The New Star Trek Movie

October 30, 2007

      People are having a field day on-line kibitzing about the new cast for the new Star Trek, which is pre-the original series in time setting and features them at the academy and getting acquainted - heaven knows what the plot will be. I'll watch it anyway. Leonard will be in it for a moment. I hope they have the sense to put Bill in it as well. Those two are having way too much fun in their old age! GOOD FOR YOU GUYS!
     
      But I do have to comment - as these kids tear up the old episodes (Kirk in red tights half-naked in a fight scene - does his jockstrap show?)
      It might help to pause a moment and remember.
      The 1960s was an early time yet for TV.
      We had just discovered color.
      In fact, Gene himself said they picked Yellow, Red and Blue (these are primary colors) for the shirts to be sure that they showed up looking somewhat Yellow, Red and Blue on the early color TV sets, and would also appear different (they have different gray components) on black & white TV sets, which were by far the majority.
     
      It hurts to go that far back! In fact, I watched the show on a black & white set for some years and was blown away the first time I saw it in color.
     
      We did not have high-resolution.
      We did not have very big screens.
      We got up to change the channel.
      We had tubes and then transistors - discrete parts!
      Most of the kids today have no friggin' clue to what I just said.
     
      I watched Howdy Doody and Milton Burl on an 8" round black & white oscilloscope driven by a 9-tube contraption - in the late (very) 1940s - early 1950s.
      My stepfather built our TV. It ran forever. I biked to the drug store with the 9 tubes to test and replace them on occasion. I was under 12. What did I know.
     
      So there was low-budget bastard sci fi television, doing its level best to surmount incredible odds.
      It was the show swept into the corner. It was not helped.
      It was canceled, stripped of its original team and let run loose for the last year. (it was the silly year)
     
      It used salt shakers from the cafeteria for medical scanners.
      It carried around plastic chips and claimed they held files - 20 years later we had colored zip disks that did - but not then.
      The boxes of flashing LED lights that were supposed to be computer consoles, well, that's what the prototypes actually looked like in the labs in the 1960s. I worked on some of those mainframes.
      Let's face it, in the 1960s, we did not even have the CONCEPT of a laptop!
      Communicators? We have the cell phone. At the time we had bulky rotary phones. And party lines.
      Tricorder? We have fancy cell phones! Nothing scanned anything in the 60s. Nothing you could hold in your hand!
      None of this was dreamed of at the time.
      Shuttles? Transporters? We have shuttles. We are working on the transporter concept. None of that existed.
      Space travel? We were trying to get to the moon. Never mind Mars. Venus. Or a probe running right out of the solar system.
      We were thinking about it.
      Special hospital therapy beds that took measurements? We actually have them - and they can do some things. We wanted them once Star Trek showed us the way. They were faking everything. They had a low budget. They turned down incredible scripts as being "too expensive to make".
      (OH the horror!)
      At least some of those were resurrected for the animated episodes. Drawn by I might add, some very dedicated Trekkie artists. (Filmation Studios was awesome.)
     
      The show did well.
      It inspired people like me to go get BSEE, MSE and PhD degrees and help the nation lead the way in science.
     
      A jock strap showing? Honey, in those days, the news shows, the morning shows, and the like were building their sets out of painted cardboard!
      The line of a jock strap would never have been visible at low resolution.
      It hid a lot of seams.
     
      I remember being on Jack Parr on the morning show at age 13, and being totally confused by all the cardboard and the fakeness of it all.
      It was my first encounter with doing wild things with a TV camera.
      Years later, I stood on a blue screen with Greg Bear (now a big name writer) and picked off Tribbles from his star fleet uniform while we discussed the upcoming star trek convention. On TV, we were "beamed" from the star ship (a 35mm 1/2 slide) to the lobby of the El Cortez (which I think is no longer there), also a 35mm slide.
      The beaming process required a TV camera be focused on a TV receiving no signal ("snow") - we had tried other things that did not work.
      Once you see how it's done - I think it makes it even more admirable that they pulled it off.
       Keep on Trekking!