I’m currently working on several pieces about the women of X-Men but I couldn’t let this trailer go past.  I think this looks amazing.

Lee is a a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks and writes for Quit Your Day Job.

Connie Chan Po-Chu was Hong Kong cinema’s most beloved teen idol in the sixties. She was born 1947 to impoverished parents and sold to a couple of famous Cantonese opera stars. (No, she’s not a relative of Jackie Chan who’s Chinese name is Chan Kong-Sang) Her career exemplary outlines the development of Hong Kong’s movie productions. She played in over 200 movies in many different genres: Cantonese opera, wuxia, action movies, romances, melodramas and youth musicals. (She even starred as a female James Bond in ‘Lady Bond’ and its three sequels - China’s answer to 007 movies.)

Though she quit the silver screen in 1972 she still has a strong fandom. In 1999 she came back from her retirement and has starred in different successful stage productions. In January this year she was honored with the lifetime achievement Hong Kong Drama Award - kind of Hong Kong’s oscar.

It seems like not one of her movies is available on DVD, so I was happy when I found some very interesting and odd movie clips of Connie at YouTube, just click to watch them and let yourself be carried away to Hong Kong in the sixties:

See happy pilots and flight attendants dancing merrily to a simple tune. This is the first clip I found. It made me wonder if she really worked in Hong Kong - it looks more like propaganda from Peking…

Here she is acting with cartoon characters - seems like electric irons went through times of trouble in the sixties.

See Connie Chan and Lydia Shum singing the Chinese version of the Monkee’s hit ‘I’m a believer’.

Here’s a typical Cantonese Opera movie: ‘Flag of Pearls’. The male part is played by Connie.Here are two interesting fansites: Movie-Fan Princess and in Chinese: Chan Po-Chu Net.

This article first appeared at The In-Sect 

Zep Hopper lives near Munich, Bavaria, Germany. He was born 1964, has a family and worked as a media designer for over twenty years now. Zep saw the rise and fall of DOS, Basic, the Newton, multimedia CD-ROMs and of Web 1.0 and naturally is a little sceptic about Web 2.0, but thinks the Internet is a place full of wonders and surprises. Zep says that the internet is as huge and multifaceted as humankind itself. It is as unpredictable and chaotic as life itself. It is the greatest picture that humans ever painted about being alive as homosapiens. Its main color is pop culture: The language and symbols we all learned as children. This diversity, these colors, these emotions are exhibited day by day at the In-Sects site. Seeing is believing.

B’Elanna comes to us via the long Star Trek tradition started by Spock in the original series.

The hybrid.

Spock of course being half human half Vulcan, Deanna Troi continued on the tradition in the Nex Generation being half human half Betazoid which brings us to B’Elanna Torres. Now both Troi and Spock are interesting in that their human halves are the part of them that is the most emotional or unrestrained. B’Elanna has the opposite problem, she struggles to maintain her human traits and fights to suppress her other heritage, Klingon.

Of all the main characters on Voyager it is B’Elanna who takes the most interesting journey during the seven year series. She drops out of Starfleet Academy when she is 19, joins the Maquis (a renegade organisation who fight against the Cardassians) and finally is forced to return to Starfleet after the Voyager’s chief engineer is killed and she is eventually put into the role. Here she clashes with Captain Janeway, earns the respect of the crew, takes on responsibility, marries Tom Paris and gives birth to their daughter whilst in the middle of a Borg transwarp conduit! Heck of a seven years.

I think one of the more compelling story lines involving Torres was her decision to use gene therapy on her unborn child to ensure that she would not have the same cranial ridges that Torres herself carries. When she was young she found it hard to control her ‘klingon’ violent outbursts when being teased about her appearance. I must say though I’m fairly certain most children would be capable of outbursts when taunted with the term ‘turtlehead’ although probably don’t have the Klingon strength to back it up.

Towards the end of Voyager we see Torres beginning to accept and celebrate her Klingon heritage. One of the things I liked about the character was that a reason was developed for her rejecting her Klingon half instead of just accepting it. Her parents would fight when she was younger and she always believed that her human father was driven away because of her mother being Klingon. Not her mother as a person but Klingon itself being too hard to live with.

She is a complex driven character and a strong addition to the Trek universe. As Roxann Dawson herself puts it:

“She was an unruly teenager who grew into a woman, over the course of seven years.”

Lee is a a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks and writes for Quit Your Day Job.

I have a love hate relationship with Seven of Nine or Seven as I’ll refer to her throughout the remainder of this article. She is certainly one of the more interesting characters to be produced in the Star Trek universe with a world of potential story telling and character deconstruction. She is also unfortunately and I don’t believe through Jeri Ryan’s own fault at all a representation of the poorer side of the Star Trek universe’s approach to women.

I’ll get my main gripe out of the way immediately.

The catsuit.

The skin tight obvious ploy at attracting twelve to one hundred year old boys. The most uncomfortable looking costume in Star Trek (this is before T’Pol’s time well kinda if you forget that it’s a prequel and… enough of that my head is going to hurt). For a supposedly enlightened television series in its approach towards diversity and gender Star Trek still has a lot of way to go in how it treats the way women dress in the 24th century. Uhura and the mini skirted women of Star Trek the original series were a product of their time and in their own way because of the times they were liberated, but that’s no excuse now and I’m not going to dwell on this point except to say as a male I’m slightly offended that Star Trek doesn’t think that intelligent strong women appropriately dressed would be attractive enough. End of rant.

Seven herself though is this extraordinary complex character that represents so much of what we all go through. She is the ultimate outsider, foreign to her own people, feared by them and incredibly sheltered. Seven was born Annika Hansen and was assimilated into the Borg at the age of 6.

The Borg violate, they rape, they brainwash.

When the Borg assimilate an individual into the collective they take every part of that individuality and strip you of any privacy. Your body is invaded with Borg technology and twisted to the requirements of the Borg. Nothing is yours.
This all happened to Seven when she was a child and she is reminded of it every time she looks into a mirror or down at her Borg encrusted hand.

It is fortunate that she was rescued by the Voyager ‘family’. Had she been taken in by another crew the results could have been disastrous. It is the family bonds of the Voyager crew that help Seven become more comfortable with herself. She has swapped one collective for another but one that respects the rights of the individual and during her time on the ship she is healed both physically and mentally.

The real joy watching Seven is how she interacts with the crew especially with Naomi Wildman the first child born on Voyager, in many ways Seven was reborn on Voyager herself. It’s also interesting to see her come full circle when Voyager takes on some children who have been assimilated and then separated from the collective. Seven assumes the role model / motherly figure that Janeway served as for her.

This is part two of a three part series examining the women of Voyager - you can read the first part here. 

Lee is a a huge popular culture freak, loves comic books, science fiction, soundtracks and writes for Quit Your Day Job.