Monday, February 23, 2009

Unknown Crossovers Week, Day 1: Sledge Hammer

With this new daily series I'm going to expose some of the crossovers I've found, that to the best of my knowlege have never been exposed or expounded on before. Case in point: Sledge Hammer.
Heres a cut-down and corrected version of the wikipedia entry:
"Inspector Sledge Hammer of the San Francisco Police Department is a violent, sadistic, insensitive, yet oddly likable detective. His best friend is a .44 Magnum with a customized grip featuring a drawing of a sledgehammer. Hammer sleeps and showers with his gun, and even talks to it. Hammer believes in shooting first and asking questions never. In the pilot episode, he deals with a sniper on a roof by blowing up the entire building with a rocket launcher, then turns to the uniformed cops on scene and says "I think I got 'em"
While purportedly a stickler for law and order, Hammer is rather lax when it comes to following police regulations. He enjoys roughing up suspected criminals, whom he frequently refers to as "brain-dead mutants", "yogurt-sucking creeps", and the like. He is often suspended from duty.
Hammer drives a beat-up, bullet-riddled, lime green Dodge St. Regis with an "I ♥ VIOLENCE" bumper sticker. He prefers to wear cheap sports jackets, loud neckties, and dark sunglasses.
Despite his irresponsibility and utter incompetence, Hammer always ends up getting his man (or woman), often through sheer luck or brute force. Hammer's unintentionally ironic motto is "Trust me. I know what I'm doing." (Disaster usually follows afterward.)
Hammer's partner is the beautiful Detective Dori Doreau (played by Anne-Marie Martin), who is competent, kind, sensitive, intelligent, and sophisticated—everything Sledge is not. "

Still with me? good. Now, before we finaly get to what you came here for I have some videos for you guys:

The Opening

Sledge takes out a sniper


One last thing, Sledge Hammer was not a parady. except for several episodes from the mosty subpar second season, the show was about one slightly insane individual and his dealings with a society gone mad.
Now to the main event, The Crossovers

1. In the pilot, The Mayor of San Francisco is played by John Vernon, In Dirty Harry he played the mayor of San Francisco. In both he plays the exact same character(although he is a bit more full of him self in Sledge)
2. Miami Vice. Again in the pilot, when Sledge first goes into the captains office. On the other side of the glass you can see a pair clearly intended to be Crockett & Tubbs
3. Alfred Hitchcock. In the episode "Comrade Hammer" A man supposed to be Alfred Hitchcock walks by the screen, in fact he looks so close to Hitchcock that I though it was him himself, until I looked it up and saw that Hitchcock had died a few years before.I included this one on the condition that we could get all (or all least most) of Hitchcocks films into the Wold Newton Universe if we count his cameos as ligament crossovers. (which I do)
4. The Ghost of Sam Spade. In the episode "Play it Again Sledge" the ghost of Spade assists Sledge on a case. (Spade assists almost exactly like Al helped Sam Becket on Quantum Leap)
5. The Maltese Falcon. Again in the episode "Play it Again Sledge" Hammer is put on extended Suspension and buys an old detective agency. On display is...The Maltese Falcon.

Sunday, February 22, 2009

An Essay on Doc & The Shadow


For my English class we had to do a one page comparative essay. For some reason all my serious
ones were dropped for being far too broad.
I had 24 hours to think of a final report. My eyes fell on the Doc Savage paperback I had been reading, a desperate idea popped into my head and I ran with it. Just agumenting what was in my head with some books and websites.(I'm pretty sure I had the largest Works Cited list out of the entire class)
On this paper I got an A- for some grammeral errors and an incomplete sentence. I have not changed them for this blog.



Doc Savage Vs The Shadow
During the dark days of the Great Depression, two very different heroes began their crusades against crime and injustice. The Shadow, Master of darkness, settled mobsters’ scores with blazing automatics and a haunting, mocking laugh. Doc Savage, Man of Bronze, who was dedicated to wiping out evil through the use of science.
Both Doc Savage and The Shadow had assistants in his war. While The Shadow’s aides followed his instructions to the letter, Savage’s might disobey him. As seen in this excerpt from The Gold Ogre by Kenneth Robeson:
“Doc Savage shouted, “No Unnecessary killings!” It was his policy never to take a life if it could possibly be avoided. If Monk heard, he pretended not to, Monk not being entirely in sympathy with the bronze man’s respect for the lives of gentlemen such as Vick Francks…bullets began moving in quantities.”
Doc Savage preferred not to kill criminals, instead as he caught them, they were sent to his “Crime College” where they would be rehabilitated and “cured” of their criminal tendencies by the extreme method of brain surgery. This operation was the near equivalent of a lobotomy. As contrast, in Serpents of Siva by Maxwell Grant:
“[The Shadow’s] guns ripped from the instant the first thug entered…bullets were pounding those brass-faced walls. Crooks were dropping, with smoking guns in their fists.”
Savage operated with the full support of the government (although they knew nothing of the Crime College.) He and all of his men carried cards that guaranteed the full cooperation of any American law enforcement agency, and several foreign organizations.
While Savage did battle from the gleaming peaks of New York’s skyscrapers, The Shadow ran his crusade against crime from the darkness shaded alleyways and decrepit buildings where malevolence lurked. He had no help from the government, local or national, nor did he seek it. Unlike Savage, The Shadow did not bend the rules for justice, He broke them outright, in order in insure that the criminal learned that “Crime does not pay”
Both Doc Savage and The Shadow used a large array of gadgets. Savage’s were things that would not be invented for decades to come like, automated telephone answering machines, Bullet-proof vests, and a radar-like tracking device. While The Shadow’s were more mundane with things along the lines of mini-flashlights, grappling hooks, and magic tricks such as gunpowder flashes from his hands.
Oddly enough both made peculiar sounds. Doc Savage made a strange trilling sound whenever he was intrigued. The Shadow scorned his foes with a haunting laugh that struck fear into their dark hearts.
One man a World War One spy driven by whatever horrors he witnessed to go from being a “Black Eagle” to a living shadow, the other a muscled polymath trained from birth to be the ultimate human, driven ever onward toward the light. They are polar
opposites yet they are the same, Flip sides of the depression coin. One battling against the utter despair of today, the other looking forward to the joys of tomorrow.

Works Cited

Farmer, Philip J. (1975). Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life. New York: Bantam Books.

Grant, Maxwell (2006). The Shadow: Crime, Insured. Encinitas, CA: Nostalgia Ventures.

Grant, Maxwell (2007). The Shadow: Serpents of Siva. Encinitas, CA: Nostalgia Venture.

Leary, Roman (2008). "The Evils Against Which We Strive" anthologized in Tales of the Shadowmen Vol.4. Ed. J. M. & Randy Lofficier. Encino, CA: Black Coat Press. 90-103

Robeson, Kenneth (1969). Doc Savage: The Gold Ogre. New York: Bantam Books.

Robeson, Kenneth (1982). Doc Savage: The Secret in the Sky. New York: Bantam Books.

Robeson, Kenneth (2008). Doc Savage: The Man of Bronze. Encinitas, CA: Nostalgia Ventures.

Kaluta, Michael & Goss, Joel (1993). The Shadow: In the Coils of Leviathan. Canada: Dark Horse Comics.


Web Pages Cited

Lai, Rick. "Chronology of Shadows, part 1." The Wold Newton Universe. 10 Feb. 2009.

Lai, Rick. "Chronology of Shadows, part 2." The Wold Newton Universe. 10 Feb. 2009.

Sippo, Art C. "Bullet-Proof vests." Weblog post. Speculations in Bronze. 7 July 2007. 11 Feb. 2009 .

Wednesday, February 11, 2009

The Return of the Revenge of Fu Manchu. YAY!

If you didn't guess by the title, Fu Manchu is back, in a new novel by William Patrick Maynard. I don't know much about other than in set during The Hand of Fu Manchu. so its most likely going to end up something like Ten Years Beyond Baker Street except with out Sherlock Holmes.
You can see its page and eventually pre-order it at: http://www.blackcoatpress.com/terrorfumanchu.htm

A shout out to Win Scott Eckert and his blog for alerting me to this book. Thanks man!

Also at my other blog Ive posted the original magazine version of the first few chapters of The Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu. They are a little bit different then the final book version. Nothing earth shattering though. but enough to be interesting.