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Gadget, needing a little help around the lab, built her own double as an assistant. By and large identical to the original except for her camera lens-like eyes, as well as goggles that have microscopic, infra-red and other lenses.
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I don't think there was a problem ... I was just making a joke. If she made robot imitations of all the RR, they would be sort of like that old comic book superhero team, "The Metal Men." Well, except the MM were all metal and didn't wear furs or clothes, and each was a different metal like iron or gold. But they each looked different from each other and had their own personalities. Mercury was mercurial. Iron was strong. Gold was noble. Tin was humble. Platinum, a.k.a. "Tina" was a knockout! She was the only female member. Anyway, I thought it was funny to compare the idea of one with the other.
1975 was an era in which relations between the USSR and the USA were beginning to defrost. Both countries cooperated in space for the first time with a joint Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1972, I think, but maybe later. 1968, though, we expected you to launch an all-out nuclear attack on the Western World any minute ... well, the American government said so. I'm not sure how seriously we took that bullshit in Canada, where we never pitted ourselves against Communism with the religious fervor that they did in the US. So while we thought the danger of war was real, we were half convinced the Soviets would blow up the US while sparing Canada. (After all ... we never did anything to Russia!) 1968 was not long after Kruschev. I still remember him banging his shoe in the UN and telling the media "We will bury you!" Strangely, he was a sort of likable character. Make no mistake, he was a monster with vast oceans of blood on his hands from WWII and the early Cold War, but he was colourful and didn't actually seem to wish the West any harm. He even liked Disneyland. Brezhnev, on the other hand, was dull and gloomy, and never said if he wanted to see Disneyland. Hard to like. 1967 was the year that the World's Fair was held in Montreal. I attended Expo 67 and viewed the Soviet pavillion and all its space vehicle exhibits. I bought some tiny little brass 1 kopeck coins from a gum machine that sold all sorts of international money -- the first Soviet money I ever saw. You never saw it in coin stores before then. I have a ton of Russian money today -- all the way back to Peter the Great! And some modern post-Soviet coins too. I've some Soviet era paper bills as well.
I had a dream. The dream of peace in the world. The dream of the absence of the rich and the poor. The dream of a spaceship that will travel to distant stars. On science, for which there are no barriers. The fact that every day will be better than the last. It hurts when the dream collapses. It hurts when all fought so hard with what fills the gray muddy slush every day. I hold in my heart fragments of dreams. I look into the past and see the dirt. And was the image of the light, which may be in the world. Apparently, with all the correct ideas of communism - to implement it are not suitable people.Sorry - I'm human. But every time I think about money, I see advertising, eat at McDonald's, broken dreams pain felt in my heart. I still believe that capitalism - a bad thing. And the news on TV only confirm my opinion. Only when the Soviet Union - it was foreign news, but now things are happening around the world.
Stalin could keep everything in his hands, but he died. And Khrushchev, a goat corn, was a liar, which is created from Stalin's bloody tyrant and scared them around. Brezhnev was just the same incarnation of the cult of personality, which is so exposed Khrushchev. Star Hero of the Soviet Union - a hefty slap in the face to those who really deserve this award.
Each chairman was getting worse. And the accumulated effects of the information war waged by the United States. And when under Gorbachev elite youth thought of jeans and praised all overseas - the USSR collapsed. I can understand the U.S. and can not understand the traitors. I was born in a country that no longer exists. My perception is poisoned, my past slandered.
I found a solution. Invent worlds and live in them. I have no interest in what abyss falls humanity, I just hope to die before the final chord of this fall. I hope to be born in nov on a world that has seen my imagination.
I do not know. Maybe I should not tell about all this.
Stalin could keep everything in his hands, but he died. And Khrushchev, a goat corn, was a liar, which is created from Stalin's bloody tyrant and scared them around. Brezhnev was just the same incarnation of the cult of personality, which is so exposed Khrushchev. Star Hero of the Soviet Union - a hefty slap in the face to those who really deserve this award.
Each chairman was getting worse. And the accumulated effects of the information war waged by the United States. And when under Gorbachev elite youth thought of jeans and praised all overseas - the USSR collapsed. I can understand the U.S. and can not understand the traitors. I was born in a country that no longer exists. My perception is poisoned, my past slandered.
I found a solution. Invent worlds and live in them. I have no interest in what abyss falls humanity, I just hope to die before the final chord of this fall. I hope to be born in nov on a world that has seen my imagination.
I do not know. Maybe I should not tell about all this.
As in the old Chinese curse, you've lived in interesting times.
I don't believe Karl Marx knew what he was talking about -- he had a classical education that was heavy in philosophy (including theology), history (that was mainly hero worship and conflict between states), Latin, and other old-fashioned concept that had fallen behind the scientific advances of the late 19th. century. He brings to the science of economics a battery of medieval values that show Marx to be utterly caught up in the logic system of the Middle Age. He is incapable of seeing that management brings value to a product, for instance, and like a 14th. century monk categorizes anyone but a laborer as a parasite. Strangely, for a man who supposedly championed the common working man, he couldn't stand to have them around him, and protested their inclusion in early communist meetings.\
Where communism, as such, fails is first its unsophisticated view of value -- ie: value = labour. But also because it copies the autocractic model of rule that was common in Eastern Europe in Marx's time. Communist governments were supposed to magically embody the wishes and values of the common man, but had no mechanisms to allow the common man to express his views. He could belong to the local party and support communist ideology, but that was all. Anything else was prohibted. As such, communist governments were beyond criticism, could not be held accountable for mistakes, were defined as being popular even carrying out highly unpopular policies, and could not be changed for any other party or set of policies. Inevitably, the party being the govermnment made it an uncontested source of power, and become corrupted. Of course, with a lack of enforceable guarantees of citizen rights and protections, the part was government for, by and of the party. (Misquoting Abraham Lincoln, "government for the people, of the people and by the people." It was a recipe for abuse and dictatroship, in other words.
Capitalism is a much misused word -- it doesn't really mean free enterprise, because the existence of huge corporations, business subsidies and government contracts worth billions, pretty much gives an overwhelming advantage to the most powerful interests. Small businesses have a hard time surviving in that environment. Furthermore, "capitalism" in the US seems to be mainly about speculation in investment, and trading money back and forth. Which is why business in the US is "hollowed out." The neocons believed there was more money to be made in buying and selling stock than in building cars or making steel, so let all those enterprises migrate to Asia or Europe. Now what America does best is buy cheap goods from Thailand or China, re-brand it with a familiar American name, and retail it. If the course the American's have steered in the last 40 years is capitalism, I wouldn't want anything to do with it, either.
The bottom line is that I believe in results. On the whole, I'm an old-fashioned Liberal that believes government shouldn't interfere more than necessary, should never be partial t one interest over any other, and ought to exercise leadership where it is clearly to the advantage of the country. For instance, if there is not enough air travel for more than one airline, you wouldn't want it to have a monopoly, and charge high fares for poor service, so a national airline would make perfect sense. In a large country like the US, there is room for competition and competition would probably serve the public better than a state operated airline. As circumstances are not alike, so solutions shouldn't be alike. Some business opportunities are best left to private interest, but some may take more capital than any company is likely to be willing to invest in -- building railway tracks from the Canadian Maritimes to British Columbia on the west coast, for instance. So the Canadian government created the Canadian Pacific Railroad and raised the money trough general tax revenues. But that's no reason for the govenment to monopolize the manufacture of shoes, bicycles or kitchenware, say.
We see a perfect justification for this philosophy in Canada's health care system, which resembles that in most Western European nations. It looks after most people adequately, for a manageable cost. In the US, on the other hand, they had a system of private health care that demonstrated that this was not an area where competition or the profit seeking motive worked for the benefit of people who needed health care. Americans paid far more than anyone for their doctors, medication and hospital stays ... so much so that many Americans got little or no health care at all. They have improved on the old system a little -- but Obamacare still leaves the private hospitals and insurance carriers in charge, so everything is still outrageously expensive. In effect, the new law makes buying insurance mandatory -- a gift to the industry! If you can't afford the rates, then the state pays for it. But it's still the insurance company that says what it will charge, unlike with true socialized medicine, where the state sets the rates, collects the paycheck deductions and pays the doctors and hospitals directly. In the long run, I don't think the American compromise will work.
To put it simply, I think what I am is a Social Democrat -- I believe in mixed economies driven by results and not ideology. Being Human is no simple thing, in which black and white answers are always the right ones. We are neither cogs in the machinery, interchangeable and without distinction from one to the other, the way Marx saw Man, nor are we islands unto ourselves, each a Master of his own destiny and without obligations to other human beings the way Ayn Rand saw us. (She also saw most Humans as failing in this description, and deserving humble, dependent existences just like the peasants she rememberd from pre-revolution Russia.)
I don't believe Karl Marx knew what he was talking about -- he had a classical education that was heavy in philosophy (including theology), history (that was mainly hero worship and conflict between states), Latin, and other old-fashioned concept that had fallen behind the scientific advances of the late 19th. century. He brings to the science of economics a battery of medieval values that show Marx to be utterly caught up in the logic system of the Middle Age. He is incapable of seeing that management brings value to a product, for instance, and like a 14th. century monk categorizes anyone but a laborer as a parasite. Strangely, for a man who supposedly championed the common working man, he couldn't stand to have them around him, and protested their inclusion in early communist meetings.\
Where communism, as such, fails is first its unsophisticated view of value -- ie: value = labour. But also because it copies the autocractic model of rule that was common in Eastern Europe in Marx's time. Communist governments were supposed to magically embody the wishes and values of the common man, but had no mechanisms to allow the common man to express his views. He could belong to the local party and support communist ideology, but that was all. Anything else was prohibted. As such, communist governments were beyond criticism, could not be held accountable for mistakes, were defined as being popular even carrying out highly unpopular policies, and could not be changed for any other party or set of policies. Inevitably, the party being the govermnment made it an uncontested source of power, and become corrupted. Of course, with a lack of enforceable guarantees of citizen rights and protections, the part was government for, by and of the party. (Misquoting Abraham Lincoln, "government for the people, of the people and by the people." It was a recipe for abuse and dictatroship, in other words.
Capitalism is a much misused word -- it doesn't really mean free enterprise, because the existence of huge corporations, business subsidies and government contracts worth billions, pretty much gives an overwhelming advantage to the most powerful interests. Small businesses have a hard time surviving in that environment. Furthermore, "capitalism" in the US seems to be mainly about speculation in investment, and trading money back and forth. Which is why business in the US is "hollowed out." The neocons believed there was more money to be made in buying and selling stock than in building cars or making steel, so let all those enterprises migrate to Asia or Europe. Now what America does best is buy cheap goods from Thailand or China, re-brand it with a familiar American name, and retail it. If the course the American's have steered in the last 40 years is capitalism, I wouldn't want anything to do with it, either.
The bottom line is that I believe in results. On the whole, I'm an old-fashioned Liberal that believes government shouldn't interfere more than necessary, should never be partial t one interest over any other, and ought to exercise leadership where it is clearly to the advantage of the country. For instance, if there is not enough air travel for more than one airline, you wouldn't want it to have a monopoly, and charge high fares for poor service, so a national airline would make perfect sense. In a large country like the US, there is room for competition and competition would probably serve the public better than a state operated airline. As circumstances are not alike, so solutions shouldn't be alike. Some business opportunities are best left to private interest, but some may take more capital than any company is likely to be willing to invest in -- building railway tracks from the Canadian Maritimes to British Columbia on the west coast, for instance. So the Canadian government created the Canadian Pacific Railroad and raised the money trough general tax revenues. But that's no reason for the govenment to monopolize the manufacture of shoes, bicycles or kitchenware, say.
We see a perfect justification for this philosophy in Canada's health care system, which resembles that in most Western European nations. It looks after most people adequately, for a manageable cost. In the US, on the other hand, they had a system of private health care that demonstrated that this was not an area where competition or the profit seeking motive worked for the benefit of people who needed health care. Americans paid far more than anyone for their doctors, medication and hospital stays ... so much so that many Americans got little or no health care at all. They have improved on the old system a little -- but Obamacare still leaves the private hospitals and insurance carriers in charge, so everything is still outrageously expensive. In effect, the new law makes buying insurance mandatory -- a gift to the industry! If you can't afford the rates, then the state pays for it. But it's still the insurance company that says what it will charge, unlike with true socialized medicine, where the state sets the rates, collects the paycheck deductions and pays the doctors and hospitals directly. In the long run, I don't think the American compromise will work.
To put it simply, I think what I am is a Social Democrat -- I believe in mixed economies driven by results and not ideology. Being Human is no simple thing, in which black and white answers are always the right ones. We are neither cogs in the machinery, interchangeable and without distinction from one to the other, the way Marx saw Man, nor are we islands unto ourselves, each a Master of his own destiny and without obligations to other human beings the way Ayn Rand saw us. (She also saw most Humans as failing in this description, and deserving humble, dependent existences just like the peasants she rememberd from pre-revolution Russia.)
I probably contradictory personality. I was never happy with something that exists right now. Communism I understand how to work together for a common goal. Commune. Communism. Cognate words. Only joint efforts can build the entire chain of production from the hammer to the starship. Competition? This crystal has many faces, and half of them are black. Need a dictatorship, all played by the rules. Not to compete through bribes and sabotage. Need a rejection of the capitalist conception of the value of money to devalue the concept of bribery. Need a new education to all speak the same language and understand each other. We need a strong and beautiful dream to the heart beat in unison. That's what I understand as communism. The only value of such a society is to be social value of the individual. Voiceless cogs are only machines. But here and there the main problem: To educate people of the new world - we need new teachers. Who will educate teachers?
John Steinbeck mentions Krushchev's shoe business in his book Travels With Charley; someone he met on the road told him about it from TV news and made a joke about how he should be presented with a shoe-shaped gavel "so he wouldn't feel embarrassed." Indeed.
Brezhnev was less exciting perhaps, but I recall hearing about something he said to President Ford during some meeting - asking Ford where he came from and being told it was Grand Rapids, Michigan, Brezhnev promised that in the event of WWIII he would see to it that Grand Rapids would be spared. What a sweetheart!
In the actual event of WWIII my home town would have been one of the first to become a radioactive BBQ pit. Oddly enough there were no shortage of loonies who though we could win a war like that.
Brezhnev was less exciting perhaps, but I recall hearing about something he said to President Ford during some meeting - asking Ford where he came from and being told it was Grand Rapids, Michigan, Brezhnev promised that in the event of WWIII he would see to it that Grand Rapids would be spared. What a sweetheart!
In the actual event of WWIII my home town would have been one of the first to become a radioactive BBQ pit. Oddly enough there were no shortage of loonies who though we could win a war like that.
I didn't know it at the time, but -- in retrospect -- clearly Brezhnev, then Adropov, then Chernenko, were conservative backlash against Krushchev's tentative step forward. They weren't especially aggressive leaders, but their doctrinaire, inflexible policies are what finally exhausted the Soviet Union, and set the stage for Gorbachev. It would have been interesting to know how history would have unfolded if Krushchev had remained in power for another 10 or 15 years.
I wonder what would have happened if Ford had asked Brezhnev about his home town, and had promised to spare it as well ... only to be told that Brezhnev was born in Moscow?
I wonder what would have happened if Ford had asked Brezhnev about his home town, and had promised to spare it as well ... only to be told that Brezhnev was born in Moscow?
The Metal Men were meant to be a filler one-shot, hence their destruction by the last page. Because no new ideas for Showcase continued to be evasive, (after the Atom moved into his own comic), they had to do 3 more MM stories. By then their destruction each issue was almost a staple now.
Their total destruction between #57 and the new mini-series (post Crisis or Zero Hour) was not explained. One fan suggested that the events after their fighting Plutonium did not happen: their responsiometers were cooked by the radiation and could not be repaired, and that Doc lost his creative edge as a side effect of the meds he had to take now. He had to confer with T.O.Morrow to get the data back, on building new responsiometers and then new Metal Men.
Their total destruction between #57 and the new mini-series (post Crisis or Zero Hour) was not explained. One fan suggested that the events after their fighting Plutonium did not happen: their responsiometers were cooked by the radiation and could not be repaired, and that Doc lost his creative edge as a side effect of the meds he had to take now. He had to confer with T.O.Morrow to get the data back, on building new responsiometers and then new Metal Men.
I just pretend nothing happened after the last issue of the comic in the 1960s. They rusted away, maybe, except for gold and platinum, who became so expensive that they were melted for bullion. I mean, who in their right mind would build a robot out of platinum? It would be cheaper to have made her from compressed $100 bills.
Curiously, Gold was remade only as a head ! No body ! Platinum is still around -as you depicted her.
Though in issue #12, the MM were brought into the world of the JLA, etc. Before then, there were no other heroes. When the flaming doom monster came out of the past, none of the JLA stepped up to have a crack at it./ The army called on Dr. Magnus to build heroes. Inconsistency was the order of the day.
Though in issue #12, the MM were brought into the world of the JLA, etc. Before then, there were no other heroes. When the flaming doom monster came out of the past, none of the JLA stepped up to have a crack at it./ The army called on Dr. Magnus to build heroes. Inconsistency was the order of the day.
OR they might have all destroyed ,sacrificed by film's end, to enable their living prototypes to escape. Gadget would then vow to build them again, but - never gets around to it.
My Dupli-Kate or Catspaw or Clone or Dust-Bunny(she can't settle on a name) creates copies of herself to use in dangerous situations, and, left to their own devices, would die and go to dust in 11 hours. There WAS a completed story-arc where two doops being destroyed by disintegrator energy and that energy being resorbed with them, led to strange variations in her power to duplicate herself for a . The arc was completed before I burned out on cartooning.
My Dupli-Kate or Catspaw or Clone or Dust-Bunny(she can't settle on a name) creates copies of herself to use in dangerous situations, and, left to their own devices, would die and go to dust in 11 hours. There WAS a completed story-arc where two doops being destroyed by disintegrator energy and that energy being resorbed with them, led to strange variations in her power to duplicate herself for a . The arc was completed before I burned out on cartooning.
I wonder how many still know that those two objects on top of Gadget's head are the objectives from a microscope, used for really close-up work? By now, as far as most folks know, they may as well be like the two bolts on top of Dr. Robotnik's head ... those are bolts, aren't they? Anyhow, when's the last time she was shown using them (i.e., pulled down over her eyes)?
There was a TV special,"Peter and the Magic Egg" presented by PAAS.
In it, a magic boy named Peter endowed a rabbit and other animals with human-level intelligence and then they fought or had a plowing race with a robot monster named Tobias Tinwhiskers. Peter lost, fell into a coma, A year passed ...
At that point, I just got up and walked out, saying it was childish. I do not recall it being ever shown again on TV. Anyway, I never regretted my decision to walk out on it.
In it, a magic boy named Peter endowed a rabbit and other animals with human-level intelligence and then they fought or had a plowing race with a robot monster named Tobias Tinwhiskers. Peter lost, fell into a coma, A year passed ...
At that point, I just got up and walked out, saying it was childish. I do not recall it being ever shown again on TV. Anyway, I never regretted my decision to walk out on it.
Sounds like many of those Eastern European cartoons, which seemed to follow no logic at all. Weird stuff would just happen, like a talking boot rise up out of a well, or a gnome step out of the shadows and turn someone into a wooden barrel until they could solve three riddles ...
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