Month: August 2007

I own every existing full Doctor Who story on VHS. Quite how this happened would require a whole dissertation on the 1996 tornado, a friend of mine in Sacramento, a massive box of tapes, hours of dubbing, whatever happened to all of the “retired” SVHS tapes discarded by Fox 46, and boxes so heavy that their shipping costs rivaled some countries’ gross national debt. I had these tapes long before BBC Video really got with it and made everything from the series available, due to the generosity of my friend Mark, and I’ve been dubbing off the B&W ’60s episodes to DVD-Rs en masse while housecleaning, so I can discard the much bulkier tapes later. Why those particular episodes? With the remainder of this year’s DVD releases almost entirely in the Tom Baker and Peter Davison eras, there seems to be a clear signal that the lower-selling B&W episodes are being put on the back-burner when it comes to DVD releases. Also, I’ve only had to dub three Troughton adventures (The Krotons, The Dominators, The War Games), because almost all of the second Doctor’s complete stories are on the market already (there aren’t that many that are complete and therefore marketable). Somehow I doubt that we’ll be getting The Gunfighters (purportedly the worst episode in the show’s entire history), The Sensorites (the story in which Susan describes her home planet as having orange skies and silver leaves, a description that the new series made sure to follow up on in The Sound Of Drums) or The Romans on DVD anytime soon. I’m popping them into Amaray keep cases with covers by talented fan artists like Simon Holub, Lee Johnson, Thomas Evans and Tom Payne, and slotting them in among the official releases happily.

But what I really love about these, and what I’m preserving carefully alongside the main course of each adventure, is the introductory material produced by Sacramento’s PBS affiliate, KVIE. Three presenters would, on a rotating basis, provide a wealth of background material on each story in about three minutes before the show. I could go on about ogling their meticulously-built TARDIS console, Police Box and Dalek props that appeared on set, but what made these intros so great was the piles of trivia, background and quite frankly educational material layered into each one. Historical stories were given some real-life context, missing episodes were noted (and viewers were encouraged to go check out the novelizations of those stories from the library – a shrewd move that suddenly puts this silly old sci-fi show on the map as an educational item), and ties to the show’s past and future adventures were pointed out. The BBC should be including these on the official releases whenever they deign to release a 1960s story on DVD. The presenters are personable, even if their costumes verge on convention cosplay contest goofiness, and they clearly know their stuff – they’re both knowledgeable Who fans and capable public speakers.

I don’t know where these three, or their more-than-handy prop and stage crews have wound up, but this entry is a salute to all of them. Very, very well done. You guys clearly did this for the love of the show, and that’s what makes this stuff so special.… Read more

Tonight’s uncovered treasure: binders full of Cinefantastique Magazine’s annual Star Trek double issues. CFQ, as it was abbreviated, was a nifty magazine whose editors seemed to espouse an ethos of “we like this stuff, and we say so, but when we see a great big overbaked turkey, we’ll call a spade a spade”. Rob Heyman and I used to eat these issues up, especially when Mark A. Altman took over stewardship after the late 1989 issue. I’m not sure it can be overstated how influential these CFQ issues were on theLogBook.com’s own editorial “outlook.” Back around 1994-95, when theLogBook went through its brief incarnation as a print ‘zine, I’m unafraid to admit that we borrowed CFQ’s 4-star episode rating system and more than a little of Altman’s writing style. (At least for a while – I’m also unafraid to say that this was a “phase” for both of us.) It was the gospel according to Altman, and It Was Good.

Why bother with these when I was waxing rhapsodic just yesterday about Starlog’s official TNG magazines? Altman had a very fair but firm critical approach, and his behind-the-scenes pieces were wonderful warts-and-all profiles. Despite the descriptions of conflicts of personalities, egos, creative agendas and styles, they made both of us want to write for television all the more. Unlike the Starlog magazines, which were vetted by Paramount, CFQ would seek the opinions of pissed-off former TNG writers like Tracy Torme and Herb Wright, who often had perfectly legit axes to grind. Neither of us really exactly wound up going in that direction, but we have both served our time in the trenches of journalism – so Altman may have wound up being more of an influence on our lives than Michael Piller or Ronald D. Moore, though we didn’t realize it at the time.

As wasn’t uncommon for that point in my life (early 90s), I carefully removed the staples from each issue, gently separated the pages, and put each Trek-related page in a page protector in the binders. So these aren’t exactly “intact.” But if anyone’s interested in taking the binders off my hands, give me a shout. The 1989 issue has already been claimed by a friend of mine, but the rest of them (1990-94/95) are up for grabs.… Read more

Today’s blast from the (housecleaning) past – the Starlog Group’s old official Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine magazines. There was a time, before Paramount (disastrously) took the print periodicals in-house, when Starlog held the exclusive license to do these mags, and they were nifty. At the time, Dave McDonnell was editing both the TNG mag and Starlog itself, so there was some crossover material if you read both, but man, if the magazine wasn’t a treasure trove of the studio’s official still photography file, there was no such thing. And now looking back through the old issues, I’m marveling at some of the interviews – they managed to talk to writers who never opened up for interviews again, and they did profile pieces on extras and hand doubles, all really inspirational stuff about how these guys had left the midwest and ditched everything to come to Hollywood, and wound up working full-time as background extras in uniform on TNG. It was all really neat stuff, especially for something very carefully targeted at the young adult audience. It was the only publication I ever read that interviewed Keith Birdsong, who was a local artist whose Trek novel cover artwork was all the rage in the early ’90s. They’d talk to the book authors, comic writers and artists, and whoever they could get a hold of – it was truly a magazine aimed at Trek-as-a-lifestyle. A few years ago, long after I’d given up being enough of a Trek fan to pick up one or two magazines at a time, I picked up Paramount’s official Trek magazine, and while I can comprehend that the franchise had grown (or, perhaps, not grown) to the point where one-publication-per-series was no longer feasible, it just didn’t have the cool factor that the old Starlog mags had. It was all about how this story tied into this non-sequitur reference from an original series episode, etc. etc., and what great Officially Paramount Approved Merchandise was coming out. In other words, it was all about how far up its own ass the Trek franchise was by that point. I don’t know if a Starlog-produced magazine would’ve been any different, but my instinct is that the Starlog mags always seemed to be a little more in touch with what the fans were thinking. Of course, the Starlog mags were also largely pre-internet. Maybe the official Paramount mag was right on the money for earlier this decade.

Why Starlog hasn’t put these things out there on a disc, I have no idea – which is sad because I really need to sell off the magazines to save space, and I’d happily buy a set of CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs with these on them. I went to look Starlog up to see if they still exist, and found they have a website up that would’ve been mighty impressive in 1998 or so. It turns out they’re still selling back issues of these for $7 a pop, so if they’ve got that many copies in the warehouse, maybe I’m overestimating how successful they were just because of the magazines’ impact on my personal landscape. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made that mistake.

Speaking of people who have moved on since Trek, Dennis McCarthy has released a CD of his mid-1990s music from Sliders (link here). So anyone who’s doing their Christmas shopping early, you know what to get me. 😆 … Read more

There’s a really fascinating article here about the “other” creator of Lost – the guy who happens not to be J.J. Abrams or Damon Lindelof whose name shows up under “created by” every week. It’s very interesting, and I feel for his plight of constantly being patted on the back for something that he can’t even stand. Most of us in the lower-than-Hollywood income bracket would probably say “Yeah, but that six-figure income from Lost alone probably helps to mitigate that.” But as an allegedly creative type myself, I can see where it would, in fact, bug the living hell out of me if I were in his shoes.… Read more