100 Greatest Sci FI Characters

TOTAL FILM AND SFX PRESENT

SCI-FI CHARACTERS

HEROES AND VILLAINS FROM FILM AND TV STAR WARS DOCTOR WHO TERMINATOR STAR TREK AVENGERS BATMAN ALIENS

STAR WARS HAN SOLO

ALL WE KNOW ABOUT THE SCOUNDREL’S MOVIE

A UNIVERSE OF LEGENDS

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TOTAL SCI-FI LET THE COUNTDOWN COMMENCE W

elcome to the ultimate personality clash. Welcome to a Top 100 where talking cars are pitted against green monsters; where robot trucks jostle for position with alien superheroes; where cyborg killers battle it out with post-apocalyptic revolutionaries. Welcome to the Top 100 Greatest Sci-Fi Characters ever.

What makes a great sci-fi character? It’s impossible to construct a formula. How do you compare a droid with a cop? A mutant with a supercomputer? Yet despite the mind-boggling list of characters – and different types of characters – the genre has to offer, certain names do crop up again and again when you ask sci-fi fans to name their favourites. Some characters – for reasons that can’t be measured or gauged or predicted – have the essential magic ingredient to capture the imagination. The greatest of them are the ones even your mad aunt – who’s lived all her life in a locked attic with only an army of cats and a subscription to Reader’s Digest for company – can name.

While genre boundaries are always tricky to define, we tried as far as possible to stick with predominantly sci-fi characters as opposed to predominantly fantasy characters. Even though there were cyborgs and aliens in Buffy, 99% of the beings she fought were supernatural, so she’s not here. And while Thor and Batman may not necessarily be SF in themselves, they clearly exist in SF-dominated universes. But hey, sci-fi fans could argue these things for an eternity. Someone has to make the decision of what to include before then. Which is what we did. So, um, sorry Buffy. And Doc Brown, who’s at number 101…

DAVE GOLDER, EDITOR

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 3

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

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CONTENTS SCI-FI’S GREATEST CHARACTERS 100 Mork 99 Davros 98 Walter Bishop 97 Sarah Manning 96 Bender 95 Mace Windu 94 KITT 93 Dr Robert Ford 92 Khan 91 John Crichton 90 Morpheus 89 Catwoman 88 Sapphire 87 Katniss Everdeen 86 Baymax 85 Chewbacca 84 Lady Penelope 83 G’Kar 82 Londo 81 Avon 80 Aeryn Sun

7 7 8 8 9 9 10 12 12 13 14 14 15 15 16 16 17 18 19 20 20

79 Servalan 78 WALL-E 77 Caesar 76 Seven-Of-Nine 75 Marvin 74 River Tam 73 The Fantastic Four 72 The Master 71 Worf 70 Ava 69 Number Six (Battlestar Galactica) 68 Gene Hunt 67 Bill & Ted 66 Groot 65 Roy Batty 64 Professor Bernard Quatermass 63 Gort 62 Darth Maul 61 Barbarella

4 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

21 21 22 24 24 25 26 27 30 30 31 32 34 34 35 35 36 36 37

128

60 Captain Jack Harkness 59 Kryten 58 Thor 57 Kylo Ren 56 Starbuck 55 Black Widow 54 Rose Tyler 53 Mal Reynolds 52 Dave Lister 51 Arnold Rimmer 50 Frankenstein’s Monster 49 HAL 48 Data 47 Sarah Jane Smith 46 Professor X 45 Optimus Prime 44 Uhura 43 Robby the Robot 42 Magneto

38 39 40 42 43 44 45 46 48 49 50 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

41 Steve Austin 40 Number Six (The Prisoner) 39 Godzilla 38 Maria 37 The Predator 36 Judge Dredd 35 ET 34 Flash Gordon 33 Hulk 32 Obi-Wan Kenobi 31 Rick Deckard 30 Yoda 29 Nick Fury 28 Peter Venkman 27 C-3PO 26 Boba Fett 25 Neo 24 Luke Skywalker 23 Captain America 22 Sarah Connor

58 59 60 64 64 65 66 68 72 73 74 76 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

37

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Editor Dave Golder Art Editor Rebecca Shaw Production Editors Rhian Drinkwater, Simon Withers Special Editions Editor Will Salmon CONTRIBUTORS Tara Bennett, Jane Crowther, Lauren O’Callaghan, Richard Edwards, Steven Ellis, Ryan Gilbey, James Lovegrove, Joseph McCabe, Richard Matthews, Andy McGregor, Michael Molcher, Jayne Nelson, Jamie Russell, Nick Setchfield

COVER ILLUSTRATION The Red Dress Total Film and SFX would like to thank the following picture libraries: Allstar, Kobal, Rex and BBC.

EXTRAS & SPECIAL FEATURES KITT CAR 10 We explore all the special features on the most pimped ride ever

GENDER’S GAME 28

104 21 The Joker 20 Marty McFly 19 Mad Max 18 Wolverine 17 Mulder & Scully 16 Jean-Luc Picard 15 Wonder Woman 14 R2-D2 13 RoboCop 12 Iron Man 11 Batman 10 Princess Leia 9 Spider-Man 8 Ellen Ripley 7 The Terminator 6 James T Kirk 5 Superman 4 Darth Vader 3 The Doctor 2 Spock 1 Han Solo

87 88 90 92 94 98 100 102 104 108 110 112 114 116 120 124 126 128 130 134 138

Sci-Fi characters who have undergone gender reassignment. There are loads more than just the Master!

ASHES TO ASHES 33 As it would have been if there had been a comic strip adaptation of the show back in the ’80s

THOR: ACTOR INTERVIEW 40 Chris Hemsworth on playing a god in a sci-fi world

MAL REYNOLDS: ACTOR INTERVIEW 46 Nathan Fillion on keeping the universe shiny

THE ORIGINS OF GODZILLA 60 A look back at the film that created the legend

THE ORIGINS OF FLASH GORDON 68 He saved every one of us, in comics as well as on film

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ROBOCOP VS JUDGE DREDD 106 Who is the greatest law enforcer of the future?

GOING SOLO 142 Han is very much alive in the past. Everything we know about the forthcoming solo Solo movie...

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ISSUE 3 ON SALE NOW

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Happy Days (1978) BUT MAINLY IN Mork & Mindy (1978-1982) PORTRAYED BY Robin Williams BEST MOMENT Mork trying to get a chicken egg to fly KNOWN TO SAY “Nanu nanu”, “Shazbot” WHY HE’S GREAT Mork from Ork started life as a one-off character in a dream episode of Happy Days. The lunatic energy of then-unknown Robin Williams (a producer quipped that he was the only alien who auditioned for the role) resulted in the dream aspect being retconned and Mork getting his own show. For four seasons Mork flatshared with Mindy and reported back to his boss Orson on the ways of Earthlings. It was basically an excuse for Williams to take his observational comedy and ad-libbing to bizarre extremes, but it worked brilliantly.

BBC, KOBAL

Biodata

100

FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who “Genesis Of The Daleks” (1975) PORTRAYED BY Michael Wisher; David Gooderson; Terry Molloy; Julian Bleach (pictured) BEST MOMENT Coming over all orgasmic when he responds to the Doctor’s theoretical question about whether he would release a virus that could kill all life in the universe – of course he would!

KNOWN TO SAY “That power would set me up above the gods! AND THROUGH THE DALEKS, I SHALL HAVE THAT POWER! ” WHY HE’S GREAT He’s the creator of the Daleks and his body appeared to be kept alive as much by pure hatred as by the lifesupport tech in his wheelchair. He’s only appeared a handful of times in the show over 40 years, but his status as the new Dr Frankenstein has been truly cemented in the public psyche.

MORK

He is the egg-man

99

DAVROS

The Daleks’ daddy

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

WALTER BISHOP Double trouble

97

SARAH MANNING Clone ranger

8 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

BENDER He’s 40% pure sci-fi goodness

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) PORTRAYED BY Samuel L Jackson BEST MOMENT Beheading Jango Fett KNOWN TO SAY “We must move quickly if the Jedi Order is to survive” DID YOU KNOW? Mace Windu had a purple lightsaber because Samuel L Jackson asked George Lucas to give him one. Jackson wanted Mace to be easily spottable in the arena fight scene in Attack Of The Clones.

WHY HE’S GREAT Mace Windu was a name before he was a character. George Lucas considered making him the narrator of the original trilogy or Leia’s brother. Eventually he became “the second baddest Jedi in the universe next to Yoda” (Samuel L Jackson’s words) in the prequel trilogy.

95

MACE WINDU

Adding some serious cool to the Jedi council THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 9

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME You know you wanted one…

C O N V E R T IB L E R O O F (from 1985 onwards)

W IN C H In a compartment behind the tail-light plate.

SMOKE SCREEN/OIL JETS Under the rear bumper.

B O D Y PA N E L S Made from “Tri-Helical Plasteel 1000 molecular bonded shell” armour coating. This is finished with Pyroclastic Lamination, a thermal-resistant layer that can withstand temperatures of up to 800°C.

H I G H -T R A C T I O N D R O P D O W N S Hydraulically raise KITT’s chassis for better traction when driving of-road.

TYRES KITT can deflate and reinflate his tyres.

T R A C T I O N S P IK E S T W O -W H E E L S K I D R I V E

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K.I.T.T. The car’s the star

H

e was the ultimate KITT car, a ride so pimped that Q would be jealous.

KITT started life as the high tech, four-wheeled steed of Michael Knight (David Hasselhoff) in the ’80s series Knight Rider. Part Pontiac, part cylon (at least that’s what you have to assume from the little red light that went back and forth on his bonnet) KITT could even talk. Together man and car took on the bad guys each week where “direct action might provide the only feasible solution” as long as that direct action involves lots of revving, leaping and burning rubber.

Here’s our guide to the (ridiculous number of) special features on the original ’80s car.

10 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

FLAME THROWERS GRAPPLING HOOK

Biodata PA R A C H U T E S E L F -T IN T I N G W I N D O W S

MICROSCANNERS Tiny audio and visual sensors embedded into the grooves of KITT’s body enable KITT to visually track anything around him.

ETYMOTIC EQUALIZER Enables KITT to hear.

FIRST APPEARANCE Knight Rider (1982) FULL NAME Knight Industries 2000 (1982 series); Knight Industries 3000 (2008 series) PORTRAYED BY A 1982 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am with the voice of William Daniels (1982 series); a 2008-2009 Ford Shelby GT500KR with the voice of Val Kilmer (2008 series) BEST MOMENT KITT colliding in mid-air with his evil twin, KARR KNOWN TO SAY “When you’re one-of-a-kind, companionship does not compute” DID YOU KNOW? William Daniels, the voice of the original KITT, played Dustin Hoffman’s character’s dad in The Graduate

HEADLIGHTS KITT’s headlights can flash red and blue like police lights, and he has a siren too.

ANAMORPHIC EQUALIZER KITT’s front-mounted scan bar enables KITT to “see”, including in X-ray and infrared. This is KITT’s most vulnerable area.

O L FA C T O R Y S E N S O R

R O TAT I N G L I C E N C E P L AT E

Enables KITT to smell.

TEAR GAS LAUNCHER

F I R E E X T IN G U I S H E R

K.I.T.T. FEATURES (2000 MODEL) 1985 conversion onwards.

F

F Alpha Circuitry – never fully explained. F Electromagnetic hyper-vacuum disc brakes give a 14-foot braking distance F KITT is powered by the Knight

F Vacuum – KITT can expel all breathable air from the driver

Industries turbojet with modified

at 70mph.

compartment.

supercomputer on wheels. The “brain”

afterburners and a computer controlled

of KITT was the Knight 2000

eight-speed turbodrive transmission.

F Sub Zero – KITT can release

microprocessor which is the centre of a

F F Voice Synthesizer – KITT can speak

F F Medical Scanner – including an electrocardiograph (ECG).

the driver compartment.

F

F Sleep Gas – KITT can release a gas

KITT was essentially an advanced

“self-aware” cybernetic logic module that allowed KITT to think, learn, communicate and interact with humans.

F

KITT’s reaction time is one

F

KITT’s memory capacity is 1,000

nanosecond. megabits (125MB – you can get more memory on a cheap MP3 player these days).

Goes from 0-60mph in two seconds.

fluently in a number of languages.

F F Ultramagnesium Charges – useful Silent Mode – for stealth work.

for diverting heat-seeking missiles.

F

Microwave jammer – for knocking out

F

Surveillance Mode – multi-purpose

electronic systems. tracker (bordering on magic).

Bomb Snifer.

cryogenic gases and “flash freeze”

Fuel Processor – enables KITT

to run on any combustible liquid.

F F Seat Ejection System.

F Ultraphonic Chemical Analyser F Interior Oxygenator – useful if KITT Voice Stress Analyser.

is submerged underwater.

F

Third Stage Aquatic Synthesizer –

enables KITT to drive on water.

into the interior of the car that renders people inside unconscious.

F Comm link to maintain remote contact with the driver.

F KITT is programmed to protect his

designated driver at all costs, as well as all human life.

F Homing device.

KOBAL

F Super Pursuit Mode – pimped up from

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

KHAN

Grudge dread

DR ROBERT FORD Android inventor

12 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

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In one episode Crichton wakes up in women’s clothes in the middle of an alien red light district…

It was that kinda show.

Biodata

CRICHTON

The astronaut who flew into the middle of a creature feature

J

ohn Crichton was Buck Rogers with a dirtier mind and a geekier frame of reference. He was an astronaut who found himself (via a wormhole) not in the 25th century but in a bizarre corner of the universe with the freakiestlooking aliens ever (designed by Jim Henson’s Creature Shop in the real world). He joined a bunch of criminals and rebels on a mysterious spaceship fighting against an evil regime which was all very

clichéd except… Crichton’s self-aware attitude towards the weirdness around him put a refreshing new spin on everything. He was one of the most relatable sci-fi heroes ever, wondering if he’ll get home before Buffy is axed. He also spent a good while with a virtual version of the show’s main villain, Scorpius, in his brains; typically he decided to nickname him Harvey after the imaginary rabbit from the movie of the same name.

FIRST APPEARANCE Farscape (1999) PORTRAYED BY Ben Browder BEST MOMENT Almost an entire season when there were two versions of Crichton flying around the Farscape-verse DID YOU KNOW? Ben Browder’s wife, Francesca Buller, played four different roles in Farscape, and each time she was one of Crichton’s enemies

“WELCOME TO THE FEDERATION STARSHIP SS BUTTCRACK”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

MORPHEUS

The Matrix revolutionary

89

CATWOMAN Feline sexy

14 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Batman #1 (1940) AKA Selina Kyle PORTRAYED BY Julie Newmar, Lee Meriwether, Eartha Kitt in Batman (TV, 1966-68), Michelle Pfeiffer in Batman Returns (1992), Halle Berry in Catwoman (2004), Anne Hathaway in The Dark Knight Rises (2012), Camren Bicondova in Gotham (TV, 2014-present) KNOWN TO SAY “Life’s a bitch, now so am I. ” WHY SHE’S GREAT She started her comic life as a whipwielding cat-burglar and soon she was getting her claws into the Dark Knight. They’ve had a love/hate relationship ever since and Selina is currently more anti-hero than villain.

Film-makers and TV producers love playing on the teasing relationship between Wayne and Kyle. They love the slinky cat suits too.

88

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Sapphire & Steel (1979) PORTRAYED BY Joanna Lumley BEST MOMENT Every time her eyes glowed blue.

KNOWN TO SAY “There is a corridor and the corridor is Time. It surrounds all things, and it passes through all things. But you can’t see it.

Only sometimes. And it’s dangerous.”

WHY SHE’S GREAT She was the one with emotions in the partnership. When time agents Sapphire and Steel were assigned to sort out temporal problems in the most inscrutable UK SF series ever made, he got on with the nitty-gritty, leaving her to do all that irritating but necessary interacting-with-humans nonsense. She could also rewind time, (Steel could freeze it) and tell the age of any object just by touching it. No viewer ever knew quite what was going on but Lumley managed to convince you that Sapphire did.

SAPPHIRE Element of surprise

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE The Hunger Games

by Suzanne Collins (2008) AKA Katniss Everdeen, the Mockingjay, the Girl On Fire PORTRAYED BY Jennifer Lawrence in The Hunger Games movies (2012-2015) BEST MOMENT Pissing off the president by not only winning the Hunger Games but getting the rules changed so there can be two winners and saving Peeta.

KNOWN TO SAY “My name is Katniss Everdeen. Why am I not dead? I should be dead.”

WHY SHE’S GREAT She started out as a reluctant contestant on a deadly reality show and ended up bringing down an evil regime. She made archery popular.

She rocked the most outrageous gowns in SF history. And she made all the boys look like a bunch of wimps.

87

KATNISS

This Game bird was a mockingjay THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 15

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Biodata

BAYMAX

Your flexible friend

85

86

CHEWBACCA Let the Wookiee win

16 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

FIRST APPEARANCE Sunfire & Big Hero 6 #1 (1998) FIRST FILM APPEARANCE Big Hero 6 (2015) PORTRAYED BY Scott Adsit (voice) BEST MOMENT Using his rocket fist for the first time.

KNOWN TO SAY “Flying makes me a better care provider.”

WHY HE’S GREAT The movie Baymax is very different from the comic version and a whole lot more interesting. The film may be named after the superteam but Baymax is the undisputed star.

An inflatable medical droid (think: a rubber version of Star Trek: Voyager’s Emergency Medical Hologram), he’s given an armoured exoskeleton upgrade by a teenage electronics prodigy called Hiro. He’s cute and bad-ass; funny and formidable; weird but cool. Shame he’s not a part of the official Marvel Cinematic Universe.

We demand a crossover NOW!

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode VI: A New Hope (1977) PORTRAYED BY Peter Mayhew (Star Wars Episodes III-VII) BEST MOMENT Capturing the AT-ST during the battle for Endor in Return Of The Jedi.

KNOWN TO SAY “Nowrrrrragh!”

WHY HE’S GREAT Han’s best mate, or a “walking carpet” as Leia called him. A native of the planet Kashyyyk, Chewbacca was a Wookiee of around 200 years old when he first teamed up with Solo.

Chewie is another one of those Star Wars characters who oozes personality even though you can’t understand a word he’s saying. Y’see that’s where Lucas went wrong with Jar Jar Binks – he insisted on giving him dialogue. And as Harrison Ford said, “George, you can type this shit, but you can’t say it!” Chewie is charming. Even his grunting is cute.

How to freak out your guests: dress to match the large picture of yourself hanging on the wall.

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Biodata

LADY PENELOPE Adding a touch of class to International Rescue

T

he problem with the Tracy Brothers in the original Thunderbirds is that they were pretty interchangeable. Arguably, their vehicles had more personality than they did. But Thunderbirds did give us one human (well, puppet) character who left an impression: International Rescue’s UK agent, Lady Penelope. Sure, she had a high-tech vehicle too, but this peer of the realm was never outshone by the bonnet of her pink Rolls. The

height of sophistication, with the elegance and style of a ’50s film starlet, she went into action alongside trusted butler Parker and never lost her cool. She even recorded a single about her trusted aide, “Well Done, Parker”, but she never became a pop star.

Sophia Myles’s take on Lady P was far and away the best thing about the disastrous 2004 film. And now we have an all-new CG version, carrying the pristine champagne glasses into the 21st century.

FIRST APPEARANCE Thunderbirds (1965) AKA Lady Penelope Creighton-Ward PORTRAYED BY Sylvia Anderson (voice, original TV show); Sophia Myles (2004 film); Rosamund Pike (voice, 2015 TV series) DID YOU KNOW? FAB1, her pink Rolls-Royce, was inexplicably swapped for a hideously ugly customised Ford for the 2004 film. At least it still had six wheels.

“GET THE ROLLS-ROYCE – WE’RE GOING FOR A LITTLE RIDE”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

G’KAR Prophet motive

18 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

LONDO

When two races go to war, B5 is all that you can score…

Sail of the Centauri

L

ondo and G’Kar; their animosity was legendary. Londo was a Centauri while G’Kar was a Narn and the two races had a longstanding grudge (the Centauri empire having occupied Narn at one point). So when both were appointed as Ambassadors to serve on Babylon 5 – a kind of UN in space – they were never going to get on. Especially when Londo tells G’Kar that he he’s had a vision that – ultimately – they would kill each other.

In the end, they did, but by that point they had reconciled their differences and their deaths were actually a self-sacrifice to save others.

Londo was the Victor Meldrew of Babylon 5, always complaining about something or other; G’Kar was the infuriating philosopher who seemed to see straight through people’s motives.

Londo was blunt in his dealing with others: “Ah, arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you!”; G’Kar loved bamboozling them with purple prose: “We are all the sum of our tears. Too little and the ground is not fertile and nothing can grow there; too much, the best of us is washed away.”

Londo became an Emperor; G’Kar became a prophet.

It was an epic story arc for both of them but they’ll always be best remembered for their early, bitter verbal sparring most of all: Londo: “There, you see! I’m going to live.”

G’Kar: “So it would seem. Well, it’s an imperfect universe.”

Londo: “Bastard.”

G’Kar: “Monster.”

Londo: “Fanatic.”

G’Kar: “Murderer.”

Londo: “You are insane!”

G’Kar: “And that is why we’ll win.”

Londo: “‘Go be the ambassador to Babylon 5,’ they say. ‘Will be an easy assignment.’ Ah, I hate my life.”

G’Kar: “So do I.” Londo: “Shut up!”

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 19

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

AVON

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Blake’s 7 season one, episode two (1978) PORTRAYED BY Paul Darrow BEST MOMENT Shooting Blake in the final episode.

KNOWN TO SAY “Blake… I’m finished. Staying with you requires a degree of stupidity of which I no longer feel capable.”

WHY HE’S AN ICON Look up “anti-hero” in the dictionary and you’ll probably find a picture of Avon. Duplicitous and self-serving, the convicted hacker and embezzler spent two series being a major pain in Blake’s backside. He mainly seemed to stay part of the crew because being on the Liberator, the most powerful ship in the universe, was the best way to avoid capture by the Federation.

When Blake vanished, Avon became the rebel’s reluctant leader, his trustworthiness not helped by the fact he appeared to have the hots for their arch-nemesis, Servalan.

Not-so-trusted leader

81

80

AERYN SUN Peacekeeper defector

20 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Farscape (1999) PORTRAYED BY Claudia Black BEST MOMENT Dropping her own mother to her death from a skyscraper balcony.

KNOWN TO SAY “But shooting makes me feel better” WHY SHE’S GREAT Aeryn Sun was the hard-as-nails, leather-clad Sebacean Peacekeeper who turned against her old employees and threw her lot in with the rebels on the sentient ship Moya.

The she met John Crichton, and instantly loathed him. Four seasons, one mini-series and a hell of an emotional journey later she married him and they had a son. It was the most compelling love story in SF ever, and yet she never became just “the love interest”. This warrior remained het own woman throughout – it was a marriage of equals.

FIRST APPEARANCE Blake’s 7, season one, episode six (1978) AKA Commissioner Sleer PORTRAYED BY Jacqueline Pearce BEST MOMENT Snogging Avon KNOWN TO SAY “Where there’s life there’s threat” WHY SHE’S GREAT As the arch-nemesis of Blake and his numerically-challenged rebels, Servalan put the opera into space opera with increasingly architectural costumes and a performance that puts all other divas to shame. A textbook sociopath who would destroy a planet to advance her ambitions and happily use sex as a weapon, she rose through Federation ranks to become President. Sadly her empire collapsed soon after. She could never work out if she would rather kill or kiss Avon, and spent a lot of time and energy attempting to do both.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE WALL-E (2008) PORTRAYED BY Ben Burtt (vocal performance) BEST MOMENT His breathtakingly beautiful ballet in space with his new-found love EVE KNOWN TO SAY “Eeeeeev… ah!”

WHY HE’S GREAT Few screen robots have a milionth of the personality of WALL-E, which is all the more impressive because WALL-E displays a more limited vocabulary than Arnie in The Terminator in addition to spending a great deal of the movie on his own. Even before EVE arrives and steals his metal heart, his cheery tenacity as he tries to tidy up a deserted Earth buried in trash wins the hearts of the viewers. He’s as funny and engaging as any of the greatest slapstick stars of the silent era. And he makes a noise like an Apple Mac when he reboots. Sweet.

79 SERVALAN

Evil with an operatic dress sense

78 WALL-E Romantic rubbish robot

BBC

Biodata

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“YOU ARE NO APE!”

CAESAR

The ape that changed the world

I

n the original Planet Of The Apes film series, Caesar was born Milo in 1973, the son of Cornelius, the intelligent ape who travelled back through time from the post-ape-ocalypse.

In the more recent series he’s super-intelligent thanks to his mum being experimented upon by a scientist looking for a cure for Alzheimer’s. In both he’s the instigator of the ape revolution that leads to the fall of mankind.

Roddy McDowall delivered a passionate and defining performance from under the latex as the first Caesar. Technology had moved on by the time it was Andy Serkis’s turn to go ape. The man who had 22 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

been Gollum took CG performance-capture acting to new levels with his take on Caesar. By turns sympathetic and scary, he was the heart and soul of director Rupert Wyatt’s glossy 2011 reboot, and the bridge scene is his defining moment. Turning the tables on his human captors, Caesar leads an army of escaped chimps, gorillas and orangutans over (and under) San Francisco’s gridlocked Golden Gate Bridge to the safety of the forests beyond. While the humans panic, the animals move tactically – and mercilessly – knocking mounted policemen off their steeds and a helicopter out of the sky, before teaming up to use an overturned bus as a battering ram.

77 Biodata

The traic jams in this city were really getting out of hand.

FIRST APPEARANCE Escape From The Planet Of The Apes (1971) (as a baby) AKA Milo PORTRAYED BY Roddy McDowall in Conquest Of The Planet Of The Apes (1971), Battle For The Planet Of The Apes (1973); Andy Serkis in Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes (2011), Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes (2014) & War For The Planet Of The Apes (2017) BEST MOMENT The first time he speaks in Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, saying, “No!” DID YOU KNOW? Roddy McDowall also played Caesar’s dad Dr Cornelius in the first three Apes films

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THE 100 GREATES

SEVEN OF NINE

The Borg that left the collective

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MARVIN Life? Don’t talk to him about life

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FIRST APPEARANCE The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (radio, 1978) PORTRAYED BY Stephen Moore (radio, TV); Alan Rickman (voice) and Warwick Davis (in the suit) for the 2005 film.

BEST MOMENT He doesn’t have best moments – they’re all really, really depressing.

KNOWN TO SAY “I think you ought to know I’m feeling very depressed.”

WHY HE’S GREAT Marvin the Paranoid Android would have cringed at learning he’d inspired a song by Radiohead. The endlessly quotable robot (“I’ve calculated your chance of survival, but I don’t think you’ll like it”; “Do you want me to sit in a corner and rust or just fall apart where I’m standing?”) should be happy, though, that he was the only Hitchhiker’s character who’s best incarnation was in the movie version.

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You never knew what kind of River you were going to get.

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RIVER TAM The girl with the dark secret

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uch of River Tam’s appeal can be explained by the fact that: a) she’s one of Whedon’s trademark kick-ass femmes; and b) she’s played by every sci-fi geek’s favourite actress, Summer Glau. But River’s got a lot going for her in her own right – an awesome name for starters, plus a wide-eyed hippy vibe and an air of mystery hiding big, big secrets beneath the surface.

Before being rescued by her brother Simon, River was the subject of an Alliance experiment to create an army of psychic super-soldiers. The experiments worked, but it wasn’t until River’s suppressed abilities were triggered that we saw her true

potential. Fragile, yes, but an angel of death capable of laying waste to a room full of the ’verse’s most feared foes with a balletic mix of martial arts, kickboxing and a very big sword.

Firefly’s tragically short lifespan meant there wasn’t enough time for River to etch herself into mainstream consciousness as Buffy did, but from her first moments River was every bit as arresting.

She’s adorable, sweet, a total whack-attack and has a knack for the scene-stealing one-liner – calmly announcing she’ll kill Jayne with her brain if he betrays her ever again. Undoubtedly Glau’s greatest role, and in many ways Firefly’s secret weapon.

FIRST APPEARANCE Firefly (2002) PORTRAYED BY Summer Glau BEST MOMENT Going kick-ass in the bar in the film, Serenity.

KNOWN TO SAY “You gave up everything you had to find me. And you found me broken.”

DID YOU KNOW? In Serenity Simon (River’s brother) uses the phrase “Eta Kooram Nah Smech!” to send her to sleep. It’s actually a Russian phrase which literally translated means, “This is for hens to laugh” which is a Russian idiom for, “This is ridiculous.”

“ALSO, I CAN KILL YOU WITH MY BRAIN”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Super-family go ballistic, Galactus goes supernova…

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Fantastic Four #1 (1961) MR FANTASTIC PORTRAYED BY Ioan Gruffudd (2005-7); Miles Teller (2015) THE THING PORTRAYED BY Michael Chiklis (2005-7); Jamie Bell (2015) THE INVISIBLE WOMAN PORTRAYED BY Jessica Alba (2005-7); Kate Mara (2015) THE HUMAN TORCH PORTRAYED BY Chris Evans (2005-7); Michael B Jordan (2015) BEST MOMENT Defeating Galactus for the first time in Fantastic Four #50.

KNOWN TO SAY “Flame on!”

DID YOU KNOW? The Fantastic Four have had various replacement members over the years when core members have been pregnant/gone evil/died for a while/ resigned in a huff/lost their powers.

These include: the Inhumans Crystal and Medusa; Luke Cage, Power Man; She-Hulk; Ant-Man; Ms Marvel; Namorita; Spider-Man; Storm; and Black Panther.

“IT’S CLOBBERING’ TIME”

THE FANTASTIC FOUR No ordinary family

MARVEL

T

he Fantastic Four were the first great creation to roll off the Stan Lee/Jack Kirby superhero conveyor belt and put the fledgling Marvel Comics on the map. They were different: superhero celebrities, with no secret identities. They also – gasp – squabbled and had personal issues.

This was the birth of superheroes with angst, an innovation Lee and Kirby would use again and again with characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men. This “Fab Four” were the Beatles of the superhero world. They were superstars in their own world as well as a hit comic creation in ours. The wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm was a

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Hello-level event back in 1965. Namor, Prince of Atlantis threatened to be their Yoko but he never quite got the (invisible) girl. Their very human interrelations were a realistic backdrop for some of Marvel’s most cosmic adventures.

Disastrously the lacklustre mid-noughties films – 2005’s Fantastic Four and 2007’s Fantastic Four: Rise Of The Silver Surfer – actually managed to lessen the brand. There’s huge controversy over the new film too, due for release this summer, which has made some audacious/radical (depending on your viewpoint) changes to the formula. But the Fantastic Four will always be the first family at Marvel.

Vote Saxon.

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THE MASTER Dancing to the beat of his own drum

H

e is the Doctor’s Moriarty, the evil Time Lord who may or may not be the Doctor’s brother (or maybe that’s sister now, considering his recent gender reassignment). He stared into the time vortex as a child and the sound of drums beat out a new destiny for him. And lo, he went forth into the universe to f**k it right over.

He likes black. He likes hypnotising people. He like shrinking enemies with his tissue compression eliminator. He likes being a she when he fancies a change. He used to like beards. He’s plotted with Sea Devils, Cybermen and Daleks. He’s been Prime Minister of the UK, a French knight,

an Arabian sorcerer and the curator of the afterlife.

He/she loves a good word puzzle. In that list of aliases (right): Magister means Master in Latin; Martin Jurgens is an anagram of Master Gunnjir (Gunnjir being the spear of Odin); Estram is an anagram of Master; Yana stood for “You Are Not Alone”; Missy was short for Mistress; Colonel Masters… doesn’t need explaining, surely? On a more meta level, the Master once took over the body of Tremas, another anagram of Master; and Sir Gilles (actually played by then-Master Anthony Ainley in a bad fake wig) was credited as played by “James Stoker”, an anagram of “Master’s Joke”.

FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who “Terror Of The Autons” (1971) AKA Colonel Masters, Emil Keller, Martin Jurgens, Reverend Magister, Professor Carl Thascalos, The Portreeve, Kalid, Sir Gilles Estram, Bruce, Professor Yana, Harold Saxon, Missy PORTRAYED BY Roger Delgado (1971-1973); Peter Pratt (1976); Geoffrey Beevers (1981); Anthony Ainley (1981-1989); Eric Roberts (1996); Derek Jacobi (2007); John Simm (2007-2010); Michelle Gomez (2014-present) BEST MOMENT Classic series – watching The Clangers in prison to distract from the fact that he’s plotting with the Sea Devils; new series – grooving to “Voodoo Child” (“Here come the drums, here come the drums…”) while unleashing the Toclafane to destroy Earth.

KNOWN TO SAY “I am known as the Master… universally” DID YOU KNOW? The producers of the US Doctor Who TV movie approached Christopher (Doc Brown) Lloyd to play the Master.

“I AM THE MASTER AND YOU WILL OBEY ME”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

GENDER’S GAME CURTIS R A brief history of sci-fi sex swappers

ecently on Doctor Who the Master regenerated into the Mistress. In the Marvel comics universe, Thor is currently a woman, after the old Thor lost the ability to pick up his hammer and a mysterious woman stepped in to wield Mjölnir instead. But they are far from the first sci-fi characters to undergo gender re-assignment; it’s actually quite common. Here are some of the more famous examples.

GODZILLA

You could always rely on super-powered wasters show Misfits to take a sci-fi cliché and reinvigorate it in strange and perverse ways. Curtis originally had time-bending powers but in later seasons he could swap between male and female versions of him/herself. At first he was horrified by having to endure “women’s problems”: periods, the wandering eyes and hands of leery blokes, date rape and his mate Rudy’s opportunistic muff diving (though oddly – considering how rubbish men are it usually – he gets the hang of bra straps quickly). He also has sex, as a male, with a girl who also fancies his female self, so he has sex with her as a female as well.

STARBUCK (AND BOOMER)

Fans of the Japanese Godzilla were less than thrilled with Roland Emmerich’s bizarre decision to turn the clearly testosterone-fuelled giant lizard of the original film series into a doting, egglaying mom for his US outing. God may be a woman, Godzilla certainly is not. He was a he again for the 2014 film.

STARHAWK

A member of Marvel’s superteam from the future, the Guardians of the Galaxy (although not used in the film), Starhawk (aka Stakar) was forced to live part of his life time-sharing a body with his adoptive sister Aleta Ogord – they took turns occupying the same physical space; while one was “here” the other was banished to some kind of limbo. Somehow this didn’t prevent them developing romantic feelings for each other, and when they were finally separated they had three kids together. It’s all just too weird…

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The new Battlestar Galactica was particularly gender-, colour- and species-blind when it came to recasting characters from the old show – Boomer went from being a black male human to an Asian-American female Cylon. The most highprofile sex change, though, was Starbuck’s – Dirk Benedict in the original show was replaced by Katee Sackhoff in the reimagined show, though she still puffed on the odd cigar. Benedict initially seemed happy with the idea; he posed and shared a cigar with Sackhoff for a publicity stunt held, of course, at a Starbuck’s.

Later, though, he had a major change of heart, saying in an interview in May 2004: “‘Re-imagining’, they call it. ‘Un-imagining’ is more accurate… Everything is female driven. The male characters, from Adama on down, are confused, weak, and wracked with indecision.”

HOLLY/HILLY

If there was ever a character who was least likely to undergo an unexpected, self-elected sex change it would have to be Red Dwarf’s grumpy, sardonic, world-weary computer Holly.

Yet that’s exactly what happened.

Actually, it’s even weirder than that. Holly decided to have a “head sex change” after meeting and falling in love with his alternate female self, Hilly – he actually became her! In image at least. That’s like a man deciding to have a sex change then a facelift to look like his wife.

M

Bond’s boss was a man. Then he was a different man. Then he was a woman. Then again, Bond himself has been a Scotsman, a Welshman, an Englishman, an Aussie, an Irishman and a shop window mannequin in a safari suit. So it seems likely Q, M and perhaps even Bond are mere code names, and different people can take up the mantle. Does that mean we could soon have a Jemima Bond? Would that split fans as much as the idea of a female Doctor? (Of course, the Doctor did regenerate into Joanna Lumley in 1999’s “The Curse Of Fatal Death”, but that was a one-off comedy episode produced for Comic Relief – we’d love to see the first proper female Doctor!)

DR JEKYLL & SISTER/ MS HYDE

You really wouldn’t want to read a feminist critique of Hammer’s 1971 The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll And Sister Hyde. The good Dr Jekyll (Ralph Bates) becomes the evil Sister Hyde (Martine Beswick) – it’s not exactly PC, is it? Dodgy gender politics aside, it’s a typically affable piece of Hammer melodrama, and about a million times more watchable than 1995’s Dr Jekyll And Ms Hyde , a “comedy” starring Tim Daly and Sean Young where the real evil comes in the form of the insultingly lame script.

HG WELLS

Yep, in the wacky world of TV show Warehouse 13 HG Wells is a woman. An evil woman. Helena Wells. She never really changed sex. It’s more a conceptual change. Y’see, she wrote all the books back in the 19th century, but had to pretend her brother really wrote them because it was man’s world. For a while she was an apprentice at Warehouse 12, but went off the rails after her daughter was killed, and became obsessed with finding a way to time travel so she could go back and save her.

She never seems too worried about missing out on her book royalties, though.

DREN

Some scientists are a bit thick. The modern-day Frankensteins in Splice, Clive Nicoli (Adrien Brody) and Elsa Kast (Sarah Polley) (horror fans will get the in-joke in the names) create some artificial slug-like creatures. Unfortunately, they unexpectedly and spontaneously change sex during an ill-timed press conference, and, being male now, they maul each other to bloody pulps. Clive and Elsa then create the far cuter Dren using similar methods, but only cotton on to the fact that she’s due to turn into a psychotic male when it’s a tad too late.

SASQUATCH

Sasquatch, a kind of orange, furry, Canadian version of the Hulk, created for superhero team Alpha Flight, has been a woman twice. When he went evil, he was killed by teammate Snowbird, but – after a long series of hiccups – his soul was eventually recovered and placed in the handily-recently-vacated body of Snowbird (there’s irony for you). In this female form he became a white Sasquatch. After a while, he became a bloke again. Don’t ask (but the spirit of Snowbird was involved). Later, in Marvel’s Exiles, we met another female version of Sasquatch – but this one was a woman from an alternate dimension, so that doesn’t really count.

BERGU KATTSE/ ZOLTAR

You may or may not know that ’80s classic Battle Of The Planets was originally the Japanese show Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, given a makeover for US TV. There were a lot of differences between the shows. The Americans introduced a comedy robot called 7-Zark-7 for a start. They also significantly changed the nature of the show’s Big Bad, Zoltar, or Bergu Kattse in the original. Kattse was a chimeric mutant created by fusing two fraternal twins (one male, one female) into a single entity. As a child Kattse would change from male to female on a yearly basis and had to spend years transferring between schools before gaining control of his body. Zoltar, on the other hand, was a camp bloke in a silly mask.

DELENN

The Delenn we first met in Babylon 5’s pilot TV movie looked – and sounded – very different to the Delenn in the subsequent series… even though she was played by the same actress. The original idea was that Delenn would be a male chatacter played by a female with a digitally altered voice. The idea was dropped (and alien make-up changed) when the voice was judged to be unconvincing.

SAM BECKETT

And finally, TV’s greatest serial sex changer. It took a season and a bit before the producers of Quantum Leap bit the bullet and experimented with Sam leaping into the body of a woman for the first time in “What Price Gloria?” If they had any worries about the audience reaction to putting their star in drag, they needn’t have. The response was overwhelmingly positive, and Scott Bakula proved so game at tottering around in high heels that soon gender-swapping leaps were a regular part of the show.

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WORF

Klingon on the bridge

AVA

More human than human?

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Trek: The Next Generation “Encounter At Farpoint” (1987) PORTRAYED BY Michael Dorn BEST MOMENT His wedding to Jadzia Dax, one of the few wedding episodes in TV sci-fi worth watching. It’s genuinely hilarious.

KNOWN TO SAY “Today is a good day to die.”

WHY HE’S GREAT Worf is the only character who’s been in the main cast for two Trek shows.

Arguably the dour Klingon fitted in even better on Deep Space Nine than the show he was created for – Next Generation. Similarly, DS9 felt like it had found its missing piece when he arrived. Though 100% Klingon by blood he was brought up by humans after his parents were killed, becoming the first Klingon officer in Starfleet. A few questionable hair cuts later, he adopted the ponytail and never looked back. Qapla’!

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Is she all in your head? Do you care?

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NUMBER SIX Cylon witness

D

ifficult to imagine from a 1970s point of view that one day teenage boys would be getting all hormonal over a Cylon. But back then Cylons didn’t come in the shape of a 5’ 10” supermodel in a body-hugging red evening dress.

The sixth Cylon of “the Significant Seven”, Tricia Helfer nabbed the role with what Battlestar director Michael Rymer describes as “her vibe”.

“Nobody gets how hard that role is,” he says. “To bring the depth, the vulnerability and the mystery to essentially a robot chick.”

Six started off the series as a Cylon infiltrator having an affair with Baltar and manipulating him

into treacherous acts. That Six died but somehow lived on as “Head Six” – a virtual Six that only Baltar could see and interact with. He thought she might be a hallucination but she knew things he couldn’t.

She claimed to be “an angel of God sent here to protect you, to guide you and to love you” and the ambiguous final episode would seem to back that up.

Meanwhile in the real world, the consciousness of the version of Six that died to save Baltar was given a new body – again played by Helfer – and she became known as Caprica Six. And what do you know, she was afflicted with a virtual buddy too: Head Baltar!

FIRST APPEARANCE Battlestar Galactica (2003) AKA Caprica Six, Shelly Godfrey, Gina Inviere, Natalie Faust, Lida and Sonja PORTRAYED BY Tricia Helfer BEST MOMENT The first time Baltar meets one of the “real” Number Sixes (as opposed to the one in his head that only he can see and talk to) and tells her she should undo another couple of buttons on her blouse, not realising that everyone else in the room can see her and hear him too.

KNOWN TO SAY “God has a plan for you Gaius. He has a plan for everything and everyone.”

DID YOU KNOW? Showrunner Ronald D Moore has confirmed that Number Six in Battlestar Galactica was a nod to Number Six in The Prisoner (see number 40).

“HUMANITY’S FINAL CHAPTERS ARE ABOUT TO BE WRITTEN”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

1980s Hunt could be just as politically incorrect as 1970s Hunt – just the way we loved him.

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“You’re nicked!”

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GENE HUNT Take a look at the law man beating up the right guy

G

ene Hunt was an unapologetic throwback; a shamelessly un-PC antihero who emerged from the unlikely belly of Blair’s touchy-feely PC Britain. We all knew it was wrong to like him. We couldn’t help ourselves.

He was a chauvinistic bully who didn’t bend rules so much as flagrantly ignore the fact they even existed. He was uncouth. He was often drunk. He had the dress sense of a second division football manager. But he also had charisma, loyalty and an arsenal of the most colourful insults and comebacks

ever. Both Sam Tyler and Alex Drake started off loathing him before grudgingly coming to admire – even love – him. Little did they know that ultimately, he would save their souls.

“Gene Hunt is that character a writer only creates once in a lifetime,” said co-creator Matthew Graham. “Someone who excites and challenges an audience in equal measure. He was a joy to write, as I could invoke the rough’n’tumble mates of my dad’s who used to smell of scotch and cheap cigars.

I’m going to miss him.”

FIRST APPEARANCE Life On Mars (2006) PORTRAYED BY Philip Glenister (UK); Harvey Keitel (US) BEST MOMENT “Vandalising” the Blue Peter garden KNOWN TO SAY “They reckon you’ve got concussion – but personally, I couldn’t give a tart’s furry cup if half your brains are falling out.”

“Anything you say will be taken down, ripped up and shoved down your scrawny little throat until you’ve choked to death.” “Gene Hunt smashes doors down, he does not pick girlie locks.”

DID YOU KNOW? In the feeble US version of the show the big revelation is that Hunt and co are in a virtual reality scenario while their real bodies are in suspended animation on a mission to Mars.

“DON’T MOVE – YOU ARE SURROUNDED BY ARMED BASTARDS”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

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GROOT

That’s “Ent”-tertainment

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FIRST APPEARANCE Page: Tales To Astonish #13 (1960) Screen: Guardians Of The Galaxy (2014) AKA His Divine Majesty King Groot the 23rd, Monarch of Planet X, custodian of the branch worlds, ruler of all the shades PORTRAYED BY Vin Diesel (voice) BEST MOMENT Regrowing as a dancing twig.

KNOWN TO SAY “I am Groot.”

WHY HE’S GREAT Until 2014 Groot was barely even a C-lister in the Marvel universe.

A minor character from the ’60s rescued from obscurity in the ’00s when he joined the Guardians Of The Galaxy, the vocabulary-challenged sentient tree became the unexpected hit of the 2014 Guardians film. Rocket Raccoon was cool as well but too desperate to be loved; Groot simply enchanted us all with three words.

KOBAL

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? by Philip K Dick (1968) AKA Roy Baty (that’s how his name is spelled in the novel) PORTRAYED BY Rutger Hauer in Blade Runner (1982) BEST MOMENT The “Tears in rain” speech he gives as he’s dying, clutching hold of a dove.

KNOWN TO SAY “All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain…”

WHY HE’S AN ICON Rick Deckard’s “antagonist” in Blade Runner is hardly a typical villain. He’s a man-made Replicant suffering existential angst as his sell-by date fast approaches. He just wants more life. His death scene is a true landmark of sci-fi cinema. His deeply moving monologue was completely rewritten by actor Rutger Hauer. His greatness, though, wasn’t just about his death.

There’s the hair and starey eyes too.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE The Quatermass Experiment (1953) FULL NAME Professor Bernard Quatermass PORTRAYED BY ON TV: Reginald Tate in The Quatermass Experiment (TV, 1953); John Robinson in Quatermass II (TV, 1959); André Morell in Quatermass And The Pit (TV, 1958-9); John Mills in Quatermass (TV, 1979); Jason Flemyng in The Quatermass Experiment (TV, 2005); ON FILM: Brian Donlevy in The Quatermass Xperiment (1955), Quatermass II (1957); Andrew Keir in Quatermass And The Pit (1967) WHY HE’S GREAT He’s had almost as many faces as Doctor Who. The chin-stroking, pipe-smoking boffin at the British Experimental Rocket Group, he investigated alien shenanigans with a stiff upper lip. And in the film version of Quatermass And The Pit Hammer Studios produced a bona fide sci-fi movie masterpiece. Good show!

ROY BATTY The Replicant who wanted to live on

64 QUATERMASS

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951) PORTRAYED BY Lock Martin BEST MOMENT Blasting a tank with his laser vision.

KNOWN TO SAY Nothing. But try saying “Klaatu barada nikto” to him and see what happens.

WHY HE’S GREAT Gort is the robot rottweiler who guards the flying saucer while his boss is going undercover as a human. When his master dies, it’s Gort who throws a tank-destroying tantrum until he turns his attentions to resurrecting his master instead. The costume – worn by a seven-foot-seven-inch doorman from Hollywood’s famous Grauman’s Chinese Theater – was a striking and clever design. Two costumes were made; one with the join at the back, the other with the join at the front.

That way the camera need never show the join and in the final film Gort appeared seamless. Genius.

GORT

Stand and deliver

62 DARTH MAUL Going, going… Qui-Gon

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) PORTRAYED BY Ray Park (body) and UK comedian Peter Serafinowicz (voice) in The Phantom Menace, Sam Witwer (voice) in The Clone Wars animated series BEST MOMENT His awesome lightsaber duel with Qui-Gon Jinn and Obi-Wan Kenobi.

KNOWN TO SAY “Die, Jedi, die!”

WHY HE’S GREAT Maul was far and away the best new Star Wars character introduced in The Phantom Menace and then Lucas killed him off – what a waste!

Everything from his startling appearance (those horns! That face tattoo!) to the balletic fight movies (courtesy of stunt performer Ray Park) made him a premier league bad guy and the film’s (literal) poster boy.

And he killed Qui-Gon Jinn, the rotter!

Aah, the incredibly practical combat gear that is the chainmail bikini.

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BARBARELLA Sex and the sci-fi

E

uro-trash pioneer Dino De Laurentiis tapped into cinema’s zero-G spot with his groovy film adaptation of Jean-Claude Forest’s adult comic. Brash and bra-less, it was a boost for a genre that rarely puts the “sigh” in sci-fi.

Living in a strange future that looks a little like a fetish version of the ’60s, Barbarella (Jane Fonda) jets off into space after being ordered to retrieve a doctor from a distant planet. But outer space must be hotter than previously thought, as she spends more than a little time running around sans clothing – perhaps it’s the fur-lined spacecraft that’s keeping her warm (or the copious amounts of sex, of course).

When she does put something on, it’s often so tiny it can barely be called an outfit.

Roger Vadim’s ultra-kitsch sci-fi classic improves with age. Despite being constructed largely from gold tinfoil and lava lamps, its dreamy innocence is timeless. Jane Fonda’s space-faring Alice in Wonderland is pure ditzy ingénue stereotype. But as she takes up the cause of a bizarre Oz-like planet full of assorted weirdos under the cosh of an evil, sexy dictator (Anita Pallenberg), and ends up breaking the dastardly Durand-Durand’s hilarious “Excessive Machine”* – which causes victims to die of pleasure – the film starts to play more like a charmingly sly dig at the era’s rampant sexism. (*Many fans erroneously believe this was called the orgasmatron, but that device is actually used in Woody Allen’s SF comedy Sleeper.)

FIRST APPEARANCE V Magazine (1962) PORTRAYED BY Jane Fonda in Barbarella (1968) BEST MOMENT The title sequence in which Barbarella strips out of her spacesuit in zero gravity, all to the coolest grooves, man (“Barbarella psychedella,” croons the singer). She even interacts with the letters in the credits.

DID YOU KNOW? The video for Kylie Minogue’s “Put Yourself In My Place” recreates the opening scene from Barbarella

“MAKE LOVE? BUT NO ONE’S DONE THAT FOR HUNDREDS OF CENTURIES!”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “No hanky panky in the TARDIS?” Not any more.

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CAPTAIN JACK HARKNESS Who wants to live forever?

W

hen I launched Queer As Folk back in 1999,” remembers Torchwood creator Russell T Davies, “I did a Q&A in a club called Nightingale’s in Birmingham, and the very first question was, ‘Why aren’t there any bisexuals on TV?’ And I remember making a mental note, right there and then. So that’s a scoop – he was created in a gay club in the Midlands!”

When Captain Jack Harkness arrived in “The Empty Child” in season one of the reheated Doctor Who, the sexually omnivorous intergalactic conman signalled the first glorious break with the past 42 years of sexually frigid Who. RTD is under no illusions as to why Jack caught on. “It’s John,” he told SFX. “He’s simply outrageous – but he’s clever, too. And let’s not forget 38 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

that those first scripts were by Steven Moffat.

Whatever happened to him? But he just made Jack soar – within two pages, he’s slapped a man’s arse, in a gentlemen’s club in 1941! That’s brand-new territory, in his very first scene. Seriously – try to think of a character who does something brand new to TV in his very first appearance. See how hard it is? Then look at Jack!”

Jack later became immortal thanks to the “Bad Wolf” version of Rose Tyler, and went on to lead the remnants of Torchwood after the Dalek/Cyberman battle at Canary Wharf. He also gained a pet pterosaur, fathered and lost a daughter and had an on-off fling with a pizza delivery guy called Ianto. He was last seen trying to carve a career in America and wondering if the Doctor will need his services again.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who “The Empty Child” (2005) AKA The Face Of Boe (possibly – the Doctor thinks that’s what he might become) PORTRAYED BY John Barrowman BEST MOMENT Stripped of his clothes for a futuristic version of What Not To Wear. “Am I naked in front of millions of viewers?”

“Absolutely.” “Ladies, your viewing figures just went up.”

KNOWN TO SAY “Skinny guy in tight jeans runs into water…? I was taking pictures.”

DID YOU KNOW? Barrowman experimented with using an American, English and Scottish accent for Captain Jack, before showrunner Russell T Davies decided it “made it bigger if it was an American accent”.

“EXCELLENT BOTTOM!”

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“No such thing as Silicon Heaven?

Then where do all the calculators go?”

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KRYTEN

Do androids dreams of electric trouser presses?

N

eurotic, house-proud and pernickety – you’d think that Kryten would be the worst droid possible to join the Red Dwarf crew. Surely the slobbish Lister would infuriate him, the officious Rimmer would abuse his programming and Cat would leave fur balls all over the place?

Somehow, though, he fitted like a glove – in comedy terms at least. Programmed to be polite and helpful (a Series 4000 mechanoid, he even had a hoover attachment) he saw Lister as a role model (“Don’t you think I’d love to be deceitful, unpleasant, and offensive? Those are the human qualities I admire the most!”). In Rimmer he found someone whose complete lack of empathy with other humans

made him feel more human. In Cat he found a creature so thick, even his programming didn’t prevent him from feeling morally superior.

The Dwarf crew found Kryten in a crashed spaceship, still tending to the crew even though they were all dead. Pretty soon Lister was teaching him how to swear and lie, while Rimmer callously abused his programming to use him as a stooge for many of his hair-brained schemes. Kryten slowly became more independent, though, and his literal responses to requests often provided the best lines in the show. “Step up to Red Alert!” Rimmer once demanded. “Sir, are you absolutely sure?” queried Kryten. “It does mean changing the bulb.”

FIRST APPEARANCE Red Dwarf “Kryten” (1988) AKA Freak Face, Novelty condom-head, Captain Chloroform, Metal Bastard, Butter-pat Head, Plastic Percy, Commander U-Bend PORTRAYED BY David Ross in the series two episode “Kryten” only (1988); Robert Llewellyn (1989-present) BEST MOMENT Lister teaching Kryten how to lie. As the words jam his mechanical mouth, Kryten begs Lister to stop until suddenly he calls a banana, “a small, off-duty, Czechoslovakian traffic warden.” Result!

KNOWN TO SAY “A superlative suggestion, sir, with just two minor flaws. One: we don’t have any defensive shields. And two: we don’t have any defensive shields. Now I realise that, technically speaking, that’s only one flaw; but I thought it was such a big one, it was worth mentioning twice.”

DID YOU KNOW? Original Kryten David Ross did make a return to Red Dwarf… as the voice of a toaster in series four

“SPIN MY NIPPLE NUTS AND SEND ME TO ALASKA!”

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 39

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “Doth Mother know you weareth her drapes?”

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Journey Into Mystery #83 (1962) CREATED BY Stan Lee, Jack Kirby PORTRAYED BY Eric Allan Kramer in the TV movie The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988); Chris Hemsworth in Thor (2011), Avengers Assemble (2012), Thor: The Dark World (2013), Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015) BEST MOMENT The Mighty Thor #380 (1987) in which Thor takes on the deadly Midgard Serpent Jormungand in an issue entirely created from splash pages. An epic written and drawn by the legendary Walt Simonson.

DID YOU KNOW? John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in The Lord Of The Rings and Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) voiced Thor in the 1990s cartoons The Fantastic Four and The Incredible Hulk

40 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“I SAY THEE NAY!”

THOR

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Thunder God, Avenger, occasional frog

N

ew fans of Thor who’ve discovered the character through the recent Marvel films are going to be in for a surprise if they pick up the latest Thor comic. Currently, Thor’s a woman. The previous Thor had been having a rough time of it in recent years: first losing an arm, then losing his ability to pick up his hammer, Mjölnir.

That’s when a mysterious woman stepped in, grabbed Mjölnir and took on the mantle of Thor.

It’s the latest twist in a bizarre comics history for Marvel’s Norse God Of Thunder. At one point he even turned into a frog. No, really…!

The early years of his comic strip adventures were orchestrated largely by the legendary Jack Kirby. Others received writing credits but he was very much the backseat driver as well as the artist.

Thor’s increasingly epic, universe-leaping stories gave a first taste of the cosmic Kirby that would culminate with The New Gods and The Eternals.

If Kirby had still been alive when the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) kicked off a few years ago, he would have been amused at the naysayers who doubted Avengers Assemble could convince audiences that Norse gods and Iron Men could fight side-by-side. He was combining sci-fi and fantasy into a dizzying hybrid decades before with deft ease.

That’s why Thor could happily join the Avengers as a founding member. The fact he was a god simply wasn’t an issue for Kirby and Stan Lee, and ultimately it was never an issue for the MCU either.

Explaining a world of frost giants, rainbow bridges between planets and Loki’s mysterious powers took all of two sentences. “Your ancestors called it magic but you call it science,” says Chris Hemsworth’s Thor, flicking through a book on Norse mythology, “I come from a land where they are one and the same.” Throwing in a massive robot didn’t hurt the first Thor movie’s sci-fi claims, either.

Interview with Chris Hemsworth The MCU’s Norse god talks playing Thor for real How do you make Thor relatable to an audience?

“Kenneth [Branagh, director of the first Thor movie] kept saying, ‘You have these huge, elaborate costumes and these amazing sets.

Everything about it is fantastic. Then you can basically bring it all down to, “This is a scene between a father and a son. Or a brother and a brother…”’ I tried to keep it that simple. Everything else is there and does its job and sells that side of things. You don’t have to keep winking to the audience to say, ‘Hey, we’re gods by the way.’ The story tells that, and the props and the sets and the costumes. For us it was about, ‘What’s the truth in this scene? What are these people saying to each other? What are their motivations?’ You have to have it relatable. You’ve got to feel for the guy. He can’t be this one-note warrior, walking around, breaking things, being brash.”

How did you approach Thor’s speech?

“It’s not quite Shakespearean, but there’s an old English feel to it, certainly. There’s a fine line between it being real and hokey.”

In reading the comics, did any particular stories make a big impact on you?

“There was one particular story… I have the image of him living on a vacant lot, on

a farm somewhere, and he’s rebuilding his kingdom there. There’s a great sense of Thor being alone in this one particular comic [Thor #2, August 2007]. It was him rebuilding his kingdom but also his purpose. I don’t know why, but that sort of stuck out for me. ” Joss Whedon has described the Avengers as a family. Who is Thor in that family?

“It’s a fairly dysfunctional family isn’t it?

[Laughs] From the comic books, I’ll say that they’re all very lonely in a lot of ways.

Because they’re all so different. Whether or not they’re surrounded by people, there’s still a sense of isolation. I think that’s how maybe why they began to bond.”

Having worked with both JJ Abrams (as George Kirk in Star Trek) and Joss, can you compare their approach to filmmaking?

“They have the same amount of fun. You get in a banter match with them and you lose.

I remember the best piece of direction I got from JJ was when I was on a cable when the explosion happens [in Star Trek]. He comes up and he goes, ‘Yeah, um, less Superman and more super f**ked!’ [laughs]. They’re just guys who know and love every aspect of storytelling in this business. It’s not a job for them; they really do love it.”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

57 Biodata

A troubled kid. But can Ben Solo be redeemed like his grandad?

KYLO REN Death becomes him

I

t probably wasn’t Disney’s smartest idea to make Kylo Ren the face of The Force Awakens’ merchandising. We’re not saying he isn’t a memorable villain – after just one outing, he already ranks among Star Wars’ finest disciples of the Dark Side. It’s more that the First Order enforcer is hard to love. Ren is a moany, angsty kid who’s risen to a place where he can take his anger out on the galaxy with a misshapen lightsaber. Oh yeah, and he kills Han Solo, surely one of the most heinous crimes in the history of cinema. As his famous grandad once said, “Nooooooooooo!”

Where many writers would have made the carrier of the Skywalker lineage a hero, Episode VII scribes Michael Arndt, JJ Abrams and Lawrence 42 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Kasdan decided to make the son of Han and Leia a true wrong ’un. The former Ben Solo is a walking Petri dish of the Light and Dark sides of the Force, who started out as a pupil at his uncle Luke Skywalker’s Jedi school, before being corrupted and wiping out his fellow students. He’s the ultimate Darth Vader fanboy, idolising his grandfather while striving to avoid the “weakness” that saw Palpatine’s right-hand man redeemed. Even his look is modelled on the Sith Lord’s black armour – the contrast between the masked warrior and the vulnerable man-boy underneath is remarkable. The battle for Ren’s soul – the love of his mother versus the “final training” promised by Snoke – will undoubtedly be a major part of Episode VIII and IX.

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars: Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) AKA Ben Solo, son of Han and Leia PORTRAYED BY Adam Driver BEST MOMENT Probably the impressive feat of stopping a laser blast in mid-air with the Force.

KNOWN TO SAY “Your son is gone. He was weak and foolish like his father, so I destroyed him.”

DID YOU KNOW? Oscar-winner Eddie Redmayne auditioned to play Kylo Ren. “They tell you you’re auditioning for the baddie. If you’re me, you then put some ridiculous voice on.”

“NOTHING WILL STAND IN OUR WAY. I WILL FINISH WHAT YOU STARTED”

Despite the controversy, Sackhoff quickly established herself as the definitive Starbuck.

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STARBUCK Fellowship of the wings

S

he was cigar-chomping, dogtag-wearing proof that you shouldn’t always fear change. With Dirk Benedict’s charismatic, skirt-chasing Starbuck burned into the minds of anyone who watched the original Battlestar Galactica, it seemed an outrageous affront to all that was holy to make the rebooted Starbuck a woman – for shame!

But critics soon found themselves thumped in the face by Katee Sackhoff’s no-nonsense Kara Thrace, whose toughness and determination made the original look like a bit of a girl himself.

“What made people accept Starbuck as a woman was that she was such an interesting character,” says

Sackhoff. “Once people let their guard down and their prejudices of what the show was supposed to be, they stopped thinking of the old show.” Indeed: we can’t imagine any other Starbuck now but the one who could out-fly every other pilot in the universe after necking back whisky the night before; who could fight ’n’ whore so determinedly without an ounce of guilt or restraint; who could be so deeply in touch with her spiritual side while still happily killing bad guys left, right and centre.

We’re not sure we’d like to be her (she’s borderline psychotic at times, after all) but it was sure as hell fun to watch her.

FIRST APPEARANCE Male: Battlestar Galactica (1978); Female: Battlestar Galactica(2004) AKA Kara Thrace (female version) PORTRAYED BY Dirk Benedict; Katee Sackhoff BEST MOMENT After apparently returning from the dead, the Galactica crew fears she might be a Cylon. In a stand-off with President Roslin she demands that Roslin shoot her if she thinks she really is an impostor.

DID YOU KNOW? The producers of the revived Battlestar Galactica seriously considered casting Bear McCreary – the man who composed the show’s incidental music and theme tune – to play Starbuck’s father, who was a musician. Sadly, auditions revealed he couldn’t act for toffee. “For the good of the show, and of humanity in general,” McCreary joked on his blog, “I didn’t get the role.”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “Someone bring me a chair to smash.”

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BLACK WIDOW From Russia with lovely fighting moves

T

he Black Widow is another Marvel superhero who started life a criminal. She was originally a non-costumed Russian spy who squared off against Iron Man and the Avengers. Her partner in crime back then was a certain archer called Hawkeye. He soon swapped sides. Widow also defected from Russia and became an Avengers ally before officially joining the team in Avengers #111 (1973).

In 1970 she adopted the skin-tight black costume and metal wrist bands she became famous for. She’s spent most of her time as a support character in other heroes’ titles, though there have been plenty of 44 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

mini-series exploring her background. It’s fair to say that she was, until the 2010s, a B-lister and 10 years ago would never have made a list like this.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe and Scarlett Johansson have changed all that. While it’s a shame that Marvel still has yet to give Widow her own movie (Captain Marvel will be the first femalefronted Marvel movie in 2018, which seems an awful long time to wait after the MCU launched) she has been one of the star attractions in the Avengers, Iron Man and Captain America movies. Her fight moves are especially impressive, and she never gets pushed to one side by all that testosterone.

FIRST APPEARANCE Tales of Suspense #52 (1964) FIRST FILM APPEARANCE Iron Man 2 (2010) AKA Natalia Alianovna “Natasha” Romanova PORTRAYED BY Scarlett Johansson in Iron Man 2 (2010), Avengers Assemble (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015) BEST MOMENT Fighting a bunch of hoodlums while still tied to a chair in Avengers Assemble (2012) – so cool!

KNOWN TO SAY “The truth is a matter of circumstances, it’s not all things to all people all the time.

And neither am I.” DID YOU KNOW? In the Marvel comics universe, Black Widow has had flings with Iron Man, Daredevil, Hawkeye and Hercules.

For a while she was leader of the superteam The Champions of which Hercules was also a member (along with Ghost Rider, Iceman and Angel).

“I ONLY ACT LIKE I KNOW EVERYTHING”

“Oh Bad Wolf girl, I could kiss you!”

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ROSE TYLER Worth burning up a star for

W

hen Doctor Who returned in 2005 the name of the first episode was the name of his new companion – “Rose”. The revamped show placed an emphasis on the companion role that it had never had in the classis series, with showrunner Russell T Davies using the cheery cockney from the council flats as a way for non-SF fans to identify with the show. This new Who, Davies was saying, isn’t just for geeks. It’s for everyone.

Rose was what TV types like to call the “audience identification” character. In other words, she was more likely to say, “Blimey, Doc, that time tunnel fing nearly made me ’eave,” than, “The temporal displacement led to chronic flux nausea.” She celebrated her first journey in time with chips and a coffee. She called the Doctor out when he became sullen and evasive. Most importantly of all, she conveyed the wonder of time travel.

It was a masterful move and it worked perfectly.

Arguably audiences loved Rose more than the ninth Doctor. She was cheeky, brave, resourceful and oozing with charisma but always, always still the girl from down the road. She was a major factor in the revived show’s success, and when Tennant took on the role the show had its dream team. Old-school Doctor Who fans were horrified at even a whiff of hanky panky in the TARDIS. New fans lapped it up. So much so that when the Doctor and Rose were separated in alternate universes at the end of series two, tears welled up across Britain. When the Doctor managed to send her a message – “I’m burning up a sun just to say goodbye” – it was the most exquisitely sad moment in the show’s history.

Then they brought her back. But, hey, that’s sci-fi. And she did have a very big gun second time around.

FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who “Rose” (2005) PORTRAYED BY Billie Piper (2005-2013) BEST MOMENT Her teary goodbye to the tenth Doctor on the beach in an alternate universe’s Bad Wolf Bay KNOWN TO SAY “I met the Emperor. And I took the time vortex and poured it into his head, and turned him to dust. Did you get that?

The god of all Daleks... and I destroyed him. Ha!” DID YOU KNOW? The haunting, specially-composed music that accompanied Rose and the Doctor’s extended departure scene in “Doomsday” triggered so many letters and emails to the BBC enquiring about it that it convinced the BBC to release a soundtrack CD of the first two seasons of Doctor Who.

“BEFORE YOU GET ME BACK IN THAT BOX, CHIPS IT IS. AND YOU CAN PAY.”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Our favourite space cowboy in some really tight pants.

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Interview with Nathan Fillion Playing the space cowboy

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How does it feel to know Mal Reynolds is so popular after all these years?

“You know what? That show and that character changed my life entirely. To this day it still has an effect on my life. So I’m glad to see that it has a place in other people’s hearts and not just mine.”

What is it about Mal that you think fans like?

“He’s not a winning guy, and I think we can all relate to that. In our lives we don’t walk around winning all the time; we’re constantly waging little wars everywhere and I think rarely do we, y’know, just walk away winning. I think people can relate to that. People can relate to, ‘Aw, man, things are not going my way.’ And I think people find solace in watching TV and finding out they’re not the only ones. I think Mal’s a good man, I think he’s got redeeming qualities, I just don’t think he’s the kind of guy you want to be around for any extended length of time.”

Looking back on your time on Firefly, what would you say you’re most proud of?

“I’m really proud of the work. Every job has its challenges, and that was my first job as a lead, it was my first one-hour series; the schedule was different, the demands were different; it was my first time getting a hold of that and I was presented with the most incredible dialogue, the best character I’ve ever played, the best stories.

There was never a day where I went to work and was looking at the script going, ‘Meh. I gotta do that?’ It was always, ‘Whoa, I get to do that!’”

Even when you had to be naked in the desert?

“Even that day! I can’t remember who told me, I think it was Joss, and they said, ‘There’s an episode coming up where you’re going to be naked.’ I said, ‘What?’ And he said, ‘The show opens, the camera pans down to you sitting naked on a rock.’ And I started laughing and said, ‘Okay, I like it.’ No explanation.”

On the show you were called Captain Tightpants.

Will that haunt you to the grave?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if it did? There’s a lot of things that as an actor you say, ‘I don’t want to get pigeonholed.’ If I had to get pigeonholed, it would be as Captain Malcolm Reynolds, thank you very much. ‘Oh he’s that guy, you know the guy who’s really crazy awesome, gets beat up all the time, keeps winning a little bit…’ Everything about Mal, I just loved him.”

“NO ONE’S KILLING ANY FOLK HERE TODAY, ON ACCOUNT OF WE GOT A REALLY TIGHT SCHEDULE”

MAL REYNOLDS Aiming to misbehave

J

oss Whedon created Malcolm Reynolds to be “everything that a hero is not”. A former soldier, he becomes the captain of a motley crew on a makeshift ship, earning their way through smuggling operations in a corner of the galaxy that will forever be a Western movie. He works (and lives) with his former second-in-command, her pilot husband, a prostitute, a priest, a mercenary, a mechanic and two siblings on the run. He tries hard to operate under the wire and not get noticed. But despite trying to come across like he doesn’t give a damn, at heart he really does give a damn. He’s a hero when he needs to be and an innate distrust of authority means he’s ready to take on the system if he thinks it’ll really piss the system off.

He’s lost a war (badly), survived a marriage (she was a little sneaky), earned a crust (not necessarily legally), lost some family (sniff) and lived to fight another day (even if we don’t get to see him any more).

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Firefly (2002) AKA Captain Tightpants PORTRAYED BY Nathan Fillion BEST MOMENT Certain fans might say, “Naked Mal!” but we’re going for the goofy look on his face the first time he sets eyes on Serenity DID YOU KNOW? There’s a “Han in carbonite” toy somewhere in the background on Serenity in every episode of Firefly

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME The last human… using the word human in its loosest possible sense.

DAVE LISTER In space nobody can hear you slob

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t takes a special person to stay positive after waking up from 10 million years of cryo-sleep to discover humanity has expired, your cat has evolved into a narcissistic biped and your irritating roommate is still around as an even more irritating hologram. Oh, and the ship’s being piloted by an eccentric AI with an IQ of six. But space slob

48 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Dave Lister is different. Put a pint and a bum-holeburning curry in front of him and you couldn’t find a happier bloke in the galaxy, last human alive or not.

Lister isn’t the sharpest tool in the box, but when it comes down to it he can outsmart a cybernetic angel of death with the best of ’em. Less a character, more the best mate you never had.

FIRST APPEARANCE Red Dwarf (1988) PORTRAYED BY Craig Charles BEST MOMENT Being attacked by a polymorph in the guise of a sausage, which then makes its way inside his pants KNOWN TO SAY “I’ve seen time running backwards, I’ve played pool with planets and I’ve given birth to twins but I never thought in my entire life I’d taste an edible Pot Noodle” DID YOU KNOW? At the end of series two Lister was pregnant but that whole cliffhanger was written off with a Star Wars-style scroll of text at the beginning of series three. This is because the writers, Rob Grant and Doug Naylor, abandoned the planned “Lister gives birth” episode – which was to have been called “Dad” – halfway through writing it.

“GET REAL MAN. MOST EUNUCHS HAVE GOT MORE BALLS THAN YOU.”

REDDWARF.CO.UK PRESS

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51

“It’s cold outside.

There’s no kind of atmosphere…”

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RIMMER Lickety-split, it’s the holo man

A

lthough we’ve put Lister at 52, let’s call Lister and Rimmer a joint 51, because neither would be the great sci-fi character they are without the other. They are yin and yang. They are the Daily Mail and the Guardian. They are a hangover and the squits. They just belong together. They are cosmically entwined.

Rimmer is the crew member who Red Dwarf’s sentient computer Holly decided to resurrect as a hologram to keep Dave Lister company when the rest of the crew died. There was some logic behind

the choice but not much. The only worse choice would have been Piers Morgan. Rimmer is officious, cowardly, rude, duplicitous, chauvinistic, hopeless in love and a bit thick. He also has a heroic alternate universe alter-ego called Ace Rimmer (“Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast!”) whom everybody adores, which makes him even more embittered.

But like all the great comedy creations there’s an exquisite sadness to him that somehow makes him loveable. And love is all he needs. Not of the inflatable variety, though.

FIRST APPEARANCE Red Dwarf (1988) PORTRAYED BY Chris Barrie BEST MOMENT The trial of Rimmer in “Justice” when Kryten, acting as his lawyer, calls him “A man of such awesome stupidity he even objects to his own defence.”

KNOWN TO SAY “I’ve seen Westerns, I know how to speak cowboy… Dry white wine and Perrier, please.”

DID YOU KNOW? Among the actors who auditioned to play Rimmer were Norman Lovett (who got the role of Holly instead), David Baddiel, Hugh Laurie and Alfred Molina.

“KRYTEN! UNPACK RACHEL AND GET OUT THE PUNCTURE REPAIR KIT!”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

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H.A.L.

Control-alt-delete won’t cut it!

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FIRST APPEARANCE 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) AKA HAL 9000 (Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer) PORTRAYED BY Douglas Rain (voice) BEST MOMENT Singing “Daisy, Daisy…” when Dave Bowman is shutting him down.

KNOWN TO SAY “I’m afraid that’s something I cannot allow to happen.”

WHY HE’S GREAT Malfunctioning HAL is the creepiest killer computer ever. It’s partly the iron-fist-in-a-silk-glove voice; fake concern barely disguising an utter contempt. It’s partly the fact he has no “body”; on the spaceship Discovery One HAL is virtually an omnipotent being. Even when he can’t hear all he sees all, reading astronauts Poole’s and Bowman’s lips when they plot to shut him down.

Man or machine?

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DATA He wanted to be a real boy

A

Star Trek series wouldn’t be a Star Trek series without at least one character struggling with emotions. On the original show there was Spock, always trying to be more Vulcan and logical but betrayed by his human half. On Deep Space Nine there was Odo, desperate to be loved despite the fact he spent every night in a bucket. On Voyager there was the holographic Doctor (“Please state the nature of the medical emergency”) forced to become more “interactive” with the crew and improve his bedside manner when the emergency stretched on and on and on. On Enterprise there was… a female Vulcan (yeah maybe it was one spin-off too many).

With The Next Generation’s Data, though, Star Trek created the ultimate “Pinocchio” character in sci-fi.

For seven seasons on TV and beyond into the movies

we followed the pasty-faced android Data as he clawed and groped his way towards being ever more human, with many a misstep along the way.

He learned how to love, sort of. He learned how to makes jokes, kinda. He learned how to be sad… ish. He never quite mastered sneezing though, and to the end his laugh was more scary than jolly.

Basically, The Next Generation covered just about every base when it came to discussions about when a machine stops being a machine and when it becomes sentient; when it becomes independent; when it becomes culpable; when shutting it down becomes killing. Not until Ex Machina (2015) would a film or TV show manage to put a new spin on the theme, and even when watching Ex Machina you can’t help thinking, “Is that Data’s sister?

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Trek: The Next Generation “Encounter At Farpoint” (1987) PORTRAYED BY Brent Spiner (1987-2005) BEST MOMENT Populating an entire Western town on the holodeck with versions of himself KNOWN TO SAY “I am programmed in multiple techniques. A broad variety of pleasuring.”

DID YOU KNOW? Brent Spiner actually plays five different characters in the Star Trek universe: Data, Lore (Data’s evil brother), Dr Noonien Soong (Data’s creator), B-4 (another Soong-created android in Star Trek: Nemesis) and Arik Soong (criminal creator of genetically engineered humans and ancestor of Noonien Soong in Star Trek: Enterprise)

“IF YOU PRICK ME ...

DO I NOT ... LEAK?”

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47

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME We’re sure we’re not the only ones who noticed how Elisabeth Sladen never aged.

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SARAH JANE SMITH Move aside Lois Lane

H

ad Elisabeth Sladen turned down the chance to return to the Whoniverse in the David Tennant episode “School Reunion”, there was never a back-up actress on the reserves bench. Only Sarah Jane Smith had the iconic fuel behind her to make that appearance work. Her re-emergence not only thrilled old fans of the show, it won Sarah a whole new set of fans too. Enough that, 34 years after the strong-willed, resourceful journalist was first introduced as Jon Pertwee’s third and final companion, she finally starred in a spin-off show that bore her name.

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Admittedly, she had starred in a Who spin-off before – 1981’s K9 And Company – but this time the hierarchy was as it should have been; the tin dog was playing second fiddle to her.

It’s amazing to think that Sarah Jane on television has spanned so many cultural lifetimes, from the Britain of Wizzard and The Sweet to the Britain of Dizzee Rascal and N-Dubz. “Whatever planet, age or alien menace, we believed in her,” Sarah Jane Adventures writer Phil Ford told SFX, “and we believed in her because Lis Sladen gave her heart and soul.”

FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who “The Time Warrior” (1973) PORTRAYED BY Elisabeth Sladen in Doctor Who (1973-2010), K9 And Company (1981), The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011) BEST MOMENT Sarah and Rose comparing notes about the Doctor in “School Reunion” (2006) – “Does he still stroke bits of the TARDIS?” KNOWN TO SAY “The universe has to move forward.

Pain and loss, they define us as much as happiness or love. Whether it’s a world, or a relationship… Everything has its time.

And everything ends.”

DID YOU KNOW? Elisabeth Sladen was a last minute replacement in the role. The part originally went to an actress called April Walker but she was swiftly replaced. It is alleged that Pertwee wasn’t happy that she was tall and a very forthright character; he preferred someone he could act as a father figure to. Enter five foot three-and-a-half Sladen.

“MR SMITH, I NEED YOU!”

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The most perfect casting since that second series of Star Trek.

PROFESSOR X The mutant headmaster

P

rofessor Charles Xavier had a vision. That vision became the X-Men. While officially he was the headmaster of the Xavier School for Gifted Youngsters, what he was actually doing was recruiting and training young mutants for induction into a team of superheroes. Yep, his student’s school uniforms are made from lycra.

Charles has had the standard life for a character in the Marvel comics universe: he’s died a few times, become a super villain, dated an alien princess (the Princess-Majestrix Lilandra of the Shi’ar Empire), lost and regained his powers. While his outward persona has always been that of a philanthropic humanitarian (mutantitarian?) he also has a tendency to act like an authoritarian tit at times.

He is, after all, a member of Marvel’s “Illuminati” a shady organisation of major Marvel characters (Tony Stark, Reed Richards, Black Bolt, Namor,

Dr Strange) who make decisions and act on them behind the scenes and answer to no one. Anyone got the number for a human rights lawyer?

And through it all there’s been that legendary friendship/rivalry with Magneto. Bromance of the century. Sometime you just want to tell them to get a room.

On screen his nobility remains intact, despite going a bit off the rails in Days Of Future Past. He was originally played with incredible dignity and charm

by Patrick Stewart, an actor whom fans were saying should play Professor X long before the films were even mooted. (There was even an X-Men/Star Trek: The Next Generation crossover comic before first film came out that made reference to this “similarity”.)

James McAvoy is now playing a younger, more roguish Professor X and bringing a whole new dimension of fun and insecurities to the character.

FIRST APPEARANCE The X-Men #1 (1963) AKA Professor Charles Francis Xavier, Wheels, Onslaught (on bad days) PORTRAYED BY Patrick Stewart in X-Men (2000), X2 (2003), X-Men: The Last Stand (2006), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009), The Wolverine (2013), X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014); James McAvoy in X-Men: First Class (2011), X-Men: Days Of Future Past (2014); X-Men Apocalypse (2016) BEST MOMENT Young Xavier coming nose-to-nose with old Xavier in Days Of Future Past KNOWN TO SAY “Records show, without exception, that the arrival of the mutated human species in any region was followed by the immediate extinction of their less-evolved kin.”

DID YOU KNOW? In the ’90s Professor X became the villain Onslaught, a manifestation of his dark side. Onslaught then killed everyone in the Marvel universe but – worse than that – told Jean that the Prof once had the hots for her. Gross.

“LET’S JUST SAY I KNOW A LITTLE GIRL WHO CAN WALK THROUGH WALLS”

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Biodata

What’s cooler than a giant talking robot? A giant talking robot that TURNS INTO A TRUCK!

OPTIMUS PRIME Robot in disguise

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ho would have believed that a robot could make grown men cry? When SFX conducted a readers’ poll to discover the saddest moments in sci-fi and fantasy, the biggest surprise on the resulting list was the death of Optimus Prime in the cartoon Transformers movie (1986). This was supposed to be a cartoon for prepubescent boys, a demographic not usually known for getting in touch with their emotions. But decades later they could still recall the trauma of seeing the lights go out on the great red and blue lug after a battle with Megatron. Hot Rod took over as 54 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

leader, changing his name to the infinitely less awesome Rodimus Prime. It wasn’t the same.

But Optimus came back. Of course he did.

Michael Bay, for one, was never going to make a Transformers movie without him.

The leader of the Autobots who would disguise himself as a lorry, Optimus Prime was Cybertron’s supreme badass. And when you come from a planet of giant shapeshifting robots that’s not to be taken lightly. Honourable, brave and a dab hand at putting a stop to Megatron’s nefarious schemes, Prime is an icon for kids aged eight to 80.

FIRST APPEARANCE The Diaclone Japanese toy range was bought by Hasbro in the 1980s and rebranded as Transformers for the western market in 1984. The animated series also began in 1984.

PORTRAYED BY Pete Cullen (1984-present… yes the same guy who voiced Optimus Prime in the TV series is still voicing him today in the movies) BEST MOMENT His death in the The Transformers: The Movie (1986) DID YOU KNOW? Hasbro hired comic book writers Dennis O’Neil (most famous for his Batman work) and Bob Budiansky to create the backstory for its new toy line. Budiansky came up with most of the names and wrote many issues of the original Marvel Transformers comic. O’Neil, though, came up with the name Optimus Prime.

“FREEDOM IS THE RIGHT OF ALL SENTIENT BEINGS”

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“Nichelle, ma belle”

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UHURA Hailing the goddess of original Trek

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hura and Nichelle Nichols have a place in TV history as well as science fiction history. In the 1968 Star Trek episode “Plato’s Stepchildren” Uhura and Kirk gave US TV its first-ever interracial kiss. Then again, with Kirk’s libido, it was bound to happen sooner or later.

Uhura was the communications officer on the Enterprise, famous for her high-tech ear furniture and “Hailing frequencies…” catchphrase. When the need arose she was more than capable of taking on navigation, helm and science post duties. She was a crucial part of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry’s vision of having a racially integrated crew and in the ’60s she became a role model for black women,

including a young Whoopi Goldberg: “I just saw a black woman on television; and she ain’t no maid!”

At one point Nichols considered leaving the show to take a role on Broadway but was convinced not to after a chance meeting with Martin Luther King.

The civil rights legend told her, “I am the biggest Trekkie on the planet, and I am Lieutenant Uhura’s most ardent fan,” she recalled in 2010. He said she had to carry on because she was one of the first black characters on TV playing a leading role that didn’t need to be played by a black actor. She heeded him.

In classic Trek there was always a hint that Uhura had the hots for Spock and with the rebooted Trek the Zoe Saldana version of Uhura finally got her man.

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Trek “The Man Trap” (1966) FULL NAME Nyota Uhura PORTRAYED BY Nichelle Nichols in the original Trek universe (1966-1991), Zoe Saldana in the rebooted Trek universe (2009-present).

BEST MOMENT Uhura singing ”Oh, On the Starship Enterprise” accompanied by Spock on the Vulcan lyre in “Charlie X”. We suspect she was trying to seduce him.

DID YOU KNOW? Uhura’s first name wasn’t mentioned on screen until the 2009 Star Trek movie, though it was first noted in William Rotsler’s 1982 licensed tiein book, Star Trek II: Biographies.

Rotsler created the name – which means “star” in Swahili – and both Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry and Nichelle Nichols approved. Uhura is the Swahili word for freedom.

“HAILING FREQUENCIES OPEN”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Robby: your glass and metal pal who’s fun to be with…

Biodata

ROBBY THE ROBOT

The best use of metal and glass since the Crystal Palace

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ost robots in ’50s movies were, frankly, rubbish. Two bucked the trend. One was Gort (see number 63) who was designed to look as simple and as stark as possible.

The other was Robby, who in an era long before the concept of steampunk had even been thought of – indeed, the guy who coined the term, KW Jeter, was only six at the time – looked for all the world like the creation of a Victorian mad scientist. Okay, he was clearly electrically powered but there was an industrial elegance to his polished metal body and elegant glass-domed head – like an electric train built to a steam engine aesthetic.

He was the true star of Forbidden Planet, one of 56 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

the genuinely great SF films of the decade, the first Hollywood flick set entirely in space, with no action on Earth. To back up the film’s authentic science fiction credentials he even adhered to Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics – in one scene he’s commanded to kill a human and he almost blows a fuse instead.

On the other hand, would a proper, hard sci-fi robot get drunk on home-brewed hooch, as Robby does with the spaceship’s cook? How, exactly?

He also had a great voice, somewhere between sarcastic and supercilious; you half suspect he wished he weren’t programmed with Asimov’s Three Laws because he could have quite happily throttled these irritating humans.

FIRST APPEARANCE Forbidden Planet (1956) PORTRAYED BY Robby the Robot (honestly! That’s how he’s credited! In actuality Frankie Darro wore the suit and Marvin Miller provided the voice) BEST MOMENT Appearing over the horizon and approaching the heroes’ spaceship on a whizzy landspeeder affair.

DID YOU KNOW? Since starring in Forbidden Planet and The Invisible Boy (1957), Robby has cameoed in many, many films and TV shows including Lost In Space, Project UFO, Wonder Woman, Gremlins and Looney Tunes: Back In Action (which also featured Daleks, if you need a great link in a game of Six Degrees of Separation).

“SORRY, MISS. I WAS GIVING MYSELF AN OIL-JOB”

42

Sir Ian McKellen captures Magneto’s magnetic appeal

Biodata

MAGNETO Fatal attraction

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agneto, that master of magnetism (Stan ‘the Man’ Lee was on fine alliterative form that day) and the X-Men go way back. Way, way back. They both made their debut in the first issue of The X-Men and they’ve been fighting and making-up ever since. In the comics he seems to have spent as much time as the headmaster of the Xavier Institute or leading some X-team offshoot as he has planning world domination with the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants.

He’s had more aliases than Mission: Impossible’s Ethan Hunt. From the films you might think Erik

Lehnsherr is his real name but no, even that was an alias in the comics (in a frantic piece of retconning to explain why he seemed to have two “real” names).

He’s also been ruler of the super-advanced nation of Genosha in his time, possibly just because he didn’t want Dr Doom getting one up on him with Latveria.

On the screen he’s been well served by two fine actors who’ve certainly conveyed the conflict and nobility of the character. Even more amazingly both Sir Ian McKellen and Michael Fassbender have managed to look not completely stupid with an upturned metal bucket on their bonce.

FIRST APPEARANCE The X-Men #1 (1963) AKA You might think his real name is Erik Lehnsherr, but it’s actually Max Eisenhardt. He was also Magnus for a while. Plus: Erik the Red, the White King, the Grey King PORTRAYED BY Sir Ian McKellen, Michael Fassbender (various X-Men films, even the same X-Men film once) BEST MOMENT Using his powers to slowly push a (dramatically significant) coin through Sebastian Shaw’s head.

KNOWN TO SAY “They wish to cure us. But I say to you we are the cure! The cure for that infirm, imperfect condition called ‘Homo sapiens’!”

DID YOU KNOW? In the Marvel Comics universe Magneto is the father of the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver, a fact both the X-Men and Avengers movie franchises are ignoring. He also has another daughter – Polaris – who inherited his powers.

“LET’S JUST SAY, GOD WORKS TOO SLOW.”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Digital radios were much bigger in Steve Austin’s time

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Biodata

THE SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN Not taking into account inflation

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teve Austin was, as The Six Million Dollar Man’s producer would tell us every week in the opening narration (wonder if he paid himself?), “A man barely alive”. In a nearfatal air crash he lost both legs, an arm and an eye.

But, chimed in robotics boffin Oscar Goldman over the intro credits, “We can rebuild him. We have the technology. We can make him better than he was.

Better, stronger, faster.”

Six million dollars later and Steve Austin was the Bionic Man. He could now leap small buildings and run at 60mph – at least that’s the number he reaches in the opening credits. He could lift cars with ease. His sight was 20 times better than that of normal human beings. And he always set off alarms at airport security.

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Steve becomes an agent for the OSI (Office of Scientific Intelligence) and brings a new meaning to the word superspy. He also popularised the idea that the best way to make running really fast look supercool if you haven’t got a big budget was to use slow motion. Meanwhile, children the world over would try to imitate the noise his bionic arm made (“ch… ch… ch… ch… ch…”) but merely ended up sounding like Thomas the Tank Engine.

The show spawned the equally brilliant The Bionic Woman starring Lindsay Wagner. There were even a bionic boy, a bionic girl, a bionic dog and a seven million dollar man by the show’s end. And if rumours are true, Mark Wahlberg will be starring in The Six Billion Dollar Man movie sometime soon. Well, that’s inflation for you…

FIRST APPEARANCE Cyborg by Martin Caidin (book, 1972) FIRST TV APPEARANCE The Six Million Dollar Man (1973) AKA Steve Austin, the Bionic Man PORTRAYED BY Lee Majors KNOWN TO SAY “Flight Com, I can’t hold it! She’s breaking up! She’s brea…”

BEST MOMENT Fighting Bigfoot – who was, incidentally, played by The Princess Bride’s André the Giant.

DID YOU KNOW? Steve Austin has a Geiger counter embedded in his bionic arm but he only ever used it in one episode.

Also, it’s a fact that every child who looked through the eye of the Bionic Man action figure was really disappointed it was just a fisheye lens and not a telescope.

“WE CAN REBUILD HIM. WE HAVE THE TECHNOLOGY...”

40 Biodata

NUMBER SIX

“Really, I just got bored with the job.”

He is not a number

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he ’60 Prisoner is less a TV series and more a succession of icons; phrases, concepts and characters that linger in the zeitgeist, naggingly familiar to people who’ve never seen nor heard of the show. A prison called the Village that is a village; inmates with numbers instead of names; “Who is Number One?”; giant white balloons that act as guard dogs called Rovers; “I am not a number, I am a free man!” It all still resonates to this day.

Patrick McGoohan, as creator, star and occasional writer and director, was a driving force behind the show, creating something that was both intrinsically ’60s and effortlessly timeless.

The fashions, camera angles, psychedelic dream sequences and extras in search of a hippy rock festival were the kaleidoscopic aesthetic veneer to

a show that at its core was as cynical and suspicious of humanity’s dark side as Nineteen Eighty-Four.

McGoohan played a spy who resigns in a fit of pique, and is kidnapped by his own masters to find out why. Deciding that water boarding is just too dull, instead of a more straightforward torture they choose to strip him of his identity, imprison him in a sinister fairytale village and play mind games on him. Trouble is, Number Six is an Olympic champion at mind games. And things just get weirder and weirder…

The taciturn McGoohan is magnificent, rarely saying a line unless it’s cutting, witty, steeped in double meaning or shouted with great indignity.

40 years later Jim Caviezel – normally a great actor – simply looked thoroughly bemused throughout the laborious, incoherent remake.

FIRST APPEARANCE The Prisoner (1967-1968) AKA “That would be telling,” as Number Two might say…

PORTRAYED BY Patrick McGoohan (1967 series); Jim Caviezel (2009 remake series) BEST MOMENT Giving his interrogator, Number Two, a nervous breakdown in the penultimate episode in which they were pretty much the only characters DID YOU KNOW? Nigel Stock played Number Six for the majority of the body-swap episode “Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darling” because McGoohan was off filming Ice Station Zebra, hoping it would be his big break into Hollywood

“I WILL NOT BE PUSHED, FILED, STAMPED, INDEXED, BRIEFED, DEBRIEFED OR NUMBERED”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“RAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR”

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Biodata

GODZILLA King of the monsters

H Godzilla’s second (and much improved) attempt to crack Hollywood cinema.

e’s the ancient, giant lizard who started off destroying Tokyo before becoming Japan’s first line of defence against other giant monsters (known by fans of the genre as “kaiju”). Created by Toho Studios, Godzilla has gone on to star in 27 further films for his Japanese creators, while Hollywood has had two stabs at launching his career in the west: the 1998 version from director Roland Emmerich (sigh) and the 2014 reboot from Gareth Edwards (slightly disappointed sigh).

Toho has recently released a reboot of its own, Shin Godzilla.

FIRST APPEARANCE Godzilla (1954) PORTRAYED BY Men in suits, then pixels BEST MOMENT Godzilla slugging it out with King Kong atop Mount Fuji in King Kong vs Godzilla (1962) MOST ICONIC MOMENT Godzilla chewing on a train in Godzilla (1954) SILLIEST MOMENT Godzilla’s victory dance in Invasion Of Astro-Monster (1965) MOST UNEXPECTED MOMENT Using his nuclear breath to take off and fly in Godzilla Vs Hedorah (1971) DID YOU KNOW? We get a rare glimpse inside the Big G’s mind when, in Godzilla Vs Gigan (1972), Godzilla and Anguirus discuss their strategy for dealing with a common foe which is represented on screen by the use of speech bubbles

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

CREATING GODZILLA I

How a film about a giant lizard became one of the most important in Japanese history n the middle of an apocalypse, a man sits in a bomb shelter, telling fairytales to comfort his frightened children. Outside, the city of Tokyo is an inferno past imagining, as waves of American bomber planes pound the Japanese capital. It is 10 March 1945, during the savage last days of the Pacific War. Around 100,000 men, women and children died, perhaps more.

There will be similar bombardments on Japan’s other major cities, reaching a crescendo in August, when man-made suns over Hiroshima and Nagasaki will herald a dreadful new world.

That teller of tales was Eiji Tsuburaya, who was blessed; he and his family survived the inferno. Less than a decade later, Tsuburaya would destroy Tokyo again, this time in miniature, in a blockbuster monster film called Godzilla. Yes, Godzilla was a blockbuster; for all the Big G’s later cheap and cheery image, the first Godzilla film was at the time the most expensive Japanese film ever made, with A-list actors and a director who was a close friend of Akira

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Kurosawa. And while it’s true the title character was a man in a monster suit, that wasn’t Tsuburaya’s choice. An effects veteran with two decades of experience, Tsuburaya would have loved to have animated Godzilla in the way pioneered by King Kong’s maestro Willis O’Brien, but there simply wasn’t time. In any case, Godzilla wasn’t a personality in the way Kong had been. Rather, Godzilla was a fire-breathing, city-stomping metaphor for the post-Bomb world: the fear, the stupendous destruction, the slow deaths from radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki – and not just there.

In 1954, the same year Godzilla was released, the American military blasted Bikini Atoll with an H-bomb test. One civilian vessel was too close – a Japanese fishing boat called, with horrid irony, Lucky Dragon. The crew was showered with fall-out, and the radio operator died of leukemia months later. The scandal is openly referenced in Godzilla’s first scene, showing a fishing boat on a seemingly peaceful sea; there’s

a glaring light, a massive explosion, and the boat bursts into flame. Apart from the suggestion of a roar, there’s nothing in this opening scene to imply a monster. Rather, this was real life.

MONSTER MASH-UP Director Ishirô Honda was a documentarian and the assistant director to Akira Kurosawa on the 1949 film Stray Dog, a contemporary thriller in bombed-out Tokyo. “Every day I told [Honda] what I wanted and he would go out into the ruins of post-war Tokyo to film it,” Kurosawa remembered. “I’m often told that I captured the atmosphere of post-war Japan very well, and if so, I owe a great deal of that success to Honda.”

In Godzilla, Honda takes his subject overwhelmingly seriously, using scenes of spectacular destruction to tell a gripping story without ever revelling in the carnage. As Spielberg put it, Godzilla “was the most masterful of all the dinosaur movies, because it made you

REX

Who really cares that lizards don’t roar? Not us.

believe it was really happening.”

After much trial and error, Godzilla’s design combined elements of T-Rex and the iguanodon, three rows of backplates from a stegosaurus, and alligator-like grey skin. The inside of the latex rubber suit was horribly rough, giving the two sweaty actors alternating as Godzilla cuts and scars. His marvellously unscientific roar (a lizard roaring?) was created by musician Akira Ifukube, who also wrote Godzilla’s relentless leitmotif that entangles with the roar in the title credits. Ifukube made the roar by opening up a double bass, rubbing the strings with a coarse leather glove, and playing the result at reduced speed.

Honda downplayed Godzilla’s Japanese history, stressing its debt to American monster cinema (he even said, “The basic film is American”); King Kong was an obvious inspiration, another was The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953) in which a giant reptilian dinosaur is woken by nukes and barges into New York. Godzilla’s working title was The Giant Monster From 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea. Unlike most monster movies, Godzilla is as much about the humans as the monster. The script sets up a love triangle between the stricken scientist, Serizawa, his fiancée Emiko and her increasingly close male friend Ogata. One of the film’s most effective scenes doesn’t involve Godzilla at all; rather, it has Serizawa giving

Emiko a demonstration of his deadly invention.

The shrieking violin strings anticipate Psycho. We see Emiko scream in horror but we don’t see what the invention does until a flashback much later on.

The fourth major human character is an older scientist, Yamane (Emiko’s father), played by the actor Takashi Shimura. Yamane is a passionate advocate of learning from Godzilla, rather than destroying him. As a figure of moral authority, he’s rather like Jon Pertwee’s Doctor Who, circa 1970 – even if, like the Doctor, he drops the odd scientific clanger, such as his claim that dinosaurs walked the Earth a mere two million years ago!

ALL-OUT ASSAULT As with many 60-year-old films, Godzilla’s drama occasionally creaks. Ogata and Emiko are somewhat one-dimensional, and even Serizawa has the odd fit of melodramatics. But the sequence that does hold up spectacularly on the big screen, which is where it really needs to be experienced, is Godzilla’s all-out assault on Tokyo. Fifties American monsters usually cause small-scale urban mayhem, but Godzilla beats up a whole city. Even here, the monster itself is almost secondary. The intensity of the destruction comes from the fire, the melting pylons, the

explosions, the falling rubble. In its cumulative power, the carnage elevates even the most wonky effects to tragic grandeur.

As Spielberg says, you believe it’s really happening, as it had effectively happened in Tokyo nine years earlier. Honda goes still further, showing the aftermath of the rampage, a hospital overflowing with dying people while children wail for their parents. The sight traumatises Emiko, making her betray Serizawa’s secret weapon and leading the film towards its inevitable end. But irrespective of the outcome, Yamane notes, in this age there will always be more Godzillas.

Twenty-eight more Godzillas, in fact, from the hasty sequel Godzilla Raids Again a year later, to the 50th-anniversary Godzilla: Final Wars in 2004.

Then there’s the whole genre of Japanese kaiju (“monster”) movies, from Mothra to Rodan to the non-Toho Gamera. Not forgetting these films’ TV competitors, dominated by Tsuburaya’s own Ultraman franchise from the 1960s. Some of these follow-ups were good, some were fun, some were frightful. None of them, though, had the same shell-shock force as their founder. The first Godzilla was no mere monster flick; it was made by people who’d lived through Japan’s worst time and made it into a dark and resonant fairytale to shield their children from the fire.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

MARIA

Beware false idols

38 THE PREDATOR The thrill of the chase

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Metropolis (1927) AKA False Maria, Maschinenmensch PORTRAYED BY Brigitte Helm BEST MOMENT The transformation scene when the Maschinenmensch becomes Maria.

KNOWN TO SAY “Who is the living food for the machines of Metropolis? Who lubricates the machine joints with his own sweat?”

WHY SHE’S GREAT The robot Maria is on screen for a mere fraction of Metropolis’s running time and yet the image of her sleek, art deco lines remains one of sci-fi cinema’s greatest achievement nearly a century later. The costume was made from a material called plastic wood after copper proved too heavy.

Actress Brigitte Helm was pinched and scratched to blazes wearing it and it was so stiff a hidden stagehand had to help push her out of her chair.

JUDGE DREDD

Just don’t expect him to take off his helmet.

Rough justice

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n the year punk exploded, the UK also gave the world a crimefighter who’s exploded a fair few punks in his time. In 1977 writer John Wagner and artist Carlos Ezquerra – with input from editor Pat Mills – created the ultimate super-antihero for issue two of a revolutionary new comic, 2000 AD. Judge Dredd was sci-fi’s take on two hard-bitten iconic Clint Eastwood characters: spaghetti Westerns’ Man With No Name and “Dirty” Harry Callahan. He was the tough, no-nonsense lawman with the very big bike and very big gun, protecting Mega City One from criminal scum. Unlike most American comic heroes he would kill, maim, torture and act like a complete bastard at times. He was cool to read about but you wouldn’t want him as a mate – there was a thin line dividing him from a fascist boot boy. But the strip’s various writers weren’t fools. They knew this and they played on it to incredible satirical effect, using Dredd’s world as a dark mirror of our own.

The 2012 Dredd movie came close to the right feel. The 1995 Stallone movie was little more than a cartoon parody.

36 “ I AM THE LAW!”

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE 2000 AD #2 (1977) AKA Joseph Dredd, The Dead Man PORTRAYED BY Sylvester Stallone in Judge Dredd (1995); Karl Urban in Dredd (2012) BEST MOMENT The “Cursed Earth” saga (1977-1978) DID YOU KNOW? Dredd once sentenced a perp to 20 years for Illegal Boinging (spraying a substance that forms a rubbery bubble around the user). Selling old comic books in Mega City can lead to up to eight years of incarceration.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME ET found his way into all our hearts.

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“ET PHONE HOME”

ET: THE EXTRATERRESTRIAL Alien resurrection

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE ET: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) AKA Eeeeeeeeeeeee-Teeeeeeeeeeeeee PORTRAYED BY Pat Bilon (in the costume); Pat Welsh (voice) BEST MOMENT Levitating a whole pack of teen kids on their bicycles to avoid the police DID YOU KNOW? When figures are adjusted for inflation, ET remains the fourth most profitable film worldwide in movie history after Gone With The Wind, Star Wars and The Sound Of Music

e good” was ET’s parting wisdom when he left Earth, spoken to the only humans who had shown him kindness. And that’s the (ahem) crux of this Christ-like character: according to critic Stanley Kauffmann, ET was “the gospel according to St Steven”.

An otherworldly creature left behind during an abortive alien mission, ET inspires Elliott (Henry Thomas) to believe in him so completely he can bring him back to life. He is goodness personified, an unconditional friend and the possibility of life beyond Earth made wrinkled, rubbery flesh.

Forged from director Steven Spielberg’s boyhood dreams, ET was the imaginary buddy he turned to throughout his parents’ divorce and a character he revisited during Raiders Of The Lost Ark’s trying shoot. Working with Harrison Ford’s screenwriter wife Melissa Mathison, Spielberg dredged up his boyhood feelings of alienation to create the script for ET: The Extra-Terrestrial. The funny little alien was his riposte to Poltergeist: “A friend who could be the brother I never had and a father that I didn’t feel I had any more.”

Modelled on the face of poet Carl Sandburg and the eyes of Einstein, with a pug dog thrown in for good measure, ET boasted a visage that, as Spielberg admitted, “only a mother could love.” But the Beard’s directorial deftness (he shot only from

a nipper’s point of view and in chronological order to give his child actors more emotional resonance) meant that anyone watching could relate to the friendship the squat little alien offered a small boy in a world of confusion and uncertainty. ET is every friend we ever lost touch with, every pet who ever died. No wonder it prompted hardened Cannes audiences to give it an unheard-of standing ovation.

A huge box-office hit around the world, ET was nominated for Best Picture at the 1982 Oscars but lost out to Gandhi. Even that film’s director thought the movie had been robbed. “I was certain that not only would ET win, but that it should win,” Richard Attenborough admitted. “It was inventive, powerful, wonderful. I make more mundane movies.”

Spielberg lost out in the Best Director stakes too and had to make do with technical gongs: Sound, Visual Effects, Sound Effects Editing. Nowadays, though, who remembers Sir Dickie’s epic with anything more than a weary yawn?

“The best movies I’ve ever seen are movies that are slightly above one’s normal eye-level,” Spielberg told The New York Times. “Something you have to reach up to and suspend your disbelief.” No matter how many times you watch ET, or how old you are when you do, that suspension is complete. Like Elliott, that little rubber feller will always have a special place in our hearts.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME The original comic strip began in 1934.

“GOOD LUCK MY FRIEND, AND I HOPE YOU TAME YOUR FIANCÉE” (TO PRINCE BARIN IN THE ORIGINAL COMICS) 68 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

34

FLASH GORDON Ahhhhh-ahhhhhhh!

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Newspaper syndication, 7 January 1934 PORTRAYED BY Buster Crabbe (three cinema serials, 1936-40); Gale Gordon (1935 radio series); Steve Holland (1954 TV series); Sam Jones (1980 film); Eric Johnson (2007 TV series) KNOWN TO SAY Most famous quote in connection to Flash Gordon : “Gordon’s aliiiiiiiiive!”

DID YOU KNOW? Sam Jones’s voice was overdubbed by another actor throughout the 1980 movie

lex Raymond, creator of a universe, was a dreamer with a death wish. He lost his life by gunning a Corvette on a wet Connecticut highway, racing the rain, racing to die. It was a demise stained with irony and simple unjustness. Raymond dreamed until you feared his gift must burst; his visions were huge with colour and life, romances of rocketships and death rays, dragons and Hawkmen, Emperors of the Universe and Queens of Magic, all captured with a clarity that astonishes even today, as if he had personally witnessed such worlds and needed to preserve them forever.

Born in 1909 in New Rochelle, New York, the father of Flash Gordon was a graduate of the Grand Central School Of Art, labouring on such newspaper strips as Tillie The Toiler and Tim Tyler. In 1933 he was approached by King Features, whose rival, National Newspapers, had enjoyed huge success with Buck Rogers. King craved its own high concept fantasy adventure strip to compete with National’s 25th century daredevil.

The first instalment of Flash Gordon appeared on Sunday 7 January 1934. America was dreaming desperately in the 1930s, building such kingdoms in the clouds as the Chrysler Building and dancing away the Great Depression with the razzle of Hollywood chorus lines. The debut chapter of Flash Gordon showed a world where financial calamity on Wall Street was a mere sideshow, where headlines screamed “World Coming To End – Strange New Planet Rushing Toward Earth – Only Miracle Can Save Us, Says Science!”

That miracle was Flash. Raymond’s first episode finds the “renowned polo player and Yale graduate” rocketing into uncharted space with the beautiful Dale Arden and faintlycrazed scientist Doctor Hans Zarkov. Their destination is Mongo, the “Strange New Planet” ruled by a despotic Emperor, THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 69

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME In space, no one is allowed to cover their thighs.

Ming the Merciless. Mongo is a cosmic Oz, populated with tribes of Tree Men, Monkey Men, Clay Men and Lion Men, a dream-logic geography of underwater lands, forest realms and ice kingdoms. Raymond’s art was a pure headrush, but never feverishly so. A sublimely gifted craftsman, his exotic worlds were created with fine brush strokes, all grace and precision.

Flash only saved the world on Sundays until 27 May 1940, when a daily strip appeared, drawn

by Raymond’s former assistant Austin Briggs.

Universal Pictures acquired the rights to Flash Gordon in 1934, releasing a 13-episode Saturday matinée serial in 1936. The serial found Mongo on a collision course with Earth, warping our gravity and pummelling us with meteors.

Universal invested heavily, budgeting the serial at $350,000, three times the usual cost of such pulp picturehouse fare. The large budget allowed for matte paintings and split-screen shots as well as a lavish set for Ming’s throne room. The costumes worn by Flash, Ming and Barin were exact reproductions of Raymond’s baroque originals, while all the clothes were made in colour, rather than the muted greys and browns that were the norm for black and white film-making of the time.

Elsewhere there were economies. The serial borrowed the crypt and the tower sets from The 70 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Bride Of Frankenstein, while Ming’s lab was a redressed castle set from Dracula’s Daughter. An Egyptian idol from The Mummy became Mongo’s great god Tao, while Zarkov’s rocketship was a recycled miniature from 1930’s flop science fiction musical Just Imagine. There could be no travelling mattes or rear screen projection and the producers were denied access to Universal’s famed miniatures department. So cameraman

“AT THE TIME, WHO COULD THINK OF MARS AND OUTER SPACE AND ALL THAT? I THOUGHT THE WRITER OF THE SERIAL HAD LOST HIS MIND!” Jerry Ash created the skyways of Mongo in an empty barn on the studio lot. Rocketships of wood and metal were lashed to microphone booms and flown past the camera, powered by resourcefulness and flurries of electrical sparks.

Larry “Buster” Crabbe beat Jon Hall for the role of Flash. The former athlete had won

Olympic gold for swimming in 1932 and initially saw Hollywood as simply a means to fund his law school ambitions. “A guy on another planet was a way-out theme in those days,” said Crabbe, smarter and more ambitious than the classic beefcake, “but still interesting enough to tickle the imaginations of adventurous souls. I thought Flash Gordon was too far out, and that it would flop at the box office.”

Jean Rogers was cast as Dale Arden and shared her co-star’s scepticism. “Buster and I both thought the whole thing was nuts,” she recalled. “At the time, who could think of Mars and outer space and all that? I thought the writer of the serial had lost his mind!”

Ming was played with huge, universeenslaving relish by Charles Middleton, a familiar villain from Laurel & Hardy shorts. “He was a very nice guy, but he had to stay in character,” Rogers remembered. “He strutted around like Ming. The minute he put on his street clothes, he was a different person.”

Shot in just six weeks, Flash Gordon was a box office triumph, so popular that it played to evening crowds as well as the Saturday matinée bubblegum set. 1938 saw the inevitable sequel, Flash Gordon’s Trip To Mars, billed as “15 startling chapters of further adventures on a new planet.”

The tyrannical Ming was now allied with Azura,

the Red Planet’s alluring Queen of Magic, strafing Earth with a diabolical “nitron lamp”.

Flash’s Martian adventure was produced for $175,000, half the expense of the first serial. Ming was reduced to supporting character status but Middleton perfected a Mephistophelean sense of menace, adorned in a shadow-black skull-cap.

Infrared photography was used to enhance the atmosphere of Mars while a city-spanning bridge of light perfectly captured Raymond’s heady sense of marvel. The serial was brutally edited to feature length and re-released as Rocketship before being rushed into cinemas again – this time it was opportunistically titled Mars Attacks The World – in a bid to ride the notoriety of Orson Welles’s prank Martian invasion.

Universal produced a third and final serial in 1940. Flash Gordon Conquers The Universe finds Ming blighting the Earth with a lethal plague known as the Purple Death. While blessed with improved miniature work – and impeccable art direction that captured the majesty of Raymond’s later strips – the last of the Flash serials is perhaps the least. “I didn’t like it,” said Crabbe. “We used a lot of [stock footage]. I thought it was a poor product that was nothing more than a doctoredup script from earlier days.”

In May 1944 Alex Raymond abandoned his galaxy to join the US Marines. Austin Briggs

succeeded him on the Sunday pages, but never replicated the grace and quixotic imagination of his mentor. Raymond left the navy as a Major in 1946 and returned to newspapers, creating Rip Kirby, a noirish police strip. He would never draw Flash Gordon again.

On 6 September 1956 he lost his life while indulging his lust for fast cars. He died instantly on impact, killed by a shard of a Corvette’s wraparound windscreen. It was his fourth car accident in a month. He had been hospitalised three times. “He was trying to kill himself,” believes fellow cartoonist and fateful passenger Stan Drake, who sensed a darkness and a disquiet in Raymond, perhaps precipitated by recent troubles in his marriage.

Raymond’s enduring legacy was Flash Gordon. Just ask George Lucas. “Originally I wanted to make a Flash Gordon movie with all the trimmings,” he revealed, “but I couldn’t get the rights.” His world-conquering tales of the Skywalkers are clearly in debt to the ray-gun fairytales of Alex Raymond.

Lucas’s loss was Italian movie mogul Dino De Laurentiis’s gain. When the wallet behind Death Wish, Barbarella and the ’70s King Kong remake learned of Lucas’s original intentions, he snapped up the Flash Gordon rights, banking that cinema audiences would appreciate the “real thing” over

Luke Skywalker. To tell this space opera, De Laurentiis hired screenwriter Lorenzo Semple, the man behind the classic 1960s Batman TV show. To direct the opus, he recruited Mike Hodges, best known for his noir classics Get Carter and Pulp. After a long casting search, Sam Jones and Melody Anderson were chosen as Flash Gordon and Dale Arden. Surrounding the two youthful American leads was a fine international cast led by Brian Blessed, Timothy Dalton and Max Von Sydow. A rich score from classic rock group Queen also added to the film’s success.

The result was a high camp extravaganza that managed to slip unbelievably levels of kinkiness into a family adventure. Some despise the movie; some absolutely love it. What you can’t deny is the impact it’s had on the zeitgeist. People still beg Brian Blessed to bellow “Gordon’s aliiiiive!” wherever he goes, and say the word “flash” loud enough and someone will go, “Ahhh-ahhhhh!”

In 2007 the US Syfy channel produced a new Flash Gordon TV series. It was a limp affair that used teleportation portals to hop between Canada and a Mongo that looked suspiciously like Canada. That’s right, no spaceships – this was Flash Gordon without the space opera. Just lots of wandering round forests. Utterly pointless.

But Flash Gordon will live again. He isn’t dead. We trust Brian Blessed on that.

KOBAL

The 1980 film combined high camp with classic rock.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“HULK SMASH!”

Is he always angry because his jeans crush his nuts when he changes?

HULK It’s Gamma Time!

T

he Hulk started as co-creator Stan Lee’s superhero spin on Frankenstein’s monster, a creature borne of science who is not evil but misunderstood. Superheroes need an alter-ego, so Lee looked to another literary classic for inspiration: Dr Jekyll And Mr Hyde. Thus was born the grey monster into whom scientist Bruce Banner would transform every night following an incident with a gamma bomb. Hang on. Grey?

Every night? Yep, the green skin came with issue two of the comic (the printers had problems keeping the grey consistent) and the idea that anger triggered the Hulk came after he joined the Avengers.

Later in his comic career Hulk would become grey again, and red as well. We would also learn that Banner was the victim of child abuse that left him 72 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

with dissociative identity disorder, a condition which lead to a spectrum of different personalities based on repressed emotions, from savage to hyperintelligent. He’s also become an alien king, declared war on Earth and become the centre of a “Hulk Family”. There are so many Hulks running round the comics universe now it’s difficult to keep track.

On screen he remains the iconic green and angry Hulk. The ’70s TV show may have been low on supervillains but is fondly remembered and gave us the “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry…” catchphrase. After a couple of false starts at the cinema (one movie was too talky, the other too generic), Mark Ruffalo and writer/director Joss Whedon crafted the perfect movie Hulk for Avengers Assemble. And with the words, “Puny god!” he stole the film.

Not a ponytail in sight.

“MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU” Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) OR Star Wars Episode I : The Phantom Menace (1999) if you’re being pedantic AKA Ben Kenobi PORTRAYED BY Alec Guinness (1977-1983); Ewan McGregor (1999-2005); James Arnold Taylor (Star Wars: The Clone Wars 2008-2014) BEST MOMENT Fighting Darth on the Death Star and warning his former friend: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine…” So that’s exactly what Vader does, the fool.

DID YOU KNOW? Alec Guinness wrote to a friend when he was cast in Star Wars that it was “fairy-tale rubbish but could be interesting perhaps.” He also thought Harrison Ford was named Tennyson.

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OBI-WAN KENOBI This is the Jedi mentor you were looking for

T

he mentor is a hugely important figure in fiction, with the loss of that mentor often the final obstacle their young apprentice has to face before they can become a hero in their own right. Alec Guinness’s Ben Kenobi fulfilled this role admirably in A New Hope, propelling young Luke Skywalker on a mission of revenge that eventually changed the universe. Guinness might not have enjoyed the role, but he still gave it his trademark poise and solemnity: a perfect old wizard teaching his apprentice the ways of the world.

Ewan McGregor had huge shoes to fill, then, when the prequels came along, and by and large he does a decent job (even hampered by a silly ponytail): moving from Padawan to Jedi Master with as much attention to reality as an actor can give while surrounded by green screens (we can only imagine what Guinness would’ve made of them… or the ponytail). Whether brandishing a lightsaber, swirling a cloak or dispensing the wisdom of ages, Obi-Wan Kenobi introduced us to the Force. And we have never forgotten.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Human? Replicant?

You decide…

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“THAT WAS MY PROFESSION. EX-COP. EX-BLADE RUNNER. EX-KILLER.”

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RICK DECKARD Retiring hero

I

’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain,” murmurs replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) in the last moments of Blade Runner.

Ridley Scott’s adaptation of Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? is obsessed with memory, especially that of Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), its retired, washed-up hero.

Deckard is a “blade runner”, an ex-police detective whose job involves hunting and terminating replicants, genetically manufactured humanoids who are implanted with memories so human that they sometimes don’t even know they’re not flesh and blood.

Scott styles the year 2019 as future noir, with Deckard as a “Philip Marlowe-style gumshoe”.

Haunted by the things he’s done – “Shakes? Me too.

I got ’em bad” – Deckard is lured back by his bosses for one final replicant-killing gig. It goes badly: he shoots replicant Zhora (Joanna Cassidy) in the back in a crowded street; is almost dropped off a tenement building roof by Batty; and ends up in the arms of femme fatale replicant Rachel (Sean Young). Worst of all, he begins to question his own reality and memories… “What he does is act as a garbage disposal,” says Scott of his troubled ’tec. “It’s rather like getting rid of industrial waste.” But it’s no longer quite that clinical; Deckard starts to feel sorry for his

replicant victims, seeing them as more than just synthetic machines, even empathising with them.

Ford came onboard straight after shooting Raiders Of The Lost Ark, after Scott ditched an early plan to cast Robert Mitchum as Deckard. He instantly had problems with Deckard’s wardrobe: “Ridley wanted the character to wear a big felt hat along with the raincoat,” recalls Ford. “I had just worn a big felt hat in Raiders; I wanted to change my physical appearance.” So Ford talked Scott into letting him have his hair cropped short, arguing that Deckard was a character who was supposed to have given up on everything, even his appearance.

But is Deckard a replicant? It’s a question that’s produced more fanboy speculation than the existence of God. “Ridley himself may have definitely felt that Deckard was a replicant,” claims editor Terry Rawlings. “But still, by the end of the picture, he intended to leave it up to the viewer.”

The movie’s troubled production only made the character more mysterious. The voiceovers, multiple script revisions, Director’s Cut and Ford’s own belief that Deckard was human (“I thought the audience deserved one human being on screen that they could establish an emotional relationship with”) turned Deckard into one of cinema’s great enigmas. He’s a character who poses sci-fi’s most enduring question: what does it really mean to be human?

Biodata

FIRST APPEARANCE Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep? (1968) AKA Possibly a serial number, possibly not…?

PORTRAYED BY Harrison Ford in Blade Runner (1982) and Blade Runner 2049 (2017) BEST MOMENT Fighting Roy Batty on the tenement building rooftop at the film’s climax DID YOU KNOW? Ridley Scott was seriously interested in Dustin Hoffman for Deckard until Hoffman explained that he had an entirely different take on the role

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“DO. OR DO NOT. THERE IS NO TRY” 76 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

We waited a long time to see Yoda wield a lightsaber but boy, was it worth it.

YODA

30

Judge him not by his size

N

ot every character can lay claim to have screwed up a generation’s grammar. George Lucas’ diminutive creation for The Empire Strikes Back certainly can. “Death is a natural part of life. Rejoice for those around you who transform into the Force. Mourn them do not.

Miss them do not. Attachment leads to jealousy.

The shadow of greed, that is.” What? “Named must your fear be before banish it you can.” Um, yup.

Gobbledygook speak in I will. Mess with me not or sabred your ass will be…

In a saga of beloved characters, Yoda is somewhat unique. Like the Emperor, the little green guy entered the space opera in Empire and had big, Alec Guinness-sized shoes to fill. Young Skywalker crash-lands on swampy hellhole planet Dagobah seeking Jedi Master Yoda, whom he assumes is a tall, dark and handsome warrior, but instead finds a short green troll… A troll that can move an X-Wing with his mind!

The genius of Jim Henson collaborator Frank Oz’s superb puppetry and vocal work in Yoda’s first appearance cannot be underestimated. It’s the greatest compliment to Oz and to make-up effects master Stuart Freeborn, who was responsible for Yoda’s original sculpts, that Yoda feels most alive in this debut incarnation and handles comedy, drama and even wisdom with aplomb.

According to legend, Lucas was so taken with Oz’s turn in Empire that he lobbied for the Muppet man to be nominated for an Oscar. Unsurprisingly, the Academy decided that voice actors and puppets were ineligible. But that first turn was so good even subsequent super-sophisticated mega-bucks CGI never quite nailed the old Force guru. As George himself admits: “It’s one thing to create a digital character from scratch, but to take a puppet we already know and everybody loves ... to replicate that digitally was a huge, huge challenge.”

However, newfound freedom did allow Yoda to inspire a new generation with his jumping-frog lightsaber-fighting style, kickass Force powers and breakdancing moves (okay, that was only a DVD Easter egg). When Lucas was finally bringing his epic saga to a close, he knew he had to give Yoda a fitting send-off, so the most powerful Jedi ever faced off against the most powerful Sith ever, his duel with Darth Sidious showing the full power of the Force.

And who can forget the sight of Yoda’s little clawed fingers scratching into the metal of one of the Senate pods in a bid to keep hold? The joy of the prequel trilogy is that if you finished Sith feeling sorry for the little dude, you can shove Empire in the DVD player and watch him badger, cajole and tutor Luke all over again. Personally, we think his best bit is when he scraps with R2 over that torch. But that’s just us…

Biodata

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) or Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) depending on how you’re counting PORTRAYED BY Frank Oz BEST MOMENT Going all kick-ass against Count Dooku DID YOU KNOW? George Lucas originally intended the character to go by the full name of Minch Yoda but decided against it.

Instead a different Star Wars character was named Minch – another Jedi master, from the same species as Yoda, who lived 700 years before the Battle of Yavin and first appeared in the Dark Horse comic Star Wars Tales #16 (2003).

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “I RECOGNISE THE COUNCIL HAS MADE A DECISION BUT GIVEN THAT IT’S A STUPID-ASS DECISION, I’VE ELECTED TO IGNORE IT”

29

NICK FURY

Biodata

“I wear an eye-patch now. Eye-patches are cool. I made them cool.”

Director of SHIELD

H

e began his comic life in 1963 as a Howling Commando in a comic set in World War II. By 1965 he was a colonel and a super spy working for the then-contemporary SHIELD. He hadn’t aged much – he takes annual Infinity Formula injections. This could explain why he and Captain America are such best buds; they’re the same age. Though Fury wasn’t asleep for most of his life.

Fury is one of those characters that Marvel fans love, but not enough to keep a solo title running for any length of time. He’s always performed better as a supporting player or star of a mini series. He’s one of the “mortar” characters of the Marvel universe, binding the superhero bricks together.

78 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

In the main Marvel comics universe, he’s always been a white guy. The black Nick Fury made his debut in the Ultimate Marvel universe in 2001. His appearance was later redesigned deliberately to look like Samuel L Jackson when he became the lynchpin of the Ultimates (the Ultimate universe’s answer to the Avengers, who provide a lot of inspiration for the MCU Avengers). When the actor heard about this he was more than happy to put himself forward to play the role in any future films.

However, back in the main Marvel universe there’s now a Nick Fury Jr, the illegitimate son of the original Nick Fury, who also strangely bears a resemblance to Samuel L Jackson… Funny, that.

FIRST APPEARANCE Sgt Fury and His Howling Commandos #1 (1963) AKA Scorpio, Gemini, The Unseen PORTRAYED BY David Hasselhoff in the TV movie Nick Fury: Agent Of SHIELD (1998); Samuel L Jackson in Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Thor (2011), Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Avengers Assemble (2012), Marvel’s Agents Of SHIELD (TV 2013-14), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) BEST MOMENT His triumphant return from the dead on the helicarrier in Age Of Ultron DID YOU KNOW? SHIELD originally stood for Supreme Headquarters, International Espionage, Law-Enforcement Division. In 1991 it was changed to Strategic Hazard Intervention Espionage Logistics Directorate.

In the Marvel Cinematic Universe it stands for Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division.

Ridding the world of ghosts one Slimer at a time.

“HE SLIMED ME, RAY!”

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DR PETER VENKMAN Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Ghostbusters (1984) PORTRAYED BY Bill Murray (movies); Dave Coulier and Lorenzo Music (Ghostbusters cartoons) BEST MOMENT After watching Dana Barrett violently mutate into a hellhound, he observes laconically: “So… she’s a dog” DID YOU KNOW? The role of Venkman was originally written for John Belushi, who died before filming

He ain’t afraid of no ghost

B

ill Murray is a legend. We all know it, and anyone who disagrees is basically… well, Slimer. Despite Murray’s many, many credits, however, the role of Dr Peter Venkman is the one that stands head and shoulders above the rest when it comes to mainstream adoration – and deservedly so.

It’s certainly the funniest. Wisecracking as though his life depends on it, Venkman is the Ghostbuster who’s there for no other reason than to get rich, meet the ladies and have a laugh; saving the world is only a footnote. He’s the guy most guys watching the film would like to be, even though, in a more enlightened 2015, he’s a bit of a dick. Take his attempts to chat up Sigourney Weaver’s Dana: “I’m gonna go for broke. I am madly in love with you,” he

says, mere minutes after meeting her – what a creep!

He electrocutes a student in the psychic study at the start of the first film, despite the fact that the poor schlub actually gets the right answer – what the hell?

And don’t even get us started on what he says about Dana’s baby (“Well, he’s ugly. I mean, he’s not Elephant Man ugly, but he’s not attractive…”).

But somehow Venkman gets away with it. Part of it is that good old Bill Murray charm; part of it is the way his wisecracks are genuinely brilliant; part of it is the fact that he acts as our voice as the film progresses, translating the gobbledegook spouted by his companions into English. He’s the human heart of the Ghostbusters, the personification of New York’s cocky brashness, and the reason no spook will ever take over his town on his watch.

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27

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“WE’RE DOOMED”

Biodata “Have you seen a lion and a scarecrow around here?”

C-3PO

The golden droid with a lot to say

F

luent in over six million forms of communication, C-3PO is capable of talking the hind leg off a bantha in all of them. He’s the Victor Meldrew of protocol droids who never shuts up, and always finds something to whinge about. He also seems to have the flimsiest joints in the galley if the number of times he’s lost limbs – or even his head – is anything to judge by.

And even that doesn’t shut him up. He’ll doubtless say something like, “I’m falling to pieces!”

The design of the neurotic C-3PO was unashamedly based on Maria from Metropolis, though rendered in gleaming gold. After decades 80 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

of bulky screen ’bots, he was the most humanoid of droids, though the tight-fitting costume caused no end of discomfort for actor Anthony Daniels on the first Star Wars. He couldn’t even sit down on his own while wearing the costume; if you see a shot of him sitting it’s because he’s been manoeuvred into that position by stage hands. In many shots Daniels wore only the top half of the costume if his legs didn’t need to be seen.

C-3PO is an iconic image. Paired with R2-D2, they become the greatest droid double act ever, a mechanical Stan and Ollie. But there are times when you wish, like Stan, he was the silent partner.

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) or Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) depending on your viewpoint AKA The Golden One (to the Ewoks) PORTRAYED BY Anthony Daniels in Episodes I-VII and Rogue One (1977-2016) BEST MOMENT His indignity at having to be carted round on the back of a Wookiee after he’s blown to pieces in The Empire Strikes Back KNOWN TO SAY “Don’t blame me. I’m an interpreter. I’m not supposed to know a power socket from a computer terminal. ” DID YOU KNOW? Despite how it seems in The Phantom Menace, Anakin did not build C-3PO. He was built on the Cybot Galactica foundry world Affa and 80 years later his gutted chassis was found by Anakin and Kitster Banai on the streets of Mos Eisley. Anakin decided to recondition him.

26

Silent but deadly.

Biodata

It’s always the quiet ones

S

o icicle-cool he makes James Dean look like Michael Gove, Boba Fett’s mythic status was achieved after showing up for less than five minutes in both The Empire Strikes Back and Return Of The Jedi. You could write his all his lines using just one tin of Alphabetti Spaghetti and still have letters left over to swear in Huttese (well probably… we haven’t actually tested this theory but you get the drift).

While Fett was intriguingly enigmatic in the original trilogy, George Lucas came perilously close to sabotaging the character’s opaque coolness by giving him an unasked-for backstory (father, clones, extreme childhood trauma) in the prequels. “I based him on Clint Eastwood,” definitive Fett Jeremy Bulloch says. “Eastwood hardly moved. The way he moved was slow and easy, silent. I tried to translate that over into Boba Fett.”

“HE’S NO GOOD TO ME DEAD”

KOBAL

BOBA FETT

FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980) PORTRAYED BY Jeremy Bulloch (Star Wars Episodes V and VI); Daniel Logan (Star Wars Episode II) BEST MOMENT Escaping Bespin in Slave 1, with Han encased in carbonate for company DID YOU KNOW? Jeremy Bulloch was cast as Fett because he fitted the costume, which had already been made

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Neo-classical.

Biodata

NEO

He knows kung fu

R

25

esponsible for more nonsensical late-night discussions than any other movie ever made, The Matrix twisted the world’s melon, and it was all down to Neo. The little office drone who could, he woke up and fought the system with a breathtaking slow-mo style that has been repeatedly ripped off, but never bettered. Okay,

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so the next two Matrix films systematically destroyed everything that was great about the franchise, but Keanu Reeves remained a bastion of cool as all around turned to utter drivel. Everyone wanted that futuristic slidey-widey phone of his, and for a second there, dark glasses in the daytime and black trench-coats seemed like a viable fashion choice.

FIRST APPEARANCE The Matrix (1999) AKA Thomas Anderson (his original name), Mr Anderson (usually said sarcastically

by Agent Smith), The One (by the people who want him to save them), The Anomaly (by the machines who don’t want him to save anything) PORTRAYED BY Keanu Reeves in The Matrix trilogy (1999-2003) BEST MOMENT All the bullet-time fights in the first movie, but especially the lobby shoot-out DID YOU KNOW? Keanu Reeves had spinal surgery shortly before filming the original Matrix and had to wear a neck brace throughout the preceding fight training period. As a result he couldn’t do justice to the kung fu kicks and the fight choreography was amended to take this into account. He actually performs very few kicks in the final movie.

“I DON’T LIKE THE IDEA THAT I’M NOT IN CONTROL OF MY LIFE”

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“ALDERAAN? I’M NOT GOING TO ALDERAAN, I’VE GOTTA GET HOME. IT’S LATE”

LUKE SKYWALKER The new hope

Y

ou know the score with Luke Skywalker (née Starkiller until George Lucas changed his mind). He was the farm boy who became a Jedi Knight and took down the evil Empire (snogging his sister along the way but you can blame Yoda and Obi-Wan for that… they could have at least hinted it might not be a good idea). Despite all these achievements, it was Han Solo who came away from the original trilogy as the fan favourite.

Thing is, it’s easy to impress as the rogue. You don’t have the same limitations as the hero. So to redress the balance a bit…

WHY LUKE IS COOLER THAN HAN 5• REASONS

He’s a loner – No Wookiee needed! Save for the occasional assist from Artoo, Luke is a solo act.

He’s has a natural charm – There’s only one lady in the original trilogy, but she kissed Luke three times before laying lips on someone she wasn’t related to.

AT-AT attacker – For all Solo’s bravado, there is nothing he does as badass as single-handedly destroying an Imperial Walker.

The man with the plans – As his audacious rescue of the Corellian from Jabba’s vile clutches proves, Luke is a master strategist.

He’s full of surprises – “Oh you want me to stop Darth Vader? How’s about I do that and save his soul?”

• • • •

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) PORTRAYED BY Mark Hamill in Star Wars Episodes IV-VIII (and possibly more…?)

BEST MOMENT His lightsaber duel with Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back DID YOU KNOW? Scriptwriter Lawrence Kasdan considered some alternative, darker destines for Luke in Return Of The Jedi, including killing him off and having Leia take down Vader, or Luke killing Vader then turning to the Dark Side (well, he did give in to anger…)

Luke auditions for the Tatooine version of Misfits.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

23

Looking good for a guy in his nineties.

Biodata

CAPTAIN AMERICA A superhero out of time

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n one level, resurrecting World War II superhero Captain America in the ’60s was a no-brainer for Marvel. He was a ready-made icon. On another level, it was an anachronistic move for this brash new comic company, born from the ashes of Timely Comics (which held the rights to the character). Marvel was spearheading the trend for humanising superheroes with the teen angst of Spider-Man and dysfunctional family antics of the Fantastic Four. In this respect, Captain America was a difficult character to pitch. Although the man-outof-time aspect clearly appealed, what did the Captain stand for as the counter culture fastened its grip on an America in the throes of the Vietnam War? Four decades later then-Cap writer Ed Brubaker was facing the same problem: “All the really hard-core left-wing fans want Cap to be giving speeches against the George W Bush administration and all the really

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right-wing fans want him to be over in the streets of Baghdad, punching out Saddam Hussein.”

Perhaps the key to understanding how Marvel has kept the character pure, true to himself and above political squabbles is encapsulated in this quote from Civil War, when he tells Spider-Man: “Doesn’t matter what the press says. Doesn’t matter what the politicians or the mobs say. Doesn’t matter if the whole country decides that something wrong is something right. This nation was founded on one principle above all else: the requirement that we stand up for what we believe, no matter the odds or the consequences. When the mob and the press and the whole world tell you to move, your job is to plant yourself like a tree beside the river of truth, and tell the whole world – ‘No, you move.’”

It’s an ethos Chris Evans is embodying to stunning effect in the movies.

FIRST APPEARANCE Captain America Comics #1 (1941) AKA Steve Rogers, Winghead, Nomad PORTRAYED BY Reb Brown in two TV movies (1979); Matt Salinger in the film Captain America (1990); Chris Evans in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), Avengers Assemble (2012), Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014), Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015), Captain America: Civil War (2016), Infinity War Part 1 (2018) and Infinity War Part 2 (2019) (Dick Purcell played a character called Captain America in a 1944 cinema serial who had a similar costume but a very different background – his alias was District Attorney Grant Gardner for a start) BEST MOMENT Fighting Iron Man in Civil War DID YOU KNOW? Captain America actually wasn’t an original member of the Avengers. He was defrosted from his post-World War II suspended animation in issue four.

“AVENGERS ASSEMBLE!”

Staring off into a bleak, deathfilled future.

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Biodata

SARAH CONNOR Mother of rebellion

C

ompare and contrast: the poodle-haired ’80s slip waiting on tables and giggling with her doomed flatmate in The Terminator, and the steel-sinewed war mother notching pull-ups on an overturned cell bed in Terminator 2. In the seven years between the first and second Terminator films Linda Hamilton totally transformed her physique. The result is… authentic. And terrifying.

The scenes in Terminator 2 of a wildy aggressive Sarah snarling at orderlies and heralding the coming apocalypse are a shocking, brilliantly effective yet believable development from the Sarah we’d seen in the first film.

Because make no mistake – the Sarah Connor of then original film was no pushover. She may have

looked the wispy victim at the outset, but the situation she found herself in crafted a proto-Ripley out of her. By the end of the film, when she dourly acknowledges that, “There’s a storm coming,” you’re left in no doubt that she’s ready for it.

On the small screen Lena Headey – the future Queen of Westeros – was a worthy successor to Hamilton over two series of The Sarah Connor Chronicles, making the most of the extra hours screen time to deepen her relationship with her teenage son. Amusingly the current Sarah Connor comes from just across the sea from Westeros: Emelia Clarke (Daenerys Targaryen) took on the role in Terminator: Genisys, playing an alternate reality Sarah who was brought up by a T-800.

FIRST APPEARANCE The Terminator (1984) PORTRAYED BY Linda Hamilton in The Terminator (1984), Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991); Lena Headey in The Sarah Connor Chronicles (2008-9); Emilia Clarke in Terminator: Genisys (2015) BEST MOMENT Wounded Sarah – with one arm useless – pumping shot after shot into the T-1000 in Terminator 2, cocking the the weapon after each turn using just her good arm KNOWN TO SAY “You don’t know what it’s like to really create something; to create a life; to feel it growing inside you. All you know how to create is death and destruction.”

DID YOU KNOW? Linda Hamilton was Terminator director James Cameron’s fourth wife. They separated when he had an affair with Titanic actress Suzy Amis, whom he married in 2000.

“GOOD MORNING DOCTOR SILBERMAN. HOW’S THE KNEE?”

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

The Jokers from left to right: Cesar Romero; Jack Nicholson; Mark Hamill; Heath Ledger.

THE JOKER You’ve gotta laugh

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ure, it’s been said time and again, but it bears repeating: every great hero deserves a great villain. In Batman’s case, he practically cried out for one. And a teenager named Jerry Robinson heard his cries.

Robinson was recruited by Batman creator Bob Kane when the former was fresh out of high school, and bound for a career in journalism. The two met one summer on the tennis courts of a mountain resort, where Kane was celebrating the Caped Crusader’s debut success. “I think the first issue was on the stands,” Robinson tells us. “So this was a celebratory vacation for him. I knew nothing about comic books. But he said, ‘I need an assistant on the strip, and if you come to New York I can get you a job immediately.’”

That “job” became the stuff of legend, as Robinson joined Kane and Batman writer Bill Finger in crafting most of the Dark Knight’s earliest adventures. The character’s success, which began with one tale a month in Detective Comics, led to his first solo comic – simply entitled Batman – and the book’s four additional monthly stories led to the birth of comicdom’s most famous villain.

“Really the co-creator of Batman was Bill Finger,” says Robinson. “He created all the characters in Batman, the origin. Bill was very prolific. But being an ambitious writer myself, I immediately volunteered to do a story for the first issue of Batman. Everybody agreed that would reduce the burden on Bill.

“I went home that night to create a story. The first thing that I set out doing was to create a villain worthy of Batman. I knew that all great heroes in literature, the Bible and mythology, had a major antagonist. So that was my first goal. And the second was to create a character that would be memorable and indelible. I didn’t think of a one-time crook. Most of our villains in Batman

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before that were embezzlers, gangsters, hijackers.

I knew from my studies that great characters had some contradiction in terms. I thought a villain with a sense of humour would be different. And I wanted to make him bizarre, and in the tradition of great heroes and villains, from Sherlock Holmes and Moriarty on. I ran through all the names you can think of that might tell the story, and I hit on ‘The Joker’.”

Key to the Joker’s success was his look, which Robinson based on a simple playing card. “You know,” he laughs, “everything in your life has to feed in somehow. Cards were a family tradition – my mother and two of my brothers were expert bridge players, so there were always cards around. That night I found a deck of cards, and fortunately it had that classic image. His look was fashioned after the traditional Joker playing card; that led to making his face white.”

Robinson left Batman’s home, DC, decades ago (though not before creating quintessential teen sidekick Robin), and he’s enjoyed a long career managing a syndicate of political cartoonists. In the mid noughties he returned to the franchise to serve as consultant on The Dark Knight. “My job was to see that they were able to adapt our original concept of the Joker. And use as much of my original visual of him as possible, and the concept of the character himself.”

His character has two current interpretations, with Jared Leto slapping on the white make-up for Suicide Squad in 2016 and presumably future DC movies. The TV series Gotham, meanwhile, is reinventing the origins of all the major Batman characters and has teased viewers with a number of candidates for its Clown Prince of Crime. The most obvious contendor is Cameron Monaghan as Jerome Valeska, the deranged son of a circus snake charmer who looks, laughs and grins just like the Joker.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Batman #1 (1940) PORTRAYED BY Cesar Romero in ’60s TV Batman; Jack Nicholson in Batman (1989); Mark Hamill in animated Batman; Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight (2008); Jared Leto in Suicide Squad BEST MOMENT The graphic novel The Killing Joke

by Alan Moore (1988) DID YOU KNOW? In the DC comics universe the Joker’s real name has never been officially revealed

“How did I get these scars? Well, I’m glad you asked.”

“WHY SO SERIOUS?”

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“I’ve still got time to rescue my dad and invent rock’n’roll.”

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“ARE YOU TRYING TO TELL ME THAT MY MOTHER HAS GOT THE HOTS FOR ME?”

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MARTY MCFLY So iconic that there’s a band named after him

Fox is loathe to pinpoint why Marty McFly was so popular: “It’s hard to analyse, and maybe it’s best left that way. It’s like Mark Twain’s analogy between comedy and a frog. If you dissect it, you might find out what makes it work, but it’ll die in the process.”

Maybe Marty is so loved because he’s the embodiment of ‘what if?’ What if you could time travel? What if you could go back and do things differently? Fox experiences it all for us with immense charm and enthusiasm.

Back To The Future changed the way films are made. Fans were so eager to know what happened to Marty that Zemeckis and Bob Gale set about writing and shooting a then unheard-of sequel and threequel back-to-back. The money-reaping aspects of guaranteed audiences didn’t go unnoticed by studio honchos and three-picture deals became de rigueur. The trick allowed Marty a full, fleshed-out and satisfying character arc, which made us feel he was less a studio creation and more a mate we’d grown up with.

Okay, so Marty later inspired boyband McFly and prompted Ronald Reagan to quip “We don’t need roads where we’re going” in his 1986 State of the Union address… but to most of us he’s still a well-meaning kid whose adventures reinforce our belief in fundamentals that transcend time: family, friendship and – oh yes – love. Not bad for a slacker.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Back To The Future (1985) FULL NAME Martin Seamus McFly PORTRAYED BY Michael J Fox in Back To The Future (1985), Back To The Future II (1989), Back To The Future III (1990); David Kaufman in Back To The Future The Animated Series (1991-2) BEST MOMENT McFly performs a manic guitar solo during a rendition of “Johnny Be Good” at his school prom DID YOU KNOW? In the French dub of Back To The Future, Marty McFly is called “Pierre Cardin” in 1955, rather than “Calvin Klein” while in the Italian and Spanish dubs he’s called “Levi’s Strauss”

KOBAL

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hen Michael J Fox was auditioning for roles, he was told by one studio exec that his face was not the kind that would ever be “seen on a lunchbox”. By 1985 it was hard to find a lunchbox that didn’t feature the impish features of Fox as wide-eyed, body-warmerwearing Marty McFly – the high-school kid who accidentally time travels to 1955, the year his parents first met.

Back To The Future became 1985’s highestgrossing flick and Fox celebrated by sending the exec a lunchbox with his mug on the front.

He had every right to feel smug. The film was successful due to the likeability of its protagonist, which had as much to do with Fox’s sitcom-honed comedy reading as the funny, playful script. When Fox was initially approached to play McFly he’d had to turn the role down due to work commitments on Family Ties. Writer-director Robert Zemeckis hired Eric Stoltz instead, but his overly serious performance was sapping the energy from what was supposed to be a zippy family comedy.

Future’s producers then persuaded Family Ties’ production company to let Fox work nights and weekends while still filming the sitcom. An exhausting task – perhaps it’s why his dazed expression as a boy trapped in his ’50s hometown is so convincing.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME The cold stare of a man who’s lost pretty much everything.

MAD MAX

The Road Warrior

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eople don’t believe in heroes anymore?” growls the police chief (Roger Ward) in the first of George Miller’s post-apocalyptic road movies. “Well damn them! You and me, Max, we’re gonna give them back their heroes!”

A futuristic take on the tall, dark stranger familiar from a million and one Westerns, Max Rockatansky (originally played by Mel Gibson) is Shane with added horsepower. Born on the dusty freeways of the Aussie Outback sometime in the post-oil future, Gibbo’s cop-turned-vigilante became an Oz icon – a dead-eyed killing machine who revs up for vengeance after bikers turn his wife, child and best buddy Goose (Steve Bisley) into roadkill.

Then all of 21, Gibson arrived at the casting session with his face mashed up after a party brawl: “I had cuts, bandages, bruises. But the agent asked to take some pictures of me. I was told they were looking for rough guys.”

Miller – an ex-ER doctor who’d spent night shifts patching up road accident victims – knew instantly that Gibson was the right man for the part. The writer/director’s harsh vision of carmaggedon had already left an actress and a stuntman hospitalised during pre-production. He needed a lead who would roll with the punches… not to mention the car crashes, gunshots and explosions.

Playing this highway super-cop with laconic menace, barely speaking, never smiling, Gibson is a one-man vengeance machine in dusty bondage gear. The sequels toned down the darkness, giving Gibbo’s tortured cop a shot at redemption as he tries to help a besieged community in Mad Max 2 or becomes a surrogate dad in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.

Along the way he gets a dog called Dog (it gets shot with a crossbow) and a kiddie sidekick (Emil Minty), and he confronts Tina Turner’s badass Aunty Entity. But none of it compares to the dusty majesty of Miller’s 1979 original, a descent into the Down Underworld as one man thirsts for grim revenge.

“The style demanded caricature,” Gibson would later moan.

“There was nothing there to let me strut my stuff.” But it’s precisely his zombified, deadened heartlessness that gives Max his raw power. He’s a vigilante, not a hero – something the sequels tried to paper over as Miller’s reading of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With A Thousand Faces gave the character an arc. At his best Max is an outlaw, a psycho, a madman who puts the pedal to the metal in his Pursuit Special or ankle-cuffs Johnny the Boy to a burning gas tank with just a hacksaw for company.

Now Tom Hardy is playing a “new interpretation” (Miller’s words) of Max in Fury Road. In some previous roles – Bane, Bronson, Alfie Solomons in Peaky Blinders – he’s felt more like a force of nature than an actor portraying a character, so it’s canny casting. He’s just as taciturn as his predecessor, but more feral, more twitchy, even more unpredictable. Look like Max is going to stay mad for the foreseeable future.

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Mad Max (1979) FULL NAME Max Rockatansky PORTRAYED BY Mel Gibson in Mad Max (1979), Mad Max 2 (1981), Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (1985); Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) BEST MOMENT Driving the 18-wheeler in Mad Max 2’s exhilarating destruction derby.

KNOWN TO SAY “The chain in those handcuffs is hightensile steel. It’ll take you 10 minutes to hack through it with this. Now if you’re lucky, you can hack through your ankle in five minutes. Go!” DID YOU KNOW? Max’s dog in the second film was played by a pooch so scared by the noise of engines that the production team gave him earplugs

Tom Hardy took over the role in 2015’s acclaimed “reinterpretation” Fury Road.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Yeah, that still looks painful.

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Biodata

W OLVERINE The claws are out

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olverine was a bona fide superstar of the comics world long before Hugh Jackman introduced him to cinema-goers in the X-Men films. Originally seen as a bit-parter in a 1974 Hulk comic – an agent of the Canadian government assigned to take down the green giant – the feisty Canuck was soon enlisted into the X-Men. With his retractable claws, mutant healing power and surly attitude he was an unlikely hit and soon became one of the team’s most popular characters. Under writer Chris Claremont – who would write the Uncanny X-Men title for 16 years – Wolverine’s character was deepened and his mysterious past explored, turning him into one of the most complex heroes (or often anti-heroes) that Marvel boasted.

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And in “Snikt” – the noise of his claws coming out – he has one of the most iconic sound effects in comics, only matched by Nightcrawler’s “Bamf”.

Jackman totally nailed the character on screen; no easy feat considering there was one huge difference between him and his comic counterpart – a difference of about 11 inches in height. In every other way, though, the Australian channelled the Canadian superhero with admirable gusto. It’s a shame his solo films have both been a little creaky (although Origins had almost as many mutants fighting alongside him as a normal X-Men film) but he’s always one of the highlights of the X-Men films, whether that’s fighting Lady Deathstrike, letting a cat lick his claws or simply telling the young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr to “Go f**k yourself.”

FIRST APPEARANCE The Incredible Hulk #180 (1974) AKA Logan, James Howlett, Weapon X PORTRAYED BY Hugh Jackman in every single X-Men and X-Men spin-off movie BEST MOMENT The four-part mini-series Wolverine (1982) with art by Frank Miller that took Logan to Japan and into a world of samurai, ninja and yakuza. Although the film The Wolverine (2013) used various elements, the comic version is about a million times more awesome and gave whole new dimensions to the character.

DID YOU KNOW? Despite claiming to be a loner, Wolverine has been part of more Marvel super teams than any other character. Online encyclopaedia Comic Vine currently lists him as having served in over 40 teams, including the Avengers, the X-Men, Alpha Flight, the Fantastic Four, the Defenders, Cosmic Champions, Team X, Weapon X, X-Force and X-Treme Sanctions Executive. Oh, and he spent one entire issue of the Civil War saga fighting in the nude.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Scully Biodata NAME Agent Dana Scully FIRST APPEARANCE The X-Files, “Pilot’” (1993) PORTRAYED BY Gillian Anderson BEST MOMENT Eating a live cricket in “Humbug”, then revealing she faked it using sleight of hand: thus making a clever analogy to her work on debunking those pesky X-File cases.

KNOWN TO SAY “The truth is out there but so are lies” DID YOU KNOW? Because of the height difference between Duchovny and Anderson, many scenes featuring them alongside each other were filmed with Anderson standing on a box.

“Sometimes I forget I’m on the box,” she said in an old interview during the show’s run. “I’ll have this very serious moment in a very serious scene and I’ll turn to the camera and fall right off the box…”

“THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE...”

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Points to anyone who can figure out what the arrow on that X-ray is pointing to.

Fox Biodata NAME Agent Fox Mulder FIRST APPEARANCE The X-Files, “Pilot” (1993) PORTRAYED BY David Duchovny BEST MOMENT After dipping his hands in the bile left by stretchy bad guy Eugene Tooms, Mulder quips: “Is there any way I can get it off my fingers quickly without betraying my cool exterior?” In one sentence, he’s the perfect combination of manly investigator and wisecracking hero.

KNOWN TO SAY “Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?”

DID YOU KNOW? Mulder is always shown sleeping on the couch. It’s not until the season six two-parter “Dreamland” that we finally see into his bedroom and he gets a bed. (Although technically his waterbed is bought by the guy possessing his body at the time, but let’s not split hairs.)

MULDER & SCULLY

The sceptic and the believer team

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ou can’t have a Mulder without a Scully, and you can’t have a Scully without a Mulder, which is why we’ve given them a joint entry here – who could possibly vote one of them above the other, anyway? After all, when David Duchovny decided to leave The X-Files after its seventh season, the show suffered immeasurably from his loss and never quite recovered, proving our theory that these guys should be together forever. They’re one of television’s bestmatched teams, which is kind of curious when you think about how different they are…

Back in 1993, when Chris Carter was putting together his new Fox show, he decided to make the female character the sceptic and the male character the dreamer – a strangely revolutionary concept for the time which then became even more revolutionary when he refused the network’s nowinfamous demand to cast a “blonde bombshell” alongside David Duchovny. The network wanted to play up a romance between its two leads, while Carter wanted to focus on other things – you know: scripts, stories, action, intrigue. (How very inconvenient of him.) Thanks to his rebellion, a little-known Brit named Gillian Anderson became Dana Scully, dyed her hair THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 95

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

The most famous couple of the ’90s?

red and eventually became a bombshell anyway, thus proving that networks shouldn’t judge women by how they look standing next to their male co-star. Romance between the two leads also followed but not for a long time – and during those years The X-Files built a solid base that made their eventual bedroom partnership a mere footnote among far more important things.

And what things they were: alien abductions, monsters, ghosts, mutants, clones, freaks, geeks – all brought to the mainstream with our two FBI agents hot on their heels. “Spooky” Mulder was the guy who believed in the lot of ’em, Duchovny imbuing a character who might otherwise have come across as an irritating flake with enough charm and vulnerability to make you root for him. Conversely, Anderson played Scully as straight as could be, dousing Mulder’s flights of fancy with iceberg-cold water on a regular basis, but without coming off as mean or smug in the process. Thankfully she had a sense of humour, too, which was a relief when her role occasionally required her to spout lines as horrendously flat as: “Mulder, not everything is a labyrinth of dark conspiracy, and not everybody is plotting to deceive, inveigle and obfuscate.” (Knowing Anderson, she probably nailed that in one take, but still... who talks like that?)

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Right from the off, Mulder and Scully were as different as it was possible to be: Fox lost in a world of conspiracies and plots; Dana rational and clear-headed, convinced that there must always be a logical explanation. There were changes to their dynamic as the show worked through its nine seasons, however (a few too many years, if we’re honest – as stated above, once Duchovny left even the wonderful Robert Patrick couldn’t make up for the loss). Mulder finally grew disillusioned, fed up of being given the runaround by that deceitful, obfuscating government, eventually taking a long time-out after discovering the truth behind the kidnapping of his young sister. Scully – who had always clung on to her Catholic faith, despite it being the one thing she really couldn’t rationalise like everything else – felt her world shatter after she was abducted and implanted with a strange chip in her neck that gave her cancer when she removed it. She then started to believe in the very conspiracies her partner had chased down, although whether she accepted they involved aliens or not is still open to debate.

As their characters inevitably opened and closed their minds, the series became more and more grim and its arc plot… er, lost the plot.

Thus the charm of our investigating duo started to lessen – and once Duchovny moved on, a light

was lost. Scully became a shadow of her former self without Mulder to bounce off, and while it was nice to see them reunited six years after the end of the series in 2008’s big-screen effort The X-Files: I Want To Believe, the po-faced script robbed us of the joy we should have felt at their return. Likewise, last year’s miniseries was a patchy mess, managing just one true classic in its six part run. Still, it did at least prove that the appetite for more is still there and the door is open for another series. We can only hope they recapture the long-lost charm of days gone by.

Because back in the early days, back when Mulder met Scully in the basement of the FBI building in Washington, it was pure magic.

Mulder would eat sunflower seeds. He’d throw pencils into the ceiling tiles when he was bored.

He’d read UFO reports and talk to government insiders, then laugh when Scully “Scullied” him (meaning “to throw scorn on someone’s convictions”, this is now a verb in itself). Scully, meanwhile, would humour her partner as far as she saw fit before explaining away his ideas using science, because she was a brilliant intellectual. She’d smile when he disagreed.

Crack a sly joke. She’d always have his back, as he had hers, because they were partners to the end. Mulder without Scully? Scully without Mulder? Never gonna happen.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Still doesn’t look anything like Tom Hardy.

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“LET’S MAKE SURE HISTORY NEVER FORGETS THE NAME . . . ENTERPRISE”

CAPTAIN PICARD Captain, my captain, make it so

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Trek: The Next Generation, “Encounter At Farpoint” (1987) PORTRAYED BY Patrick Stewart (1987-2006 when he voiced the Star Trek: Legacy game) BEST MOMENT Being turned into Locutus of Borg.

Probably not Picard’s favourite moment in the grand scheme of things, mind you, but we all loved it.

KNOWN TO SAY “Space. The final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its continuing mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”

DID YOU KNOW? Patrick Stewart lost his hair as a teenager. A journalist once asked Gene Roddenberry: “Surely they would have cured baldness by the 24th century?” To which Roddenberry, to his eternal credit, replied: “In the 24th century, they wouldn’t care.”

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hat a shock it must have been to the American psyche when the Captain of the USS Enterprise became a man with a French name and a British accent. Was there ever a character so perfectly, boisterously American as James T Kirk, after all? (It’s often conveniently forgotten that William Shatner is Canadian.) Wasn’t the Enterprise the symbolic figurehead of the American desire to explore, to keep going west, to enforce their Manifest Destiny on the universe? Who was this British guy anyway?

Nobody had even heard of him! Surely Star Trek: The Next Generation was doomed from the start…

What a canny piece of casting, then, to cause such an outrage. And how unprepared poor Patrick Stewart was for the world of US television, with its crazy working hours, those endless, technobabbly speeches and aliens with silly foreheads. Coming from a background steeped in Shakespeare and the stage, this was one British thesp who found himself in over his head – but, after a while, something clicked. Captain Jean-Luc Picard might not beam down to a planet and have a fistfight with an alien every week but he possessed a dignity and intelligence some might argue was sorely missing from our brash Captain Kirk. He thought about things, followed the rules, avoided conflict at all costs. As the years passed and Stewart and Picard got to know each other, a legend was born.

It’s telling that the two most important and memorable Jean-Luc moments featured him losing

that British stiff upper lip. The first was in the season three finale, “The Best Of Both Worlds Part 1”, which saw him transformed into a Borg in one of the most shocking images ever to appear in Star Trek – if you didn’t gasp when we got our first glimpse of Picard as Locutus, the Borg must have already assimilated you. The other saw him tortured by Cardassians in “Chain Of Command”, played with all the gritty realism an actor of Stewart’s calibre could really sink his teeth into.

The psychological fall-out of his encounter with the Borg, and the repercussions of his Cardassian torture, gave Picard a dimension the original series’ cast could only dream of. Much as we love them all, suddenly here was an Enterprise Captain who was human.

Since the final film featuring the Next Generation cast, 2002’s disappointing Star Trek: Nemesis, Stewart has turned his attention to mentoring mutants in the X-Men movies. His Professor X isn’t a world away from his Picard, funnily enough: an inspiring leader with a warm heart and a calculating mind. Yelling at Magneto isn’t a far cry from bellowing his disapproval of Q, when you think about it. Perhaps Stewart has been a little typecast: perhaps he did such a good job commanding the Enterprise that his career was, ever after, to be filled with the sight of him commanding other enterprises. It’s difficult to care when he does it so well. Jean-Luc Picard was a Starfleet Captain for a brave new age, and the Enterprise was rarely held in such sure hands.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Beware the Lasso of Truth!

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“DON’T RAISE YOUR HAND UNTIL YOU’VE FIRST EXTENDED IT”

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WONDER WOMAN In her satin tights, fighting for your rights

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sychologist William Moulton Marston was hired by comics publisher Max Gaines to develop a new character: Marston came up with the idea for a female superhero who would conquer her foes less through violence than through love. In this he was influenced by a pair of strong women: his wife Elizabeth and Olive Byrne, who lived with the married couple in a polyamorous relationship. “Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world,” he declared.

Wonder Woman was originally conceived as the daughter of Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, a tribe of warrior women living on a secluded Pacific island. However, subsequent storylines saw her reimagined as the recipient of blessings from the Ancient Greek gods, leaving her “beautiful as Aphrodite, wise as Athena, as strong as Hercules, and as swift as Hermes”. Later still, the two backstories were merged and her mythical homeland’s name changed from Paradise Island to Themiscyra, while Wonder Woman herself was designated an ambassador to “Man’s World”. In her current comics incarnation she is a full-on demigoddess and as fierce and belligerent as she’s ever been. The bullet-deflecting bracelets and magic golden lasso that are her signature weapons (the latter able to compel anyone bound by it to tell the truth) have been joined by a xiphos, a type of Ancient Greek sword.

Marston, then, aided by other writers such as Martin Pasko, George Pérez and Brian Azzarello who over the years have built on the foundation he created and expanded the character and her potential, succeeded in creating a superheroine quite capable of holding her own against her male counterparts. In the 1970s Wonder Woman was

embraced as a feminist ideal, with writer Gloria Steinem praising the values she upholds: “strength and self-reliance for women; sisterhood and mutual support among women; peacefulness and esteem for human life; a diminishment both of ‘masculine’ aggression and of the belief that violence is the only way of solving conflicts”. Since then she has risen to become a mainstay of the DC Comics universe, earning a place as one of the company’s “Big Three” alongside Superman and Batman. She has also merited a recent scholarly study, The Secret History Of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore, which explored her cultural significance and legacy from the era of women’s suffrage to the present day.

In other media, however, Wonder Woman remains sorely under-represented. She has featured as a team member in various Justice League cartoon series but unlike Superman or Batman has only a single solo animated feature film to her name. There was, of course, the mid-70s live-action TV show, a laudable effort whose popularity is in no small part due to the beautiful and statuesque Lynda Carter, who played the title role with impish conviction. Gal Gadot appeared in the bloated Batman v Superman: Dawn Of Justice, a cameo that acts as springboard for a solo movie of her own later this year. Fingers crossed it does the character justice.

Carter’s excellent TV portrayal has been widely credited for Wonder Woman’s adoption by the LGBT community as an icon, with countless drag queens donning their satin tights and fighting for their rights, just as the show’s theme tune encouraged. Yet Wonder Woman remains, above all else, the most independent and powerful superheroine of all, a sister who really does do it for herself.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE All Star Comics #8 (December 1941) AKA Princess Diana of Themyscira CREATED BY William Moulton Marston SYMBOL Shiny gold eagle breastplate PORTRAYED BY Lynda Carter in the 1975-1979 TV series and, on the big screen, Gal Gadot from 2016 onwards BEST MOMENT Lynda Carter twirling round and round at high speed to make the transformation from dowdy, bespectacled Diana Prince to glossy, tiara-wearing Wonder Woman DID YOU KNOW William Moulton Marston also invented the polygraph. Would we lie to you?

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

So much more than pixels.

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“BRRR BEE RRRRR BOOOP BEEEP!”

R2-D2

A Jedi’s best friend

W

ould it be demeaning to compare R2-D2 to a dog? In the futuristic world of Star Wars (well, as futuristic as it can be, given that it’s a long time ago… you get what we mean), it makes a certain kind of sense that kids don’t have pets any more. Instead they have robots, and if you were going to have a pet robot, chances are that your childhood self would want an Artoo.

Whatever he was originally designed for – a thermocapsulary dehousing assister, apparently, whatever the heck that means – you can’t deny that Artoo would make a fantastic pooch. Loyal, useful, talkative and (mostly) obedient, you could name him Fido and, furry cuddles aside, you’d probably never notice the difference.

This theory, of course, actually cheapens what this little chap ended up becoming in the Star Wars universe. There’s a reason he’s been featured in six – soon to be seven – movies (the only character, alongside C-3PO, to appear in the entire run). He’s a perky, cocky bugger who has more personality than some of the franchise’s flesh-andblood actors (yes Hayden Christensen’s Anakin, we’re looking at you). Cheapened when rendered in CGI, as proved beyond a shadow of a doubt in that godawful factory sequence in Attack Of The Clones, Artoo has consistently managed to steal scenes simply by physically being in them, one big metal bucket of proof that all the computerised filmmaking in the world can’t make up for putting someone inside a costume and getting them to bring it to life. In this case it’s been the 3ft 8in Kenny Baker doing the honours since 1977:

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a thankless task, for the most part, given that it was uncomfortable work and nobody could see his face on screen at the end of it.

But it paid off for Artoo, as what could conceivably have been nothing more than a moving trashcan showed us it could have feelings. Take the scene in A New Hope in which Artoo wanders the canyons of Tatooine. He whimpers like a scared child, then screams when he’s caught by the Jawas; and as he does so, your heart bleeds for him. He talks back to Threepio, and while we don’t understand most of what he says (Artoo’s whistles and bleeps were created by sound designer Ben Burtt), we get the sense he’s a sassy little sausage who can give as good as he gets. He spends his time on Dagobah being miserably used as a toy by Jedi-in-training Luke, and you suspect that, by the end, the poor astromech droid is on the verge of giving his master a kick up the arse. And, finally, he’s a loyal co-pilot in several space battles, valiantly risking his droid life to fight the bad guys: a true hero, whether he’s made of metal or not.

Designed by Ralph McQuarrie and John Stears, Artoo’s looks are aesthetically pleasing, too, from the pretty blue panels on his dome to the big lens that serves as his eye. Threepio may have all the bling, but Artoo’s got the class. And while his legs don’t look entirely practical for all terrains, the way he hops from leg to leg in excitement from time to time is truly adorable – taking us back to that dog analogy again, because it’s strangely puppy-like.

Would you like your own pet R2-D2? We’re guessing that’s a big, fat yes.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) OR Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1998) if you’re being pedantic AKA Artoo Detoo, Artoo or R2 PORTRAYED BY Kenny Baker (all seven Star Wars films) BEST MOMENT Kick-starting our childhood dreams by helpfully projecting the hologram of Princess Leia as she pleads: “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope” DID YOU KNOW? You can glimpse R2-D2 in the wreckage of Vulcan during the 2009 Star Trek movie. Quite what he was doing there is a mystery, to say the least…

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“YOU HAVE 20 SECONDS TO COMPLY”

R

oboCop is effortlessly iconic. It’s not just his look – the original 1987 look, that is, which not even the sleek suit in the 2014 remake could dislodge from the public psyche – it’s the way he moves; the noise he makes when he moves; what he says; what he does.

If Frankenstein was the modern Prometheus, RoboCop is the modern Frankenstein’s monster.

When shot-to-bloody-stumps cop Alex Murphy is resurrected as a cyborg, he struggles to retain his soul as big evil corporation OmniCorp takes control of his body. In director Paul Verhoeven’s violent first film, RoboCop is both the bad-ass action hero and a sympathetic victim at the centre of a satire about consumerism, corporate greed and the media.

He’s also highly quotable. It’s not Shakespeare, sure, but his deadpan delivery is a gift for dance music and thrash metal sampling requirement; 104 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“20 Seconds To Comply” by Silver Bullet rose as high as number 11 in the UK chart in 1989.

Subsequent films, TV shows and even – shudder – cartoons (featuring a RoboCop with a Marilyn Monroe bum-wiggle, we kid you not) watered down the violence but somehow could never erode the inherent cool. The more recent film added a new level of body horror, effectively conveying the terrifying sense that all that’s left of Murphy is a detachable head and hand. This time the satirical swipes were aimed more at marketing and PR, which almost excuses the fact that the Robo-suit for much of the movie looks worrying generic.

Because RoboCop should not be designed by a committee at Apple. Sleek is good for mobile phones.

Built-like-a-Sherman-tank is good for Robo-icons.

After all, this entry is an honorary nod to the iconic status of Ed-209 as well.

ALL STAR

He’s behind you!

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

THE CLONE VS THE CYBORG

They’re both lawmen of the future but just how similar are Judge Dredd and RoboCop really?

THE MEN A clone of the legendary “father of justice” Eustace Fargo, Judge Joseph Dredd is now pushing 70. That doesn’t stop him from continuing a gruelling routine of daily armed and unarmed combat. His uniform is comprised of skin-tight biker’s leathers incorporating protective pads on his shoulders, elbows and knees while his belt pouches contain everything from handcuffs and stun gas to a “Birdie” hand-held lie detector. Due to repeated major injuries, a significant number of Dredd’s bones are now artificial. After losing his eyes, he was given bionic replacements that provide him with 20/20 zoom vision and vastly reduced blinking time.

THE HELMETS The Justice Department standard headwear is both a protective helmet and, since it hides half of a Judge’s face, part of their psychological arsenal. The foreheadmounted shield can be pulled down for use as a respirator breathing apparatus and the helmets are sometimes depicted with a retractable microphone and internal HUD providing all-round vision.

THE BOOTS Dredd wears standard Justice Department motorbike boots with reinforced steel toecaps.

His right boot has a side holster in which he stores his Lawgiver, providing easy access to his weapon when seated on a Lawmaster, while the left boot includes a sheath for a knife. Dredd likes to wear them a size too tight, to keep him on edge.

THE WEAPONS The Lawgiver can fire six different types of ammunition: Standard; Hi-Ex; Armour Piercing; Incendiary; Heatseeker; and Ricochet – as single shot or automatic fire.

Palm-print recognition means it will explode if fired by an unauthorised person.

Originally a slender handgun, the Lawgiver Mk 2 now resembles a chunky submachine gun with a single bottom-loading ammo cartridge. Judges can also deploy a daystick truncheon and the fully automatic Widowmaker 2000 shotgun.

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Alex J Murphy was a loyal, tough and well-liked member of the Detroit police department until he suffered massive physical trauma at the hands of Clarence Boddicker and his gang, and was left for dead. OCP technicians performed a revolutionary “total body prosthesis” whereby his face and portions of his cerebrum and cerebellum were integrated into a cybernetic body, and he was reborn as RoboCop. His exoskeleton, made from titanium laminated with Kevlar, is fireproof and capable of surviving major damage from armour piercing and explosive rounds, as well as major impacts from falls or vehicle collisions.

Although it has a removable faceplate RoboCop’s helmet is integrated into his main systems, giving him zoom capability and heat vision, as well as a playback recorder to collect evidence. His vision is connected directly to his targeting capability, which also gives him the ability to calculate bullet trajectory accurately. As with Dredd, part of Murphy’s face is still visible.

RoboCop doesn’t technically wear boots. His legs and feet are actually an integrated part of his cyborg body.

His right leg does, however, contain a hidden mechanical thigh holster from which he can quickly deploy his Auto-9 gun for when a spot of instant justice is required. Which is more often than not, frankly…

The Auto-9 is a 9mm handgun – a heavily-modified Beretta m93R machine pistol with long barrel. It is capable of firing in three- or seven-round bursts, or in fully automatic mode, from a huge 50-round magazine. Later on it was modified so that only RoboCop could fire it and it could shoot different types of ammunition.

THE TRANSPORT

The Detroit PD’s standard vehicle is the sturdy 1985 Ford Taurus, fitted with a lighted pushbar, roof-mounted spotlight, onboard computer and dashboard arsenal. Retro.

The Lawmaster is a chopper-style motorbike with thick tyres, onboard computer, auto-aiming twin “bike cannon” machine guns, and turbo-boost capability (which enables it to leap great distances). Earlier models have a “Cyclops” laser mounted on their front.

THE CATCHPHRASES “I am the law, creep!”

THE CRIMINALS Aside from normal criminal activity, Dredd has dealt with characters such as head-butting maniac Mean Machine Angel, delinquent skysurfer Chopper, mad Chief Judge Cal, mass-murdering teenager PJ Maybe and alien superfiend Judge Death – as well as leading guerrilla movements against Soviet invaders and rogue Judges.

THE DUTIES Judges patrol alone or in pairs, unless called upon to perform urban pacification and riot control. They work shifts stretching over many days, punctuated by ten minutes of hyper-accelerated rest in specialised Sleep Machines and eating K Rations from the store on their Lawmasters.

Judge Dredd mostly patrols on his own, though he has regularly teamed up with psychic Judge Cassandra Anderson from Psi Division.

THE LAW Dredd enforces the strict penal code of Mega-City One, intended to keep order in such an overcrowded city. Minor crimes are punished with vastly disproportionate sentences, either with solitary confinement in huge blocks of Iso-Cubes or summary execution.

THE CITIES Mega-City One: Following the Atomic Wars of the 2070s, humanity retreated into Mega-Cities. With 95% unemployment, citizens are crammed into vast, crime-ridden blocks. Once home to 800 million people and running down the American east coast from Canada to Florida, war and disaster have recently taken their toll on the city and reduced the population to 50 million.

“ Dead or alive, you’re coming with me!”

After tackling Clarence Boddicker’s gang, whose attack led him to become RoboCop in the first place, Murphy has taken on corrupt officials at OCP, drug cartels, the rival ED-209 droids and his replacement, Cain/RoboCop 2.

Although capable of operating on his own as a crime prevention unit, RoboCop usually works with his former partner, Officer Anne Lewis. His systems require downtime for diagnostics as well as basic repairs and power source recharging. He is fed with a rudimentary “baby food” paste that sustains his organic systems.

Aside from the laws of the city, RoboCop follows four Prime Directives: serve the public trust, protect the innocent, uphold the law. The fourth directive is later revealed to make him incapable of placing any senior OCP employee under arrest.

Detroit: An ’80s vision of American dystopia full of decrepit heavy industry, poverty and crime alongside gleaming skyscrapers and sharp suits. The bankrupt city has handed over running of its police department to megacorporation Omni Consumer Products, which aims to replace the city with a planned municipality run by fully-privatised services.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“GIVE ME A SCOTCH – I’M STARVING”

IRON MAN

Metal clothes maketh the metal man

I

ron Man has come a long way in the last decade.

Before the launch of the Marvel Cinematic Universe he was a much-loved character among comics fans, with a long and noble history. Well, sometimes not so noble. There was that whole alcoholism thing. And killing Yellowjacket. And the rocket roller skates. Not to mention that whole farrago when Stark temporarily died and was replaced by a teenage Tony from an alternate timeline.

But mostly it was noble. He was the billionaire businessman with the dicky ticker who built the Iron Man armour to keep his heart beating and to escape capture by some communist terrorists. Soon after he joined the Avengers, saved the world multiples times and continually updated his armour.

But he never quite made the leap into the public consciousness the way Spidey, the Hulk, Batman and Superman did. The fact was, until the computer graphics revolution in special FX took place, he was 108 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

never going to get to headline a movie or TV show – he would have looked like a 1950s sci-fi robot.

By 2008, special FX were ready, and Marvel launched its cinematic universe with Iron Man. However, the key element in the on-screen success of the character turned out not to be the megabucks spent on pixels but the casting of Robert Downey Jr. He brought a charisma to the role that made a cocky, chauvinistic arms salesman (soon to reform) one of the most engaging comic book characters ever transferred to screen, delivering the zingers with an energetic relish. The fact that the Iron Man action scenes looked the business too was almost icing on the cake rather the main reason to see the film.

Since then Iron Man has become the poster boy of the MCU and one of the major reasons why Avengers Assemble, Avengers: Age Of Ultron and Iron Man 3 are all currently in the Top 10 of the biggest money-making films of all time.

Choosing what to wear today is always such a major decision.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Tales Of Suspense #39 (1963) AKA Tony Stark, Shellhead PORTRAYED BY Robert Downey Jr in Iron Man (2008), Iron Man 2 (2010), Avengers Assemble (2012), Iron Man 3 (2013), Avengers: Age Of Ultron (2015), Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) BEST MOMENT Iron Man saves the day by intercepting a nuclear missile and dragging it off into space in Avengers Assemble (2012) DID YOU KNOW? Ghostface Killah of Wu-Tang Clan has often made reference to Iron Man in his lyrics and sampled the cartoons.

He was even featured in a scene deleted from the first Iron Man film.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

BATMAN

“I’M BATMAN!”

Gotham’s Dark Knight

A

boy sees his dad and mum get gunned down in an alleyway by a crook. In adulthood, Bruce Wayne still isn’t over the trauma but instead of committing to years of psychotherapy, he decides to work out his issues by fighting crime as a masked, caped vigilante. “Criminals are a superstitious cowardly lot,” he muses to himself, “so my disguise must be able to strike terror into their hearts. I must be a creature of the night, black, terrible… a … a …” At which moment of epiphany, a bat fortuitously flies in through the window at Wayne Manor. Good thing it wasn’t a parrot. Or a toucan.

Training himself to the peak of perfection as a detective, martial artist and gadget user, Wayne becomes Batman, scourge of evildoers in his hometown of Gotham City. And there’s the reason why the character has endured as one of the world’s best-known superheroes for over three quarters of a century. It’s because anyone, with the right impetus, could be him. It’s also because his motivations are easy to identify with. Batman is everyone’s revenge fantasy writ large. At some point in our lives we’ve all wanted to lash out at the world over some injustice or other. He channels that rage for us, and directs it, and also suffers for it, taking injuries but still relentlessly persevering.

The recent trilogy of movies directed by Christopher Nolan play on this aspect beautifully, showing a Batman obsessively fixated on his mission to the detriment of everything else, from his health to his relationships. Nolan shows us the man beneath the Bat cowl, a hero fighting the good fight without powers, just his skill, wits and cunning, embracing the darkness in order to bring light.

In the comics, Batman is less of a loner. He has a “family” of loyal sidekicks and allies, a counterweight to his extensive rogues’ gallery of demented, depraved villains. Some of the latter, especially arch-nemesis the Joker, serve to show the flipside of monomania. Batman is only a few steps short of becoming as unhinged as the psychopaths he battles. His greatest conflict, then, is the constant war he wages to maintain his own sanity. There are hints of this even in the romping 1960s TV show, whose garish silliness and high camp dialogue are the bright surface hiding an under-layer of disorientating surrealism. Episode after episode, it all seems like a psychedelic fever dream, perhaps something Batman himself is experiencing after exposure to some bioterrorist’s mind-bending hypno-gas. To quote Robin himself from the full-length 1966 movie: “Holy hallucination!”

Batman, it seems, can survive anything. He has endured daft comics storylines from the ’50s and ’60s featuring time travel, bizarre physical transformation and the attentions of magic-powered pest Bat-Mite. He has overcome the horrific murder of Jason Todd, the second Robin. He has had his spine broken by Bane and come back fighting. He is indomitable in every sense, an ever-changing, everlasting emblem of the war against crime – and of its costs.

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Detective Comics #27 (May 1939) AKA Playboy billionaire and supermodel catnip Bruce Wayne CREATED BY Bob Kane and Bill Finger SYMBOL Bat logo on chest. Instantly recognisable the world over.

PORTRAYED BY On TV by Adam West (1966-1968); and on the big screen by Michael Keaton (1989-1992); Christian Bale (2005-2010); and Ben Affleck (2016 onwards).

We’ve deliberately left out Val Kilmer and George Clooney. They and Joel Schumacher know why.

BEST MOMENT The confrontation with Superman at the end of Frank Miller’s seminal 1986 graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns.

An exoskeleton-armoured Batman schools the big blue boy scout for letting himself be co-opted as a Reaganite stooge. It looks very much as though a version of that scene will feature in next year’s big-budget spectacular Batman V Superman: Dawn Of Justice.

DID YOU KNOW? Batman famously doesn’t use firearms. Except for the automatic pistol his early comics incarnation toted regularly. And the machine guns on the movie Batmobile and Batpod. And the god-killing bullet he recently shot DC baddie Darkseid with. And… oh, never mind.

The “sad Batman” image that launched a thousand memes.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Carrie Fisher said the only thing she knew about Princess Leia was her favourite colour – white.

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“AREN’T YOU A LITTLE SHORT FOR A STORMTROOPER?”

PRINCESS LEIA

Redefined the role of the damsel in distress

T

here’s no getting away from it, the original Star Wars was primarily made by, for and about boys. What women there were (and there weren’t many) were mostly there for decorative purposes. But a good actor can make the most of any role, however limited it may seem at first, and that was certainly the case with Carrie Fisher, who took a piece of window-dressing like Princess Leia Organa and invested her with real fight. The princess who needed to be rescued turned out to be one of the franchise’s strongest, most capable characters. A princess, a Jedi and – finally – a General.

Various young actresses, including Jodie Foster, Amy Irving and PJ Soles, were rumoured to be in the running, but the part went to Carrie Fisher, daughter of actors Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher. She was frank about the princess’s shortcomings: “Leia is not a real character. She is more of a caricature, and is somewhat onedimensional. It’s not really possible to write out a list of Princess Leia’s likes and dislikes. I do know her favourite colour, though: it’s white. She wears white all the time. But that doesn’t help me much.”

Stories abounded about Fisher both on set (her famous remark that Lucas insisted her breasts be held down with Gaffer tape because, “there’s no breasts bouncing in space, no jiggling in the Empire”) and off (her drug use that landed her in rehab). But all that matters is the confidence and swagger she brought to a role that was originally seen as little more than an accessory hanging off the arm of Luke Skywalker or Han Solo. A whole generation of young boys (and a fair few young girls

too) swooned to Leia, whose assertive behaviour conformed to nobody’s idea of how princesses should behave. Even if her striking hairdo, which suggested that someone had clamped a Danish pastry to each side of her head, was ill-advised.

Whether or not the subsequent development of Leia’s character was a response to Fisher’s spirited performance in Star Wars is open to conjecture, but there certainly seemed more for her to do in The Empire Strikes Back, by common consent the finest of the series. It’s no exaggeration to say that her verbal sparring with Harrison Ford was akin to seeing Hepburn and Tracy in deep space, and her sarcasm came in handy to temper the underlying absurdity of the whole premise.

Return Of The Jedi was a less happy experience, and – much though it pleased some fans – it was hardly edifying to see Fisher trussed up as Jabba the Hutt’s plaything.

For many years Fisher maintained a discreet distance from Leia, honing a career as novelist and Hollywood script doctor. Her razor sharp wit has become legendary in interviews and on chat shows.

She once remarked ruefully of the series’ extensive merchandising: “I don’t own my image. Every time I look in the mirror, I have to send George Lucas a couple of bucks.”

Still, she made a glorious return with The Force Awakens, which saw the now General Organa leading the Resistance against the First Order. Fisher will appear again in the forthcoming Episode VIII: The Last Jedi later this year, following a vocal cameo in Rogue One. Sadly, that was her last role, as Fisher sadly passed away in December 2016.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) FULL NAME Princess Leia Organa PORTRAYED BY Carrie Fisher FURTHER MAJOR APPEARANCES Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi (1983), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Rogue One (2016), Star Wars Episode VIII: The Last Jedi (2017) BEST MOMENT Throttling Jabba the Hutt while wearing nothing but a gold bikini. No one objectifies this princess…

DID YOU KNOW? In character, Carrie Fisher sings the song “Tree Of Life” to the tune of the Star Wars theme at the end of the infamous 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special – a US TV variety show that also features dancing Wookiees

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Our favourite scene in Spider-Man 2 – Spidey saves the runaway train.

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“MY SPIDER-SENSE IS TINGLING!”

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SPIDER-MAN

With great power comes great responsibility. And swinging

S Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Amazing Fantasy #15 (1962) AKA Skinny, bespectacled nerd Peter Parker CREATED BY Stan Lee and Steve Ditko SYMBOL Spider silhouette on webbed background PORTRAYED BY Nicholas Hammond in the late-1970s TV series. In the movies, Tobey Maguire (2002-2007); Andrew Garfield (2012-2013); Tom Holland (2016-) BEST MOMENT Stopping the runaway train in Spider-Man 2 through sheer strength, determination and strands of hightensile webbing. Amazing. Spectacular.

Sensational. Superior.

DID YOU KNOW? In the comics, Spider-Man has in fact been a member of the Avengers and the Fantastic Four. And the X-Men too. So much for “outsider”.

pider-Man is a superhero defined as much by his insecurities as his powers. Thanks to the bite of a spider altered by radioactivity (this was retconned in the movies as genetic modification because, you know, radiation bad), he can stick to walls, swings on webs that he shoots from his wrists, and possesses “the agility and proportionate strength of an arachnid”, not to mention a “Spider-sense” which alerts him to danger.

Beneath the mask, however, he’s an ordinary kid with an ordinary kid’s anxieties and problems. He has trouble with girls. He has money worries. He isn’t some buff billionaire dabbling in the vigilante game.

He’s an honest, well-intentioned everyman who gets beaten up by fate almost as often as by supervillains.

In the classic early comics, Stan Lee’s scripts upped the woe quotient to the maximum. Peter Parker is bullied at school and ostracised by his peers. He is an orphan living with his elderly aunt, who is frail and in failing health, never more than one fainting spell away from a stay in hospital. He is haunted by the death of his beloved Uncle Ben, which he could have prevented had he not, in an atypical fit of arrogance, declined to stop an escaping burglar who would later – oh, the irony – fire a fatal bullet. Meanwhile, his web-slinging alter ego is hounded by the press and the authorities. He receives none of the respect and acclaim accorded to, say, the Avengers or the Fantastic Four, whose lives are glamorous by comparison. The public revile him as “creepy”. He is as much wallflower as wall-crawler, a perpetual outsider. What disaffected, alienated young comics fan could fail to identify with that?

What saves the character and makes him undeniably heroic is his devotion to doing the right thing come what may – that whole “with great power comes great responsibility” mantra, underpinned by guilt and grief over his uncle.

Once he dons the red-and-blue longjohns, Peter gains focus and resolve and can overcome any self-pity or hang-up. This is reflected in the superhero persona he adopts: smart, wacky, confident, wisecracking.

All the same, there are still long dark nights of the soul, most famously the “Spider-Man No More” story arc in Amazing Spider-Man #50 (July 1967), when a perfect storm of letdowns and setbacks leads Peter to quit the whole costumed hero biz, although by the end of the comic he rediscovers his sense of purpose. This narrative arc was borrowed for the Spider-Man 2 movie (2004), director Sam Raimi even framing a shot to mimic John Romita’s unforgettable cover image of the Spidey costume ditched in a dustbin and Peter walking disconsolately away.

Spider-Man may at times be down, then, but he is never out. It is one of the character’s signal traits that he can take a beating, both physically and emotionally, but always springs back. Even something as devastating as the death of a girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, at the hands of arch-nemesis the Green Goblin, may derail him for a while but won’t destroy him. One of the things 2014’s messy, convoluted Amazing Spider-Man 2 got right was its closing scene, when Spidey reappears after a long absence, still mourning Gwen but ready once more to resume his role as defender of New York.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Alien (1979) PORTRAYED BY Sigourney Weaver FURTHER MAJOR APPEARANCES Aliens (1986), Alien3 (1992), Alien: Resurrection (1997) BEST MOMENT Climbing into a bay loader eco suit to confront the alien queen at end of Aliens DID YOU KNOW? Buffy The Vampire Slayer’s Sarah Michelle Gellar once played Ripley – kinda. She provided the voice of an animated action figure version of Ripley for Robot Chicken.

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“GET AWAY FROM HER, YOU BITCH”

8

ELLEN RIPLEY

A xenomorph’s recurring nightmare

“So, you don’t think women can be action heroes?”

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ALL STAR

T

he first thing you should know about Ripley, the indomitable heroine of the Alien series, is that she wasn’t even a she to begin with. The initial draft of Dan O’Bannon’s screenplay, written in 1976 and titled Starbeast, contained the following note beneath the dramatis personae: “The crew is unisex and all parts are interchangeable for men or women.” When the decision was made, apparently by producer Walter Hill, to make Ripley a woman, it was based largely on the idea of wrongfooting the audience, who would have been used to seeing the female characters bite the dust early on in other horror flicks.

“I mean, I think actually the irony is that the producers were trying to do something commercial,” noted Sigourney Weaver, who immortalised Ripley on screen. “That’s how all change happens anyway in our capitalist society. They weren’t trying to be feminists. They thought, ‘No one will ever think that this scrawny girl would end up as the hero, so no one will ever guess the ending of our movie.’ And that’s why they changed it.”

Even after a firm decision was made on Ripley’s gender, the role still wasn’t Weaver’s. Her co-star, the more frail and

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME At some point one of them is going to realise they have the same hairstyle.

waif-like Veronica Cartwright, was initially pencilled in as Ripley, before a wise last-minute switcheroo at the behest of Hill and director Ridley Scott.

The concept of Alien was simple. It was a monster movie, a kind of haunted house in space, in which the crew of the Nostromo were picked off one by one by a marauding, slimy, teeth-gnashing, shiny-domed creature from another world. And without Ripley, Alien might have stayed that way – just another very well-made chiller. With her, however, the film gained an inspiring icon-in-the-making, without whom the likes of Lara Croft would’ve remained a twinkle in some marketing executive’s eye.

Ripley showed that it can be done – a woman can have an interesting and exciting part to play in an action or horror movie without any kind of compromise or pandering. (Give or take doing the final scene in your undies, that is. But let’s be fair – it was hot in there.)

Weaver herself is modest about her achievements, despite earning Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for the first sequel, Aliens.

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someone else,” she has said. But she knows that Ripley was one in a million. “When people start writing a woman action hero, they have to think through the character and the approach to playing her. That’s why the Alien movies worked.

They were thought-through. The material is not good anymore. They think that by putting a woman in an interesting costume, they’ll make up for lack of a compelling character. But they can’t. No action actress can pull that off. No actor can pull it off, either. We’re not charming enough. We need some substance to work with.’’

The miracle of James Cameron’s 1986 follow-up was that it reinvented the concept as a hybrid of horror and action film – a “‘Boo!’ movie” as The New Yorker’s Pauline Kael (not a fan of the film) termed it. Cameron gave Ripley a new crust of scepticism that became one of her most endearing qualities, while Weaver was stronger than ever, refusing to take any crap from whatever crossed her path – human, android or alien. Another ingredient added to Ripley’s mix in Aliens was a hint of the maternal; with an orphan, Newt, to protect from the alien, the battle became more primal than ever – when

A heartwarming tale of a woman and her loveable pet cat.

Ripley faced off against her opponent, it wasn’t just woman versus alien, it was one mother against another (a point emphasised by her most famous line, defending Newt with the cry, “Get away from her, you bitch!”).

“The thing we always differed on was how much she hated the alien,” said Cameron.

“Sigourney had the response, ‘The alien is a creature and I can’t blame it for the death of my crew,’ and my feeling was, ‘You hate that motherf**ker.’ I was the throttle and she was the brakes. She would always pull back from a moment that was pushing it too far – that’s why you get this incredibly modulated performance.

Let’s face it, science fiction films don’t usually get nominations for Best Actress.” But Weaver did – and what’s more, she deserved it.

Alien3 was besieged by difficulties, most of which were due to the obstacles placed in the way of new director David Fincher by the studio, 20th Century Fox, but it was fascinating to watch Ripley’s development in this iconoclastic take.

“Of course, she had that minor love story in Aliens,” said Weaver, “and in Alien3 the first thing David Fincher does is kill that whole story. He

kills the little girl, takes the love interest, Michael Biehn, puts them both in the morgue. Ripley loses everything she had ever looked forward to having a normal life with. And then of course she discovers that she has one inside her. That, to me, is the most existential one.”

“WHEN PEOPLE START WRITING A WOMAN ACTION HERO, THEY HAVE TO THINK THROUGH THE CHARACTER. THAT’S WHY THE ALIEN MOVIES WORKED” And it was Weaver who requested that the iconic character be killed off. “At that point I really wanted to do all these other things,” she said. “It was perfect – I got to go off and do other kinds of work and then come back to almost a new character.”

And in Alien: Resurrection, directed by Delicatessen’s mad lunatic Jean-Pierre Jeunet, Ripley found herself cloned – and more cynical and hard-bitten than ever. This last sequel (penned by Joss Whedon) was by far the least popular, but it’s a brilliant crystallisation of Ripley’s appealing qualities. Despite the carnage around her, she has learned to laugh.

For years after that Weaver was adamant Ripley would never return to the screen – “I doubt it,” she said, “I think Alien Vs Predator did us all in” – but could that all be about to change?

District 9 director Neill Blomkamp is currently in pre-production on Alien 5 which will feature Weaver as Ripley. Allegedly the project went from wishful thinking to reality when Blomkamp, who already had an idea for a new Alien film, worked with Weaver on Chappie and discovered that, contrary to common belief, the actress was still amenable to playing the role again.

A lot can happen to prevent a film making the leap from pre-production to actually being shot, but certainly it looks for the moment as if it might be resurrection number two for a xenomorph’s worst nightmare.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

Someone so big and imposing probably isn’t the best infiltration unit, but when he looks this good…

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“POSSIBLE RESPONSE: YES/NO; OR WHAT?; GO AWAY; PLEASE COME BACK LATER; F**K YOU, ASSHOLE; F**K YOU”

THE TERMINATOR

He’ll be back… again and again and again…

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE The Terminator (1984) AKA The T-800 PORTRAYED BY Arnold Schwarzenegger BEST MOMENT The T-800 sacrifices himself in molten steel at the end of Judgment Day. The last thing we see go under is his hand in a thumbs-up gesture.

DID YOU KNOW? If you think that Bill Paxton’s bluehaired punk in Terminator is killed and not just knocked out in Terminator, then he’s the only actor in film history to have been killed by a Terminator, a Predator and an Alien

ames Cameron stuck to his guns.

“I had many, many people trying to buy that script,” he recalls, “but I wouldn’t sell unless I came with it as the director.” It’s hard to believe now but the sultan of the summer-sized event flick and self-proclaimed “king of the world” made his first real mark with a keen, lean and metal-mean conceptual sci-fi thriller.

It didn’t sink under its ambitions.

It didn’t let its star, a pre-parodic Arnold Schwarzenegger, loose on any quote-sized quips. It lifted from Alien, robot movies, slasher flicks, conspiracy thrillers and film noir, yet emerged as a brash, bolshy beast of its own. And, post-Alien and pre-Aliens, it helped engineer a switch for female actors from career-girl types to action-geared leads (Hamilton’s arc is surprisingly full and persuasive). The Terminator was small and cheap, but it was deadly effective.

Even now, Cameron’s grab-’em-fast script looks like a test-case in efficiency.

Two visitors from a machine-dominated future arrive in LA. One is a cyborg out

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “How embarrassing.

I’m naked.”

Nah, that jawline could never be human.

to terminate Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton), whose as-yet-unconceived son will grow up to become the leader of the human resistance; the other is a resistance foot soldier (Michael Biehn), sent back from 2029 to save Sarah’s life.

If you think Arnold Schwarzenegger was a shoe-in for that robot role, think again. “Initially, I didn’t really want Arnold to play the part. I’ll never forget telling my roommate, ‘I’ve got to go and have lunch with Conan and pick a fight with him.’ That was my agenda: to get in an argument with him and come back and say he was an asshole,” admits Cameron. “Casting him shouldn’t have worked. The guy is supposed to be an infiltration unit and there’s no way you wouldn’t spot a Terminator in a crowd if it looked like Arnold. But that’s the beauty of movies. If there’s a visceral, cinematic thing happening that the audience likes, they don’t care if it goes against what’s likely.”

In the end Arnie was “so charming and so into the script” that Cameron gave him the role, “even though he made me smoke a cigar that made me sick for six hours”.

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the Austrian Oak. The Terminator plays smartly to Arnie’s limited range, giving him the forward momentum of Halloween’s Michael Myers and the pure purpose of Ridley Scott’s alien (“It can’t be bargained with, it can’t be reasoned with.”)

Having pulled off a blinder with Aliens against everyone’s advice, a sequel to The Terminator held no fears for Cameron. “The

“IF THERE’S A VISCERAL, CINEMATIC THING HAPPENING THAT THE AUDIENCE LIKES, THEY DON’T CARE IF IT GOES AGAINST WHAT’S LIKELY” last 25 pages were written non-stop – we’d been up for 36 hours – and we shot the film in less than 13 months,” he says. As with the first film, he blended ground-breaking SFX (“I wanted the effect of the T-1000 to look like a spoon going

into hot fudge”) with a script that played on Arnie’s iconic standing. “The first time I saw the film with an audience, the moment Arnold walks down the steps of the bar got the biggest reaction. I thought, ‘Why are they reacting so strongly? Because they got it. He’s back. Now we can do anything,’” says Cameron.

Jonathan Mostow’s third film in the series, Rise Of The Machines, may have taken this a little too much to heart. The similarities to Judgment Day might offer a strong comfort factor for the audience but they also make for a formulaic threequel.

Despite a lukewarm reception for the fourth film (and Christian Bale’s infamous on-set freak-out), the Terminator franchise absolutely will not stop until it is dead. The fifth film was released in 2016. Terminator: Genisys was the first of a planned trilogy, but a poor box office performance – not to mention a disasterous critical response – put paid to that idea. Still, just as we were going to press it was announced that James Cameron has regained the rights to his franchise and is planning a new film with Deadpool director Tim Miller at the helm. Maybe, just maybe they’ll get it right this time...

Is there a more ’80s image?

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“INTUITION, HOWEVER ILLOGICAL, MR SPOCK, IS RECOGNISED AS A COMMAND PREROGATIVE.”

He’s from Iowa… he only works in outer space

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rom the dramatic, opening-credits voiceover that so memorably and perfectly etched itself into our popular culture, to his penchant for ripping his shirt during a battle... From the gentle, cheerful goading of his Vulcan Science Officer to the fact he’d outwit a diabolical computer without batting an eyelid... From his way with the ladies (especially the green ones) to the cheeky method he used to succeed at the Kobayashi Maru Starfleet exam... From that twinkle in his hazel eyes to that clenched jaw when he heard Khan’s voice on the intercom and yelled, “KHAAAAAAAAAN!” From William Shatner to Chris Pine (surely the Shat reborn in younger, perkier form), this yellow-shirted Enterprise-lover is justifiably one of the most recognisable characters in popular culture history.

When you go back to the very, very beginning, back when Shatner replaced the stolid Jeffrey Hunter after the first Star Trek pilot and turned Captain Pike into Captain Kirk, it’s as though you can already see the future. As Kirk struggles to cope when two of his crew develop superpowers in “Where No Man Has Gone Before”, it’s all there on screen: the warm heart, the quirky smile, the bravado, the swagger... there’s even a ripped shirt before the end credits roll. The series went on and Kirk’s legend grew bigger – teaching androids how to kiss, taunting alien bullies, endless bouts of fisticuffs, that friendship with Spock and McCoy. By the time Star Trek was cancelled,

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Captain James T Kirk was a household name and William Shatner’s life would never be the same – a fate he may have struggled with at first, but seems to have accepted with good grace as the years passed.

Then came the movies. They were a mixed bag – that “even number good, odd number bad” theory does hold some water – but, while Shatner understandably aged, Kirk remained true to form and as cocky as ever. Who else in the Trek universe could have held up a hand and asked so cockily: “What does God need with a starship?”

And then... Kirk died. But the less we say about that, the better.

In our age of reboots and remakes, the fact he was resurrected as a newer, fresher model wasn’t really much of a surprise. The fact that Chris Pine did such a masterful job, however, was a surprise.

Bouncing on his heels with youthful enthusiasm, he brings exactly the same energy and cocksure joy to his Kirk as the one we first met 50 years ago; so much so, in fact, that at times you almost want him to calm down, because people just aren’t so melodramatic today. There are moments when his performance is so uncannily Shatner-like that it makes your hair stand on end, but he’s not a parody: he’s a whole new iteration. Two films in and with a third on the horizon, Pine’s Kirk is shaping up to be an icon of an icon. There’s nothing we can do except salute them both.

Master of the Paddington Bear stare. And snogging.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Sure it’s a good look, but revolving doors must be a nightmare.

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“I’M HERE TO FIGHT FOR TRUTH, JUSTICE AND THE AMERICAN WAY”

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Action Comics #1 (June 1938) AKA Mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent.

Also goes by his Kryptonian name, Kal-El. CREATED BY Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster SYMBOL Big red S on a yellow triangle.

Unmistakable. Inimitable.

PORTRAYED BY On the small screen, George Reeves in Adventures Of Superman (1952-1958); Dean Cain in Lois & Clark: The New Adventures Of Superman (1993-1997); and Tom Welling in Smallville (20012011). On the big screen, Christopher Reeve (1978-1987); Brandon Routh (2006); Henry Cavill (2013 onwards).

BEST MOMENT In the otherwise bungled Superman Returns, one scene stands out.

Superman saves a stricken airliner, bringing it safely to the ground in the middle of a baseball stadium. Expertly directed, it tells you everything you need to know about Superman – his power, his solicitude, his willingness to sacrifice himself – in four nail-biting, exhilarating minutes.

DID YOU KNOW? Kryptonite, the one substance that can render Superman vulnerable, was invented for the 1940s radio serial.

It was introduced into the comics continuity a few years later, and has appeared in various differentcoloured versions, each of which has a specific individual effect on the Man of Steel. One, pink kryptonite, can even make him temporarily gay.

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SUPERMAN

Intergalactic asylum seeker becomes world saviour

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veryone knows the backstory. Rocketed to Earth from the doomed planet Krypton, an infant grows up to discover he has a whole raft of super powers: strength, speed, flight, invulnerability, X-ray vision, heat vision, freeze breath and, best of all, the ability to make a pair of spectacles an impenetrable disguise.

But there’s a whole lot more to Superman than just a suite of godlike gifts. Over the decades this alien has come to represent the human ideal, the best of us. He is compassionate. He is benevolent.

He never fails to carry out his responsibilities. Like an American police officer, his sworn duty is to serve and protect. He does this unselfishly and unstintingly. He knows he is better than all of us but does not look down on us or dismiss us. Rather, he sets an example for us to follow, inspiring us to better ourselves.

This has never been quite so effectively or touchingly portrayed as in the comics miniseries All-Star Superman by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely, in which Superman, discovering he has just one year left to live, attempts to help as many people as possible in order to leave a lasting legacy for humankind. Every page exudes nobility and grace.

Christopher Reeve brought just that same nobility and grace to his big-screen performance as the last son of Krypton, which is one reason why it’s so memorable. Reeve not only looked the part but carried himself with dignity throughout the movie

series, even in the muddled, well-meaning farrago that was Superman IV. Such was his skill as an actor that he made the Clark Kent alter ego convincingly different and credible. Watch the scene in Superman II where he reveals his true identity to Lois Lane in the honeymoon suite at the Niagara Falls hotel. The transition from stooped, bumbling Clark to upright, confident Superman involves more than just taking off the specs. It’s a complete change of posture, body language and tone of voice. It’s quite magical.

Many have seen Superman as an allegory of Jesus Christ. Like Jesus, he is an only son sent down to Earth by his father with an instruction to fight for truth and justice, help the less fortunate, and shine as a beacon of hope. Superman’s co-creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish kids from Cleveland, Ohio, did indeed look to the Bible for inspiration, but the figures they drew on the most deeply were from the Old Testament: Samson and Moses. Both Richard Donner’s 1978 movie and Bryan Singer’s Superman Returns (2006), however, explored the messianic elements of the character, while Zack Snyder is on record as saying that he embraced “the Christ-like parallels” in his Man Of Steel (2013). “That stuff is there, in the mythology,” he told CNN. “That is the tried-and-true Superman metaphor.”

Latter-day Jesus or not, the wonder of Superman is that he doesn’t just make you believe a man can fly. He makes you believe anyone can fly.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME Remember him this way, not as the annoying teenager it turned out he used to be.

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“I FIND YOUR LACK OF FAITH DISTURBING”

DARTH VADER The man in black

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arth is a contraction of DARk Lord of the SiTH. And Vader is a variation of father. So it’s basically Dark Father.” Gee, thanks George. Of course, if you watched The Exorcist subtitled in Flemish (didn’t we all?) you saw Father Merrin referred to as “Vader” and any usage of the word dark subtitled “darth”. So it was obvious really.

All of this is redundant, however, because before the “I am your father!” revelation in Empire, and before the CGI prequels, the Dark Lord of the Sith was loved simply for being bad-ass cool.

He made a huge impression when he first stomped onto screen to John Williams’ pounding score, black cape swooshing, sinister mask hissing and surrounded by white-suited stormtroopers. To top it off, next time you see him he’s throttling a man, holding him off the floor as James Earl Jones’ smooth baritone voice booms out and… well, a generation of kids had found their ultimate baddie.

Sod the Oedipal undertones, George Lucas had created a frightening, iconic villain. Everything else – the chopping off of his own son’s hand, encasing series heartthrob Han Solo in a wicked carbonfreeze coffin, even finding redemption by throwing his gnarly boss the Emperor down a massive shaft thus saving Luke, the Rebellion and intergalactic peace – is just icing on a black-plastic cake. We’ll ignore the fact that when Luke finally removed his Japanese-Samurai-inspired head gear he was a wizened old prune (Sebastian Shaw) and that he turned out to be a whingeing young sprog in The Phantom Menace, then a whingeing teen in Attack Of The Clones, and focus on the dark Jedi who cut Alec Guinness down a peg or two. We’ll even forgive the Frankenstein’s monster birth in Revenge Of The Sith because his Tie Fighter attack makes the final battle in A New Hope something to treasure.

The top movie villain in this list, Vader gained his trademark outfit when conceptual artist Ralph McQuarrie painted him in a space suit used to traverse open space between his Star Destroyer and the blockade runner – hence the breathing mask.

Lucas saw something potent in the image and rewrote the character as a cyborg, a disgraced Jedi

encased in metal and robot parts. Lucasfilm’s sound guru Ben Burtt then sampled himself breathing on a scuba regulator to supply his distinctive rasp, while towering Bristolian actor David Prowse chose to play Vader over hairy sidekick Chewbacca because he thought the part was more memorable.

Prowse was proven right but he was gutted to discover that his Bristol twang would be dubbed out, initially by Orson Welles before Lucas decided his lustrous vocals were too well-known. Instead, Lucas offered the job to James Earl Jones, who brought a deep, soulful intonation to Vader’s dialogue.

Prowse was to face one more indignity when Lucas, paranoid about his mega-twist leaking out, gave the actor a fake line at the climax of Empire – “Obi-Wan killed your father!” – with Prowse discovering the truth with the rest of the world’s moviegoers: in a cinema.

Furthermore, he wasn’t the only guy in the suit: stuntman Bob Anderson stood in during the lightsaber battles. It’s only when Vader is stood talking or doing his trademark finger point-and-wag that it’s Prowse under the famous helmet.

By Return Of The Jedi, the Luke/Vader tussle was the centre of the saga, and while the ILMmanufactured space battle raged around them, the real drama was whether Vader would kill his son, if Luke would succumb to the Dark Side or if son would be proved right and we’d find the “good in him”. As Luke screamed within the searing crackle of the Emperor’s Force lightning, Vader looked on, hand symbolically severed by his son’s lightsaber, beginning to have doubts. For kids of the ’80s, the few tense moments when Vader looked from his suffering offspring to the Emperor and back were nerve-wracking. When the fallen Jedi finally hurled his master to his doom, movie theatres exploded in ecstasy and the seeds of a new trilogy were planted.

When Revenge Of The Sith debuted 28 years after Star Wars, Lucas promised, “I was telling a story about a nice kid who becomes a Jedi and later falls into the abyss. We’re going to watch him make a pact with the devil.” Back in ’77, Vader himself was the devil and was all the better for it.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) AKA Anakin Skywalker PORTRAYED BY James Earl Jones (voice) in Star Wars Episodes III-VI, Rebels and Rogue One; David Prowse (body) in Star Wars Episodes IV-VI; Sebastian Shaw (as the man under the mask) in Star Wars Episode VI; Gene Bryant (body) in Episode III; Spencer Wilding and Daniel Naprous in Rogue One BEST MOMENT Rogue One’s final scene was great, but the lightsaber smackdown with Luke in The Empire Strikes Back remains definitive. It culminates in the series’ defining revelation – and sparked collective gasps across a generation DID YOU KNOW? James Earl Jones’ wasn’t officially credited as the voice of Darth Vader until Return Of The Jedi

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Doctor Who (1963) AKA Ask Clara, she seems to know PORTRAYED BY See the next four pages BEST MOMENT Every time he regenerates KNOWN TO SAY “Oh my giddy aunt”, “Reverse the polarity of the neutron flow”, “Fantastic”, “Geronimo”, “I don’t want to go” DID YOU KNOW? Hugh Grant, David Walliams, Bill Nighy and Ron Moody were all offered the role of the “official” Doctor on TV but turned it down

THE DOCTOR

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The faces as well as the times keep a-changing

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he Doctor is a British institution as well as an icon. But what a weird and gloriously quirky icon – as befits a show about a man who travels through time and space in a 1960s police telephone box.

So, what exactly is strange about the Doctor being an icon?As a Time Lord he’s changed not just his face but his whole personality multiple times since we first encountered him as a grumpy old git in Victorian clothes hanging round a junk yard in 1963. While there are many characters in this list who have been played by various actors, the Doctor is the only one who changes totally each time. What’s iconic about one Doctor – a scarf and jelly babies – is not iconic for subsequent Doctors. While an actor

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playing, say, Captain Kirk has to tick certain boxes, an actor playing the Doctor need only tick “Generally Heroic”. Hell, he can even be a she.

So, bizarrely, you have a character who becomes a series of consecutive icons. So much so that there’s always fans who’d complain that each incarnation should have a separate entry in a list like this. Possibly… but then Colin Baker might get hurt when he’s not included.

So, how many people haved played the Doctor? That’s a little bit like asking “How long is a piece of string theory?” The show’s 52 years old now, so we’ve found one for each of those years – though we’re stretching the definition of what constitutes “the Doctor” in places. Splendid chaps, all of them, as the Brigadier used to say…

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THE OFFICIAL TV DOCTORS

ALTERNATE TV DOCTORS

1 William Hartnell 2 Patrick Troughton 3 Jon Pertwee 4 Tom Baker 5 Peter Davison 6 Colin Baker 7 Sylvester McCoy 8 Paul McGann 9 Christopher Eccleston 10 David Tennant 11 Matt Smith 12 Peter Capaldi

13 John Hurt as the War Doctor (a kind of 8b between McGann and Eccleston) as seen in the 50th anniversary special “The Day Of The Doctor” 14 Michael Jayston as the Valeyard, the villain of “The Trial Of A Time Lord” during Colin Baker’s era who, it was revealed, was “an amalgamation of the Doctor’s darker sides from between his twelfth and final incarnations” 15 Geoffrey Hughes as Mr Popplewick – a disguise used by the Valeyard 16 Toby Jones as The Dream Lord – the eleventh Doctor’s dream manifestation of himself 17 Catherine Tate as “Doctor-Donna” – thanks to that pesky regeneration energy

Let’s get the obvious ones out of the way first…

18 Daniel Anthony as Clyde in The Sarah Jane Adventures who channels the Eleventh Doctor in the episode “Death Of The Doctor” 19 Richard Hurndall standing in for William Hartnell as the first Doctor in “The Five Doctors” 20 David Bradley as William Hartnell as the Doctor in An Adventure In Space And Time 21 Reece Shearsmith as Patrick Troughton as the Doctor in An Adventure In Space And Time (Mark Gatiss, who wrote An Adventure In Space And Time also filmed some scenes as Jon Pertwee, but they ended up on the cutting room floor – Gatiss does eventually get his own entry here though if you want to leap forward to number 44) 22 Adrian Gibbs as the Watcher, a kind of future echo of the fifth Doctor, who appeared in the final story of the fourth Doctor’s era, “Logopolis” THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME | 131

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THE BRAIN OF MORBIUS SUB-ROUTINE

faces were supposed to be the Doctor’s. So there.

But who were they? All members of the crew who had raided the costume cupboard, it turns out.

Although it is generally accepted that William Hartnell was the first Doctor (it’s been stated in-canon on a number of occasions) the show did contradict itself in the fourth Doctor adventure “The Brain Of Morbius”, wherein the Doctor became embroiled in a mental battle with the titular Morbius, another Time Lord (though in a Frankenstein body at the time). This battle shows images of the Doctor regressing through his past incarnations, with several faces shown after William Hartnell’s. Retconning can explain this away as Morbius’s previous incarnations rather than the Doctor’s but that doesn’t quite square with how the battle unfolds on screen. And besides, the production team at the time stated that the 132 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

23 Philip Hinchcliffe – producer, early Tom Baker episodes (when the show was going through its gothic horror period) 24 Robert Banks Stewart – writer, various episodes 25 George Gallaccio – production unit manager 26 Christopher Barry – the director of “The Brain Of Morbius” 27 Christopher Baker – production assistant on the following story, “The Seeds Of Doom” 28 Robert Holmes – the script editor at the time and one of the most prolific (and well-regarded) writers on classic Doctor Who 29 Graeme Harper – production assistant and a later director on the classic and new show 30 Douglas Camfield – director of many episodes of classic Doctor Who

THE DOCTOR IN OTHER MEDIA 31 Peter Cushing as the Doctor in the ’60s Dalek films 32 Richard E Grant as the Doctor in the 2003 web animation “Scream Of The Shalka” (he also played the Doctor in “The Curse Of Fatal Death” – see later – and has played an arch villain in the main show) 33 Trevor Martin as the Doctor in the 1974 stage show Seven Keys To Doomsday 34 David Banks as the Doctor in the 1989 pantomime Doctor Who: The Ultimate Adventure (he was understudy for Jon Pertwee, standing in when Pertwee fell ill for two performances) 35 Michael Sagar as the Doctor in the 1984 New Zealand version of Seven Keys To Doomsday 36 Arabella Weir as an alternate Doctor in the 2003 Big Finish audio production Exile 37 David Warner as an alternative Doctor in the

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Big Finish audio productions Sympathy For The Devil (2003) and Masters Of War (2008) 38 David Collings as an alternative Doctor in the Big Finish audio production Full Fathom Five (2003) 39 Ian Brooker who has one line as the Doctor (making him the shortest-lived Doctor with a speaking role on this list) as an alternative Doctor in the Big Finish audio Full Fathom Five (2003)

COMEDY DOCTORS We’re not allowing any old comedian who did a sketch called “Doctor Poo” in here, only sketches and episodes that were clearly riffing off the show’s continuity or have Doctor Who creator credentials.

40 Rowan Atkinson as the Doctor in the 1999 twopart Comic Relief special, “The Curse Of Fatal Death” which was written by Steven Moffat. He regenerated

into Richard E Grant (we’ve already mentioned him at number 32) who then regenerated into…

41 Jim Broadbent, who then regenerated into…

42 Hugh Grant, who then regenerated into…

43 Joanna Lumley 44 Mark Gatiss as the Doctor in The Web Of Caves shown as part of Doctor Who Night in 1999 45 Stephen Mansfield as Doctor True in The Corridor Sketch, a 1991 famous-fan-packed humorous look at the making of Doctor Who’s pilot episode (it’s a bit like Dead Ringers doing An Adventure In Space And Time)

DOCTOR DOUBLES 46 Brian Proudfoot, the First Doctor’s double in “The Reign Of Terror” 47 Edmund Warwick, who not only played the first Doctor’s robot double in “The Chase” but who

also doubled for William Hartnell again in “The Dalek Invasion Of Earth” 48 Albert Ward as the First Doctor’s hands in “The Celestial Toymaker” (when Hartnell went on holiday, the writers made him invisible and silent for a couple of episodes – well, invisible apart from his hands, that is). Look, we told you we’d be getting desperate by this point…

49 Chris Jeffries, who doubled (embarrassingly obviously at times) for Patrick Troughton in all the location footage for “The Dominators” 50 Terry Walsh, a stunt double for Jon Pertwee and Tom Baker on many, many occasions 51 Paul Heasman, a stunt double for seventh Doctor Sylvester McCoy in “Silver Nemesis” Phew, nearly there now…

And finally…

52 Whoever was standing in for the second Doctor in the Sky Ray ice lolly adverts.

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Captain Spock in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

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“LIVE LONG AND PROSPER.”

SPOCK

His appearance at number two is only logical

T

ry to imagine seeing Mr Spock for the very first time in the ’60s. You’ve been brought up on a diet of schlocky B-movies and cheesy sci-fi serials in which aliens are rarely treated with anything less than contempt. You’re expected to laugh at them. Then one evening you sit down to watch a new sci-fi show named Star Trek. There’s some guy with silly eyebrows and pointy ears and he’s clearly an alien, but… you don’t laugh.

For a start, Mr Spock doesn’t want you to laugh at him. He’s deadly serious. So serious, in fact, that he never, ever smiles. It’s important to his culture that he never shows emotion, and this has the side effect of making him seem powerful and controlled. If you laughed at him, he’d simply raise an eyebrow, making you feel awkward and embarrassed. Even more importantly, none of his colleagues laugh at him, either: he’s clearly an intelligent, important member of a starship crew who – while they occasionally, and good-naturedly, mention the fact he doesn’t look like them – respect him for what he is.

And then, when you look beyond those eyebrows and those ears, you notice that the actor playing him (some chap named Leonard) is fully immersed in Spock’s persona. He’s not doing it to pay the bills, oh no: he’s determined to give this alien Science Officer a gravitas and a dignity that even the writers of the show probably weren’t expecting. He’s Spock to the core – you wonder how long it takes him to laugh and joke again once he’s removed those rubber eartips at the end of filming. This is very important, because if the actor believes that Spock

2

is real, then so do you. When Spock says something, you believe him.

Spock isn’t like any character you’ve seen on TV. He remains that way for many, many years, too – long after Star Trek is cancelled in 1969, you watch the actor on shows such as Mission: Impossible and all you can see is the Vulcan. You hear rumours that the actor’s probably not very happy about this fact; who would be? But as more years pass and the crew of the Enterprise hit the big screen, you sense that he’s okay with it now. And hey, there’s Spock in your local cinema, his face a little more lined and his voice a tad more gravelly, but he’s still played just as straight as ever. You cry when he dies in Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan, and are delighted when he’s brought back in the following film. You watch him age and you see him pop up in other Star Trek shows. He’s always Spock.

And then one day you see him at the cinema with another Spock: a younger one who’s actually rather good, even if he’ll never be the old Spock you know and love. The original actor seems to like him, passing him the baton in not one but two new movies... and somehow, when the end credits roll on Star Trek Into Darkness, you feel in your heart that you’ll never see your lovely old Spock ever again.

Sadly, you’re right. On 27 February 2015, Leonard Nimoy left us, and while Zachary Quinto channels so much of his dignity, his presence and his elegance on screen, Spock will never be the same.

But we still have that little show from the ’60s to remember him by, at least. And we’ll never stop taking that pointy-eared Vulcan seriously.

He was, after all, our friend.

Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Trek, “The Cage” (1964) PORTRAYED BY Leonard Nimoy (1964-2013), Zachary Quinto (2009-) BEST MOMENT Any time he raised a single eyebrow at something said by his Captain.

DID YOU KNOW? Leonard Nimoy was the first cast member to direct a Star Trek film (Star Trek III: The Search For Spock).

William Shatner and Jonathan Frakes would go on to do the same.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME “Fascinating”

It’s smiles all round – almost – on the Enterprise bridge

A LIFE LONG & PROSPEROUS In 2010 the legend that was Leonard Nimoy spoke to SFX about his life as Spock.

At the time he was sure he would never play him again… but Spock would return.

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ctor. Director. Photographer. Poet. The legendary Leonard Nimoy can even add singer (he’s covered “Proud Mary”and sung about Hobbits… really) to his already illustrious list of talents. And yet the majority of the world will always see him as a pointy-eared alien with hyper-expressive eyebrows and the deadest of deadpans.

That doesn’t bother Nimoy one bit. The Boston native has directed half a dozen films (including Three Men And A Baby, Star Trek III and IV) and acted in more than a hundred television, film or theatre projects. But he knows the Vulcan will outlive them all.

“Mr Spock has been a blessing to me because I find it a very dignified and a positive character and a great role model for a lot of people,” Nimoy says with sincere pride. “I am one very, very grateful guy. Ever since Star Trek was put on the air in 1966, I have never even had to concern myself with whether or not I would work again.

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There was always work available to me. So, it’s all about gratitude for me these days.”

And while many of his acting peers might have grown bitter about their life-long genre association or the pigeon-holing that comes with being branded by a single character, Nimoy says that he’s never felt restricted by any aspect of his career.

“I set out to be an actor when I was 17 or 18 years old,” he remembers. “I left Boston, travelled to California to try to build a career.

My very first efforts were very humble. My first science fiction work was in a series of short films called Zombies Of The Stratosphere in which three of us came from Mars, landed on Earth and stole a pick-up truck and a couple of revolvers. We announced we were going to take over Earth and knock it out of its orbit because Mars has an orbit of lesser equality. We wanted the orbit that Earth has. It was a very simplistic, fantastic notion. It was very primitive

and very crude but I was eager to do the work and happy to get it. Since then it’s been exciting to me to work on sound stages and on locations all around the world. I’ve worked with some great, great talents. I worked with a number of Academy Award winners, with wonderful, talented people.”

In recent years one particularly persuasive and talented guy named JJ Abrams has been responsible for the “retired” Nimoy getting back to the big and small screen. “Yes, I had a wonderful time working on the new Star Trek movie with JJ Abrams. When it was done, he asked me to look into the possibility of playing William Bell on Fringe. I was frankly not terribly aware of what the show was all about. I began looking at some episodes that William Bell, the character, had been talked about rather frequently, but had never been seen.”

In the end, Nimoy admits he ultimately said yes to Fringe because “I felt that I owed JJ a

The older, greyer Spock in the 2009 Star Trek reboot

favour. He did a great job on the Star Trek movie and treated me extremely well. I’m very glad that I did Fringe because it was an exciting project.”

Over two seasons, Nimoy appeared seven times as Bell, the brilliant but ethically challenged founder of the Massive Dynamic corporation.

As he was the former research partner of John Noble’s Walter Bishop, the two men were keepers of each other’s dirty little secrets which made for some juicy confrontations.

“I had some wonderful scenes to play with John Noble who I think is a wonderful actor,” Nimoy enthuses about his screen partner. “I admire him. I call him ‘Noble John’,” he chuckles.

And Nimoy admits he became a real fan of the hybrid sci-fi series once he got immersed in the mythology. “SF has become much more sophisticated and complicated than the SF that I worked in many, many years ago. The writers are doing fascinating work. The production values are much more sophisticated than what we used to be able to do because of the advancement in the technology. And Fringe is extremely well produced. The stories are unusually complex, but fascinating for an audience.”

His end as Bell in the second season finale also marked Nimoy’s second retirement from acting – an exit he plans to stick to this time. “It wasn’t anything about the Fringe job or the character of

William Bell that made me decide I didn’t want to do this any more,” he clarifies. “It’s a coincidence.

I’ve been at this for 60 years. My first professional work in film was in 1950. Sixty years, I think, is long enough.

“I had decided not to do any more acting and directing several years ago. I was called back to work to do the Star Trek movie, which was very attractive. I thought it was going to be a wonderful film. I read the script and a great handling of

“THE FANS HAVE BEEN WONDERFUL. PEOPLE OFTEN SAY TO ME THAT MR SPOCK WAS A VERY POSITIVE INFLUENCE IN THEIR LIVES” Leonard Nimoy the Spock character and an introduction of a wonderful new actor [Zachary Quinto] to play Spock. He’s ready to do wonderful work, which I think he will.”

And he’ll do it alone next time as Nimoy clarifies that he’s handed over the character to him with a happy heart. “I think I can be

definitive about the fact that I will not be in it. I have said that I think it’s time for me to get off the stage and make some room for Zachary Quinto.

“It’s not hard to say goodbye,” he says. “I’m very grateful for all the great opportunities that I’ve had and all the people that I’ve met, the people I’ve worked with. And the fans have been wonderful to me. People very often say to me that Star Trek and Mr Spock was a very positive influence in their lives. Many, many people have told me that they’ve gone into the sciences because of Star Trek and Mr Spock and made a career in science. We certainly do need great scientists in this country and this world today.

It’s a very heartwarming experience to be in my position to know that, day after day, I have these great fan comments.”

Three years later Nimoy did come out of retirement again, and it was Spock who was responsible of course. Who else? In the event, he didn’t take much convincing, telling StarTrek.com, “[JJ Abrams] just said, ‘Would you come in for a couple of days and do me a favour?’” adding, “I think he’s done a great thing for Star Trek. I’m very grateful to him. We all owe him a lot. When someone comes along like he has done and picks it up and elevates it, we should be grateful. So when JJ calls me, I take the call.”

It was, after all, the only logical thing to do.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

“HOKEY RELIGIONS AND ANCIENT WEAPONS ARE NO MATCH FOR A GOOD BLASTER AT YOUR SIDE, KID.”

HAN SOLO It’s fitting that Solo is the Number One

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tough James Dean-style star pilot, a cowboy in a star ship: simple, sentimental and cocksure,” was how the original draft of George Lucas’s script for Star Wars described Han Solo. As a smuggler who flies the “fastest ship in the galaxy” – the rust bucket Millennium Falcon – Solo’s a futuristic version of the western’s archetypal gunfighter, with his low-slung blaster pistol replacing the good ol’ six-shooter.

Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) may be the fresh-faced hero of the first three Star Wars movies but Han Solo is their beating heart. In a world of droids and “lobsters in flight suits”, he’s also one of the few characters audiences can connect with. Not even the series’ Jedi mysticism is safe from his crowd-pleasing sarcasm: “Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid.”

And when he joins the Rebels in their fight against the Empire, you can’t help thinking that if he hadn’t fallen for Princess Leia, he’d be off in some godforsaken cantina having a lot more fun. He’s the guy who always flies solo, even with faithful Wookiee Chewbacca by his side.

“You get a sense of a whole lot of back story with him,” says

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Biodata FIRST APPEARANCE Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope (1977) PORTRAYED BY Harrison Ford, Alden Ehrenreich FURTHER MAJOR APPEARANCES Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Star Wars Episode VI: Return Of The Jedi (1983), Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015) BEST MOMENT Kissing Princess Leia before being deep frozen in carbonite for Boba Fett.

DID YOU KNOW? There were plans to have a 10-year-old Han appear in Revenge Of The Sith. He would have been seen living with the wookies on Kashyyyk.

Han Solo: icon

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

George Lucas of Harrison Ford, who brought Han Solo to screen life. “Part of it is just his physical ruggedness but part of it is also the sly intelligence he keeps projecting.”

Despite casting him in the 1973 coming-ofage movie American Graffiti, Lucas didn’t want Ford for the role. It took friend-in-common Fred Roos to set them up, hiring Ford (then working as a carpenter) to build a new door in the office block where Lucas was running auditions for Star Wars. Ford was mortified, Lucas was sniffy.

But after considering Christopher Walken for the part, Lucas realised the real Solo was hammering nails downstairs.

On screen, Harrison Ford was Han Solo.

Everything about the character comes from the actor, not the script. The cocksure gait is all Ford’s and lines like, “Look, Your Worshipfulness, let’s get one thing straight.

I take orders from just one person: me,” crackle to life with his lightly ironic touch.

It’s no surprise some of Solo’s finest moments are improvs: his exasperated blasting of the communicator in the Death Star (“Boring conversation anyway”); his dampening of Luke’s enthusiasm with the ad-lib, “That’s great kid, don’t get cocky!” He’s always one step ahead of the script, his co-stars and his director.

That’s because Ford never believed in Star Wars and its sequels any more than Solo believed in the rebels’ cause. His famous quip to Lucas – “You can type this shit, but you sure can’t say 140 | THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

it” – is proof he never really bought into the Star Wars universe. That detached cynicism also gave a snippy energy to Solo’s love/hate relationship with Leia.

HIM: “You can’t let a gorgeous guy like me out of your sight.”

HER: “I don’t know where you get your delusions from, laser-brain.”

It kept their relationship fresh through three films, particularly The Empire Strikes Back, where Solo’s no longer a mercenary but still a scoundrel. When he’s betrayed by buddy Lando

IT’S NO SURPRISE SOME OF SOLO’S FINEST MOMENTS ARE IMPROVS – HE’S ONE STEP AHEAD OF THE SCRIPT AND HIS DIRECTOR Calrissian (Billy Dee Williams) and dropped into the deep freeze at the end of Empire, the trilogy got a much-needed cliffhanger.

It also generated the trilogy’s most touching moment: “I love you,” whispers Leia as Han sinks into the carbonite. “I know,” replies Solo, cocky to the last. The line was Ford’s. He had to battle the director, producers and his co-stars to change the line from the script’s deathless

retort “I love you too”.

As the trilogy continued, Harrison Ford was transformed from little-known actor to international superstar. With the profits from Star Wars and Empire rolling in he was also a very rich man. Realising how vital Solo was to the story, he tried his best to give his character a decent arc, lobbying Lucas for something dramatic to happen in Return Of The Jedi.

“Dramatic” was a euphemism for death. “He’s got no story,” the star moaned to Lucas. “Let’s kill him and give some weight to this thing.”

Yet Lucas baulked at making Jedi too dark and Solo lived. Despite a promotion to General, he had much less to do in the final chapter, where he was rescued from Jabba’s palace, chucked out of his own spaceship by Lando and surrounded by Ewoks on Endor. For Lucas it was part of Solo’s redemption, the outlaw finally dragged into the fold to fight for the common good. In exchange, Solo finally got the girl.

More than three decades later Ford got his wish for a fitting end. In The Force Awakens, we met an older and wiser Solo. A man who had lost his son Ben to the Dark Side and broken up with Leia. The two were reunited, of course, but just once before Han was murdered by Ben, now going as Kylo Ren. And yet, it’s not a tragic end.

Han Solo, the scoundrel who only cared about money dies not for wealth, but for love. And we’d bet a Corellian freighter that Solo’s final sacrifice will weigh heavy on his son...

Solo encased in carbonite. No escape from there, surely?

Never trust a man who smiles, Han!

Awww!

The Imperfect Shot Want proof of how highly regarded Han Solo is by Star Wars fans? Check out the furore over “Who Shot First: Han or Greedo?”

Then in the majorly re-tinkered-with 2004 version, Han and Greedo shoot simultaneously but Han somehow miraculously dodges the baddie’s laser blast.

In the original Star Wars we’re under no illusions that Solo’s a cowboy. His second scene involves a barroom gunfight in the Mos Eisley Cantina with reptilian bounty hunter Greedo, hired by Jabba the Hutt to bring him in dead or alive.

The Who Shot First? question became the Dealey Plaza of the Star Wars universe and a dozen half-baked conspiracy theories were batted about online: Darth Vader made Greedo miss so he could capture Luke; Greedo missed on purpose for some reason; Ben Kenobi used some Jedi magic. The bottom line? The fans were outraged, with those at the extreme (and tasteless) end claiming, “George Lucas raped our childhood”.

“Over my dead body,” snarls Solo.

“That’s the idea. I’ve been looking forward to this a long time,” gloats Greedo, his blaster pistol already out.

There’s no doubt that Han shooting first was one of

In the original version it was Han who shot first, blasting Greedo under the table before the green guy fires a shot. In Lucas’s tinkered-with 1997 version, Greedo shoots first but misses, even though he’s at point-blank range (c’mon, seriously…).

the cornerstones of his roguish character. Belatedly trying to turn him into a kiddie-friendly nice guy was sacrilege. Deluged by fans’ petitions, Lucas finally relented and released the original version on DVD, re-establishing Solo’s credentials as a hardboiled, no-nonsense space cowboy. Yee-haw.

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United Archives GmbH / Alamy Stock Photo

THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

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GOING SOLO

He may have met his end in The Force Awakens, but there’s life in the old nerf herder yet... David Barnett looks at what we know about the solo Solo movie...

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e’re not going to see the Han Solo movie until 2018, but with casting announcements dribbling out and the appetite for all things Star Wars showing no signs of abating, speculation is naturally rife as to what it’ll all be about. Here’s 10 things that we know so far...

1 IT’S DIRECTED BY THE LEGO MOVIE GUYS Phil Lord and Christopher Miller are the dynamic duo behind the second Star Wars Story standalone movie (following last year’s ace Rogue One). That’s exciting hiring – The Lego Movie took what could have been a cynical money-making exercise by a toy company and a film studio and delivered one of the smartest, funniest blockbusters in... well, ever.

2 ALDEN EHRENREICH IS HAN SOLO Call it blasphemy, if you must, but Harrison Ford is no longer the only actor to play Han Solo. At 27, Californian Ehrenreich is six years younger than Harrison Ford was when he appeared for the first time as Solo in 1977’s original Star Wars (or A New Hope if you prefer), so we can safely assume we’re looking at a mid-twenties Han or thereabouts, or possibly younger; Ehrenreich has the required boyish good looks that, with attention from make-up

and lighting, could help him pass even for a late-teens Solo if required. Still, the good news here is that we’re not seeing a very young Solo.

There’s no danger of a repeat of The Phantom Menace’s kid Annie fiasco.

3 IT’S SET BEFORE A NEW HOPE Yep, like Rogue One, the Han Solo film slots in somewhere in the 19-year gap between Revenge Of the Sith and A New Hope. The Empire is at the height of its repressive powers, but the seeds of dissent are growing across the galaxy. It’ll be interesting to see how close towards A New Hope the new movie travels. Will it cover the whole of Han’s life before that, right up to the point where, perhaps, he does the dirty on Jabba and hunkers down on Tatooine for a spell?

Or will the producers be playing their sabbac cards close to their chests and just concentrating on one period of Solo’s life, with the plan to – if the movie is successful – follow it up with more adventures?

4 LANDO’S BACK One of the most exciting developments for fans of movies (and music) is the announcement that Donald Glover, best known for TV hits Atlanta and Community and his rap career as Childish Gambino, will be playing Lando Calrissian – the

administrator of Cloud City and former smuggler who has a long history with Han Solo.

A titbit from the official starwars.com site suggests Lando (originally played in his older form by Billy Dee Williams) will have a largish role in the new movie: “This new film depicts Lando in his formative years as a scoundrel on the rise in the galaxy’s underworld – years before the events involving Han, Leia and Darth Vader in The Empire Strikes Back and his rise to Rebel hero in Return Of The Jedi.”

We’ll also hopefully see Han take possession of his beloved ship the Millennium Falcon. We know that the Falcon used to belong to Lando Calrissian, and Solo won her from him in a game of sabbac, so we can probably expect to see that little episode go down.

5 IT HAS SOME EXCITING SECONDARY CASTING Another confirmed name is Game Of Thrones’ Emilia Clarke, but we have no idea who she’s playing yet. It’s probably a fair guess that she might provide some kind of love interest for Solo… after all, we can guess that before he settled down (in relative terms) with Leia he might have put himself about a bit. But with the ethos of current Star Wars movies, we can also probably be fairly sure that the Khaleesi isn’t

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

You’ll see this scene again. Well, pretty much.

going to be any kind of shrinking violet. We must assume, given her fair hair and light skin that she won’t be playing Sana Solo (née Starros) – Han’s first wife, introduced in the recent (and canonical) Marvel comics.

Another recent appointment is Woody Harrelson, veteran of everything from Cheers to The Hunger Games to True Detective, with a lot of stops in between. In an interview with Variety while plugging another movie at the Sundance Festival, Harrelson confirmed he will play the young Solo’s mentor. Though no character name was given, there have been quite a few educated guesses on the internet.

6 SOLO’S HISTORY IS WIDE OPEN...

It’s worth here mentioning the two distinct Star Wars universes that have built up over the past 40 years or so. A long time ago, but not so far,

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far away, there was the Star Wars Expanded Universe – the collective name for the spin-offs that filled out the backgrounds of Star Wars’ many characters and planets, and which were considered more or less canon. When Disney took control of the franchise, however, they renamed the EU stories “Legends”. The Legends characters and timelines differ, sometimes in slight ways, sometimes in a more major fashion, from the core canon. An example of this is Grand Admiral Thrawn – officially now a part of the Rebels timeline, but originally introduced in a Star Wars novel set after Return Of The Jedi.

However, that’s not to say that the Solo movie’s directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller won’t possibly mine the Legends stories for ideas, concepts and even whole plotlines.

That’s the thinking that has led to a lot of people

suggesting that Harrelson’s character might be Garris Shrike. Shrike was created by author Ann C Crispin for her Solo-led novel The Paradise Snare, a Fagin-style gang boss who recruited orphans and street kids – Han Solo among them – to train as smugglers and criminals. Could Miller and Lord be picking up this plot thread to tell the tale of how young Solo became the guy who did the Kessel Run in twelve parsecs? It would seem to make sense in the framework of an origin story, especially as Han rebels against his mentor and flees for the life of a smuggler on his own terms… kind of a Guardians of the Galaxy Starlord-Yondu dynamic at work.

But that’s in the context of Legends, of course. In the official canon, not a great deal is known about Solo pre-A New Hope, save for the reputation that precedes him. All we really

FIVE POSSIBLE PLOTS So what is this thing actually going to be about?

A BOY AND HIS WOOKIEE A lot of people would be pretty pleased to see an origin story of the Han-Chewbacca partnership.

It’s understood that Han saved Chewie’s life at some point, putting the big fella ever in his debt. Will be interesting to see how the partnership develops.

That spaceship can do all sorts of clever things…

know about Han is that he was born on the planet Correllia, at some point hooked up with his ever-present Wookiee companion Chewbacca (after saving him or freeing him from Imperial arrest) and worked for Jabba the Hutt… eventually falling foul of the crime lord when he ditched a cargo he was smuggling to avoid the Empire’s ships and ending up with a price on his head.

7 SO, ABOUT CHEWIE We haven’t had a Chewie casting yet, but it’s a safe bet that the film will cover the characters’ first meeting. In the Legends books, Han actually spends some time as an Imperial pilot and it’s in this role that he’s ordered to kill Chewbacca, who is discovered in a derelict spaceship. Han refuses, and Chewie swears a life-debt to him. Don’t expect the Wookiee to look much different, mind. “He’s as much younger as I am in the film,” said Ehrenreich recently. “I think he’s like 190 or something. I don’t think there’s a huge growth spurt for him from 190 to 210, so he’s probably about the same height.” Indeed, you may remember that Chewie appears in Revenge Of The Sith, fighting in the Clone Wars on his homeworld, Kashyyyk, and he looked virtually identical.

8 IT WILL BE VERY DIFFERENT TO PREVIOUS MOVIES If you thought the bleak tone of Rogue One was an unexpected tonal shift, expect this to be even wilder. “This moves closer to a heist or Western type feel. We’ve talked about [Frederic]

Remington and those primary colours that are used in his paintings defining the look and feel of the film,” said Lucasfilm president, Kathleen Kennedy, recently. Indeed, given Han’s very loose ties to the Rebellion, this could well be a chance to explore the Star Wars universe without all the usual (if fun) baggage of TIE Fighters and Stormtroopers. We can probably expect a few bounty hunters though – maybe one in particular. We know that there was talk a few years ago of a Boba Fett movie, which has since apparently hit the buffers. Fett was, of course, the man who brought in Han Solo when Darth Vader wanted bait to lure Luke into his clutches, and then passed him on to Jabba’s slimy hands. Maybe they had history before?

Could the ideas intended for the Boba Fett movie be folded in some way into Han’s adventures?

9 WE KNOW WHAT IT’S CALLED... KIND OF Okay, we’ve no idea what the final title will be (other than it will likely have “A Star Wars Story” appended to it). But we do know that it’s going under the working title of Red Cup, thanks to a tweet from Phil Lord showing a clapperboard with that logo written in a chunky, Western-style font, lending credence to those “Western” rumours again.

10 IT’S NOT FAR OFF...

Officially, Red Cup – or whatever it ends up being called – isn’t out until 25 May 2018. But with the new Star Wars films finding such success in a Christmas slot, don’t be too surprised if it gets bumped back a few months.

DUDE, WHERE’S MY MILLENNIUM FALCON? The presence of Lando in the film makes for a lot of potential for a buddy movie with the two carefree young smugglers getting into all kinds of scrapes and jams. With the Finn-Poe Dameron friendship in The Force Awakens proving a big hit, this could be the next big Star Wars bromance.

THE ATOLLON JOB At the behest of Jabba the Hutt, Han has to assemble a gang of crooks and mavericks to liberate some fantastic treasure from the heart of an Empire stronghold, resulting in wacky races and over-the-top chase scenes.

TURN IT UP TO 11 Tired of the criminal life, Han embraces his first and true love: music. He joins the Mos Eisley Spaceport Cantina band and they head off on a tour of known space, with Han on percussion.

He does such a good job they rename him “Drum” Solo, then get into all kinds of Spinal Tapstyle escapades. Unlikely.

MANY HANS MAKE LIGHTSABER WORK Solo finds an ancient weapon of the fabled Jedi. Realising an ordinary human can’t wield such power, he visits the planet of Kamino and uses the clone technology to grow multiple versions of himself... no, no even just to make that awful pun work this is patently ridiculous.

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THE 100 GREATEST SCI-FI CHARACTERS OF ALL TIME

FROM THE BEST TO THE WORST Jeer and loathing in sci-fi: five characters who we all love to hate

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1. JAR JAR BINKS (STAR WARS)

The flouncy, flop-eared fool with the un-PC cod-Jamaican accent from The Phantom Menace was supposed to be the comedy relief. The vast majority of viewers could have happily throttled him with his own tongue.

2. MELANIE BUSH (DOCTOR WHO) Bonnie Langford has matured into a much-loved British treasure but when she appeared as the new companion for Doctor Who back in 1986 she was still mainly associated with irritating stroppy, plummy child characters. If she was hoping Who might change that image she must have been disappointed. She came across like an Enid Blyton character, and screamed constantly.

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3. NEELIX (STAR TREK VOYAGER) The irritating, nasal-voiced chef and self-appointed morale officer on Voyager made the audience’s morale sink every time he appeared on screen.

4. GODZOOKY (GODZILLA)

In the original Japanese movie Godzilla had a “cute” son called Minira. In the American Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the late ’70s he had a nephew called Godzooky. You knew he was going to be crap as soon as you heard the theme tune which went from majestic and mighty for uncle God to some carnival hurdy-gurdy comedy music for God Jr. Cue Goodzooky prating about and flying into things hilariously.

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5. RUBY RHOD (THE FIFTH ELEMENT) The shrieking, camp DJ from the Fifth Element had a haircut that said it all – dick.

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