Entertainment
How Sci-Fi’s Greatest Master Trashed His Reputation With One Space Movie
By Joshua Tyler
| Published
America loves convenience. After all, we’re the culture that invented the cell phone, 24-hour fast food, and my most beloved, the remote control.
In 2001, in what was meant to be his final effort as a filmmaker, one iconic director took his love of convenience too far. That director was John Carpenter. That John Carpenter. The genius mastermind behind The Thing, Escape from New York, Starman, and They Live!.
Why John Carpenter’s Ghosts Of Mars Failed
Ghosts of Mars stars 90s VHS rental icon Natasha Henstridge as a tough-as-nails, pill-popping, Martian cop, sent with her squadron to retrieve ‘Demolition’ Williams (Ice Cube) from a remote mining town for trial back home. When she and her comrades, appropriately dubbed ‘The Commander’ (screen icon Pam Grier), ‘The Rookies,’ and the guy with the cool accent (a not-yet-famous Jason Statham) discover the town’s residents slaughtered, they are forced to team up with Williams to escape from the remaining residents’ head-chopping, alien-possessed clutches.
Filled with a lovely overuse of storytelling flashbacks, flash-sideways, and viewpoint changes, Ghosts of Mars is a hapless mishmash of poorly constructed dialogue and ill-conceived action sequences. The only thing keeping this film from becoming an incomprehensible mess is the sheer idiotic simplicity of its story. Ripped straight from the pages of a 1970s zombie movie, Ghosts leaps from one convenient moment to the next, stopping only to kill the most convenient characters to lose.
Attempts at character interaction and development are rare and forced. Most of these moments come off as Kwik-E-Mart wisdom, dispensed heartily around the Slushee machine of life by the even-tempered streetwise hand of Ice Cube. With a gun in one hand and a dynamite cap in the other, Cube reminisces about his street life, comparing the zombie-stomping fun to ‘Me and my brother when we was kids.’ Apparently, crime in the Bronx has gotten so bad that the residents have actually taken to ritually decapitating one another for entertainment.
But, even in the film’s darkest moments, fate conveniently lends a hand, supplying heavily armored transportation and easily accessible rifles and dynamite. Yes, in the future, man may travel to space and conquer Mars, but nothing beats a good stick of TNT. As we all know, every police station, past, present, or future, keeps a healthy supply of dynamite on hand.
Characters die, heads are lopped off, but they were only supporting roles anyway, so why should we care? As long as you have plenty of narcotics, immunity is guaranteed. Eventually, though, even the most well-trained zombie alien gets a bit uppity and needs to be taught a lesson.
What better way than by sacrificing a few minor characters to a convenient nuclear detonation, killing anything the machine guns can’t handle. Explosions are fun. And even if the nukes don’t get them, the conveniently placed dynamite packs on the train stolen from the set of The Road Warrior certainly will.
Ghosts of Mars defines itself when our cop’s tribunal pronounces, ‘Is that all you have to tell us?’ Indeed, this was the place where master filmmaker John Carpenter ran out of things to say and instead decided to use whatever was convenient to tell a ridiculously bad story.
GHOSTS OF MARS REVIEW SCORE
Ghosts Of Mars Ended John Carpenter’s Career
Released on August 24, 2001, the film grossed just $14 million worldwide against a $28 million budget, marking it a significant box office disappointment. Worst of all, nearly everyone hated it. Ghosts of Mars holds a 23% rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Audiences were similarly unimpressed, awarding it a C− grade on CinemaScore.
John Carpenter stepped away from the camera for nearly ten years after the failure of Ghosts of Mars. He returned for one last movie called The Ward in 2010, but it was received with little fanfare. Ghosts of Mars was the real endpoint for the directing career of the man who gave us some of the best sci-fi ideas of all time.
After Ghosts of Mars, Carpenter moved into the music business. Music has always been one of his passions, which is why the sound in his movies is so unique. Doing what he loves is the perfect way for an icon to spend his later years. Now, do your best to forget about Ghosts of Mars.
Entertainment
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for July 21, 2026
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you’re a theater kid.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that’s captured the public’s attention. The game is all about finding the “common threads between words.” And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we’ve served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today’s puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today’s Connections solution. But if you’d rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
What is Connections?
The NYT‘s latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications’ Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there’s only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Mashable Top Stories
Here’s a hint for today’s Connections categories
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today
Here are today’s Connections categories
Need a little extra help? Today’s connections fall into the following categories:
Looking for Wordle today? Here’s the answer to today’s Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today’s puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today’s Connections #1136 is…
What is the answer to Connections today
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Kinds of tops: CROP, HALTER, TANK, TUBE
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Software downloads: APP, DRIVER, EXTENSION, PLUGIN
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Elements of a musical: BOOK, LYRICS, MUSIC, ORCHESTRATION
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Tele___: GRAM, KENESIS, PROMPTER, VISION
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today’s puzzle.
If you’re looking for more puzzles, Mashable’s got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you’re after? Here’s the solution to yesterday’s Connections.
Entertainment
Star Trek’s Greatest Writers Thought The Best Episode Would Be A Disaster
By Chris Snellgrove
| Updated
One of the most fascinating things about insanely talented writers is that they are typically overly critical of their greatest works. Sometimes, this is because they lack confidence in themselves and worry that everything (no matter how successful) could always be better. Other times, it’s simply because they were writing under a tight deadline and became convinced they could have done better if they only had more time. This actually happened to some of the greatest writers of Star Trek: The Next Generation when they were working on one of the show’s best episodes: “Yesterday’s Enterprise.”
These days, fans look back on this episode as a defining episode of the series, one that demonstrated how much potential TNG really had. At the time, though, the writers (including future Deep Space Nine showrunner Ira Steven Behr and future Battlestar Galactica showrunner Ronald D. Moore) feared that the episode would be a disaster because they had to work over Thanksgiving and turn a completed script in by the end of the weekend. However, the sheer quality of the episode proved one thing once and for all: if there’s anything these guys can do, it’s work well under pressure!
Star Trek Into Darkness (Literally)
Why did the writers for “Yesterday’s Enterprise” have to work on the episode over Thanksgiving? This had everything to do with the episode’s special guest stars, Denise Crosby and Whoopi Goldberg. Crosby’s character had been killed off back in Season 1, so she was busy with other projects during filming for Season 3. Meanwhile, Goldberg was a big-deal movie star who only appeared on Star Trek because she loved the franchise so much. The episode was originally going to be written after Christmas, but to accommodate both actors’ schedules, the writers had to suddenly have a completed script by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.
According to the reference book The Making of Yesterday’s Enterprise, Ira Steven Behr said that the writers (which included himself, Ronald D. Moore, Hans Beimler, and Richard Manning) were understandably grumpy about having to work over a holiday weekend. In order to get the episode done under the deadline, each writer was given a different portion of the script to handle. For example, Moore was the main guy handling the romance between Tasha Yar and the time-displaced Richard Castillo.
Dropping Everything For Some Very Special Guest Stars
Despite having a game plan, they feared the episode would suck; according to Star Trek: The Next Generation–The Continuing Mission, Eric Stillwell (who developed the story) claimed, “Most of the writers were not very happy with the script. They thought it was going to be horrible, because they don’t like having to write [something] and make it work in three days.” However, these writers embraced a silver lining: they finally got to write the kind of dark, tension-filled episode that various Trek bigwigs (notably, Gene Roddenberry himself) always rejected. Fortunately, their hard work paid off, and “Yesterday’s Enterprise” became the third highest-watched episode of the entire series.
It’s hard to understate the influence of “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” which became a favorite episode of Denise Crosby, Rick Berman, and episode director David Carson. It won an Emmy and was voted the best episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation on six different occasions. And, for better or for worse, Roberto Orci later said this episode was the primary influence of Star Trek (2009), which kickstarted the Kelvinverse. Ironically enough, though, this insanely successful and influential TNG episode was written by four annoyed writers over three days, all of whom thought it would be completely awful and just wanted to eat some leftover turkey!
Entertainment
Raunchy 1970s Cult Classic Changed Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi Forever
By Jonathan Klotz
| Updated
The 70s was an odd time for sci-fi movies. On the one hand, the genre had broken free of the generic 50s mad scientist/monster movies and a new wave of filmmakers was experimenting with stories that pushed the envelope. On the other hand, those wild experiments sometimes got a little weird. Case in point 1975’s A Boy and His Dog, which follows Vic and his telepathic dog Blood wandering a post-apocalyptic wasteland as they search for food, and more importantly, women. Streaming for free on Tubi and Amazon Prime, it’s an unlikely inspiration for both Fallout and Mad Max, while a time capsule of what sci-fi was like before Star Wars changed everything.
A Boy And His Dog And His Libido
A Boy and His Dog stars Don Johnson as Vic, and Tim McIntire as the voice of Blood. The two constantly bicker as any two male best friends do. Blood’s ability to sniff out women is of incredible importance to the horny and lonely Vic, who after saving one girl, Quilla June (Susanne Benton) from mutants and finally getting laid again, decides to follow her to Downunder, a secret society beneath the surface that’s a near utopia compared to the nuclear blasted wasteland.
Unfortunately, Blood remains on the surface and none of the human characters can match his dry wit. It’s there, in the subterranean version of Topeka, that Vic learns he’ll achieve his dream of copulation thanks to a high “stud rating,” except he’ll be “sent to the farm” after impregnating 35 women. Worse, it’s all done through electrodes, and that more than anything is what spurs Vic to escape Topeka.
A Faithful Adaptation Of A Sci-Fi Legend
It’s a weird plot, but it’s also a rather faithful adaptation of the novella, A Boy and His Dog by the sci-fi icon Harlan Ellison. The biggest change was a few lines of dialogue that make the film more, according to Ellison, misogynistic than his novel ever was. It wasn’t enough to stop the film from becoming an immediate cult classic. It would never, ever be made today. Johnson’s performance, which makes it pretty clear that Vic can be outsmarted by everyone he comes across, goes so far as to start flipping the script.
The influence A Boy and His Dog had on Fallout is immediately clear. Vic calls Blood “Dogmeat,” Downunder is essentially a Vault-Tec experiment, and the complete breakdown of society’s old order explains why something as mundane as bottle caps became currency in the games. Who knew a black sci-fi comedy about a horny survivor would influence one of the best post-apocalyptic series of all time?
A Boy and His Dog bombed in theaters, but once it became a cult classic, work started on a sequel. Instead of Vic, it would follow a female survivor named Spike and of course, Blood, the real hero of the series. Nine years after he brought Vic to life, Don Johnson starred in Miami Vice and changed television forever. If you ever wanted to see Sonny Crockett as a horny scavenger, A Boy and His Dog is your chance.
A Boy and His Dog is streaming for free on Tubi, Amazon Prime Video, Pluto TV, Plex, and YouTube.
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NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for July 21, 2026
