Floyd M. Riddick (July 13, 1908 – January 25, 2000) was a Parliamentarian of the United States Senate from 1964 to 1974, and is most famous for developing Riddick's Senate procedure. He sat immediately below the presiding officer in the Senate chamber, providing information on precedents and advising other senators on parliamentary procedure. He is famous for discussions of the censures of Joseph McCarthy and Thomas Dodd, the contested election between John A. Durkin and Louis Wyman, and the preparations for a planned impeachment trial of Richard Nixon. He is also famous for advocating the change in the rules of cloture.
Floyd M. Riddick was born in Trotville, North Carolina in an agrarian area. His father was a farmer and merchant who did not finish primary school. Floyd Riddick's ancestor, Lemuel Riddick, was one of the signers of the Stamp Act passed by the House of Burgesses of Virginia. Riddick's family lived on a village, Gatesville, North Carolina. After his father became ill, in 1928, Riddick moved to Suffolk, Virginia. After finishing high school, Floyd M. Riddick attended Duke University and received the Bachelor of Arts degree. He was originally majoring in pre-law but then switched his major to political science after a talk with an influential professor, Robert Rankin. He then received a Masters Degree at Vanderbilt University in 1932, and returned to Duke to receive his Ph.D. in political science in 1935. While researching his doctoral dissertation, he spent a year observing the workings of the United States House of Representatives, a study which he eventually expanded and published as Congressional Procedure in 1941.
Richard B. Riddick, more commonly known as Riddick, is a fictional character and the antihero of four films in the Riddick series (Pitch Black, The Chronicles of Riddick, the animated movie The Chronicles of Riddick: Dark Fury, and Riddick), as well as the two video games The Chronicles of Riddick: Escape from Butcher Bay and The Chronicles of Riddick: Assault on Dark Athena. Actor Vin Diesel has played the title role in all of the Riddick-based films and video games so far.
Within the canon of the series, Riddick is shown to be a highly skilled predator—he is extremely mobile and stealthy - especially for someone of his size, has a vast knowledge of how to kill almost any humanoid in a variety of ways, is an extreme survivalist, and is notoriously hard to contain. He is also self-admittedly a dangerous convict and murderer—yet despite this, he is sometimes shown to perform moral or even atypically heroic actions, usually against his own better judgment and survivalist nature.
Riddick is a Furyan, a member of a warrior race obliterated by a military campaign that left Furya desolate, and is one of the last of his kind. One of his most defining features are his eyes, a characteristic inherent in a certain caste of his species (The Alpha-Furyans), although he implies in Pitch Black that they were "shined" by a back-alley surgical operation. This allows him to see in the dark with no difficulty at all, but also renders his eyes incredibly sensitive to concentrated light, therefore he wears tinted welding goggles for protection.
Riddick is the protagonist of several science fiction movies and video games.
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The Chronicles of Riddick, also simply called Riddick, is a science fiction action media franchise created in 2000 by David Twohy spanning three live-action feature films, a direct-to-DVD animated film, two video games for PC and consoles, one motion comic, one mobile game, and two novelizations.
The series follows the adventures of antihero character Riddick (either portrayed or voiced by Vin Diesel) in the 28th century. The Chronicles of Riddick fictional universe was initially created with the release of Pitch Black, which was written by director Twohy, Ken Wheat, and his brother Jim Wheat. Since then Twohy has written and directed the two live action sequels and was involved in the development of the storyline of a number of the franchise's offshoots.
The first installment of the franchise, Pitch Black, was a lower budget production compared to the later ones. The story involved Riddick being transported to prison on the Hunter Gratzner, a commercial cargo ship. When the spaceship is damaged in the wake of a comet and makes an emergency crash landing on an isolated desert planet, Riddick escapes. However, when flying creatures begin attacking all the survivors, Riddick joins forces with the others to escape the planet. After the release of the sequel titled The Chronicles of Riddick, in the hopes of building a franchise, this film has often been referred to as The Chronicles of Riddick: Pitch Black in subsequent home video re-releases. It received mixed reviews but today is considered a cult classic.