Tag: Star Trek

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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

Let’s talk books

Because that’s something I seldom bring up here, right? Except…there have been a few changes to the schedule.

VWORP!3With Peter Capaldi announcing that he is not only leaving, but his final episode will be this year’s Christmas special, VWORP!3 will be gaining a subtitle along the lines of “The Capaldi Years” and has slid back to January 2018. In line with the rethink of the WARP! series, VWORP!3 will be a thinner book that its predecessors, and it’ll cover four main topics:

  • The Peter Capaldi era on TV
  • Class
  • Big Finish audios featuring new series Doctors (10th Doctor stories, War Doctor stories)
  • Big Finish audios featuring other new series characters (UNIT, Churchill, Torchwood)
… Read more
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Write, Write, You Bloody Well Write

WARP!1 pre-launch status update

WARP!1WARP!1 has engines, I’m just loading the last few bits of dilithium in them.

Well, okay, that’s rather a glib way of putting it. My third book is very much in the same “extensive critical guide to a TV series” wheelhouse as the first two books, but to be totally honest with you… this is my favorite. It’s been my favorite to work on, and my favorite to go back weeks/months later and re-read bits of.

WARP!1 examines the “Roddenberry era” of Star Trek in depth: the original Star Trek, the animated series, the original cast movies, The Next Generation, and the Next Generation movies. It examines Roddenberry’s non-Trek work from the same period, namely his string of 1970s TV projects that never got past the pilot stage. It examines how others have taken the Original Series and reinterpreted it, reviewing the J.J. Abrams movies to date and a cross-section of the better fan-made series to date. It also examines Star Trek’s immediate antecedent, Roddenberry’s single-season series The Lieutenant, both on its own merits and in light of what came later. … Read more

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...And Little C Makes 4 ...And Little E Makes 3 And Beyond The Infinite Gaming Television & Movies

Everybody’s geekin’ for the weekend, part four: do it again!

Whoosh!In February, the fine folks at Oklahoma City’s Starbase Studios announced another of their open house events, during which all and/or sundry are invited to tour their exquisitely detailed replicas of the original Star Trek shooting sets, free of charge (though it’s hoped that visitors might be impressed enough to drop a few coins in the hat, donating to the upkeep of those sets so future fan-made productions can make use of them. My wife was pregnant with Little C when Little E and I tagged along with some friends to visit the sets last year, and that was before they had built sickbay and started work on a transporter room (!). There was no way she was going to miss out on this open house.

As the date got closer, Little E expressed disappointment that we weren’t going to repeat the entire trip with the Martins – i.e. Friday night at Arkadia Retrocade, and a visit to the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma (almost an hour further west from OKC). Since he was so keen on doing it all again, we reserved a hotel room in Weatherford and decided to make it a whole geeky weekend getaway. (It should be pointed out that the timely arrival of a tax refund was pretty much the pivot point where we went from “go to OKC and back” to “make a whole weekend of it.”)

What follows is a ridiculous record – over 60 photos – of the geeky weekend in question. Ready to beam up and go to the moon?

OKC+WXford trip
Click on any photo below for the full-size version – I took “the good camera” this time and didn’t rely on my phone for much of the picture-taking this time around.… Read more

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...And Little E Makes 3 Television & Movies

Everybody’s geekin’ for the weekend, part three: Space (the final frontier)

An enterprising visitHaving gone to Arkadia Retrocade on Friday night in Fayetteville, followed by a Saturday morning visit to the Stafford Air & Space Museum in Weatherford, Oklahoma, we headed homeward, but with one more stop planned in Oklahoma City itself (40 minutes east of Weatherford) before returning to Fort Smith.

The second leg of the central Oklahoma space pilgrimage took us to Oklahoma City proper, in a part of town that we might not have visited otherwise but for the presence of a starship. In a rented space next to a roofing repair company in Oklahoma City is one of the only two 360-degree classic Star Trek bridge sets in the United States, replicating – if not improving on – the Enterprise set from the original ’60s series.

Starbase Studios was holding one of its rare open house events. They’re rare because the bridge is a working film set, and exposing it to the public puts it at increased risk of suffering accidental damage. Keeping the entire set fully lit (rather than the usual practice of only lighting those sections needed for a particular spot), and running fans to make the already-warm studio space tolerable for visitors, runs up a considerable electric bill, even for a single day.

We joked en route that the directions to the nondescript studio building sounded like a ransom note – in between lines of the directions I had printed out from the studio’s web site, I was riffing helpful additions like “place the money in an unmarked paper sack inside the newspaper vending machine on the corner; do not look around you, you are being watched.”

The verdict? Totally. worth. it. … Read more

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Television & Movies

Clear direction: ten of Cliff Bole’s best

As if losing Harold Ramis on Monday wasn’t enough, genre fans get another kick in the teeth, though perhaps not as high-profile as Ramis. Frequent-flyer Star Trek director Cliff Bole left us on February 15th, though word only leaked out to fandom today. With its very fixed lighting grid and the extremely limited setups afforded by sets that were not built “wild” (i.e. chunks of the set could be wheeled out of place to offer a perspective that would be impossible with a solidly-built three-or-four-wall set), Star Trek: The Next Generation was, perhaps, not the best showcase for a director. You had a week to prep, you had an ensemble cast who would undoubtedly tell you – though kindly – that they didn’t really need direction as such, and you had a monolithic, unmovable central set with bright, even lighting. Now what? Cliff Bole was one of a handful of Trek directors who managed to stand out without blowing out the budget or honking off the cast (two things that would likely prevent any director from becoming the recurring fixture that Bole was).

Directed by Cliff Bole

Here are my recommendations for ten of his best that aren’t The Best Of Both Worlds: episodes that he managed to rock despite limited resources and the show’s admittedly limited playbook. … Read more