******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…
Tag: Dorothy Fontana
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…