rallamajoop | Recent Entries

Since most of my activity here nowadays seems to be me writing Man from UNCLE meta or fic on every topic under the sun, I figured it was time to make a proper masterpost of everything I've posted here or to various comms.

Most of these links go to LJ, though there are a few at the end to odds and ends I've posted to tumblr too.

( Fic and fic recs )
( Resources - subtitle files, episode credits and official production materials )
( Meta and analysis )
( Photoshoots and picspam )
( Book reviews )
( Misc extras from tumblr )

Hey there, and welcome to yet another hopeful Yuletide letter! I am prone to rambling when talking about my favourite shiny things and known to get a bit carried away coming up with prompts, so just for the record up front: feel free to take as much or as little from any of these as as you please, and run with them wherever they may take you.

I'm rallamajoop on AO3 too, and absolutely opting-in for any treats people might like to write.

( General likes/dislikes )

( Deus Ex )

( Deus Ex: Human Revolution )

( Hammer Dracula )

( Varney the Vampire )

So I made this post about all the old news articles I'd tracked down about the early UNCLE girls – mostly just to say, damn, these nearly-forgotten bit characters actually got a lot of press back in the day, and here's a rough timeline to back that up. But when I came back to update it with some new links (turns out the archive I was using keeps adding new material), I'd slightly overrun the post limit (the post isn't that long, the table just takes a lot of css, which evidently counts). So, here's a new post for the updated table.

Links marked with a ▼ are shortcuts to where I've reproduced those articles in the other post. All other links go direct to the newspaper.com article page (though you'll only be able to see a thumbnail and OCR text without an account) – or you can just hover over the link to see a quote.

Links are organised by date – to put things in context, I've included a list of what episodes were in production and what was airing as all this news came out. Coloured text identifies each actress named and each episode they appeared in.

For example, you can see that news about Grace Lee's casting started coming out about the same time as they were shooting her first (and only) episode, whereas news about Leigh Chapman didn't start to appear until her first episode was about to air. Less than a month after the first news items (I can find) which mention Grace Lee's hiring for a continuing role, press releases were already starting to appear with Linda Ho's name taking the place of hers. Photos of Vaughn with both Lee and Heatherly nonetheless continued appearing in the press long after Lee had been replaced by Linda Ho, and often continued to carry captions suggesting both girls still had 'continuing roles' in the series. Occasional photos of Heatherly went right on appearing even after she, too, was gone, and Leigh Chapman seemed to have taken her place (a few such references even turned up in later years). Editors often didn't bother to check whether the captions supplied with the publicity photos were still accurate.

Basically, you could get a really skewed idea of who was still appearing in the show if you believed everything you read. The original UNCLE girls seriously were promoted a lot more widely than you might think.

( Table under the cut )

So, I've been poking through the library of old licensed fiction from the old Man from UNCLE paperback series and magazine. A few are good, but most (as general fan consensus seems to agree) fail to capture the spirit of the series in any particularly convincing way, or are just not that well written, or (and frequently) both. It's a matter of record that few of the authors were fans (some, one rather suspects, had probably hardly seen the show at all), and were usually working from little more than a few pages of development notes – and it shows, not least thanks to how many seemed determined to pad their word counts by incorporating as much of those notes as possible. The result is a bizarre little series of highly variable tone and quality, existing in its own little parallel continuity, in which writers often referenced their own previous stories, and occasionally referenced one another's, but remained largely ignorant of almost anything that had ever happened in the show. In fact, about the most fascinating thing about it (at least to me) is just how fixated some of those authors were on sharing as much of those original development notes as possible.

The following analysis comes courtesy of my recent acquisition of the entire series in digital format, plus some handy epub-library software. Pick a few key phrases out of the original MGM bios and development notes, and the number of hits that come up in a library-wide search tells one hell of a story – or perhaps more accurately, exposes just how little effort so many authors put into telling a story which would be original. That which was original was frequently an obvious mistake. I’m not honestly sure whether anyone but me is ever going to want to read this many words worth of analysis of who-lifted-what-from-where and who-fucked-what-up, but I am seriously far too fascinated by the train-wreck of error and plagiarism that is some of these novels not to get my thoughts down in full. Possibly you might prefer to skip to the sections on recurring original characters and the conclusion for some of the more interesting parts. If you’re looking for my reviews of those stories I’ve so far read in full, here’s that link.

( The Authors )

( Describing UNCLE )

( The Sections of UNCLE )

( On THRUSH )

( The Actual Men from UNCLE )

( Crossovers with The Girl from UNCLE )

( The Support Staff of UNCLE )

( The Miscellaneous Recurring Characters (and Themes) of UNCLE )

( What wasn’t in the notes )

( Some Conclusions )

Intrigued by the section on the various tie-in novels in C.W. Walker's book Work/Text: Investigating The Man from UNCLE (which goes into the subject in quite a bit more detail than Heitland's earlier book on the series), I had a bit of a poke around the web to see whether any were available online. What I discovered, largely by accident, is that more or less the entire collection of novels and magazine stories and those from the Girl from UNCLE series can indeed be found in text format on the web. Some can be found transcribed by fans here, while others will require you to be willing to poke through assorted variously dodgey-looking download sites to acquire (seriously, though I have done my best to check, I cannot 100% guarantee I have not picked up a load of nasty malware in the process of finding all these, which is one of the reasons I'm reluctant to link to some of my sources. That said, if anyone would like me to send them the complete batch, drop me a line).

Many of these books can still be got second hand on ebay and other various sites around the web nowadays, though as the physical books are long out of print and the authors never received royalties from them as it was, it's hard to feel too terrible about the minor case of piracy required to snag the full collection. More importantly, having them in digital format makes the collection searchable, not to mention easily cross-referencable, and wow, is there some telling stuff in the keyword and key-phrase usage in these things (or at least if you're of the kind of mindset that finds those sorts of statistics interesting to begin with, which it goes without saying I am). But I’ll get to that in another post.

For now, I wanted to make some notes on the ones I’ve read enough of to have formed an opinion, and write something about my general impressions of the series. But because this is inevitably going to involve me rambling a lot, the short version is that about the only ones I might go as far as reccing were those by McDaniels, and perhaps the one by Fredric Davies. Neither are what I'd call must-reads, but I did have some fun with both. For general reference, the Fans from UNCLE website also has a brief review of all the novels, though less to say about the magazines.

( Some vital statistics )

( And some more general analysis, because I never can resist the urge to write an essay or two )

( The Copenhagen Affair – John Oram )

( The Vampire Affair – David McDaniels )

( The Mad Scientist Affair / The Power Cube Affair – John T. Phillifent )

( The Invisibility Affair / The Mind Twisters Affair – Thomas Stratton )

( The Splintered Sunglasses Affair – Peter Leslie )

( The Assassination Affair – J. Hunter Holly )

( The Cross of Gold Affair – Fredric Davies )

( The Howling Teenagers Affair – Dennis Lynds )

( The Beauty and Beast Affair – Harry Whittington )

( The Deadly Dark Affair – John Jakes )

( The Pillars of Salt Affair – Bill Pronzini )

Back during my very first viewing of UNCLE's first season, I made an off-hand joke after watching (and, I must say, thoroughly enjoying) the infamous Bow Wow Affair about Illya "having to maintain his team's mandatory heterosexuality quota in Napoleon's absence". If you've read A Unified Theory of UNCLE (and if you haven't, you probably ought to do that before reading the notes below) you already have an inkling how far that idea snowballed.

Inspiration for the rest of the story came from various sources, split between other details that amused me about this show and numerous tidbits of real history. Actually, writing this fic became my excuse to read up on a whole wealth of interesting queer history and espionage-related subjects which I knew about only in passing going in. Since only a minority of all that was ever going to make it into the fic in any form, I'm taking this excuse to share a bit more about the real history I got to read up on, and plus plenty of links to more.

( History notes - queer, de-classified, or otherwise )

( UNCLE canon notes )

( And, finally, a word or two on the subject of Illya's PhD )

Poking through the old slashfic archives for The Man from UNCLE, one soon notes that where other fandoms have hooker AUs, MfU has the popular Illya Kuryakin: Gay KGB Honey Trap fanon backstory. Like so many old 90’s slash tropes, this one seems to have waned in popularity in today’s (at least theoretically) more culturally sensitive times, which may be no great loss. But the big surprise for me, when reading up on history of espionage for a quite unrelated fic idea, came in discovering just how much historical support there was for this particular sensationalist take on the inner workings of the KGB (let alone all the other Cold War era queer-espionage-shenanigans I'd wind up discovering along the way).

( Under the cut: Gay sexpionage, the Cambridge Spy Ring, wild conspiracy theories about the ‘Homosexual International’, the UK secret services’ century-long love-hate relationship with gay spies, and a long and shameful legacy of persecution )

( Further reading )

Had to stick this last one in a separate post, as the post below was getting close to the limit. Not wholly a bad thing — it's the longest article in the set by a wide margin, so it doesn't hurt to separate it out.

Kannapolis Girl Writes Movies — And Acts Too
July 4, 1965
The Daily Independent from Kannapolis, North Carolina · Page 2
( Read more... )

Just when I thought I was done with the girls-from-UNCLE, I discovered the archive of newspapers.com. They don't let you see whole articles without a subscription, but with a little creativity it's not too hard to find pages with partial OCR text, which covers more than enough to give you the gist (if not the full text) of many an article. The auto-text isn't perfect — a search for articles featuring 'David McCallum' will get you a good crop of results, but there's no way to know how many you've missed where his name has been misread as 'MCCALLL;M' or 'MwOellm' or whatever else, and the archive doesn't cover every issue of every paper in US history by any means. But even if you assume whatever you find easily is just the tip of the iceberg, it's still a veritable goldmine of historical data.

For example, limit the dates to 1964-65 and feed in the names of May Heatherly and Grace Lee, and it soon becomes apparently that those first two oft-forgotten UNCLE girls didn't just appear in the early promotion for the show, they were major features.

Robert Vaughn is still the star, of course, but any number of articles have more to say about Lee and Heatherly than they do about McCallum or Carroll, and were far more likely to print a picture of them. Some don't even mention Vaughn or UNCLE as more than an afterthought. At least one article features no more than a passing mention of anything relating to the show, but still finds space for a large photo Vaughn flanked by both those lovely ladies. Heatherly in particular was the favourite — not only was she a gorgeous young actress whose career might be just taking off, recently returned to the States from Spain, but she'd reportedly spent some of those years in Spain studying to be a bullfighter, only to have to give it up on discovering that women weren't actually allowed in the ring. Her casting in UNCLE didn't need to be more than a convenient excuse; May Heatherly was already a story in her own right.

No matter how long I spent looking for references to her, I went on stumbling onto still more quite by accident, while looking for something else altogether, such as the one that appears next to a blurb primarily about Anne Francis' role in Giuoco Piano (Heatherly herself doesn't appear at all in that episode, though she is in Quadripartite). Indeed, photos of her assuring us that she had a "continuing role" in the series continued to appear long after the last of her episodes had aired. One even turns up in Press and Sun-Bulletin from Binghamton, New York next to an article about The Indian Affairs Affair as late as 1966. (Another paper misidentifies an actress as Grace Lee in a promotional shot from the end of 1965.)

( Read more... )

( News Articles )

The most famous girl from UNCLE is, of course, April Dancer, who starred in her own spin-off series, and many will at least remember Lisa Rogers, Waverly's assistant from the final season. But UNCLE was never short of female staff in a variety of lesser-known roles, some of whom would become the longest recurring characters in the show. Though they may not have made the opening credits, characters like Heather, Sarah and Wanda shared more than enough screentime to deserve a little recognition of their own.

But as anyone who's ever paid much attention to the guest cast would realise, the producers of The Man from UNCLE weren't all that sold on the importance of consistency, or even above taking the name "Mark Slate" from a 40-something American and giving it to a 20-something Brit. The supporting cast got this particularly bad. Mr. Del Floria, the only comparable male role, was played by four different actors over his six credited appearances (and at least a couple more over his uncredited ones), "Sarah" by three different actresses, and "Wanda" by seven – one of whom also played Sarah, just for maximum confusion. Producers would often cast whoever happened to be available at the time, while others would apparently drop a recurring actress so their girlfriend could have the role instead. After several attempts to make sense of it all via IMDB I eventually put together an honest-to-god spreadsheet just to get my head around it all. Instead, this turned out to be only the beginning.

Still, even between clashing schedules, unpredictable production changes, and more than their share of casting couch bullshit, some of these actresses still had a chance to leave a mark on the show – and the more I read up on them, the more interesting they turn out to be. Not much seems to have been written about either the characters or the actresses behind them – the section on them in John Heitland's otherwise fairly comprehensive book, for example, was riddled with errors and miserably brief. What started for me as a tongue-in-cheek attempt to make sense of just how many "Wandas" there really were gradually grew into a major piece of detective work and several thousand words worth of essay on half a dozen different characters. The result is probably going to be of most interest to trivia junkies and fic writers looking to flesh out their supporting casts, but if ever you find yourself in need of a (relatively) definitive resource on the female support staff of UNCLE, well, here you go.

The complete article is now more than long enough to require sub-headings. Links below cover all the most significant recurring roles, plus a handful of others who only showed up once who also stuck in my memory for one reason or another.

( Read more... )

I've been meaning to write up some proper tumblr recs for all the best Man from UNCLE slashfic I've been finding around the web since I fell for the show, starting with three of my all-time faves. It turns out, however, that I can't adequately explain how much I love the work of authors like Cord Smithee and Kellie Mathews without the post growing to much longer than is really appropriate for tumblr. So, once again, I've dumped the full post here, and posted a cut-down version to tumblr, minus most of my editorialising.

( Chrome and Gunmetal )

( AO3 )

( File 40 )

( Miscellaneous websites )

Notwithstanding that I am completely out of the habit of posting fic here first, I figured I'd at least bring the record up to date on what I've been writing over the last six months or so. Below: A brand new short Cable/Deadpool ficlet posted last last year, a prequel chapter to that old Little Mermaid-AU story which (I kid you not) has been kicking around in my head since 2011, and an extended piece of kinky Napoleon/Illya AU smut, because entering fandom at the shallow end is apparently not even something I do anymore. Links go to AO3.

Cable & Deadpool

At the wedding (or, née Cable and Deadpool)
Summary: Not everyone on the guest list is equally enthused about the impending nuptials of one Wade Wilson and one Nate Summers. What Scott doesn't know is quite how far in advance his reaction was anticipated.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 2284
Notes: Sequel to Marital Commitments, nominally written in honour of the news about the new Split Second mini.

The Ugly Merman, chapter 0
Summary: You know the story - there's a handsome prince, an unfortunate shipwreck, and old sea-witch, and a lovesick mer-something (who may or may not deserve the moniker 'little'). The rest comes down to interpretation.
Rating: PG
Word Count: 1690 (this part), 5790 (whole fic)

Man from U.N.C.L.E.

Fatale
Summary: Napoleon’s weakness for femme fatales has never been one of the more ambiguous facets of his sexuality. (Or, a world in which Illya began his career on the wrong side of the law certainly isn’t one where Napoleon is any less likely to wind up in bed with him.)
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6630
Notes: Napoleon/Illya, AU, BDSM, gunkink, likely to wind up as the first in a series

Hi there, Yuletide writer (and whoever else may stumble upon this post)! I generally seem to wind up taking these letters as an excuse to dump pretty much every spare relevant fic idea I’ve had over the last year or more in one place in the mad hope of getting someone to write one of them for me, so this is likely to get a little rambling. But as the cliché goes, optional details are optional, so feel free to take as much or as little from my disorganised jumble of prompts as you like, and run with them wherever they may take you.

( General stuff and crossover-y prompts )

( Season 6B )

( Scream of the Shalka )

( Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death )

( Deadpool Pulp )

Crossposts: http://rallamajoop.livejournal.com/126876.html

(Originally written for tumblr, posted here after it got a bit lengthy for that, with a trimmed down version over on tumblr itself)

So, the first comic I’ve had any real interest in rushing out to buy new in the last couple of years is coming out on the 20^th October [insert obligatory Deadpool & Cable: Split Second plug here] as a ‘digital first series in Marvel’s Infinite Comics format’. Given that all my past experience with ‘digital comics’ has generally begun with either an ebay listing or a bittorrent link, that’s a lot of terms I haven’t really seen outside the odd X-Axis review. Now, however, I’ve got a title I want to see do well, and that means both buying it the minute it hits the stands and convincing as many others as possible to do the same. Obviously, this was my cue it was time to take one for the team here and investigate exactly what ‘digital first Marvel Infinite’ means, in terms of what they’re selling us and how.

Digital distribution channels have come a long way in the last few years, but can still be a little impenetrable to the newcomer – the release calendar on the Marvel website doesn’t even seem to cover digital-first releases, and that’s before you even get into comiXology versus the Marvel store or Marvel Infinite vs Marvel Unlimited versus a half-dozen other marginally different ways of selling you basically the same thing with a few different restrictions. What existing Internet guides I could find to this morass appear to consist largely of puff pieces or reviews of one particular service, frequently long out of date. Time to do some independent research.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve signed up for no less than three different distribution services, picked up as many free titles as were available, and spent roughly $12 USD. Time and effort were by far the greater expenditure, and that much I can share for free. What follows is a quick overview of your options for (legally) getting hold of a digital copy of a Marvel comic. Some of this will also apply to buying digital comics from DC or any other distributor, but I haven’t looked that far into finding out how non-Marvel-related alternatives compare. They’re out there, but not covered here.

Let’s start out with a quick glossary of a few key nouns.

comiXology: The main online distributor for digital comics. If you’re looking for a short answer to ‘how and where do I buy [comic title X]?’, this is what you’ll want. (more detail)

Marvel Store: Basically comiXology again, but with only Marvel comics available. Exists mostly for marketing reasons, not much to recommend it over the parent service. (more detail)

Marvel Unlimited: A library-like subscription-based service granting you unlimited access to a large back-catalogue of older comics for a flat $9.99 per month fee. Great for archive binges, not so great for access to new stuff. (more detail)

“Free” Digital Copies: Many Marvel print comics now come bundled with codes that will give you access to a complimentary digital copy for no extra charge. You’ll have to wait a couple of months to get hold of a digital-first issue this way, however.

Marvel Infinite: An imprint covering a subset of Marvel’s digital releases, specifically for comics written to take advantage of features that are only available in digital format. Unrelated to Marvel Unlimited, despite the names.

Guided View: Guided view is a reading option for digital comics which will take you panel-to-panel in a preset sequence, rather than just dumping the whole page on your screen at once. Nice when it works, just annoying when it doesn’t – fortunately, it’s usually possible to turn it off. Much of Marvel Infinite exists to make best use of these sorts of features.

( More detail on all of those under the cut )

Because there's quite possibly someone left here watching me for the C&DP goodies who hasn't followed me over to tumblr/AO3, a crosspost: I wrote new Cable/Deadpool fic for Yuletide! Two of them, in fact (well, one longer fic and one 24-hour ficlet hammered out at the last minute)! Links go to AO3, as I'm well out of the habit of posting to LJ first nowadays. Feedback equally welcome either here or over on AO3.

What Happens on Providence
Summary: Wade has a very, very serious complaint to make about the management around these parts. Trouble is, Nate might just have a solution.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 6889

CablePool: A Conjoined Situation
Summary: Nate really should have foreseen this becoming a problem.
Rating: NC-17
Word Count: 1536

Over on tumblr someone very politely asked a question about Garden of Eden, one of my long-abandoned old Guilty Gear WIPs, and I had to admit there's basically 0% chance I'll ever go back to that fandom again now, but I could maybe write up a summary of what the plot was originally supposed to be, if they were interested? Because for all that it's languished unfinished for all these years, it was a fic I started because I was absolutely in love with the idea behind it (seriously, wibbly-wobbly time-travel love-stories - what's not to love about that?) and because the plot (if not the actual fic) just about wrote itself. And though the asker very politely told me not to worry about it, by that stage I'd remembered that I did actually write more of that story (or at least a Sol POV side-story to the same) as a Christmas present for

velithya (the fic's major cheerleader during my GG fandom days, whom I'd emailed regularly with ideas back when I was first hashing out what was to be the plot). There's not much point just posting that fragment now though, since it was written to be read after I'd finished the main fic and wouldn't make much sense without the context of the whole rest of the story.

So I sat down and hammered out that summary of what the plot would have been after all. Both that and my long-orphaned side story under the cuts below.

( Everything that would have happened, in 4000 words or less. )

( That other bit I wrote )

Hi there, prospective writer-person, whoever you may be! I am a total Yuletide newb this year, but I do hope I've managed to throw together a letter you'll find helpful. Most of the prompts here are fairly slash-focused (or possibly het, in the case of The Curse of Fatal Death), but in case there is any sort of doubt: if you are happier writing gen, by all means, go for it! Though it ought to go without saying: optional details are optional, so feel free to take as much or as little from my disorganised jumble of prompts as you like, and run with them wherever they may take you.

I've recced fic before for all three of the fandoms I'm requesting, if you'd like some idea of what sort of fic has worked for me in the past (and even if not, we obviously have at least one under-loved fandom in common, so have some recs you might enjoy looking through sometime!) Stuff I've recced can be found here for Scream of the Shalka, and here for The Curse of Fatal Death. I've only yet recced two stories related to Withnail & I, though there's another twenty or so still sitting in my tumblr drafts, which I swear I will get posted properly just as soon as I'm done with this Yuletide letter stuff and here for Withnail & I.

A few general notes to begin with (possibly of questionable relevance to what's likely to come up for these fandoms, but what the hell).

( General likes/dislikes )

( Withnail and I )

( Doctor Who and The Curse of Fatal Death )

( Doctor Who: Scream of the Shalka )

Cross-posted from tumblr (increasingly becoming my main fannish hangout these days) on the off chance anyone still hanging around this joint would like to squee with me about this

Reactions:

HOLY SHIT so much metal arm porn *_*

HOLY SHIT so much amazing action porn O_O

this movie was like two hours of solid action porn. Who even directed this thing? they are to direct ALL THE MOVIES henceforth

Did Chris Evans get hotter or is it just that the haircut and the new suit really really work for him? (note to self: conduct further research).

I did not expect Falcon to be in the movie for solidly logical plot reasons instead of entirely gratuitous comic-canon-fodder excuses. This was an entirely welcome surprise.

On a more serious note, what you need to understand about me going into this movie is that I am intimately familiar with Brubaker's Winter Soldier arc from his Captain America run, and I love it like I love few other non-Deadpool-starring things Marvel has ever given me. I went into this movie with expectations. The movie I got did not deliver the Winter Soldier arc I loved so much in the comics; instead, it was a few iconic WS moments pasted onto an entirely different story (where, alas, they did not entirely fit). The comic-version implications that WS had been pulled out of the freezer specially to fuck with Steve's head - the loss of the whole sequence where Steve reads through the intelligence report that spells out exactly who he's up against, all the glorious angsty goodness to follow - are absences I feel on a very deep and personal level. The lack of more than a couple of passing mentions of the Russian/Soviet connections missing from the new plotline, only a little less so. The movie very nearly made up for these losses by a) being completely fucking awesome, and b) promising me a completely unexpected ENTIRE SECOND ACT to follow. Nonetheless, my biggest complaint about Captain America: Winter Soldier is that it did not contain nearly as much Winter Soldier as I had been led to expect.

The scene where we thought we were getting a surprise!badass old lady and instead got Natasha in a clever disguise was unanimously voted the movie's Biggest Disappointment in our post-showing debrief. So, basically right with you there, tumblr. It was still awesome, but it could've been awesomer

did I mention that metal arm thing? Because damn. I was not quite expecting how well that would work for me.

When I originally wrote my Who's who of Six Pack post, I meant to include an entry for Vanessa – who was never strictly a member of the team, but got lots of scenes with them and played a comparably significant role in both our heroes' backstories. I eventually took her entry out, not because I'd changed my mind but because I have such a soft spot for her that her entry was getting large enough for a whole post of its own. This is the finished version.

( Detailed bio + a little editorialising )