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What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself.
In 1978, Harlan Ellison published a fine collection of his short stories, called Strange Wine, with an Introduction entitled, “Revealed at Last! What Killed the Dinosaurs! And You Don’t Look So Terrific Yourself.” This was Harlan’s classic broadside against the watching of television.
I was reminded of him while reading a news story headlined: “Almost 40% of university students surveyed are addicted to their phones.” Harlan could have easily updated his Introduction against all of social media. (If you’d like to read the full version of the Introduction, go to Strange Wine on Amazon Kindle, click on the “Look inside” cover image, and scroll down.
Let me give you the highlights:
He begins by saying that it’s all about drinking strange wine, and that it will seem disjointed and will jump around like water on a griddle, but it all comes together, so please be patient.
He mentions a news story about an anchorwoman who committed suicide on camera, making a statement about television on television. (Echoes of the film Network.) Next, he recaps a talk with Dan Blocker of Bonanza about a fan who seemed not to understand that Lorne Greene was in fact not in reality his father.
Once during a college lecture, Harlan casually mentioned that he had actually thought up the words spoken by the Star Trek cast in the sole episode he had written. A young man jumped up in tears and screamed, “Liar!”
Harlan says that these stories about people who merge television and reality illustrate how television is a bad thing. And that he took stock of how much time he himself spent watching television, and it scared him.
In college students, he had noted a zombiatic response, manifesting primarily in the kinds of questions he was asked. Not about his lengthy body of written work, but rather, “What was it like to work on Star Trek?” and “Why did Tom Snyder keep cutting you off on the Tomorrow show?” And Harlan gets angry with them about how shallow and programmed television is making them. And they don’t like him for it.
Television, unlike books or old-time radio, “is systematically oriented toward stunning the imagination.”
For him, “A book is a participatory adventure. It involves a creative act at its inception and a creative act when its purpose is fulfilled. The writer dreams the dream and sets it down; the reader reinterprets the dream in personal terms, with personal vision, when he or she reads it. Each creates a world. The template is the book.”
After a couple of pages of detail, he concludes, “Quite clearly, if one but looks around to assess the irrefutable evidence of reality, books strengthen the dreaming facility, and television numbs it. Atrophy soon follows.”
Yes, and what does social media do to the imagination and ability to think complex thoughts? Even to us, who use it much more than we should?
A high school teacher told him three stories:
First, a 15-year-old student rejected reading books because they weren’t real. “Because it was your imagination, and your imagination isn’t real.” What was real? Television. Because you could see it.
Second, students missed an important school function one night because they stayed home to watch the drama Helter Skelter based on the Manson murder spree. The next day the teacher compared the movie as being not real compared to a living event that was real. Another student insisted that it was real, he had seen it.
Third, each class had a television set, mostly unused. When the teacher had trouble controlling the class, she would turn the set on with nothing but snow, and they would settle down.
After several pages of more stories, some horrific, Harlan comes to his conclusion, which should not be paraphrased, because it is perfectly written, and is best to end this meditation:
Published in EntertainmentAll this programs the death of reading.
And reading is the drinking of strange wine.
Like water on a hot griddle, I have bounced around, but the unification of the thesis is at hand.
Drinking strange wine pours strength into the imagination.
The dinosaurs had no strange wine. They had no imagination. They lived 130,000,000 years and vanished. Why? Because they had no imagination. Unlike human beings who have it and use it and build their future rather than merely passing through their lives as if they were spectators. Spectators watching television, one might say.
The saurians had no strange wine, no imagination, and they became extinct. And you don’t look so terrific yourself.
Also, I would point out that one of Ellison’s supposedly most scathing criticisms of The Starlost was how they used the term “solar star.” Ellison was outraged! Why, he’d yell, that’s just as stupid as saying “I live in a big house home!”
Actually, no.
Is a “house home” different from “apartment home?”
Of course it is.
“Condominium home?”
Yep.
“Trailer/mobile home?”
That too.
So, what might “solar star” mean?
How about, maybe a star WITH PLANETS?
Just for one possibility.
I didn’t realize it at the times I first encountered Ellison, but Ensign Ro summarized him rather well:
“I think you’re a small man who feels a rush of power in his belly and enjoys it far too much.”
I was joking.
Now, I do agree with Harlan that The Starlost was pretty bad, and I do get annoyed at just how screwed up Hollywood is, but at the same time I am happy to poke fun at snobbery and related faults. (For instance, Harlan was foolish to be angry at Gene Roddenberry for removing an illegal drugs subplot from his script for The City on the Edge of Forever, as it was incompatible with the envisioned Star Trek future. One might argue with the utopian tendencies of Roddenberry’s vision, but it was his vision and Harlan should have respected it.) (Furthermore, pulp fiction may be formulaic but it is sometimes quite good.)
[ Jots name in book of People Who Cannot Read My Mind ]
I don’t recall any of his specific criticisms. By “solar star” did they mean “Sol type star”? As in a Type G, Main Sequence star?
No, from the comments of various friends and colleagues I’d say he was not a small man–he could be extremely kind and generous. But I’ll speculate that his extremely quick wit and verbal agility made it easy for him to argue for whatever he felt at the moment, and that this might have tempted him into saying things that were not warranted. For instance, when Art Linkletter’s daughter committed suicide Harlan wrote that it was Linkletter’s fault: he was an Establishment hypocrite, and his daughter and other kids started taking dangerous drugs because of that hypocrisy. (A strange chain of reasoning which was really only a chain of assertions. And cruel, too.)
I might argue that The Starlost had problems not because it was a bad idea, or not even because they didn’t follow Ellison’s “vision” to the letter. His tirades were often of “flaws” that might have made sense only to Ellison, and maybe only derided because Ellison hadn’t thought of them first? “They can’t find the bridge until the end of the series” might be #1 on that list. I still don’t understand why Ellison thought that made any sense at all, let alone somehow being critical.
A writer can write anything, and not have to give a second thought – or even a first thought – to how much it would COST to put in a big-budget movie, let alone a TV show in the 60s. The writer can write “a million warriors on a million horses came thundering over the hills..” and doesn’t even have to pay for the ink to put it in the script. This is another thing that Ellison has been “famous” for, I seem to recall that he’d included some rather ridiculous things in his original Star Trek story – in addition to his desired drug-dealing subplot – and may very well have had similar notions for The Starlost. None of which were even remotely POSSIBLE, but that doesn’t make either one “bad.”
Also, it’s been some time since I read the book but my recollection is that Ellison had the main cast being young teenagers. Which could seem better in novel form, I suppose, somehow… But how are those teenagers supposed to accomplish… much of anything, really… let alone eventually “succeed,” unless maybe it takes so long that they’re adults by that time?
But the most serious problems were just limitations of TV production at the time, including a writer’s strike, and failure of some newly-invented special-effects technology.
It would be a lot easier to keep track of those who CAN. And those people are far more dangerous to you, too.
In the show, they would say “class G solar star” which Ellison apparently thought was scandalous and worthy of immediate cancellation. It was clear to me even at that age, that “solar star” wasn’t necessarily a stupid redundancy. As far as I’m concerned, Ellison might as well have criticized Star Trek for referring to “warp drive” by saying something like “Drive? What are they driving? Sulu doesn’t have a steering wheel!”
The person Ro was referring to had also been generous and stuff, had fought in battles against the Cardassians etc, but there are many ways that one can be “small.”
Did you ever hear of the Hollywood producer who, when he heard of “the backup control room” thought it was for making the ship back up? And then there were the jokers who would tell people that an aircraft’s pedal controls were the accelerator and clutch.
The “backup control room” would have a rear-view window, of course.
And some people have areas or gaps of ignorance that are less obvious. Ellison might easily be one. In other cases, people may be able to go through their entire life/career without these things coming to light. Perhaps when someone is reaching into different regions – such as “speculative fiction” – these gaps are more likely to be revealed.
And what’s all this about backing UP? Ships can’t go UP. Well, okay, SHIELD’s Heli-Carrier can, but no others!
You are such a geek.
Agreed, but I believe (bearing in mind that these are memories from 30 to 40 years ago) that at root was angered Ellison was that the producers didn’t care–were not interested in learning better or in taking direction to make their movies and TV shows better. Thus, if someone pointed out that something made no scientific or engineering sense the producers ignored the criticisms and the suggestions for improvement.
We just about had one (very young) engineer convinced that the helicopter’s cyclic was the gear shift.
Not sure what you mean by engineering sense etc. Most of what I’ve seen of Ellison suggests that it’s Ellison that doesn’t really care about actual engineering or other aspects of what is “possible” or “makes sense.” That’s especially an issue when it comes to practical matters of TV/movies – as mentioned earlier, it’s easy to WRITE something that makes no sense and couldn’t ever be produced for film/TV in anything resembling present-day reality – but it seems to have other forms as well. Such as the previously-mentioned “can’t find the bridge until the end” and “the main characters exploring (and ultimately trying to save) a huge centuries-old spaceship are children/teenagers.”
[ insert video clip from Airplane! where we see and hear (clunk, clunk) that the plane has a manual transmission. ]
Not at all the same thing, but if you recall a WKRP episode where they made of joke of how Les Nesmann pronounced “Chi Chi Rodriguez” and “Chihuahua”, in college we almost had my roommates girlfriend convinced that Les Nesmann’s pronunciation of the little dog was correct (Phonetically I guess it would be Chee-who-uh-who-uh). A couple of us who had seen the episode recently started using that pronunciation, and when she told us we were mispronouncing it, we told her, no that’s how it’s pronounced. The next two people who walked into the room, who we had *NOT* prepared in any way but had also seen the episode, we told her to ask them how to pronounce the breed of those little Mexican dogs, and they both said “you mean chee-who-uh-who-uh?” She said something about “Have I been mispronouncing it all these years?” before one of us broke out laughing.
At the very end of Better Off Dead as the credits start to roll when they show Badger’s home-built space shuttle launch, you hear a sound effect of an car engine cranking over a couple times just before the engine lights up.
Step aside. The Dork Knight approaches.
The Skycrane has a cockpit in the back.
How elsecould you set down stuff “just so?”
And of course they used prop-plane sound effects for the plane, instead of jet.
Larger fire trucks do too. Because the back wheels need to be steered separately.
I do listen for the clunk, clunk that indicates that the landing gear is locked down.
Perhaps we should look at it as a care/don’t care thing, where on the one hand he wanted the shows to be plausible but on the other hand tended to forget/not understand what was feasible in the studio. And as I recall he had no formal education in the STEM fields and never acquired any deep knowledge later (a debate on any technical matter between him and Jerry Pournelle would have been…interesting.) He never thought of himself as a science fiction writer, always insisted that he be seen as a fantasy or speculative writer, and indeed his stories are heavy on feeling and mood but light on science and engineering.
Just to clarify, the issue was mismanagement.
Finding a large and impressive-looking control room was supposed to be the climax of the series, according to the storyline already accepted by all parties. But the producers failed to properly communicate this to the builders.
To still do the agreed storyline, they would have to film the last episode first, which would put them behind schedule (all weekly TV shows are fighting the clock) and over budget, or rent another soundstage for all the other sets the show was going to need, which would blow the budget completely.
But this is just sci-fi crap for children, they reasoned. The audience won’t care. And writers are nothing more than whores. So what if we promised him things: this was about money now.
True. Although I’d make the caveat that they also show contempt for accuracy in other sorts of films. We all know that “based on true events” usually means “[REDACTED] marketed as truth”. Not all of them, fortunately.
That is certainly how they tend to treat writers–and whoever else they feel they can cheat or mistreat with impunity. (But the “whores” metaphor inconveniently reminds us that Hollywood producers often behave like the nastier sort of pimp.)
If the bridge set was supposed to be large and impressive, that sure didn’t come across very well in the show.
And maybe the mismanagement thing was because neither side had much… “technological insight?”… into the actual situation the characters were facing. Both that a) the control room would NOT be hidden or even particularly difficult to find and b) if they had found the control room in the series finale, it most likely would have been useless to them because they had no idea what to do once there. Unless they were planning to use that as a wedge for a sequel series, what’s the point?
For that matter, why is the backup bridge hard to find?
Writers especially.
The recent Mank, with the great Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz, is about how Orson Welles stole half the credit for the screenplay of Citizen Kane.
@kedavis —
If the bridge set was supposed to be large and impressive, that sure didn’t come across very well in the show.
And maybe the mismanagement thing was because neither side had much… “technological insight?”… into the actual situation the characters were facing. Both that a) the control room would NOT be hidden or even particularly difficult to find and b) if they had found the control room in the series finale, it most likely would have been useless to them because they had no idea what to do once there. Unless they were planning to use that as a wedge for a sequel series, what’s the point?
For that matter, why is the backup bridge hard to find?
Remember, Ellison will have read dozens of stories about space arks before he came to write The Starlost.
The control room was hidden to keep the passengers from messing with it. Whether the passengers could do much once they find it depends on what kind of AIs we imagine are deployed there, and what sort of computer-assisted instruction. Did the designers plan for the contingency where they lose the entire crew? Yes? No? Badly? The writer gets to pick whatever makes the best story.
Given that The Starlost was a low budget Canadian series made in 1973, I’m not surprised the sets look cheesy to our eyes.
But they could have made a larger set without a lot of trouble, and it sounds like they did – at least based on the supposed problems reported afterward – but it wasn’t “filmed” to show it.
Anyway, remember that the Ark’s “passengers” had been sealed in their domes to protect their individual characteristics. They weren’t free to roam around the other parts of the ship, not even as much as passengers might be able to on a cruise ship. Devon and Rachel and Garth were only able to “escape” because a couple “keys” had been left behind hundreds of years earlier, perhaps by mistake. (Maybe right after The Accident, a couple of the crew members had reached Cypress Corners before dying from radiation or whatever, and they had their “keys” with them? One possibility.) Several times during the course of the series, they visited domes where the inhabitants didn’t have “keys” and so were still unable to leave their closed environments. Devon and Rachel and Garth were able to go in, but once they left with their “keys,” the rest of the dome inhabitants couldn’t follow.
Another example: James Cameron’s The Terminator, which was a ripoff of a story by Harlan Ellison: Ellison wrote in an essay that at least one reason the company settled without going to court was that Ellison had a witness who had heard Cameron boast at a party that he had ripped the story off and could do so without negotiating story rights. In an earlier essay Ellison mentioned a producer who said to a visitor something more or less like “Why should I bother to pay a writer to come up with a story? See that shelf of science fiction magazines? I can just lift a story, file off the serial numbers, and call it my own.” So, we have not only gross amorality but also arrogance.
One of my favorite romances: “He went back in time to save the woman he loved!”