RIP Yvonne Craig

Actress Yvonne Craig, TV's Batgirl, has passed away at the age of 78 after a battle with breast cancer. This was not the kind of news I wanted to wake to a morning earlier this week, or any morning.

For many of us, boy and girl, Yvonne Craig's Batgirl was our first crush. It was never a matter of Ginger or Mary Ann, it was Batgirl or Julie Newmar's Catwoman. Hell, even today, those two women might very well be responsible for my predilection for redheads. Seeing her with Elvis in Kissin' Cousins, and later as the green-skinned slave girl from Orion on "Star Trek," cemented that crush for myself, and thousands of others.

As Batgirl on the 1960s "Batman" TV series, she was the original super-heroine role model - before Wonder Woman, before the Bionic Woman, or Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, and definitely before the Black Widow, Yvonne was kicking butt and taking names and even had her own theme song, debatably cooler than Batman's. And although there was a Bat-Girl in the comics in the 1950s, the character of Barbara Gordon as the new Batgirl was launched almost simultaneously with the TV version, many times taking her cues from Yvonne Craig's portrayal.

I met Ms. Craig once, for just a moment at a convention years ago. She still looked great, was sweet and tolerant of my gushing, and was funny and ironic. Unlike many stars folks meet at cons, she was a delight, and she will be missed.

The Towns That Dreaded Sundown

Producer/director/actor Charles B. Pierce, perhaps best known for making Bigfoot famous in The Legend of Boggy Creek, took another 'true story' and mined it for this Sam Zarkoff American International movie that serves as the blueprint for the traditional slasher film. Written by Earl E. Smith, in 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown, we learn the tale of the Phantom Killer who terrorized young couples on lovers lanes in Texarkana in 1946.

The movie begins documentary style establishing the period, including narration by Vern Stierman who also did the job more than ably for Boggy Creek. His frequent voiceovers keep the film solidly in docudrama mode, which for the most part works.

Unlike the slasher flicks that would follow, this one views things from law enforcement as opposed to the kids. Veteran character actors Andrew Prine and Ben Johnson take point in the investigation with great chemistry, along with Bierce himself providing much needed comic relief as their sidekick. Also look for Dawn Wells, Mary Ann from "Gilligan's Island," late in the film.

The film looks very good, and the period is set well. I loved the music, the clothes, the cars, and even the language. Kudos go to Jaime Mendoza-Nava, an underrated composer of 1970s B-movies who deserves more credit than perhaps he's been given. He was good. The film gets all As for atmosphere. And it's not just a great period piece for the 1940s, but also 1970s cinema as well.

Stuntman and later stunt coordinator Bud Davis played the masked killer known as the Phantom. Except for the ridiculous trombone scene, he is actually pretty frightening. And his white bag mask conjures imagery of the Ku Klux Klan, which is scary enough, but notably it made me wonder what the movie was really about when I saw the video box before I ever saw it.

The Town That Dreaded Sundown was reimagined in 2014 by Ryan Murphy, the brains behind "Glee" and "Nip/Tuck," and his sometime collaborator Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, a big muckety-muck at Archie Comics, and whose credits also include The Stand comics for Marvel, HBO's "Big Love," and the 2013 remake of Carrie. It might seem like an odd fit, but it kinda works.

This is notably not a remake as much as it's a sequel, one in which the original movie is a movie based on the real events. Yeah, I know, it's a whole new level of meta. There are many

parallels, and the narration is a nice touch. With "Nip/Tuck" so many years ago, and more than a few seasons of "Glee" since then, it's easy to forget that Ryan Murphy has a very deft hand with suspense and horror.

Watching these two flicks back to back was an intense but entertaining evening of television, two generations of creators giving their take on a supposedly true story. They're both worth a look, more so for horror fans. And don't forget, it might have happened decades ago, but they never did catch the Phantom...

Evolve or Die, A Star Trek Rant

Those Star Trek people infuriate me. You know the ones I mean. Whether they call themselves Trekkers or Trekkies (and yes, I do know the difference), it makes no difference when it comes to the 2009 reboot of the franchise, and its upcoming sequel in just a few weeks.

Let’s be serious now – if Gene Roddenberry had actually gotten his “Star Trek: Phase II” on the air when he wanted to, would we be still talking about Trek now or would the proposed series just be an embarrassing footnote like “Rescue from Gilligan’s Island” or “The Brady Bunch Hour”? Let's all be thankful that Star Wars was so successful, and Paramount made Roddenberry move it to the big screen.

And while we're being thankful, let's be thankful for J.J. Abrams for finding a way to both be faithful to continuity, and to free himself of it. He paid respect to the fans, and opened up the field for a new generation of fans. It works in the story, and you have the old continuity and the new continuity existing side by side. And come on, it's not like time paradoxes and parallel universes are foreign territory for the franchise. It's almost the norm if you look at the original series.

Let's talk about TOS, as "The Original Series" is called. It may as well stand for The Old Series, because it's dated. Worse than that, "Next Gen" is even more painful when it comes to looking dated. Special effects and hairstyles weigh down TOS, but man oh man, ST:TNG just screams eighties. It's so bad, it's almost embarrassing. And for most of these Trek people, TNG is the gospel canon.

I lost interest in Trek television, when "Deep Space Nine" came along, and once the Captains met in the movies, I was out of there too. "Enterprise" brought me back. The Trek people hate "Enterprise." I think it was great, it not only brought me back to Trek, it brought The Bride as well. The Trek folks whined about how the Vulcan protagonist behaved, behavior that was rationalized in the context of the series by the way.

These are the same people that don't have a problem with Klingons not having ridges in TOS, faulty physics, jumbled histories and timelines, and of course the fantasy of a cashless society. But a Vulcan enacting free will, that's wrong. It's okay for Spock, but nobody else.

Seems to me that the Trek folks have a problem with the mainstream taking their toys. It was okay when no one else liked Star Trek, but when there's a blockbuster movie, they get defensive. And I throw the "Doctor Who" latecomers into the same garbage bin.

I loved Abrams' Star Trek, and can not wait for the sequel. All y'all old Trekkies and Trekkers, feel free to stay home and not see it, just shut up about it. You're ruining it for the rest of us.

Sherwood Schwartz 1916-2011

Writer/producer Sherwood Schwartz passed away in Los Angeles this morning after several surgeries. He was 94. Schwartz was best known for being the creator of two of the most memorable television series of the 1960s and 1970s - "The Brady Bunch" and "Gilligan's Island."

Both shows had a huge influence on the childhoods of of several generations, and could be said to have even formed what many people considered sitcom humor. As a child myself, I don't remember a time when these two programs were not on the air in syndication, and also that they had both appeared on every UHF station in the Philadelphia area. I also remember vividly having to be home on Friday nights to see new episodes of "Brady Bunch" and coming home for lunch to see reruns as well.

Both series lived on for decades in syndication and in animation and reunions, and for the Bradys, in film as well - such is the legacy of Sherwood Schwartz.