Year: 2019

Categories
Deaths Matters of Life & Death Movies Star Wars

Peter Mayhew, actor, dies

  • April 30, 2019

Peter MayhewActor Peter Mayhew, who went from a job as a hospital orderly to co-starring in the Star Wars films as Chewbacca, dies at the age of 74. Following filming on Star Wars, with no way to anticipate the movie’s upcoming blockbuster success, Mayhew returned to his orderly job, continuing that line of work after the filming of both 1980‘s The Empire Strikes Back and 1983‘s Return Of The Jedi, before becoming a full-time fixture at Star Wars and science fiction conventions (and, later, the internet, regaling fans with behind-the-scenes stories both in person and online). He had some prior monster-suit-acting experience before George Lucas hired him for Star Wars, but not enough to amount to a steady stream of work. He reprised the role of Chewie in 2005‘s Revenge Of The Sith and 2015‘s The Force Awakens before handing the Wookiee suit off to former basketball player Joonas Suotamo, but still received a consulting credit for 2017‘s The Last Jedi, coaching Suotamo during filming. He had also put on the Wookiee suit for any number of promotional appearances, playing the character on The Muppet Show and Donny & Marie, as well as the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special, which afforded Chewie a larger role than some of the movies did.

Categories
Crewed Spaceflight New Shepard

Blue Origin NS-11

  • May 2, 2019

Blue Origin NS-11Commercial spaceflight operator Blue Origin, owned by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, launches its eleventh New Shepard flight. The uncrewed (but human-rated) capsule includes 38 experimental payloads, some of them designed by NASA, New Century Technology High School, and MIT’s Media Lab Space Exploration Initiative. As with past missions, both the capsule and its single-stage suborbital booster come in for soft landings near Blue Origin’s Texas launch facility. This is the fifth flight for the third New Shepard reusable capsule, as well as the fifth flight for the third New Shepard reusable booster.

Categories
theLogBook.com Podcasts

Retrogram #7342: Saturday Morning Cartoons, Saturday Night Massacre

  • May 24, 2019

Retrogram 7342theLogBook.com releases the first episode of the Retrogram podcast, hosted by Earl Green, covering the following shows from the week of October 14th, 1973:

  • The Starlost: Children Of Methuselah
  • Star Trek: The Animated Series: The Infinite Vulcan
  • The Six Million Dollar Man: Wine, Women, and War
  • Moonbase 3: View Of A Dead Planet
  • Super Friends: Too Hot To Handle

More about the Retrogram podcast here

Categories
theLogBook.com Podcasts

Retrogram 7409: Houston, We Have Quite A Large Number Of Problems

  • July 19, 2019

RetrogramtheLogBook.com releases the sixth episode of the Retrogram podcast, hosted by Earl Green, covering the following shows from the week of February 24th, 1974:

  • Orson Welles’ Great Mysteries: The Furnished Room
  • The Tomorrow People: The Blue And The Green Episode 4
  • The Six Million Dollar Man: Doomsday And Counting
  • Doctor Who: Death To The Daleks Part 2
  • TV movie: Houston, We’ve Got A Problem

More about the Retrogram podcast here

Categories
Chandrayaan Uncrewed Spaceflight

Chandrayaan-2 mission launched

  • July 22, 2019

Chandrayaan-2ISRO, India’s space agency, launches the Chandrayaan-2 mission to Earth’s moon, consisting of an orbiter and the Vikram/Prgyan lander/rover combination. The robotic vehicles are intended to conduct measurements, both from orbit and on the surface, of possible water ice deposits believed to exist at the lunar south pole. Much like the Beresheet mission launched by Israel earlier in the year, Chandrayaan-2 will employ a series of orbit-raising maneuvers until its apogee is high enough to propel it into lunar orbit with minimum reliance on burning fuel. The landing is expected to take place in September 2019.

Categories
Deaths Doctor Who Matters of Life & Death Television

Terrance Dicks, Doctor Who writer/script editor, dies

  • September 2, 2019

Terrance DicksTerrance Dicks, script editor of Doctor Who from 1968-1974, and writer of many episodes of the show both during and after that time, dies at the age of 84. He first took on Doctor Who script editing duties during the Patrick Troughton years under producer Derrick Sherwin, culminating in taking over as co-writer of an epic ten-part finale for the second Doctor, The War Games, when two other planned scripts fell through on very short notice. In incoming producer Barry Letts and frequent writer Malcolm Hulke, Dicks found a kindred spirits keen to introduce real-world issues into Doctor Who’s storytelling, resulting in what many fans of the original series regard as a golden age for the series. During the break between the 1973 and 1974 seasons, Dicks and Letts collaborated on an original science fiction series, Moonbase 3, which lasted a single season. When Tom Baker took over from Jon Pertwee, Dicks was succeeded by his protege (and frequent Doctor Who writer) Robert Holmes as the script editor, and then wrote numerous stories of his own, including Baker’s debut story, Robot, The Brain Of Morbius, The Horror Of Fang Rock, State Of Decay, and The Five Doctors. After Doctor Who ceased to exist as an active BBC production in the 1990s, Dicks contributed scripts to numerous commercial (but largely fan-made) direct-to-video productions, such as Shakedown, Mindgame, and Mindgame Trilogy. He also wrote for Space: 1999, Big Finish Productions, and the vast majority of Target Books’ voluminous output of Doctor Who novelizations in the 1970s and ’80s, based upon both his own scripts and those of other scriptwriters, which may ironically be the work for which he is ultimately best known.