David Lynch and Mark Frost’s Twin Peaks: The Return arrived on television screens in the summer of 2017, promising to take fans of the original 1990-1991 ABC series back to the comfort of coffee and cherry pie at the Double-R Diner. What Lynch and Frost delivered was a sometimes bewildering 18-hour film that tested the limits of serialized television storytelling…
By the early 1980s, TSR’s Dungeons & Dragons had fully taken over the rec rooms and breakfast nooks of North America. The release of the three Advanced Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks between 1977 and 1979, along with countless AD&D adventure modules, codified optional and advanced rules that had been growing throughout the mid-1970s…
Last week, a story came across the We Are The Mutants news desk that inspired equal parts hope and dread: a reboot of the classic paranormal documentary series In Search of… is in the works, appropriately hosted by 21st century’s Mr. Spock, Zachary Quinto. I like Quinto well enough, and appreciate the sentiment of trying to resurrect probably one of the most important television shows from my youth. But of course I’m extremely skeptical about how well it will recreate the oddball outsider art aesthetic of the original series…
These two odd little volumes were discovered a few months ago in an antiquarian book shop in Canterbury, UK. Published by the British Society of Dowsers in 1980, Dowsing and Archaeology and Site and Survey Dowsing collectively offer a few dozen short articles, culled from the annals of the Journal of the British Society of Dowsers over the half-century leading up to 1980. As the book titles make clear, these articles take dowsing past its usual folk magic remit of finding sources of water and into territory usually ceded to archeologists or metal detectorists: finding ancient objects and the outlines of ancient structures…
In the wake of the passing of Ursula K. Le Guin last week, I took the opportunity to revisit one of the more fascinating products of her life and career: the 1980 television-movie adaptation of her 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. Produced by station WNET in New York City, the film is the summation of nearly a decade of technological and artistic experimentation in public television…
A recent spate of books have sought to analyze the visual culture of 20th-century ufology. 2016’s Flying Saucers Are Real!, which featured the archive of science fiction writer and amateur UFO material collector Jack Womack, offered richly-drawn, full-color images of UFO culture from every decade of the phenomenon. What Flying Saucers Are Real! did for American ufology, David Clarke’s UFO Drawings From The National Archives does for the United Kingdom…
I’m finding Saturday Night Fever a surprisingly slippery text to analyze in 2018. I rewatched it for this piece and it just seems like such an odd document. It’s not so much that it feels alien: the aspirational, ethnic, working-class swagger of Tony Manero is still with us in 2018, as cultural myth if nothing else…
Brian Bennett’s career started in grand fashion; while barely out of his teens, he became the drummer for one of the UK’s biggest pop groups, Cliff Richard’s backing band, The Shadows, taking over from original drummer Tony Meehan. Bennett’s 1978 solo effort, Voyage (A Journey Into Discoid Funk), marked his first solo effort…
In our contemporary media landscape, where consumers are surrounded by full-to-bursting computer-generated imagery, the wondrous has become drearily everyday. The thousands of hours of artists’ labor and computer programming time involved in creating visual effects often vanishes in the face of overwrought spectacle…
The memories of the love I had for these… things as a kid has largely faded. The memories that matter today all have to do with people: the family that gave me love and supported my interests and hobbies, the friends with whom I played these toys and games, and the shared memories with all of you who’ve commented and written to us in response to our articles…
We Are the Mutants 