Ok Disney, #WhatIf we replaced all of Richard E. Grant's dialogue in #Loki with his dialogue from Withnail and I? Would it still work?
"We've gone on holiday by mistake."
"All right, this is the plan. We get in there and get wrecked. Then we eat a pork pie. Then we drop a couple of Surmontil-50s each. That means we'll miss out on Monday but come up smiling Tuesday morning."
"I'm not having this shag sack insulting me. Let him get his drugs out."
"Nonsense, this is a far superior drink to meths. The wankers don't drink it because they can't afford it."
"Listen, we're bona fide, we're not from London."
"Fork it!"
"I'm in a park and I'm practically dead; what good's the countryside?"
"Monty, you terrible c*nt!"
"We want the finest wines available to humanity, we want them here and we want them now!"
See, it really does work: Withnail and Loki!
"Bastards! You'll all suffer! I'll show the lot of you! I'm gonna be a sta-a-a-a-ar!"
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Time once again for my occasional series "Women with great hair fleeing gothic houses!"
There are a lot of these...
What is gothic romance? Essentially it's about a relationship between a young woman and an old house. She may have inherited it, married into it or sought refuge in it. But slowly a sinister echo of the past is magnified by its walls, and in horror she must try and flee it.
Why flee a house? Why not a man, a cruel stepmother or a ghost? Well they can all play a part in gothic romance, but the locus of evil is usually the house itself. It's a genre based on a fear of engulfment - of being taken over, driven mad, suffocated by someone else's past.
Today in pulp... a band of fearless rebels, a glowing sword, a mysterious 'force' and a masked baddie. Sounds familiar? Well the year is 1980, and the new decade has summoned a new movie hero. Sort of.
This is the epic saga of Hawk the Slayer!
In the early 1980s there were a slew of B-movies cashing in on the Star Wars phenomenon, but it took cinema much longer to latch on to sword and sorcery. Hawk the Slayer was the low-budget British Film that spanned the gap.
In 1979 writer Terry Marcel and musician Harry Robertson (of Hammer horror and Lord Rockingham's XI fame) were working on adapting a Ray Cooney play when they got chatting about Fritz Lieber and fantasy novels.
Hard-boiled and Noir are two distinct - but overlapping - genres of crime fiction. So it's no surprise that both have their roots in the same soil: a pulp magazine that broke the mould. Twice.
Let's look back at the legendary Black Mask...
"The Black Mask" started as an answer to a business problem: how could journalist H. L. Mencken and theatre critic George Jean Nathan keep their slick, influential but loss-making magazine 'The Smart Set' going?
Publishing a pulp title to subsidise it seemed to make sense.
Launched in April 1920 The Black Mask published a traditional mix of adventure, mystery, romance and detective stories. After eight issues, having made enough money, Mencken and Nathan sold the pulp title to its publishers and went back to the world of the slicks.
Today in pulp... some short-lived '80s hi-tech action heroes. These people aren't Knight Rider or Airwolf: they're the other guys!
Let's start with Automan.
Launched in 1983 Automan was Glen A. Larson's attempt to cash in on both the computer games craze and Disney's stylish movie Tron.
Neither of which were in good shape by 1983...
Automan starred Desi Arnaz, Jr. as a police computer whizz who created a holographic detective (played by Chuck Wagner) who sadly could only fight crime at night, due to the huge amounts of electricity needed to make him appear.
The Time Machine, Brave New World, 1984: these weren’t the first dystopian novels. There's an interesting history of Victorian and Edwardian literature looking at the impact of modernity on humans and finding it worrying.
Today in pulp I look at some early dystopian books…
Paris in the Twentieth Century, written in 1863, was the second novel penned by Jules Verne. However his publisher Pierre-Jules Hetzel rejected it as too gloomy. The manuscript was only discovered in 1994 when Verne’s grandson hired a locksmith to break into an old family safe.
The novel, set in 1961, warns of the dangers of a utilitarian culture. Paris has street lights, motor cars and the electric chair but no artists or writers any more. Instead industry and commerce dominate and citizens see themselves as cogs in a great economic machine.