That time was before beloved franchises like Star Trek and Star Wars and Lord of the Rings were converted into garbage message mechanisms for garbage ideologies. Now… anything that *might* be good is now viewed initially with skepticism, and more often than not finally with contempt.
So will “Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny” be any good? I have no reason for optimism. There are rumors that the plot involves time travel, and that the end of the movie has Harrison Ford’s Indy being erased from the timeline and replaced with Phoebe Waller Bridge as a female Indy. “The REAL Indy was a woman, all along!” This could be utterly wrong… but things have gotten so predictably bad that I won’t discount the distinct possibility.
The original USS Enterprise model is back in the restoration shop at the National Air & Space Museum. Adam Savage got to go in and take a close look at it, and you can *feel* just how hard it was to not get handsy with the thing.
The Paramount/Nickelodeon series “Star Trek: Prodigy” is very definitely a kids show. The main characters are kids, the plots are generally kid-friendly, the writing is pretty much kid-level. Given how the last three Star Trek live action series – STD, STP and SNW – have all to greater or lesser degrees crapped on the legacy of Star Trek, it would be both easy and fair for an actual Star Trek fan to simply give “Prodigy” a pass. But I am becoming more and more of the opinion that prodigy, like fellow animated series “Lower Decks,” is *actual* Star Trek worthy of attention.
Prodigy has started in on the second half of the first season. The most recent episode, “All The World’s A Stage,” has our heroes stumbling across a primitive society that was previously contacted by the USS Enterprise under Captain Kirk a hundred years previously. As happens rather a lot in Star Trek, there was cultural contamination and the locals have picked up on Starfleet appearances, iconography, technology and ideology, though incompletely and somewhat inaccurately. But what *is* accurate: when it came time for “Star Trek Prodigy” to depict the shuttlecraft, phasers, uniforms and bridge of Kirks Enterprise… they used TOS designs. Not Discovery, not Strange New Worlds… The Original Fricken’ One And Only Series.
It is somewhat amazing to me that the people behind the friggen’ *cartoons* care vastly more about canon than the people with actual vast sums of money to lavish on the live action shows. While the animated series have from time to time dropped little nods to the Crap Series like STD and STP, when given the option they go with the good stuff. This indicates to me that the two animated series (three if you want to go back to the 70’s) are canonical with TOS and TNG and DS9 and VOY, while STD, STP and SNW are not.
The video below is by a couple of guys who arguably spend *way* too much time on this sort of thing. Here they’re geeking out over the appearance of true TOS in Prodigy. Included are a number of screenshots, including several when the bridge of the USS Protostar is holographically reconfigured to have TOS crew stations. And these guys are correct: it looks *glorious.* There was never any good reason to redo the TOS aesthetic.
By the way: I know a lot of people liked “Strange New Worlds.” Compared to STD and STP, it was a massive step up, but it was still a massive step down from proper Star Trek. The link to Discovery was enough to mean it’s not canonical, but the show was *filled* with evidence that SNW cannot be considered to exist in the same universe as TOS. Besides the various carryovers from STD (including the fact that the Enterprise is like 50% bigger), there are two main discrepancies within SNW:
1) They run into the Gorn, again and again. They’ve had direct interactions with them, met them face to face, have detailed scans and biological samples. This is around ten years before Kirk & Co. were supposed to have run into the previously wholly unknown Gorn for the very first time.
2) The season finale had Captain Pikes mind projected into an alternate future where he was still captain of the Enterprise during the TOS “Balance of Terror” episode. In the end, his mind is returned to the “present,” and he decides to choose a path that won’t lead to that divergent timeline. Great, wonderful. But… he *remembers* that timeline. The McGuffin that permitted the time travel, a Klingon “time crystal,” is a previously established thing that Starfleet is fully aware of. So doubtless Captain Pike will promptly file a report. A report that will tell Starfleet that:
A) The Romulans are a Vulcan offshoot
B) The Romulans are working on their plasma weapon
C) The Romulans are working on a practical cloaking device, and methods to detect it
D) The Romulans will attack this, that and the other outpost on such-and-such dates.
In the SNW universe, when “Balance of Terror” does eventually roll around, that Romulan warbird will get blown to smithereens the moment it first drops its cloak, because Starfleet will have had a decade to prepare. So, no… SNW is not in the TOS universe.
Guillermo del Toro has released some -re-viz video created by ILM for his cancelled 2011 “At The Mountains of Madness.” There is a fairly creepy critter here, but it does not seem to match the descriptions in the novella. It’s *certainly* not an Elder Thing; all it can be is either a Shoggoth (which should be an oily black “the Blob” with a bunch of eyes and pseudopods) or an all-new creature invented for the movie.
I’ve seen a number of YouTubers react to “2001.” A common thread is a general dull-wittedness… confused by what they’re seeing, and unable or unwilling to try to think it through, certainly unable to come up with intelligent suppositions. These two guys, however, seem to get it. Well… as much as *anyone* can “get it” without reading the novelization. After the events of Tuesday, this is perhaps a tiny morsel of hope that there might be some remaining shreds of intelligence among Gen Z.
Still a little clunky, but they’re getting close to a practical unit. The graphics it can place over reality remain monochromatic and low-rez, basically text (looks like circa 1980 home computer stuff), but the fact that they can get *anything* is impressive. I doubt something like this would be a good idea for fighter pilots; G-forces would doubtless suck the things out of place. But for commercial pilot or astronauts? Maybe. Though it’d probably be easier and all-around better for this sort of thing to be integrated into the faceplate of a space helmet. The Hollywood use for this would be communications with secret agents and assassins; an advanced version of this would look invisible and would automatically use facial recognition to spot targets in a crowded room. It would be handy for electricians, bomb techs, surgeons and the like, overlaying schematics and 3D models atop the thing/patient being worked on. For the civilian market, an obvious use would again be facial recognition: you get on a subway, look around, and you’re informed just which of the creepy weirdoes surrounding you have criminal records and for what. Some people might be dismayed to find that random people around them are suddenly maintaining a safe distance, out of pocket-picking and rail-pushing range.
The filming miniature of the USCM Dropship from “Aliens” is being auctioned off. It’s a bit incomplete and showing its age, but it’d be a hell of a thing to own. I’d love to have one in 1/35 scale to go with the APC model kit.
The YouTube channel “Found and Explained” just released a video on the 4,000 ton Orion Battleship, with the model used based on my reconstruction from issue V2N2 of “Aerospace Projects Review.” The video was sponsored by a “Star Trek” video game, so there are a *lot* of Star Trek references in the video.
For more information on the project, including blueprints, be sure to check out issue v2N2.
YouTube is filled to overflowing with “fan edits” of this or that movie, or fan-made videos showing spaceships from Star Wars, Star Trek, Babylon 5, Battlestar Gallactica, etc. The quality of these vary greatly. Lots are *terrible.* But every now and then, you get THIS:
It’s a reworking of the “launch” scene from Star Trek VI. The original was fine, but this is *way* better. And note that the artist didn’t decide to redesign the Enterprise or Spacedock; he respected the canon.