Scribblings From The Public Restroom Stalls Of The Gods

Today’s blast from the (housecleaning) past – the Starlog Group’s old official Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine magazines. There was a time, before Paramount (disastrously) took the print periodicals in-house, when Starlog held the exclusive license to do these mags, and they were nifty. At the time, Dave McDonnell was editing both the TNG mag and Starlog itself, so there was some crossover material if you read both, but man, if the magazine wasn’t a treasure trove of the studio’s official still photography file, there was no such thing. And now looking back through the old issues, I’m marveling at some of the interviews – they managed to talk to writers who never opened up for interviews again, and they did profile pieces on extras and hand doubles, all really inspirational stuff about how these guys had left the midwest and ditched everything to come to Hollywood, and wound up working full-time as background extras in uniform on TNG. It was all really neat stuff, especially for something very carefully targeted at the young adult audience. It was the only publication I ever read that interviewed Keith Birdsong, who was a local artist whose Trek novel cover artwork was all the rage in the early ’90s. They’d talk to the book authors, comic writers and artists, and whoever they could get a hold of – it was truly a magazine aimed at Trek-as-a-lifestyle. A few years ago, long after I’d given up being enough of a Trek fan to pick up one or two magazines at a time, I picked up Paramount’s official Trek magazine, and while I can comprehend that the franchise had grown (or, perhaps, not grown) to the point where one-publication-per-series was no longer feasible, it just didn’t have the cool factor that the old Starlog mags had. It was all about how this story tied into this non-sequitur reference from an original series episode, etc. etc., and what great Officially Paramount Approved Merchandise was coming out. In other words, it was all about how far up its own ass the Trek franchise was by that point. I don’t know if a Starlog-produced magazine would’ve been any different, but my instinct is that the Starlog mags always seemed to be a little more in touch with what the fans were thinking. Of course, the Starlog mags were also largely pre-internet. Maybe the official Paramount mag was right on the money for earlier this decade.

Why Starlog hasn’t put these things out there on a disc, I have no idea – which is sad because I really need to sell off the magazines to save space, and I’d happily buy a set of CD-ROMs or DVD-ROMs with these on them. I went to look Starlog up to see if they still exist, and found they have a website up that would’ve been mighty impressive in 1998 or so. It turns out they’re still selling back issues of these for $7 a pop, so if they’ve got that many copies in the warehouse, maybe I’m overestimating how successful they were just because of the magazines’ impact on my personal landscape. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve made that mistake.

Speaking of people who have moved on since Trek, Dennis McCarthy has released a CD of his mid-1990s music from Sliders (link here). So anyone who’s doing their Christmas shopping early, you know what to get me. 😆 … Read more

There’s a really fascinating article here about the “other” creator of Lost – the guy who happens not to be J.J. Abrams or Damon Lindelof whose name shows up under “created by” every week. It’s very interesting, and I feel for his plight of constantly being patted on the back for something that he can’t even stand. Most of us in the lower-than-Hollywood income bracket would probably say “Yeah, but that six-figure income from Lost alone probably helps to mitigate that.” But as an allegedly creative type myself, I can see where it would, in fact, bug the living hell out of me if I were in his shoes.… Read more