Infinite State

I like  science fiction just as much as every other purple-blooded American boy born in the 1960′s, though I wouldn’t call myself a fanatic. I was definitely influenced by Star Trek growing up, though I stopped watching TV a number of years ago and so I haven’t really kept up with the various TV sci-fi shows of the 90′s and on. I did, however, catch a few Farscape episodes and got pulled in for the ideas, production qualities and characters…enough to watch most of the first season on DVD. I haven’t thought about it for awhile until it just popped into my head as I was waking from a Sunday afternoon nap — that Farscape echoes Guardians of the Galaxy in a lot of ways…

“Their ship doesn’t have a baby” pointed out my son, Milo. But look:

• Major Vance Astro of the Guardians is a wildly out-of-place American, thrown forward in time 1000 years (actually, he slept to it like Rip Van Winkle) and he is that same macho wise-cracking but sexy buccaneer character with an underbelly of pathos as John Crichton of Farscape.
• Yondu, the spiritual (native american) space Indian in touch with nature is a lot like Xan, the emotional/spiritual priestess (who shares that same smooth head and blue colored skin).
• Nikki, the trouble-attracting fast-talking leg-baring space girl is what got me started down this path — she’s eerily like Chiana.

Now my memory from reading comics in the late 70′s is not this detailed — but I recently unearthed my handful of Guardians comics that I’d managed to save from childhood and gave them to Milo as a present. I finally filled in the missing issues (thank you, eBay) and was reading them last night. I guess it takes awhile for the brain to make its connections and mine did. I’m not saying someone consciously ripped off an old (and not particularly great but interesting) Marvel comic from 30 years earlier — it could just be that these ideas float around and get recycled, or reflect classical themes in new skin-tight representations.

But I was surprised that when I did a quick Google search I didn’t turn up someone already pointing this out. On second thought, maybe it is a little obscure…