Flash Gordon first published by Little White Lies, as entry 109 in my Cinema Psychotronicum column Alex Raymond’s adventure comic strip Flash Gordon was first commissioned in 1934 by King Features Syndicate to rival the similarly space-set Buck Rogers, and astonishingly, was still running almost seven decades later (the last new strip appeared in 2003)….
At the beginning of writer/director Miguel Llansó’s Jesus Shows You The Way To The Highway, the title is presented as the colourful title screen for an Eighties computer game, complete with garishly coloured 8-bit graphics displaying the film’s main characters, all to the accompaniment of old-school electronic squelches on the soundtrack. It is an apt…
Metropolis (Metroporisu) first published by Little White Lies, as part 25 of my Cinema Psychotronicum column “Every epoch dreams its successor,” states text at the beginning of Rintaro’s feature-length anime Metropolis (Metroporisu). This quotation from the nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet captures something of the film’s retrofuturist vibe, as we see Rintaro’s towering world of tomorrow…