Star Trek

[Buster's Uncle]

HOLY CRAP!  For the VERY FIRST TIME since the first episode of Voyager, someone FINALLY realized that a holographic person is a computer program with an exotic interface.  --Like maybe they'd have backups of the file stored? Maybe?

[Buster's Uncle]

Actually watching the credits.

Not Olivia Munn.  -There goes the special effects Oscar I was going to nominate Renegades for, for her cleavage.

Concluding remarks to follow shortly...

[Buster's Uncle]

Probably the Chekov's best piece ever.

This does not suck as much as I'd heard - and expected, given the weary off-model 'dark' premise.  It IS fundamentally flawed, and thus, a surprise and delight when they did anything right, which, as I've noticed is not a one-sentence list.

Their website is now saying "web series", so I guess we may get more...  Put the Khan girl out an airlock and put Matt Sykes in command of a better-looking ship, and they've really, truly, got something, if you can get past what they've done to Ichib.  If they actually finish more episodes, I'm definitely going to post and watch (w/ low expectations, mind)...

[Buster's Uncle]

STAR TREK: RENEGADES – Not So Rebellious
Movie Review, Movies, Reviews, TV, Web Series
scifi4me.com
August 7, 2015 , by Angie Fiedler Sutton   






Star Trek: Renegades starts off right in the middle of the story. The only problem for me is that the last (non-Abrams’ universe) Star Trek I really paid attention to was Enterprise. That means I got a little lost as to what’s going on, and it feels like a sequel to a film I never saw.

The basic plot is described as The Dirty Dozen in a Trek universe. Set ten years after Voyager‘s return, we start out with the news that dilithium crystals are disappearing. On top of that, there is some sort of device that’s causing space and time to fold around planets, isolating them. Suspecting a conspiracy that may involve the Federation, Admiral Pavel Chekov (Walter Koenig) turns to the current head of the newly reorganized Section 31, Commander Tuvok (Tim Russ). He, in turn, recruits Lexxa Singh (Adrienne Wilkinson) and her crew of people on the run from the Federation for various reasons.

As stated in the prior article, Renegades is a television pilot geared for potential online purposes that was funded via crowdfunding sites Kickstarter and Indiegogo. And while the intentions are good, the actual execution of it doesn’t quite work. The special effects (both visual and makeup) are what you expect from a low budget, with fairly obvious computer graphics filling out the backgrounds and aliens that have so much makeup that you can’t see mouths move when they talk. The acting, while well intentioned, tends to go for melodrama as opposed to drama much of the time. There are too many characters, which means there are too many storylines, and both get sacrificed all too often for the sake of the action. It’s not bad, but it comes across like a low production film that just happened to be able to snag some well-known actors into it. It could be so much better.

Wilkinson’s character is the stereotype of the ‘strong female character’, which boils down to a female character that acts like a man, with rape threats being part of her history and her kicking ass and taking names. The bad guy is a walking, talking stereotype that doesn’t really go beyond ‘I want to be bad’. There’s a lesbian kiss, true – which LGBT representation is something that’s been danced around but never quite got in the onscreen Trek universe – but it’s more for the sake of titillation than representation. The action scenes seem disjointed, and since it is a pilot, there are a lot of loose ends.

One of the quotes from the production is “always be true to yourself, and the rest will follow.” Star Trek is recognized for being a ground-breaking franchise in terms of civil rights for minorities. The basic plot and characters have a lot of potential. However, it’s another attempt to make Trek gritty a la Firefly or the rebooted Battlestar Galactica, and it doesn’t quite work. The end product doesn’t feel like Trek.

Since it’s a pilot, I can only hope that if it goes to series, it will learn and grow. Star Trek: Renegades may be trying to go where no other series has gone before, but it has light years to get there. For more information about the production, visit the Star Trek: Renegades website.

Star Trek: Renegades Official Trailer

http://scifi4me.com/2015/08/07/star-trek-renegades-not-so-rebellious/

[Valka]

I bristle a little sometimes at the assumption that you have to explain all this to me like I don't know my Trek.  I usually let it pass, but you may have noticed that I'm a little testy of late - seems like a lot of that going around, making me feel a little defensive.

I'm not saying you don't know your Trek, but you forgot this particular point about Trek (McCoy's age in Encounter at Farpoint). I don't quibble about decimal points, but you were off by a significant number of years about something that was very definitely stated on-screen, and that led to a classic McCoy grouch-and-grumble about Vulcans.

I don't claim to have a perfect memory about Star Trek, and the fact is that I don't own any Trek DVDs, don't subscribe to the Space Channel that shows some of the series, the only Trek series that's currently available on Netflix Canada is TNG and Canadians don't have access to Hulu or cbs.com to see the rest of it, and there's a lot I never paid attention to anyway.

One of my daily hangouts is TrekBBS, and the people there rattle off facts and figures and episode titles that I either never knew or never bothered to pay attention to in the first place... about the non-TOS series. I can name more DS9 novels than episode titles, because it just wasn't important enough to bother remembering.

But the Encounter at Farpoint thing really stuck with me, partly because of the circumstances when I first saw it. That episode premiered on the same day that our local SCA group held our annual Harvest Feast & Champion's Tournament. It was an extra-special one, since the King and Queen of An Tir were in attendance (very unusual for a small, out of the way shire like Bitter End). And after the feast was over, everyone who wasn't immediately heading back to Edmonton, Calgary, Camrose, etc. went over to the autocrat's house because she had recorded Encounter at Farpoint. So there's 2-3 dozen people, most still in medieval costume, gathered around the TV, watching the premiere of Star Trek: The Next Generation. And we were happy to see DeForest Kelley, since the presence of Dr. McCoy told us that this really was intended to be a true sequel to TOS, not a replacement.

They took Joanna out of Way to Eden from a wrong-headed wish to not make McCoy that much older - and Dorothy Fontana took her name off the script, what with the heart ripped out of Joanna to make a worse-than-usual episode.  But I have eyes, and no way was McCoy in his thirties; that's wrong for the character anyway, he being a cranky old man in a cranky middle-aged man's body.

I agree with you about McCoy in the TV series. He was obviously older than Kirk, the actor was older than Shatner, and I'd have loved to have seen Joanna. At least some of the novels have addressed her character.

Take the 's' out of https when you paste a URL - dunno why, but then it'll embed. The 's' is something to do with web security.

Thanks!

! No longer available

The quality is crap, but his age is clearly stated.

[Buster's Uncle]

First season TNG - so excruciatingly bad.


So anyway - considering how wrong-headed the premise is -there's nothing good about section 31, nothing- and how awful everything about Livia Khan is -Ricardo Montalban used up everything worth doing with augments forever, apparently, and the actress is just terrible- Renegades was not as bad as it could have been, and there was some craft in the execution when you look at it as a first episode.

[Buster's Uncle]

Fans of real Trek may want to stop 40 seconds in, depending on your opinion of the movies.

STAR TREK IN CONCERT - in VIENNA 2013 ORIGINAL HD!

The world would be less interesting if it didn't have people who are wrong in it.

[Valka]

Hey, of all the spinoffs, the Voyager theme is my favorite. I usually hum it right along with the TV/computer. This orchestra didn't do it justice, though. It was too fast, and they cut part of it out.

Everything from about 3:50 onward could have gone, though, since that's the nuTrek crap.

[Buster's Uncle]

  You know what I love best about the 'Star Trek': Lost in Space theme?  It's incredibly easy to improvise lyrics to as it plays - I actually broke off two-thirds of the way through, saying "Take it," [Mylochka] and she was able to soldier out a credible finish, though very surprised and unprepared.

I also liked that it wasn't the DS9 theme, which sounded like someone wrote a great orchestration of the backing, but had the score snatched away before (s)he got to putting down the melody.  Seriously; it's almost great, but sounds utterly unfinished.

-And of course, the Enterprise theme was the very worst idea in a show almost entirely made of bad ideas.  It's one of the most wrong-headed and off-model things of everything in the history of ever.

[Valka]

I don't actually remember what the DS9 theme sounds like. It's been a really long time since I last saw that show, since it's not part of the Space Channel lineup (and it's been ages since I last regularly watched that, since it's an extra expense with my current setup).

As for the TNG theme... why didn't they get something original, instead of just ripping off the first movie?

[Buster's Uncle]

Star Trek Deep Space Nine Theme

Not bad, but unfinished...



As for everything about TNG ... why didn't they get something original, instead of just ripping off the first movie?

Riker was Decker and Troi was Illia - Worf was Chekov, down to growing up in Russia.  Yar was the only new character. 

[Buster's Uncle]

Star trek openings - all series

(I modify the post once made, and copy/paste the real vid title in place of the "No longer available", is how I do that workaround.)

[Buster's Uncle]

As long as I have the tab open and YouTube automatically loads some vid when I don't interrupt first...  This is all movies, thus all inferior, but what the heck.

Star Trek Soundtracks [HQ]

"Star Trek Der Film" is now officially my favorite title translation ever - although I'm sure the Japanese version couldn't help but amuse...

[Valka]

Not bad, but unfinished...

What a repetitious mess. Not in the least bit inspiring, which likely is the reason I forgot it.

I make an effort to remember good, inspiring music. I once went without TV or radio for over two months, in an effort to mentally record the rock opera Jesus Christ Superstar (I used to work in musical theatre, and we did JCS in the spring of 1981). That was the only music I allowed myself to listen to - our version, not the movie soundtrack - and it paid off. While I've forgotten some of the the words over the years, all I need is the written lyrics in front of me to mentally replay every sound in that production. I remember the precise voices of the singers, the orchestration, and it's one of those things in my "mental tape recorder" that are very precious.

[Buster's Uncle]

Mylochka says that I have an excellent memory for music.  -I have a bunch of scores from old-standard musicals I was in nearly 40 years ago stored in my bean, though, like you say, getting very weak on the lyrics.

Was in a production of JCS in 1987 as a disciple.  I used to be able to do Mary's songs in a very credible soprano, before renfairs ruined my falsetto.  I LOVE THAT SCORE.  (The book doesn't display a great grasp of Jesus, but it's really a story about Lazarus, anyway.)