Eruditorum Press

No nationalism but Terry Nationalism

Sensor Scans

Sensor Scan: Star Wars

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You didn’t think I was really going to skip this one, did you?

But this is going to be a different sort of Star Wars retrospective then is perhaps the expected norm. Because I really find all the major things that can be said about this movie to be not only obvious, but commonly accepted knowledge. And ultimately because, one or two points notwithstanding, the legacy and impact of Star Wars are not actually especially important here in Star Trek land.

The major intersection between Star Wars and Star Trek I can think of is far more materialistic than inspirational: Paramount’s decision to scrap Star Trek Phase II and greenlight Star Trek: The Motion Picture instead would seem to be the standard response, but that actually had far more to do with Close Encounters of the Third Kind then it did with Episode IV, as during the period between the two films everyone largely assumed Star Wars was a fluke and science fiction held no promise for regular, reliable success at the box office. The only other thing I can think of off the top of my head is the frequent description of Benjamin Sisko’s story as a “Hero’s Journey”, which to me is just as much about a fundamental failure to understand what Star Trek: Deep Space Nine was supposed to be about then it is about Star Wars cementing itself into the collective Western consciousness.

I am, of course, expected to talk about Joseph Campbell, the Myth of the Hero, how Star Wars draws on many myth and story archetypes from around the world and how that transformed not only the pop culture landscape, but how people respond to all stories at an instinctual level. It’s had an incalculable impact on entire generations of writers and readers alike, and I’m sure you all are waiting for me to say something about it. The thing is, absolutely everybody who has ever written about Star Wars has talked about this: Star Wars is, in fact, one of the most overanalysed and overstudied works of fiction in history. I’ll just let James Rolfe explain this in a far more heartfelt, poignant and personal way then I could ever manage, and then call in Phil Sandifer to make the case for the prosecution (in spite of me largely disagreeing completely with his opinion of Star Trek) and to point out the problems with the Campbellian approach. I have literally nothing more to contribute.

One observation I will make is that one of the reasons at least the original Star Wars had the impact it did was because it is very good at building a sense of a larger pre-exisiting world and history that we only get fleeting glimpses of. Everything from the famous opening text crawl, to Obi-Wan telling Luke about the mysterious and long-departed Jedi, to the Jawa merchants and the canteen on Tatooine (with its twin suns) to the Empire itself, is described in terms that make them seem equally wondrous, fantastical and mundane.…

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Sensor Scan: Rocket Man

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Elton John and Bernie Taupin’s “Rocket Man” is usually read as a very poor imitation of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity”. Both songs explore the mundane reality of space travel and both came out just as the wave of public interest in outer space and spaceflight had crested and was beginning to roll back (though “Space Oddity”, at least the original version, was far more timely in 1969, with “Rocket Man”’s 1972 release date already making it feel curiously dated, though do recall “Space Oddity” was re-released that year too) and, to top it off, both songs were even produced by the same guy: Gus Dudgeon. And of course, the critical consensus goes, no-one is going to call Bernie Taupin an especially poetic, captivating or moving songwriter, and David Bowie is, well, David Bowie.

But this misses, I feel, a big part of the nuance “Rocket Man” actually displays. Yes, I’ll come right out and say it: This is pretty clunky song, and there are a fair few embarrassing verses and questionable lines. But I’ll also freely admit this is one of my favourite pop songs, and while I’m well aware my taste in music can be described as “eclectic” at best and “suspect” at worst, just hear me out for a bit. First of all, that chorus has got to be one of the most achingly beautiful things ever recorded, and that’s really all “Rocket Man” needs to become an instant classic, because in pop the hooks and chorus are unabashedly the most important parts of the song. Secondly though, “Rocket Man”’s origins are a bit more interesting than most people tend to give them credit for, as it was inspired both by a Ray Bradbury short story of the same name and Taupin witnessing a meteor or faraway airplane when looking up at the sky at night. Far from echoing David Bowie’s indictment of (or at least very mixed feelings about) the Space Age on “Space Oddity”, what “Rocket Man” is actually about is a world where rocketry, at one time the most exciting and fashionable technology around, is so commonplace and mundane that astronauts become like truck drivers.

This is what takes “Rocket Man” from being curiously out of time to being very much of its time: In the mid-to-late 1970s pop culture in the United States had a particular fascination with truck drivers and trucker culture, brought upon by a number of movies from this period glamourizing the lifestyle and the widespread popularity of CB radio. With the 1970s fuel crisis in full swing, many people, but especially truckers, used CB radio to coordinate fuel runs to stations that had the best gas prices and to organise protests against new regulations. Truckers were seen as, in a sense, bringing back lost “American” values of rugged cowboy individualism (never mind the fact this assumption had zero historical precedent and is due more to the popularity of John Wayne movies: The fact is it existed) and, as a result, truck drivers, CB radio, and the distinctive language of slang they used, became very fashionable.…

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Sensor Scan: Roots

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Chalk this one up as another “we’re covering it because there’s no way to *not* cover it” kind of entry.

Roots needs no introduction, least of all from me. Based on the novel of the same name, Roots is a fictionalized and dramatized version of writer Alex Haley’s attempt to trace his genealogy back across multiple generations to one man in Africa taken from his home and made into a slave. It was one of the most groundbreaking and influential television series of all time, capturing the imagination of an entire country through television in one of the last moments it was possible to do that, solidifying the miniseries as viable format for dramatic storytelling and making African history and heritage a central mainstream concern for one of the first times in modern history.

For my purposes, of course, the most obvious and superficial reason to tackle this show in the context of Vaka Rangi is because it introduces an up-and-coming young actor by the name of LeVar Burton in the pivotal role of Young Kunta Kinte, who will go on to play a rather significant role in the evolving history of Star Trek and the entertainment industry at large, not to mention my own life. Knowing what LeVar Burton will eventually go on to do, it’s hard not to let that completely overshadow the rest of the series, but, perhaps surprisingly for someone coming to this show from a contemporary perspective on the basis of its reputation alone, he’s only actually in it for two of the show’s eight episodes. That said, they are two of the most important, as they depict the defining moments of Kunta Kinte’s life: Namely, being abducted from his home in a Mandinka village by a slave trader, brought to the United States, sold into slavery and being tortured until he accepts his new assigned name of Toby. However, while these may be the most iconic moments of the show and while Burton’s performance is predictably heartfelt, powerful, tragic and instantly memorable (which is all the more impressive given this was his first professional acting gig), this is not actually what the majority of Roots is about.

Because of this, and hastily acknowledging that Roots is the beginning and a major part of LeVar’s legacy, I sort of want to leave him for the most part out of my analysis here. His presence will definitely be felt, welcomed and embraced-LeVar Burton is a person and a theme who will inspire and guide this project from this point onwards, but in the context of what Roots in particular can tell us about the television climate of 1977 and the Star Trek franchise more generally (aside from the screaming obvious, that is), his career trajectory is actually a secondary motif. Anyway, I tend to be of the belief the most revealing erudition we can discern about what LeVar Burton brings to Star Trek can be found in that other little show he was involved in for a time, but we’ve got a few more years on either end to get through before we can look at that one just yet.…

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Sensor Scan: Burnham’s Celestial Handbook

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This one is going to take some explaining.

For me, Star Trek and astronomy are connected in a particular and important way. Not because of the material connection between Paramount’s PR wing and NASA; it’s debatable whether that can even be called astronomy in the first place. No, the reason why I think of astronomy when I think of Star Trek is quite simple: My love for one inspired my love for the other, and I feel the true strength of both can be found in wayfinding.

Though I’ve mentioned it several times before, my personal connection to and relationship with the realm of the sky is going to become a major, central theme in my reading of not this next phase of Star Trek’s history, but definitely the one directly after it. One of the benefits of living where I live is that my relative distance from urban civilization and comparatively high altitude mountain residence means that I have access to something that’s sadly not afforded to many people these days anymore: A truly vast and open night sky free of light pollution. On a clear night, it seems like you can look into infinity, with layers upon layers of countless stars and the dazzling ribbon of the Milky Way winding its way across the celestial sphere. The cliche is that looking up at the night sky is a humbling experience that makes people aware of their cosmic insignificance, but that’s not how I’ve ever seen it: To me, spending a really good night under the stars here is a truly profound experience that makes me aware of the Cosmic Whole, and our interconnectedness with it. When I was younger it would also fire my imagination, causing me to dream of travelling amongst those stars.

The very first thing that struck me about Star Trek: The Next Generation was a captivating, hypnotic sense that permeated throughout the whole show: Everything about it seemed to exude an awareness and embrace of the mystical vastness of the universe, and to say that humanity is not in fact dwarfed by it but belongs to it, as much a part of it as the inspired planets, comets, nebulae and other cosmic wonders that sailed by in the show’s intro sequence, which remains possibly the single piece of visual media that inspires and means the most to me to this day. I guess I may have been immediately drawn to this and had the kind of reaction I did because it reminded me so much of the way I felt when looking at the real sky at night in my backyard. Considering we only got Star Trek: The Next Generation in syndication late at night, that just compounded the effect and to me created the perfect mood to get lost in the imaginary dreamscapes the show would evoke at me. Sometimes I’d go out at night, look up at the Milky Way and imagine the Enterprise and all those who lived on her sailing to all those different stars.…

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Sensor Scan: Space Ritual

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There’s a certain set of expectations that are put in place when you put on a record with a title like Space Ritual. These are further heightened when you glance at album artwork like that, which has got to be one of the most gorgeously mind-warping bits of sleeve design I’ve ever seen. So suffice to say I guess I expected that whatever this album was going to sound like it simply had to be some kind of consciousness-elevating, perspective shifting head trip. What I experienced was not quite what I anticipated, but an experience Space Ritual certainly is.

Music is one of the hardest things for me to write about, and it aggravates me no end. Probably nothing resonates with me as powerfully as music does, but it evokes such a complex tapestry of emotions, moods and imagery for me I often find myself unable to translate my feelings into anything resembling coherent language. I’m no musicologist or music critic and maybe that has something to do with it, but either way, no place do I feel the torment of Avital Ronell’s ethereal phantom dictator than when I try to say something intelligent about music. I always end up feeling like the protagonist of William Shatner’s “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”, haplessly and fruitlessly trying to describe enlightenment to someone who didn’t experience it firsthand. I’m also once again handicapped by the fact I’m writing about a group of artists I’m not especially familiar with and feel woefully underqualified to actually talk about.

But even so there are a fair amount of interesting things I was able to notice about Hawkwind’s Space Ritual even given my limited experience with the band that slot the album very nicely into the cultural zeitgeist of the early 1970s. Hawkwind, firstly, are a UK-based rock outfit who combine elements of Psychedelia, acid rock and prog rock and who are usually credited as the originators of space rock, which fuses all of these disparate sounds together through an interest in science fiction motifs. While this isn’t the kind of space rock I’m familiar with (which uses a lot more electronic instruments, distortion and overdubbing) it is quite an apt description of what Hawkwind sound like. With their heady themes and incredibly skilled guitar shredding, Hawkwind are also seen as the intermediate step between the Hippies of the Long 1960s and the Punks of the Long 1980s. They were also one of the most laudably workmanlike bands of their time, regularly doing one show every three days and once playing five consecutive nights for free outside, not at, the Isle of Wright Festival. Space Ritual itself isn’t an album in the traditional sense: It’s a double-disc live album chronicling a night from Hawkwind’s 1972-3 tour to support their Doremi Fasol Latido album. However, like so many great live albums, Space Ritual holds together perfectly on its own to the point it more than overshadows the records it’s ostensibly trying to support.

That Space Ritual is a recording of a concert is key to grasping its impact, as it really does feel like this kind of music is meant to be shared with a live audience.…

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Sensor Scan: William Shatner in the 1970s

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Modern genre fiction actors are superstars. They’re today’s teen idols, appearing in multi-billion dollar film and television projects and have their name and face instantly splattered across the Internet the moment their franchise sees the merest inkling of popular success. Typecasting too is far less of a problem now then it used to be: Nowadays up-and-coming genre stars go out of their way to nurture a cult of personality as soon as they start to become famous, and take care to ensure each marquee role they play is a slightly different twist on their iconic public persona from the start: Benedict Cumberbatch, for example, plays a version of Khan Noonien Singh in Star Trek Into Darkness that can succinctly be described as “Evil Sherlock” even though he is self-evidently capable of a vast and diverse acting range. Likewise, there’s not a whole lot of difference between Martin Freeman’s Bilbo Baggins, his John Watson and his Arthur Dent, which was already an exaggerated and caricatured version of the character he played in The Office. This isn’t so much a criticism as it is an observation that in contemporary genre fiction, typecasting is something that’s acknowledged and accounted for from the beginning

It wasn’t always like this.

It’s not like the cast of Star Trek were ever really not famous. The series was always afforded a primetime slot in its original run: Even in the third season when it was shunted into the Friday Night Death Slot, at least it was in the primetime part of the Friday Night Death Slot. Star Trek was a marquee show for NBC, and all the accounts I could find dating to the 1960s indicate it was a series that was considerably recognisable and well-known. At the very least, you don’t get to record novelty albums or appear on variety shows if you’re not doing at least somewhat well for yourself (and certainly this also would seem to indicate there’s always been some sort of teen idol appeal within genre fiction). But the flip side of this is that if you became famous for genre fiction in the 20th century…well, there was a good chance that’s all you were ever going to be famous for. And, sadly, perhaps the archetypical example of this phenomenon is what happened to the Star Trek cast, who universally struggled to find work throughout the 1970s, forever becoming associated with the roles they played for three years on the starship Enterprise. No matter how rough the cancellation of the Original Series was for Trekkers, the fact is it was infinitely worse for the cast and crew. And arguably few had it as bad as William Shatner.

Shatner’s bad luck started a few months before the end of Star Trek when his wife Gloria Rand divorced him. While things like this are of course complicated and involve many different factors and variables, Shatner himself has expressed suspicion that this might have had something to do with his character bedding a different woman every week on a popular primetime science fiction show.…

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Sensor Scan Bonus: Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!

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This is the second part of my reading of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! in the context of Star Trek and the larger pop culture landscape of the late 1960s and early 1970s. You may wish to check out part one (covering the period of the show when it was actually known as Mysteries Five) first if you haven’t done so already, or even if you have just for a bit of a refresher. This part goes into more detail about the actual show and what I think the main characters represent. And, like the previous part, it’s a revised, remixed, expanded and otherwise tweaked version of a piece I wrote a year ago on one of my other blogs.

I’m not going to pull what Gene Roddenberry did with “Assignment: Earth” and pretend this isn’t a backdoor pilot for another project I’d really like to write someday. This is manifestly why it’s an overstuffed two-parter: I’m trying to condense my entire reading and thesis into one blog post when covering Scooby-Doo could well be a project of comparable size and scope to Vaka Rangi. However, the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is still one of the biggest cultural signifiers of 1969, so I’ve really no choice but to put this here. My apologies in advance. That being said, if you’re at all interested in hearing me talk more about Scooby-Doo (as if for some reason this ridiculous spiel wasn’t enough for you) or just want to discuss it further, please do let me know in the comments or anywhere else you’re able to get ahold of me. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

If there’s another pop culture franchise that’s meant as much to me and about which I have as many complex, conflicting emotions as Star Trek, I’m not at all ashamed to admit it has to be Scooby-Doo.

You find yourself on a dirt path. It’s an avenue lined with leafless trees on either side. The Moon is full, and the moonlight shining through the trees gives the gnarled landscape a transfixing, grotesque otherworldly beauty. In the distance there’s an old Victorian estate. Through the evening dusk, you can just make out that it seems completely abandoned, all save for one window that remains eerily lit. There’s a crack of thunder, and a flock of bats comes flying at you. There’s an almost legibly thick haze in the air, blurring the boundaries between night and day, between our world and the others. How far across the expanse does the dream extend? How long have you been here? Difficult to say. All you know is that you need to get to your next gig and your dog’s hungry in the backseat.


When last we left Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, we dubbed it the reanimated shell of a dead show we didn’t get to see forever haunted by the potential its predecessor hinted at. While in many ways this remains true, one of the most fascinating things about Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!…

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Sensor Scan: Space Oddity

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First of all, let me say I am without question the least qualified person in the world to be talking about David Bowie. I’m as familiar with him and his career as the next person I suppose, but I certainly wouldn’t consider myself any kind of expert. There are people who have spent their entire lives following David Bowie and to whom his music is as formative and important as, well, Star Trek is to me I guess.

That said there’s simply no getting out of writing about “Space Oddity”. It’s an irreducible part of the cultural zeitgeist of mid-to-late 1969 and having it released not a month after the original Star Trek was canceled (for real this time) is about as revealing as it’s possible for an amateur scholar of media history to hope for. However, I’m also not going to pretend I have anything remotely resembling original insight to offer about something this iconic: I’ll just link you to this piece by Chris O’Leary out of Pushing Ahead of the Dame, which is pretty much the definitive take on “Space Oddity”, and just humbly ask for your patience as I toss out some random assorted thoughts about what this all might have to do with Star Trek and the state of science fiction at the end of the 1960s.

While “Space Oddity” has been rightfully read to be about a lot of different things, one of the most reoccurring motifs I notice in the song is, essentially, Bowie eulogizing the Space Age. Far from the Golden Age archetype of the bold, heroic space explorer, Major Tom is a soft-spoken, reserved fellow and his spaceflight is a gigantic publicity spectacle: It feels like the events of the song are being broadcast on national radio, and Ground Control even straight-up asks him what brand of shirts he’s wearing so they can squeeze an advertisement into the live coverage. This would of course tie into the general countercultural belief at the time that the Apollo programme (don’t forget Apollo 11 touched down that same summer) was in truth a giant PR stunt for the US government instead of an actual scientific expedition (which, sadly, sort of turned out to be the case).

And, although I’m not keen to draw direct causal links between the Apollo missions and the change in science fiction (or Star Trek, for that matter) there was a cultural shift that this speaks to. Whatever Apollo 11 actually was, one thing it proved pretty decisively is that when it came to outer space, science fact didn’t really look like science fiction. Whether or not you think it’s a problem for Star Trek that the Apollo missions proved the Moon was essentially a hunk of rock and dust (which I don’t think it is: To me the Moon has always remained a beautifully stark, hauntingly evocative alien landscape: With the exception of the mushroom bit, Georges Méliès largely got it right, though Hergé was closer) the fact the space mission itself was troublingly bound up in Cold War politics, capitalist pandering and militaristic bicep flexing surely would be-It’s hard to keep your sense of wonder about the universe with all that going on, especially when you and your friends are being relentlessly persecuted by the very people asking you to love NASA and the astronauts.…

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Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

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William Shatner is one of those personalities who is so ubiquitous that their reputation precedes and obfuscates their actual contributions to art and pop culture. Shatner is so famous as Captain Kirk and the the king of unironic and self-evidently ridiculous camp that his iconic public persona dwarfs and overshadows his entire creative body of work. One of the reasons why I focus so heavily on Shatner in my overview of this period of Star Trek history (if not the primary one) is that his status as an omnipresent and immediately recognisable part of pop culture has ironically made it difficult to discern any reasonable erudition about the kind of actor he is, the style of performance he delivers and what the positionality he draws it all from really is. That’s not to say Leonard Nimoy, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols and Walter Koenig aren’t equally as iconic and memorable in their roles, they are, but everyone knows they’re brilliant and, more to the point, everyone largely knows why they’re brilliant. That’s not really the case with with William Shatner.

All of which is to say that in 1968 William Shatner released an album of spoken-word poetry.

This is, it should probably go without saying, manifestly not the sort of thing anybody expected of William Shatner at the time, two thirds of the way through the original run of Star Trek. It is also probably fairly safe to say it is still not the sort of thing people expect of William Shatner today, because despite his subsequent musical performances becoming part of his camp reputation, the sort of bemused detachment this part of his oeuvre attracts from would-be fans and critics is rather telling. But the existence of The Transformed Man is in fact a very revealing look at not only the approach to Soda Pop Art in the late-1960s but also Shatner’s own worldview and how his presence helped re-shape what Star Trek came to represent. So with that said, what the heck even *is* The Transformed Man?

It may actually be beneficial to begin with an overview of what The Transformed Man *isn’t*, as this is the source of the overwhelming majority of confusion and bafflement this record attracts. In this regard it’s worth comparing it, if for no other reason then the comparison is unavoidable, with Leonard Nimoy’s musical catalog. In 1967, just as Star Trek was starting to gain a significant following, Dot Records released an album called Mr. Spock’s Songs from Space, which was pretty much exactly what it sounds like: A collection of fluffy novelty songs Nimoy recorded in full-on Spock-the-logician mode to abjectly hilarious results. Literally the only reason this album exists is because Spock was the show’s breakout character, and in the 1960s releasing an album of novelty music to tie in to a popular TV show was just sort of the thing you did, no matter how nonsensical it might sound if you think too hard about it (see also “Snoopy’s Christmas” by The Royal Guardians).…

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Sensor Scan Bonus: Mysteries Five and 1968

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Before I began Vaka Rangi, I was toying with the idea of doing projects of similar size and scope for other pop culture phenomena. I posted most of these “pilots” to this blog’s sister site Soda Pop Art, if anyone’s interested in some of the things I write about outside of Star Trek. One of the projects I’ve considered doing off and on for the past three or four years is a comprehensive critical history of the Scooby-Doo franchise, which, in my opinion, is one of the most frequently misread things in pop culture. And, when I was planning the between-season material for the gap between the end of the Original Series and the beginning of the Animated Series, there was one show from 1969 I knew was an absolute no-brainer for me to cover.

Unfortunately, I’d already written about it.

So yes, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! is getting a Sensor Scan post sometime after “Turnabout Intruder”. But as it’s part of a larger project I’d still like to write someday and as its sociopolitical and ethical roots really date back to 1968, the production history of the show has its own post, which you can read below.

This essay then, as well as the planned one on the show-as-aired, is a revised, remixed, expanded and otherwise tweaked version of a piece I already posted to Soda Pop Art about a year ago. Because of that, I’m not comfortable making this an “official” Monday/Wednesday/Friday post (even though it’s certainly long enough to be one) and you’re free to skip ahead and go read up on Scooby-Doo over there if you like. Or if you’d prefer to wait to see the strangled way I try to connect this all back to Star Trek, you can certainly do that as well.

Mysteries Five

The year was 1968.

Hanna-Barbera, long having proven itself one of the major pillars of the children’s television animation genre they helped create, was under fire from Parental Rights and moral guardian activist groups who were complaining that their Saturday Morning Cartoon market, at the time dominated by sci-fi action serial inspired offerings such as Space Ghost and Jonny Quest, were too violent and scary for children and demanding their programming be changed to reflect more “suitable” content and topics. Despite being Exhibit A, Hanna-Barbera were far from the only studio targeted by this campaign, and one of the earliest, and most influential, responses was Filmation’s The Archie Show, which reconceptualized the Riverdale high kids from the popular evergreen comics as a teen pop band and centered around themes of teenage relationship and parent drama.

With the complaints by parental watchdogs echoing in their ears, Hanna-Barbera set to work trying to come up with a show that would both please the activists and serve as a tentpole series for their upcoming season. While all this was going on, Fred Silverman, then head of CBS’ children’s television department, contacted producers Joe Ruby and Ken Spears with an idea he had for a new show that combined elements from I Love A Mystery and Armchair Detectives, two popular radio serials from decades past.…

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