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20060901
Star Trek Rebooted
Entry 271
After the as good as certain debacle of Star Trek XI, aka The Franchise Is Dead, that is loathed by the fans before the movie is even made, Paramount has now announced an upgrade of all episodes of the original series.
This will mean: (computer generated) enhanced battle sequences, ship exteriors, galaxy shots and landscapes. The original music will get a stereo re-recording and even Captain Kirk’s Space, the final frontier monologue will get a digital treatment.
Read more at: Startrek.com
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20060913
Star Trek - TOS 'Enhanced' Promo Trailer
Entry 284
The ship will hit the fans, well that is what CBS Paramount Domestic Television says on its promo trailer that has been released a few days ago. We will have to wait for the real episodes to see what all the fuss is all about, because all I can tell you know is that the title music has been re-recorded and that some digital effects have been added.
Or with a little luck you can even watch it here. Internet Explorer users may have to click twice: once to activate the movie, once again to start it. Now that I think of it: Opera users as well.
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20070706
Star Trek vs. Monty Python
Entry 316
Ah. The mist of time. Star Trek TOS was the greatest science fiction
series of all times (remember Arena?)
and Monty Python were always brilliant. Here is a combination of both.
Extremely silly.
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: Giordano Kazemi
20070707
Star Trek vs. Jefferson Airplane
Entry 317
Grace
Slick has always been one of the more flamboyant inhabitants of my
wet dreams. Probably that is because of her mythical reputation.
Perhaps.
It's
a bit what happened to the British psychedelic underground movement in
the mid-sixties. Because the blokes who ruled it didn't have a clue what
the alternative scene was in the States (no Internet, no
intercontinental television, remember) they invented a British version
that was apparently much more progressive than the American one.
(English underground was mainly a boys club, Miles's
girlfriend remembers how Barry and his alternative gang were discussing
sexual liberation while she was in the kitchen and could only come out
for serving tea and biscuits).
This was also reflected in the music. As Pink Floyd and the other acid bands only knew from hearsay what their American examples were doing they constructed the Brit-variant of the sunshine underground. When Pink Floyd toured America a few months later they were rather disappointed. Manager Peter Jenner was shocked how lame the Fillmore West was compared with UFO and how 'ordinary the bands were compared with the English psychedelic bands'. Roger Waters called the Haight-Ashbury bands less 'extraordinary and mindblowing and trippy' than he had anticipated. (Groupie attention was another thing of course and when the boys got back home from their first American tour they rushed off to a London hospital to get some injections against gonorrhoea.)
I had more or less the same experience (no, not the clap one). When I first listened to The Grateful Dead my immediate reaction was 'this is fucking country music', not understanding what was so special about these guys. As a matter of fact The Grateful Dead never made it big in Europe and have only been world famous in the USA.
A few years ago I read Grace Slick's autobiography 'Somebody to Love'. The reason why I bought it was because I was genuinely interested in a fair amount of sex, drugs and, why not, some rock'n roll. But alas, the book was as interesting and inventive as most of her solo albums. Slick's most famous quote is that 'if you remember the Sixties, you really weren't there' (others attribute this quote to Paul Kantner or even to Timothy Leary) and apart from the fact that she once had a nookie with Jim Morrisson she doesn't remember a lot. I now have this vision of Grace Slick as a rock'n roll granny who calls herself a painter and who listens to the insubordinate tunes of the Gypsy Kings.
But there has always been that voice that can turn even the tackiest song into a classic. And the video is brilliant too...
If you liked this post - you might be interested in this one as well: John Lennon called him 'Normal'....
20071101
Don't kill Bill!
Entry 352
Mr. William Shatner is angry, so tells me my local newspaper. The reason is fairly simple. A new Star Trek movie is in the make and the actor who is going to play James Tiberius Kirk is not his royal wigginess but a guy called Chris Pine, a young actor who looks like an underwear commercial model.
You can't deny that William Shatner is an old man, he must be around one hundred and three right now, and so we can't expect him to play the role of young Kirk, can we? And that is what this new movie, aptly called Star Trek, is apparently about: the adventures of young Kirk in Trekkieland.
If I may believe the reliable source also known as the Internet this prequel drags around a few characters such as Christopher Pike (tetraplegic after a delta radiation incident), Captain Garrovick (killed by an attack of the dikironium cloud creature) and George Samuel Kirk, James's brother (killed by an attack of the Beta Portolan neural parasite). (Deduct the before mentioned captain Garrovick will'ya, nobody found a way to write him into the script.)
Rumours go that in the movie old Spock (Leonard Nimoy) and young Spock (Zachary Quinto, a young actor who looks like an underwear commercial model) team up. They have to prevent that young Kirk from the past will be killed by some evil Romulans from the future. Thus keeping the timeline intact were geriatric Kirk (William Shatner), now 138 years old, dies on the planet Veridian III in order to save the entire universe, an event that all Trekkies remember as being thoroughly sad and slightly overacted.
So basically this is just an average time travel story, one of those science fiction plots invented by authors who have got no inspiration left. We've already had our share of time travelling movies in the past. In Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Kirk and company travel to 1986 to save some whales. If you are not interested in Trek history: don't bother to ask. Star Trek Generations puts Kirk away in a timeless zone, a bit like an airport terminal, so that he can meet his prolific successor, Jean Luc Picard, in the future. And in movie number 8, First Contact, the next generation crew takes the time travel express to 2063 in order to save young Zefrane Cochram from the evil Borg queen.
Recycling is such a beautiful thing. For the past and for the future. But please let us not forget the elderly. Give them a home, a place to stay, an enterprise to believe in...
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20080504
The Restaurant At The End Of The Typewriter
Entry 778
Douglas Adams (DNA) obviously was one of those persons who graduated summa
cum laude at the William Shatner Star Trek Unfinished Projects
University. An explanation may be needed here.
In the seventies several attempts were made to resuscitate Star Trek at the movie theatres. Three scripts were made for what laughingly was called Star Trek II: The God Thing, by Gene ‘thank god for miniskirts’ Rodenberry; The Planet of the Titans, Kirk going mad and thinking he’s a Greek god – I kid you not!; and an unnamed blood sucking reptiles take over planet Earth story by Harlan Ellison that would have saved Brazil’s rubber production for the production of lizard suits alone. Every time someone uttered Star Trek and movie in one sentence hordes of lawyers, agents and cocaine delivery boys were summoned and gigantesque sums of money were handed over to the actors of the original series, who were begged not to take any other movie role for the time being. (This is valid proof of the fact that movie people are a bunch of ass-eating monkeys; you must be one sick person to even think that anyone wanted to cast the Star Trek actors for another project.)
After these three aborted attempts there were talks for a new TV series called Phase II. Business as usual: the actors got paid - nothing got produced. But the good thing (probably good is not the right adjective here) was that the pilot from the Phase II series grew into that horrific monster called Star Trek: The Motion Picture (ST:TMP). (Also here the choice of the adjective wasn’t really appropriate: the picture did a lot of things but moving wasn’t actually one of those.) Although ST:TMP contained a lot of miniskirts it was rather disappointing and the tagline that this was the most expensive SF movie ever was only true because the production company had added all previous cost of all aborted projects inside ST:TMP’s budget.
Douglas Adams also was one of those people who were extremely busy producing nothing and getting huge amounts of money for it. To quote Steve Meretzky, co-author of the Hitchhiker Infocom game: “Douglas certainly raised procrastination to an art form.” In 1983 DNA signed a contract with Infocom for 6 (six) text-adventure computer games based on his Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy (H2G2) books. The first in the series came out in 1984 and sold a staggering 400 000 copies. But problems arose when Infocom politely reminded Adams that is was about time to think of parts 2, 3, 4, 5 & 6 of the series. DNA who, according to his own terms, suffered from sequelitis, came with another idea. Infocom didn’t want to kill the goose with the golden eggs and reluctantly agreed to produce Bureaucracy. When that game came out in 1987, already a couple of years overdue, it sold a mere 40 000 copies. Days of text-adventure games were over. (I stole most of the above from M.J Simpson’s biography: Hitchhiker.)
Although attempts were made to create a second Hitchhiker Infocom game Restaurant At The End Of The Universe it was generally believed that the game never left the development stage. But a few weeks ago, so after more than 20 years, it was announced that a playable prototype does exist.
The full story (it is very long, you are warned!) can be read at the Waxy blog. It is also interesting to browse through the comments as well. These contain contributions, explanations and alternative timelines from Infocom people such as Steve Meretzky (H2G2), Tim Anderson (Bureaucracy), Marc Blank (Infocom VP and creator of Zork) and Michael Bywater (Bureaucracy).
The playable prototype has been published on the web and can be tested at the following URL (Java5 needed): Milliways.
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