Word: sci-fi
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Other writers may sit white-knuckled at their desks, grinding out a few pages a day, a book every couple of years. Not Isaac Asimov. Back in 1938, the teenage author sold his first tale to Amazing Stories, a science-fiction magazine. Encouraged, he branched out from sci-fi to fields as varied as his interests: literary criticism, psychology, mathematics, mystery, poetry, humor, American history. Simenon may have written more thrillers, Chesterton more poetry and philosophy, Pulp Romance Writer Barbara Cartland more novels. But no single author has ever written more books about more subjects than Isaac Asimov...
...film's story, once it can be deciphered, is even more tired than its ideas. Quintet is built around a vintage sci-fi gambit that only a few years ago turned up in an execrable action movie, Roller ball. Here again, we are in the midst of a futuristic society that worships a deadly game with indecipherable rules. Quintet appears to be a shotgun marriage between backgammon and Russian roulette. The hero (Paul Newman instead of James Caan) is trying to beat the game before he becomes its bloodied victim. Yet the plot is so familiar that the audience...
...happily remembered old movie. There is an irresistible urge to improve it, expand it, stamp it with the personalities of the remakers. So it is with the new, all-new version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, which was just fine, thank you, as a cheap, neat, slightly loony sci-fi horror picture...
Then Palmer introduced a second male, and, as he had expected, an entomological display of macho erupted. Battling to assert their supremacy and win a female, the two little beasts went at each, other like monsters in a Japanese sci-fi flick, pushing and shoving each other with their horns. If one beetle seemed to be getting the upper hand, the other often slumped on its side, blocking the first beetle's path. The more aggressive beetle would then use his horns as levers in an attempt to dislodge his opponent. Sometimes the defender flipped over on his back...
Mork & Mindy (Thursday, ABC, 8 p.m. E.D.T.). Were it not for one inspired stroke of casting, this sci-fi sitcom would be indistinguishable from the rest of the kiddies' drivel aired by ABC at 8 each night. Robin Williams, a new young comic, sends Mork & Mindy into hyperspace. The show casts him in the role of Mork, a friendly alien who settles in Boulder, Colo., with Earthling Mindy (Pam Dawber), after leaving the planet Ork. It's a premise more appropriate to Saturday morning TV than prime time, but Williams transforms trivia into a tour de force...