#spaceknights

[smbhax]

Rom #66, May 1985. P. Craig Russell cover pencils & inks.

Info from Grand Comics Database

[plasticsparkphotos]

Behold, Rom! Greatest warrior of the Legendary Space Knights! Dire Wraiths beware, Rom will hunt you to the ends of the galaxy and back.

📸 Marvel Legends - Rom: Space Knight

[bringbackwendellvaughn]

Rom the Spaceknight's handbook profile from the Deluxe Edition of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe written by Mark Gruenwald and Peter Sanderson with art provided by Steve Ditko and Eliot R. Brown. Some re-used art by Sal Buscema and Frank Miller too.

[deepdreamnights]

ROM Monsters

Wherein I breakdown my process and opine about the world of ROM and what makes a good TV adaptation.

For my Rom & Brandy video I needed the Dire Wraiths, among others. Creating something that looks like a suit or puppet was the first step. Vidu's "object reference" option means that if you've got a good pic, you can typically get it to walk around and move, but you've gotta have the pic.

As with creating any kind of specific design, a lot of editing was involved with each. For the male "science" Dire Wraith and Serpentine designs I used mainly text prompting. Hybrid and the the female "sorcery" Dire Wraith design were overpaintings of modified panel-art.

The idea that the show would have started in '81 meant that the sorcery wraith form wouldn't have been introduced yet, and the original wraith designs in early issues were intentional placeholder "transitional forms" that they used when around outsiders.

This was to give Parker Bros a chance to come up with a toy, which they never did. Translating this blobby form into the eventual male wraith form was just a matter of interpreting the "Pillsbury Doughdemon" form into something more froglike:

Which is a track a live action production would have done back in the day. Thus when John Saxon gets neutralized, he turns into a spinning pale frog-monster.

And on that subject, complex shots like the neutralization process aren't really promptable on their own. I wound up making a spinning wraith, then a swirling oil-light painting, and compositing them old-school. I contemplated faking a bluescreen halo onto him, but I didn't think the joke would land.

The female Wraiths I had initially made for Carol of the Hells/Scary Wicked Deadly Evil Christmas

The majority of their appearances in Brandy and Rom are, I will admit, anachronistically good. That design would have been a suit with a an anamatronic puppet-head for closeups/tongue-lashes, and stop-motion for wide shots.

Thankfully, Wraiths are in human form 90% of the time, and banishment scenes can be stock footage.

Serpentine...

I admit, I didn't do a whole lot to make extra accurate outside some tweaks to his horns. He was a one-off baddie, I liked the sports-bra harness more than the y-harness, he's recognizable, so it works for a 2 second shot. Didn't bother fixing his toes because he was never showing up full-screen, but I will if I use him again.

I'm kinda lukewarm on Serpentine as a concept, which is weird given I'm huge into reptiles, but here's some unused shots nonetheless.

In-show, Serpentine's would not have been a one-and-done. To make sure they got their money's worth out of the suit, he'd show up multiple times, and the suit would be redressed for various aliens in the Galador flashbacks and in "The Return of Starfire"

Last but not least, Hybrid:

"Booga-booga!, scared you!"

I conceive Hybrid as being a combination of a puppet and a head-and-shoulders mask for dialog shots. I'll get into his human form in the post about the non-Galadorian human characters.

While TV Rom would crossover like mad just like his comic counterpart did, he'd mainly be meeting other Marvel TV characters, successful and failed.

I don't see them introducing the X-Men conceptually within a ROM TV series as a backdoor pilot, so a harem of mutants in spandex isn't on the table.

Hybrid still wants to sire a master race of wraith-humans, but with a simpler, hotness-based Moonraker-style approach, with Brandy at the top of his list.

[deepdreamnights]

ROM Humans (And Human Disguises)

Tutorial and Fancasting

As I continue going through my process on Rom & Brandy we now come to the non-Galadorian humans. The crossover Marvel cameos will be in a future post.

Source images for all the humans were made by either generating an outfit and then compositing on the actor's face from the early 80s, or by inpainting the outfit onto such an image. A few were used straight. I'll go into details of process where needed. Photoshop, Midjourney & Huggingface spaces were the primary tools.

Vidu's reference-to-video was used for most shots, with image-to-video used in a few specific scenes.

Geena Davis as Brandy Clark

Off-key: "The Spaceknight said Brandy, you're a fine girl (such a fine girl), what a good wife you would be, but there's di-i-ire wraiths running free-"

Brandy is the most important casting in a Rom adaptation. Rom is going to be a special effect 90% of the time. Brandy is your main human focus.

In 1981, that perfect choice was Geena Davis. She's got the look, she's talented, and she has a delightfully expressive face that would help counter-balance acting against a faceless robot.

Now I'm sure you're going "Geena Davis was too big to be in a Marvel Productions show" and yes, post-Beetlejuice that might have been true, but in 1981 she was "guest player on Knight Rider" tier.

A screencap of which I used for several shots because the outfit was cute.

Louise Fletcher as the Wraith Witch

The switchboard operator Wraith-Witch gets a lead role as a commander in the show, given that there would be far fewer characters overall, especially recurrent wraiths.

Louise Fletcher (my gen is a little too skinny and throws off the likeness, I fear) played a very similar role in Invaders from Mars and for a terrifying lady-baddie of the time, you could not do better.

John Saxon as the Wraith Enforcer

It's an 80s sci-fi thing. John Saxon has to be there. He's not any specific dire wraith from the comics, more an amalgamation of numerous mooks as a major threat in the pilot story, ending with his being the first fully-shown on-screen banishment.

Ricky Schroeder as Jimmy Marks/Hybrid

The half-wraith incel Hybrid is played, in human form, by Ricky Schroeder, Hybrid would have been a second-season villain, putting Schroeder at the 12-13 age perfect for him as a departure guest star role while he was starring on Silver Spoons.

I strongly remember thinking Ricky Stratton was a twerp and if I could have tuned in to see him disintegrated by a space-cyborg back in the day I'd have been there. And I don't think I'm the only one.

I imagine the initial Hybrid story being much smaller and, given the X-Men wouldn't be introduced in a backdoor pilot in ROM of all things, not involving them.

Instead, Jimmy is still the son of a Dire Wraith who went native, but with some twists. Brandy would run into him and his family alongside a small group of other people (probably a group of athletes training for a not-Olympics, going by the tropes of the time). They get locked in with each other in a snowstorm, setting up the conflict.

Rather than hayseeds, Jimmy's folks would seem to be a sitcom-parody perfect family. Eventually revealing that the family is telepathic illusions, Hybrid killed them years ago and is using the kid-guise because it's the last way he remembers being human and the illusions are his TV-corrupted memories. Keeping the story merely 80s-TV skeezy.

[deepdreamnights]

Spaceknights in Training

From the 1981 "ROM the Spaceknight" TV series.

I'm going to be posting my various reference pieces for my 80s Rom Music Video through the week.

The premise of the project was "What if ROM got a TV Show in 1981." I don't think I entirely hit the mark as Vidu couldn't consistently give me the tokusatsu look I wanted for the Spaceknights and effects, but perfect is the enemy of the good, and I wanted it out in time for Valentines weekend.

And it was an excuse to do some fan-casting.

I couldn't just pick A-listers of the time, however, because if it was a Marvel project in 1981, you got Reb Brown, not Burt Reynolds.

Ron Ely as ROM. Tarzan was over, he could grow his hair out or wear a wig.

Haywood Nelson as Karas/Firefall I - Haywood would have been two years out from the end of What's Happening? and Karas's human form in the comics was yet-another-long-haired-white-guy, so a good fit in my book for Rom's best bud.

Cheryl Ladd as Landra/Starshine I - She would have been one of the major draws from the show, as an ex-Charlie's Angels actress.

Erik Hexum as Rem/Terminator - We never saw Terminator's human form or got his Galadorian name in the comics. Here he's reinterpreted as Rom's brother and Erik Hexum, because I'm still upset about Voyagers being canceled.

My thought is that a TV adaptation would use flashbacks to Galador, dream sequences, and "how I see myself" VS "the real me in the mirror" scenes to give the lead some actual face-time.

Thinking like a TV producer, matching the Galadorian uniforms to the eventual spaceknights they would become, and while i love Galador, it's civilian clothes are dorky as hell. Rom's was first, with Karas and Terminator's photoshopped and in-painted off his.

I generated roughs of them in Midjourney with a combination of text and image prompting. Once I had a stack, each of the costumes were inpainted and photoshopped, and composited faces from various 1978-1981 actor head shots both the old fashioned way and with some help from Huggingface spaces.

Video post is here.

[btvd8100]

[doctorslippery]

Galadorian Spaceknights without Rom...not cool.

And Galadorian Spaceknights who wear suits or armor instead of having their biologicalness infused into an android/cyborg suits of armor that serves as both weapon and life support as they battle the Dire Wraiths across the heavens for the survival of Galador and all life in the universe.