If there's a particular subject of interest, click one of the tags below and you'll get a list of relevant, irrelevant, and sometimes irreverent postings.

In honor of William Shanter's 77th birthday, I decided to do a tribute to the women of Star Trek (the original series).


( Lots and lots of graphics )

Captain Kirk's Guide To Women (Feb 2008)

They'd better not use any of my tips gained from Kingdom of the Spiders, but then this book seems to limit itself to Star Trek: TOS

Variety is reporting that Simon Pegg will play Scotty in the upcoming Star Trek: The Big Reset movie. John Cho (Harold and Kumar) will be Sulu.

startrek.com press release:

10.05.2007
SPECIAL EVENT: Remastered "Menagerie" in Theatres!

On Tuesday, November 13, the two-part Star Trek Remastered version of "The Menagerie” will beam onto the big screen in a special engagement with selected theatres. The screening — a first for episodic Star Trek on this scale — will be seen in nearly 300 venues across the U.S. and Canada. This one-night-only event will also feature a special introduction by Eugene "Rod” Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, plus an exclusive behind-the-scenes look at the making of the Remastered series.

"The Menagerie" will be presented in its digitally remastered, high-definition format and in Cinema Surround Sound. The screening is in part to promote the HD-DVD/DVD release the following week (Nov. 20) by CBS Home Entertainment and Paramount Home Entertainment.

If you recall, the two-part "Menagerie" is the only episode to feature the casts of both the original pilot and the regular series, with Spock the only character to make the transition from from the pilot to the series. Much of the footage, of course, is taken from the rejected first pilot "The Cage." The story sees the Vulcan hell-bent on returning Captain Pike to Talos IV, the intention being that this is where his injured former commander can peacefully live out the rest of his days. Spock risks his career in Starfleet by hijacking the Enterprise and faces a court-martial for his actions. All this is eventually revealed to be an illusion, courtesy of the Talosians and their very strong telepathic hallucinations. Spock is then exonerated, Pike is returned and everything works out in the end. (Oops! Sorry to give it away!) "The Menagerie" was the 16th episode of Star Trek produced, and the 11th one to air.

A complete list of theaters for this viewing can be found here.

Now, to plead with Chats to go as an Orion Slave Girl.

BTW: 40 years ago today one of my favorite episodes, Mirror, Mirror, was first broadcast. To celebrate, Chats& I watched the remastered HD version via the XBOX. Pretty awesome. Though Chats is refusing to answer to her new title as "The Captain's Concubine" which is not so awesome.

Okay, Seth at Robot Chicken, gear up!

Why no Lt. Uhura? I remember I had an Uhura. I used to look at her boobs.

Taking old stuff and adding new, better special effects doesn't strike me as an assault on our collective heritage or anything along those lines, as long as they don't alter elements of the original plot, characters, or setting.

I even grudgingly allow Lucas to do stupid crap like have Greedo shoot first. Star Wars is his creation. If he wants to turn Han into someone willing to bet his life on Greedo missing from a distance of three feet, rather than saving his own skin, it's your model railroad set to wreck, George. Of course, I'm still going to call it stupid crap. Hell, switch Boba Fett's "What if he doesn't survive?" to "I'm going to get him a thoughtful greeting card," you pussy. But I digress.

Howard sent me a pretty cool link to one of the re-edited Star Trek (I'm not going to add "TOS*" TOS is Star Trek) episodes, The Doomsday Machine. Here in Chicago it'll be on MeTV this weekend, which is too bad because we don't have cable. I'd call it a great improvement. Hope it comes out on DVD.

ETA: Well, whaddya know. Just found it on iTunes. I think. Just bought Balance of Terror, which I believe is the "re-imagined" version.


*The Original Series

Good news! Next up on Rifftrax: Start Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country.

Better news! Guest riffers with Mike will be Kevin Murphy and Bill Corbett. Mystery Science Theater, the later years, reunited. And it feels so good. The trio did a thorough job on Battlefield Earth a few weeks back.

Spotted at mssrcrankypants

Go Ask Alice/Star Trek mash up. I remember playing that tune as a kid. While myself and two other early teen buddies shared a swiped Miller High Life. Man, what a trip, listening to that song with a third of a can of weak American beer in you... That's me, Mr. Counterculture.

I thought the editing was pretty skillful, though there's no end of source material. The cast had to act pretty high every other week, since they were always getting mind controlled by aliens.

And speaking of freeing your head, Chats is off to San Francisco for a bellydance workshop. Hope she can concentrate on her art and forget about her recent losses.

My bud Howard Andrew Jones loaned me a DVD that I'm finally getting around to sending back to him, along with his Xmas card.

It's called Mind Meld. Basically, it's William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy sitting in Nimoy's backyard talking about Star Trek and how it changed them. Because they're such good friends, they often spoke in a sort of shorthand to each other, which I've translated.

TrekCeleb Speak	Vernacular
"Filming a TV series is a grind. It's like coal mining" (Shatner)	Sometimes the catering was late and Gene Coon hogged all the good dip.
"My marriage fell apart" (Shatner and Nimoy)	My wife finally threw in the towel.
"You had a unique energy, Bill" (Nimoy)	You screwed around on set a lot.
"You were so devoted to your craft." (Shatner)	Tight ass.
"I wanted to experience life. Live fully." (Shatner)	I nailed every piece of hot totty I could. They were throwing themselves at me!
"I never understood why the rest of the cast felt that way." (Shatner)	I never gave a damn what they thought. Second stringers riding my friggin' coat-tails.
"Now I'm involved in my art. My photography. My latest is a very spiritual work."(Nimoy)	God, it's fun to take arty pictures of tits.
"I love you, Leonard. I really do."(Shatner)	You're the only one left who still speaks to me.

Anyway, it's a fun DVD, and it's cool to hear two old friends (for all the kidding, it's obvious that they're close) talk about Trek. I got a lot out of it. Shatner said that he saw Kirk as a classic Greek hero, which explains some of the flourishes to his performance. Check it out for Nimoy's memorabilia collection alone. He has a tribble on his desk, and I've decided my office desperately needs one as well.

Next up on Rifftrax is John Carpenter's original slasher, Halloween. You know, the one with assorted thirty-year-olds playing terrorized teen babysitters. As I age, I'm finding that watching high school kids die screaming brings an entirely new kind of satisfaction. I keed! I keeed!

Looking up Halloween movie trivia, I found out that Michael Meyer's famous mask is actually a William Shatner mask painted white. Ai Carumba! You'd think Carpenter would have mentioned that in the commentary!

John C. Snider has a Star Trek 40 roundup at his zine. He asks the question, "where does it go from here?"

Let us stipulate the following:

• There are people on my flist with more Star Trek knowledge in their spare set of pointed ears than I have in my whole body.


• As long as there are enough fans who want more, the "Star Trek has played its part and should step off the stage" set are arguing against both individual taste and profit motive.


• Generally, the closer the stories stick to Roddenberry's vision, the better they do. Again, people can make perfectly cogent arguments against this, but it's one set of weeds I don't want to get lost in at the moment.

My recipe for the return of Star Trek?

The Mirror Universe.

Set it in the "Lost Generation" between TOS and TNG. The main character can either be a "our" universe type who gets trapped there, or a member of the "resistance" outlined below.

First off, it's hella fun: Any series where "The Captain's Concubine" is a post on the starship will have me tuning in a few times to check it out. Give the fanboys a thrill and make the Captain/consort pair lesbians.

Lots of Drama potential: In the Mirror Universe you can rise by intrigue and assassination, therefore the Bridge Team is going to make I, Claudius look like a high school Model UN.

Fanboy porn: Since it's the Mirror universe, they can run into a lot of the same stuff TOS and so on met. Take City on the Edge of Forever and do a two-part episode showing how the Mirror universe got that way. Bring in Turtledove to write it. Sure, the Romulans fought the Federation to a standstill, but that was the Federation, not the fuckin' Mirror Starfleet. They'd be a conquered people, and would probably do quite well. The Klingons? Ditto. Obviously they'd be the Praetorians, brought in like the Germans to guard the Roman Emperor. Need an enemy? The Gorn! In alliance with Tholians, etc... But please, no Q Continuum.

Hope and idealism: This is where Roddenberry's vision comes back into it. Okay, maybe the Spock-with-a-beard character who predicted the implosion of the Empire gets his head handed to him, but like Jesus he won a few hearts and minds. Secret societies could be formed to resist the Empire from within. There's some pretty rich early Christian history they could mine.

A familiar face: George Takei is in great shape for his age, and his character strikes me as the kind of guy who could rise in the Mirror Universe. Bring Sulu back and make him the head of Mirror Starfleet, an example of better living through limb and organ grafts. Maybe have Will Wheaton back too, only make him an Apparatchik of Internal Security. He invents new and better agonizers in his spare time. Who doesn't love to hate Wesley Crusher? I bet you could talk Shatner into doing an episode or two as (who else?) the dissipated, corpulent, Tiberius-at-Capri-style Emperor Kirk (later deified).

The addition of Kevin Murphy to the riffing makes a huge difference quality-of-snarkwise.

Like the scene where Spock's rocket boots send him, Kirk and McCoy shooting up the enormous shaft that connects seventy different decks on the Enterprise for no particular reason. . .

Kevin Murphy: "Nope, not connected to the wall at all."
Mike Nelson (excitedly): "Pure movie magic!"

Next up will be Tom Cruise in Cocktail. Which I don't own. "We can always rent," sez Chats.

After doing the Rifftrax we watched it again with Shatner/Shatner's Daughter commentary. Several times the Shat sighed that they had a great vision for a particular scene, but it just didn't turn out. Ummm...isn't that the fault of the director, Bill? But he came off as pretty genial, though he didn't take on any of the controversies surrounding The Final Frontier as the worst Star Trek ever (I disagree with that assessment, BTW).

Just a quick reminder that the William Shatner Roast is on Comedy Central tonight.

To warm up, here's one of my first Shatner posts, with a link to the Shatner Fame Audit.

I just downloaded the RiffTrax to The Fifth Element.

We'll see how I handle Nelson's commentary, because I adore Besson's scifi masterpiece. It's got a lot of two-fisted action and a quirky sense of humor that very much reminds me of Keith Laumer's writing. Okay, Besson tries a little too hard to recreate the "Natalie Portman standing at the door" scene from Leon, and Ian Holm hams it up in full Denholm Elliott Last Crusade style, but damn, it's a fine movie.

I'm sure I'll love Mike's wit, but I'm prepared to have my panties bunched when he makes fun of Leeloo's hair.

The bright spot on the horizon is that the next RiffTrax is Shatner's magnum opus, Star Trek V (featuring guest riffer Kevin Murphy!).

ETA: Mike was pretty good. Maybe a few too many jokes about Leeloo's clown hair, his commentary of Ruby Rhod boiled down to "damn he's annoying" but a listenable effort, especially for the price. I was a little surprised that he said nothing about the weird "traffic signals in space" (which seem to just watch a horizontal plane) that the Mondoshawans encounter early in the film. Chats said: "It was good, but Disembodio got annoying." Disembodio is a voice who shows up now and then to say a line of dialogue in case your version drifts off the Rifftrax version. He's turning into a minor character to talk to Mike, but he's no Tom Servo.

More graphics! This time it's Star Trek Inspriational Posters

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Plus I'm in love with the new embedding thing...

I've so fallen behind on my Shatner films.

Chats and I checked out King of the Ants, directed by Stuart Gordon of Dagon fame (no well-endowed squid women slurping around, just Kari Wuhrer of Anaconda, minus the implants from that movie. Good for her, I'm a natural fan). Shatner promises sf/fantasy/horror movies in his collection and I'm not sure this really fits into those categories. Maybe the horrific violence makes it horror, but the film is a lot better at achieving suspense, which is where I'd file it.

The story is based on a Charles Higson novel. Higson contributed to the screenplay, but I think he should have fought a little harder for his original vision.

Like too many movies these days it started out quite well and then went flat as cheap beer. They were going for "incompetent film noir" of Blood Simple and Fargo where day laborer Chris McKenna is sort of hired to follow a guy then whack him, and getting good results, but then it turned into a lame vengeance flick. The only deaths being avenged with brutal torture and murder were ones the protagonist himself committed, so I had a bit of a tough time really rooting for McKenna's character.

Chats said that the movie went south when McKenna, who was attracted to his victim's wife, sought her out after the killing (and some brutal torture from the guys who hired him in order to retrieve a packet of evidence) and started up a relationship with her. Turns out this wasn't in the novel.

I'd say if you've got a Netflix membership and can get it free, it's worth checking out for the first half. Nice performance by George Wendt, who also produced -- he was my favorite part of the film. A couple of head-injury visions that border on Naked Lunch surrealism add interest too. But beware, there's a Baldwin in the woodpile.

This must be stopped.

Ben Affleck rumored to play the young James T. Kirk in Star Trek Prequel...

National monuments, Tom Clancy movies, is there nothing sacred this man isn't trying to ruin?