Star Trek IV The Voyage Home

September 28, 2017

Book Launch: The Next Generation

Forest of Illusions Star Trek II The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, Star Trek Phase II, Star Trek The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Next Generation 14

In honour of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s 30th Anniversary today, Vaka Rangi Volume 2: Star Trek Phase II, Original Film Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 1) is now available for order from certain online retailers.

This volume covers the years 1977-1988 and aims to tell the story of Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s conception and birth over the course of that decade, starting from the fandom’s staunch resistance to letting Star Trek go in the late 70s leading to the abortive Star Trek Phase II project, which eventually morphed into the Star Trek film series. Every pitched Star Trek Phase II script is examined in detail, with particular emphasis on the ones that were eventually adapted into television episodes and movies: “In Thy Image” (Star Trek: The Motion Picture), “The Child”, “Devil’s Due” and “Kitumba”. Also covered during this section is the fanmade Star Trek Phase II web series and the famous and illustrious “Star Trek Trilogy”-Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.

Moving beyond fandom history, the book explores the other, less-frequently acknowledged pop culture influences on and antecedents of Star Trek: The Next Generation as well, such as Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Cosmos, Miami Vice, Alien and Aliens. New to the book version is a section on the history of 80s anime and its relationship to the contemporary science fiction scene, and how Star Trek: The Next Generation staffers like Rick Sternbach and Mike Okuda were profoundly influenced by the work being done by Japanese genre fiction creators. This section’s brand-new essays are on Urusei Yatsura, Mobile Suit Gundam, Super Dimension Fortress Macross (and Macross: Do You Remember Love?) and two special revised essays on Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind and Dirty Pair.

Speaking of Dirty Pair, longtime fans will no doubt remember the somewhat infamous run of blog posts through the entire Classic Dirty Pair anime series that accompanied the original version of this project (and that can still be found in Eruditorum Press’ archives). Regrettably this is one of the sections I had to cut for space concerns (the final book is already pared down from what I initially wanted it to be, and as it is I just barely squeaked in under Createspace’s upper page count limit with the biggest possible trim size), but don’t think for a moment I’ve forgotten about Kei and Yuri: I’ve decided that they, alongside Nausicaä, really deserve a project unto themselves, so one of my future books will be a rumination on the themes of animist utopianism in 80s anime, building off of a spun-off, heavily revised and expanded version of that section of Vaka Rangi. I can tell you right now this is not my next blog project, but it is one I’ve been in the serious planning stages of for awhile, so please look forward to that in the future.…

August 24, 2014

“I was quite the swinger back in my day”: Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Forest of Illusions Star Trek Film Series, Star Trek IV The Voyage Home 13

The 1980s were a good time for someone with a developing interest in oceanography. In 1984, archaeologist Barry Clifford found the wreck of the Whydah, a pirate ship captained by Black Sam Bellamy during the Golden Age of Piracy, off the coast of Wellfleet, Massachusetts on Cape Cod, a stretch of coastline that’s a notorious navigation hazard and the site of many wrecks. It’s also a coastline that happens to be six hours away from me and a place I consider a second home. The discovery of the Whydah by Clifford and his team was the result of an extensive search up and down Cape Cod’s Atlantic coast and marks the first, and to date only time, an authentic pirate shipwreck has been located by marine explorers. Clifford founded a museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts (just north of Wellfleet) dedicated to Bellamy and the Whydah that remains open to this day, and while he’s a local hero in New England, neither him nor the story remains well known outside of the region.

In 1985, Robert Ballard and a team of oceanographers from Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute on Cape Cod made world headlines by locating the much sought-after wreck of the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic. Ballard’s discovery captured the imagination of people all over the world (myself included), it remains possibly the most famous exploration and recovery mission in the history of oceanography, and the story of the Titanic would inspire director James Cameron to create one of the two highest-grossing movies of all time over a decade later. It’s since been revealed Ballard’s expedition was actually a front, and that throughout 1985 he had been secretly in the temporary employ of the United States Navy. The true purpose of his mission to clandestinely search for two missing US submarines, the USS Scorpion and USS Thresher, which had sunk in the same waters in the 1960s before they got to test the experimental nuclear reactors they had been outfitted with.

Also in 1985, a humpback whale nicknamed Humphrey attracted heavy media attention after he got “lost”, travelling through the Golden Gate to end up in San Francisco Bay. Marine biologists grew concerned when he further deviated from his normal migratory patterns by swimming up the freshwater Sacramento River before getting himself trapped at the other end of the Rio Vista Bridge, putting his life in danger. In order to get Humphrey to safety, humpback researcher Louis Herman and acoustical engineer Bernie Krause played recorded songs of whales feeding on high-power underwater speakers provided by the US Navy to get Humphrey to retrace his steps and return to the Pacific Ocean. My interest in whale songs and whale behaviour was fostered by the story of Humphrey (adapted into a wonderful book called Humphrey the Lost Whale) and other whales in the news at the time (including the sadly near-annual tradition of pilot whale beaching themselves on Cape Cod), helped cultivate my interest in the ocean and a living ecosystem and is but one facet of the link I share with it.…

September 29, 2013

Sensor Scan: The Transformed Man

Forest of Illusions Sensor Scans, Star Trek III The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV The Voyage Home, The Transformed Man, William Shatner 10

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).…