Glen’s Popcorn

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The 1977 television series “Quark” was created by “Get Smart” co-creator Buck Henry and starred Richard Benjamin (featured in such varied films as Westworld, Love At First Bite, Catch-22, and The Sunshine Boys, and TV shows ranging from “Doctor Kildare” to “Pushing Daisies”). The series lasted a grand total of eight episodes before fading into sci-fi camp obscurity. The entire series is widely available, however, on a single DVD that sells at a bargain price.

“Quark” is the continuing story of Commander Adam Quark and the hapless crew of his galactic garbage scow. Following the orders of Otto Palindrome (Conrad Janis, who also played Mindy’s father in the first season of “Mork & Mindy”), the crew finds itself time and time again entrusted with the fate of the known universe, in spite of being on the bottom rung of the social ladder.

The series is far from a television classic, and one could be forgiven for writing it off completely on the evidence presented by its first two episodes. At the third episode, however, the series hits its stride and becomes a fun romp through a strange science fiction world. Sadly, it was too little too late for the series. But the result of this rapid arc and the series’ short life is that its first three episodes are able to teach us volumes about the way stories are told — not just on television, but in any medium.

Episode 1: “Quark”
The Lesson: Hit The Ground Running

The “Quark” pilot gets the series off to a very rough start. In a perfect world’s entertainment industries, pilots — which are largely sales pitches to the networks — would never air. Unfortunately, they often do. This particular pilot is a disorganized mess of a show that barely introduces the base concept of “we think science fiction is funny.” The plot, in which Quark and his crew find themselves in the path of a galactic cloud of digestive enzymes, is little more than a framework from which hackneyed, unfunny science fiction jokes are hung with aggressive application of canned laughter.

The primary lesson of this episode is that the worst possible way to begin your series is by dawdling over obvious jokes and commentary. Goofy looking space pet is more interested in eating its owner than its pet food? Check. Food is dispensed through tubes? Check. Robots are inefficient and have attitude problems? Check. Mad scientist is more mad and less scientist? Double check. An entire season’s worth of groaners are packed into a tight 26 minutes, leaving no room for such trivialities as character, plot, or originality.

Taken individually in episodes spread out over an entire series, these groaners would be momentary distractions. But when the episode offers almost nothing else, the jokes become so tiresome as to tax your ability to last through a half hour. Pilots more often than not wind up airing, no matter how many changes are made before the start of the regular series. If you’re going to tell a story, then hit the ground running. Give your audience a reason to want to listen to you through the end of your story — and to anticipate your next story.

Episode 2: “May The Source Be With You”
The Lesson: Offer Something Original

If the pilot got things off to a slow start, “May The Source Be With You” brought things to a grinding halt. A plodding parody of Star Wars, it follows the formula to the letter. Perhaps the most damning comment that can be made is that in terms of entertainment value, “Source” ranks at most as equivalent to “The Star Wars Holiday Special.” Aside from a few chuckles to be found as Quark bickers with the whiny, egotistical Source and the first appearance of a halfway interesting character — Ficus, the evolved plant who replaced the pilot’s mad scientist — there is nothing of interest to be found between the opening and closing credits.

The problem with a by-the-numbers parody is that it offers nothing new. Just as the pilot was loaded down with predictable jokes, practically every moment of “Source” is a moment that can be predicted from the very start. Your story can’t depend on the tried, because the tried and true quickly becomes the tried and tired. Offer your audience something new, or you’ll find they’re tuning you out at record speed.

Episode 3: “The Old and the Beautiful”
Set Your Own Pace

For the third episode of Quark, Commander Quark finds himself with a plush assignment for once — an extended romantic interlude with a princess — only to find himself infected with a virus that ages him at the rate of two years every hour.

The change in the direction of the series is blatantly obvious. What had been a bland, lifeless slog through unengaging science fiction parody suddenly becomes entertaining, evoking actual laughs. Beyond that, the series starts to show signs of life beyond the jokes. Story and character suddenly take a priority in the series, and it’s a change for the better.

The quickest way to sum up the change in the series is that it finally finds its format. It’s at this point that Quark ceases to be a science fiction parody and becomes a comedy in a science fiction setting. Its stories stop depending on hackneyed jokes and instead become solid science fiction ideas executed with a sense of humor. Essentially, it becomes the sitcom of “Star Trek” (in fact, borrowing a couple of plots from that series and taking them in new directions).

Even more importantly, the series sets its own pace. Part of the evidence of this change is the fact that the laugh track has less and less of a presence until it’s almost unnoticeable. Some scenes manage to pass without a punch line or with only the most fleeting of jokes. It’s as though the format change, from simple parody to sci-fi comedy, frees the writers to actually focus on story.

Which is the final lesson of the first three episodes of “Quark.” When telling a story, set your own pace. Figure out what the story calls for, and don’t try to rush it through. Every story has a speed of its own, and every storyteller has a speed at which they work.

Perhaps if “Quark” had learned this lesson from the first episode, it might have had more than eight episodes to make its case with audiences.

The title of the show is “Popcorn.” Well, part of it, at least.

In that spirit, I offer the following video.

Tell me. Is there any geek who grew up in the 80’s who did not wish they could have the Ecto 1?

Well, sparky, here’s your chance now. Provided, of course, you’ve got over $40,000 you can drop on it. The Ecto 1 is on sale at eBay.

Last night, after successfully pulling a clip (not the entire movie, mind you - a clip) from a movie to use in my weekly cable show, the software I have been using without incident for the past 12 episodes broke.

It was broken while trying to read Ultraviolet - a disc that, in addition to holding an absolute mess of a movie, is notorious for having some of the most pervasive and destructive copy protection around. And when I say the software broke, I mean that it can no longer read any disc in my collection without crashing, including unprotected discs of my own work.

There are plenty of solutions to my problem, of course - all of which I’ll be exploring. In the meantime, however, I’m using a much slower and clunky process to get my clips. One which necessitates copying the entire movie to my hard drive instead of a 3-10 minute clip like I usually do.

And it occurs to me that this situation is exactly the sort of thing that represents why I got into the debate over intellectual property early on. DRM is invasive. It is destructive. And it is a violation of our rights.

As an independent reviewer, I have a legal right to use materials from the movies in my review. This is not a debate, and I will not argue about it with anybody. It’s explicitly stated in copyright law, and it has precedent in the Supreme Court. Duplication of copyrighted material - including excerpting at length - is permissible so long as the purpose of the finished product is review of the media in question. At length hardly matters in my situation, however, as no clip has ever gone longer than two minutes.

This kind of DRM represents the movement of the industry in recent years to destroy the rights of its consumers. Make no mistake about it - it does not hurt the pirates, it only hurts the everyday consumer and the independent media. If you go to any pirate movie server online, the chances are that you will find a pristine copy of Ultraviolet available for download because somebody felt that it was worth working at it to crack it. But the end user who wants to move the film from their DVD onto their iPod, or the independent reviewer (me) who just wants to sample a clip from it to go into their program - these people are shut out of the equation altogether.

Oh. And did I mention who released Ultraviolet? Sony. Yeah. The people who put a destructive rootkit (read: virus) onto their music CD’s as “copy protection.” Class act all around, they are.

On tomorrow’s Popcorn Theater, Elske McCain will join us for our inaugural episode! The fun starts at http://www.blogtalkradio.com/cglenwilliams at Noon (EST) when we go on the air and Elske joins us to discuss her career in such films as Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead,You’re Next 3: Pajama Party Massacre, Gimme Skelter, and Jessicka Rabid. Tune in and join the fun! In the meantime, enjoy some clips of Elske in action.

ROUND OFF starring ELSKE MCCAIN