This weekend has been busy. I have recorded over 2.5 hours of audio, most of it after midnight due to time zone complications. Today I get to edit it all. So the first thing I’m going to do is donate some money to the folks who produced Levelator, because without it today would be an utter nightmare.
Of course my brain is utter mush due to lack of sleep, and I have a stinking headache, so I’m doing things fairly slowly. To give myself time to wake up I listened to someone else’s podcast over breakfast. My good friend Terry Frost from Melbourne has a long-running series about old movies, the Paleo-Cinema Podcast. Mostly he talks about films I have never seen and am never likely to see. This week, however, to celebrate the 69th episode, he is talking about sex comedies, and inevitably that means Barbarella.
These days, of course, Barbarella is liable to be viewed as a product of the bad old days of sexual exploitation. Confused teenagers will be scratching their heads over why a film would name the mad scientist villain after an 80s boy band. But when it first came out the film was something entirely different. I first saw it on TV, so that must have been a few years after its theater release in 1968. I don’t mind confessing that teenage me very much wanted to grow up to be Barbarella (and have a mad scientist make me nice toys to play with). Of course it would have taken a massive fortune and the best plastic surgeons in the world to make me took as good as Jane Fonda, but hey, kids dream. And besides, here was a science fiction film with a female action hero. I mean, where were the female role models in 2001?
Thinking about the movie again also reminds me that, thanks to Heavy Metal magazine (Métal Hurlant, which literally translates to screaming or howling metal), my teenage SF consumption was influence almost as much by France as it was by the USA. The new issue of Salon Futura, which I’m working on at the moment, will have an article about the great French animator, René Laloux. That’s something for you to look forward to.
Anyway, thank you, Terry, for reminding me of Barbarella. Everyone else, if you are into old movies, Paleo-Cinema is a really good podcast. And because we now all have YouTube at our fingertips, let’s end with a gratuitous sex scene.
I just can’t resist giving you this link … on the off chance that you don’t read ‘Vogue ‘ on line …
” Forty years after that riot of youth and beauty in deep space, Jane Fonda has suggested a sequel. It wouldn’t be a remake with some another actress, someone young and beautiful (which has been talked about for a while), but a genuine sequel, with the now seventy-odd Barbarella in the starring role. ”
http://www.vogue.it/en/people-are-talking-about/from-hollywood/2011/01/il-ritorno-di-barbarella
Jane Fonda is aged 70 ! But .. I don’t have to believe it if I don’t want to.
Mind you, as desirable as Fonda was in Barbarella, the Teenage Me who saw that film in the Cinema in the ’60s still preferred Anita Pallenberg ..no accounting for male tastes I suppose but The Great Tyrant was Soooo Deliciously decadent … as was Pallenberg of course. Barbarella was ” very pretty pretty pretty ” but Pallenberg ! …
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak1227_mOqU
One of my favorite scenes in the movie. I think Barbarella almost lets out a little whimper when Dildano says he wants to do it like Earth people. And the scene gives new meaning to the phrase “That will curl your hair.”