Oh, rabbits!

Well, if you’re looking for absolute perfection in a ST theme, good luck. It’s not like Mike Post or John Williams were writing these suckers.

That said, I thought Alexander Courage did a hell of a job on the original.

I find it ever-so-slightly pompous with all the horns, but otherwise, a cool remix of the original theme.

Roddenberry from what I’ve read in multiple places sounded like a huge asshole to me, and nowhere near the ‘Great Bird of the Galaxy’ he liked to self-label himself as. Now yes, a very talented asshole, whose vision started the franchise, and certainly who put in much work on TOS (along with many other talents), but nevertheless a real PITA on a personal level who wound up burning most of his bridges.

Point is-- if Meyer lost his cool with him as a young guy, I wouldn’t be very surprised.

@[email protected]

And… what symmetry would THAT be, dude?

It’s been a long, loooong time since I’ve uttered these words, but: THAT ABSOLUTELY KICKS ASS. (or Romulan pastrami, whatever)

Now, there’s always going to be a quibble, so here’s mine: Leonard Nimoy was about 6’ in actual height, and I believe Jon Frakes is about 6’3" - 6’4," right around Michael Dorn’s height, for example.

Still-- I get it. If the artist is trying to suggest the outsized influence of Spock, I understand. I mean, Shatner was utterly magnificent in his role, but Nimoy was also right there with him, a brilliant, iconic presence that helped turn TOS in to what might have otherwise been “Lost in Space.”

Right on.

Now this is just personal anecdote-- but one thing I’ve always been pretty surprised by (as a person with fairly severe health issues, haha not sure how that totally influences thigns) is how, when there’s a local emergency, the adrenaline just hits me and I spring in to action (as much as I can) to help out.

Par example, three times now I’ve survived bad fires that way, and after comparing notes with an old friend over Uvalde, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that both of us felt the same way-- that we wouldn’t have been able to look ourselves in the mirror if we hadn’t made our best attempt to save the kids.

Seriously, how do these BLUE people look at themselves in the mirror for either not doing their best that day, or on a national scale, for enabling this awful betrayal of public trust?

boys and girls in blue

How about we clarify that as: little boys and little girls in blue.

Altho TBF, women in blue are typically at the bottom of the chain, and almost certainly deserve the least amount of critique here, whilst the highest ranking dudes unquestionably deserve all the shit in the world for directly ordering their forces not to make any meaningful attempt.

Good stuff; thanks for sharing.

The contrast between Curtis’ outgoing personality versus the character she played reminded me a bit of Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock Holmes. I would think one’s native personality would peek through the stoniness of the role from time to time, regardless.

Excellent; was going to post about the Cornella vibes.

I’d previously uploaded a collection to Imgur with a NSFW tag, but they deleted it.

You’re quite right, altho I think it was a different scene or sub-scene.

This seems to be either an outtake or a between-scenes shot.

The coming of the apocalypse, I presume! D:

But seriously, I was blown away when I first saw this, especially strange since it’s been around for… well over 10yrs I think?

Thanks for commenting, and I was hoping it might lead to some interesting discussion.

If I may ask-- did you feel like Gerrold was too harsh in particular towards Roddenberry?

Haha, I think maybe I feel you on that.
Filmation worked so much better when it came to shades of comedy & farce, and for me, there was a tonne of understated comedy & farce in He-Man, hearkining back to lots of H-B farce. (never watched Godzilla personally, have no interest at all, sadly or unsadly)

So Filmation to me were mostly disappointing (and again, the damn limited budget) when it came to TAS, but they also had to walk a sort of line, just like Rankin-Bass with The Hobbit, and then the “Return of the King.”

The first one was fairly charming (and the songs were absolutely awesome), based on a children’s book, but the latter?

Yeah, that shizzle just didn’t work for a serious fantasy epic. Okay, I’ll admit it had its points, but Rankin-Bass was so *not* the animation studio to do RotK, other than bringing back the super-charming… Glenn Yarbrough (sp?) as the narrator-singer.

I both liked and disliked this series. I thought it so impressive that they got most of the original cast back together, had DC Fontana running it, and had some really top-notch writing talent. Also, with animation, there was the promise of doing all kinds of interesting special effects that weren’t possible with TOS.

The problem is that the animation budget was so limited! I didn’t mind that sections of scenes were recycled, something which also happened here and there in the original series, but that the Filmation art & technique was just so mediocre. As in, not nearly as interesting as some other studios were putting out, such as Depatie-Freling. Even some H-B series had far more interesting art & backgrounds, like Scooby Doo.

Another problem is that the weak budget meant that poor Jimmy Doohan had to voice virtually every male character outside of the core cast. Similar with Nichols & Barrett having to do all the extra female characters. It got pretty identifiably ridiculous even just a few episodes in, and was a shame, because Hollywood’s always had an amazing stock of versatile voice actors that worked surprisingly economically. (Mark Evanier’s blog is a good place to read about that sort of thing)

OTOH, I sort of enjoyed the animation bloopers, and there were many. One of my favorites was the way background characters would sometimes be larger than foreground characters. So, interesting to read that many of such ‘bloopers’ were in fact by design:

“There were also only so many layers you could use before the colors started changing. Sometimes, you’ll see a missing leg or something like that. It’s not always a blooper, it’s just that they only had so many cells that they could use.”

“If they wanted to have an animation on top of whatever was happening, sometimes they’d have to sacrifice something that maybe nobody will see this,” states Harvey. "At one point, Scotty’s doing something and he has no legs. He’s just a floating torso. For me, that’s part of the charm. It’s just the idea that this wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, we’re being caught careless.’ It was, ‘We have to make a decision on how we’re going to do this.’ That was the process. That’s a very abbreviated version of that process.

Because the title leaves out the fact that Kirk’s native character was actually inspired by Horatio Hornblower, not Cook. Also, Hornblower was such a complex character that his attributes got split up in to both Kirk and Spock, evidently.

It’s a pretty interesting read!

Difficult to tell when he’s playing an android

I thought that was a big part of how Spiner made Data just about the most interesting character in the series-- the understated little flourishes, tics, and burblings of emotion showing through.

To me a very clever variation on Nimoy’s amazing work on Spock in the series before, but of course Brent made the character wholly his own to the point that it barely registered that he was cut from the ‘Spock template.’

Laate reply, but very interesting comments that do make a lot of sense to me, particularly about the different mechanisms used in the ZAZ and Mel Brooks’ movies.

Judging from more recent movies clearly built on the models above, I feel like in general, modern directors & producers try to broadcast more to the audience as to how and when to react. That is-- in this post-MTV age, it seems like they’re more scared of potential dead air time, and want to avoid indulging too much in the deadpan, pregnant moments common in ZAZ films. Ones that made them so delicious, of course, tending to appeal to the thoughtful person.

By comparison, King of the Hill is maybe a rare case of a cartoon comedy that wasn’t entirely concerned with whether the audience understood the full humor of the situations. Just popped in to my head anyway, so I thought I’d mention it.

Their successors forgot that however thin, the underlying movie has to be watchable, or you lose something. Maybe it’s just generational (always have to allow for that at my age), but I kind of think that Scary Movie et al is stuff that is not nearly as timeless.

That reminds me of one of the major keys to the success of the ZAZ movies, which was to hire a cast known for their serious, dramatic roles, a type which Nielsen epitomized. At no point could the actors indicate that the situations going on around them were funny, otherwise the illusion might be punctured.

Perhaps some of the later imitation films, like Scary Movie et al, kind of drifted away from that premise, I don’t know.

Speaking of Blazing Saddles, I recall reading that the musicians and orchestra were told that they were producing music for a classic-style western, and when they ultimately learned that the movie was an intentional farce, they were *not* amused.

There’s also the ‘Ask Historians’ analysis, which posits that there were at least three major ideas about how to handle a nuclear bombing entertained between the principles deciding.

While it’s tempting to look at the situation in retrospect and agree with the report that ‘yes obviously there wasn’t a need to bomb to elicit a surrender’ that nevertheless doesn’t mean that the majority of the deciders were fully on board with that understanding & approach, unlike Ike.

Without doing a deep dive, the AH approach makes about the most sense to me and seems consistent with history, in which there was a level of uncertainty and multiple players & arguments going in to the final decision.

Btw, that first link barely mentions the matter, and the second link is far too subjective to be of much use, far as I can tell.