Or at least one of those ‘60s Victorian/Edwardian farces — like The Great Race, or Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines.

World’s fairs back then were pretty sprawling events, though. There was room to have the carnival/“hoochy-koochy” attractions without necessarily stigmatizing the cultural and technological exhibits.

Moore (already 55) lackadaisically amble through the narrative without the slightest concern that any woman would find him anything but deadly sexy

I’m fully with you on Octopussy. It’s easily one of the more plausible villain schemes of all the Moore-era films (though I think For Your Eyes Only was the most self-consciously scaled back). And I think it more-or-less introduced the trope of having multiple cooperating villains instead of one big überbaddie, which…

And dealing with the German traffic cops, and the basic problem of having to persuade anyone to listen to him while dressed as a clown. Pretty much all the action in Octopussy, besides maybe the afterthought raid on Khan’s palace, is really first rate.

A weirdo with gun-crushing mechanical hands and an underground lair with giant aquarium walls and built around an unshielded nuclear reactor, one might add. Lotte Lenya and iron-man Robert Shaw are John le Carré characters by comparison.

I’m not sure the sensibilities of From Russia with Love were all that drastically different. If it’s gadgety, the gadgets are at least plausible ones. And the stakes largely revolve around an attempt to assassinate Bond himself, rather than anything particularly grandiose. I’d argue it was Goldfinger that really built…

Short of a movie, it’s a natural fit for RPG campaigns — a natural for women wanting to play criminals in Call of Cthulhu, “classic” or “gaslight” settings.

Similarly, it’s been noted that among serial killers, men tend to have “hunting” M.O.s, while women tend to be “trappers”, letting victims come to them. Whether such behaviors are innate tendencies or cultural impositions is, of course, its own political issue.

Your take seems very close to my non-comprehension of the prequel version — Why the hell does accidentally killing a random Jedi functionary somehow enslave Anakin to Palpatine, as opposed to pissing him off and inspiring him to kill Palpatine? I think it works in Jedi, though, because of what is, for most viewers, a…

Which is fine, but it’s fairly amazing that he could persuade people to invest a billion dollars in that proposition. ;)

I get that Empire is considered the best of the originals, in spite of my own prejudice against cliffhanger endings. And I even understand the “by-the-numbers” criticisms of Jedi. But I’ve always hesitated to call it “weak” because of the masterful execution that Breihan acknowledges — particularly the three-fold…

I agree on Vader’s expressiveness, but don’t forget to credit James Earl Jones voice work in Empire and Jedi as part of it.

I think the key weakness of all of the Disney “post-quels” was Abrams’ decision to leave the storyline essentially open and make it up as the directors went along. It’s baffling to me that the producers, committing over a billion dollars all-told to such a project, would agree to shrug at having a clear road map for…

The end of Jedi was arranged by the Emperor as an elaborate device to achieve the corruption of Luke to either replace or “reinforce” his father. He doesn’t throw Luke in a cell or have him executed, because either would push Vader to the point where he might turn on the Emperor.

Which, previously, got worse and more omnipresent than 50s rock nostalgia nonsense...

The Dragon’s Lair/Cliff Hanger games really prefigured the modern trope of watching game playthroughs on YouTube. I had zero interest back in the day in playing a game that just involved memorizing joystick patterns, but I absolutely enjoyed taking a break at the arcade, standing back, and watching a real “pro” play…

This was actually pretty awesome, if really just a parody of samurai movie tropes. It benefits a lot from my having had the misfortune of seeing last April Fools Day’s “Bushworld Adventures” Rick And Morty short awhile back, which was... excruciatingly Australian.

I think there was one segment — of a helicopter chasing the heroes through a sewer — that was from some other Lupin III film or special, but most was indeed Castle of Cagliostro.

The link shows that indeed they were, and somewhere notes that, contemporary with the “Mars Attacks” cards (and before the dinosaurs), Topps released a “Civil War News” series that was also notably bloody. The reviewers suggest that there was less parental objection to the civil war cards in spite of their gore, becaus…