<span class="SFPTagline">
From SCIFIPEDIA
</span>
- Welcome to the Archive for July, 2007
You may need to purge the cache to see the changes you make here.
You may also see the archive for 2007 or the entire archive for Today's Featured Article
- July 1
Highly respected British character actor Christopher Eccleston (born February 16, 1964) is perhaps best known to genre fans for two television roles. He played the 9th incarnation of the The Doctor on the British sci-fi program Doctor Who and has appeared as Claude, the invisible man, on several episodes of NBC's Heroes.
Early Life
Eccleston was born in Salford, England. His upbringing has been described as both "happy" and "working class." He nourished loves of both television and soccer. But, by age 19, he had decided that he was a more talented actor than a soccer player. Subsequently, he enrolled at the Central School of Speech and Drama.
Film Career
Eccleston has compiled an impressive resume of feature films, including roles in eXistenZ (1999), Gone in 60 Seconds (2000), The Others (2001) . . .
- July 2
The Burning Zone (September 3, 1996 – May 20, 1997) was a short-lived UPN series created by Coleman Luck. Michael Harris starred as Dr. Daniel Cassian, a man appointed by the White House to create a scientific team dedicated to preventing biological disasters. Their more secret mission is to stop an agency known as "Dawn," whose goal is to rid the planet of humankind. The team is comprised of Dr. Edward Marcase (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), a paranoid genius with strong spiritual beliefs; Dr. Kimberly Shiroma (Tamlyn Tomita) who believes Dr. Marcase is responsible for the death of her fiancee, and Michael Hailey (James Black), the head of security. Before the end of the first season, the characters of Shiroma and Marcase were written out and . . .
- July 3
Karate Kid is a fictional comic book superhero owned by DC Comics and is part of the Legion of Super-Heroes.
Val Armorr's father was Kirau nezumi, a notorious criminal known as the Black Dragon. The sensei kills the Black Dragon, and decides to raise the son as his own. Residing in the 31st century in the Japanese sector of a united Earth, the sensei trains Val in all Martial Arts techniques as well as peaceful creative practices such as meditation, sculpting, and painting.
Val becomes a master of all martial arts forms, many having their origins on different worlds. He develops his own . . .
- July 4
Independence Day (1996) was directed by Roland Emmerich and written by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich, the same team that created Stargate and then went on to do the 1998 remake of Godzilla. When the movie was originally released, it became one of the biggest blockbuster hits of its time, with a domestic box office of more than $300 million and a worldwide gross of over $600 million. It starred, among others, Will Smith (soon to establish a personal reputation for big-opening blockbuster movies on the July 4 holiday weekend), Bill Pullman, and Jeff Goldblum.
On July 2, completely without warning, communications systems worldwide are disrupted as a huge, alien spaceship appears in orbit around the Earth and deploys many smaller but still massive ships, which take up position over many of the world's major cities. David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum) has observed strange sequences in the radio signals associated with the appearance of the aliens, and believes he has decoded the aliens' methods of communications, revealing their plans for massive attacks on cities around the world. Despite his attempts to warn the president of the United States (Bill Pullman), all hell breaks loose on . . .
- July 5
The Hulk squares off against Wolverine
Dr. Robert Bruce Banner was a brilliant nuclear scientist, working on a special top secret project, the Gamma Bomb. The bomb would be the first based on gamma radiation, and the project was based in the desert of New Mexico, as many nuclear bomb tests were in the 1960s. The project was run by General "Thunderbolt" Ross and his second in command, Major Glenn Talbot. Also living on the secret base was Ross's daughter, Betty Ross. The General had hoped that Betty would fall for the attractive major, but was surprised and disturbed to find her falling for the shy scientist, Dr. Banner, instead.
On the day of the test, after the countdown was begun, Dr. Banner became aware of a teenager named Rick Jones who had driven out onto the testing range on a dare. It was too late to stop the test, so Banner drove out to the site to try to save the boy's life. He managed to get Rick over the protective barrier just in time, but was himself hit with the full force of the Gamma radiation. Instead of vaporizing him, Banner seemed to miraculously . . .
- July 6
Tamlyn Naomi Tomita (b. January 27, 1966 in Okinawa, Japan) is a Japanese-born American actress who has appeared in several films and television series. She may be remembered by some for her role as Waverly Jong in the 1993 film The Joy Luck Club and her role as Dr. Kimberly Shiroma in the short-lived series The Burning Zone. Tomita is of of Fillipino and Japanese descent and, before turning to acting, she won the pageant title of Queen at the Nisei Week Pageant in Los Angeles in 1984. In 1991, she was listed among People Magazine's "50 Most Beautiful People."
Tomita made her film debut in The Karate Kid, Part II. She also appeared . . .
- July 7
The Invasion is an eight-episode serial from season 6 of the long-running program Doctor Who. Its first episode premiered in the UK on November 2, 1968.
The TARDIS materializes somewhere in the England of the 1970s, only to find that some very strange things are happening around the headquarters of International Electromatics, the largest supplier of electronics in the world. People who worked for the company and who live around its grounds are disappearing. Moreover, the corporation has hired its own police force, which patrols the area and rounds up anyone who gets too close. What is managing director Tobias Vaughn up to and who are his mysterious silent partners? Can the Doctor, Jamie and Zoe learn the answers in time to avert catastrophe?
The original video for episodes 1 and 4 of this serial have sadly been lost . . .
- July 8
Anthony Michael Hall (April 14, 1968) is an American actor, producer, and director who has appeared in several notable film and television roles. His most recent and notable appearances is as the star of the USA Network series, The Dead Zone. Hall came to fame as a member of the brat pack, appearing in the films Weird Science, Sixteen Candles, and Breakfast Club. He made his transition to adult roles by joining the cast of Saturday Night Live and making appearances in the films Johnny Be Good, Edward Scissorhands, and Six Degrees of Separation.
Hall was born in West Roxbury, Boston, Massachusetts, to singer and actress Mercedes Hall and . . .
- July 9
Black Canary is a fictional comic book character owned by DC Comics. She began in 1947 and was a later member of the Justice Society of America in its final years. When her husband, Larry Lance, was killed, in a 1969 issue of the Justice League of America, the Black Canary decided to leave Earth Two (then perceived as the home of the Justice Society) and travel to Earth One and become a member of the Justice League. In a few years, she became embroiled in a romance with Green Arrow.
The problem with this is that the Black Canary who started her career in 1947 would have been way too old for the Silver Age Green Arrow . . .
- July 10
David Ogden Stiers (b. October 31, 1942) is an American actor born in Peoria, Illinois. He is best known to genre fans in the role of Rev. Gene Purdy on the USA Network series The Dead Zone and has made frequent genre appearances.
Stiers worked in Northern California in the Actor's Workshop and the California Shakespeare Festival before moving to New York to study drama at Julliard. He also joined the Houseman Acting Company. Early roles include a voice role in THX 1138, guest sports on Kojak, Charlie's Angels, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Rhoda. He also appeared in the movies Sergeant Matlovich vs. the U.S. Air Force, Oh, God!, A Circle of Children, and Magic!
In 1977, he joined the cast of M*A*S*H as the surgeon Major Charles Emerson Winchester III. When the series ended in 1983, he followed up with several TV movies . . .
- July 11
Dark matter is a theoretical part of matter that refers to the portion of the universe that remains unquantifiable. However, the existence of dark matter remains to be proven. Dark matter is also known as dark energy.
Evidence for the existence of dark matter is indirect but its existence can be inferred by the gravitational effects on visible matter. Scientists developed the theory after their attempts to calculate the mass of the universe resulted in a significantly greater mass than could be accounted for with visible matter. Astronomers Jan Oort and Fritz Zwicky coined the term to explain the mass that must exist but could not be seen.
Skeptics of dark matter have . . .
- July 12
Doctor Who is a science fiction TV series produced by the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC). Its lead character is a human-looking alien known as the Doctor. Traveling through time and space in a ship called the TARDIS, the Doctor has adventures and fights evil throughout the universe. He's almost always accompanied by a companion or companions—people he's befriended during his adventures who have accepted his offer to travel with him (or who have stowed away on board the TARDIS). Doctor Who has the distinction of being the longest-running science-fiction show in television history, being broadcast on the BBC from 1963 until 1989, when BBC One Controller Jonathan Powell put it on a "hiatus" that would last until 2005. It was shown in weekly 25-minute episodes (except for a single season in the mid-1980s that had 45-minute episodes), with complete, separate stories comprising anywhere from two to fourteen episodes. After its cancellation, Doctor Who was briefly revived as a single two-hour TV movie on the American Fox Network in 1996, but low ratings . . .
- July 13
Superman is a fictional comic book character from the planet Krypton endowed with superpowers that enable him to become the first superhero.
Writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster worked for years before they thought that their creation Superman was ready for the world, then found out that the world wasn’t ready for them. Their character was introduced as a bald villain in a 1933 fanzine, re-invented as a benevolent and muscular mortal, then transformed in 1934 to a visitor from outer space whose alien origin explained his incredible powers. This final version, intended as a newspaper comic strip, earned rejection slips for years from everyone who saw it.
While this triumph of modern American mythology languished, a new medium arose to make a place for it. Comic books began as giveaway reprints of newspaper strips, but those publishers who were practically penniless were obliged to print original material from aspiring amateurs. One such outfit, known as National Periodical Publications and later as DC Comics . . .
- July 14
Neon Genesis Evangelion is an anime series written and directed by Hideaki Anno and produced by GAINAX studio. The series ran for 26 episodes from 1995–1996, and was finished by a finale movie released in 1997, the aptly named "The End of Evangelion."
Often considered a watershed event, Evangelion reached unparalleled popularity with Japanese audiences. Evangelion sought to revive the "giant robot" anime genre-style which had flourished in the early 1980s and which Anno felt current anime had strayed from. Evangelion was immensely popular, but also incredibly controversial, with disturbingly high levels of violence and psychological trauma. Anno suffered a psychological breakdown . . .
- July 15
Stigmata are marks or wounds (or the perception of them) that spontaneously appear on a person and correspond to the injuries believed to be received by Christ during his crucifixion. A person experiencing stigmata is called a stigmatic.
Stigmata have been used as plot elements in some sci-fi works.
Typically, wounds may appear on the palms or wrists, and/or on the side of the body. These wounds (or marks) may behave unlike typical wounds, for example, flowing freely for days. They may appear and disappear.
There is a concept of invisible stigmata, in which the person feels the wounds, but they are not visible to other people.
Theories
- The wounds may be seen as a miracle, a divine manifestation.
- The wounds may be psychosomatically created, caused by an intense belief.
- Mundane medical conditions may be misinterpreted.
- There may be fraud involved in some cases . . .
- July 16
Lex Luthor is a fictional comic book super-villain owned by DC Comics and is Superman's arch nemesis in most variations of the Superman story.
Lex Luthor was first drawn with red hair. In his first appearance, he had at least one assistant who was completely bald. The next year, he was accidentally drawn bald, and the look worked. He has been drawn bald ever since.
When the Golden Age Superman first meets Luthor, he asks "What sort of creature are you?"
Luthor answers, "Just an ordinary man—but with the brain of a super genius! With scientific miracles at my fingertips, I'm preparing to make myself the supreme master of the world!"
By the 1950s, Luthor was officially his arch-nemesis, sometimes teaming up with the Joker against Superman and Batman.
In the Silver Age of Comics, Lex Luthor solidified his status as Superman's arch-nemesis. Supposedly they were contemporaries, both growing up in Smallville together, originally friends. In those days, Lex had a full head of hair. He was a real fan of Superboy's, and saved the Boy of Steel's life by pushing a kryptonite meteor into a gully full of quicksand. He was already . . .
- July 17
The deep Amazon jungle of Brazil provides the backdrop for tales of the Mapinguari, a large nocturnal animal with a frightful screaming cry. Locals describe the Mapinguari as about two meters in height when standing on its hind legs. It is covered in red hair and emits a foul odor. Its feet are turned backwards and its claws are capable of ripping apart the palm trees upon which it feeds.
Ornithologist David Oren believes the Mapinguari is real. He has searched for it for twenty years. Oren suggests the Mapinguari is a surviving ground sloth, similar to the (presumably extinct) Mylodon. While the smaller tree sloths still exist, ground sloths are generally assumed to have died out around ten thousand years ago. So far no tangible evidence of the Mapinguari has survived close scrutiny.
Oren is not the first to suggest that giant ground sloths still exist. In the 1890s Ramon Lista, an Argentinian explorer, encountered a large unknown . . .
- July 18
Kate Mulgrew is an American actress best known for her role as Kathryn Janeway on the series Star Trek: Voyager. She was born Katherine Kiernan Mulgrew in Dubuque, Iowa on April 29, 1955, to parents Joan Virginia and Thomas James Mulgrew. She is the oldest of eight children in an Irish-Catholic family.
She became interested in acting at age 12 and left home at 17 to pursue acting in New York City. She attended New York University and was accepted into the Stella Adler Conservatory. She left school in her junior year to pursue acting full time.
She immediately got a job on the ABC soap Ryan's Hope as Mary Ryan. She played the character from 1975 until 1989. She also starred . . .
- July 19
Brandon James Routh (b. October 9, 1979) is an American actor from Des Moines, Iowa, best known for playing Superman in the 2006 film Superman Returns. Routh is the third of four children born to Ron and Katie Routh. He grew up in Norwalk, Iowa and graduated from Norwalk High School. He attended the University of Iowa where he studied writing and appeared on stage in productions at the Norwalk Theater of Performing Arts.
Routh moved to New York City and then to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. He appeared in a Christina Aguilera video and had his first acting role guest starring on Odd Man Out as Connor. He also appeared on Undressed and Gilmore Girls before landing a role . . .
- July 20
Lieutenant Natasha Yar (b. 2337) is a fictional character in the series Star Trek: The Next Generation played by Denise Crosby.
Tasha is a Starfleet officer born on the war-torn colony of Turkana IV. She has one younger sister, Ishara. The girls' parents were victims of a violent clash among the planet's cadres and they were taken in by a foster family who soon abandoned them leaving them to fend for themselves and elude the rape gangs that roamed the planet.
Tasha left the planet at fifteen leaving her sister, who refused to leave, behind with the Coalition Cadre. Yar attended Starfleet Academy and became a security officer and an expert in the martial arts. Captain Jean-Luc Picard requested she be assigned to the USS Enterprise-D under his command where she served as security officer until . . .
- July 21
The Bermuda Triangle is an area in the Atlantic where legend says that ships and aircraft disappear under mysterious circumstances.
Charles Berlitz's 1974 book The Bermuda Triangle was a huge bestseller, and popularized the term with the general public. It wasn't the first mention of the reportedly hazardous area, nor even the first use of that specific name. However, its success led to a number of other books and reprints of earlier titles.
The basic assertion that the triangle is unusually dangerous has been disputed by insurers and other writers. While it would seem that the statistics would be easy to establish one way or the other, it's hard to create any sort of baseline . . .
- July 22
In the series Stargate SG-1, the Lucian Alliance is a powerful criminal syndicate within the Milky Way that came to power following the fall of the Goa'uld. The syndicate includes former Jaffa Warriors as well as human smugglers and mercenaries and the occasional alien seeking to profit from the power vacuum left behind by the defeat of the System Lords and the ultimate decline of religious and political systems on planets throughout the galaxy.
The Alliance was first encountered in "Prometheus Unbound" when con artist Vala Mal Doran stole the Earth ship Prometheus with the intention of trading it to the alliance for weapons-grade naquadah. Daniel Jackson successfully thwarted her attempts but their run in with alliance members Tenat and Jup would not be their last . . .
- July 23
Rutger Olsen Hauer is a Dutch actor, and producer born in Bruekelen, Utrecht, Netherlands to actors Arend and Teunke. His parents ran an acting school in Amsterdam and Hauer began appearing on stage at five. He made his TV debut in Asmodée.
At 15, he ran away from home on a Dutch Merchant Navy freighter which took him around the world. He discovered a talent for languages and easily mastered English, German, French, and Italian. He returned to The Netherlands and to school, working odd jobs during the day and studying at night. He also pursued his love of cars and motorcycles experimenting with dangerous stunts.
Hauer made his film debut in the 1969 film Monsieur Hawarden; his scenes were cut from the final version. He also gained success in television, appearing in the series Floris, a medieval action series.
In 1973, he was cast in Turkish Delight, directed by Paul Verhoeven. The film proved successful and he followed up with his first English language film . . .
- July 24
The Modern Age of Comics is an era of comics beginning in 1986, with the conclusion of DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths maxi-series. At this point, DC decided to refurbish and reshape its continuity, virtually restarting the story of two of its oldest heroes, Superman and Wonder Woman. The changes were many, and difficult for both fans and creators to grasp. Among the important changes were:
1) Superman's adopted parents, the Kents, were now still alive. They hadn't died before he came to Metropolis.
2) Superman was the only survivor of Krypton's destruction. No Supergirl or any Super-Pets ever existed.
3) Superman's powers didn't fully develop until he was an adult. So, he was never Superboy. The "Boy of Steel" was wiped from existence . . .
- July 25
Red Planet is a 2000 film written by Chuck Pfarrer and Jonathon Lemkin and directed by Antony Hoffman.
When overpopulation and pollution on Earth become overwhelming, Mars becomes the focus of a terraforming project aimed ultimately at colonization. The planet was seeded with algae intended to create a breathable atmosphere. A team of astronauts, with various specialties and differing ideologies visits Mars to check on the project's progress and discovers that the levels of oxygen being produced has decreased. Their equipment suffers severe damage that threatens their lives but they soon discover that in their attempt to create life where none appeared to exist, they awoke a native life form that began to eat the algae. Despite the decimation of the algae the Mars atmosphere has become breathable as the insectlike lifeforms eat anything and produce oxygen as a byproduct. While the project proved disastrous . . .
- July 26
Parallel universes are a science fiction and fantasy staple that has its basis in quantum physics theories. The idea is that any choice made in this universe results in the creation of another universe where an alternate choice was made. A parallel universe may occasionally be referred to as an alternate reality though the term typically refers to a reality similar to our own but different in small ways or a universe that has a similar history but a recent point of divergence.
Sometimes the divergence is in history. Perhaps in one parallel universe, the Nazis won World War II, and so the author can explore what our world might have been like if this had happened. The TV series Sliders (1995) the characters would "slide" to different Earths where history had gone differently . . .
- July 27
Unbreakable comes from writer/director M. Night Shyamalan, who wowed audiences with his suspenseful movie The Sixth Sense (1999), which came complete with a twist ending that succeeded where so many have failed. The world had high expectations for his follow-up act a year later. Unbreakable (2000) brought back the star of "The Sixth Sense", Bruce Willis, but no magic can bring back an audience's innocence. No matter how much tension was generated in the first reel, the audience suspected the filmmaker had something up his sleeve, and that is usually enough to blunt the keen edge of a twist-in-the-making. "Unbreakable"'s worldwide gross came to less than half that of "The Sixth Sense", despite having a script as taut, direction as knowing, and a cast as magnetic. Its talented child star, Spencer Treat Clark, even had three names, just like the Oscar-nominated Haley Joel Osment.
Unbreakable tells the story of David Dunn (Willis), a man bewildered and rudderless in a world that . . .
- July 28
Battlestar Galactica: Zarek Comic - Number 2 continues Dynamite Entertainment's Battlestar Galactica series, set during the continuity of the re-imagined SCI FI Channel series. The second issue of Zarek takes place in the wake of the first Cylon War. Excerpts from Tom Zarek’s book The Revolution Within provide narration as we learn that his home colony of Sagittaron is still a virtual slave state. Following the death of his parents, Zarek has grown to adulthood and developed a consuming hatred for the Colonial government.
Over the next few years, Zarek increases the profile of the labor union started by his mother and finds that the governmental resistance has escalated to deal with the situation. Eventually, a raid is staged on the group’s headquarters, leaving Tom and his associate Mason to start over with a handful of resources and loyal members. The rebirth of the organization opens the door to a more revolutionary approach and a new name: the SFM (Sagittaron Freedom Movement).
Following a successful raid on a Colonial . . .
- July 29
Liv Tyler (b. July 1, 1977 New York City, New York) is an American actress and the daughter of rock star Steven Tyler and former model Bebe Buell. Tyler is best known to genre fans for her role in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy as the elf Arwen.
Tyler grew up believing rock star Todd Rundgren was her father but after recognizing a near twin-like resemblance between herself and Steven Tyler's daughter, Mia, confronted her mother who admitted the truth. Liv took her father's name and left home in Portland, Maine, to begin a modeling career in New York. Her interests soon changed from modeling to acting and after appearing in one of her father's videos, she won roles in Silent Fall and a starring role in . . .
- July 30
On the series Stargate Atlantis, a Wraith hive ship is a vast mother ship home to thousands of Wraith. The ship allows most of its inhabitants to hibernate for centuries and also has room for hundreds of humans which can be held in stasis until the Wraith are ready to feed on them. The first ship encountered in the series appeared not to be a ship at all but a mountainside complete with trees growing on its surface. Despite becoming a part of the landscape during its thousands of years of hibernation, the ship was still capable of flight and after the vessel's inhabitants were unintentionally awoken by Lt. John Sheppard and his rescue team, it later took off to cull the humans of the Pegasus galaxy.
Wraith ships are part biological and are capable of growth and healing. They are also capable of interstellar travel, although . . .
- July 31
Terrence Mann was born July 1, 1951, in Kentucky to Charles and Helen Mann. He attended Jacksonville University from 1969–1971 before transferring to and later graduating with honors from the North Carolina School for the Arts. Terrence made his Broadway debut in 1982 at the St. James Theatre in the Tony Award winning show "Barnum" in which he played Chester Lyman. However, his real break-out performance was in the original cast of Andrew Lloyd Weber's "CATS" where he created the role of the Rum Tum Tugger.
Terrence's film and TV credits include Critters 1, 2, 3, and 4; Solarbabies, Big-Top Pee Wee (in which he plays an adorable, stuttering clown named Snowball), The Equalizer (TV series), Bump in the Night, The Tick, Gargoyles (voice), Mrs. Santa Claus (TV movie), The Dresden Files . . .
2008, SCI FI. All rights reserved.
