I don’t normally post stuff that really isn’t mine to post, but damned if this isn’t the biggest belly laugh I’ve had in 2006 that wasn’t kitten-induced. Click here to see this clip from The Daily Show with Jon Stewart from September 12th.
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Maybe it’s the heat getting to me, or maybe it’s me putting into database format all those episode guide synopses from back in the day when I was completely and totally enthralled with Star Trek, but so help me, I’m missing my final frontier fix here lately.
With that in mind, I finally broke down, made VCDs of all the New Voyages stuff I’d downloaded, and sat down with my wife to watch some of it recently. Now, if you know that the word “fiddygibber” means, you know that I’m 100% behind the folks who are turning their talents toward telling new tales from the Trek universe. The results…well now, those are mixed. 😆 I’ve been downloading some Hidden Frontiers episodes to check out when I get the chance, and I’m eagerly awaiting the U.S.S. Intrepid fan film, a Scottish-made project, because the pre-release stuff on their site looks cool and hey, I’d just like to see a Star Trek project filled with Scots accents. I didn’t realize, until checking out Wikipedia tonight, that there’s also an active Trek audio drama scene – for the folks who don’t have the budget, the materials, or (and let’s be frank now, because I’m definitely in this category) the physique to make fan films. So there’s something else for me to check out.
There’s something audacious about an amateur project like that, and there’s something perhaps even more daring about stepping up to the plate and taking a swing in someone else’s ballpark, to completely mangle an baseball metaphor when I’m trying to talk about intellectual property. There’s also something called taking it too far, and I’m sure in my explorations of the fan-made media I’ll probably run into that too. (And I’ll know it when I see it, because my own fan-made spoofs from years and years ago crossed that line – believe me, I’ve talked to Robert many times about somehow slipping Jump Cut City onto the web, but the reality of it is…we just can’t do it. We couldn’t do it without getting sued into the 23rd century. Which is why you may not, in fact, know what a fiddygibber is. Well, that, and big wodges of it are just embarrassingly bad in an unintentionally-funny, Star Wars Kid kind of way – we were both 20ish at the time. And acting every bit of 13.)
Seeing folks do this stuff and do it well makes me ache to be among the people putting it together again. (If you want to see what I mean about doing it well, visit newvoyages.com and download Center Seat – it’s a short, self-contained story with original effects and music, and by God, if that shot of the Enterprise leaving spacedock doesn’t make you catch your breath and bring tears to your eyes, you must have pointed ears. And the acting ain’t bad either.) Now, I don’t think anyone needs to see me squeeze my bulbous frame into a Starfleet uniform – I look in the mirror from time to time, and I certainly know that’s not anything I need to see. But it might be fun to be a voice on a speaker somewhere.
So here’s my challenge to anyone working on a fan video or audio project: throw me in there somewhere. Seriously. Just an off-screen voice, even if it’s just one or two lines. I think it’d be fun, between now and whenever Paramount puts the next Star Trek movie on the screen (and hey, if someone wants me to do a voice for that, I can probably find a gap in my schedule), to be a part of any Star Trek fan media project coming out in that time that’ll have me. You guys know where to find me (hint: take my first name, put one of those swirly things after it, and then chase it down with thelogbook.com, and that’s a good start).
Because there was a time when every new Trek project coming down the pike wasn’t on autopilot for lamesville, and a time when, even with two shows on the air every week, you were generally assured of two good episodes a week. I’m sure there are some fan projects that also reside in lamesville, too, and I’ll stumble across them in time – but even if I don’t dig ’em, someone else probably does. So give me a call – all this new Trek ain’t gonna make itself.… Read more
Ya know, it seems like me and about six other people in the world remember this movie. It was a shot-mostly-on-video HBO production, made in Canada and aired in 1984, depicting a series of live news broadcasts about a series of events leading to the first exchange of nuclear weapons between the United States and the Soviet Union – an exchange taking place in, of all locales, the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
I remember seeing this movie played late one Saturday night, after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, on KHBS (ironically, the station I now work for), in 1988 or so. As I was already taping Star Trek, I wound up taping this is well, though something later happened to that tape and it’s long since gone; in any case, it was broken up by commercial breaks in a way that I don’t think, even today, live breaking news of this magnitude ever would be, to say nothing of the constant crawling disclaimer at the bottom that THIS IS ONLY A MOVIE.
The thing is, unlike another “fake newscast” scare favorite of mine, Without Warning,, the fact that it was a movie was blatantly obvious. For whatever reason, the writers and producers decided to go “behind the scenes” and show some personal drama in the newsroom – big whoop. To emphasize the change, these segments were shot on film, giving the whole thing a bizarrely BBC-esque feel (as in Monty Python’s “We’re on feeeeelm suddenly!!”) for something made in North America.
Still, toward the end, it’s got that same great zinger as Without Warning – i.e. showing you all hell breaking loose and then cutting to a faked Emergency Broadcast System signal. Supposedly, Countdown To Looking Glass was based on a real military study of a possible scenario for the opening volleys of WWIII, and the appearance of then-familiar newsies Eric Sevareid and Nancy Dickerson lent it just a little bit of the reality of which that the filmed “drama” segments persistently robbed the proceedings. … Read more
You know, seeing my name printed, in someone else’s ink, on someone else’s dime, simply does not get old*.
It’s a pretty good book overall – expect a full review soon in the book review section. Hopefully that’s not too much of a conflict of interests – I was asked to be a “fact checker” on the book earlier this year, making sure that there weren’t any glaring Star Trek mythology/historical errors that would make the essayists look like they didn’t know what they were talking about. (I found the idea that I was going to be fact-checking David Gerrold, D.C. Fontana, Eric Greene and Norman Spinrad enormously amusing.) I generally like the SmartPop books, and I think this one, personal bias aside, is my favorite to date. And of course – tell me you didn’t see this one coming – you can pick it up in theLogBook.com Store.
* = unless it’s the police reports or obits in the paper.… Read more
So, at long last, the BBC is releasing a soundtrack album for the new Doctor Who. Hooray!…kinda. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll certainly buy a copy, and I look forward to listening to it. But in only two seasons (a total of 27 episodes), dear old Murray Gold has achieved the same effect that it took Christopher Franke about four years to accomplish: he composed a lot of music that I thought was brilliant the first couple of times I heard it, and then reused all of these wonderful pieces to the point that it just completely robbed them of a lot of their power.
Franke did that for me during the fourth season of Babylon 5. Don’t get me wrong, that whole “floor” of my CD shelf that’s wall-to-wall Babylon 5 episodic CDs says it all: I loved me some B5 music. (Same for that shelf below it and one over – the one that’s almost wall-to-wall Doctor Who music spanning from the second story shown in 1963 to the 1996 TV movie.) But Chris Franke started reusing certain bits of music in the fourth season until I just started tuning it out (the music, that is, not the show – you know me better than that).
I’ve interviewed quite a few composers, and in a conversation (not published in any of the interviews on this site), I let my guard down a bit and mentioned my beef with Franke. My interviewee’s response was more or less, “Hey, let’s see you come up with completely new music that doesn’t in any way reference anything you’ve done in the past, or sound similar to it, every week for five years.” And I stood corrected in that opinion – yeah, it’d be next to impossible not to sound like…well…yourself. And as big a fan of TV soundtracks as I am, I will admit that it is a limitation of both the medium and the schedule on which it has to be made. And let’s face it, not a brag here, but I probably listen to television scoring more closely than the average viewer. For the average viewer, the occasional reference in the musical library merely reinforces a consistency of sound, rather than red-flagging a reuse of material.
That said, I’ve loved Murray Gold’s music from day one of the new Doctor Who, and yet I also admit that the Franke Effect is in play. There’s one theme in particular which is rolled out every time Rose experiences some emotional revelation, and by now it’s come up so many times that it’s almost its own cliche. But it’s a beautiful piece of music. Also, for season two, even the cues which were recycled from season one were recorded anew with big, widescreen arrangements by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. (I’ve a feeling that the CD is going to present us with very few, if any, of the all-synth/sampled scores of the first year.)
There have been one-off episodes whose scores, never referenced again, have been brilliant – School Reunion and The Girl In The Fireplace, to name but a couple – and truthfully, the scores have probably all been that brilliant, but like a perfectly good hit song played ad nauseum on the radio, they’ve just been overexposed.
That said, I look forward to the CD. There are plenty of bits that I hope are on it (and I’m hoping like mad that the pleasantly Phil Spector-ish “Song For Ten”, heard at the end of The Christmas Invasion and later referenced toward the end of School Reunion, is among ’em). I hope against hope that anything from the Eccleston season isn’t automatically out of consideration just because no one paid to put a real orchestra in (surely the choral stuff from Dalek / The Parting Of The Ways is grand enough to make the cut, and I liked the theramin-esque version of the End Of The World theme just fine, thanks), and I’d like to add both the Eccleston version of the main theme and the orchestrally heavy Tennant version to that wish list too.
Just look at that. Orchestral Doctor Who music. And to think, people still write off the 1996 McGann movie as a detour? It was more of a road map to the future of the show, like it or not.
Thanks to the readers of this site, I’ve got a few pounds’ store credit laying in wait at Amazon UK, just waiting to pounce on the pre-order for this. If you haven’t been able to tell from the number of music reviews I’ve done from this series and its offshoots, or that huge overview analysis of the music’s influences and styles, or the number of times that a Doctor Who track appears up there in my “now playing” box on this very blog, chances are I’ll still like it.… Read more
Hmmmmmmm.
StarTrek.com has several downloadable versions as wallpaper and AIM icons, and they do indeed acknowledge it as a promotional image for the movie.… Read more
I haven’t done one of my “famous film spaceship” things in a while, so here’s one that I’ve had the pictures sitting around for for ages and just haven’t gotten around to organizing and writing.
Though it seems like the buzz about a J.J. Abrams-produced Star Trek movie is going to put off the inevitable retrospectives of the later movies in the series, I still have to stick with my assessment that, at some point in the future, 1994’s Star Trek: Generations is going to be looked upon as the conceptual jewel in the crown of the TNG movies. It seems like it’s really the only one of the four TNG films to even attempt the exploration of a science fiction idea (in this case the Nexus), even if its treatment of that concept suddenly takes a weird right turn in the last 20 minutes that’s never fully explained (the whole bit with Picard and Kirk apparently simply choosing to leave the Nexus and go back just a li’l bit in time). Malcolm McDowell is certainly the TNG movie villain with the most staying power (but I’m biased, as he’s a favorite actor of mine), and Generations also edges out Nemesis (for killing off Data) and First Contact (for re-inventing the Borg) for having the most lasting impact on Trek fiction as a whole (for killing off Kirk). (I also think a reassessment of the movie’s music is long overdue – as much as I love Jerry Goldsmith’s work, it all started to sound similar toward the end of his Trek tenure, and Generations represents, hands-down, some of the best music Dennis McCarthy ever put in front of an orchestra.)
But Generations is also fascinating for what it shows us. Without revamping the exterior of the Enterprise-D for her final voyage, it presents us with significant changes to the well-worn interior sets. What do all these new additions do, and why? Read on, true believers.
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OK, so…no liftoff just yet. We’ll give it another go this afternoon. Still, my previous comments stand.
And now, for your amusement and delight, a new video feature here in Scribblings. I was recently going through my DVDs of footage recorded at CGE 2003, and run across quite a lengthy romp through Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Not only is it a neat place, but when Mark Holtz and I went there on the Friday night that I arrived in Lost Wages, it was a ghost town – we virtually had the place to ourselves. We also arrived right after the next-to-last group of guests for the evening had just begun the “ride” part of the attraction, so there was plenty of time to grab video and photos of all that Trekkie goodness (including the outlandish prices in the gift store!). It’s spliced into three self-loading flash video segments here – meaning that as each ~4.5 meg segment ends, it autoloads the next segment seamlessly.
Enjoy. And don’t forget to watch that whole real space saga unfolding this afternoon.… Read more
Far back in the mists of ancient time, or in the summer of 2004 to be precise, Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski was approached by Paramount with an eye toward taking over Star Trek: Enterprise’s writing room. He declined the offer, needless to say, though this isn’t necessarily a bad thing – for the most part, I think most fans felt that the fourth season finally saw the show come into its own under the guidance of Manny Coto. But Straczynski did reveal – rather cruelly, I thought! – to Trek and SFTV fans everywhere that he and Dark Skies co-creator Bryce Zabel had collaborated on a pitch for a new Trek series. And Straczynski hinted on several occasions that the idea leaned toward a complete re-imagining of the Trek universe, using many of the same conventions (no pun intended) but removing some of the boundaries that had been erected by Roddenberry, et al. – boundaries which, and this is my opinion, not JMS’, were put in place to rewrite history and make the original series sound more socially important than it was. Let’s be fair, the original series’ ideal world of the future may have been culturally diverse, but the turbolift still smacked into the Glass Ceiling on more than one occasion. Somewhere along the way, one of those barriers that Roddenberry added to the basic tenets of the Trek universe was that our characters don’t argue amonst themselves, at least not in a petty way. But some writers of the spinoff series of the 1980s and 90s interpreted this to mean that everyone got along swimmingly – Deep Space Nine was a refreshing exception – and along with other factors, the life was gradually bled out of the franchise.
But what would Straczynski and Zabel have done differently? … Read more
So…an interesting series of coincidences involving Doctor Who, both on our screens and in our ears, has me putting two and two together. Follow along if you like. …