******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Paramount+’s latest Star Trek series, “Star Trek: Starfleet Academy” (STSA) has finished its freshman year. Created by showrunners Alex Kurtzman & Gaia Viola, STSA is a mix of old and new elements; with A-list actors, Star Trek veterans and a fresh-faced cast of cadets tossed together in a 32nd century, post-Burn Federation seeking…
Tag: Gene Roddenberry
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…
Pass or fail? Star Trek: Starfleet Academy opens with “Kids These Days,” and “Beta Test”…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** As an old Trekkie from waaay back (as old as the franchise itself), I’ve read about pitches for a Starfleet Academy movie as far back as the late 1980s, when the late Star Trek movie producer Harve Bennett had a movie about Kirk and Spock’s academy days together. That pitch was rejected, though…
Why “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (1979) is the greatest love story of the Star Trek movies…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** After seeing “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (TMP) theatrically in the late 1970s at age 13, the last thing I would’ve labeled it was a love story. There are no cute-meets of characters spilling coffee on each other in turbolifts. We don’t even see Captain Kirk romance a single green-haired alien woman. In…
Star Trek TOS: “The Corbomite Maneuver” (1966) put the series on course…
******FESARIUS-SIZED SPOILERS!****** As a kid watching Star Trek out of broadcast order in reruns during the 1970s and 1980s, I could always tell earlier episodes by their ‘growing pains’; uniforms without black collars, different paint/layout scheme for the ship’s interiors, Spock’s makeup tweaks, various terminology differences (“United Earth Space Probe Agency,” “Vulcanian” ), etc. First…
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…
Trekking down memory lane with the “Star Trek” Fotonovels & Photostories…
In the dark ages, before streaming… This might come as a tremendous shock to younger readers, but once upon a time, when we Gen Xers were kids (sometime after the Yucatan impact killed the other dinosaurs), we weren’t able to simply stream nearly any movie or TV show we wanted on our phones, tablets or…
Star Trek TOS: “The Savage Curtain”; Abraham Lincoln beams up for a slightly goofy, yet memorable episode…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** Here in the United States at the time of this writing, I’m not exactly in the ‘President’s Day’ spirit this month. However, this site is about sci-fi/fantasy/horror and nostalgia, not modern politics. Way back in March of 1969, Star Trek aired “The Savage Curtain,” an episode cowritten by no less than creator/ex-showrunner Gene…
Where Nomad had gone before: Star Trek TOS’ “The Changeling” (1967)…
******STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!****** An ancient Earth space probe, radically upgraded and repurposed by alien technology, now seeks to eliminate Earth’s ‘infestation’ of irrational ‘biological units.’ What sounds like the short synopsis of 1979’s “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” (ST: TMP) also happens to be the plot of a 1967 episode of Star Trek: The Original Series…
Star Trek TOS: “Space Seed” (1967) yields a greater crop than what is sown…
*****STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!***** This column might get me in some trouble. While I certainly appreciate the legacy of the Star Trek’s Original Series episode “Space Seed,” which gave the Trek multiverse its power-mad villain Khan Noonien Singh, it is a clumsily-executed episode whose current reputation relies greatly on its legacy (namely 1982’s exceptional sequel, “Star…
Star Trek: The Original Series; examining “Metamorphosis,” 55 years later…
*****55-YEAR OLD STARSHIP-SIZED SPOILERS!***** The Star Trek Original Series (TOS) episode “Metamorphosis” was first broadcast via the NBC network on November 10th, 1967. This was a heady time for the sophomore series, with creator Gene Roddenberry producing, along with some terrific writing talent attached to the show, including script editor Dorothy Fontana (1939-2019), and prolific…
Retro-Musings: Gene Roddenberry’s failed dystopian pilot, “Genesis II” (1973)…
*****SUB-SHUTTLE SIZED SPOILERS!!****** Back to the Future After the cancellation of NBC’s “Star Trek” (1966-1969), the show began to develop an even stronger cult following through the magic of syndication, when it was sold to local stations and began to broaden its audience (which was how I fell in love with it, in fact). To…