Rocky Jones, Space Ranger: Crash of the Moons (1954)

"Crash of the Moons" is a two-part episode of the 1954 television series Rocky Jones, Space Ranger that, when watched in sequence, makes for a 72-minute, movie-like experience. This episode finds titular hero Rocky getting word that two "gypsy moons," which are mutually locked together and drifting through outer space, are going to crash into one another. On one of the moons, Posita, the denizens are willing to relocate. However, on the other moon, Ophecius, the waspish female suzerain Cleolanta is set upon destroying Posita (and its inhabitants) before it crashes into her home. It's Rocky's aim to set things aright.

Richard Crane, seen here in
another role, plays Rocky

It might seem like what we have here is boilerplate black-and-white 50s TV sci-fi, and, for the most part, that assessment adequately characterizes this episode. But watching this last night, I will confess that this episode moved me nonetheless. When Cleolanta's minions start bombarding the moon opposite them with missiles, the camera cuts from an outer-space perspective of explosions on the surface of the planet to the ground-level happenings on the planet itself. Infrastructure clatters down and roofs cave in and Rocky Jones' female assistant and his twelve-year-old ingenue, Bobby, scramble for cover. And as they do so, the infant prince of Posita wails and shrieks.

Hearing this crying baby last night, I thought of the babies in Gaza—the Palestinian babies and the Israeli babies. The leaders of men can come up with all kinds of reasons why they should bomb their neighboring peoples, but the babies can only cry. Listening to those straining screeches, my chest seized up and my mouth became pinched. We have destroyed one another in the past, we destroy one another in the present, and we will destroy one another in the future. In fact as in fiction, too many babies are doomed on arrival, born into the insoluble and perpetual conflicts of angry rival cultures locked in one another's gravitational pull. Gravity's a metaphor here, of course; hate is the real and abiding attractive force. Destruction of another gets conflated with self-preservation. Perhaps we should listen closer to the babies' crying. Babies shriek the same way, then and now and forever. 

I guess what I am saying is that this boilerplate black-and-white 50s TV sci-fi legitimately affected me. This vision of the future from the past put me in the immediate present. I was moved enough to have my heart teleported 6,290 miles from my watching location to the Gaza Strip. So I'd recommend you watch and listen to the crying baby in this two-part episode of Rocky Jones, Space Ranger and in life. Maybe it will move you, too. But probably not enough to make you do anything.

Babies cry and the skeletons smile.

In Defense of Tubi

Tubi or not Tubi? That is not the question, as that is the kind of referential, pun-driven “wit” that has ruined comedy in the internet age. Regardless of this article's inane intro, some readers might still be wondering if the Tubi TV app is worth downloading. The answer is yes—if you like to watch trash with ads intermixed.

That is not an attempt at acerbic wit or irony. Rather, I am earnestly recommending Tubi to people who like movies and TV that are so bad they are good . . . or just bad.

Perhaps most notably, Tubi boasts an excellent lineup of bad horror movies. Here you can find classics such as The Hills Have Eyes and the Rob Zombie movies, most notably House of 1000 Corpses. There is no shortage of obscure slashers, such as Slaughter High, Final Exam, House on Sorority Row, The Mutilator, and Don't Go in the Woods. There's also a cornucopia of exploitation horror—that is, the real nasty and relentless grindhouse fare such as Nightmare (a.k.a. Nightmare in a Damaged Brain) and the seminal gore films of Herschell Gordon Lewis such as 2000 Maniacs. And while Tubi features hundreds of crappy independent horror films made in the last few years, including unwatchable fare like Don’t F*** in the Woods, there are also some gems. Check out, for instance, Terrifier and tell me that Art the Clown isn't more terrifying than Pennywise and Captain Spaulding combined. All told, Tubi is a crash-course in horror and exploitation.

Tubi must also be praised for its junky science-fiction. Crappy schlock classics such as The Astro Zombies, War Beneath the Earth, and Battle of the Planets can all be found here, among hundreds of others.

For years, many of the aforementioned films were nigh impossible to find on Blu-Ray or even DVD, and so a person like me would find themselves searching YouTube for bootlegs. Sometimes people like me even had to resort to downloading illegally from seedy sites like Rarelust. But not anymore, now that I've found Tubi.

For the non-horror and sci-fi fan, there's a lot of other compelling material on Tubi that could never go mainstream. Take, for instance, Pro Gay Wrestling, a non-heteronormative wrestling federation. I love the idea and a lot of the storylines—most notably the heel wrestler who swears he's not gay—but a lot of the quality of the wrestling itself is subpar. There's also a healthy serving of obscure cartoons from yesteryear. Any JEM fans among our readers? If so, you've got a date with nostalgia on Tubi.

Tubi lets you have all of this for free, but there is, of course, an ostensible catch. Tubi has ads interlarded within the programming, and this has been enough to make consumers look askance at this service. After all, it's just classier to pay for Netflix, Paramount, Amazon Prime, and Disney Plus and not watch ads, right? Ads are so prole. Or are they? There are only three or four commercial breaks in any given Tubi movie, far fewer than on conventional television. Moreover, these commercials don't run as long as on television, meaning they're relatively unobtrusive. This may not eliminate the nightmare kaleidoscope of a typical commercial break completely, but it can at least mitigate the horror by making it less kaleidoscopic. That said, it's still a bit jarring to be watching Art the Clown bisect a buxom naked blonde woman with a bandsaw and then have Tubi cut to a commercial for Barbie-licensed Little People.

In many ways, Tubi is upstream from the paid services. In fact, Tubi seems to be capable of setting new trends. Just recently, Netflix has offered cheaper subscription tiers that feature some advertising. While Netflix might have “better” programming (“better” meaning overcooked dialogue and labyrinthine, recursive plots, in the view of the average middle-class viewer), Tubi still has a lock on cost-free streaming. Given the sad state of the economy and its attendant skyrocketing inflation, I think we're going to need more services like Tubi. Tubi is the food bank of entertainment.

(This image is property of 20th Century Fox, while the Tubi corporate logo is property of Tubi, Inc.
These properties are used here strictly for purposes of parody.)

As a schlock and horror fan, I give Tubi my highest recommendation. Tubi is the place to watch old horror and exploitation and sci-fi. You can call me a shill, but does someone really qualify for that moniker when no money has been exchanged? Sure, Tubi is trashy and quintessentially lower-middle class. It's not a prestige subscription by any stretch. And “Tubi and chill” just doesn't sound nearly as sexy. But it's free, and all it will cost you is time. So while it might be embarrassing to introduce Tubi to your friends, what with their sleek, voluptuous Netflix and Disney Plus subscriptions, just remember—they're the ones paying for services rendered.

The Astro Zombies (1968)

The Astro Zombies sometimes gets heralded as a schlock sci-fi/horror classic, but this is a gross misconception. I doubt if anyone who has ever suffered through this film in full could earnestly put forward a positive evaluation of the experience. Some might defend the movie by saying it's "so bad that it's good", but The Astro Zombies is just bad. The "so bad that it's good" designation really only applies to well-paced crap. The Astro Zombies may actually be the worst-paced movie of all time. It's ostensibly about alien-looking "quasi-men" who have escaped a lab run by John Carradine to commit "mutilation murders", but there's very little action of that nature depicted on-screen. Director Ted V. Mikels chews up most of the runtime with interstitial shots of driving, parking, and sci-fi babble, all of which makes for excruciatingly boring viewing. The only redeeming aspect of this movie is that it inspired The Misfits' song "Astro Zombies", a recording that accomplishes a lot more in two minutes and eleven seconds than The Astro Zombies does in an hour and thirty-one minutes.

Super Baseball 2020

Super Baseball 2020 is SNK's futuristic reimagining of baseball. Released in North America in 1993 for the Sega Genesis and Super Nintendo by way of EA Sports, the game features some crucial rule changes for the “distant” future that the year 2020 represented at the time.

First off, in an effort to curb out-of-control power hitting, the dons of Super Baseball 2020's in-game universe have decreed that the left and right field fences should be colossally high, ensuring that homeruns can only be hit to straightaway center. In a similar effort to facilitate at least some degree of small-ball, foul territory has been limited to the space in front of first base and third base. Balls landing in the foul territory behind third and first as we presently know them are considered fair. The field itself has also been modified. At the warning track, for instance, there are “jump zones,” within which an outfielder can leap with some extra spring in his, her, or their step to take a stab at a fly ball. The field also changes over the course of the game. From the fifth inning onward, the Super Baseball rule book mandates that the field must play host to “crackers”—proximity mines that explode whenever someone ventures into their vicinity. Crackers can seriously debilitate a heedless fielder. Even the players themselves can change within game. Various sorts of plays lead to monetary awards, and in-game earnings can be used to upgrade a player.

Super Baseball 2020 also includes some significant changes around the culture of the game of baseball and, presumably, the society alongside which it has evolved. In consonance with the overarching sci-fi sensibilities, robots are among the players on the field and the umpires calling the plays. Even more fantastically, women appear on these big league rosters; in fact, there are entire teams of females, all of whom are identically blond and buxom and clad in short-shorts to boot. The crowd, meanwhile, appears to be made up of scattered robot parts. On the whole, these changes in rules and culture give Super Baseball 2020 a unique aesthetic, and provide a refreshing alternative to baseball in our current continuity, both past and present.

Indeed, Super Baseball 2020 looks drastically different from baseball in 1993 or in 2020 as it stands. Of course, baseball in present-continuity 2020 looks drastically different from baseball as it did in 1993, or even 2019, for that matter. As Super Baseball predicted, the volume of homeruns has increased dramatically in real-life 2020. With that has come an increase in strike outs. In an era of a deeply polarized politics, and a wholly politicized America often dictated by the whims of its leftist and rightist extremes, isn't it fitting that America's pastime has become about feast or famine, strike out or home run? Baseball has certainly seen rule changes. In an effort to speed up pace-of-play, Major League Baseball has mandated for the 2020 season that any given relief pitcher must face a minimum of three batters. More radically, to expedite extra innings, the tenth inning starts with a designated runner placed on second. And yet the biggest changes in Regular Baseball 2020 have been shaped around culture—not so much that of baseball itself, but rather that of a society racked by a respiratory virus and an unsatisfactory response thereto. With the coronavirus out of control in America, and with a staggering proportion of the American populace unwilling to believe the virus is real, baseball games are played in empty parks. In the absence of fans, enterprising PA guys pipe in 70 different situation-based crowd reactions. To fill the void, some parks have equipped the bleachers with cardboard cut-outs of people, which look a bit like the fans in N64-era baseball games, and are probably preferable to used-up robot parts. All told, actual Baseball in 2020 feels far more dystopian than Super Baseball 2020. At present, watching baseball sometimes feels like watching a video game.

If you're going to play video-game baseball, though, Super Baseball 2020 isn't a bad option. Its visual style and gameplay distinguish it from conventional baseball fare of its era. By comparison, 90s realist simulations like EA’s Tony La Russa Baseball look and feel dated. Super Baseball's futurism affords it some degree of timelessness. However, Super Baseball 2020 is not without its flaws. Chiefly, the game is somewhat buggy. For instance, if a base runner has touched a base, they cannot go back to their original base to avoid a force out (though this anomaly could be explained away as another rule change of the future). More broadly, Super Baseball 2020 suffers from pace-of-play issues of its own. The amount of innings in a game is non-adjustable, and playing a complete game usually takes over 20 minutes. “Futuristic” does not, in this dispensation, mean “streamlined” or “speedy.” And when pitted against other futuristic baseball games, Super Baseball actually pales. Inevitably, Super Baseball prompts comparisons to Base Wars, Konami's 1991 NES release that features all-robot squads playing a fairly conventional version of baseball. There's one important difference, however: force plays in Base Wars occasion one-on-one duels between baseman and baserunner robots. On account of this innovation, as well as overall speedier gameplay, Base Wars is a more enjoyable experience than Super Baseball 2020. 

All that being said, Super Baseball 2020 is still a fine game, and it will endure beyond its eponymous year in the history of both video games and baseball. Truth be told, Major League Baseball in our present continuity could learn a thing or two from Super Baseball. Mandatory green monsters in left and right in every stadium would turn the focus back to something other than homeruns (and the strike-outs that unfettered fence-swinging makes commonplace). The MLB has already started looking into the use of robot umps. It still seems like it will be awhile before baseball culture, or the androcentric American culture that sustains it, will consider the possibility of female players. That said, the San Francisco Giants just recently hired Sacramento State's softball standout Alyssa Nakken as their first-base coach. This is an important first step for women in the MLB. Your correspondent would like to believe we’ll see women on a major-league baseball field before we see proximity mines. Of course, this is America we’re talking about, so you can never count out the tyranny of crackers.