Review: 'The Star Trek Archive: 100 Objects and Stories from the Final Frontier'

Star Trek has been granted longevity that few franchises could ever dream of because it was smart, well-written, had a specific point of view, and was full of memorable, lovable characters. But, like all enduring sci-fi works, it was also full of stuff. Just as Star Wars had its lightsabers and landspeeders, Star Trek had its phasers, tricorders, Enterprises, tribbles, and pointy ears. 

Review: 'Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home-The Making of the Film'

The Wrath of Khan may be the best Star Trek film, but The Voyage Home is easily the most lovable. It's the cinematic equivalent of "The Trouble with Tribbles": fun, breezy, a bit silly, and more focused on the dynamics between the crew than matters of galactic gravity. 

I do wish there was a bit more of the Enterprise's crew in John and Maria Jose Tenuto's Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home-The Making of the Film, but this is still a pretty wonderful book that really conveys the film's warm, joyous spirit. The writers provide a clear idea of Leonard Nimoy's sensitive directing techniques, the challenges and triumphs of bringing the film's humpback whales to life, and the key members of the film's crew, most notably Kirk Thatcher, the wunderkind who not only served as associate producer, but also played the punk who gets memorably silenced by Spock and wrote and sang the punk song that so displeases our favorite vulcan.

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Videotapes From Hell'

If you take Mr. Peabody's Wayback Machine to 2017 here on Psychobabble, you may find that Grady Hendrix's Paperbacks From Hell was one of my favorite books of that year. Its abundance of images of sleazy, cheesy, outrageous horror paperback covers was the hook, but the anchor was Grady's writing, which was both informative and really funny, eagerly tapping into the goofy fun of those horrid novels that occupied check-out counter spinner racks in the seventies and eighties. 

Review: 'Star Trek-The Illustrated Oral History: The Original Cast'

Star Trek-The Illustrated Oral History: The Original Cast is not the first oral history of that boldly going sci-fi archetype, but it's unique in that all of its quotes were pulled from a single source—Titan's long-running Star Trek Magazine— and that "illustrated" bit. This is a beautiful little book, illustrated with color photos of what could be TV's most splendidly vivid series. 

Review: 'The Future Is Now: Madmen, Mavericks, and the Epic Sci-Fi Summer of 1982'

Even though pretty much everyone loved it, Star Wars became an easy go-to villain for every dreary movie critic who'd come to complain that it ruined cinematic art by making special effects and bottom line far more important than story, complex themes, and characterizations. Nevertheless, it took a few years for the influence of George Lucas's film to really ripen. Aside from a few stray extravaganzas like Superman, Alien, and Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Star Wars influence was mostly manifest in grade-Z schlockers like Star Crash and Battle Beyond the Stars in the years immediately following the summer of '77. 

Review: 'Star Trek: Designing the Final Frontier'

There are plenty of reasons to dig Star Trek, but the thing that hooked me after decades of laboring under the assumption it was boring (I was roughly 69% wrong) was the way it looked. Despite taking place during the 23rd century, the original series is a display case of fab mid-twentieth century design. Between the tulip-style Burke chairs by Knoll on the bridge, sharp John Follis planters in the botany bay, Madison swivel chairs, and shapely Empoli decanters in Uhura's quarters, I would not mind living on the Enterprise at all. And when the crew beam down to Balok's ship, which he controls with a modified lantern by Malcolm Leland, or zip back to 1968 when Gary Seven sat behind a fab Boomerang Executive desk by Osvaldo Borsani, the style got even wilder. 

Review: 'Alien Invasions! The History of Aliens in Popular Culture'

Because it isn’t very likely that aliens from other worlds have ever visited Earth, they can be imagined in any number of ways. Are they tentacled, bulbous-brained beasts? Are they green-skinned seductresses in brass bikinis and weird headgear? Are they friendly little, big-eyed chaps who just want to go (and phone) home? Are they hostile? Neutral? Are they super advanced or super primitive? Are they from distant galaxies or our very own moon?

Review: 'Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl'

There have been a lot of compilations of album cover art, and they’re usually good for a flip-through but lack focus and insight. Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl is in a whole other universe. Collecting the covers of sci-fi and fantasy soundtracks, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas’s new book has a specific focus and is atypically enlightening.

Review: 'Star Trek: Year Five: The Wine-Dark Deep'

One of the great pleasures of the first three issues of Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly’s Star Trek: Year Five is the comic series’ faithfulness to Gene Roddenberry’s original TV show. Artists and writers alike rendered characters with perfect fidelity to Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, Bones, and the rest. The stories could have been adapted to actual episodes of the original TV series due to a simplicity and clarity in line with what could be brought to the small screen in the late sixties.

Review: 'Star Trek: Year Five'

At the beginning of each episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk informed us that the crew of the starship Enterprise was on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and so on. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the gang never got to finish their mission on TV because hostile aliens from the planet NBC aborted it after just three years.

In light of season-three’s high ratio of stinker episodes like “Spock’s Brain” and “Turnabout Intruder”, Star Trek’s early cancellation may have actually been merciful, though there were more tales worth telling in that universe, hence the franchise’s healthy life beyond 1969.

One of the most recent continuations of the Star Trek story returns us to its origins to complete the Enterprise’s original mission. Star Trek: Year Five is a comic series from IDW that began last April, and the groovy thing about this series is how faithful it is to the original series at its best. Like that original, Year Five is the work of multiple writers and multiple directors—or in this case, artists—yet all are dedicated to recreating the Star Trek we know and love in terms of storytelling, characterizations, themes, and visuals. While the art style varies from issue to issue, it never becomes so stylized that we cannot recognize the faces of Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols, and the rest. As soon as Bones orders Kirk to drink brandy on the job in “episode” one (these are episodes, not issues), we are transported right back to the sixties. Fortunately, that period flavor does not extend to its treatment of Uhura, who gets a much bigger role throughout these comics than she did in the original series (Sulu, however, tends to get sidelined).

Review: 'The First Star Trek Movie: Bringing the Franchise to the Big Screen, 1969-1980'

Star Trek had barely been cancelled when its obsessive fans began obsessing about where the Enterprise might head next. Even as Gene Roddenberry dangled the possibility of a new live-action series, and forced fans to settle for a cartoon, there was talk of a feature film for years. Events began to snowball by the mid-seventies, and Trekkers (never call them Trekkies!) got their big screen treat when Star Trek—The Motion Picture zoomed into cinemas in 1979. Well, maybe “zoomed” is not the right verb. Perhaps “floated in slow-mo” is more appropriate for Robert Wise’s notoriously inert epic. Disappointment followed.

Farewell, Sid Haig

The stars may get the asses in the theater seats, but it's often the weird character actors and actresses who make watching movies fun. Few character actors were weirder or more fun to watch than Sid Haig. 

After starting his entertainment career drumming with The T-Birds ("Full House", a tune that suggests Angelo Badalamenti found more than a little inspiration from it when he wrote the opening jitterbug for Mulholland Dr.), Haig settled into a long-run as a small and big screen fixture, and he has a special place in we Psychobabblers' hearts for his multitudinous roles in culty and horrory TV and films. The cat found a place in Batman as one of the few henchmen almost as colorful as the villain for whom he henched (the hilarious King Tut), Star Trek, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., the amazing Spider Baby, C.C. & Company, THX 1138, The Big Doll House, Coffy, The Six Million Dollar Man, Electra Woman and Dyna Girl, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, Jason of Star Command (in which he starred as Jason's arch nemesis Dragos), Fantasy Island, Jackie Brown, a bunch of Rob Zombie movies, and well over 130 other things. 

While he was known for his over-the-top strangeness in these parts, Haig always came off as gracious, kind, and humble when discussing his lengthy career. Sadly, Sid Haig died of a lung infection this past Saturday. He was 80.

Review: 'Retro Fan' Magazine

The very idea of starting a magazine so deep into the digital age is totally retro, so it is appropriate that you can read TwoMorrow Publishing’s Retro Fan without the aid of any electronic device. Reading the quarterly magazine on a kindle would spoil the feeling, and this thing is all about the feeling. Maximum nostalgia is editor Michael Eury’s (author of the excellent Hero A-Go-Go) battle cry as he loads his pages with stories of the TV shows, comics, and toys that defined our mid-twentieth-century childhoods. Think of it as Dynamite for the adults who read Dynamite when they were kids. 

Issue #1 includes Eury’s interview with Lou “The Incredible Hulk” Ferrigno transcribed from a Comic Con appearance, and another with Betty Lynn of The Andy Griffith Show, as well as deep looks at Filmation’s Star Trek cartoon, Mego’s line of Stretch Armstrong rip-offs, and The Phantom. These pieces are all collected in a colorful, glossy package intended to stimulate the nostalgia glands, yet there is also intelligence behind these looks at the trivialities of our youth. Eury’s pieces exude a palpable yearning for a less troubled time in our lives without pretending that the era surrounding our childhoods didn’t have its own troubling baggage (though, as a rebuke to one of that era’s biggest problems, it would have been nice to have some female voices on Retro Fan’s currently all-male writing staff).

Some of the articles are a bit rambling (Ernesto Farenio’s memoire “I Met the Wolf Man”), but even when these pieces are not supremely informative, they always stoke that nostalgic feeling. I never watched The Andy Griffith Show, so I personally wasn’t riveted by the series of pieces on that series, but anyone who spent their childhood whistling down at the waterhole surely will. I never was a fan of The Phantom either, but Martin Pasko’s piece on the pioneer superhero who just can’t seem to endure was fascinating in that it filled valuable details into the more general topic of superhero history. And with a cover depicting Elvira, the Groovie Goolies, and Ben Cooper Halloween costumes, the upcoming autumn issue of Retro Fan looks like a can’t-miss item.

Review: 'Star Trek: The Book of Lists'

Star Trek was one of the most thoughtful American shows from a pre-Golden Age period when most series didn’t share a single brain between them (I’m looking at you, Gilligan and Jeannie). Nevertheless, you shouldn’t really expect great thoughtfulness from a book with a title like Star Trek: The Book of Lists. Even as far as a book of 100 lists about topics such as “Kirk’s Most Memorable Kisses” and all the times Shatner appeared on screen shirtless goes, Chip Carter’s Book of Lists is pretty simple-minded. Commentary is minimal, and in some cases, non existent, as lists of characters who appeared in mirror universes and time travel episodes consist of nothing but names and titles.

But the nice thing about Star Trek is that it was thoughtful and fun, and while Star Trek: Book of Lists doesn’t try to deliver thoughtfulness, it does a fairly good job of bringing the fun. Lists of props and costumes that were remade and reused from episode to episode, 21^st century devices and technology Star Trek predicted, merchandise, and actors and actresses who appeared on both Star Trek and Batman are a kick. Since the design is image heavy, graphically appealing run downs of the series’ various uniforms and most outré fashions, as well as side by side comparisons of how various aliens were depicted across various Star Trek incarnations, are groovy too. Some of this stuff is even informative. I hadn’t realized the Shari “Lambchop’s Mom” Lewis co-wrote the “Lights of Zetar” episode or that none other than MLK was a Trekkie.

There are some questionable inclusions too, though, as “Assignment: Earth” guest star Teri Garr is erroneously credited as a star of High Anxiety and Ronald Reagan is listed among famous Star Trek fans simply because he once screened The Search for Spock at the White House (he didn’t even like it). However, a photo of the U.S.’s last functional president, Barack Obama, snuggling with Nichelle Nichols and flashing the Vulcan salute is a geeky gas, and that’s really the kind of thing you should be hoping for from a book like Star Trek: The Book of Lists.

Farewell, Miguel Ferrer

Sad news today. Miguel Ferrer, the gruff actor beloved here at Psychobabble for his unforgettable turn as Special Agent Albert Rosenfield on Twin Peaks and in the feature film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me, has died of cancer at the age of 61. Ferrer had quite a resume. As well as being the show-biz offspring of Rosemary Clooney and José Ferrer (who also worked with David Lynch in Dune), he was a drummer who played on Keith Moon's cuckoo solo album Two Sides of the Moon, and of course, an actor. Throughout his very prolific career he appeared in such cool items as the underrated Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, the genuine cult classic Robocop, and Tales from the Crypt. In a sad coincidence, he also ran lines with Carrie Fisher when she was gearing up to audition for Star Wars. However, it was his embodiment of the  cynical special agent who also professes to live in the footsteps of Gandhi and King that may have won him the most fans. As Rosenfield, Ferrer was off-puttingly hilarious, and his statement of purpose to Sheriff Truman was one of the most brilliant scenes in a show with now shortage of them. Fortunately, we'll get to see him in the role one more time this May. 

I love you Sheriff Truman. Love you Agent Rosenfield, too.

31 TV Shows for 31 Days of Halloween Season: Day 7

Series: Star Trek

Episode: “Catspaw”, in which Kirk, Spock, and Bones visit a sort of haunted house planet where Scotty and Sulu have gone missing. Robert Bloch is one of the biggies of horror, but his script is basically a muddled excuse to pitch a bunch of spooky nuggets at the viewer. There are three hideous floating witch heads, a giant black cat, a misty old Gothic castle, dungeons, skeletons, curses, a sorceress and sorcerer, mist, and lots of references to Halloween (the episode aired just a few days before October 31, 1967). The denouement, which involves a couple of tiny space lobsters, wins points for total weirdness. Spock’s blasé reaction to those terrifying witch heads is comedy gold. So is Chekov’s wig.

366 Days at the Drive-In: Day 324

The Date: August 19

The Movie: Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)

What Is It?: The second Star Trek movie is often sited as the first good one, but it’s really the only one worth a damn. While the first one tried to be 2001, the second strives more for Star Wars and succeeds incredibly well by continuing the original series’ “Space Seed” episode in which Ricardo Montalban’s Khan last appeared. And, yes, those are Ricardo’s real muscles. The finale must have been a real shocker for long-time Trekkies.

Why Today?: On this day in 1921, Gene Rodenberry is born.

Review: 'The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry'

One of the interesting things about Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek was that there were often several things going on at once. It could be a bit campy and a bit intellectual, a bit solemn and a bit adventurous, a bit profound and a bit overly simplistic, a bit progressive and a bit stuck in outdated ideas about gender. Lance Parkin’s The Impossible Has Happened: The Life and Work of Gene Roddenberry has several things going on at once too. It’s a bit of a biography of the series’ creator, a bit of a history of the show, a bit of a making-of account, and a bit of a cultural analysis of the series’ themes and point of view.

Review: 'Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics-The Complete Series Volume One: 1969-1970'

In the classic “Mirror, Mirror” episode of “Star Trek”, Captain Kirk, Uhura, Scotty, and Bones get zapped onto a parallel-universe Enterprise where Spock is a sadistic monster with a Van Dyke beard, Chekov attempts to assassinate Kirk, and Sulu is a horny creep with a weird scar and comb-over. OK, the characters who appeared in the “Star Trek” comic strip that ran in UK magazines from 1969-1973 weren’t as far-removed from their better-known counterparts as the “Mirror, Mirror” villains were, but they definitely weren’t TV’s Kirk, Spock, Sulu, etc. Spock was a much more bellicose dude than the logical and peaceful chap on CBS’s series. Kirk was sometimes called “Kurt.” In early strips, Uhura and Sulu tend to get sidelined in favor of a Red Shirt named Bailey who’d only appeared in one episode of the TV series. That series had its share of nutty episodes, but they didn’t suck nitrous oxide the way stories in the UK comics did. A typical tale finds Kirk getting imprisoned in a zoo by a giant mantis before playing soccer on The Planet of the Apes.

The UK “Star Trek” strips were kind of like Marvel’s Star Wars comics, which rocketed away from the canon in similar fashion, and like those crazy Star Wars books, the “Star Trek” strips are fun because they are so goofy, so wrong. They are also painted beautifully with the characters regularly resembling their screen incarnations very closely, which was rarely true of Marvel’s Star Wars.

IDW gathers nearly 90 strips in Star Trek: The Classic UK Comics-The Complete Series Volume One: 1969-1970. IDW’s great strength has always been its fidelity to the original comics it reprints, and I’ve often praised the publisher’s grainy, comic-like paper stock and refusal to recolor. However, fidelity is the undoing of half of The Classic UK Comics Volume One. These comics were originally published as two-page spreads in various magazines, and a magazine is much easier to spread out than a hardcover book. Because IDW copies that magazine format so closely, a lot of image and text gets lost in the crease. This problem evaporates half way through the book when a variation in the original layout appears. Unfortunately, this is also when original artist Harry F. Lindfield disappears, and with it goes the flawless likenesses of the characters. Fortunately, the parallel-universe shenanigans are still goofy fun to read, which will hopefully continue to be the case when IDW publishes volume two.