Coming soon!

If you haven’t seen Return to the Forbidden Planet, and you’re anywhere near London over the next month, you owe it to yourself to get tickets, head over to Hornchurch, and enjoy one of the better evenings you’ll ever have. The tickets are only a hair over twenty quid, and deliver so many times the level of enjoyment you’d get from a far more expensive West End show. If there’s a shred of geek, live music enjoyer or living being in you, go here and book your seats right now  …and then write to me at the end of the evening to tell me how right I was.

It’s a musical, sort of, but it’s sort of a rock gig, and it’s sort of a flight through space. And it’s sort of Shakespeare. If I told you the premise – that the film Forbidden Planet wasn’t based on the Tempest after all, but on Shakespeare’s long-buried rock musical masterpiece Return to the Forbidden Planet, which was so far ahead of its time that Shakespeare had to settle for the sci-fi-free, rock-less Tempest until his manuscripts were more recently unearthed, and that the entire science fiction and rock & roll genres were in fact derived from little bits of Shakespeare’s work filtering into the popular consciousness, and that here is the whole world-changing show finally reconstructed and staged… if I told you the premise, then you’d still have no concept of how fun this experience is. So just book tickets. If you really need more convincing, I do have a recording of the excited bellowing that audiences do right at the end of this thing, and although I didn’t think to take a photo of my genuinely red-raw hands after I clapped them to bits during a memorable evening with Planet, I think you’re starting to get the idea anyway.

This is the thing, though, this is what should hook you: the cast are the band. Instead of a normal musical, with a band hidden under the stage, in this show the instruments are the ship’s computers, engines, etc. They’re hidden craftily around the stage (the ship’s bridge) so that the cast – who show every sign of being able to pick up any instrument around them and play it brilliantly – can grab them wherever they happen to be, and create very, very loud music.

Just go, find out the rest for yourself. You’ll honestly thank me. They haven’t done it in something like ten years, and they’re doing it for a month with lots of great cast members from productions past, so don’t miss it. It’s actually more awesome than this picture suggests.

The robot in the picture, incidentally, has a Twitter account here: @arieltherobot

Good old Jack Harkness, fondly remembered from RTD-era Doctor Who. I can’t believe I only just remembered to put this here, because I drew it way back when I drew Matt Smith as the Doctor. For anyone who doesn’t remember that, and can’t be bothered scrolling through to find it, here it is again:

Sadly, the planet of these sweet little fellows has been occupied by space invaders. The aliens’ only option is to try and swoop down en masse and hope to overwhelm the invaders before their houses get shot entirely to bits.

Raymond Briggs’ wonderful Snowman ready to go to war in full Krogan Battle Armour.

In which Spotty, ally of Superted and the latest member of the Christmas Effect team, tells his sad story to his festive crewmates. From the annual Snatter stories we ran on the Something Awful forums. They were a bit daft, as you can see. Last year it was all a big Mass Effect gag. As you can see.

Zool and Zooz, Ninjas of the Nth Dimension, try and explain the DNA of Christmas. They could teach us so much, but sadly, nobody around here speaks their language.

This is Sharon, a vague but intriguing NPC from David Jones’ ZX Spectrum classic “Knight Tyme”. All we know about Sharon is that she is almost infinitely strong and she “comes from Valhalla,” which in context probably means a star system of that name. Due to the graphical limitations of the time, I’ve no idea whether this is what her sprite was supposed to depict, but it’s certainly what I saw, and wasn’t that one of the great things about the limited graphics back then? We all had our own interpretations of what we were looking at.

Depicted: Mankind’s first contact with a Mysterious Alien Creature. Old games fans will have noticed the communication board from ERE Informatique / Exxos’ Captain Blood, along with a variety of ailments and their hair not being quite what it once was. And that’s MAC, from Mac and Me. There were all sorts of reasons for drawing this, and I’ll tell you what they were if you want, but it would take up too much blog space if I did it here.