A great gain: A Female Time Lord! Two great losses: RIP: Martin Landau and George Romero

[thewayne]

Jodie Whitaker will be the next Doctor Who, appearing in the Christmas Special, which should be quite interesting. Already fans are screaming, either in joy or anguish. Myself, I'm in the joy category, I think it's quite awesome. She's a great actor and I think it's high time. The lead vocalist for Blink-182 had a fabulous tweet: "Oh great a female Doctor Who. What next? Female real doctors? Female pilots? Female scientists? Female sisters and mothers? Female WOMEN?!"

Long may she reign! Or at least I'd like to see more than three years.

The BBC has a nice fan reaction piece that includes a short intro video, she looks great!


In sadder news, the passing on Saturday of Martin Landau, he was 89. Landau's first big movie was Hitchcock's North By Northwest, but I'll always remember him for Space: 1999 and Mission: Impossible. He was also the first choice for Mister Spock, but he turned it down and Gene had to go with his second choice, some guy named Nimoy. He kept himself pretty busy in his later years, pretty good for a guy pushing 90. He will also be remembered as the father of at least a two-generation acting dynasty as his daughter Juliet Landau, well-known for her work as Drusilla in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel is a VERY active actor herself.


On Sunday night, we lost the father of zombies, George Romero, to lung cancer. He was 77. I created a sort of zombie game called Zombie Cafe, wherein you operate a deli selling brains to zombies. There's a blog called the Zombie Rights Campaign which used to frequent horror conventions, handing out flyers and holding demonstrations, demanding an end to head shots and such: they labeled my game as Zombie Friendly as I did not advocate violence against zombies. He also gave a copy of my game to George, but I never heard anything from him. That would have been nice.


It's interesting to think of the two men, iconic actor and iconic film maker. They both left major marks in the industry and both will be remembered for a very long time.

Comments

[devilc]

For reasons I do not know, Juliet Landau has followed me on Twitter. I feel so sorry for her to have such a public aspect to your grief.

[thewayne]

If I were a public figure such as her, I think in such a situation that I'd suspend my social media accounts for a month or two if I could. That is interesting that she followed you.

[moxie_man]

I created a sort of zombie game called Zombie Cafe, wherein you operate a deli selling brains to zombies.

I can see the name/logo of said cafe:

Zombway
Eat Flesh!

[thewayne]

This is what the main art work looked like, done by Steve Crompton, the main artist for Flying Buffalo Games. There were two decks of cards, brains and action cards. This was the back of the action cards. I did the lettering for Zombie and Spare Brains Games using a 'rubber eraser' pointer on an IBM Thinkpad laptop and the spray paint tool in Photoshop to look sort of like graffiti.



I've been working on a second edition that was a fairly major redesign and also included major amounts of artwork, but being out of work means no money to ship to Crompton.

[moxie_man]

An actual published game...that's cool. But a bummer that the 2nd edition is on hold. I see their website hasn't been updated in nearly a decade either.

[thewayne]

An actual Self-Published game, and that's why the site hasn't been updated since 2010.  I've been thinking about updating the site but just haven't had the motivation to do it: nothing really new to put on it.  And it's literally a one-man operation.

The profit margins were really slim, and the game needs a 2.0.  I should have been consistent in investing in the artwork when I was working, and I was not, because now that I'm unemployed I would at least have that cushion to get the artwork done now that I have the time to work on the rules.  I wasn't able to get any traction with selling it online or through stores, the only store that I was selling through was spun-off from Flying Buffalo and owned by friends whom I worked with AT Flying  Buffalo, so I've known the owner for 35 years.  It moved fairly consistently, but the slim profit made it barely worth it.  If I can get a 2.0 going and find a better manufacturing model, then I may try a re-launch.It's a fun little game, the mechanics is to get rid of all the cards in your hand.  You are dealt a number of brains, your objective is to sell all of them.  The cards you draw you use to improve the quality of your brains (increase the value/quality) and sabotage the other player's brains, so a high level of screw your neighbor.  Fast playing. It also has an automatic success/fail component: regardless of the value, you always fail to sell on a 12 (2d6 roll) and always succeed on a 2.  I remember one game where pretty much everyone was down to 1 or 2 brains, and we'd screwed Richard on his last brain to where he was down to -5 or something, and the bastard rolled snake eyes and won. :-)  Oh, and if you roll doubles, you get to roll to try to sell another brain. I still have a copy or two floating around here somewhere.  Got an excellent review published in Knights of the Dinner Table.

[moxie_man]

Neat and too bad at the same time. I'm guessing you never received permission to roll out the karaoke one.

[murakozi]

Commander Koenig is always the first role I think of when it comes to Martin Landau, with Rollin Hand being the next one that comes to mind. I never did see him in Ed Wood, which I've been told was pretty good.

I do kind of find it amusing that he passed on playing Spock, recommending Nimoy for the part, then when he left Mission: Impossible! Nimoy ended up getting the part for the character that replaced Landau's.

[thewayne]

I also find it interesting that he was the first choice for Spock, and then Nimoy followed him to M:I. I was commenting to my wife last night that without Nimoy in Star Trek that we wouldn't have the Vulcan hand salute or the Vulcan neck pinch.

I don't remember much of Space 1999 except that I enjoyed it. It's possible that I haven't seen it since it originally aired. I do remember that it was pretty silly. Martin Landau was obviously having lots of fun playing Lugosi in Ed Wood, he got in some good scenery chewing. Speaking of which, have you seen the new A Series of Unfortunate Events on Netflix? We've watched the first two stories (four episodes). Very high production values, excellent fourth-wall breaking.