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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(un)reason" data-source="post: 8399945" data-attributes="member: 27780">Polyhedron Issue 70: April 1992part 5/5Into the Dark: James chooses another exceedingly specific topic this time that I'm surprised has enough to fill a column. Movies about Sinbad?! I guess he is a reasonably popular literary figure, and like King Arthur or Robin Hood, he is public domain, so anyone can make movies about him without worrying about licensing. But like Westerns, the number of movies about him has dropped in recent decades, as you can no longer cast any random white guy as a middle-eastern character without complaints. Looking at the cast lists of these 5, they are indeed not only all starring white guys, but all different ones even when they're by the same company and intended to be an actual sequel, which tells you exactly how much Hollywood cared about both cultural accuracy and internal continuity back then, with no army of internet nerds making wikis for every successful franchise and mercilessly picking over any inconsistencies. So yeah, this is all stuff that hasn't aged well, and the fact they're using it to cross-promote Al Qadim reminds us that setting was also more based on western pop-cultural depictions of Arabia than primary sources, and also probably hasn't aged well 30 years later. This is probably going to involve large quantities of cringe.The 7th Voyage of Sinbad is the oldest of these, but also curiously one of the best, as it was the one that started the trend in the first place. Ray Harryhausen's stop-motion special effects were groundbreaking at the time, and still hold up better than many later films using the same techniques. The human element isn't quite as great, and there's some cheaply recycled stock footage to cut corners, but at least it's still watchable today. Captain Sinbad has a more convincingly dashing swashbuckling lead than the previous film, but pretty much everything else is worse. It's still watchable in a B-movie way, but nothing worth tracking down if you're already on the fence about the whole premise. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad is the other one that James thinks is actually good. Future Dr Who Tom Baker makes for a suitably melodramatic villain, the script is on point, and the rest of the cast do their jobs pretty well too. If you watch just one of these, it should probably be this one.Sinbad & the Eye of the Tiger :guitar riff intensifies: fails to live up to it's awesome name, with distinctly wooden acting, and effects that are worse than 20 years ago despite being done by the same people. Stop motion takes time and precision, so a rushed shooting schedule is just the worst idea with it.Sinbad of the 7 Seas is by far both the most recent of these and the worst. Lou Ferrigno as Sinbad is a miscasting for the ages and the rest of the production values are on the same level. Only remotely tolerable with a little help from the MST3K puppets. GEnie And The Network: The RPGA continues to be rather more online savvy than the rest of TSR. They've had a message board for several years, and now they've made it possible for you to sign up and renew subscriptions entirely online. No more postage fees just to communicate at all or not getting your first issue until several months after you sent off the application. I suspect it'll probably still be several years before online applications overtake physical ones and email communications about submissions put the no SASE ogre out of a job, but it's good to see them thinking ahead. The price per hour to use their network & message boards has dropped again, and is actually free to regional directors and club heads, so they can set up regular meetings where they debate RPGA policy with members across the globe in real time. All stuff that would be routine now (although setting a good meeting time with members from lots of timezones never ceases to be a pain) and another reminder of how much our everyday lives have changed in a few decades. One of those bits of progress I can be unreservedly positive about.Bloodmoose & Company can't resist making Doctor Who jokes, even at the expense of continuity. Well, they just got a time machine, so it comes with the territory. Just don't paradox yourself out of existence and things'll all work out in the end. A second issue that's well above average for both usability and historical progress in a row, which is quite nice to see. Every little change brings us closer to the present, and this time, the changes are the ones that I'd like to see. Of course there are also plenty of ways things have got worse since then. Let's see if next issue has anything to do with those.</blockquote>

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