Addicted to love. Flower cultivator, flute player, verse maker. Usually delicate, but at times masculine. Well read, even to erudition. Almost an orientalist.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • Lots of negativity in this thread, but that seems to be par for the course for any fandom. Personally I’m cautiously optimistic.

    Skydance produced/co-produced (often partnering with Paramount) on a number of franchise movies, including Star Trek, Mission Impossible, Jack Reacher, Top Gun, GI Joe, Terminator, The Old Guard and Spy Kids. Some of their productions have been well-received (eg Mission Impossible, Top Gun Maverick) and others less so (Terminator Genysis and Dark Fate, although personally I quite liked Dark Fate). They’ve also produced smaller, critically acclaimed movies like True Grit, Annihilation and Air; as well as their share of dreck of course, like Geostorm.

    What I think is clear though is that Skydance is primarily interested in big franchises, so if they were to acquire Paramount, I think more Star Trek movies would very likely be in the works which, as a fan, I’d be happy about. I know there’s an argument that Trek is best suited to TV, but some of the best Star Trek has been big screen Star Trek. And studios are more willing these days to have franchises run across both TV and film concurrently (MCU, DC, Star Wars), granted with mixed success.

    Re Larry Ellison’s involvement - my guess is that he’d be a silent partner, putting some of his personal fortune - rather than Oracle’s funds - to help out his son. I believe he did the same thing for his daughter, Megan Ellison, whose company Annapurna Pictures he helped fun and which went on to produce films like Her, Zero Dark Thirty, Phantom Thread and Books Smart (and the stage musical A Strange Loop). I doubt Larry Ellison will take a hands-on role in the management of Skydance/Paramount.



  • Movies:

    • Rebel Moon. If you gave an AI the prompt: “A Star Wars movie written and directed by Zack Snyder but with all Star Wars copyrighted material disguised” this is what you’d get. I know that’s exactly what the movie was, minus the written by AI bit (though I wonder), but it felt almost like a parody of itself.
    • Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. Mediocre, except for Patrick Wilson who elevated every soggy line he was given to read. They desperately wanted to recreate the Thor/Loki dynamic to the point where I thought in one scene I actually heard Aquaman call his brother “Loki”.
    • One Life. Schindler’s List if Schindler’s List focused more on the red tape needed to rescue people from the Nazis, and Oskar’s twilight years. Kidding aside, a decent movie, but more on the “worthy” end of the spectrum than the entertaining.
    • Poor Things. The best movie I’ve seen this year. May still be true 51 weeks from now.

    TV:

    • For All Mankind. I enjoyed the “retro” early seasons more, but it’s still a very watchable show, and one I still consider to be a Star Trek prequel if I squint and look at it slightly sideways. They certainly seem to be heading towards a Fundamental Declarations of the Martian colonies scenario this season. One of the few shows I’m watching week-by-week instead of saving up and bingeing.
    • A Murder at the End of the World. Well acted, somewhat slow moving murder mystery. Unfortunately I guessed the identity of the killer after two episodes, and thought both that, and a certain revelation about one of the characters, were overused tropes in the early 2020s.
    • Bodies. Decent crime mini series set across four time periods. I thought the more modern settings and characters were more interesting than the oldey timey (wimey) ones, but the show managed to bring all four storylines together in a pretty satisfying way.
    • Silo. Halfway through. Pretty good, but maybe not as good as I heard it was.

  • Fedilab is a Fediverse client for (according to the website) Mastodon, Peertube, Pixelfed, Pleroma, GNU Social and Friendica. You can also follow kbin users (and, I assume lemmy ones as well, though I haven’t tried). The app will allow you to manage several accounts on Mastodon, Peertube and Pleroma instances.

    You can block content by keywords or phrases (either hiding them with a warning or hiding them completely) but I don’t know if you can bulk upload keywords. (You can add several keywords/phrases at a time manually.)

    Unfortunately (for you) the app is currently only available on Android.


  • That Bob Justman memo reminded me how much fun they had making TOS (as well as working long and hard of course). Perhaps my favourite is the memo chain Justman started about Vulcan proper names.

    Re fixing mistakes: I guess I don’t have a problem with it as long as the mistakes are trivial, are clearly errors, and the original version remains available. What constitutes a “trivial error” of course can be up for debate. Correcting a background audio cue - sure, why not? Changing early TOS references of “Vulcanians” to “Vulcans” - definitely not.



  • I’m pretty sure I encountered “City on the Edge of Forever” through James Blish’s short story adaptation before I saw the actual episode *cough cough* years ago, because Edith’s speech as televised:

    One day soon… man is going to be able to harness incredible energies, maybe even the atom. Energies that could ultimately hurl us to other worlds in… in some sort of spaceship.

    has always struck me as being incredibly blunt in comparison to what appeared in the short story version. Blish didn’t work off the final shooting scripts but earlier revisions, so I assume Edith’s “astronauts on some sort of… star trek”-like predictions must have been inserted by Roddenberry or maybe Fontana.

    While some of the poetry and elegance may have been taken out of Ellison’s script (along with other, more justifiable, changes), there’s no denying that “City” is an absolute classic, and one of the few instances of Trek doing romance well.




  • No it wasn’t, it was genes and it sat on his desk before being loaned out to the studio

    It was loaned out in the run-up to Star Trek The Motion Picture. It was not loaned to the studio at the time of production of the original series. I’m talking about the ownership of the model back in 1964, not 1978/79.

    No the model was made before any production, again documented and linked for source.

    Filming of the first scene of “The Cage” took place on 24 or 27 November 1964 (accounts vary).

    The 3-foot model was commissioned from Richard Datin on 4 November 1964. He received the blueprints on 7 or 8 November 1964. An in-progress version was presented to Roddenberry on 15 November 1964, with Roddenberry apparently requesting a number of changes, ie “more detail”. The model was delivered to Roddenberry on 14 December 1964 while “The Cage” was being filmed in Culver City.

    Therefore the model was made during production, not before.

    Source for most of these dates: http://www.shawcomputing.net/resources/shaw/1701-33-inch.html

    And even if the model was made before production of “The Cage” started, it doesn’t negate my point, which is that the model would almost certainly have been paid for, and therefore owned, by Desilu or Norway as it was clearly a production/pre-production expense. It was used consistently throughout the run of the show, and was even modified to more closely resemble the 11-foot model. I find it inconceivable that Roddenberry would have paid for it out of his own, personal, pocket.

    Again it’s documented, you’re simply making things up.

    I’m not making things up, I’m speculating based on what I know of business and Roddenberry himself. Roddenberry was known to appropriate items that were owned by the studio for his personal benefit, eg when he took film clippings after the show was cancelled and sold them through his private business Lincoln Enterprises.

    Roddenberry merely stating “I’ve owned it since the Desilu days” in a letter doesn’t necessarily make it so. Note I’m not claiming he didn’t own it, I’m raising it as an academic possibility. And, as I said, I have no problems at all with the model going back to the Roddenberry family once it’s been recovered.


  • @CCMan1701A has a point. The model was built for production purposes, so it would have almost certainly been paid for - and therefore owned - by either by Desilu Studios or Norway Corporation (aka Norway Productions) depending on how the accounting was set up back in 1964. So unless Desilu/Norway sold or gifted the model to Roddenberry at some point, ie formally passed title to him, technically it would still be the property of the original corporate owner.

    What I think quite possible though is that after TOS was cancelled Roddenberry took possession of a bunch of production assets nobody ever thought would have any value. Star Trek, after all, was a failed show. IIRC it was known that he used to do stuff like that, eg selling off merchandise to fans that - technically - he didn’t own. It’s just that nobody really cared too much back then.

    Now as it so happens, Norway was actually Roddenberry’s production company, but technically that doesn’t matter, as there’s a legal distinction between a corporation you own on the one hand, and you as an individual on the other. That’s the whole purpose of setting up businesses as separate legal entities. So even if the model was originally purchased by and owned by Norway (as opposed to Desilu, which was sold to Paramount during the show’s run) then Norway (Roddenberry’s company) would still have needed to pass ownership to Gene Roddenberry the individual (via a gift or sale) in order for Majel Roddenberry’s statement that “it was Gene’s” to be strictly true. Of course, that would have been a cinch to do: Roddenberry, as owner/executive of Norway, simply sells or gives the model to Roddenberry the individual.

    It’s possible that this happened, ie that Desilu or Norway sold or gifted the model to Roddenberry, but it’s also possible (especially if the model was owned by Desilu/Paramount) that he merely ended up with it, and that nobody questioned his legal right to it in the years since.

    Personally, regardless of whether technically (ie from a legal or accounting perspective) Roddenberry did or did not own the model, I fully understand that Rod Roddenberry would be interested in recovering this seminal piece of Star Trek memorabilia, and I wouldn’t have any issues if it stayed in the Roddenberry family or was gifted to an institution like the Smithsonian.









  • Her whole pivot into even-more-than-normal overtly reckless behavior three episodes after the supposed precipitating event felt very abrupt, and the scene where she talks it over and appears to resolve her issues with Ma’ah felt rushed, almost forced.

    Agreed. It’s tricky injecting serious notes into an all-out sitcom and I’m not sure it worked as well this episode as it might have.

    The Sito Jaxa makes reasonable sense as a backstory component, but I found it distracting and it does add to the “small universe” syndrome that expanding IPs risk falling into

    Again, agreed. Lower Decks has as much (more even) blatant fan service as Picard season 3, although because it is a comedy I find it more forgivable and less grating than I did in the other show. That said, “Lower Decks” is my favourite TNG episode, so appreciated the Sito Jaxa callback for that reason (and it was a nice way of connecting this series and the episode it was named after). As long as they’re not foreshadowing her return. That would be very very bad. They thought about bringing her back on DS9 but wisely refrained. Keep your hands off Sito Jaxa’s corpse McMahan!!