Star Trek movie retrospective Part 1: Star Trek the Motion Picture
Like I said yesterday, while going through images for a ton of new Star Trek T shirts I came across shirts for every Star Trek movie made to date, including Generations. It seems to me as time and movies progress they are less like true Star Trek movies and more like lame Hollywood crap marginally inspired by Star Trek. The last few movies managed to both suck and blow, which is such a strong contrast to the Wrath of Khan it’s almost as if the more recent films were made by (non Federation) aliens of some kind.
I thought I would put my feelings down on this blog by doing a modest retrospective of each movie and what was going on at the time. These are not formal review, as I haven’t seen most of these recently enough to give them any kind of fair treatment. This is a simple overview.
So, Star Trek the Motion Picture. The year is 1979 and Star Trek has been retired for 10 years. Paramount was working on a new TV series called Phase II (given that the majority of weak stories from the first series were in season 3 (cough cough Abe Lincoln in space cough cough) I don’t know if trying to continue the stories with the same cast would have done much). Roddenberry had campaigned for a movie, but the studio was convinced lightning would strike twice with TV. Then E.T. made a ton of money and all of a sudden the brainless apes known worldwide as studio executives decided it might be worth trying.
The script was actually a rewrite of the pilot script for Phase II, which kind of explains a lot. Also, the special effects weren’t done in what could be termed a timely manner and the final cut left the editors studio just a few days before the debut.
So it’s 1979. Margaret Thatcher is elected prime minister of Great Britain. Sony releases the Walkman to massive success. The first snowboard is invented. The staff of the American embassy is Tehran is taken hostage. The USSR invaded Afghanistan, where they would eventually get their ass kicked. The Who has a concert in Cincinnati and 11 people are killed in the ensuing riot. Saddam Hussain takes power in Iraq. France is hit by a tsunami. Sid Vicious died. The YMCA sued the Village People for obvious reasons. And the Bee Gees hit number 1 with Love You Inside Out.
Also, at this time I was grinding my way through Mrs. Lovemark’s 5th grade class and slowly coming to the realization that my social life was probably going to suck compared to most of my “peers”. As you can see there was a moral and cultural hole in American culture and my personal life, and we all needed something to fill it.Star Trek attempted to fill that gap with this film but, in my opinion, failed.
Let’s talk about what Star Trek the Motion Picture had:
William Shatnar in a body stocking. Spock. A super hot bald chick. A horrific transporter accident. The original cast. Some decent 1979 era special effects. The Enterprise. Did I mention the super hot bald chick?
Here is what it didn’t have:
Action of any kind. A coherent plot. An understanding of astrophysics (Voyager 6, in the couple hundred years since it’s launch until the aliens found it, would have a best been ten light years from Earth). A decent costume designer (what part of Shatnar in a body stocking sounds like a good idea on any level?). Emotion of any kind, except, ironically enough, Spock (Decker and Kirk arguing about command of the Enterprise does not count). Any real sense of story or accomplishment.
Yes, this was mediocre. However, it grossed enough worldwide to justify a sequel, which is of course the fabulous TWOK. I will talk about that in the next post.
This movie was important as a stepping stone towards the continuation of the franchise. I don’t think any of the TV shows would have arisen had this movie not paved the road to some of the good films. In that regard, I like this movie a lot. Just not in a hurry to see it again.
Ugh, I just found out something depressing. That super hot bald chick was an Indian actress named Persis Khambatta. If you think she was hot bald, check her out with hair. Anyway, I just discovered she died in 1998 at the age of 50. Ironic that she was 17 years younger than Shatnar and he is still going strong. Now I’m depressed.
As a weird side note, I remember reading the book adaptation of this movie. The one thing that struck me was that the hot bald chick (her screen name was Ilia) was a Deltan. That race generated sexual pheromones that were supposed to drive human males crazy, so the subplot was all the humans trying to not lose it. Given that they were all wearing body stockings it seems like the chance of an embarrassing uniform accident would be considerable.
By the way, I have made friends with some of the people at TheStream.TV. They do original internet TV with a definite nerd bent, and are having a big release event coming up. Check it out. I have seen some of their geek shows and it is pretty good. If you look carefully enough you might see actual footage of me expressing my opinion on some popular comic book characters at one of the comic cons I did earlier this year. I haven’t watched much lately as my sound card has died again and I can only stream stuff in my iPhone.
On a completely related topic, I am getting my new iMac tomorrow. I am so excited. Talk to you soon.
Dave, where the hell have you been?
I just looked at my last post and realized it has been a full week since I did anything. I apologize to those of you who are avid readers and want to hear my words of wisdom each day. To the other 99.999% of you I will just say I have been really busy with the Star Trek show we attended this last weekend. Even now I am scrambling to fold and sort t-shirts, but wanted to at least make a prairie dog-like appearance and let my beloved readers know I am still shuffling on this mortal coil.
The show I went to was the San Francisco Star Trek convention, and let me say it exceeded all my expectations, both in sales and in fun. It’s a smaller show and I thought it would be kind of slow, but it was popping the whole time. I met some amazing people, saw some decent costumes, and finally discovered a way of displaying t-shirts that I like.
I find these shows to be especially cool in that I really enjoy hanging out with the true fans, if you know what I mean. Sure you meet cool fans at shows like Wondercon and so on, but you also get a lot of dross wandering in off the street. You have to be truly dedicated to travel to a Star Trek show, and it feels good to be in a room where 100% of the people with you are into the same thing you are. I think it an interesting case that one of the best selling t-shirts from the show was this United Federation of Planets (from the Star Trek T shirt category) rather than one of the character shirts, as only a true fan of Star Trek would even recognize this logo. Very cool.
So this week I will do a post each day. Tomorrow more dating advice. Tomorrow night I think I will see Battle: Los Angeles so you can look forward to a review for what I hope is a great movie Wednesday. I need to blog a lot over the next two weeks as I will be working hard to get ready for Wondercon in early April and will start having a hard time finding time after about the 27th. More on that show later.
Nerd Dating: Online Dating pt 18: Keeping the conversation going.
OK, you sent out about 100(,000,000) emails to assorted women and got one back. Your job is now to keep the conversation going until she is comfortable enough with you to agree to meet up.
This is actually a lot harder to do than you would think. The problem is if you exchange too many emails she will either get bored or come to the conclusion that you have something to hide (missing limb, frequent and fragrant flatulence, etc). It’s like trying to drop excess weight to keep a helium balloon from going down in piranha infested water and the only thing you have left to drop is your excess blood. You have to balance out enough weight lost without bleeding to death (while the piranhas get driven into a frenzy by all that blood dripping into the water).
Honestly, I tend to treat this like I would going for the first kiss while dating. 3-5 emails seems to be the correct number. Each email needs to both tell her something about you (not too much) and keep her interested enough to reply. The best thing to do seems to be to ask her a few questions about herself related to her last email while answering her last set of questions with as few details as possible. By the way, if she is not asking you questions than odds are she is just killing time at work. You can probably let the thread drop.
The thing about these is never volunteer extra information. You need her to feel like you are doing her a favor even telling her your name. Also, by keeping detains low you will intrigue her and make her want to see you face to face, where the implication is you will be more forthcoming. If you give here everything she has no reason to email you again.
Here are a few examples.
She asks: “Where did you go to college.” The correct answer would be “UC Irvine. Where did you go?” The incorrect answer would be “UC Irvine. I studied studio art. It’s kind of boring but I had some fun. All my best friends came from there, and my frat voted me “Most likely to bazooka barf on Yeager” three years in a row.” See, if you had gone with the first answer she would have been forced to email you again with questions like “What did you study? Did you like it? Have you ever projectile vomited while drinking Yeager?”
She asks: “Did you have pets as a kid?” and you answer “We had a cat and a dog.” She will then ask stuff like “What kind of dog? Is he still alive? Is there the slightest chance he’s actually a werewolf trapped in canine form?”
See how that works? Answer her questions, but leave the subject open for more questions.
Also be sure to ask her questions. Never get too specific or detailed or she will conclude you are likely a stalker of some kind (probably correctly). Here are some innocuous questions you can feel free to use. “Where did you grow up? Where did you go to school? What did you major in? Do you have any brothers or sisters? What do you do? Do you like it?”
The one thing to remember is any details you are given you will have to remember and reference when you do meet here, so don’t do too much or you will strain your brain.
Incidentally, this exchange is exactly like the game point in a tennis (or, for the less athletically inclined readers, ping pong) match. You hit the ball into her court, she returns, rinse and repeat. If the ball gets dropped for any reason it’s game over. If she fails to respond to your last email you must have butchered it and no amount of “Hey, you never replied to my last email. Everything OK?” will get the ball bouncing again. Go back to spamming new girls.
That’s it for today. I think it safe to assume most of you actually communicate better via email than in person so I won’t burden you with too much detail. Next post we will talk about actually meeting with your girl.
I want to mention real quick that this weekend I will be at the Star Trek Convention in San Francisco this weekend and will very likely be wearing this Star Trek red T shirt just because I like to live dangerously. This show will feature the vaunted Leonard Nimoy as well as the great Michelle Nichols, so if you are in the Bay Area be sure to stop by and say hi. I will have a new girl working with me on Saturday as well so if you see a cute nerdish girl there while I am trying to get Nimoy’s autograph be sure to say high to Angela.
Nerd Dating: Online Dating pt 13: interpreting photos
They say a picture is worth 1000 words, but if you are clever, it can actually be worth 1001-1010 as you glean little insights into the personality, sense of humor, fitness, motivations, and general suitableness of your prospective procreation partner.
Picture with a cat (or cats). If this is a guy, either he thinks this is really clever and funny or is something that rhymes with “Tin the Bloset”. If the first he could be a great guy to date, but you will never ever know for sure which of the two he really is. If this is a girl first of all go back and reread my “More than two cats” rule for dating women. If she is shown with only one or two cats then you can explore further, but know that she has probably made her cats her substitute children in a way that will absolutely drive you nuts at some point.
Picture from high school. Unless this person is actually 18 years old, steer clear. Either they have hit the wall so hard that they have broken through (with their face) into new, unexplored territories of ugliness and this is the last time they took a good photo, or they were one of those super popular kids in high school who now feels a desperate desire to go back in time to when they were cool again. If they only included the high school pic in addition to some more recent ones then it is probably is the latter case, but even then you will soon become thoroughly sick of stories that all start with “This one time in high school…” Take it from me (the bitter troll that I am), if you took the total sum of all your accomplishments, parties, and popularity you had in high school it has the value of a wad of used chewing gum at the bottom of an empty grande latte cup from Starbucks the day after you graduate. Move on.
Girl in group shot with other girls cheek to cheek. This inevitably means sorority girl (or the junior college or GED equivalent). It also generally means she likes to party and wont have a real problem sleeping with you. If she does love to party go back and look at the guideline I did for “Love to Party.” Otherwise, as long as you aren’t a hard core GDI you should be able to date her and have fun, although I would not be surprised if she turned out to be a little shallow.
Guy in group shot doing the “hang loose” symbol with one hand, beer in the other, and his tongue out trying to touch his chin. Frat boy. I don’t know why it is, but every frat boy I have even known has a biological imperative to turn profile, do the hang loose (thumb and pinky extended to the max), and stick out his tongue whenever they are in a group and someone points a camera at them. They all have hundreds of these photos and love to post them on profiles in an attempt to show you what kind of a fun party guy they are. If fun for you is watching him get hammered every night at the sports bar down the street with his Greek friends, than by all means go for it. Also, most of these guys have a hat on backwards. Not sure I understand the motivation there.
Girl in group shot where she is the hottest one. This girl is kind of a user and also has some self esteem issues. She will most likely only be friends with women she thinks are less attractive. All things are relative, but usually they are pretty hot and extremely well groomed. They also tend to be pretty shallow and a little overbearing. Odds are she is looking for a guy to hold her purse while she shops, so if you feel like you have an overabundance of machismo go for it.
Girl in group shot where she is obviously NOT the hottest one. This can be two different kinds of women. Either she is a fairly cool girl who is OK with her appearance or she is a walking, talking doormat. The first one can be very cool to date as they are interesting and opinionated. However, they also tend to do stuff like get sick of washing their hair and cut it all off with clippers. The second girl as been thrown on so many grenades by her girlfriends that she will probably be remarkably easy to date. However, you will constantly be attracted to her friends and there is a reasonably good chance one of them might fool around with you just to reassert who the Alpha female is in her circle of friends is, so dating her can lead to some serious drama in spite of the fact that she herself is low drama. Both of these girls are pretty low maintenance, in my experience.
Guy in a football uniform. This is always a high school shot (guys who played football in college generally don’t have to go online to date) so all the things I said above about high school photos apply. However, this is a special case. This guy desperately wants the world to remember that at one point he was an athlete. However, they inevitably have gained about 50 pounds since then and the closest they have come to participating in sports in trying to sink wadded up paper in a trash bin. If he were still in shape he would have a current shot of himself playing volleyball or something.
Girl in a cheerleader uniform. This is the female version of the guy in a football uniform, with the added need to show you that at one point in her life she was hot enough to be a cheerleader. The one difference is once in a while you can get a woman that shows herself as a college cheerleader too. Everything I said about the football guy applies here, plus she is probably much higher maintenance to date than most women.
That’s it for today. More on this tomorrow. 
Yesterday’s question, second fiddle Riker verses the extremely lovable Chief Engineer Montgomary Scott, has caused me a lot of angst. I really, really want to say Scotty would kick Rikers ass, being a real man and all, but I can’t help but think that Riker is taller with greater reach and seems better trained. However, Scotty worked in an environment where violence was more common (he did throw the first punch in the Trouble with Tribbles) and probably has a lot more actual fighting experience, so I am going to make myself happy and go with him. The problem is I don’t believe it enough to put money on it. It would be a close one. (Riker image courtesy of the Star Trek t shirts category).
For today I present something that seems really obvious until you think about the kinds of fights he has overcome with his brain: who would win, Batman versus Darth Vader? Think about it for a while before answering.
By the way, if you like my writing and are looking for someone to write blog articles or other online content I am willing to do some contract work. Check out some of my product descriptions on the commercial site. Email me at [email protected].
