Shuttle launch date set. NASA has set a date just around the corner for the next launch of space shuttle Atlantis. On the afternoon of Thursday, February 7th, Atlantis is due to lift off with the vital Columbus European Laboratory Module of the International Space Station; the flight will be the 24th mission toward the station’s construction. The two missions after that will see the delivery of two components of the Japanese-built Kibo Experiment Module, which has its own manipulator arm similar to those installed on the shuttles and on another part of the station; those are scheduled for March and April.

Fan-made Trek brings back the Kzinti. Stock up on the cat litter, because the cats are coming back. Fan-made Star Trek series New Voyages is bringing back the Kzinti, the catlike creatures created by SF author Larry Niven as the chief antagonists of the Known Space novels; Niven himself penned the Kzinti’s singular previous appearance in Trek lore, the animated episode The Slaver Weapon in 1973. Written by Jimmy Diggs (and originally penned as an episode for the unproduced fifth season of Enterprise), the New Voyages episode Kilkenny Cats is due to begin production later this year, and amazingly the show’s makers are promising fully rendered CGI Kzinti (which would be a good trick for a network-produced show, never mind a fan-made show). There’s no official word yet on whether or not Kzinti creator Larry Niven has given his blessing to the project.

Playmates Treks again. Several sources are reporting that Playmates Toys is once again in the Star Trek business, having gotten the license to produce action figures, playsets and vehicles based on the upcoming movie. One source at action-figure.com reports having seen actual prototypes at a UK toy fair, though that report says there were no fewer than three scales, including a line of 4″ figures compatible with the accessories and figures from Playmates’ popular line of figures from the first four TV series in the 1990s. There’s been no official comment yet from Playmates itself.

It’s not every Battlestar Galactica cast member, original or new series, who winds up with an astronomical body named after them, but Edward James Olmos – the new series’ Admiral Adama – has managed it. An asteroid discovered in 1993 has been dubbed 5608 Olmos, with the designation ratified by the International Astronomical Union, in honor not only of Olmos’ acting career but his work on behalf of various humanitarian organizations. (That being said, being the nominal leader of a certain ragtag fleet probably didn’t hurt his chances.) Formerly known as 1993 EO (which, by a total coincidence, happen to be Olmos’ initials), 5608 Olmos was discovered by Seiji Ueda and Hiroshi Kaneda.
Source: Sci-Fi Wire

How high can you go? Why not ask the two men who made it their mission to rack up the world record high score at Donkey Kong? King Of Kong: A Fistful Of Quarters, now out on DVD, chronicles their struggle to jump the barrels, grab the hammer, and save the damsel…over and over again. (You can check out Rob O’Hara’s review of it right here. You can snag your own copy now in theLogBook.com Store, and you don’t even have to topple a giant ape to do it.

Somewhere on Earth, in a matter of mere weeks, some heavy stuff is going down. A U.S. spy satellite, whose size and weight will apparently remain classified until it breaks into bits, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in late February or early March; where it will land, no one is quite sure yet – either that or they’re just not saying. The satellite lost its ability to maintain its orbit and “may or may not” contain unspecified hazardous material, according to an anonymous source who spoke to the Associated Press. (Presumably, even if the potential landing site of any surviving debris is known, it can’t be divulged to the public without providing enough information to work out upon whom the satellite was spying.)
Source: Associated Press

Another major portion of Phosphor Dot Fossils has moved into a new format – all of the existing game reviews for the Colecovision console have now made the jump into our searchable, sortable database format, many with video clips and a few with links to the original (and very ’80s) television commercials for those games. Work is now underway on the archives of Intellivision, NES and Atari 5200 reviews, and hopefully that work will be done in the next week. Features such as printable custom “remixed” controller overlays will still be available. We’re very excited about how the new PDF is shaping up – as you might have guessed from all these recent mentions – and we hope you’ll give it a look.

MST3K switches labels and goes digital. In a move that ironically brings it under the same corporate umbrella as Mike Nelson’s Film Crew Project, Mystery Science Theater 3000 is switching from Rhino Home Video to the Sony-spawned sublabel Shout! Factory. Also included in that deal will be a move into the arena for digital downloads, a first for the sorely-missed 20 year old show (and a move that probably means the last of Best Brains turning a blind eye to the fan-run Digital Archive Project). Also being promised is the release of numerous episodes that have never before seen the light of day on DVD, though no specific titles are mentioned. Coincidentally, Shout! Factory is run by the same people who originally started Rhino, so in that context, this announcement is less of a surprise than one might think.

“Who” did they get this idea from? One wonders if the producers of ABC’s Lost have been watching the production notes subtitles on Doctor Who DVDs lately: the January 30th repeat of last year’s finale, Through The Looking Glass, will include on-screen text pointing out clues, offering backstory for viewers who are just discovering the show, and so on. (Where this information is coming from is unknown, since the show’s writers are striking.) The following night, in the show’s new regular time slot, the fourth season – truncated to a mere eight episodes because of that strike – will premiere with another catch-up special, Lost: Past, Present And Future, and the first episode of season four, The Beginning Of The End.

Catching up with the Cylons. Catching-up-on-the-mythology specials are also the order of the day for Sci-Fi Channel, which has produced not one but two half-hour specials to drum up interest in the new season of Battlestar Galactica. Airing back-to-back on Friday, March 28th, Battlestar Galactica Revisited” and “Battlestar Galactica: The Phenomenon” will catch viewers up on the show’s intricate story so far and set the stage for the fourth and final season (of which only 11 episodes were completed prior to the writers’ strike). The show will premiere the following week in April.

Sarah Jane Adventures renewed? In an interview with SFX Magazine, Sarah Jane Adventures star Elisabeth Sladen, who originated that role in 1974 during Jon Pertwee’s final season on Doctor Who and still plays the character in her own spinoff today, announced that the BBC has given the green light to a second season of Sarah Jane Adventures – and this time it will consist of 24 half-hour episodes (more or less equivalent to 12 hour-long episodes). As usual, it’s prudent to take this information with a pinch of salt until these details have been confirmed by the BBC itself.

Time Travel is always a difficult concept to work with. One bump, and the timeline goes all kablooie. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is one of those bumps. It follows Terminator 2: Judgment Day. But if you try to tie Chronicles into Terminator 3: Rise Of The Machines, the only thing you’re going to get is a headache.

Rebooting the franchise onto the small screen, the producers have created a new Terminator mythology. The most significant issue is that the new current timeline is now apparently littered with resistance fighters and terminators from the future who have been dropped into the past several decades. Depending on the chess piece, they’ll either help or hurt John and Sarah Connor, and their new Terminatrix buddy, Cameron (a nod to James Cameron, Director of the first two Terminator movies). While there’s plenty of running and explosions, always good in my playbook, the series is more focused on stopping the development of Skynet, the computer system that wages war against mankind.

In its attempt at appealing to action viewers, the first hour seemed rather cold. Once the puzzle pieces started connecting in the second hour, Chronicles’ rewrite of future history gained ground. We know that John Connor is going to live to lead the resistance. The difficulty lies in creating believable situations in which he will be challenged and the Terminatrix can save or help him. There’s only so many times that he can be yanked out of a life-threatening situation before it becomes a satire of itself. Here, the producers seem to be making wise choices. While sometimes his angst runs into O.C. proportions, there are definite signs he will grow into the hero he must become.

His protector is a spiffy new model of Terminator, apparently capable of learning and mimicking human behavior and emotion, although not so spiffy that she can change shape as was seen in T2. Cameron is the killbot with the heart of gold. There are suggestions, though, that there is more to her mission than protecting John and Sarah.

But the series is indeed about Sarah, as she struggles to raise her son to be a hero while preventing him from being killed and seeking out and halting Skynet. A lot of the paranoia and anger has been leeched out from T2, but most of the suspicion and distrust is still there. There’s also an undercurrent of her own mortality. There was a time shift in the first episode in which the characters jumped to our present time. Doing so allowed her to escape her own death by cancer.

In a another tip of the hat, a supporting character is named James Ellison. Author Harlan Ellison sued James Cameron for plagiarizing his work, which resulted in Ellison being included in the closing credits of the original Terminator.

All too often, TV shows using movies as their source are bland and pale imitations, usually because they are unable to move beyond the formula that made the movie work. Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has taken the formula and used it as the cornerstone to build its own house.

New Voyages captain on deck for new Trek. It seems that Leonard Nimoy won’t be the only familiar face on the Enterprise when Star Trek returns to the big screen under the auspices of J.J. Abrams this Christmas. Star Trek: New Voyages star James Cawley will be back in Starfleet uniform somewhere in the background in Abrams’ new Trek film, at the producer/director’s invitation. Cawley had earlier expressed some misgivings about a “reimagining” of the Trek franchise, though now he seems to have done an about-face on some of those comments after seeing the movie’s Enterprise sets and uniforms up close. In a message posted on the New Voyages web site, Cawley says he feels that Abrams’ movie will help keep Gene Roddenberry’s vision alive.

Sci-Fi snags Jericho. With CBS’ Jericho set to return with a complete seven-episode story for its second season – including two endings, one of which would be edited into the final episode if Jericho is picked up for a third season – Sci-Fi Channel has grabbed the cable rerun rights. A four-episode marathon will kick off Sci-Fi’s Jericho reruns on February 11th, one day before the second season premieres on CBS. (As Jericho’s demanded-by-the-fans second season was written and filmed before the writers’ strike, it’s one of the few scripted shows that will get to tell a complete story by the end of the current season.) According to Sci-Fi Wire, Jericho’s producers should know fairly early in the second season run if the show will continue.

Fire up the Interociter! TV Guide is reporting that Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie will be back in print on DVD this May, quashing your webmaster’s hope that his copy of the original release could put his son through college someday. Out of print for over ten years, the movie – Mike and the ‘bots sole big-screen bow, incorporating the SF classic This Island Earth – was one of Universal’s early DVD releases, bearing absolutely no extras whatsoever (and a menu that you practically needed a hunting dog to find). This new issue will be much the same, except that it will include the theatrical trailer. (It is known that, at the very least, an electronic press kit and a vintage Comedy Central special using footage from that EPK to promote the then-upcoming movie do exist, but none of that material will be included.) MST3K: The Movie returns to DVD in May – there goes your window for selling the original DVDs on eBay.

Few genre films from 2007 made the cut for this year’s Academy Awards. The list of nominees, announced Tuesday, includes three nods for Transformers (best visual effects, best sound editing, best sound mixing), with fantasy films Pirates Of The Caribbean: At World’s End and The Golden Compass competing for the visual effects trophy; Pirates is also nominated for best makeup. Lost (and upcoming Star Trek film) composer Michael Giacchino was nominated for best musical score for Ratatouille.
Source: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences

More work is underway in the Phosphor Dot Fossils database, with several more systems now entirely in the new format. Additionally, older HTML versions of reviews are being removed as they are ported into the new database, so some links from outside sites may need to be corrected. In addition to the Odyssey2 reviews moved earlier this week, the following systems are also now in the database:

• Apple II
• Atari Home Computers
• Atari 7800
• Commodore 64
• TI 99/4a
• Vectrex

We appreciate our readers’ patience as these sweeping changes are implemented. Stay tuned for more announcements!

The nominees for the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America’s annual Nebula Awards have been announced, and the script category is a surprising mix of nominees- from the Wachowski
brothers’ film adaptation of V For Vendetta to renowned (but commercially obscure) SF movie entries such as Children Of Men and The Prestige, the Blink episode of Doctor Who…and the Star Trek: New Voyages fan-made episode World Enough And Time. The judging is based upon the scripts as written, not the finished production. Other nominees in that category include Harlan Ellison’s Masters Of Sci-Fi episode and Pan’s Labyrinth. The Awards in this and other Nebula categories will be presented in late April.
Source: SFWA

If conquering space online is your thing, your next massively multiplayer fix may come from the unlikeliest of sources. NASA is in the early stages of working on an “educational MMORPG” which it hopes will balance a fun online gaming experience with a program allowing players to sample careers within the space program. No launch date for the game has been set; NASA is still asking for game proposals from parties potentially interested in helping them develop it.
Source: gamesindustry.biz

Directors’ Guild agreement raises hopes of strike end. After several days of closed-doors discussions, the Directors’ Guild of America emerged with an agreement with the major studios and media conglomerates, including major gains in the area of compensating directors for work in DVD and internet projects – key areas that deadlocked the studios’ talks with the Writers’ Guild last fall. Hollywood is now holding out hope that this may get the WGA back to the negotiating table and allow TV and film production to resume. Still looming ahead are the studios’ talks with the Screen Actors’ Guild later this year, which could be a bit more contentious than the DGA talks.

Big Finish goes digital. Outpost Gallifrey is reporting that Big Finish Productions, makers of the audio adventures of Doctor Who, Stargate and others, will be retooling their web presence yet again to begin offering paid digital downloads as of February 1st. CD editions will still be available, but the downloads will be welcome news to fans whose currency exchange rates didn’t exactly favor buying 2-CD sets from the UK. The downloads will not be available through iTunes or any other third party services, but only from bigfinish.com itself, beginning next month.

Saturday night is all right for time traveling. BBC America has set a January 26th (Saturday) start date for both the second season of Torchwood and the third season of Doctor Who. Torchwood’s second season already premiered in the UK to record ratings on BBC2.

The Phosphor Dot Fossils Odyssey2 archive has moved for the first time in well over ten years. Long-time readers of theLogBook.com may or may not remember that the site’s award-winning video game archive started in the mid-1990s with a section devoted to the relatively obscure Odyssey2 game console. Though that may have seemed odd when compared to the site’s guides to futuristic science fiction shows at the time, it caught on and Phosphor Dot Fossils – now covering over a dozen systems and hundreds of classic home console, computer and arcade games – became one of the site’s most popular destinations. Now that entire Odyssey2 section has moved for the first time: it is the first system whose entire archive has been entered from start to finish in the new, database-driven version of Phosphor Dot Fossils. All of the Odyssey2 game reviews and features can now be found here. Eventually every review will be ported over to the new database, but this is an early milestone for a major project that’s likely to take most of this year (hey, you try porting articles from HTML to a database with a baby in one hand).

Earl Green
theLogBook.com webmaster / editor-in-chief

After six years in the big chair at Sci-Fi Channel, Bonnie Hammer is stepping back and letting Dave Howe, the channel’s executive VP of marketing and brand strategy for six years, take over as the cable channel’s president. Howe was instrumental in developing and promoting Battlestar Galactica and Eureka, and will have direct control over development of new shows and the promotion of existing ones now. Hammer remains in charge of USA Network, and may be groomed for a position with oversight of all of the cable networks owned and operated by NBC Universal. Howe is already working on expanding the Sci-Fi Channel brand onto the big screen, as well as trying to find another show that could generate as much buzz as Galactica (no easy task in a development/pilot season that’s been quashed by the Writers’ Guild strike). Hammer will still have advisory connections with Sci-Fi.
Source: Daily Variety

For the first time in over 30 years, a spacecraft from Earth has flown past the innermost planet, Mercury. The Messenger space probe, launched in 2004, is due to take up an orbit around Mercury in 2011, but this first close pass – just over 120 miles above Mercury’s surface – was designed to alter its trajectory. Messenger carries little fuel, and has swooped past Earth three times and twice past Venus to use both planets’ gravity to change its heading. Two more close passes of Mercury will be needed before it finally becomes caught in the tiny planet’s orbit, where it will spend roughly a year mapping the planet’s surface and taking dozens of other measurements, including Mercury’s surface composition and gravity field. The last space probe from Earth to visit Mercury was Mariner 10, which made three close passes in 1974/75. Mariner 10 photographed only 45% of Mercury at that time, while Messenger is expected to map nearly the entire surface with the exception of the north and south poles. You can watch a brief Celestia simulation of Messenger’s trip to Venus and Mercury here (Flash required). On this swing past Mercury, Messenger captured its first 1,200 images, including a side of the planet never before seen from Earth.
Sources: NASA / APL