But practically all of the members of the team are pretty used to facing insanity-inducing circumstances, so I’m rather optimistic that they’ll regain at least most of the lost SAN in time for the next strip - more on Monday.

Convergent evolution and quantum entanglement are currently the leading scientific explanations for inexplicable parallels in B-movies, it’s soo much sciencier-sounding than just saying “the budget”.

The Professor, of course, is rightly impressed with Biff’s remark - figuring all of that out on his own (and being able to almost communicate it) was likely the intellectual highlight of his…

…

..uh.
…life, likely. Too bad he has wasted his moment of glory on discovering a contradiction that the scriptwriter rather not explore in detail. I left out the scene where we would have seen the coin landing, so everyone can decide for themselves whether this second Silhouette mountain has the same elevator as the first one due to quantum entanglement or convergent evolution. I’m generous that way.

And, yeah - the elevator has dark wood paneling and marching music playing. It is a Nazi elevator, after all. It’s still slightly less torturous than hiking up the mountain would have been.

More on Thursday.

And yeah, Mopey is a tiny bit worried about the Professor’s health. She’s feeling a kind of luke-warm indifference toward him, which is a lot more than the cold indifference she feels toward most of the rest of humanity (although still less than the fond indifference she feels for Sephy). She’s particularly worried regarding his heart, and has repeatedly suggested to him following her lead and getting rid of it altogether, or at least keep it in a safe place outside of his body somewhere (She has had hers replaced with a triple-cursed piece of blackrock, and it works like a song! The song is a funeral march, but whatever…). If the Professor just wouldn’t be so stubborn and hide-bound about giving in to the dark side. >_>

The Professor might not have had a heart attack, but I suspect he gave Zorba one when he suddenly started screaming in his ear in panel one - but it’s probably just a light one, nothing that a few swigs of Ouzo couldn’t deal with just fine. It wouldn’t be Zorba’s first, anyway - he regularly has one when he sees the customs patrol boat closing in when he is out ‘fishing’ with the Souvlaki Queen. It’s just so hard to convince these narrow-minded officials that he fully intends to smoke those 13,ooo packs of cigarettes himself before returning to the harbor in the evening.

More on Monday.

And yeah, that guard is armed (with the production’s only rifle from the appropriate period) so he could - theoretically - shoot at our friends. He won’t, though, because he is not a rifleman-guard, he is a doghandler-guard. In order to shoot, he would first have to acquire certification in a different combat specialization, and I doubt his eyes are still good enough to pass the gunnery exam. He is only carrying the rifle as a decorative accessory to his uniform - if it was in view, you could see a big “D” for “decorative” carved into the butt of his rifle. >_> Plus, he’s preoccupied with worries about his dog. Fido is uncharacteristically lethargic today…and just a short while ago - seems like it was only yesterday, when they left Berlin for WW II, he was so energetic and bouncy…

For the time being, Zorba has taken the lead of the little group - he and all the other fishermen in the region have so long lived in fear of the Nazis of Toblerone mountain that he is almost dizzy with enthusiasm at the surprising easiness and speed at which they are taking the stronghold.

Panel five is another monument to editor Scissorhand’s subtle intercutting-before-revelation, but also serves as a useful reminder that the boat is still there at the beach, halfway buried in the sand. The way their attack on the mountain has gone up to now, having their boat stolen is actually one of their more serious worries. (Not that any but the most hopelessly desperate of pirates would ever get the idea to steal Zorba’s boat.)

More on Thursday.

As you might have noted, producer Nolan Nobucks coughed up some real money when it came to adding realism and authenticity to the scenes involving the German soldiers: original language plus subtitles, that’s definitely something you don’t get to see in every B-movie. There was a slight cost overrun with the subtitling, though, so the accuracy of the original language bits had to be reduced from “authentic German” to something half-way between “near-authentic German” and “plausible German” to save costs. Nolan felt the actors would be able to make up for that by rolling their “R"s and using lots of “K"s in their pronunciation. And to get the most out of the effect, the script gave the Germans even more lines of redundant exposition than would have been usual - but, yeah, guards and sentries in B-movies have a general tendency to be a lot more talkative than their job description would legitimately allow for.

Editor E. Scissorhands is also still up to his old tricks, panel five is a clear and beautiful application of the old “cut away to raise tension” dictum, based on the “especially if you have to cut away anyhow to hide continuity faults” subclause. Can’t you just see the tension rising to a fever pitch as the audience is left guessing whether Biff is OK or has suffered a rather ignominious end at the brittle hands of a living fossil of WW II?

Yeah, me neither.

And, no, none of the heroes is going to think of taking the guard’s rifle along, even if it’s laying there in plain sight. The props department only has a single Karabiner 98 Kurz available, so if the heroes have it, there wouldn’t be anything left to arm the nazis. =P (They used to have more of those, but they re-painted the rest silver and glued various tubes and lights to them to serve as laser rifles for some scifi movie - so they’ve been permanently de-WW IIed. That’s the problem with progress, you can never go back.)

More on Monday




*OK, I admit I have a slight advantage at predicting these things because it’s me who wrote the plot. But it’s still an amazingly accurate prediction.