Film Fantasy Calendar December 1988

 

At some point in the 80’s Starlog added a monthly column called the “Film Fantasy Calendar” which gave the anticipated release date for upcoming sci-fi and fantasy movies. I am not sure why they called it the “Film Fantasy” calendar, maybe because a lot of the dates and some of the movies turned out to be a fantasy! Let’s see how they did with this one. The dates after the movie title are the actual release dates. The calendar only provided titles, so it can be a little difficult to figure out some of these.

November

Scrooged – 11/23/1988

Oliver & Company – 11/13/1988

Vengeance: The Demon – 1/13/1989 (as Pumpkinhead)

The Land Before Time – 11/18/1988

Watchers – 12/2/1988

Cocoon: The Return – 11/23/1988

Hellhound: Hellraiser II – 12/23/1988

December

My Stepmother is an Alien – 12/9/1988

Winter/Spring 1989

Second Sight – 11/3/1989

Millennium – 8/25/1989

The Fly II – 2/10/1989

The Punisher – 10/5/1989

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen – 3/10/1989

SpiderMan – The only thing I can find related to Spiderman at that time is a fan film called Viva Spider-Man.

Warlock – 1/11/1991

Nightbreed – 2/16/1990

Witch Hunt – Not sure what this is. Maybe it was a working title for Warlock and they did realize it was the same movie.

Parents – 1/27/1989

Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure – 2/17/1989

Summer 1989

Ghostbusters II – 6/16/1989

Back to the' Future II – 11/22/1989

Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade – 5/24/1989

Star Trek V: The Final Frontier – 6/9/1989

Batman – 6/23/1989

The Abyss – 8/9/1989

License Revoked – 7/14/1989 (as License to Kill)

Grounded  - This could be Tremors which was released in January of 1990. The title Grounded sort of fits that movie.

Leviathan – 3/17/1989

Sgt. Rock – Arnold Schwarzenegger had planned to play the title role in this film but it never materialized.

Winter 1989

The Little Mermaid – 11/17/1989

Strat – See my post about this movie.

Battleground: Earth

I have talked about a few movies that were mentioned in Starlog but never materialized, and I am sure I will cover quite a few more of these. There are also projects mentioned in Starlog that took a long time to become a reality. One of example of this comes from Issue 7 (August 1977). In the Star Trek Report column it talks about some of the other projects that Gene Roddenberry had in the works including this one:

Another possible Roddenberry project is a pilot for CBS television called Battleground: Earth. Set in Earth's immediate future, the series deals with subversive infiltration of this planet by a superior alien race. The pilot script is by Brian McKay (McCabe & Mrs. Miller), based on a story by Gene Roddenberry. We are presently awaiting word from Twentieth Century-Fox on a beginning production date.

This project became a reality 20 years later (and six years after Roddenbery’s death) under the guidance of Majel Barret-Roddenberry, in the form of the syndicated series Earth: Final Conflict. Gene Roddenberry was given the writing credit on the actual pilot episode of the series, but you can read Brian McKay’s original script here. Anyone familiar with the show will find a lot of familiar things in the original script including a lot of the names and the general setup for the story. One of the big differences in the original script (spoiler alert) is that the audience and Boone find out that the Taelons have a clearly nefarious purpose in coming to Earth. The series kept the Taelons intentions a mystery for quite some time and in the end they turn out to not actually be here to conquer the Earth.

Mars Exploration

Starlog’s primary focus was sci-fi and fantasy, but they also did articles on science fact, especially about the space program. Just like the fiction news, some times that fact news didn’t come about as expected either.

In issue 6 (June 1977) there was an article about what we would see from NASA as a follow up to the successful Mars Viking mission, he is an excerpt:

The mission that NASA is now working on is the one that many space scientists would have preferred as the initial investigation. It calls for landing a pair of Mars Rovers ("Vikings on Wheels") on that planet's surface in the early 1980's. The Rovers would gather scientific data from several wide-ranging areas and send it to their mother Orbiter for relay to Earth. It is projected that these mission-controlled vehicles could travel up to three  miles a day and help one another as needed.

NASA did have plans for a Mars rover mission in the late 70’s or early 80’s but they never made it off the drawing board. You can read more about them in these two articles from Wired:

Mars Multi-Rover Mission (1977)

A 1979 Mars Rover Mission (1970)

This timeline turned out to be far to optimistic. After Viking the next successful Mars mission wouldn’t come until 1988 with the Russian Phobos 2 mission,  a rover wouldn’t make it to Mars until the NASA Mars Pathfinder mission in 1996, and the plans for dual rovers on Mars would have to wait until the Mars Exploration Rover missions in 2003.

Star Wars: The First Mention

 

One of the fun parts of reading these old issues of Starlog is finding the first mentions of things that went on to be really big deals. The best example of this is Star Wars. It is first mentioned in Starlog in Issue 2 (November 1976), here is the article:

Twentieth Century-Fox is currently completing the filming of their latest science fiction blockbuster, Star Wars. Without any parts of he film even previewed yet, some critics have already heralded Star Wars as, "... everything in science fiction you've always wanted to see on the screen but knew no one would ever put there."

Star Wars is written and directed by George Lucas, the man responsible for THX 1138 and American Graffiti. Producer Gary Kurtz, working with an $8,000,000 budget, has taken Star Wars on location to both Tunisia and London.

Star Wars is about a galaxy-wide civil war set in the distant future when Earth and its past have been entirely forgotten. Sir Alec Guinness plays an old renegade who was a great general in the first Galactic Wars. Mark Hamill plays the film's starring role, Luke Starkiller young adventurer.

Stuart Freeman, the man who designed the spectacular ape costumes for 2001: A Space Odyssey, has created several alien designs and makeups for Star Wars ' large cast. In addition to its basic science-fiction format, Star Wars will also contain elements of fantasy.

Star Wars reportedly won't be ready for release until early 1977, but for those of you who can't wait that long to find out more, Ballantine Books plans to put out a novelization of the movie in bookstores sometime this fall.

Note that there are a couple errors in this article. First, we know Star Wars was set “A Long Time Ago”, not in the future. Next they got Mark Hamill’s character name wrong, although Starkiller was the name used in early drafts of the film. Finally makeup was done by Stuart Freeborn, not Freeman.

In the previous issues there were similar articles about The Man Who Fell to Earth (“..has been gathering rave reviews from all its pre-release showings”), Logan’s Run (“Producer Saul David promises he will deliver an SF extravaganza…”), and Meteor (“… what promises to be a not-to-be-missed special-effect feast..”). Anyone reading these articles at that time would have no reason to think Star Wars was going to be anything more special then these other movies, but we all know how that turned out.

The next mention of Star Wars was in Issue 3 (January 1977):

Twentieth Century-Pox has postponed release dates again for all three of its new sci-fi productions. Originally scheduled for early 1977, Star Wars is now slated for limited release in seventy millimeter format in ten key cities across the country next November, with general release to follow in December. One source did suggest a Memorial Day release. No one is making any promises, though.

The rumor about a November release was totally incorrect. Star Wars was scheduled for a April or May release for quite some time before this issue was published, although it did slip a little bit into it’s final May release date.

I searched through all the Starlog issues from 2 through 51 (I stopped at 51) and there is a mention of Star Wars in every issue with one exception which was ironically the May 1977 issue, the month Star Wars was released. Of course this issue would have been in the works and published long before the release of the movie, but it’s still and interesting piece of trivia. The first issue to provide post release coverage was issue 8 (September 1977).

David Bowie Movie

 

I found this in Starlog #2, November 1976:

"Bowie's "The Man Who Fell to Earth" is in current release—and garnering controversial reactions and reviews. Not one to wait for final results to come in, the natural-born alien is hard at work on his second sci-fi entry: Zero Hour, which will be made by British Lion Films.”

I haven’t been able to find any information on this film. Bowie worked on a few more movies in the 70’s but none of them were sci-fi. Based on the title it’s possible that this movie was going to be related to his song Space Oddity. It is interesting to note that British Lion Films was taken over by EMI in 1976 which might have lead to the demise of this project.

Strat

 

I found this In Issue 136 (November 1988) of Starlog:

“Strat is the newest SF project involving Michael Douglas. It's an $18 million film to be executive produced by Douglas. Lennie Kleinfield scripted the Columbia release, which begins shooting shortly for a Christmas 1989 premiere.”

It also appears in the film calendar in the June 1989 issue still saying it will open in Winter of 1989.

I did some searching and found the author’s web site http://www.lennykleinfeld.com/ (note that Starlog had a slight misspelling of the name). I contacted Mr. Klienfeld and he confirmed that this was his screenplay but stated that things didn’t go well during script development. He wasn’t willing to provide more details which I can understand.

It is interesting to note that in the Summer of 1990 Columbia released the movie Flatliners on which Micheal Douglas was one of the producers. Flatliners was written by Peter Filardi , but I still think there is a possibility that Start was an early script for the same movie but it also could have been a totally unrelated project. You can read a interview with Pete Filardi in the June 1990 issue of Starlog.

Sword of Shannara

 

Some of my favorite fantasy books are from Terry Brooks’ Shannara series. I read a number of the books in the series when I was younger and I have recently started to re-read them. On page 16 of Starlog issue 26 (September 1979), there is the following news about the first book Sword of Shannara:

“Terry Brooks' Sword of Shannara had been optioned for filming by a new production company called Filme Magicke, Incorporated”

Based on an interview with Brooks in issue 107 of Starlog (June 1986), it appears that this didn’t work out so well.

“The author also has no great desire to see any of his works adapted to the big screen. "I'm scared to death," Brooks admits. "I've seen what they've done to fantasy in other forms and I haven't seen anything that I thought was done well.

'”I sold a movie company an option on The Sword of Shannara and they held it for six years. At the end of that time, they released it  with their last draft of the screenplay and it  was an abortion like you would not have believed. They completely changed the story. Thank God nothing happened. Now, I'm really gun-shy. I think maybe I'm better off if  they don't do anything and let it live out its life the way it was intended, rather than create  Frankenstein on the motion picture screen. I thought the movies butchered Tolkien [remember this was before Peter Jackson’s movies], and if  they do to my books what they did to Dune, I'll go out and shoot myself."

His attitude towards a movie adaptation must have changed at some point because in 2007, the rights were acquired by Warner Bros. Note that this article is obviously incorrect about the rights never having been optioned before.

But the story doesn’t end there. In 2010 the WB rights expired and in 2012 it was announced that Sonar Entertainment had acquired the rights and plans to develop a TV series based on the books, most likely starting with Elfstones of Shanarra. I just finished re-reading Elfstones and think this is a good place to start a series. As much as I like Sword it follows the Lord of the Rings storyline a little to closely. It will be interesting to see what happens with this project.