Short Circuit 2

Five Craziest Royal Visits to California!

4. Princess Diana Faints: Technically, William's beloved mother passed out in Vancouver, but she did so while touring the California exhibition at the 1986 World's Fair there, so close enough. And, for the record, the incident wasn't spurred by anything California did, per se—you know, like, launch a fake shark at her or something.

5. Prince Charles Gets Totally Dissed: In 1974, William's father, then a bachelor on active military duty, took shore leave in Palm Springs.

Science fiction for kids (Short Circuit 2, *Batteries Not Included ...

The Internet is choked with nostalgia for the youth-oriented entertainments of the not-too-distant past: Tumblr blogs regurgitating images of half-forgotten toys. YouTube compilations of long-lost TV-show intros. Countless blogs playing “Remember when?” with movies and video games whose rose-colored recollections aren’t always properly earned. With Memory Wipe,  The A.V. Club   takes a look back at some of our formative favorites with clearer eyes and asks that all-important question: Were they really that great to begin with?

George Lucas still had massive reserves of goodwill to burn in the fallout from Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace , and he went about doing so in a spectacular manner in a July 1999 interview with the BBC. Under fire for juvenile slapstick in the form of Jar-Jar Binks, the director fired back with an argument more powerful than he could possibly imagine: “These movies are for children but [the fans] don’t want to admit that.”

Considering that Lucas was being simultaneously harangued for sullying the childhood memories of an entire generation, this deflection seems off-point. But it also reinforces an unfortunate misperception about science fiction: Namely, that the genre is strictly kids’ stuff. Lucas came up during an era when movie serials, comic books, and pulp novels cemented this notion, but he was also a member of the filmmaking generation that tore it down. The original Star Wars trilogy was a financial smash, and while much of that was driven by younger audience members lusting after various plastic representations of Luke Skywalker, a movie franchise goes nowhere if its entire audience isn’t old enough to drive.

That said, many post- Star Wars sci-fi did seek to appeal to children first, ranging from derivative works (the Roger Corman -produced cheapie Battle Beyond The Stars ; Disney’s The Black Hole ) to films that managed to put their own spin on the adventurous spirit and technical innovations of Lucas’ blockbuster. More often than not, the films in that latter category brought the action down from the stars and into the suburbs, repositioning cul-de-sacs and subdivisions as locations with as much potential for fantastical stories as a distant galaxy or the not-too-distant future.

Short circuit 2

Webster's two new college dictionary

The World Book Dictionary

Power system analysis, short-circuit load flow and harmonics

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