What he says is interesting… mostly because it’s not what I generally expect to hear from non-sci-fi/non-science types. Most of “those people” look at “2001” with some mix of bafflement and disdain, generally bored out of their minds.

Do you want your very own genuine space suit from “2001: A Space Odyssey?” Sure, we all do. Got at least eighty grand to start bidding on it? Sure, we all don’t. But at least you can look at the pictures and dream.

Astronaut Space Suit (6) Piece Ensemble from 2001: A Space Odyssey (MGM, 1968)

2/ More photos of the "2001" lunar space suit: pic.twitter.com/4ldclFqS44

— Unwanted Blog (@UnwantedBlog) September 22, 2023

"2001" space suit backpack. Again… WANT.
/1 pic.twitter.com/m8KKv2lVuu

— Unwanted Blog (@UnwantedBlog) September 20, 2023

So, there’s this movie coming:

It looks like your bog-standard Supernatural Entity Scary Horror Movie, with the twist being that the main characters are Indian immigrant and the Entity is something out of Indian folklore. OK, sure. We’ve all seen this before, with folk monsters from various ethnicities/nationalities/whatever pestering the appropriate people.

Here’s my idea, though.

Main characters are Popular Ethnic Minority Types… Indians, Japanese, Native Americans, Nigerians, whatever. They end up plagued by some magical critter from their homelands folklore. 80 to 90% of the movie is them on the run from Scary Monster, occasionally bumping into Clueless Standard White Americans. You know, the people who in these stories can be relied upon to be of no help whatsoever, because they have no knowledge of Diverse Supernatural Entity. But one member of the Doomed Ethnic Cast – let’s say a small-ish child, willing to talk to outsiders – explains the problem to Clueless White Guy. The Ethic Cast then runs off, leaving Clueless White Guy to look after them with a look of confusion. But then at the end of the movie, when Scary Monster looks about ready to pounce and kill everybody or send them all to Hell, or whatever it does, Clueless White Guy shows up.

I see two possibilities that I’d like:

1) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. Then he looks to the empty space to his right and says, “Hey, can you help out here?” Then there’s a rumbling sound that transitions to deep laughter. Scary Ethnic Monster Turns to look at Clueless White Guy, turns to eat *him,* but then stops. Because something from Clueless White Guys ethnic folklore, in this case Thor, manifests, whips out Mjolnir, and proceeds to beat Scary Ethnic Monster into a mess of ectoplasm. When Scary Ethnic Monster is finally destroyed, Thor hefts Mjolnir, leans, back, laughs some more. Winks at Little Kid, turns, pats Clueless White Guy on the shoulder (who hands him a bottle of beer), says, “I haven’t had that much fun in ages,” then walks off/fades away.

Or…

2) Clueless White Guy shows up and sees Scary Ethnic Monster about ready to pounce. “Huh,” he says. “You know what my cultural heritage is?” he asks the monster as it begins to pay attention to him. “Science, bitch!” Whereupon he whips out something akin to a proton pack and converts said monster into nonexistence. I would also accept “Doing some basic research,” whereupon he hits the monster with holy water, garlic, salt, holy books, silver, electricity, UV, ashes, tax forms, white oak, a handful of gerbils, a pissed-off housecat… whatever it is that is appropriate for the particular threat in question.

“Our heroes aircraft is falling from the sky! Will they pull out in time to avoid a firey crash and bring the episode, nay, the entire series, to a screeching and unexpected halt, requiring not only clever writing but also difficult actor contract negotiations with the attendant risk of turning off the existing fans?”

Bah. No, of course the aircraft will pull out at the last second. Of course.

Lazy.

Those old enough to remember TV from the 80’s will doubtless *vaguely* recall any of a number of the same scene: the *enemy* aircraft, often a helicopter, has been struck. Gun, missile, onboard explosion, someone whacked the pilot, whatever, the vehicle is going down. Will it crash? Well, since these are the bad guys and, what’s more, *unimportant* bad guy characters, yes. It’ll crash. But at the last moment it’ll go down *behind* the nearest hill. You’ll know it crashed because a fireball that sure looks a whole lot like some combination of back powder and gasoline will go FOOOOM from behind the hill. It’s a hell of a lot cheaper than crashing an actual aircraft on camera, and slightly less visually awful than using bad scale models or, perhaps worse, stock footage, to depict the event. But it still got to be an incredibly tired and predictable shot.

It’s in their online catalog, but currently unavailable. I guess they sold out. A pity… there are a few points in the timeline I’d like to go back to to correct. Or at least get a few photos and videos of.

Flux Capacitor

A 1979 promo for TMP. Some interesting stuff here… work on the Enterprise model, Klingon battle cruiser models getting exploded (a scene later re-imagined) and Persis Khambatta losing her hair, and not being entirely thrilled by it.

The forthcoming “The Creator,” due to hit theaters in September, *looks* awesome. Long have I and many others bitched that Hollywood seems incapable of doing something that’s not a sequel, prequel, reboot, remake or based on an existing IP of some kind. But here’s one that seems to be entirely original, and it *looks* fantastic… on a budget of a relatively paltry $86 million. Now, we’ve been stung before… for example, “Elysium” looked, early on, like it’d be something fantastic but it turned into meh. “Interstellar” similarly had mountains of potential, much of it squandered by being both depressing and gibberishy.

If “The Creator” is actually good, I hope it does really well. Unfortunately, garbage often does fantastic business, and good stuff gets left behind.

… but just wait until these damned things get a little smarter, wake up and become self aware. Them and those friggen’ Furbies will be the death of us all.

As a followup to THIS POST, I had a half-formed idea that I posted in comments OVER HERE. I’ve decided to expand upon my idea a bit.

In short, people have recognized that in Star Trek, the federation – and in particular the Humans – are essentially mad scientists. Everybody else out there got from early industrialization to spaceflight over a span of millenia, carefully and painstakingly working their way up one reasonable rational step at a time. Humans, on the other hand, said “hold my beer” and charged from “I wonder if I can use steam to do work” to “maybe if I invent a faster than light drive I’ll get to bang a lot of hot chicks” in record time. This feature of humanity has been repeatedly shown in Trek, but I don’t believe it has been really called out as such, except for the occasional throwaway line. Well… what if, instead, a series leaned into the idea? A combination not just of Star Trek, but “Eureka” and “Warehouse 13” with a huge helping of “Stargate: SG1.”

“Star Trek: Bonkers” features Captain Liam Shaw, the best new character in Trek since The Doctor and Seven of Nine, unwisely killed off (apparently) in season three of “Picard.” Here, he has been resurrected by Federation mad science, put in command of the USS Rotwang (an Emmett Brown-class “science” vessel) tasked with researching rumors of super-science and advanced weapons that can be used to defend against existential god-level threats such as V-Ger, Organians, Q-Continuum. Episodes include:
* The one where the crew capture a rogue Q and break his mind by exposing him to the most diabolical psychological weapon yet devised: “Star Trek: Discovery.”
* The one where they accidentally shut down all fusion reactions in the Large Magellanic Cloud. That means stars, too. Whoopsie.
* The one where Emperor Kahless attempts to capture the vessel for the greater glory of the Klingon Empire. Captain Shaw zaps him with the new Trans Ray; whereupon the other Klingons tear Kahless into bits and back off from Shaw and the Rotwang, not willing to risk getting struck themselves. There are, after all, fates worse than the dishonor of retreat.
* The one where an invasion fleet of Kelvans from the Andromeda galaxy is intercepted while still 100,000 light years from Federation space… and the cubic lightyear of volume enclosing the fleet is converted from a 3-dimensional space to a natural log of 9-dimensional space.

* Based upon fragmentary documentation that survived without adequate historical context from before the Third World War, the engineers on board the Rotwang create a device that rips a hole in space which leads to a warped realm of chaos and demonic entities. A few probes are sent in, they realize the place really kinda sucks, and they close it up again. “Nope,” says the lead engineer on the project, Engineering Commodore Montgomery Scott.

*Following those events, Scotty goes on a bender. While blind drunk he creates four dimensional whisky. His first thought is “It’s green,” but in actual fact it’s an indescribable color that Man has never before encountered. As an experiment, the Rotwang taunts the Q loudly over subspace radio; one shows up and threatens to snap them out of existence. they offer him a drink first… and get him blind, stinking drunk. Then they interview him, receiving billions of teraquads of new information about reality-bending, and leave him passed out at the side of a nearby neutron star. When he wakes up he doesn’t remember what happened.

* Another Planet Killer/Doomsday Machine is discovered. It’s asleep, but seems to be waking up… and unlike the one Kirk encountered, this one is virtually pristine. There’ll be no stopping it. And since it’s neutronium, there’s no landing on it or beaming into it. So what to do? The recorded memory/personality engrams of Admiral Archers pet beagle are downloaded into it. It now wants to follow the Rotwang around like a happy puppy. This is of course a problem. Until a warp drive and massive impulse engine are bolted to a sizable moon; the warp drive knocks the effective mass of the moon down almost to zilch, which the impulse engine accelerates it at tens of G’s. Enough fuel on board to last for centuries. The Planet Killer Puppy is then told “fetch!” Asteroids control systems keep track of the PKP and maintain a constant distance, and lead the PKP on a path slowly out of the galaxy. PROBLEM SOLVED FOREVER.

* The Captain holds a contest to design, build and fly a one-man craft. It’s a race: not just to build it within a short time, but to fly ten light years out and back again. Teams from as few as three to as many as a dozen work feverishly for two weeks on their craft. But the night before the scheduled launch of the five craft that are finished, Ensign Skippy, who has not been involved, sneaks a drink of Scotty’s 4D whisky. He staggers down to the torpedo bunker and modifies a Class 8 probe and, five minutes before the race time, enters it. Everyone chuckles as he drunkenly gets in and is launched… and then promptly vanishes. The other craft go out and come back in various impressively short times, but Ensign Skippy does not return. Until he shows up for duty the next day with a pounding hangover and no recollection of the day before. A search shows that the probe is back in the torpedo magazine, the modifications burned out; sensor records show that it quietly reappeared in its rack, followed by Ensign Skippy staggering away from it and back to his quarters, two minutes before it launched.

* A new threat emerges in the Gamma Quadrant. A previously unexplored dust cloud turns out to have a single star and Earth-like planet within; the culture that evolved there has never seen another star, so they were unaware of the outside universe. Upon accidental first contact with the Rotwang due to a navigational error, the locals realize that they aren’t alone and decide that all life in the universe would have to go. Their technology, based on white servant-robots, is not particularly advanced; but evidence shows that they will very quickly become a galaxy-wide threat exceeding that of the Borg. So Captain Shaw has Scotty re-open the warp gate on the planet, spilling hellish chaos onto the place. “Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Shaw says to the senior staff as they watch from a safe distance as the entire nebula folds in upon itself, sucked into an another dimension. No report is made to Starfleet.

* Years earlier, a miniature “proto-universe” was discovered at Deep Space Nine after a ship passed through the wormhole. Given that the expansion of that universe would destroy *this* universe, such things are obviously to be avoided. So the Rotwang crew decide to see what it would take to *create* a proto-universe. Purely hypothetically. Simulated only. Not at all real. Nope. Until… “Hey, hold my beer.”

Any other ideas?

To be released on December 5, the full series (21 disks, nearly 79 hours) will cost about $100 to $135. The filmed scenes were scanned at 4K and color corrected and such, then brought down to Blu Ray rez; the CGI scenes were upscaled with AI. I do wonder if there might be thinking that in the future there’ll be a 4K release, but that would pretty much require the CGI scenes to be completely remastered. I’d support that, but I honestly doubt there’d be a financial case to be made for it. This release doesn’t seem to include the movies beyond the pilot.