#jack mckinney

[24601bc]

"If you want to win, you got to be like this. TIGHT"

[emmynominees]

tracy letts as jack mckinney in season two of winning time: the rise of the lakers dynasty

primetime emmy award nominee for outstanding guest actor in a drama series

[cantsayidont]

July 1988. An art book for a show that never quite came to be, ROBOTECH ART 3 is also the official account of how the planned sequel to ROBOTECH fell apart. if you've heard of ROBOTECH, you're almost certainly aware that it was an amalgamation of three similar but unrelated Tatsunoko anime series, tied together with a new storyline by American producer Carl Macek as a multigenerational saga with enough episodes for American TV syndication. The dilemma this presented (other than for aggrieved weebs insisting that the new storyline was a bastardization of the presumptively superior original series) was that characters from the different generations couldn't really interact, and some important plot elements could only be presented through exposition. ROBOTECH II: THE SENTINELS was to be a 65-episode original series that would chronicle how the survivors of the first generation (adapted from the popular SUPER DIMENSION FORTRESS MACROSS) set out to make peace with the Robotech Masters of Tirol (the villains of the second generation, adapted from SUPER DIMENSION CAVALRY SOUTHERN CROSS) and ended up embroiled in a war with the Invid, the villains of the third generation (adapted from GENESIS CLIMBER MOSPEADA), who eventually conquered the Earth. This was to lead up to the finale of the original series, which would be the starting point for a subsequent series.

For various reasons chronicled at length in the book, the project collapsed after only a handful of episodes were completed. (The surviving footage was later released on home video.) Macek's story outlines were then adapted in several similar but distinct ways in a series of prose novels by "Jack McKinney" (a pseudonym for the writing team of Brian Daley and James Luceno), in the Palladium roleplaying game, and later in American comic books by John and Jason Waltrip. There was also a fanon take that mostly rejected all of the other versions as incompatible with the actual scripts and footage of the original show, which eventually led Harmony Gold, the American production company, to retroactively declare the entire project apocryphal. Harmony Gold then hired the Waltrip brothers to create a five-issue comic book prelude to its truly dire 2007 direct-to-video animated sequel, ROBOTECH: THE SHADOW CHRONICLES, which is heavily reliant on the events of the SENTINELS storyline without being entirely compatible with any previous version of it, and is frustratingly unsatisfying to anyone who actually liked any of them. (Nobody won, in other words.)

THE SENTINELS is often derided for no particularly good reason. The basic storyline has its clunky aspects (in addition to the continuity issues the RRG contingent identified), but so do the original Japanese shows, and the Japanese MACROSS franchise has subsequently gone a lot of weird places that tend to undercut the claim that ROBOTECH is categorically inferior. Both have their flaws, but ROBOTECH and THE SENTINELS are hardly without merit. (The dismal SHADOW CHRONICLES is another matter …)

[retropopcult]

1979 Los Angeles Lakers

[moodboardmix]

Franklin Road House, Ponsonby, New Zealand,

Jack Mckinney Architects

[serpentinesheldonserpentine]

What we’ve lost. Or, nobody reads the papers anymore.

My father’s an immigrant from Ireland, as was my mother. He didn’t become an American by reading The Federalist Papers, or De Tocqueville or anything like that—he became an American when he got baseball.

And he finally got baseball from the sports pages of the Brooklyn Eagle and The Daily News. That’s how he got it. He understood then finally the language of baseball, and what that language was describing. And what that emotion was when you went to a ballpark and thirty-five thousand people stood up at the same time and yelled—he got it. From reading papers. — Pete Hamill

I’m delighted to be old. I read prime Hamill and hot off the presses (that idiom is meaningless today) Jack McKinney. I raced to the newsstand to follow Jimmy Breslin’s frightening dialog with the .44 caliber killer in the pages of his paper. I drank cup after cup of coffee at the Melrose, wide eyed following the News when Pete Dexter’s column resulted in him beaten with tire irons, his life saved by the intervention of a palooka named Tex Cobb.

These writers lived life in the bars and courthouses, not from behind a laptop in an endless editorial circle jerk of like minded pasty nincompoops praying to be anointed as pundits someday.

Kids? You should been there.

[omnimic]

I dunno, if I saw a giant floating disembodied head out there in the cosmos, I wouldn’t fly towards it no matter how much robotech I had.

Artist: David Schleinkofer

[cantsayidont]

April 1985 to January 1987. One half of the pseudonymous "Jack McKinney" who wrote the prose ROBOTECH novels, Brian Daley is probably best known for his trio of delightful Han Solo novels, first published in 1979–1980, and for scripting the NPR radio adaptations of the STAR WARS movies. However, he also wrote a bunch of original sci-fi and fantasy novels, including this entertaining mid-'80s trilogy about the misadventures of Hobart Floyt and Alacrity Fitzhugh (a pseudonym, although his real name isn't revealed until the third book).

Centuries in the future, Hobart Floyt is a low-level functionary in the administrative bureaucracy of the oppressive Earth government. When he's unexpectedly named in the will of Caspahr Weir, the ruler of a minor but very wealthy interstellar empire (whom Floyt has never met), Earthservice decides Floyt must attend the reading of the will, expecting to confiscate whatever bequest he might receive. Since Floyt is a sheltered Terran who's never even contemplated going off-world, Earthservice coerces Alacrity, a young part-alien "breakabout" (starship crewman for hire), into becoming his guide. Thus begins a series of picaresque adventures through the diverse, colorful worlds beyond closed and xenophobic Earth. The first book focuses mostly on our heroes' journey to Weir's throne world, Epiphany, and the many ways they almost get killed prior to the Willreading. The second book deals with Floyt and Alacrity attempting to actually collect Floyt's inheritance — a starship to which Weir has left him title, but not actual possession — and figure out why Weir left it to him in the first place. The final volume shifts focus to Alacrity's quixotic quest to become the captain of the White Ship, a fabulously advanced starship intended to search for the secrets of an ancient alien race called the Precursors, which is also an object of fascination for Floyt and Alacrity's bitterest enemy: Dincrist, the father of the woman Alacrity falls in love with in the first book.

Anyone who enjoys Daley's Han Solo novels will probably also like these books, which are similar in tone and style: droll, action-packed romps starring two likable schmoes who spend a lot of their time running for their lives, with richly detailed settings full of exotic alien creatures and engaging if rather two-dimensional characters. These novels' literary merits are modest, but Daley's object was lighthearted pulp fiction, as evidenced by an amusingly self-reflexive subplot in the second and third books: Our heroes' friend Sintilla, a freelance journalist, starts publishing a series of extremely popular penny dreadful novels starring heavily fictionalized versions of Floyt and Alacrity (without their knowledge or approval) in wild adventures even more outrageous than their real ones. This soon makes the real Alacrity and Floyt inconveniently notorious — leavened slightly by the fact that the handsome male models depicted on Sintilla's book jackets look nothing like them!

(Ironically, this is also true of the covers of more recent editions of these books. Darrell K. Sweet's covers for the original Del Rey paperbacks, shown above, are reasonably close to how the characters are described in the text — although the gawks they're riding on the cover of the third book are all wrong — but the current versions aren't even within walking distance of the right ballpark.)