Made by Star Trek fans for Star Trek fans I’ve been a fan of writer Mark Altman since his days at Cinefantastique magazine, which was a must-read for me in my twenties and thirties. I’d later buy Altman’s books, including “The Fifty-Year Mission: The Complete, Uncensored, Unauthorized Oral History of Star Trek,” which he cowrote…
Tag: Dorothy Fontana
Star Trek TOS’ “Tomorrow is Yesterday”; looking back at Star Trek’s first time travel adventure…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Way back in the dark days before streaming or even affordable home video, I used to place my old audio tape recorder up to the TV speaker and record Star Trek episodes during their syndicated broadcasts in the late 1970s and early 1980s. I’d taped roughly half of them before the shifting sands…
Star Trek: The Original Series; “The Ultimate Computer” went online 58 years ago, and is still relevant today…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** When Star Trek the Original Series (TOS) aired its second season episode “The Ultimate Computer” in March of 1968, factories and automobile assembly lines in the US were introducing new generations of machines controlled by bulky, room-sized computers that threatened the jobs of many workers. It was in that climate that Star Trek…
Bob Burns (1935-2025): The sci-fi kid, prop-maker, archivist and showman who (thankfully) never fully grew up…
Most readers below a certain age or from other countries might never have heard of Bob Burns III, who was, on the surface, a nice guy living with his wife in the Los Angeles suburb of Burbank who put on a cool neighborhood Halloween show every year. That short description is not wrong, but it’s…
Retro-Musings: Gene Roddenberry’s “The Questor Tapes” (1974)…
******CYBERNETIC SPOILERS!****** After the original Star Trek’s premature cancellation in 1969, its creator/producer Gene Roddenberry (1921-1991) whipped up a slew of sci-fi TV movie pilots he’d hoped would sell as a series. Several of them involved a cryogenically frozen 20th century man named ‘Dylan Hunt’ (Alex Cord/John Saxon) waking up in a dystopian future. The…