I've known the original 1966 story for a long time, since before Total Recall came out, and it's one of Dick's more overtly entertaining stories but (in my opinion) not sufficient as the basis for a feature-length movie; it's pretty clear why the 1990 screenplay turned out as it did. Moreover, Total Recall has to be…

My opinion of Slapstick is colored by the fact that it's his first book in which he dropped the "Jr." from his name - for some reason I wish he'd kept it.

Venus on the Half-Shell was silly and fun, a phenomenon of its era - although I was never tempted to pick it up as a book; I read it when it first appeared, in two consecutive issues of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in late 1974. At least its author went to the trouble of including the passage that had…

"Slaughterhouse and Breakfast used to be one book"
Excerpt from Playboy interview, 1973:

The "Europe '72" three-LP live album is great; everyone interested in the Dead's live sound should give it a listen.

The Beatles
Sure you can get the U.S. versions of the pre-Sgt. Pepper albums (now on CD!) and play them in order, or do likewise with the Parlophone/EMI versions, but this would miss a huge part of experiencing the Beatles as they happened: radio play on top-40 stations. I recall being at day camp in the summer of '64…

Wait… so The X-Files didn't turn out to be "nonsense"?

Pino Donaggio
He wrote the score for Dressed to Kill, with its wonderfully malignant closing scene, as well as for Carrie, Blow Out, and Body Double. I would not want his contributions to be overlooked here.

Philadelphia
I lived in center-city Philly in 1980 and one day I happened to see a film crew surrounding John Lithgow in a phone booth on the street; turned out to be a scene in Blow Out. I'm not sure of De Palma's Philly connections during the Dressed to Kill/Blow Out period, other than that a fellow named George…

The score for The Undiscovered Country is great.

Another vote for Thorens here. I bought my TD-165 new in 1975 and it's about as simple and durable as can be; it's only ever needed a cartridge placement and a new drive belt, the latter purchased for a few dollars on eBay. Doesn't play 78s, though…

I knew a year ago (from reports on io9) that this movie would greatly diverge from the short story, and have gotten used to the idea - whereas when I saw Blade Runner in the theater in 1982, the complete trashing of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? was a terrible surprise to me, despite the visual treats on offer.

"I love that they give you a warning sign by never bothering to give the game a proper title."
So do I, but for different reasons. I think it's a wonderful idea for no one to say the name of the game - maybe the only thing that gives the story merit. It leaves the viewer to fill in the backstory, and thus makes the…

I saw AMC's digital presentation of Back to the Future at the end of October. It was great. I'd seen it three times in 1985 and I remember what the state of the art was back then, and I didn't notice any difference.

Bernard Herrmann, and those newspaper clippings at the end
Herrmann died within, I think, days after finishing recording the Taxi Driver score. It's brilliant and the movie is unimaginable without it, just as it would have amounted to much less without the cinematography by Michael Chapman.

Yeah, but it was misguided hyperbole, with all due respect because I enjoy all the AV Club writers. It's like getting your signs wrong and having a hyperbola point along the wrong axis as a result. It's A Bird was a musical COMEDY (it says so right here on the Playbill cover under the title, "The New Musical Comedy"),…

Well, that's exactly my sticking point: If the two shows were compared, It's A Bird would not look so great by comparison.

For those who don't know: Phil Dick wrote his own screenplay of Ubik in the early 1970s for a French director who never made the film. The screenplay was published posthumously in the mid-1980s and again recently by, I think, Subterranean Press.

What does that even mean?
I refer to the phrase "…an updated version of 1966's It's A Bird… It's A Plane… It's Superman, which thanks to Spider-Man is now pretty much the Long Day's Journey Into Night of superhero plays…" Look, I know Long Day's Journey Into Night, and I actually saw a performance of It's A Bird……

Hubbard
I would never defend Scientology, but I don't think it's fair to call Hubbard a "hack science-fiction writer"; he became one eventually, in the post-Dianetics phase of his career, but in the 1940s he was one of the better-regarded SF short story writers. (By the early '50s, on the other hand, he had already…