A nice write-up by Peter Suderman; the consensus seems to be, pretty good, but not much like the original series.
Tag Archives: Star Trek
Do young people like Star Trek?
My tv viewing and other anecdotal evidence led me to think that Star Wars was the favored brand for Gen X onward. After all, the last Trek tv show was kind of a fizzle, the last Trek movie wouldn’t even put the Enterprise in its poster. But yesterday I heard a boy and girl, both about 20, discussing the new Trek movie, and today I’ve seen a few posts about it popping up on blogs by people a lot younger than I am.
I suppose young people could prefer Star Wars but still take an interest in Star Trek. Anything is possible.
UPDATE: Looks like the new one’s getting good reviews. Yeah, Trek!
UPDATE 2: Ward Sutton has watched a lot of Star Trek.
UPDATE 3: Obama wants to see the movie. ( I hope Politico misquotes his reference to “lithium crystals.”) Nimoy talks about Obama and other topics.
UPDATE 4: I just took a look and confirmed it: the new movie’s name is simply Star Trek, as if it were named after the franchise. That seems kind of postmodern to me.
Star Trek, The Clone Generation
In this week’s reader, J.R. Jones uses the new Trek movie to write a nice appreciation of the original series.
One episode that never fails to freak me out is “Miri,” broadcast in October 1966. Again a landing crew from the Enterprise beams down to a strange planet to find all the adults dead, this time from a horrible plague. The children are fine, but once they hit puberty their immune system gives way to the disease; they begin to collect awful blue sores, go insane with rage, and finally die. Kirk and company, infected with the plague and cut off from the Enterprise, implore the children to help them, but the kids are naturally suspicious of grown-ups—or, as they call them, “grups.” From there it’s only a short leap to “The Deadly Years,” broadcast in December 1967. This time the Enterprise officers beam down to a planet and contract a radiation sickness that causes them to age 30 years in a day. Kirk grows so forgetful that he’s relieved of his command and must collaborate with the similarly doddering Spock, McCoy, and Scotty on a serum that will reverse the aging process.
Pseudo-Harlan Ellison title for a TV episode
The Bridge to the Star That Cries
Basically, I’m trying to get something that sounds like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” A touch of the plangent, a big drop of “what the fuck?,” as in “the edge of … forever? a star … that cries?” Something that young TV viewers in 1966 would have needed an extra second or so to process. Whereas a pseudo-Ellison short story would be far too rambunctious: “Sing My Bosoms, My Prison Is Made,” “The Heart That Tore the Handleman’s Feet,” etc.
Fact
Fabian took acting lessons from Leonard Nimoy. This was a few years before Nimoy was cast as Mr. Spock. Fabian was getting ready for a guest spot on Ben Casey.
From I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy
That Fucking Shatner
From Star Trek Memories:
“The Devil in the Dark” … We shot this particular episode, our twenty-sixth, during the first half of March 1967.
Problem: Star Trek did its shooting from May of one year to January of the next. Never in the early spring. “Devil in the Dark” was broadcast on March 9, 1967.
What’s remarkable: Shatner says that on the second day of shooting he had to take off because his father died. “My beloved father.” But he got the month wrong.
All right, maybe Chris Kreski gets the blame. He’s the “with” guy under Shatner’s name in the byline. Shatner talked into a microphone, Chris Kreski did a lot of typing and organizing, looked up some dates, and got the shooting month mixed up with the broadcast month. These books about Star Trek people are such murky soup.
But we experience this amazing simulated effect: A man talks about his father’s death, “the tears and the anguish,” and he thinks the death happened months after it actually did.
Oh, that fucking Shatner.