Ben Paddon

Category: Jump Leads

  • Positive Jump Leads press

    I just posted a long and slightly lazy review of Red Dwarf: Back To Earth, which aired in the UK over the Easter weekend, over on the Jump Leads site. Also, while I’m here, how about I throw you you a link to a very positive review of Jump Leads Issue #3: Trojan Horse?

  • Bookless

    I’ll be leaving for the UK Web & Mini Comix Thing in London within the hour. I didn’t hae enough money to have tee-shirts printed up and now, thanks to a mail delivery snafu, I don’t have any books to sell either. Our artist can’t make it and one of our writers (Paul Varley, who wrote the current issue of Jump Leads) will be arriving in the early-afternoon. As if that wasn’t good enough, I’ve been told I’m on a panel at 11am, but I don’t know what the panel is for or who else will be on it.

    But y’know what? Despite all of the bad news that has unfolded surrounding this year’s Thing, I’m still positive about it. It’s always great to spend time with one’s peers (I would’ve been at the New England Webcomics Weekend were I not flying out to England from LAX on the 23rd) and hopefully today will be no exception.

    Jetlag woke me up this morning at just after 5am, so I’ve spent most of the morning sitting up surfing the Intertron on my laptop and eating the leftover prawn crackers from last night’s Chinese takeaway. Probably not the healthiest option but I followed the law of They Were Just Sitting There which isn’t, I think, that bad of an option. I’ll likely have something healthy on my way into London. I wonder if that Cornish Pasty place in St Pancras International will be open when we get there?

    Right, I should probably go wake Andrew up or something.

  • “We Ain’t Found Shit”

    I recently decided to have another look at scifi-comedy, past and present. There’s a lot of it I’m already familiar with – Red Dwarf and The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy are not only what I consider to be pinnacles of the genre but are also at the top of my list of favourite novels and TV shows, and the Back To The Future trilogy is, I think, the best trilogy ever commited to film – but there’s some stuff I haven’t seen. I’ve only seen about four episodes of Hyperdrive for instance, and although it’s not fantastic it’s hardly as bad as most Red Dwarf fans seem to think.

    A big example of scifi-comedy, one that has always been recommended to me, is Spaceballs. I’m a fan of Mel Brooks and yet I’d never seen this film. Thankfully it’s on Netflix’ Watch Instantly service, so I added it to my queue and loaded it up on my Xbox.

    Oh dear.

    It’s one of those films that I imagine was rip-roaringly funny when it first came out, but the entire thing felt really badly hewn together. The jokes were flat and uninspired, leaving me feeling that the horrendous Date Movie would have been a better choice – I laughed once during the entire film, and that was when Tim Russ, whilst combing the desert, angrily declared that he had been thus far unable to locate anything with his giant comb.

    He was a little more succinct with his report.

    The conclusion I drew from this was that Spaceballs is a terrible, terrible movie. I’m sure it wasn’t once upon a time, but now it’s awful. This film, this terrible catastrophe of a motion picture, left me wondering if Mel Brooks has ever been as funny as I thought he was. The first film of his that I saw as a kid was Robin Hood: Men In Tights, which I adored, but that hasn’t aged well either. Was I wrong? Has Mel Brooks always been terrible?

    I inadvertantly found myself watching The Producers two weeks later. I was, in fact, trying to watch the fourth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, the last episode of which contains some chunks of the Broadway musical (season four sees Larry David getting cast in the show by Brooks and partially revolves around the rehearsal process). I watched…

    …and I laughed. A lot.

    And my faith was restored.

    Earlier this week I picked up Blazing Saddles on DVD. This was my favourite Brooks film until I’d seen The Producers, and once again I find myself too scared to watch it. I don’t want to ruin the memory I have of it being a fantastic, funny film. I ruined ThunderCats by going back and re-watching it on DVD. I ruined Mighty Morph’n’ Power Rangers by watching clips of it on YouTube. Somehow clinging on to the nostalgia is more important to me than trying to prove myself that the film was worth watching the first time ’round.

    Y’know what? I think I’ll watch it tonight. Hopefully it’s still funny. Dear Glod, I hope it’s still funny.

  • Jump Leads. Vol 1: Tales From The Flurry – available worldwide!

    Jump Leads Volume 1Following the US release of the book last week, the first Jump Leads collection, Tales From The Flurry, is now available to buy from every international Amazon outlet except China (I guess the ecological message in “It Came From Space!” is just too real for them, or something).

    Here are the links to Amazon’s product pages for the book:

    You can also order the book from The Book Depository, who offer free international shipping.

    We’ll eventually start selling copies of the book from the Jump Leads site once we’ve worked out how the bloody Hell PayPal’s internaional shipping calculator works.

  • Here We Are

    BenPaddon.com is effectively done. All I need to do is get my writing portfolio online (which should be done this week) and get some photos up (which will be done… er… later) and we’re done. Thanks to SupSuper, my Web Gorilla, for making the site work based on my crude design and layout ideas. You should all head over to his blog (and his Twitter page) and moan at him until he starts blogging regularly again. Or not. It’s up to you, really.

    I’m really excited about this site – it’s a brand new way for me to talk about what I’m up to. Which means, if I want to be blogging regularly, I need to be actively doing things. If that isn’t an incentive to get my arse into gear I don’t know what is.

    I’ve spent a lot of time over the past two weeks writing outlines and pilots for two sitcoms, which I intend to pitch later in the year. Before the end of March I hope to have an additional six ideas down, and possibly a seventh – that being another attempt to get Jump Leads onto television. I’m going to try pitching Jump Leads as an animated series, I think. If nothing else, pitching science fiction is already incredibly difficult, but I’m sort-of married to JjAR’s brilliant character and set design for the comic. I’d love to see it realised on the tellybox.

    I’ve spent a fair bit of time talking to people about my idea for a comedy that almost, but not quite, parodies “Vampire with a Heart Of Gold” media such as Twilight, Interview with the Vampire, Angel, Moonlight etc., and everybody agrees I have a fantastic premise but a wobbly story. So I think I shall be scrapping the story and trying to build something new from the ground up. I fear that may take a while, though. I might find myself drawing charts and boxes and things in the near future. I see a late night expedition to a coffee shop, my sleepy frame drooping wearily over a notepad and a laptop, desperating trying to claw a half-decent story out of this idea. If I can’t find one, I might do well to just drop the idea entirely, or give it to another writer who might be able to do it justice. Pity really, as I really like the character I’ve come up with. His name is Jobe. He’s a bastard. Probably the biggest bastard I’ve ever written. Shame.

    Right, I’m going to go away and do something unproductive. I wonder if I can top my Rock Band high score on the bass-line for Muse’ “Hysteria”…