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Fullback to the Future (or, The greatest Hungarian science-fiction sports movie you’ll probably never see)
A football ascending to the heavens kicks off (snigger) 6:3; a truly appropriate image this is, for 1990s garbageman Tutti (Károly Eperjes) is about to enter a Hungarian sports fan’s heaven. Said Valhalla is actually of no great distance in space, but requires a time-travel voyage some 45 years back to the “Match of the Century” bringing victory Hungary over Team England at Wembley Stadium to snap a 30-year undefeated run. Against the early 1950s’ antediluvian and repressive system, Puskas and his teammates were nothing sort of angels for Tutti.
November 25, 1953 holds extra significance for our hero, doubling as the day of his birth. When he suddenly awakens to find himself miraculously transported to that age of 3-forint beers and communist propaganda, he finds himself torn in priority between meeting the mother he never knew and listening to the game on radio.
Right. So … where’s the damn radio, already?
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Hungary wants to know: Which woman is best for Spiderman?
From the news portal Index, based in ever-randy Hungary, comes exploration of the question “Melyik nőt döngölje meg Pókember?” which might be translated as, um … well, let’s put it this way. Within the URL link to the story, the webmasters and/or editors have changed the article title to the more, shall we say, family-friendly “Melyik nő illik a legjobban Pokemberhez?” or “Which woman is best suited for Spiderman?”
(While BuckBokai admits this has little to do with sports, hey! Pinup comic babes!)
In light of the Spiderman movie franchise reboot which featured Gwen Stacy replacing more traditional Mary Jane Watson as Peter Parker’s love interest, the author tantalizingly known only as Cinematrix reveals his/her choices for getting with the Spider someday – since “the franchise gets rebooted about every 10 years.”
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Nine super innings: DC Superstars #10
BuckBokai was going to do a full-on review of a highlight in science-fiction sports literary history, namely the lead story of DC Super Stars #10 (1976), but the issue has proved elusive to download and more importantly has been amazingly critically analyzed by Comic Treadmill back in 2005 and recently by Baseball Prospectus, so we’ll refer you to those links.
If you haven’t been lucky enough to experience the life-changing greatest of DC Comics finally living up to their “Strange Sports Stories” franchise in form, this epic is based on an argument between the simply awesome Sportsmaster and the Huntress. This couple makes a bet stemming from a dispute in which the Huntress maintains that the bad guys never win (she must have been hip to the Comics Code Authority of Earth prime, eh?) and thus set up a superheroes vs. supervillians match.
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For the glory of Empire: Reviewing Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians”
With the XXX Olympiad currently in full swing, BuckBokai today pimps a favorite science-fiction sport story, Mike Resnick’s “The Olympians.”
Celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2012, “The Olympians” serves as the seventh chapter in Resnick’s Birthright: The Book of Man
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Dreaming of 1992: An Olympic basketball movie trilogy
In 1992, the landscape of international basketball was changed forever. While most recall the dominance of the USA’s Dream Team – quite probably, BuckBokai asserts, the greatest squad ever assembled in any sport – the hoops in that famed Olympiad of 20 years ago were packed with dozens of compelling backstories, the least two of which were certainly not the silver- and bronze-medal winning Croatia and Lithuania teams.
On the eve of the opening of the XXX Olympiad and with that 20th anniversary observation firmly in mind, BuckBokai recommends a loosely connected trio of films that’ll make for fantastic viewing for the sports history nut. In the virtual screening room, we’ll run this trilogy in order of subject’s finish in the Olympic games.
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What if, Babe? A review of Harry Turtledove’s “The House that George Built”
Nowhere do the seemingly mutually exclusive entertainments of sport and science-fiction come closer than in that simple musing question “what if…?”
In sport, the question is often lamentably formed of second-guessing the decision of manager, general manager, umpire or player. To wit:
