Well, kids, this is it… my suitcase is sitting on the bed waiting to be stuffed, and in only a few hours, I’ll be breathing the sunny, ashen air of SoCal. (Those fires had great timing, didn’t they?) Play nice while I’m gone, remember to be excellent to each other, and Happy Halloween. Here’s a little something to remember me by:
Is it just me, or was Belinda Carlisle a lot hotter when she was chunky and using drugs than when she cleaned up and went solo? Maybe it’s me…
As you may have heard, Paramount is hoping to revive its venerable — and highly profitable — Star Trek franchise with yet another feature-film adventure for the original Enterprise crew, i.e., Kirk, Spock, etc., only this time there will be a whole new gang of young actors playing the iconic characters. J.J. Abrams, the creator of Lost and Alias, is writing and directing, and the final member of the core cast was announced just last week. Here’s the run-down:
The photoshopped image above (courtesy of ScreenRant.com) provides an idea of how the newbies may look in their roles as well as how they compare to the original actors. As usual, give it a click it to blow it up larger.
In addition to the core cast above, Eric Bana will be playing a villain named Nero, who is rumored to be a Romulan (plausible, considering the name and the fact that the Romulan culture of the original Trek was modelled on ancient Rome), and Leonard Nimoy is said to be appearing as a more, ahem, mature Spock in a brief cameo. That last bit suggests we can expect either a time-travel story (another one? Ho-hum…) or a frame story of some kind, no doubt intended to help legitimize the new cast by having one of the classic actors “identify” them as his old friends.
Based on what I’ve seen out there on the blogs, people seem to be generally positive about this effort to reboot Star Trek, with opinions ranging from flat-out enthusiastic to cautiously optimistic. I, however, am far more dubious of the whole — forgive the pun — enterprise.
You ever wake up with a song already stuck in your head? Yeah… mine this morning is “My Head Hurts, My Feet Stink, and I Don’t Love Jesus,” by Jimmy Buffett. Make of that what you will…
Give it a few seconds to get going.
I’m going to try and find a way to use the term “piss-midget” today…
I’ve been looking for some video from Salvage 1 to try and refresh my memory. I didn’t find very much, but there is this:
Honestly, more of my circuits fired in response to the ABC Sunday Night Movie graphics than the footage from Salvage, the TV movie that became the series Salvage 1. Remember TV movies, kids? Or the days when feature films ran on regular network TV about a year after they’d been in the theaters, back in the dark days before home video rentals, cable TV, or “on-demand” anything? Can you believe there was once a time when you could make a movie about a homespun junk dealer with a preposterous notion about flying to the Moon in a rocket made out of a cement mixer and a tanker-truck trailer, and it would actually garner enough viewers to justify a weekly TV series (admittedly a short-lived one, but still…)
Yes, we were all a lot more innocent then…
I guess the old TV series Voyagers! must be selling reasonably well on DVD — either that, or studio execs are running out of product to release and still have a bunch of blank discs they want to burn — because the rumor mill says two more obscurities from the early ’80s, Salvage 1 and Tales of the Gold Monkey, may be coming next year. Of the two, I’d say Gold Monkey is more likely, if for no other reason than the opportunity to ride the coattails of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and maybe make a few more bucks than this series would on its own. For me, it’s also the more desirable of these two possibilities. (If you’ll recall, I wrote about Gold Monkey a while back; I always loved that show.)
As for Salvage 1, I remember watching it and can easily recall the basic premise — a post-Mayberry, pre-Matlock Andy Griffith builds a backyard rocket ship so he can go to the Moon and retrieve all the equipment left behind by the Apollo astronauts — but the details have gotten pretty hazy. I didn’t realize this show had enough of a fan base to support a DVD release, but I could be wrong.
The way things are going, I guess everything will become available for us crazy collector-types one of these days…
Finding that bizarre-o Budweiser commercial earlier got me thinking about some other ’80s-vintage beer ads that made quite an impact on me: Michelob’s “The Night Belongs To…” campaign comprised several atmospheric, one-minute-long masterpieces that featured music by actual rock stars instead of the usual generic advertising tracks. The best known of these was probably the one that featured Eric Clapton playing an updated version of his 1970 hit “After Midnight.”
The Internet amazes me. Here we have a technology that is as revolutionary a means of storing and disseminating information as anything we’ve come up with in a couple of centuries, and what do we mostly use it for? Preserving the media detritus of our childhoods in the 1970s and ’80s. Case in point: I mentioned pirates in the previous entry, which started me thinking about other pirate-y things I have loved in the past, which called up a dusty old file somewhere in the adolescent stratum of my personal wetware memory bank (that’d be my brain, kids). I did a bit of searching on Ye Olde YouTube, and behold, a Budweiser commercial that I saw at some point in high school and which has remained lodged in my head ever since:
As best I can recall, this ad only ran during Friday Night Videos and other late-night programs, and I don’t remember that it ran for very long… a few weeks maybe. I’ve thought about it from time to time over the years, and tried to describe it to friends who have invariably responded with blank looks. But now, thanks to this wondrous, science-fiction thing we call the Internet, I can finally shout to the heavens, “You see? It did exist! I’m not mad! I’m not!”
Seriously, though, isn’t that a weird commercial? I don’t know about you guys, but it doesn’t make me want to go for a Budweiser… maybe go plunder some booty or something, but not drink beer.
So, if you’ve been following along with the home version of our game, you’re no doubt aware that (a) my job has been a real drag lately, and (b) the only thing that’s been keeping me going has been the promise of an upcoming vacation. As of today, I can see the light at the end of the tunnel… I just hope it’s not the California Zephyr.
Sorry, old joke. Probably wasn’t very funny even when it was new.
Seriously, though, I’ll be leaving a week from yesterday for the first real vacation I’ve had in several years… “real” meaning something longer than just an extended weekend somewhere within easy driving distance of Salt Lake. This won’t be one of my dream journeys — instead of a trek through Europe, I’ll be spending a week in southern California with The Girlfriend and her entire family, visiting Disneyland and SeaWorld, among other touristy locales — but I’m nevertheless looking forward to it. I desperately need the break, and I’m curious to see the Johnny Depp-bots that’ve been added to Pirates of the Caribbean (my favorite ride at Disneyland, FYI). Also, as much as I love my home landscape, especially in the fall when the leaves are bright and the snow is beginning to dust the mountains to the east of town, it’ll be nice to have a change of scenery. Oh, and as a bonus, my good friend Cranky Robert, who lives in LA, and I are planning to get together and paint the town, too.
People are often puzzled by my attitude leading up to vacations. Unlike, say, The Girlfriend — who has had a countdown to this vacation running in the corner of her cellphone display for weeks now — I’m just not one to express a lot of obvious, bouncy enthusiasm, even for the bigger travel experiences I’ve had (England and Germany). To be honest, I tend not to think much about an impending holiday once the arrangements have been made, and my default habit is to pack my bags at 11 PM the night before I leave. This time, though… well, like I’ve repeatedly said, I need the break, and I am willing to admit that I’m feeling… moderately restless…
I finished the Harry Potter series back around the end of August — I meant to write a nice long entry about the experience and my reactions to the whole Potter phenom, but, as you may have noticed, I haven’t been able to write many nice long entries lately; the short version is that I liked these books, far more than I ever anticipated — and I’ve got to admit, it never occurred to me that Dumbledore was gay. His sexuality never entered into my conception of him at all, actually, just as I never really wondered what kind of trouble Gandalf got himself up to after smoking a big old bowlful of, ahem, “hobbit leaf,” or whether crazy old Ben Kenobi occasionally liked to visit the famous “Bantha Ranch” House of Hospitality in Anchorhead’s red-light district. The respective texts simply don’t provide — nor do the stories require — this level of characterization for these guys, who we all know are little more than archetypal mentor figures, no matter that we love them so much. But hey, if Rowling says Dumbledore is gay, then so be it. She would know better than us, and it doesn’t trouble me in the least if he is. It’s just not anything I imagined, and I personally don’t see any hard evidence for it within the story. (I will grant that Dumbledore is probably the best fleshed-out of the three mentors, in terms of having a detailed backstory that the reader is allowed to experience as part of the book’s main plot, but there’s still nothing there that suggested any kind of a sex life, gay or straight, in my opinion.)
That doesn’t mean, of course, that other people won’t see whatever they want to see now that the idea has been planted. I imagine this will only add fuel to the fire for those busybody whackjobs who are already down on the Potter books because they’ve got our kids thinking about that evil, nasty witchcraft. Um, yeah… and all the other beloved classic stories that people have been exposing their kids to for generations, from the Brothers Grimm to The Wizard of Oz to, yes, Star Wars, have absolutely nothing to do with magic or the supernatural…
