The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #1: AT&T caves on FaceTime

Speaking of American Telephone and Telegraph, the company rounds out the 2012 list with its early December decision to cave (at least in part) on its block of FaceTime use for its cell subscribers. FaceTime is an Apple app that allows users to video chat between Apple devices (especially iPhones). Neither Sprint nor Verizon had trouble with the app, but AT&T blocked it based on the claim that users would occupy too much bandwidth.

The claim was technically questionable. Worse, the decision was barred by the FCC’s net neutrality regulations. Though a service provider could conceivably charge users extra for excessive use, it can’t block software entirely. Only Ma Bell knows for sure whether the decision was prompted by potential legal woes or the possibility of losing customers to less assholish competitors.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #2: Fiberhoods

In early September Google set its “fiberhoods,” the neighborhoods in KCK and KCMO that will get hooked up to the new fiber optic network. The run-up to the official announcement was exciting stuff, as neighborhoods competed first to get enough pre-commitments to meet the company’s minimums and then to get enough pre-commitments for a prime spot on the installation timetable.

The run-up was also disturbing stuff. The map on the Missouri side revealed a sharp division between the gonna-get-its and not-going-to-get-its, a literal “digital divide” running right down Troost. Faced with criticism about who would get connected and who wouldn’t, Google extended its upcoming reach to neighborhoods that likely would not have qualified on their own. That partially resolved the backbone issue, but it should keep us all mindful of the social, cultural and economic differences between those who can consume the most up-to-date digital media and those who can’t.

On the plus side, at least I now have a general idea of when I’m finally at long last going to be able to fire AT&T.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #3: The Olympics

The non-election half of the quadrennial Landru-commands-it festival of media mania is of course the Olympics. NBC hit a down note when it ran an ad with a gymnastics-performing monkey right after Gabby Douglas won gold, but otherwise we all had fun watching talented athletes from many countries competing at the top of their games.

Oh, wait. No we didn’t. Plug pullers like me got to see little or nothing of the Olympics. Even the stupid ad with Her Royal Majesty and James Bond failed to play properly, crapping out in the middle and leaving me to wonder why Betty Battenberg, Daniel Craig and a gaggle of corgis walking down a hallway was such a big deal.

I already griped about this when it happened, so at this happy time of year I’m prepared to let the matter rest. However, when the festivities move to Sochi in 2014, I’m going to be quite put out if Comcast’s atavistic self interest deprives me of my beloved biathlon coverage.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #4: Gangnam Style

 This video came out in July. By my presentation in November, it was the number two video in YouTube history, rapidly gaining on Justin Bieber. As of this writing, it’s now number one by a substantial margin and likely to become the first video in YouTube history to get more than a billion views.

Its immense popularity has a few lessons to teach us about media in the 21st century. First, it reminds us that our media marketplace is global. One of the few things the United States exports more than imports is media products. And here we have a piece of K-pop fluff surpassing sophisticated efforts from big record companies.

The source is also significant. South Korea tends to live in the giant media shadows of Japan and China, so PSY’s success at least got the world to recognize that Korea exists. A big part of the video’s popularity comes from viewers throughout East Asia.

Except Japan, where it seems to be more of a “meh.” Anti-Korean racism aside, the Japanese may be forgiven for their luke-warm reaction to the whole “Gangnam Style” thing. After all, Japan has been producing weird goofiness like this for decades. PSY’s magnum opus (op-op-op-op-oppa Gangnam style! damn this thing gets stuck in my head) isn’t particularly different from literally thousands of Japanese animations, music videos and other pop culture offerings.

And that’s the real million-dollar question: what makes a video that isn’t really much different from a lot of other videos suddenly catch on and “go viral”? This drives Big Media nuts. In most other realms, they’ve got success formulas all worked out. They know what makes a blockbuster movie turn a huge profit. They know which singers are going to sell tracks and get airplay. They know what works and what doesn’t in just about every medium. Sure, sometimes they guess wrong. But they’re right often enough to maintain their considerable profit margins.

But not with stuff like this. There’s no apparent formula for raising a PSY out of peninsular obscurity and selling his performance to hundreds of millions of people. This lack of predictability makes web-based media one of the most interesting things going on now and an area to watch closely in the future.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #5: Penn sues The Star

Last year The Star fired Steve Penn, a columnist for the metro section. Penn had worked for the newspaper for more than 30 years, which made the termination seem odd at best. However, the editors’ allegations were damning: they said Penn had been copying sentences and paragraphs from press releases, pasting them into his stories and passing them off as his own work.

News folk have always had an uneasy relationship with press releases. In an ideal world, a reporter would start with a press release from an outside source (company, government agency, charity, etc.) and – convinced of the story’s newsworthiness – use it as a springboard to go out and find her own facts and quotes. Someone lazier – or more pressed for time, if we want to give this practice a positive spin – might use quotes directly from a press release, provided of course that the source was clearly identified in the story.

Back in my days working PR, I heard stories about newspaper folk doing what Penn did. In fact, I heard about some reporters who copied entire releases, stuck their bylines on them and passed the whole thing off as their work. At least Penn didn’t go that far. Still, what he did was bad enough, a clear violation of the ethics we all learned in J-school.

If the firing had been the end of the story, it would at best have been one of the Eight Most “That’s Just Sad” Media Moments of 2011. But then Penn put the mess on this list by filing a wrongful termination suit in June. His most disturbing allegation was that he shouldn’t have been fired for plagiarism because what he did was common practice at The Star and in the newspaper industry.

Though I hate to see a big media company get away with firing someone who worked for it for decades, I hope he loses his suit (or at least wins it on grounds other than his “common practice” argument). I’d really hate to see him successfully prove that news writers everywhere are parroting corporate spin rather than going out and gathering the news. As if the newspaper industry isn’t already beset by enough trouble. The last thing it needs right now is erosion of confidence from the few readers it has left.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #6: Political ad files on the Internet

Once every four years we can all count on two big media moments: the Olympics and the election. On the latter front, most of the public’s attention focuses on attack ads. “They’re awful. Everyone hates them. Why do the candidates even run them? Still, what are ya gonna do?” Collective shoulder shrug.

But one of the biggest moments on the political ad front went largely unnoticed, taking place months before the non-stop onslaught got underway. In April the FCC ordered broadcasters to make their political advertising files available online.

By virtue of their use of the public airwaves, broadcasters are subject to a lengthy list of regulations that don’t apply to other media. In the realm of political advertising, broadcasters are required to accept ads from candidates and run them at the lowest rate available. Stations must keep records of all such ads and make the records available for public inspection. The new twist this year was the requirement that the records be made available via the Internet.

The National Association of Broadcasters challenged the change in court, but the suit went nowhere. Now anyone can go to the FCC’s web site and find out exactly how much each campaign is paying each TV station. Of course a lot of advertising – such as ads from pressure groups – isn’t subject to the rules. But at least now it’s possible to track at least some of the doings on the airwaves without a trek to broadcasters’ offices.

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #7: The death of SOPA

Congress kicked off 2012 with a couple of eerie efforts to smother free speech on the Internet. The version in the House was called the Stop Online Piracy Act, and the Senate’s was the Protect Intellectual Property Act. Of course the two versions differed in some details, but the main idea was the same: extend copyright “protection” well beyond the already-generous boundaries established by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (a.k.a. The Mickey Mouse Protection Act) more than a decade ago.

The Mickey Mouse law was bad enough, but this pair were plain crazy. They would have introduced the principle of “guilty by accusation,” allowing big media companies to run crying to the federal government and get entire sites shut down based on a simple claim of copyright violation. The edges of the law’s protection are fuzzy enough – particularly in the realm of the fair use exception – to require proper adjudication, not censorship based on mere suspicion.

But more interesting than the proposals themselves was the reaction to them. Big Media (with Disney and Time Warner in the lead) lobbied hard, but they found themselves up against Big Internet (particularly Google). And worse, they faced a sudden groundswell of grassroots opposition from Internet users. After a 24-hour protest that blacked out Wikipedia and several other popular sites, legislators turned tail and removed the bills from consideration.

That alone made it a big moment. How often do you see Congress pay attention to anyone other than lobbyists?

The Eight Biggest Media Moments of 2012 – #8: The Media Survival Guide

Last month I did an Academic Symposium at the college where I work. The subject was the eight biggest media moments of 2012, and my goal was to cover things that might have gone unnoticed by people who don’t follow the media for a living. Many of the things the communications industry gets up to behind the scenes have a strong influence on our daily lives as consumers. I decided to do the events in chronological order, which I admit led me to lead off with the most self-serving item on the list.

In January 8sails officially released the Media Survival Guide. I wrote the bulk of the text while on sabbatical in the fall of 2011, and in the spring the guide underwent a largely successful “beta test.” In the summer I added a downloadable PDF and a Kindle edition. In the future I hope to release it as an iBook and on the web in a format customized for mobile devices.

Based on the “bite-sized learning” model, the guide is designed for easy reading in smaller chunks, customized for students who need to study in short bursts between other activities (such as during a break at work). If a particular topic happens to pique the reader’s interest, she can delve further by exploring the links at the bottom of each page.

Amazon makes me charge 99 cents for the Kindle version, but everything else is available free of charge, a considerable savings over the $80 or so the textbook publisher charged for the textbook I used to use for my Intro to Mass Comm class. And that’s the real importance here. In the old publishing world, creating a textbook was a costly proposition requiring students to pay the substantial costs of production. Now content is key and distribution is free (or near enough to free that publication costs don’t have to be passed along to those least able to pay them).

I’m not ready to proclaim “behold the future of textbook publishing” just yet. Too many people (professors and publishers alike) are still making too much money for this new approach to learning to instantly catch on. But at least now such a thing is possible.

My eight favorite Thanksgiving movies

Thanksgiving lacks movies. Halloween? Plenty. Christmas? Oh please. But the holiday in between doesn’t have a clear cinema tradition other than the common practice of fleeing family gatherings for the relative peace of the movie theater. So let’s remedy this injustice. The holiday is about three things: gratitude, togetherness and eating. So at this festive time of year let’s get together and be grateful for movies about eating.

Specifically, movies about people eating people. I’m not trying to do the whole vegetarian “imagine the turkey was you” thing (though it is at least something to think about). It’s just that movies about cannibals tend to be more fun than movies about gourmets. To keep things simple, this list excludes people-eating zombies (after all, as Dr. Millard Rausch pointed out in Dawn of the Dead, “They don’t eat each other”). I don’t care for Italian shock movies from the 1970s, so the list also omits that particular sub-set of the cannibal sub-genre.

Still, that leaves us with a lot of movies to pick from. Especially these eight:

Texas Chainsaw Massacre – Rough as it is, this is still the ultimate “country folk will eat you” picture. Loosely based on the crimes of Wisconsin cannibal Ed Gein, this movie will leave you with at least a scrap of doubt the next time you eat a hot dog, sausage or any other kind of mystery meat.

Something from the Ed Gein list – Speaking of the Butcher of Plainfield, Gein has served as the inspiration for many a movie, some better than others. In keeping with the theme, I suggest one of the productions that sticks closer to the true story (Deranged or Ed Gein) rather than the looser, classier adaptations (Psycho and Silence of the Lambs).

The Hills Have Eyes – The Web tells me someone made a movie directly based on the exploits of Sawney Beane and his cave-dwelling, cannibal family. However, IMDb doesn’t have a listing for it, which suggests that it hasn’t been released yet. While we’re waiting, we’ll just have to be content with The Hills Have Eyes, a Beane-inspired desert romp directed by Wes Craven.

Motel Hell – It does indeed take all kinds of critters to make Farmer Vincent’s fritters. You’ll be a huge hit at the family dinner table if you volunteer to say grace and then offer up “meat’s meat and a man's gotta eat!”

Parents – Most of the rest of the movies on this list assume that cannibalism is something you encounter only if you’re foolish enough to venture outside the safety of the suburbs. This entry brings the threat right into the wholesome family kitchen. And of course Thanksgiving leftovers can’t help but bring one mindful of the “leftovers to be” line from this movie.

Sweeney Todd – I didn’t want to go the whole list without one big budget production. And what would the holidays be like without musicals? Needless to say, the list of big-budget musicals about cannibalism is fairly short.

Ravenous – In honor of the Thanksgiving myth about the Wampanoag generously (if foolishly) sharing food with the Pilgrims, the last two entries feature the Wendigo. According to Algonquian legend, anyone who eats human flesh risks becoming possessed by an evil spirit that brings with it a horrible hunger that can never be satisfied. This picture pits the monster against a small band of soldiers on the 19th century frontier.

“Skin and Bones” – If you’re watching this whole set as a Thanksgiving Day marathon, then by now you’re probably ready for something shorter and lighter. This episode from Fear Itself meets the short requirement, but it’s by far the creepiest entry on the list.

My eight favorite Martin Luther King Day movies

We just managed to survive a month largely dedicated to one specific holiday. Every year Hollywood cranks out still more Christmas-themed movies, further adding to the hype and hysteria. Nobody in their right mind wants to see Martin Luther King Day receive similar treatment.

For starters, by now we’re all sick of holiday craziness. One of the beauties of MLK Day is that it automatically comes with built-in dignity, a welcome antidote to the month of December. Further, many suggest that we treat King’s celebration as a “day on” rather than a day off. The idea is to get out into the community and do something good for someone rather than sitting around the house watching holiday-themed movies.

However, there are at least a handful of films out there that celebrate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dedication to social justice, racial equality and nonviolence. Enough at least to allow you to devote some TV time to something more than mindless entertainment.

In a way this list wrote itself after I set one simple standard: each movie had to be primarily about somebody who wasn’t white. It’s amazing how frequently movies about civil rights struggles turn out to be about a white person’s experience of the problem. Cry Freedom and Mississippi Burning come immediately to mind. Fortunately, I was able to come up with eight exceptions (even if half the pictures on the list were directed by Spike Lee).


Gandhi – Both Dr. King and this movie were inspired by Mohandas Gandhi’s nonviolent revolution in India. Ben Kingsley does a great job in the title role, helping audiences truly appreciate the man and his importance not only in his homeland but in the world as a whole.

Malcolm X – Dr. King and Malcolm X are often inaccurately treated as the carrot and the stick of the civil rights movement. And of course as the stick part of the equation Malcolm X often gets cast as a white-people-hating demon. This movie does an outstanding job of considering its subject as a multi-dimensional person rather than a cardboard boogeyman. What a shame nobody (to my knowledge) ever made a movie this good about Dr. King.

Catch a Fire – For the next three entries we cross the Atlantic to Africa, where many places have racial problems that make America’s still pretty bad situation look like a birthday present. This movie about an anti-Apartheid rebel does an excellent job of examining not only institutionalized racism but also the root causes of violence and the true value of pacifism.

Hotel Rwanda – And then sometimes the violence gets completely out of control. How can anyone keep a peaceful spirit in the middle of a world given over to mass slaughter? This tale of a hotel manager trying to rescue people from genocide demonstrates the value of nonviolence even in the most extreme conditions.

Amandla! A Revolution in Four Part Harmony – This documentary about protest music in South Africa is an excellent portrait of a brutally oppressed people finding subtle ways to fight back. Though I don’t think Dr. King would have thought much about the violent content of some of the lyrics, at least singing about violence is a step removed from actually committing it.

When the Levees Broke – Back home now. In the United States we have a genuinely astounding ability to pretend that problems aren’t actually happening. This epic documentary about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina reminds us that no matter how hard we try to convince ourselves that we’ve erased race and class lines (or at least rendered them irrelevant), they’re still very real and have very real consequences.

Bamboozled – The mainstream media really don’t take criticism well, not even when they richly deserve it. Thus it came as no surprise when this movie got buried in initial release (I’d never even heard of it until I happened to notice the disc in the video store). The production paints with a broad brush, satirizing racial ignorance by suggesting that a TV show designed to be as racist as possible could turn out to be a smash hit. Oh to live in a world where such a thing seemed less possible.

Do the Right Thing – And finally, here’s the “if you see only one” moment. More than two decades have passed since this movie’s theatrical release, and in that time the film industry (even Lee himself) has seldom if ever had anything this honest to say about the uncomfortable subject of race.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Nyan Cat

And Number One: Nyan Cat!

A world where a kitten/poptart hybrid can fly through outer space shooting rainbows behind it while a relentless techno-pop repetition of the Japanese version of “meow” plays in the background can’t possibly be all bad.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Moneyball

Number two: Moneyball

Rare indeed is the movie that earns four stars upon first viewing in a theater, at least in part because when the 8sails staff ventures into a theater it’s usually in search of some escapist trash rather than a genuinely good movie. Moneyball was a rare exception, not only to the “movies in theaters are bad” rule but also the “baseball movies tend to not ‘get’ baseball” rule. I went in skeptical but came out impressed, a truly noteworthy moment.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Everybody Poops

Number three: Everybody Poops

I’m genuinely in awe of the folks at Bad Lip Reading. They go over footage – most often from music videos and political ads – and figure out what other words might sync up perfectly with the onscreen mouth movements. Often the result is pure gibberish (which in the case of the Michelle Bachman video wasn’t all that big a departure). They’re all funny, but the one that had me literally in tears was a bizarre hybrid of the basic thesis from Taro Gomi’s popular children’s book synced up with the Black Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” video.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Honey Badger

Number four: The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

Take footage from a wildlife show about our friend the honey badger. Add some fairly random narration by some guy named Randall, and suddenly it’s a minor-league culturalphenomenon. A friend even found a honey badger T-shirt at Wal-Mart (the “Honey Badger don’t care” version rather than “Honey Badger don’t give a shit,” naturally).

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Guy on a Buffalo

Number five: Guy on a Buffalo

One of the big themes of Media 2011 was “repurposing” – taking something somebody else already did and messing with it until it turns into something new. A lot of people suck at this, but not The Possum Posse. These guys found some crazy, copyright-expired movie about a frontiersman who rides around the Wild West on the back of a hapless buffalo. Cutting it way down and putting it to music renders it absolutely hilarious.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - This blog

Number six: This blog

Because a blog this fabulous can’t go unnoted. Seriously, though, this was the first actual “blog” blog we tried, and at this point I’d describe it as reasonably successful. The goal for 2012 is to get more content in here.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Science book

Number seven: The Gary Busey science book

If the one-day fudge on the last one was a “bit of a cheat,” this one’s massive malfeasance. This article originally appeared on Cracked.com nine months before 2011 got underway. But I didn’t run across it until earlier this year. And it’s one of the funniest things I’ve ever read, well worth bending the rules to call it to your attention.

The eight best media moments of 2011 - Deadwood

In years past I’ve written up the eight best media moments of the past year as a Hoffman Lens column. But the format seems to fit well here. Plus this way I can draw it out for eight days and finish it on New Years Eve.

Without further ado:

Number eight: Deadwood on Blu-ray

Technically this one’s a bit of a cheat, because the Blu-ray box set of all three seasons was issued on Dec. 31, 2010. But we didn’t get it until months later, and we didn’t start watching it until December. Oh that we could have started earlier. The image quality is truly breathtaking, making the visuals a worthy counterpart to the writing and the acting. The experience left me longing to be back in a cabin in the Black Hills again (not that I wasn’t longing for that anyway).

My eight favorite robots

One of the most startling discoveries I made as a kid was that robots weren’t a 20th century invention. I’d assumed that the concept of a mechanical person would depend so heavily on electronics and other modern marvels that previous ages wouldn’t even have dreamed of such a thing.

But when I started reading Greek mythology, I found this wasn’t so. Thousands of years before such a thing would have been practically possible, spinners of myth were pondering the idea of building people out of metal.

Of course this discussion could rapidly devolve into hair-splitting about what can and can’t be considered a robot. Indeed, the term itself comes from a play about artificially created but non-mechanical workers, creatures that wouldn’t fit the image that the word now brings most readily to mind. Though the “replicants” of Blade Runner almost made the list, the robots here are all of the more standard mechanical ilk.

 

Robby – If you could have only one robot, Robby would be the guy. Living on a planet – even a forbidden one – with a deadly supernatural force is a small price to pay for owning a mechanical servant who can do most anything from cooking dinner to manufacturing diamonds in his spare time. Sure, his tone is a little smart-alecky at times. But that just gives him personality. He also deserves to top the list because he was the first big robot success story, a character that paved the way for cinema automatons everywhere.

C3PO – Sure, R2D2 is more popular. I can see why. Even a three-legged trashcan that can’t speak in anything but squeaks and beeps is still more likely to win the hearts and minds of moviegoers than a prissy android perpetually locked in fret mode. But hey, when Star Wars first hit theaters I was 11 and tended to fret too much myself. So it seemed to me like “goldenrod” was making good points about not getting into trouble. Besides, he looked more interesting than any of the other robots in the movie.

Huey, Dewey and Louie – This trio of walking boxes helped Bruce Dern tend to the last remaining fragments of wildlife in Silent Running. The movie overall is depressing and dumb (hence no review), but the robots in it are an odd combination of utilitarian and cute. It takes a little doing to give individual personalities to cubes with legs, but they manage to make it work.

The Terminator – I think we all knew Arnold Schwarzenegger would look like this if he ever peeled off his rubbery hide. And that’s when the Terminator gets really impressive. He’s okay when he can still pass for human, but when he gets stripped down to that shiny chrome skeleton, now that’s a scary robot. The scene in number one when the monster is chasing our heroes down a long, dark hallway is the stuff nightmares are made of.

Gort – On the surface, Klaatu’s sidekick from The Day the Earth Stood Still doesn’t seem to have much to him. He doesn’t talk. He doesn’t water flowers or fix dinner. But for silent menace he can’t be beat. His design is particularly brilliant, his smooth, deco surfaces emphasizing just how attack-proof he is. I’d still rather have Robby in the kitchen, but Gort would be my choice for sentry to stand next to my cars while I’m asleep.

The Runaway spiders – I’m a big fan of the BEAM approach to robotics. The idea here is that it makes more sense to create lots of little, cheap robots for specific tasks than it does to make big, expensive, multi-purpose androids. Needless to say, such personality-free gizmos aren’t common in movies, where the need is greater for robots that can be characters that are voiced by actors. But in Runaway, the bad guy uses some BEAM-ish spiders to do his evil bidding. The plot even points out the big advantage to the BEAM scheme: a ton of tiny terrors is harder to evade than a single, human-sized opponent.

The Minoton – I’m surprised (and a little disappointed) that Ray Harryhausen never did more with robots. His Dynamation effects techniques were particularly well suited to mechanical creatures. But though he did some robot-like creatures from time to time – Talos in Jason and the Argonauts and the Kali statue in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad – the only real robot he ever did was the Minoton from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger. It’s sadly under-utilized; a mechanical minotaur could have been a kick-ass bad guy rather than an elaborate outboard motor. But the design is still hard to beat. And true geek confession: I have models of all three of these aforementioned creatures sitting on a shelf above my desk.

Evil Maria – The robot in Metropolis is the ultimate in cinema injustice. She’s one of the first mechanical people ever to grace the silver screen, and her design set the bar impossibly high for every movie robot that followed. Further, the scene in which she’s transformed into a doppelganger of the heroine still impresses even in an age of computer effects a million times more sophisticated than what Fritz Lang had at his disposal in the 1920s. The rest of the movie is great as well, but I could sit through nothing but the robot sequences and still come away happy in the end.

My eight favorite aliens

To the question “Are we alone in the universe?” science fiction offers up a resounding “no.” The genre has served up innumerable inhabitants of countless worlds, everything from colossal beasts to dangerous microbes.

With so many to choose from, selecting eight was no easy task. I tried for a mix of different kinds of aliens, from the nearly human to the not-at-all. I also tried to choose creatures from movies that were worth watching (though in a couple of cases I had to bend that criterion at least a little).

And still the set suffers from weak spots. For example, some of the best aliens are the ones who come in peace to teach us something valuable about the universe and about ourselves. However, most of the visitors on this list are the other kind, the sort that seeks to subdue, study or just plain old eat us.

A quick note on the politics of the list: I’d made my choices and written most of the descriptions when I noticed that seven of the eight aliens were uninvited guests on Earth. This naturally raises questions about the parallels between movie xenophobia and real questions about undocumented immigrants, the folks who used to be called “illegal aliens.”

Space creatures have – for good or ill – occasionally stood in for marginalized members of society. They’ve also played other allegorical roles; for example, in the 1950s they frequently served as the Red Menace. More often, however, they’re intended to be exactly what they are: something more powerful than us with which we must contend or at least interact.

In any event, the closest any of the aliens on this list come to anything politically incorrect would be the immigrant street crime elements of Predator 2 (which didn’t actually make the list, though it has a class of creature in common with one of the following eight).

 

Aliens – It isn’t every species that can presume to go by the generic “Aliens.” But these bugs pull it off nicely. It helps that an artist – and a weird one at that – designed them. Plus they’re four aliens in one: the face hugger, the chest burster, the drone and the queen. After the second movie the series loses me a bit, but even in the bad ones the aliens still kick butt (indeed, the swimming alien was the highlight of number four).

Predator – If we’re going to include Aliens, then we’re also going to have to toss in their buddies the Predators. While most of Earth’s guests from outer space either come in peace or want to take over, all these guys want to do is get a little hunting in. I’ve seen these movies dozens of times (except for number three, for which I didn’t particularly care), and I still can’t quite decide if Stan Winston’s design of the creatures’ faces – the ultimate vagina dentata – is a “oh, cool!” or “ew, nasty!” moment. Still, I do love their M.O.

The Mutant from Metaluna – Most of the aliens in This Island Earth look just like we do (except they have bigger foreheads). But even though they show up claiming to need our help to save their planet, they turn out to have a scary-looking henchman. This “mutant” is the archetypal Bug-Eyed Monster with its huge, brain-looking head, fearsome claws and shiny space suit.

Martians – Of our three closest constant neighbors in the solar system, Mars seems to be the most constant source of alien invaders. At one point we figured we’d find people on the Moon when we got there, but they seldom seemed to have much interest in making a call on us. And of course Venus filled the heads of unimaginative screenwriters with visions of Zsa Zsa Gabor in an outlandish outfit that no inhabitant of a man-free world would ever put on. But Mars, ah, there be monsters. And they’re none too shy about engaging in a little interplanetary imperialism, either. Of all the denizens of the Red Planet, my favorite are the obnoxious little creeps from Tim Burton’s Mars Attacks. They indulge in just about every evil alien cliché in the book.

The Blob – One of the most unfortunate tendencies of timid filmmakers is the inclination to anthropomorphize visitors from outer space. In a universe of nearly limitless possibility, I find myself consistently disappointed when the aliens turn out to be guys with rubber appliances glued to their foreheads. Thus anyone with the guts to break out of this mold commands at least a little respect. I concede that this movie suffers in the execution, turning into a story that seldom rises above Rebel Without a Cause versus A Giant Wad of Red Jell-o. Nonetheless, it musters a good-sized dose of creepiness solely from the extra-alien nature of the alien menace.

The body snatchers – On the other hand, alien invaders can also maximize their scariness by looking exactly like us. Indeed, the main awfulness of the body snatching menace is that they want to take our places and become us (or at least a weird simulation of us). Though this theme has been explored with varying degrees of success (and in the name of different psychological and political agendas) over the years, it always inspires a shudder or two.

It – Now consider the opposite thesis. The aliens in It Came from Outer Space look nothing like us, and as nonhumans they’re inherently to be feared. But then it turns out that the few humans who are willing to overcome their instincts and extend a little trust turn out to be correct about the nature of the visitors. Because all the other aliens on this list are out to do us harm, I wanted to include at least one intelligent example of the other possibility.

The Thing – This one is every imaginable form of alien menace rolled into one. It can be a ravening monster or look exactly like us. It can infect us from within before we even know what’s happening (not unlike The Andromeda Strain, a different kind of alien that nearly made this list). It’s a BEM, a body snatcher and an advanced case of AIDS. And it doesn’t exactly hurt that the movie going on around it is pretty good as well.