Balladeer’s Blog’s end of year retrospective continues with this look at March’s best:
MANDY (2018): NICOLAS CAGE IN THE ROLE HE WAS BORN TO PLAY – Cage always brings the crazy and this wild, hyper-stylized and ultra-violent horror film showcases him at his psychotic best. Click HERE.
A STORY OF THE YEAR 2236 (1900): ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION – Neglected Space Opera about humanity’s rise to an interstellar empire followed by a cataclysmic war with an alien race. Click HERE.
DEMOCRATS BLOCK CORONAVIRUS AID PACKAGE – More callous playing with lives by the combined Nazis and Mafia of our time. Click HERE.
TWENTY DJANGO MOVIES – The 20 best Django movies from before Quentin Tarantino’s reboot. Click HERE.
SHAKEM AKHET: DEMOCRATS DO NOTHING FOR BLACK VOTERS – A Martin Luther King Person of Courage praises de facto Third Party President Trump and his accomplishments for communities of color. Click HERE.
ROBERT LUDLUM EXPANDED UNIVERSE – Television series like Beowulf Agate, Operation: Medusa and one set in the dystopian future from the end of The Holcroft Covenant. Click HERE.
THE STRANGER (1991-1995) – Colin Baker’s science fiction series in which he was the Doc – I mean the Stranger … yeah, that’s it … the Stranger. Click HERE.
FINAL FOUR AND ELITE EIGHT BASKETBALL – At least a few college divisions got to play their national tournaments this year. Click HERE.
TWENTY BOOKS ABOUT THE OBAMA PRESIDENCY’S SCANDALS AND FAILURES – Only imbeciles would believe that ANY presidential administration was “scandal free” (LMAO). Click HERE.
TWENTY JAMES GARNER MOVIES: Some of the underrated actor’s best work: movies 1-10 and movies 11-20.
ALL THAT GLITTERS (1977) – A long-forgotten soap opera set on a parallel Earth where women were in charge and men were the sex objects. Click HERE.
A ROUND TRIP TO THE YEAR 2000 (1903): ANCIENT SCIENCE FICTION – Long before Doc Brown and Marty McFly came this science fiction tale of time travel via a souped-up automobile. Click HERE. Continue reading
Reader Daniel Kibblesmith requested this item about how I’d treat an expanded universe from Robert Ludlum’s espionage novels. Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’m about responding to you readers. I had sprinkled my reviews of Robert Ludlum’s Top Seven Novels with observations of what I would have liked to see in terms of offshoots or spin-off stories. So, since Expanded Universes are becoming all the rage in recent decades here’s an outline of my fan fiction-style view of an Expanded Robert Ludlum Universe.
I. BEOWULF AGATE – Series of short stories or a made for cable series. The tales would be set from the 1950s to late 1970s, ending just before the events in The Matarese Circle. Ludlum’s fictional intelligence organization Consular Operations would take center stage.
II. OPERATION: MEDUSA – Another series of short stories or a made for cable series. Ludlum’s Operation: Medusa was his fictional version of the Vietnam War’s real-life Phoenix Project. Operation: Medusa was the top-secret, paramilitary Black Operations outfit in which David Webb aka Jason Bourne got his first covert experience. 
Here at Balladeer’s Blog I’m about responding to you readers. Some of you responded very strongly to the way I sprinkled my reviews of Robert Ludlum’s Top Seven Novels with observations of what I would have liked to see in terms of offshoots or spin-off stories. So, since Expanded Universes are becoming all the rage in recent decades here’s an outline of my fan fiction-style view of an Expanded Robert Ludlum Universe. 