Star Trek, Part 1

One of my earliest memories is of watching the "Operation: Annihilate!" episode of Star Trek--what people now call Star Trek the Original Series. Since it was broadcast on April 13, 1967, I was only two and a half years old. The show was very appealing to a young child such as myself because there were lots of garish colors, both in the uniforms and the sets. I remember my mother babysitting for a pair of twins named Matt and Mark, and they had shirts with traffic lights on their left breasts. I used to call them their Star Trek shirts. I had one with a bear on the left breast, but the shirt was black so it didn't qualify.

In the 1970s, Star Trek made a big comeback in syndication. Daily reruns allowed those of us in Mrs. Burkholder's third grade class to discover Star Trek's imaginitive adventure and to recreate it in pretend play. We used to take the cardboard backs of our notebooks and draw phasers and communicators on them. Then we would cut them out with scissors and use them as props on the playground at recess. We were even more excited when the cartoon began that fall, as if it had given us license to create our own Star Trek adventures. We loved the fights, the ray guns, and the action of Star Trek. We didn't get that the point of science fiction was to create allegory and parables from which to learn, but the show gave us plenty of excitement nonetheless.

My brother and I, on one of our trips to our grandparents' house, received matching Mego action figures of Kirk and Spock, and together we had many adventures on distant planets. I don't know how many times we re-enacted "Amok Time," but it counted in the hundreds. We also got one of the first trade paperbacks when we found the Enterprise Logs in a bookstore. The trade reprinted the old Gold Key Star Trek series. We read that thing dog-eared.

For Christmas in 1976, Jeff and I got matching phaser pistols from our father. They were the coolest toys for the time. When you pressed the trigger, it made a chirping sound, which was more like a communicator than a phaser, but we didn't care. The phasers were also projectors that, using a cutout that you slid over the lens, projected a picture of a ship on the wall. I remember they took a nine-volt battery in the handles for the sound, and two double A's in the back for the light. My dad probably regretted getting us noise-making toys for Christmas, but the phaser remains one of my favorite toys of childhood. When I moved in with him a month later, Star Trek was still in reruns and I was lucky enough to find a book from the library, called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield. My dog ate the cover of the paperback so we had to buy the book, but I sure didn't regret it. I was able to check off all the episodes of Star Trek that I had yet to see. We only had a black and white TV, but it didn't matter. I knew what color everybody wore! In my spare time, I created my own starship based on some of the production drawings in the book. I crewed the ship with superheroes, so that made for some interesting daydreams, to be sure. It wasn't until later that I started to get the deeper meaning behind the show, but that time would come. And that understanding only reinforced my love for this show.

More to come.

Old Time Radio, Part 1

When I was a kid, I spent some weekends with my mother's youngest brother Mike and his family. I still remember the first time I heard an old time radio show. My cousin Peter had a reel-to-reel recording of War of the Worlds, by the Mercury Radio Theater on the Air. I had never heard of radio drama before, so we listened to it. I remember sitting transfixed while the drama played. My mind conjured images of the Martian invaders and their three-legged war machines. After that, we listened to the Lone Ranger, who was my dad's favorite hero. The episode he played for me was the origin of the Lone Ranger, and again I was fascinated. The story of how the masked man came to be unfolded and I was hooked for life. I happened to have a cassette recorder that I had received for Christmas that year, and recorded both shows to take back home.

When I was a much younger boy, I had always enjoyed comedy albums. Bill Cosby, the Smothers Brothers, and Homer & Jethro were among my favorites. Bill Cosby, in his "Wonderfulness" album, used his old time radio experiences to great effect in his "Chicken Heart" routine. He also references the Green Hornet and Lone Ranger in the go-carts routine. Suddenly, these references began to make sense.

I soon started seeking out radio drama, but there was really nowhere to turn. There were the nighttime shorts on local radio featuring Chicken Man, the White Winged Weekend Warrior, but it was tongue-in-cheek. Once I saw that there was a Superman radio show from ads placed on the back of Kellogg's Corn Flakes for a record giveaway, I was really interested! I never had a chance of getting those records, of course, but that didn't stop me from looking longingly at it every morning during breakfast.

Then there were those great Power Records, which combined a large format comic book with an audio drama, remember those? Featured at right is a Star Trek book and record set that I used to have with cover art by Neal Adams. I used to get these whenever I could, especially when they came out with one for the Six Million Dollar Man. There's a guy who has a whole blog about just these items!

It wasn't until I was in high school that I really got a healthy dose of radio drama. That was when our local NPR station started broadcasting the Star Wars radio show. What's that? You didn't know there was such a thing? Oh, yes. I hurried home each night to listen to it on radio in 1981. It took the Star Wars story and expanded it, filling in gaps where the movie had been edited. There was the usual clumsy expository dialogue that radio has to use to paint the images in your mind, but it used the original sound effects and some actors from the movie, including Mark Hamill and Anthony Daniels. The actors who replaced the originals were no slouches, either. Brock Peters took the place of James Earl Jones, for example. You'd be surprised how good it really was!

More on this subject later. This is too much fun!

Catching Up

Things have not exactly been looking up since this post. So, here I am sick at home. First, my wife Magi had minor surgery, then Sera caught H1N1, then Magi caught H1N1. Somewhere in there, I probably had it too, but with lessened symptoms. After, let's see, two trips to urgent care, one surgeon's visit, and three other trips to the doctor and pediatrician, we can look forward to all of us being healthy for the first time since the beginning of October--maybe by this weekend. I guess it's a good thing I had a lot of sick days saved up, because I've taken at least two per week for four straight weeks. And health insurance? Yeah, it's paid for itself in the past month. I can't imagine what we would have paid out for our all-too-frequent visits these past weeks, between urgent care, ordinary doctor's visits and the subsequent prescriptions. It would have been quite the kick while we were already down.

The bright side of it is that I get to drink Mountain Dew mixed with orange juice and not feel guilty about calories. I've been catching up on TV watching and DVDs that I've been saving, including the DVD set for the 1973 Star Trek cartoon, which I dearly loved as a kid but seldom got to watch. Twenty-two episodes were made, and I bet I haven't seen half of them! It was a big hit with Mrs. Burkholder's third graders in the fall of that year, and when we went out for recess I always got to play Captain Kirk. Why? For the same reason Bruce Hartman always got to be Batman when we were the Super Friends. For a reason that only third graders could invent. Because my name is Jim.

No Wonder...

It's no wonder we didn't get a really good view of the new Enterprise in the Abrams movie. It's ugly.

Star Trek--Upon Further Review (Spoilers)

We went to see Star Trek again Friday night at the drive-in. I really wanted to like this movie so I gave it a second look. I did like it better the second time, but this time I brought my Skywalker Ranch director's pen with me and took notes from my favorite lawn chair. Here are some thoughts:

• The music during the Kirk birth/death scene was very reminiscent of Giacchino's work on LOST. I loved it.
• Still don't get where the deep canyon in Iowa came from. I even made sure to pay attention to make sure that's where the scene was set. It was.
• Sarek's scenes with Spock were great. I like this Sarek much better than the one in the Original Series.
• Nice nod to Star Trek the Motion Picture with the reference to the Kohlinar ritual.
• Vulcan bullies. Not logical.
• Spock seems to be vulnerable to "your mama" jokes. I suggest Dave Chappelle be his nemesis in the next movie.
• Someone get Zachary Quinto a better razor. Spock always seems to need a shave.
• Starfleet cadets are not enlightened in this future. Uhura calls Kirk a hick and suggests that he has sex with farm animals and the guys with her call him a townie and start a fight. I doubt this is what Gene Roddenberry had in mind.
• The broken Kelvin salt shaker Kirk absent-mindedly plays with in the bar is a nice touch.
• "Space is disease and danger wrapped in darkness and silence." Good grief.
• Kobayashi Maru test is a nod to Star Trek II, of course.
• Spock: "You, of all people should know that a captain cannot cheat death." Kirk should have responded with, "Your mama."
• Kirk bumping his head in the shuttle was like Scotty's similar move in Star Trek V. Still funny.
• I really liked the effects of going to warp.
• When the Enterprise enters the battle site with shields up, pieces of broken hull bounce off the hull, not the shields. With the shields up, that shouldn't happen.
• "Hi, Christopher. I'm Nero." WTF was that? A meet-cute?
• Spock's eyebrow raise was cool. But it was the wrong eyebrow. I myself can only raise my right eyebrow. Maybe Quinto can only raise his left.
• When Kirk and Sulu are beamed aboard at terminal velocity, they should have made a big splat on the transporter pad.
• Old Spock: "James T. Kirk, how did you find me?" Me: "Bad writing, Spock."
• "Are you out of your Vulcan mind?" Classic Bones.
• Reference to Admiral Archer's prize beagle was a nod to Enterprise.
• Scotty's learning of something he hasn't discovered yet harkens to Star Trek IV's transparent aluminum paradox.
• Kirk to Old Spock: "You're going with us, right?" = Luke to Obi-Wan: "I want to go with you." I get the parallel now. Luke is a farm boy, Kirk is a farm boy.
• Loved the bridge sound effects but not the lighting.
• Kirk slapping Spock on the shoulder was funny.
• Pike's uniform at the promotion ceremony was similar to Admiral Kirk's uni in Star Trek the Motion Picture.
• Kirk, in the final scene: "Bones." Holy Shat!

I'll give them a mulligan on this one. There was enough cool stuff to keep my interest.

Where Star Trek Fell Apart For Me (Spoilers)

I've been giving this a lot of thought. Star Trek got a 95% positive rating on the tomatometer, and I just wonder if I'm too close to the subject to see it objectively, like when I didn't like the Dark Knight when nearly everyone else did. After two days, I've found the point where it falls apart for me. It's not about the time travel or the new continuity or the design of the ship or the plot structure. As it should be, Star Trek is about characterization.

Where the movie goes flying off the track is the point when Spock kicks Kirk off the ship. It was the "Wait...what?" moment of the whole film. I can see punishing the insubordinate cadet who messed up your Kobayashi Maru test. There's this thing called a brig on most ships. It's a place where people can be safely contained until such point they can be dealt with with due process. But essentially throwing him overboard in a life raft was, well, extreme to say the least, and a very un-Spocklike thing to do. Where is the logic in sending the guy that the captain made your first officer to a hostile, alien predator-filled environment, landing him 14 kilometers from the nearest Federation outpost, which is manned by two engineers? In my wildest imagination, I can't see any incarnation of Spock doing that. It just seemed to serve the plot points of picking up Scotty and meeting old Spock, and no other reason.

Speaking of old Spock, why in the hell did Nero drop him off on a little planet to watch Vulcan be destroyed, and then allow him to go free? I felt like it was a Dr. Evil moment where Scott Evil suggests shooting Austin Powers in the head, rather than Dr. Evil's idea: I’m going to put him in an easily-escapable situation involving an overly-elaborate and exotic death."

I'm pretty sure that's where the wheels came off for me. I really wanted to like this movie, and to a certain extent I did. But when characters go that far away from who I think I know them to be, it takes me right out of the drama and makes me start thinking critically, and that's never a good thing for me when watching a movie, particularly when it's a subject about which I care deeply, like Star Trek or Batman.

By the end I was thinking, let me get this straight: Kirk went from a third-year cadet on academic suspension to captain of the Federation flagship in (more or less) one day? Riiiiight.

Star Trek

Spoilers follow.

Gene Roddenberry's original pilot for Star Trek was deemed "too cerebral" by the network, and they ordered a second pilot made. There was never any danger of that criticism for this movie.

This was a nice summer popcorn movie during which I felt perfectly safe not thinking too much. If I had, I might have wondered where the mile-deep chasm in Iowa was located. I might have wondered why the starship Enterprise was being built on the ground in Iowa, and how it was supposed to get into space from there. I might have wondered how JJ Abrams felt that he had captured Gene Roddenberry's optimistic future by portraying Starfleet officers as drunken bullies who beat up townies in Iowa's bars. It's a good thing I didn't think about that in the first 15 minutes. I might not have enjoyed the other 112.

This was a fast-paced action/adventure movie with enjoyable stunts, gunfights, explosions, and lots of laughs. It didn't say anything about the human condition. There was no allegory for present-day culture, morals, or beliefs. There was no lesson to be learned. In other words, it wasn't Star Trek.

I'm sure this will be a hit with the masses. It will serve to spark new interest in what was an ailing franchise and effectively reboot it. I'll enjoy the new films, as I did this one. I just hope that now that they've hit the reset button that next time they'll actually have something to say.

Happy Birthday William Shatner

From Mark Evanier's site, I got this tidbit: It's not only William Shatner's birthday, but it's also National Talk Like William Shatner Day. My students will be so sorry they missed this, since I do it in class all the time, pausing in inappropriate places to get their attention. I had to show them a clip from an episode of the original series ("Space Seed") so that they would know who he is.

Star Trek: Phase II

Okay, this is one of the coolest things I have ever seen. The original plans for a Star Trek revival included a television series with a second five year mission. These guys have pulled it off. The acting is weak, but the sets, uniforms, and effects are spot on. It's 1969 all over again:




This "show" is done in parts, available on YouTube, and apparently there's more of them. They not only have original series writers like David Gerrold working on them, but they also have Star Trek actors working as well. I really enjoyed this one!

Here's their home page!