25 Responses for "폭탄영어 #8 – Kimchi in Spaaaaaaaaace!"

1. The JinHee March 17th, 2008 at 10:37 am 1

   wow this episode is really hard to understand!
   I never watched Star Track (did i spell it right? hehehe Is it Trek?) and also I am not really a SiFi geek or anything so… haha
   Anyways, good episode once again. Even though I hardly understood. hehehehe
   Thanks!

2. themute March 17th, 2008 at 8:47 pm 2

   Can “Lord of Light” (by Rodger Zelazny) be also called as Si-Fi?

3. themute March 17th, 2008 at 9:05 pm 3

   Sorry, you mentioned Lord of the Rings and my point is “Lord of Light”. I confused it ’cause of my careless listening.

   Finally I’ve made “도배” with my comments on the board!
   Would you please make a “delete” button for peole like me?

4. The JinHee March 18th, 2008 at 9:25 am 4

   wow I didn’t know I can not delet what I write!
   ha!

5. The End of an Odyssey March 19th, 2008 at 10:32 am 5

   [...] sad to report that Arthur C Clarke has died. We actually mentioned him just this week on our show. I had just rewatched 2001 very recently and was re-impressed with his vision for humanity. If you [...]

6. Hyunwoo Sun(선현우) March 20th, 2008 at 12:28 pm 6

   I LOVED listening to this episode, just as much as all the other ones! Ingenius topic!! and I think the question itself, “why are there so few sci-fi movies made in Korea?” is something that an average Korean person wouldn’t really get to ask him/herself. And yeah, I’ve never asked myself this question before listening to this show. Awesome. I’m a HUGE fan of science fiction, and my favorite so far is the Planet of Apes. (Has anyone watched it? Do you emember “CALIMA”?)

7. Jennifer March 20th, 2008 at 2:40 pm 7

   ’68 or ’01? Glad you enjoyed this one . . .
   That’s really one reason we wanted to do this show. There’s all kinds of things we don’t think about as participants in a culture. Sometimes it takes an outsider to point things out . . .
   But as far as sci-fi goes . . .yeah, what is there?
   2009 Lost Memories
   Aaichi and Ssipak
   Wonderful Days
   Natural City . . .that’s about all I can think of, and we’re really stretching the genre to include even these. And also significant is how often instead of imagined futures, what really shows up in Korean lit and film is instead a *reimagined past*: speculative fiction in Korea is by and large historical fiction.

8. Jennifer March 20th, 2008 at 2:45 pm 8

   Ah, and there’s also Yesterday.
   And, I suppose Save the Green Planet is a sci-fi movie . . .actually, probably the most truely science fiction of them all. And yet, the mood is so very distinctive, and the genre blending so intense that I didn’t recall it as such.

9. Eric Whitman Sangrin Shin March 23rd, 2008 at 3:21 pm 9

   Star Trek.. When I was 7 years old, I saw this soap opera through AFKN. haha.

10. Kinsey May 15th, 2008 at 3:49 am 10

    Great episode. I’ve got a lot of comments:

    –Science Fiction started out as an American phenomenon with H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, which is one reason it’s so big in the US as compared to many other countries.

    –In the Star Trek pilot the second-in-command was a woman. Roddenberry said the producers didn’t like that, and they didn’t like the Vulcan. He was given the choice to keep one or the other, so he kept Spock and fired the woman (who was played by his wife).

    –You mentioned that having a woman captain on Voyager may have helped pave the way for the American public to accept a female President. I’ve heard the same thing about 24 paving the way for Obama (not that that’s scifi).

    –Not only was the kiss between Kirk and Uhura coerced, but I’m pretty sure that a lot more was implied by that scene. One interpretation is that Kirk was forced to rape her, and Spock had to rape Nurse Chapel. We never got to see how it ended, but it sure looked like that’s where it was going.

    –Race was mentioned once on Star Trek when Abraham Lincoln was introduced to Uhura and called her a beautiful negress and then apologized.

    –You said Star Wars never commented on current events, but I think you forgot Senator Palpatine’s speech in which he states that anyone who is not with him is against him.

    –How could you mention Deep Space Nine without mentioning Babylon 5 from which much of the premise for DS9 was lifted (since the two shows ran at about the same time)?

11. Jennifer May 15th, 2008 at 2:16 pm 11

    Interesting comments . . .
    - actually, H.G. Wells was English, and Jules Verne was French, so I’m not sure that really played a big role in the explosion of scifi in America.
    - Majel Barrett wasn’t fired from the series, she was given a new (and smaller) role as Nurse Chapel. She also wasn’t married to Gene Roddenberry until 1969, well after Star Trek was off the air. She was however carrying on an affair with him at that time. And the reason she was cut and replaced with Spock was primarily because the test audiences reacted so badly to her character.
    - I’m not sure how direct a link we can make, but I would think that Captain Sisko from DS9 would mean quite a bit more than the black president on 24. Actually, 24′s introduction is hardly the first portrayal of a black president in film or on tv: Think of James Earl Jones in “The Man” back in 1972. Or heck, Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact” 24 is behind the times, my friend!
    - Actually . . . we should have said that the kiss in Plato’s Stepchildren was the first black/white interracial kiss on a tv series. Technically, even Star Trek had an earlier kiss between actors of different ethnicities (Kirk kissed an alien played by Frances Nuyen in an episode earlier in the season, and there was another between two minor characters in Space Seed . . .but I guess it doesn’t count if they’re playing an alien.) And Nancy Sinatra laid a lipsmack on Sammy Davis Jr. on her variety program. And, depending on how you count it, Lucy not only kissed but had a baby with her Latino husband, Ricky Ricardo. But it was the first time such an event really hit the public consciousness. And while things are always open to interpretation . . . in the episode there are no real “cuts” immediately afterwards and action continues, so I would have a hard time supporting that interpretation.
    - I think our point was that within the Star Trek universe there wasn’t any supposition that race was important to the characters themselves. Within the Federation, it’s a non-issue.
    - The less said and thought about those films, the better. And if you must drag He Who Turned to the Dark Side into this, well . . .he said it ain’t so. And while Bush is famous for having used that line, he’s hardly the first. Let’s not give the commander in chief too much credit for originality there.
    - We didn’t mention it because neither Michael nor I watched the series, and don’t know enough about it to comment much. That said, I wish we’d mentioned it because it was an important addition to American scifi. As for the controversy about who came first?. . . I’ve heard a lot both ways, and I’d say whatever similarity in idea there may have been before, the two series ended up being quite different.

12. Kinsey May 15th, 2008 at 3:32 pm 12

    I think you misunderstood some of my points, but after stating that H. G. Wells and Jules Verne were American in my first remark, I’m certainly not in any position to quibble.

13. Jennifer May 15th, 2008 at 4:13 pm 13

    Please feel free to clarify regardless . . .
    and I’ll ‘fess up to an error also. Apparently Buckwheat from Our Gang was quite a man with the ladies onscreen, and holds record for first interracial black/white kiss to be committed to moving picture. Also, the Brits snuck some interracial romance into one of their medical dramas before Star Trek got smoochy.

14. Kinsey May 16th, 2008 at 2:16 am 14

    Okay. By the way, I love your podcast and am listening to an episode a day until I get caught up. Your friend Robin told me about the show. Here are my points:

    –Majel Barrett said once in an interview that the complaint the test audience had about her character was that they couldn’t understand who she thought she was, constantly bothering the captain with her opinions about his decisions. Apparently, even if a woman was second-in-command, she still needed to know her place, at least for 60s TV audiences.

    –I haven’t seen “The Man”, but Morgan Freeman in “Deep Impact” didn’t strike me as particularly positive. Sisko was a very positive example, but he lived in a different world, and far more people have watched 24 than DS9, despite it not being as good. I wasn’t saying that 24 had the first portrayal of a black president, just that it was the most influential with the voters in this election. I also don’t know how much, if any, influence there truly was on the voting public, but it’s interesting to speculate.

    –I haven’t seen Plato’s Stepchildren in a long time, so I’d have to re-watch it to be sure. But that is how I’ve always interpreted it. Also, I don’t think ancient Greeks would have stopped at mere kissing. Of course, truly authentic Greeks would have paired Kirk and Spock, so you may have a point.

    –I can think of one episode of Star Trek that indicated that race was still important to humans in the Federation. In an episode of DS9 (can’t remember the title) Cassidy wants to know why Sisko has never been willing to enter the Vic Fontaine holodeck program. He replies by saying something to the effect that it represents a time and setting in which black people would not have been welcome, and ignoring that fact made him uncomfortable. Personally, I think this was just bad writing. Sisko is nearly 500 years removed from that time and would never have personally experienced discrimination for being black. He would just know about it as history. I agree with you, by the way, about race not mattering in the Star Trek world. That episode is just an interesting anomaly.

    –Yeah, Lucas said it wasn’t so, but the timing was just too good. Besides, Bush is clearly a Sith. I mean, just listen to him. He’s the Jar Jar Binks of the Sith world.

    –Babylon 5 is an excellent sci-fi series, but it’s just not very good at sucking people in, which is probably why so many sci-fans still haven’t seen it. Unlike DS9, the B5 storyline (all five seasons) was mapped out in advance before shooting began. DS9 kept stealing plot ideas from it as they developed. One of the worst examples was when the Bajorans had a secret organization with an agenda of ridding their world (and space station) of all aliens, which really made no sense. They just took the idea of Nightwatch from B5 and tried to jam it into their own storyline. Actually, it’s astonishing how many bad decisions (in my opinion) in general the DS9 writers made without ruining the show.

15. Jennifer May 16th, 2008 at 9:39 am 15

    - I don’t argue that Majel Barrett’s character wasn’t removed, but she herself wasn’t, and stayed on as Nurse Chapel.
    - Nobody said anything about a positive portrayal . . . and I just think that fictional African-American presidents have a long enough history that we shouldn’t overestimate the impact of 24 . . . and besides, our point was that seeing leadership in fiction makes it plausible to people, and sci-fi in this respect is often on the cutting edge. 24 is neither sci-fi nor first on the scene, so whatever effect it may be having on the US this election cycle (and for the record, I think it has very little if any) it wasn’t part of our original conversation.
    - Our point was that in the “present reality” of the Federation, racism among humans is over. That doesn’t mean that they’re unaware of what racism is or its history. The important point of Star Trek was positing a future world where humans were no longer racist. Not that racism didn’t exist elsewhere in the galaxy, but that humans had the power to transcend and go beyond our current problems with race. Lots of episodes deal with race and racism, but they always do it from the perspective that in the future we WILL go beyond using skin color as a guide to human dignity. It’s not a denial of race, it’s hoping we get beyond it. Sisko’s historical awareness of race as an issue doesn’t seem to be an anomaly at all. It would be like Lt. Kim in Voyager being totally cool with traveling back in time to the colonial period. He may not be presently harboring any beef with the Japanese, but that doesn’t mean he wants to go back and experience it himself.
    - Michael’s point was that Star Trek is explicitly political/social commentary. Star Wars is just not. Even with that little speech thrown in, Star Wars is escapist fantasy. It’s not sci-fi. People see similarities in modern political situations in Lord of the Rings, too, but that does not in the least mean that Tolkien was trying to comment on the modern state of politics. Star Wars is great, I love it*, but it’s not designed to provide political commentary. You can read it how you like, but that’s just not its purpose.
    - I should know better than to get into it with a Babylon 5 fan, but . . . I know it’s a good series. I just didn’t watch it. That said, I’m familiar enough with the plots of both series to say that while there were some similarities in setup, their respective treatments were very different. In this case the resemblance is extremely slight, to the point where I would never have even called them similar. And contextually, the DS9 plot made perfect sense, and was deliberately meant to recall particular historical terrorist movements – DS9 was copying history and the newspapers. Re: DS9 vs. B5?
    I didn’t watch B5, but I know it was an interesting and well-written series. I bet I’d enjoy it if I ever watch it. But I could find plot points and situations that are similar between GI Joe and He-Man if I really wanted to waste my time that way, and while DS9 wasn’t perfect, but it was better than a carbon copy of B5.

16. Jennifer May 16th, 2008 at 9:44 am 16

    Re: Plato’s Stepchildren – you can interpret what was shown in any way you like, but what was shown is that immediately after the kiss, Spock and Kirk are forced to pick up weapons and threaten Ohura and Chapel. You can say you think it symbolically represents rape if you like, but the actuality of what’s shown doesn’t support it.
    Glad you’re enjoying the podcasts, keep listening!

17. Kinsey May 17th, 2008 at 1:51 am 17

    Well, yes, I completely agree. DS9 came up with the space station premise completely independently of B5, and it was very different, so much so that most of the ideas it tried to steal from B5 ended up fizzling and going nowhere. DS9 was one of the better Star Trek series IMHO.

    GI Joe and He-Man had very similar formulas in different settings.

    I’ve really got to see Plato’s Stepchildren again, but didn’t Nurse Chapel end up giving birth to a child that was one quarter Vulcan? How do you explain that? (kidding)

    The 24 reference I made was just a little parenthetical remark I threw in, because I thought it was interesting and sort of related to what you said about Janeway. Having said that, I have to disagree with “Nobody said anything about a positive portrayal”, because I did. That was my whole point.

18. Jennifer May 17th, 2008 at 10:34 am 18

    Ok, I really don’t want to get into it with a bitter B5 fan. If you think it copied B5, and stole all its plotlines from there, fine. Enjoy.
    Yes, you did say “positive”. In your third post. So it seems a little disingenuous to say I missed a point you didn’t originally make. And I still stand by the fact that there have been many, many portrayals of black leadership both as president and otherwise prior to 24. This doesn’t mean I don’t think that 24 couldn’t be havng an effect, but it is a little late to the party and I think other media portrayals were probably more significant. On the other hand, if you’d brought up “Commander in Chief” I would have been a little more understanding in how it relates to women’s leadership and Hillary’s chances, partially because the makers of that show were specific in that being one of their goals.
    Maybe what we can learn from this conversation is that we’re all partisans of our own programs. There’s DS9 fans, B5 fans (not exclusive categories, by the way) and those who wouldn’t miss 24, and the die hard CSI fan. We all tend to see wider influence in society of those things which have influenced us.

19. Kinsey May 17th, 2008 at 2:53 pm 19

    I said I agreed with you. In fact, I said I *completely* agreed with you, and you called me bitter. I said DS9 was one of the better Star Trek series, and you called me partisan. (I’m a big fan of both btw.) I said that the ideas that DS9 took from B5 quickly fizzled out and went nowhere (meaning they never became an important part of DS9), and you claimed I said it “stole all its plotlines from there”. I agree with 90% of everything you’ve said in your comments.

    The point of my first comment was just to introduce myself and contribute a bit to the discussion. It was a very good episode. I liked it and have no complaints. I can’t really add useful comments to the other (interesting and enjoyable) episodes I’ve heard so far, since I know so little about Korea

    Just to clarify on 24, I don’t know if it had an effect or not. It’s not my idea. I ran into it recently on the Internet and thought it worth mentioning. Anyway, it never occurred to me that non-positive portrayals would sway voters. When I saw that we were starting out with different assumptions, I clarified what I meant. I wasn’t changing the meaning.

20. Javis June 11th, 2008 at 7:28 pm 20

    I’m posting this before listening to the lesson, but I just read Michael’s blog posts about Star Trek and BSG. I think it’s a little simplistic to classify all sci-fi as post-modern. For example, Asimov’s early work, with its themes of technological determinism, are quite modern. Also, the Foundation and Empire novels were reflections more of historical models than the present day (i.e. Foundation = fall of the Roman Empire; The Stars, Like Dust = Golden Horde in Russia)

    Anyway, have you watched ‘지구를 지켜라’? It may be the first work of Korean post-modern sci-fi that gained mainstream exposure. It blends themes of dissatisfaction with Korea’s rapid development and distrust of the establishment with fear of the alien outsider.

21. Jennifer June 12th, 2008 at 11:27 am 21

    I hope you listen to the episode, because we didn’t really address the idea of sci-fi as modern vs. postmodern . . . but how are you defining the terms?
    I don’t think 지구를 지켜라 really did get much mainstream exposure. It left theaters remarkably quickly and is pretty much considered a 마니아 (cult) film. A shame, it’s a fabulous film.

22. Javis June 12th, 2008 at 1:47 pm 22

    Don’t worry, I did finish listening to to podcast

    I agree with a lot of what you guys said about the potential benefit from Sci-fi in Korean society. I wonder if 이소연 would have received a more enthusiastic treatment in a Korea where science fiction was popular. I recently told a Korean friend that I read a lot of sci-fi, and he had a grimace on his face as he told me of how his mother’s profession as a school biology teacher had turned him off to science.

    The modern/post-modern thing was just in response to something I had read in Michael’s blog. We’ll call it the difference between unbounded enthusiasm for progress, like the Nazi’s eugenics or “From the Earth to the Moon”, and caution and introspection with respect to potential mistakes resulting from that progress, like the Non-Proliferation Treaty or “Speakers for the Dead”. I guess it’s not a very important distinction for the genre.

23. Javis June 13th, 2008 at 12:15 am 23

    Maybe industrial and post-industrial are better labels for what I was trying to say.

24. Javis June 13th, 2008 at 12:39 am 24

    And about Save the Green Planet, I actually first read a review of the film on an English language blog about cyberpunk anyway, so I can appreciate its cult status.

25. Jennifer Choi November 4th, 2009 at 3:44 pm 25

    Hello. Iam the late 30′s Korean femal listeners.

    This is my third time to hear your funny joyful talk show^^

    Just by listening your talking, some of idea hit me and made me think of the reason why we don’t have that spectacular SF program on TV. Even if it’s just a guess, I hope it can help your to understanding below reason in the point of mine.

    I am a big fan of “Lord of the Ring”, one of my top 5 movies I’ve ever seen by now.

    I think our society couldn’t have time to cultivate the concept of the universe by now. Only it have been past
    less than a hundred years after we face with western science culture. During the long 5 hundred years of Chosun Dynaty’s seizure of political power, they ruled the Korean people with Confucianism. The political power of them result in cutting the root of dreaming idea of future with an obscurantist policy. For an example, the Confucianist didn’t welcome the invention of Hangul because they thought they didn’t hope and need to cultivate their people learn the writing and reading in Character. So the genius lower class of society who had possibility to dream the widen world couldn’t have chance to open their dream as well as the higher class were prohibited by the force of their society’s brainwashing restraint.

    Although we aren’t ruled by that kind of government, but it still have infulence to our national character I guess. I assumed most of common person couldn’t over the line within the pressure from inner and outer forcement living with them.

    Once or several time I had seen Star Track from AFKN, the US Army Broadcast system as a teenaged little girl
    Because I was a maniac of TV program. After closing of Korean TV, only I can see the movie in AFKN after a old man’s talk show around 2 or 3 am. It was so curious but I couldn’t understand any words so I just watched that late night movie with the acting from their nonverbal cues. ^^; some of them I found it assumable, I could saw them with my loose surmise.

    The second reason I thought is the Korean’s delayed advancement of Broadcasting system. They don’t have any intest to invest so much money and riskable challenge to those huge project involed with the larger staff.

    Your Star Track chatting remind me a bood of title “Cosmos”, a scientific nonfiction novel that mentioned about the universe origin or process of scientific notion and theory I had never been contact at that time. Have you heard about it?

    Anyway I’d love to see some SF drama or movie as a great lover of SF and imagible story in Korea, too.

    Great Talk! and I enjoyed the whole listening.

    Have fun and see you next time. ^^;