Tag Archives: television

Real Klingons Wear Pink in Star Trek: The Animated Series

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Star Trek: The Animated Series

Star Trek: The Animated Series

Giant pink tribbles. Spock casting magic spells. The crew turning into babies, growing gills, or shrinking. Is there no weirdness that failed to occur on Star Trek: The Animated Series?

No. No, there isn’t. And that’s why the show, which ran from 1973-74, is pure, unadulterated awesome.

Though it occupies a dubious position in Trekkie canon, The Animated Series is a must-see for fans, who will be treated to a succession of wacky events involving the almost the entire cast of The Original Series.

Inexplicably, Chekov is gone. Equally inexplicably, every single alien being sounds suspiciPink Tribbles?ously like Scotty, Nurse Chapel or Uhura. Actually, the explanation was saving money by not hiring extra voice actors or Chekov’s actor, Walter Koenig.

But this enabled them to do something the Original Series could never do, by crewing the Enterprise with more aliens. Foremost among them are the six-limbed Arex, who occupies Chekov’s seat most of the time, and M’Ress, a cat-woman communications officer.

At the time of the Original Series, I don’t think it would have been possible to have shown a guy with an extra arm and leg, like Arex had, and M’Ress would have had a somewhat wooden expression if she’d been a real person with a face covered with fur.

And then there’s the fact that one of the people working on the show was colorblind.

As a result, Klingons wear pink and purple, and Klingons in Orchid?the Kzinti, who are supposed to be terrifying telepathic cat-wolverine-people, do too.

Plus there are pink tribbles. Giant pink tribbles. If there were a way to market these to 12-year-old girls Earth would be drowned in tribbles in a matter of hours. Talk about weapons of mass destruction!

Then there’s the elevator-music theme song, which definitely is worse than the theme song from Star Trek: Enterprise, no matter what anybody says, although the animated Enterprise is so darn cute it’s easy to forgive the tune.

If you have Netflix and loved Original Series Star Trek, or just want to kill a few hours watching pure, undiluted insanity in the form of the loopiest plots ever seen in any flavor of Star Trek, check out Star Trek: The Animated Series.

For more information, check out Memory Alpha, the go-to place for online information on Star Trek, and also the source of every picture above.

Reporters Are Never Realistic on TV

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There are a few movies that I am, for the sake of other people’s fragile sanity, no longer permitted to watch.

The most notable of these is probably “Shakespeare in Love,” which missed the mark for me for the sole reason that the woman pretending to be a man (pretending to be a woman) who was Shakespeare’s girlfriend in the movie did not have the initials W.H. To me, this meant the writers of the film clearly did not care about Shakespeare, which made the whole film evil.

Other than that, though, I am no longer allowed to watch movies about reporters–specifically, newspaper reporters and news writers.

These are the characteristics of reporters on TV:

  • They do not carry a notebook and a pen, nor any technological equivalents such as recorders. Because we all memorize everything we hear and/or never have to have quotes in a story.
  • If they have a job writing features, they hate that job, and want to write big, important political news instead. Because that’s what everyone likes to write, without exception, you know! Not stories about saving puppies or the new restaurant in town! (Actually, my ambition in life is to become the official Puppy Editor for the Sun, but that’s a story for a different time.)
  • Alternately, they cover big, important, political stories. They never have to sit through four-hour meetings about ditch repair in order to do this.
  • These types of important-things-reporters very often get shot at by conspirators. I have been shot at exactly once in my years of reporting, and that was a result of covering a small-town shooting tournament in which people shooting at a metal bird managed to ricochet a shotgun blast about ten feet from where I was standing. It was an accident. And they probably should have put the “Do not stand past this line” line a little further away from the metal bird.
  • They have some sort of axe to grind, some sort of agenda. This extends to the reporter in “Star Wars: The Old Republic,” who doesn’t have a recording device and is bent on getting dirt on some guy. You know, some of us just like to write down what happens, with as little bias as possible and as accurately as possible.
  • They are hardened to tragedy and love mayhem, eagerly chasing after it like a lion hunting a wounded gazelle. I’ve cried at least a few times in my reporting career, and I know at least a few people who go and cry in the bathroom when a story hits a little too close to home. Stories do that sometimes, even to the hardened newsroom veterans. Some people do love mayhem. But a lot of us chase it because we have to, and would much rather cover puppies, thank you.
  • They are irreverent and smart-alecky, often with a fairly morbid sense of humor. This is actually somewhat true, not of all, but certainly some reporters. Humor is a defense mechanism, and it does work. Don’t mistake it for not being genuinely sorry about a tragedy, though. If my obituary’s not hilarious, I fully intend to haunt whoever writes it–or maybe just their puppies.

The Good, the Bad and the Abysmally, Painfully Awful

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Apparently, the movie Battleship is about as bad as you would have expected it to be. I have a hard time believing any movie could be as bad as Transformers was, but apparently this hits that low mark, at least according to one reviewer. (Warning: Some mild profanity!) (via BoingBoing)

“So yeah, if the trailers weren’t your first sign, rather than have the movie revolve around naval combat like the board game, and might have actually made a decent film, they chose to have it be Transformers 4, and yet achieves a level of stupidity in terms of plot and script that makes Transformers (any of them) look like Inception, Independence Day look like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Pearl Harbor look like Saving Private Ryan.”

Ouch.

The review’s probably a lot more enjoyable than watching the movie, though.

Then again, it is possible, with a movie as bad as Transformers, that having nails pounded into one’s eyeballs is more enjoyable than watching the movie.

Let’s talk happier links!

  • We are living in a golden age of proverbs. And before you laugh, think about it: “If you build it, they will come.” (via the Boston Globe’s wonderful Brainiac blog)
  • There is a blog out there devoted to posting pictures of people eating on Law & Order. No, I don’t know why. No, I don’t get it either. (via BoingBoing)
  • Have you ever wanted to kill someone using poisoned clothing? I can’t honestly say that I have, but I’d consider it as a writer of murder mysteries. Has it happened before? Snopes examined the question. There was much discussion on Livejournal. And there were also questions about whether it would work to poison someone’s hair. (I don’t know how you could do this without poisoning the person whose hair you’re… poisoning.)
  • Sad news: A white buffalo was killed in Texas. Sad and very awful.
  • Some highly entertaining and informative audio journalism from the Oil Patch, well worth listening to, that originally aired on Prairie Public Radio in North Dakota.

The Least Menacing Menace Ever

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Evil snowglobe? I didn’t think even the SyFy channel could find a scary-movie menace that was this profoundly unmenacing, but apparently yes, they have made a movie about an evil snowglobe.

I am not joking.

This movie is about an evil snowglobe.

I’m guessing it’s going to make Snakes on a Plane look like a Cecil B. DeMille piece.

An evil snowglobe.

Really.

Style at the Emmys

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Of course, what I love about the Emmys is the clothes. Sometimes I love to hate them.

Feathers seem to be featured this year, but I can never see them without  thinking one of two things: 1. Which Las Vegas showgirl did you mug to get that outfit? 2. You b******s, you skinned Big Bird!

Christina Hendricks, the most beautiful woman on the planet, had a minor fashion misstep. This is not her color. This is not her style of dress. This is not her hairstyle. Most importantly, these are not her poofy sleeves.  It says a lot for Christina that she looked drop-dead gorgeous anyway.

Holly Burrell wore some pink and black thing. I don’t know if that’s part of her dress, an ugly stole, or if a spraypainted varmint attacked her on the way in from the parking lot.

On the bright side: Elisabeth Moss, Kim Kardashian and Sofia Vergara.

Make a Glee-ful Noise

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The devil has blonde hair and coaches cheerleading.

I learned this by watching Glee, the incredibly popular Fox show that blends comedy, drama, dancing, singing and all the pain, suffering and cliches a high school can offer on television.

Although the show is not perfect and sometimes suffers from overproduced music and predictability, it is pretty darned good. Some of the characters began as cliches, including the all-American boy football player, the snotty, blonde head cheerleader and the insane over-achieving drama queen, but continue to develop in unexpected ways.

As usual, however, it seems the main characters are just the frosting. It’s the secondary characters and hilarious, over-the-top one-liners that make Glee fun to watch, particularly the evil blonde cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester (Jane Lynch).

The plot of the show is pretty simple: High school Spanish teacher Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) takes over the school’s glee club (show choir for us Minnesotans) to try and make it good again. Coach Sylvester doesn’t like how much money this takes from her spoiled champion cheerleaders, so she decides to destroy Schuester and the glee club. Meanwhile, the kids in the club are all in love with each other or have the usual mundane popularity issues that make high school a sink of pain and misery.

Simple setup.

Lynch’s Sylvester is the gem of the show, being so evil that O Fortuna sometimes plays when she shows up onscreen. She pushes kids around (literally) and rules her cheerleaders with an iron fist of suffering and random terror, saying appalling things to pretty much everyone, and getting away with it.

Sue is a cartoon supervillain. Here are a few of her lines, and they’re not her best. They’re representative of pretty much everything she says.

Sue: Bringing down this club may be easier than I thought. I am engorged with venom and triumph.

Sue: Schuester! I’ll need to see that set list for Sectionals after all. I want it on my desk warm from the laminator at 5:00 P.M., and if it is one minute late, I will go to the animal shelter and get you a kitty cat. I will let you fall in love with that kitty cat. And then, on some dark, cold night I will steal away into your home and punch you in the FACE.

Sue: Dear Journal, Feeling listless again today. It began at dawn, when I tried to make a smoothie out of beef bones, breaking my juicer. And then at Cheerios practice, disaster. It was unmistakable. It was like spotting the first spark on the Hindenburg. A quiver. That quiver will lose us Nationals. Without a championship, I’ll lose my endorsements, and without those endorsements, I won’t be able to buy my hovercraft.

Two other especially funny secondary characters are Santana and Brittany, a cheerleader so dim she thinks the square root of four is rainbows. And Santana is not much better. Both of them say appallingly hilarious things on a regular basis, things that make you wince and giggle at the same time.

Santana: Did you know dolphins are just gay sharks?

Brittany: Sometimes I forget my middle name.

And then there’s Schuester’s selfish, manipulative and utterly appalling wife, Terri.

Terri: But Will, I’m on my feet four hours a day, three times a week here. Now I have to go home and cook dinner for myself?

Terri: It’s always been my personal dream to cut down my own Christmas tree. How many Christmas trees will we have in the backyard? And do they come in different colours because… well obviously we’re starting a family and I have a real sense that it’s going to be a girl.

The show is absolutely packed with awful, funny one-liners, and it’s so over-the-top and cheesily delightful.

Getting a “Life”

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I made a wonderful discovery a few days ago on Hulu: they put up both seasons of Life, a cop show that was on NBC. It’s about a detective who is framed for murder, goes to jail for 12 years, and then returns to work after being exonerated and paid a huge settlement. So it’s a standard-issue mystery show, with an overarching plot arc.

I’ve gotten through the first half of Season 1 already, and I’m enjoying it more than I did when it was on television because I have more of a sense of continuity this way.

If you haven’t seen the show, check it out. It won’t be on Hulu forever.

On the Fringe: Television for the Strong of Stomach

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I have become addicted to Fringe, a television show which I call "Denethor, Mad Scientist," because the guy who plays the mad scientist played the mad king in Lord of the Rings. (If you don’t remember the name, he’s the one who set himself on fire and then plummets to his doom after almost killing his own son.)

It’s a surprisingly addictive show that seems to be a combination of X-Files and House. The shows usually start with something bizarre, gory and horrible happening to some poor schmoe just going about his business, and sometimes said schmoe kills a bunch of other people too. Sometimes they turn into a monster, sometimes they explode and sometimes a giant slug erupts from sensitive body parts. It’s pretty gross, which is why I’m enjoying watching Season 1 on DVD–I can fastforward past the yuck.

The rest of the show centers around the efforts of the Fringe team to figure out what happened and prevent it from happening again.

The team is composed of a kickbutt FBI agent, a mad scientist (Walter) and his son/babysitter (Peter). The mad scientist really is mad, having been taken out of a mental institution during the first episode, and he says some appallingly inappropriate and funny things on a fairly regular basis.

Walter: All commands will come through the headphones. Once you’re given the order to put on the headphones, do not remove them under any circumstances. If you do, you may die a gruesome and horrible death. Thank you for your attention and have a nice day.

And another example:

Peter: I need my own bedroom. I woke up to this morning to him singing an aria from Pagliacci.
Astrid: Your father has a wonderful voice.
Peter: Not when he’s doing jumping jacks. And did I mention he was naked?
Walter: A good morning sets the tone for the day.

It’s a strange show, and while it’s gory and kind of disturbing at times (don’t watch it with small children around!), it’s also very well-written, with the dark spooky stuff firmly counterbalanced by Walter’s total loopiness and his son Peter’s attempts to act as a primary caregiver despite not being a caregiving type. It’s an interesting dynamic for a father-son show, and I don’t remember the last time I watched a father-son show where both parties were adults.

And remember:

Walter: Just because no one has documented flying monkeys or talking lions yet hardly means they don’t exist.

Star Wars, Star Trek

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Today I have some Star Wars and Star Trek strangeness for your perusal.

First, here’s a graphic that shows themes in television science-fiction shows after Star Trek, allowing you to check out how popular space travel is compared to, say, time travel or robots.

There are some very definite trends clearly visible without much examination: sci-fi seems to have hit a peak around 1997-2001 and then it faded from the airwaves. Was it the popularity of X-Files that inspired so many people to produce science fiction around that time? Very interesting stuff.

Also, if you’re looking for a name for your band, and you are a big geek, you may want to look at this list of 50 Star Wars inspired band names, from Chewbacca Khan to Megadeth Star.

Or you can learn how characters from Star Wars would have acted if they’d used Facebook during the movies. (Fair warning: It’s kind of rude and crude, so if you don’t like that sort of humor, don’t click the link.)

The Babes of Star Trek

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An astonishing amount of female eye-candy is featured in Star Trek, the original series. It seems like every episode has some new, scantily clad female guest star, who usually falls hard for Kirk, but sometimes, just for a change, goes for Spock, Scotty or McCoy.

Sometimes the ladies are aliens, and sometimes they’re human. Often, they represent a challenge of some sort to overcome, especially when they’re in some position of power, or perhaps they’re just psychotic androids bent on taking over the galaxy.

Sometimes they represent a different type of challenge, like Edith Keeler, at left and above, played by Joan Collins. Kirk had to let her die in order to restore the course of history in one of Star Trek’s most famous episodes, "The City on the Edge of Forever."

The women of Star Trek are, pretty much, all gorgeous.

I mention this because I’ve been watching Star Trek on Hulu, and I hadn’t seen most of the episodes before, so they are new to me.

I had always wondered why so many more men liked Star Trek than women, especially in the earlier days, and although I hate to be sexist, I have to think the abundance of scantily clad, amazingly gorgeous women may have something to do with it.

Unless you count William Shatner, who even at the time had a bit of a paunch, there is no corresponding male eye candy, or if there is, it’s been so thoroughly covered with bizarre costumes apparently made out of cheap sledding toys, that I haven’t noticed it.

Or maybe I just don’t think the men of 1966 were attractive. I don’t know.

But it’s very difficult to to accept William Shatner as male eye candy when the men are getting Julie Newmar (at left, looking very fierce), Joan Collins and Lee Meriwether.

It’s also rather difficult to accept the silly wigs most of these women are wearing.

Look at Julie Newmar (left, above), for example, whose acting skills really made the otherwise silly "Friday’s Child" into an episode that’s still entertaining and interesting today. Does anyone believe that’s her actual hair? If so, I have a bridge to sell you, cheap.

Some of the makeup they wear doesn’t hold up very well in 2009, either.

The most noticeable thing about all these gorgeous women, though, is that often, they have the power to make or break an episode with their acting talent.

Many of the episodes I’ve liked the most have had very strong female characters.

"Friday’s Child" focuses on an imperious pregnant queen (Julie Newmar) who for social reasons needs to kill her baby. "Is There in Truth No Beauty" focuses on the strange career of a blind telepath (Diana Muldaur, shown at the right) assisting an alien ambassador who must not be seen by the human eye. "Elaan of Troyius" focuses on the upcoming nuptials of a bossy, barbaric warrior princess, who needs to learn how to get along in her husband’s culture.

I’m not saying they’re feminist episodes, because often they aren’t.

The plotline of "Elaan" reads quite a bit like "The Taming of the Shrew," and as I noted before, people are making sexist comments about the nature of women more or less constantly throughout the show.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t something to like, either. Just because they’re eye candy doesn’t mean they’re only eye candy.

Often, the babes of Star Trek have more to do with whether an episode of Star Trek is good or not than the main cast does.