Jerry Seinfeld's recent team-up with Bill Gates for a bizarre set of advertisements has put me in mind of other famous celebrity endorsements — especially when it comes to Star Trek. The show's futuristic setting has left Star Trek relatively immune to product placement, but that hasn't stopped the franchise from appearing elsewhere to promote…
Tag: TOS
Far Beyond the Stars
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…
Some Secrets Are Worth Keeping
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…
I Can Has Tribble?
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….
The Blessing and Burden of Methuselah
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…
Of Gods and Men
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…
Uncaged
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…
Return to the Forbidden Planet
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…