<![CDATA[io9: ricardo montalban]]> http://tags.lifehacker.com/assets/base/img/thumbs140x140/io9.com.png <![CDATA[io9: ricardo montalban]]> http://io9.com/tag/ricardomontalban http://io9.com/tag/ricardomontalban <![CDATA[Lousy Human Bastards!]]> Nothing is more awesome than watching Ricardo Montalban yell, "Lousy human bastards!" in Conquest of the Planet of the Apes - best flick of the series, and about to get a (hopefully awesome) remake.

This scene is from early in the 1972 film that traces the revolt of the apes against their human slavemasters. Ricardo is the caretaker of hyper-evolved Caesar, the secret son of Zira and Cornelius - the two apes who traveled back in time from the ape-dominated 40th Century to futuristic 1991. Long kept away from mainstream society, Caesar is shocked to see how cruelly the ape slaves are treated. And he yells one of scifi's classic lines: "Lousy human bastards!" A line which Ricardo happily takes up.

The premise of this film, which is about to be remade as a movie tentatively called Caesar, is that a plague killed all cats and dogs on Earth. So humans started keeping apes as pets, which quickly evolved into keeping them as slaves.

Caesar eventually leads the apes in a violent revolution. The film's original ending found Caesar vowing to destroy human society, but apparently that didn't go over well with test audiences. So it was reshot to include a slightly less incendiary speech from Caesar, followed by his ape girlfriend Lisa speaking for the first time. She cries out "No!" when he advocates too much violence.

Conquest of the Planet of the Apes
via IMDB

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<![CDATA[Farewell, Sweet Khan - Ricardo Montalban Has Died]]> News reaches us of the death of Ricardo Montalban this morning, at his home in Los Angeles. Best known to most people, perhaps, as Mr. Roarke on Fantasy Island, Montalban will always be Star Trek's Khan Noonien Singh to science fiction fans despite an amazing 64 year career that included appearances in The Naked Gun, Dynasty, and Dora The Explorer (You couldn't fault him for his variety). No cause has been given for his death. He was 88 years old.

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<![CDATA[How To Tell When The Fans Are Killing Science Fiction]]> Science fiction fans are like the bacteria in your stomach: most of the time, they help to keep you healthy. But when the pH balance goes wrong, and the bacteria start running the show, they can make you sick. We've expressed our view that Star Trek deserves euthanasia partly because it inevitably caters too much to its obsessive fanbase. Here's a list of examples of too-powerful fans hastening the death of a franchise.

  • The "Ian Levine" syndrome. The BBC's Doctor Who was still a runaway success in the mid-1980s, partly thanks to the return of old monsters like the Cybermen and the Daleks after years in retirement. Producer John Nathan-Turner started going to conventions in the U.S. and England and listening to fans' questions about whether the giant-ant Zarbi would ever meet the giant spiders of Metebellis Three. Soon, he hired "superfan" Ian Levine as a "fan consultant." All of a sudden, you had stories with plots like, "The scientist from 1974's "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" tries to stop that sock monster we glimpsed briefly in 1964's "Dalek Invasion of Earth" from eating the cricket player from 1982's "Black Orchid," and we won't bother to explain what's going on. It'll be awesome!" Here's the "We Are The World"-style record which Levine produced to try and save Who after he'd helped put it on the verge of cancellation:dvdcvr08.jpg
  • Manny Cotto, savior of the universe. Star Trek: Enterprise was already on its last legs when Manny Cotto took over as show-runner, and started running episodes that answered lingering questions left over from The Wrath Of Khan, or finally explained why the Klingons didn't always have weird foreheads, or resolved inconsistencies between the different shows' portrayals of Vulcans. It was like the Discovery Channel for Trek maniacs. And the fans loved it. Everybody else? Too busy watching Iron Chef. To be fair, though, Cotto's fanservice* overkill was a symptom of Enterprise's fatal illness, not its cause. Here's Brent "Data" Spiner, playing the great-uncle of Data's creator, who it turns out created Ricardo Montalban by coincidence:soong.jpg
  • "Dog-whistle" fanservice. When George Bush wanted to reassure conservatives that he wouldn't appoint any Supreme Court justices who supported Roe v. Wade, he used coded phrases that didn't mean much to most people, like "Dredd Scott." (These are called "dog-whistle" appeals, because they're only audible to some people.) In the same way, media SF sometimes slips in little nods to the fans that go over most people's heads. In Battlestar Galactica: Razor, you have Starbuck saying "I love it when a plan comes together," which is Hannibal's catch-phrase on former Starbuck Dirk Benedict's show The A-Team. Oooh, instant fangasm! (Weirdly, David Eick's Bionic Woman also had a gratuitous A-Team reference in its final episode.) More obvious fan-gifting was the inclusion of "classic" Cylons in Razor. And a recent Doctor Who episode turned a generic monster into the Macra from a 1966 story, but the reference was so vague that only fans would catch it.
  • Shippers! Let's be clear here: romance subplots are a sign of a healthy book/TV/movie series, because you don't want your characters to be sexless robots. It's only when two characters get together because the fans demanded it (I'm looking at you, Mulder and Scully) that it becomes a problem. Sometimes, romantic/sexual tension is better kept tense. And sometimes, it doesn't actually exist. (I still love the Mary Tyler-Moore episode where she and Lou Grant finally kiss — and realize two seconds later that it's a dumb idea and they have no sexual chemistry.)millenniumkiss.jpg
* - Yes, I know "fanservice" originally referred to sexy images in anime, but it's mutated now. I'm working on another post about the history of the term.]]>
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