Star Trek

[Geo]

The whistled song at the end of the trailer was good. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Y'know, the IDEA "Starfleet Academy" for a movie has been mooching around for about 45 years, which is pretty lame. 

-However, I can spot nothing objectionable, even The Doctor - and I didn't spot, but commentors said something about Admiral Kim --- he finally got promoted above Ensign, apparently...

I anticipate significant backlash over the new show, led by people who mostly enjoy the attention they can farm by claiming to be offended, and to a lesser extent by people who take special delight in complaining whenever anything isn't explicitly designed to cater to their interests.

Do I love the premise of a show about Starfleet Academy? No. Do I think Star Trek is at its most interesting when it tells the story of a starship and its crew? Yes. Do I think it's a mortal sin to innovate and build on a beloved intellectual property to try something new? No. Is social commentary bad? No. In fact, that's what Star Trek has always been--even if it sometimes fell short.

As for the Khan show, I'm excited about the possibility. I do hope it isn't a fan production, which can be very hit or miss. I love two of the fan-casted audio dramas but haven't enjoyed the cast-made materials of which Russ, Picardo, and Ryan have all been a big part. I find a lot of the acting for those shows to be extremely wooden. I was excited to buy a copy of Star Trek: Renegades, only to be put off what I felt were terrible, un-expressive performances. Ironically, I think a lot of fan efforts fail because their amateur actors don't look the part, whereas Renegades failed because the characters didn't sound the part.

I think as long as Khan stays away from trying to delve too deeply into a story about the alternate 1990s, it will be okay. Much as I'm a fan of alternate history, I really like that Star Trek pulls me far, far away from anything too approachable.

The unexplored segments of the Star Trek timeline between TOS and TNG are really prime material because there's so much that can be done before we get a much more definitive set of boundaries about what has happened in the universe.

I agree with every single thing you say, except about Renegades which was made of bad ideas and limp execution, but sorta worked, taken as a pilot for a series -which is what they explicitly intended, and few fans reacting accounted for- and also the best Chekov story ever put to film.  I talked about this at length years ago when it came out, if you want to dig it up or ask me to.

As I've also said before, a real pity nobody ever pulled together a Captain Sulu show animated after he got too old for live.  -See also a Riker and Troi Starship Titan show, Walter Koenig and Will Wheaton both being eternally available for the respective efforts.  Possibly too late for even that much, now.

[Buster's Uncle]

Fan production videos have tended towards 'look like Star Trek über Allies' over other fundamentals like good script and acting and directing - and that's the semi-pro stuff like Phase 2 and Continues -and Gods and Men and Renegades that Russ produced- not just including all the minor ones that looked so much of fans wearing costumes and everyone in the club got at least a line, and some of which were surprisingly good anyway.

Better writing, better writing, better writing - I hear that doesn't apply to Strange New Worlds, but it does to everything else 'ST' since (talking about official stuff, too, now) 1982 with which I am familiar.

[Buster's Uncle]

Here is the entirety of Princess Of The Nile starring Jeffrey Hunter and the dancing of the Divine Miss Debra Paget.

Watch the scene beginning at 24:00, and I DARE YOU not to be reminded of an iconic scene from Star Trek undisputedly inspired by this.

[Buster's Uncle]

AAHHH!

You can still watch it on YouTube at the link, but I WILL find a vid of the scene that works.

[Buster's Uncle]

-24 minutes in, and the movie is worth sitting through just for the crazy-hotness of the Divine Miss Debra Paget.  I'm not kidding.

-Note also Kang actor -and former Barbara Eden husband- Michael Ansara in the house as Michael Rennie's sidekick.

It IS also required homework for Star Trek fans, just like the old 30s Flash Gordon serials are for Star Wars, and I never heard of another ST fan discovering this...

[Buster's Uncle]

And just as a reminder:

I find it interesting -and no one ever mentions- how deliberately and resoundingly repellent Pike's table companions are.  The point of the illusion being to tempt Pike, this is a puzzling and stupid phail on the part of the Talosians...

[Geo]

Watch the scene beginning at 24:00, and I DARE YOU not to be reminded of an iconic scene from Star Trek undisputedly inspired by this.

Whom Gods destroy?

[Buster's Uncle]

Points for getting the other green-girl-dancing episode right --- but maybe I been calling the wrong friend Jokemonkey...

[Geo]

Points for getting the other green-girl-dancing episode right --- but maybe I been calling the wrong friend Jokemonkey...

To be fair, I don't remember the episode's title, just the fact of a green-skinned Orion in TOS. And YouTube is of course a big help.

[Buster's Uncle]

Vina and Pike were in The Menagerie, of course.

[Buster's Uncle]

One MAJOR criticism I've never mentioned online, I think, about post-Star Trek "Star Trek"? 

No Shakespeare or chess.

Part of the fundamental intellectual pretense signaling that Star Trek was an example of everyone involved trying to do their best work in a genre showbidness scorned as kid-stuff so universally -with three exceptions I mention shortly- was episode titles -and sometimes plots- from Shakespeare, or at least the phrasing style - and frequent glimpses of characters playing space-chess, not all Spock.  It was their way of saying "we mean this for grownups".

Maybe that wasn't needed by 1986, but it WAS a stylistic departure, a very distinct and marked one.

THIS, on the other hand, is a trailer for 1956 SF cinema classic Forbidden Planet - It's remembered all these years later in the same breath as The Day the Earth Stood Still and This Island Earth as quality SF movies of the fifties, the only ones I could name for you.

See this is Star Trek.  I'ver never see anyone admit it as an inspiration -and I daresay my ST scholarship is good enough I would have- but it HAD to be.  The story is The Tempest in space, and AI could replace Lesley Neilson with Jeffery Hunter, replace the X-1 saucer with the Enterprise and the Galileo Seven, make the uniforms The Cage/The Menagerie-consistent, and do no violence to the plot or even the dialogue save changing some names, and then it's literally Star Trek, a perfect fit.  -See also Requiem for Methuselah, when Star Trek itsownself actually did The Tempest.

Forbidden Planet was actually better than that episode.

[Buster's Uncle]

This is what I burned off my time on yesterday.   If you recall Valjiir1 mostly from the Valjiir thread, this is going to make her day.

[Buster's Uncle]

I left out War of the Worlds(1953) above as quality pre-ST SF on film.  It was more or less that.

[Buster's Uncle]

Back on Forbidden Planet:

This one is about the production of the film and twice asserts that Gene Roddenberry acknowledged it as an influence.  ...I do have a fuzzy memory, come to think of it, that someone placed him seeing the movie, maybe the These are the Voyages books of roughly 10 years ago?

---

This vid is perhaps the best I've found at giving a feel for the content of the actual movie, and some context as to the poor state of screen SF, and the wide-reaching influence of the film afterwards: