-headed monster enters the popular kaiju franchise. Ghidorah comes from space (even you non-Japanese speakers can recognize the word "UFO" in that headline in the trailer for Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah above). Like most good dragons, Ghidorah has a breath weapon (lightning), golden scales, and giant leathery wings. In case you were still wondering about his scifi bonafides, he later becomes MECHA Ghidorah, complete with cyber head and body armor (kaijugasm!!!).

"Psychic Friends" from Dragonriders of Pern series
Anne McCaffrey's classic Dragon Riders of Pern book series is about the civilization created by of a bunch of humans on an alien planet called Pern. It's hinted that long ago, the humans colonized Pern and never left. Dragons, complete with fire-breathing and psychic powers, are their companion species on Pern. In fact, dragons are necessary to its ecosystem, which is invaded every 200 years by killer "thread," spores from space that consume everything in their path. Only the dragons can kill the spore with their firey breath. Human riders of the dragons lead the charge against thread, and also form special psychic bonds with their mounts. The society on Pern is pretty medieval, with dragons serving as the main technology.

"Heroin Bulls" in the Dragon Temple Saga Trilogy
Janine Cross' harrowing, revisionist homage to the Pern series is the Dragon Temple Saga, about an alien planet strongly divided up along racial and nationalist lines. Dragons are the cornerstone of the economy: they provide transportation via flight, and food via their tasty eggs. Their venom is also the source of a powerful drug that many people on the planet are secretly addicted to. Our hero is a woman whose mother comes from the outcast "piebald" race on the planet, and she has to fight poverty and slavery to finally earn the right to be a dragon master. Along the way, she has amazing battles and, um, some sexytime with dragons. Not for the faint of heart, this series will rip your brain out and make you feel strange for weeks afterwards.

Old Lace in Runaways
In the comic book series Runaways, created and mostly written by Brian K. Vaughan, a group of teenagers discover their parents are supervillains and decide to run away to form their own group that seeks great justice. At one point, the purple-haired nerd Runaway named Gertrude discovers that her time-traveling parents have stashed a psychic dinosaur/dragon to take care of her. She names it Old Lace, and it always answers her mental call.

The T-Rex in Jurassic Park
No list of scifi dragons would be complete without a nod to Jurassic Park, whose resurrected dinosaurs are basically dragons for the genetic engineering age. Excellent as a book, fun as a movie, Jurassic Park is about what happens when a wealthy entertainment entrepreneur decides it would be a really awesome idea to recreate dinosaurs from DNA found preserved in amber. They dinos are supposed to be sterile, but unfortunately nature takes its course and soon the fun Jurassic Park island is overrun with deadly creatures, fresh from the petri dish. Some of the dinos are clearly just dinos, but when the T-Rex arrives with his deadly stomping and long teeth, you know you've got a Genomic Age dragon on your hands.

Only four Rex Havoc stories ever appeared in the pages of Warren Presents and three of those were collected in issue #14 from November 1981. Their team emblem consisted of a boot-print superimposed on a pair of buttocks, and Rex had his own fight song he would sing as the team marched into battle:

"We are the ass-kickers of the fantastic,
Let monsters all beware.
Three guys and a lass...
We kick ass...
In French we kick...derriére!"

Rainn Wilson - the evil alien Gallaxhar
Hugh Laurie - Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D.
Seth Rogen - the jellylike B.O.B.
Will Arnett - the half-ape, half-fish Missing Link
Kiefer Sutherland - General W.R. Monger
Stephen Colbert - The President
Reese Witherspoon - Ginormica

[Slashfilm]

The Descent and Doomsday both focus on women venturing into perilous situations. Do you think it's important that the heroes in your films are women? Do you write women characters differently, or are they just heroes who happen to be women?

It's certainly not some kind of career plan to have my heroes be women, it's just turned out that way. I actually wrote the story for Doomsday several years before I made The Descent. It was one of 3 scripts I tried to get made in the wake of The Descent and it was the one that Rogue Pictures chose to back, so it's really just a coincidence that my new hero is also a woman and I saw no reason to change the character into a man just because of what I'd done previously.

I try to write women as authentically as possible. Above all things, no matter how tough and rugged I make the characters, they should never lose their femininity.

The thing that seems most intriguing to me about Doomsday is that it seems to straddle genre lines, including horror, scifi, medical thriller, etc. Do you think this is true? Are you consciously trying to blend genres?

I love to blend genres. Taking the best elements from different inspirations and throwing them all into the mix is what makes it fun. Besides, I think the lines between genres have often been blurred at best, and that's no bad thing.

Most post-apocalyptic movies nowadays feature monsters (28 days, I Am Legend, etc. ) Are you consciously trying to reclaim post-apocalyptic movies from the monster-movie genre?

Absolutely! It's like there's an unspoken rule in movies now that virus = zombies! Well that's not what post-apocalyptic movies are about for me. It should be about human survival, because the day the next big global pandemic arrives, there won't be any zombies running around, I can promise you that. This is real, terrifying stuff, just as real as nuclear war was when the last great post apocalyptic movies (like The Road Warrior) came out. And that's the kind of gritty, savage world I'm trying to revisit with this movie.

This piece, called Use Technology to Collect the Women!, shows a giant, multi-limbed cyclops-like robot piloted by scientists on a mission to collect naked women on some unknown planet. "I have to say I love the logic of Sci-Fi pulp," Wragg writes on his blog. Images by Nate Wragg Nate Wragg via NotCot

No list of pollution mutants could begin without first paying homage to Hedorah, AKA The Smog Monster (1971). He lands on top of Tokyo's smokestacks and sucks the smoke out to grow bigger, and meaner, and more red-eyed. He literally shits all over the city, big slimy rivers of diarrhea. But he also does nice things, like use his grody powers to prevent us from having to hear one more folk song from a bunch of psychedelically-dressed hippies playing guitar in the middle of a field. Eventually Gojira kills him by grabbing a couple of weird glowing white balls from inside his stinky body. There are also a lot of messages "from the children" in this movie, which was allegedly inspired by letters from Japanese children saying the scariest thing they could imagine was pollution.

One of the greatest filmmakers at work in the U.S. today, John Sayles (director of Lone Star), got his start writing cheesily great pollution monster flick Alligator (1980). The fact that this movie is both funny and politically-minded is entirely due to the accident of Sayles needing some money to fund his indie movies. A pet alligator flushed and released into the sewers of Chicago starts slurping up growth hormones that people are pissing and pooping out into his home. Then he grows into a ginormous, mutant alligator who eats pets . . . and people!

A terrific and fairly obscure entry in the pollution mutant genre is Godmonster of Indian Flats (1973), directed and written by outlaw filmmaker Fredric Hobbs. "Gaseous vapors from an ancient mine" have turned a gentle sheep into a guy dressed in a fucked-up sheep suit, but that hardly matters in this strange sendup of life in a small Western town. As the town's racist mayor tries to prevent a nice black guy from buying real estate in his town of apple-cheeked whiteys, the mutant sheep rampages and tries to make it with a hippie chick. Eventually, there is some serious racist violence that takes the film from happy mutant romp into more sinister territory. Like Alligator, this is good political satire masquerading as a cheesy monster movie, and it will please you by succeeding at being both smart and gooftastic.

The best kind of pollution mutant is a rampaging, pissed-off animal, and that's why Prophecy (1979) is such a terrific flick. Bears who have been eating mercury-saturated fish in the rivers near an industrial factory have turned into massive, yucky bears who basically look like they have been turned inside-out. Rampaging and eating of humans follows, and some of the special effects are actually pretty cool. Directed by John Frankenheimer, who helmed the original (and great) Manchurian Candidate (1962), as well as a whole bunch of pretty good horror/actioners, this flick never spawned the billion cheesy sequels. Instead a supernatural movie with Christopher Walken called THE Prophecy got a bunch of awful sequels instead. That's what you get if you keep dumping mercury in the water, kids: bad sequels from a movie with the same name. It's Mother Earth's way of punishing you.

And no list of this sort would be complete without our generation's return to the pollution beastie: The Host (2007), a terrific scifi-horror-comedy about a giant thing (carp? whale? eel? combo platter?) that comes out of the waters near Seoul after a lameass military dude from the U.S. orders his underling to dump a zillion tons of old formaldehyde in the water. Bad move. Now a very angry combo platter is eating people and looking very much like the coolest special effect ever. When the mutant kidnaps the youngest girl in a family of quirky outcasts, they go on the offensive, tracking down the beastie in its lair to get their little girl back. This is the best mutant monster movie to come out in years, and like many entries in the genre it's well-written and has a social message that anybody who hates pollution can get down with.

Call of Cthulhu emulates movies from the period when Lovecraft invented the monster whose tentacled, alien power has haunted pop culture for nearly a century. Don't worry — there are no spoilers in this clip. You'll see a group of unlucky sailors who happen upon Cthulhu's scary city, just risen from the depths of the ocean during a storm. The men are terrified by its non-Euclidean geometries and shocking statues. You'll have to watch the movie if you want to see what these inventive filmmakers did to create their Cthulhu.

What's great about this short film, which is available on DVD, is that it manages to hover between devoted homage to Lovecraft, and slightly campy tweak on the original. It would be hard to recreate any Cthulhu story without some acknowledgment of its purple-prosey, over-the-top-ness. And these actors, in their 1920s pancake makeup, manage to convey that with their intense ironic-seriousness.

I thought Cloverfield was actually a great monster movie, but Call of Cthulhu has it beat for sheer originality and verve.

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What could be scarier than a bunch of new agey doctors giving you weird drugs while you're pregnant with Satan, or maybe an alien? Watch Mia Farrow try to cope with city life while pregnant with . . . something. It's all just typical New York stuff in Rosemary's Baby (1968), the ultimate urban mom horror-scifi monsterfest.

Speaking of scary babies, the man who brought you the ultimate evil baby movie It's Alive, Larry Cohen, made one of the great early-80s NY monster movies: Q the Winged Serpent (1982). Not only does it feature amazing stop-motion work on the monster — some sort of resurrected Aztec god — but you simply cannot beat a movie where a semi-naked lady sunbathing on her NY rooftop is snatched up and eaten by a winged lizard.
V, the Miniseries (1983) featured seemingly-nice aliens who came from a ship hovering over New York, but who would later rip off their human skins to reveal their hideous, reptile faces and evil natures. Though they claimed that they wanted to be friends with humans, it turned out they just wanted to eat us, turn us into soldiers, and use us as slaves. Much of the miniseries takes place in New York, though the human resistance to the aliens is located (improbably) in Los Angeles.

In response to rumors that alligators and other nasties were turning mutant in New York's sewers, a band of filmmaking geniuses brought you C.H.U.D., (1984) a tale about "cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers" who come out at night to eat New Yorkers. Now let's not get too picky about details, since if these creatures aren't human it's not exactly cannibalistic for them to eat people. One of the best B-movies of the 80s, if only due to the frantic efforts in movie ads to tie the flick into "current events."

And then, of course, there's the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man who almost destroyed New York in Ghostbusters (1984). Best giant monster ever.

In 1985, Greg Bear gave us the first nanotechnology "gray goo" scenario in his memorable novel Blood Music. In it, an experiment with nanotech goes horribly wrong after a Jekyll-ish scientist injects the nanites into his bloodstream and they become self-aware. After disassembling the scientist's body, they go on a global rampage, turning humans into the raw materials for their new cities. There's an amazing scene where a character looks out over New York City after its conversion to nanotech and says most of the city "looked like it was covered in brown and black blankets."

One of the best monsters ever to hit New York starred (not surprisingly) in a mostly-forgotten movie by Guillermo Del Toro (director of Hellboy and Pan's Labyrinth) called Mimic (1997). In it, giant cockroaches (you can see one in the top image) from the NY sewers learn to emulate human form in order to camouflage themselves, hide in the subways, and EAT PEOPLE. Seriously great human-size monsters here. Mira Sorvino stars as the detective on their trail.

We try not to speak of Roland Emmerich's U.S. version of Godzilla (1998), but there it is. The movie was made; it had a really lame CGI version of Godzilla in it; New York was attacked. There, I admitted the movie exists. Now I will close my eyes and start chanting again.

And of course no list of NY monsters would be complete without at least a cursory nod to the Fantastic Four, since pretty much every Marvel hero lives in New York anyway. That's why Galactus attacked New York in the most recent Fantastic Four movie. Galactus is just a scary cloud in the movie, but looks more like a regular giant monster or maybe a giant robot in the comic books.

And the outlier: A giant chicken terrorizes Hoboken in Daniel Pinkwater's young-adult novel The Hoboken Chicken Emergency (1977). Later made into a movie, the novel is great stuff — goofy and smart — plus it's the only story we can think of about giant chickens set in New Jersey.

The other two insane moments in Pitch: Vin Diesel's drug-addicted parole officer gets impaled and then decapitated by one of the monsters. And then Diesel gets so pissed off he wrestles one of the monsters. He's so angry, his head gets weirdly distorted and elongated. You can see his fury through the monster's weird ghost vision. He punches the monster so hard its organs come flying out. Go Vin. Why is he not the most famous action movie star in America?

Hellboy II is coming in July, and previews make it obvious that the flick will be full of Del Toro's signature dreamy crawlies. It's hard to imagine a third Hellboy without Del Toro at the helm, given that a flair for creative visual design are the bedrock of the first movie and Mike Mignola's freaky-dark comic book. At the same time, I'm glad if that means Del Toro will move onto other projects sooner. He's got some interesting stuff up his sleeve . . . such as a movie version of H.P. Lovecraft's ancient alien war story "At the Mountains of Madness," due out in 2010.

"Mountains" is my favorite Lovecraft story, and contains not just Cthulhu's Spawn but also the winged, tentacled crustacian Mi-Go and the starfish-headed Old Ones. Plus, the gigantic, polymorphous Shuggoths! I know Del Toro will know just what to do with all those crazy monsters.

I Am Legend concept art from Warner Bros.

So much of the look of I Am Legend was outdoors. How much of that was designed in advance?

We illustrated it or key-framed it. It was an illustration of the area that we were dressing. We conceptualized how much we could visually do practically, and how it was going to be augmented in the computer.

Some of the concept art sketches look very painterly, especially the evacuation scenes.

Some of the early concepts were ... entirely created as an illustration, and then as we found the practical location, we took a picture of the location and augmented the location, and added what we needed to add to it. And altered the sky and added a grainier texture to the look.

Did you watch Omega Man?

A little bit. There was the original, with Vincent Price, and then Omega Man. It was kind of a take on both of them. But also the director Francis Lawrence wanted to make it feel like it was three years later, but it was not an apocalyptic environment. But nature takes over.

Some of the original concept art looks really bombed out. There are buildings that are just skeletons of metal.

As I came on... it was [decided] not to look so apocalyptic. It was kind of a mixture, [with] a hint of what happened in the midst of the chaos, and then nature taking over. It's been three years since the virus and the town has been blocked out. So rather than having it like Omega Man, with the streets littered with trash and stuff... things are biodegradable. Nature takes over, cleans and moves things around.

Parts of it are quite idyllic and beautiful. What was the reason for deciding to make it look less post-apocalyptic?

Not to look like all the others, and also it's a combination of rather than being him in this post-apocalyptic world, it's the natural world taking over. Nature's evolving.

Did you have anything to do with designing the mutants?

A little bit. Originally the concept was to do it live action, and there was a lot of pre-concept work done early on. And then as it didn't quite play out [as] they wanted it to. It became part of the digital world. So I was involved in some of the meetings [about] how to make the creatures or monsters still human, but a little more defined in its body structure and a little more elongated.

Did the original production designer leave because of the decision to make the film look less post-apocalyptic?

Oh no. No, not at all. It just had to do with personal family stuff.

So what are you working on now?

I'm working on Fast And The Furious 4.

All I can say is: FANGASM! Srsly, OMG, Guillermo Del Toro reduces me to some kind of LiveJournal-speaking wanker.

This all started with a remake of John Carpenter's The Fog back in 2005, and these foggy mutant films just keep rolling in. Based on the box office numbers from the Fog remake and The Mist (it's just about to drop out of the top ten, where it debuted at #8), it's unclear why Hollywood is so into this trend.

The good news is that comic book publisher Studio 407, publishers of Night & Fog, signed a first-look deal with Myriad Pictures, and that means its indie properties will begin the arduous Hollywood development cycle very soon. While it's nice to see deals with companies other than Marvel and DC, we hope there will be a few original storylines tossed into the mix.

Myriad, 407 On Drawing Board [Hollywood Reporter]

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: After millions of people bought Superman #75 thinking it would some day become incredibly valuable (ha), tons of other superheroes "died" or became paralyzed or turned out to be clones. More recently, animation diva Bruce Timm put out a straight-to-DVD adaptation called Superman: Doomsday.

Elevator pitch: What if someone punched Superman really really really REALLY hard?? No, no, harder than that. A whole bunch of times. What then?

Deadliest spoiler: Superman comes back from the dead, but he pays a terrible price. He's stuck with a disfiguring mullet.

ComicVine - Death and Return of Superman

Famous names: Joss Whedon, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Allison Hannigan, Nicholas Brendon, James Marsters, David Boreanaz, Charisma Carpenter, Eliza Dushku, Anthony Head

Crunchy goodness: 5

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Angel, in which Buffy's ex gets all noir and tangles with an evil law firm — only to become what he fights.

Elevator pitch: It's like Supergirl meets Dracula — with sprinkles of Valley Girl on top.

The shit: The nonstop high school-is-hell metaphors never get old.
Too bad the cast does.

Whedonesque: Joss Whedon's Weblog

Famous names: Tom Baker, Peter Davison, Peter Purves, William Hartnell, Patrick Troughton, Colin Baker, Jon Pertwee, Sylvester McCoy, Terrance Dicks, Robert Holmes, Nicholas Courtney, Sophie Aldred.

Crunchy goodness: 5

Memorable product tie-in: The Daleks, mutant nazis in personal super-tanks, spawned a zillion types of crap, from a plastic zip-up playsuit to remote control wheelie Daleks to Dalek Sky-Ray ice lollies. (An ice lolly is like an ice-cicle.) Embarrassingly, a shitload of toy Daleks actually appear in longshot in the story Planet of the Daleks, as an army of super Daleks preparing to conquer the galaxy.

Design breakthrough: Doctor Who pioneered the art of filming in front of a greenscreen — but didn't exactly perfect it. More successful were John Friedlander's latex masks (Davros, the Ogrons, the Draconians) and Delia Derbyshire's pioneering all-electronic arrangement of the theme music.

Life lesson: It's not murder if you trick the bad guys into blowing themselves up (in, like, every episode.)

Outpost Gallifrey