Where No Geek Has Gone Before
Listen to me, you little whippersnappers, when I was kid, there was only ONE kind of Star Trek, not counting that cartoon. When you talked about the Captain of the Enterprise, no one asked if you meant Kirk or Picard, and Star Wars hadn’t been invented yet! And when Star Trek was on the TV, you had to change the channel with your own hand, and if you weren’t there in front of the TV when it was on, you missed it! Forever! Or until the next time it came on, anyway. And get off my lawn.
Anyway, came across a couple of amusing new twists on old Trek that can be downloaded from the Intertubes this weekend. Take a look after the jump.
First up, let’s address the question of the “five year mission.” You don’t have to be that much of Trekkie at all to know that the the original series (or “TOS” as it is known) ended after only three years, so what’s up with the remaining two years? Unsatisified with the answer “Paramount cancelled the show because of low ratings,” a one James Cawley of Port Henry, New York, has assembled of team of like-minded volunteers to take time away from their days jobs to produce full-length episodes of Star Trek: The New Voyages, or seasons 4 and 5. There’s actually three full episodes in the can right now that you can download, watch, burn to DVD, and anything else you might do under the Creative Commons license. The project has Paramount’s blessing as long as no one tries to charge for it. My capsule review: At least as good as the original shows, once you get past the cognitive dissonance of seeing the old sets, costumes, and props, and different actors (although Walter Koenig is in one of them!).
A slightly different take on getting another perspective on Bill Shatner can be found at Rifftrax. Rifftrax is done by one of the guys who was behind Mystery Science Theatre 3000. The twist here is that while MST3K had to buy rights to the movies they lampooned, which is one reason why the selected films for MST3K were all so low-budget. What if the Tom Servo and Crow and Joel could do big-budget, major successful movies as well? The idea behind Rifftrax is that you download the MP3 file of the track for your selected movie (there’s about 20 flicks up there, including Star Trek VI, Lord of the Rings, and Star Wars Episode 1) and you sync your MP3 file and start the movie, and off you go. The files do cost money, 2 to 3 bucks a pop. There’s a free sample, but c’mon. This is a movie showing best enjoyed with friends anyway, so what are we talking here? Seventy-five cents each? You do HAVE three friends to invite over for this, right?
The last round of twisted Star Trekking on the ‘net for this time is reading a couple reviews of Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG to aficianados) over at TV Squad. However, these are not reviews written by any hack, these are reviews written by the annoying little protogeek himself, Wesley Crusher, aka, Wil Wheaton, who has pretty damn successful blog of his own. And he knows damn well that a great many people would have been perfectly happy to leave him on that stupid planet where they were going to kill him for falling in the flowerbed.
Enjoy. And live long and prosper.
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