Cirrus@Austlit

Spellbinder II: Land of the Dragon Lord is something of a sequel to the earlier Spellbinder, also written by Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson. However, the only recurring characters are Spellbinder's antagonist Ashka and her offsider.

In this series, teenager Kathy Morgan is, like Paul in the original series, pulled into a different world: however, where Paul is pulled into an alternative Europe in which the Industrial Revolution never happened, Kathy is pulled into an alternative China (the land of the Dragon Lord), in which the empire is controlled by advanced technology. She finds enemies not only in the land of the Dragon Lord, but also in Ashka's world (the original world of the Spellbinders).

Spellbinder II was the last major collaboration (thus far) between Mark Shirrefs and John Thomson, who had previously collaborated on such important Australian science-fiction and fantasy children's television programs as The Girl from Tomorrow, The Girl from Tomorrow Part II, and Spellbinder.

'A young dancer witnesses a mass drowning tragedy at a beach and has to watch one young man die on the sand despite intense efforts to save him.

'Her distress turns to abject fear and confusion, however, when she learns these events actually took place some 45 years before.

'A clever, offbeat mystery, Kindred Spirits links two actual catastrophes in this fictional story about a young woman caught between reality and a strange tie with the past.'

Source: ABC (http://www.abc.net.au/abccontentsales/s1169477.htm). Sighted: 1/6/2012).

Little is known of this film, which won the inaugural Ditmar Award for Dramatic Presentation (where it was up against A Clockwork Orange, Slaughterhouse Five, and Tales from the Crypt.

A passing reference to it in Bruce Gillespie’s Fan Guest of Honour Speech at Aussiecon Three (2 September 1999) [republished in Scratch Pad 34, October 1999] tells us that it was made by John Litchen in 1972 and included footage of the contemporary Melbourne fan scene.