Showbits

For the third time this year, I bring you news of several talented artists who have passed on.

Composer and Emmy winner Alexander Courage passed away last month at age 88. His works include the theme to the original Star Trek television series. Yet he received little of his dues from that famous piece. To cut costs, Gene Roddenberry wrote lyrics to accompany Mr. Courage's music. Despite no intention of using the (awful) lyrics, Mr. Roddenberry was then able to claim half the royalties that would've otherwise gone to the song's rightful creator. Whether or not any reparations were ever made between the two, I am unsure. Snopes states that "After scoring a couple of first-season episodes, Courage declined to perform any further musical work for the series." But his influence on what eventually became the Star Trek franchise is noted in his filmography, which gives him attribution on practically every Star Trek movie, show, and game of the last half-century.

Shortly thereafter, the musical world also suffered the loss of Earle Hagen, also aged 88. Mr. Hagen was responsible for such memorable theme songs as those of The Dick Van Dyke Show and Andy Griffith. These are the shows I grew up on, and though these comedies played out in a different situation every week, we were always introduced to them with the familiar opening sequences and tunes. Thank you, Mr. Hagen, for leaving that mark.

I'd intended for these two passings to be the extent of this post, but I unfortunately recently learned of two others. Unlike the musicians above, Robert Justman's talent was in directing and producing for both TOS and TNG. Though he worked on only one season of TNG, his decision to cast Patrick Stewart over Gene Roddenberry's objections was a decision with an indelible mark on Trek lore. Mr. Justman died last month at age 82.

Also a directorial veteran of TOS was Joseph Pevney, who gave us such episodes as The City on the Edge of Forever and The Trouble with Tribbles. Possibly more than any episodes in TOS's short run, these two have spawned numerous plots, threads, and novels throughout the Trek timeline. Mr. Pevney was 96 when he passed.

How fortunate we are to have had the musical and directing talents of these men, both within Star Trek and without; how fortunate they were to have lived such long and notable lives.

(Hat tips to TrekToday and Dayton Ward)

It's already two-week-old news that Secret Talents of the Stars was cancelled after one show. But it was just today that I found this commercial for the show:

Given the hindsight that the show was canned, I thought this commercial was a postmortem spoof; but given that it was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of CBS (license holders of both Secret Talents and Star Trek), I must assume it is authentic. Seems they didn't think very highly of their own property — or else they're just terrible marketers. Context aside, certainly anyone can exhibit the minimal talent Takei demonstrates in the above clip.

I never saw the show and cannot attest to how horrible it must've been to have met such a swift demise. The theory seems sound: if the American television viewing public is interested in seeing actors and athletes on the dance floor, why not see what else they can do?

But since I cancelled my television service just as the first season of Survivor was premiering, I've never really understood the whole "reality TV" concept.

I can't help it: I love LOLcats. I hang onto the I Can Has Cheezburger? RSS feed for morsels of happiness in an otherwise bleak work day. Certainly some fans have taken the meme too far, such as translating the Bible into lolspeak — not that it's irreverant, but more that it's an incongruous pairing. And creating a lolcode programming language is just too esoteric.

But I didn't realize the opportunity for an effective extended work of lolspeak until today, as I was perusing the guest list for the upcoming ROFLCon. Finally, here is a match made in heaven: two of my favorite pursuits combined to form… LOLTrek.

Alas, only one episode of TOS has been adapted to this pidgin tongue, and it doesn't take long to scroll through its 60 frames. But a variety of inside jokes and consistent internal humor makes it a fun treat. Enjoy!

They say the mind is the first thing to go — yet it's a part of the organ we understand, and are able to replace, the least.

Now, Dr. Gordon Bell intends to bring Harry Potter's pensieve to life by developing a way to duplicate the memories of the human mind as easily as any other storage device. Via Slashdot, Fox News asks, "What if you could capture every waking moment of your entire life, store it on your computer and then recall digital snapshots of everything you've seen and heard with just a quick search?" A query meant to excite — or scare?

This is more a science and human interest story than a cinematic one, but consider how many films deal with cybernetic transplantation of humanity. Recreating the essence of man through artificial means is at the core of films such as Blade Runner and episodes of Star Trek like "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" in The Original Series and "Schizoid Man" in The Next Generation (in contrast to Bicentennial Man, which is about a robot becoming human). These fictions embody a very real fear of death and a desire to live on after the failure of the organic body.

But at what price immortality? Besides ethical and spiritual dilemmas, there are also legal and privacy issues inherent in such permanent records. Consider the low-tech solution currently employed by the inventor cited above: "Bell wears a SenseCam, developed by Microsoft Research, that takes pictures whenever it detects he may want a photograph. The camera's infrared sensor picks up on body heat and takes snapshots of anyone else in the room, adjusting itself as available light changes." How would you like to be in that room with Mr. Bell, knowing he was playing Big Brother?

There's a film that employs uses a similarly problematic technique for recording human experience: Robin Williams' The Final Cut. In this movie's world, parents have the option of having their unborn child implanted with an EyeTech Zoe chip. This chip piggybacks on its host's senses to create a visual and aural record of its carrier's experiences. This chip is extracted upon death; someone with the profession of "cutter" then uses this footage to create a 90-minute "Rememory", a montage of experiences by which the living can remember the deceased. A cutter is bound by only three rules: he cannot sell Zoe footage; he cannot mix footage from different Zoe implants for a rememory; and a cutter cannot himself have a Zoe implant.

I stumbled across this film two years ago, roughly at the same time I was given an open-ended assignment to "write something academic about something cinematic." At the time, I had also been reading plenty of Star Trek novels, and the intersection of the two media begged for comparison and contrast. I put two different implants — the Zoe chip and a Trill symbiont — under the microscope and came up with a 2,000-word paper entitled "Preservation of Memory as a Means of Immortality: A Science Fictional Approach".

Though the professors evaluated the essay favorably, neither were familiar with the background material. I've yet to find to find someone who is and can thus evaluate my work from that perspective. If you're a Trekkie who's seen The Final Cut and are interesting in reading the implications of each medium's method of providing permanent mental capacity, please drop me a note.

A recent article on CNN.com reminded me that the Web holds a bounty of fan films based on the various Star Trek properties. This wasn't necessarily news to me: I'd once tried watching an episode of New Voyages, which aims to continue the five-year mission of the original Enterprise, but couldn't get past the recasting of the original stars. William Shatner's portrayal of James T. Kirk was too engrained in my mind for me to accept anyone else in the role; even in science fiction, suspension of disbelief has its limits.

But to see on CNN that this series won TV Guide's 2007 Online Video Award for Best Sci-Fi Webisodes, chosen over Battlestar Galactica, suggested I should look again. I'd thought the only way to watch New Voyages episodes was via streaming video, which I generally eschew — but poking around their Web site revealed a slightly preferable BitTorrent option. The episode I selected for our reintroduction was "World Enough and Time", written and directed by Marc Scott Zicree (author of "Far Beyond the Stars", possibly my favorite DS9 episode).

Again, I was assaulted by the casting of anyone but Shatner and Nimoy as Kirk and Spock, but this time I persevered. I'm glad I did, as even if the actors didn't nail the parts, I can't blame the writing, which comes across strongly. The sets are on par with the original series (which, despite being 40 years later, is pretty good for a fan film — authentic, too), and the sound effects and CGI are fluidly incorporated.

But the star of the show is none other than George Takei, playing the role of an older Sulu. Rather than looking out-of-place, this temporal anomaly is written into the story in flawless Trek fashion, in the spirit of "Time's Orphan". For this actor to have taken time away from Heroes to so accurately reprise this role for a free Web series speaks volumes of the integrity of both Mr. Takei and New Voyages. Yet newcomer Christina Moses almost steals the show, capturing the awe and innocence of a first-time space traveller with earnest mannerisms and subtle body language. As hard as the recast TOS icons worked, their best role was to frame these two actors' characters and performances. Altogether, the cast and story made every minute of the one-hour episode worth watching.

Looking through the episode list, it appears New Voyages' other offerings are equally star-studded. Story authors include David Gerrold (author of "The Trouble with Tribbles") and Dorothy Fontana (author of "Encounter at Farpoint", "The Enterprise Incident", and more), while among the actors are Walter Koenig as Pavel Chekhov and J.G. Hertzler as Harry Mudd.

The CNN article neglected to make a timely mention of a similar project: Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, which finally debuted today. This feature-length production can hardly be called a "fan film" when you consider its weighty cast: Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekhov), Nichelle Nichols (Uhura), Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand), Lawrence Montaigne (Stonn from "Amok Time"), Gary Graham (Ambassador Soval), Alan Ruck (Captain John Harriman), Tim Russ (Tuvok), Ethan Phillips (Neelix), Garrett Wang (Harry Kim), J.G. Hertzler (General Martok), Cirroc Lofton (Jake Sisko), and Chase Masterson (Leeta) — as well as some alumni you won't recognize: Crystal Allen (an Enterprise Orion slave girl), William Wellman (a DS9 Bajoran officer), and Daamen Krall (a voice actor for the Star Trek: Starfleet Academy video game). Even "World Enough and Time"'s Kirk and Spock make appearances in other roles.

This dark, "Yesterday's Enterprise"-style mashup is every Trekkie's dream, though I worried it would've suffered from lengthy delays: the film was originally to be released back in April, and even now, only the first third, weighing in at 26 minutes, is available in low-quality streaming video. (Watch for a higher quality version once opening weekend demand dies down.) But what I've seen so far has me eager for more. These experienced actors are so comfortable in the Trek universe that watching them find new ways to play in it is a win-win for both sides of the camera.

The varying yet surprising quality of these "webisodes" has me looking at J.J. Abrams' pending TOS reboot in a new light. Both "World Enough and Time" and Of Gods and Men have demonstrated that a tight script and a talented cast can deliver an excellent story, regardless of the characters or the setting. But when that promise is exemplified best by Star Trek alumni, as is the case with the above two films, the concept of recasting the characters we know and love becomes a questionable proposition at best. I'm a bit more cautious now about the Christmas 2008 release — but I now know that, thanks to talented fans and actors, I have a wealth of new adventures to tide me over in the meantime.

It's good just the way it is — don't touch it!" is the rabid response of many classic sci-fi fans. Yet just as George Lucas revisited his Star Wars, the original Star Trek is now also being remastered. As a special promotion of that project's results, "The Menagerie", a forty-year-old two-part episode, was screened this Tuesday and Thursday nights at select theaters nationwide. I reserved my tickets five weeks ago, and this Tuesday, I finally, eagerly took my seat.

The evening opened with a brief introduction by Rod Roddenberry, who reminisced on Star Trek's genesis and his father's efforts on same before sequeing into a brief overview of the TOS remastering effort. Some of this featurette I'd already seen on StarTrek.com, yet I wished it had run longer. In hindsight, I don't know how it could've without expanding its scope to celebrate all of Star Trek — but isn't that why we were all there?

"All" wasn't as many as I expected, though: I was surprised and disappointed by how not sold out the show was. Only one person represented Starfleet in full uniform (TNG era, but so what). Nonetheless, even if they didn't wear their geekery on their shoulders, it was comforting to share the company of those discussing the finer points of Trekdom while enjoying this morsel to hold them over until next year's film release.

"The Menagerie" is a repackaging of "The Cage", a rejected first pilot for Star Trek. I'd seen "The Menagerie" before, but not recently enough to recognize exactly what special effects were changed. Whereas only a veteran of the series might pick up on minutia, the delineation between old technology and new can otherwise be garishly blunt to the uninitiated. From that latter perspective, I observed nothing out of place; all the special effects were seamless.

Plotwise, we amused ourselves by spotting various inconsistencies, back when there was no continuity to be inconsistent with, such as Spock grinning with amazement at observing the local flora. Majel Barrett, who would later play Lwaxana Troi, Nurse Chapel, and the voice of the computer on all six series, here plays the first officer — though in just one episode, she didn't have the same opportunity to develop this character. Other character moments were also fun, such as Bones' propensity for sudden and passion speeches. It capitalized for me that, despite all the marvels, wonders, and tragedies the crew of the Enterprise encountered, they never became inured with it. Perhaps, in Roddenberry's vision for humanity's future, it's that sense of wonder that propelled us to the stars, and not vice versa.

The show ended with a brief preview of the second season of TOS, remastered. It reminds me that I had spent $25 for the two of us to watch one episode — a disproportionate cost compared with getting the entire first season on HD-DVD upon its release later this month. But I'm not interested in owning this series — only in sharing and experiencing it. My life was changed when I was introduced to Star Trek on September 28th, 1987. I appreciated the opportunity to return the favor and reintroduce the franchise's origin to the man who brought it to me — and so did he:

I enjoyed going back to those days of the "first" Star Trek Enterprise actors and reflecting on just how well they did acting and especially with the technology of the times for their special effects. As I said yesterday, "Gene Rodenberry was the Galileo and Jules Verne of our era all wrapped up in one." Going where no man has gone before is always more enjoyable with a friend especially when that someone is your son.

After a week of blogging about Star Trek: The Next Generation, you might get the impression it's my favorite of the Trek series. Even I haven't decided if that honor belongs to TNG or DS9 — but definitely not in the running is TOS.

That's not an indictment of the show's datedness or lack of quality, but more simply a lack of exposure. The Original Series' debut predates my own by a decade, and since it has the least number of episodes of any Trek series and I cancelled my TV service eight years ago, it's simply not something I have much opportunity to watch. But I love the characters and have found that Kirk, Spock, and McCoy make for much more captivating novels than any other crew (especially Voyager's — blech).

Now comes the opportunity to watch The Original Series in a way previously afforded to only The Next Generation: on the silver screen. As a promotion for the November 20th HD-DVD release of Star Trek Remastered, the updated "Menagerie", which features footage from the rejected pilot "The Cage", will be shown in 300 theaters nationwide the evening of Tuesday, November 13th. "The two-hour screening includes 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," says StarTrek.com, which has links to both the press release and theater listings. (Yet another tip of the hat to Dayton Ward)

"The Menagerie" is one of the few episodes I have seen of TOS, but not like this. I already have my tickets and will my calling my father shortly to introduce him to this event, just as he did me to TNG two decades ago. If you've never seen Trek before, this might be the franchise entry point you've been looking for.

This is it: the entire week has been building up to this. Star Trek: The Next Generation turns 20 today, having aired "Encounter at Farpoint" on Monday, September 28th, 1987.

How best to mark this event? What would be an appropriate climax to this week of commemorative blogging? I could reflect on how different my life would be had my father not sat me down to watch the latest iteration of the show he had grown up with. I could analyze the show's cultural impact, or wax poetic about its message of hope and optimism for humanity's future. I could take a serious look at its special effects, its genesis from Star Trek Phase II, or the franchise's future.

But I think the most dramatic impact the debut of two decades ago was on a most beleaguered class: the red shirts.

When TNG debut, it marked a dramatic change in Starfleet's taxonomy: red, previously the shirt color of security and engineering personnel, was now worn by the indispensable command track. Former redshirts the quadrant over breathed a sign of relief to receive their new uniforms, as in the era of the gold-dressed Kirk, a red shirt was the mark of death, with these expendable bodyguards suffering more away team fatalities than any other group. This trend wasn't just a popular misconception born of fear and superstition, either: courtesy StarTrek.com, a recent statistical study proves what an unfair lot redshirts have.

Not everyone appreciates the burden of being a TOS-era redshirt; in fact, some groups are downright insensitive. Courtesy TrekToday comes news of a health care company that promises its clients "the RedShirt Treatment". Independent Health promises that, no matter who you are, when you call, or what your problem is, you're pretty much screwed.

But that's okay, because even though death is final (unless you're Spock, Kirk, Scotty — or even Denise Crosby), Eternal Image will be the last ones to let you down. When you're ready for the final frontier, this Michigan-based funerary company will ensure you receive the honor normally reserved for photon torpedoes: to be buried or cremated in the Star Trek-branded funeral or urn of your choice. (Tip of the hat to Dayton Ward)

Star Trek is a story with powerful lessons for all of humanity. But most of all, The Next Generation offers us hope for change and for a better future — no matter your shirt color. So live long — or die trying!

• T-Minus One Week and Counting
• To Everything, There Is a Season
• Where, Oh Where, Has My Little Spock Gone?
• The Human Condition
• The Voyage Continues
• But Don't Take My Word For It