star trek

Chris Knight's avatar

A few weeks ago it occurred to me why this country is presently so screwed-up financially:

From top to bottom, we have been trying to hack it on a Star Trek economy… without the requisite Star Trek technology needed to make it work.

Gene Roddenberry had funny ideas about money in his Star Trek universe. Namely, that the United Federation of Planets, including Earth, didn’t use it. It was an ideal socialist state that based its economy on the pursuit of excellence, for the betterment of self and society. Remember how Kirk and Spock had to sell the spectacles in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home ‘cuz they were cash-strapped in San Francisco circa 1986? And then later in the same movie, Kirk admitted to Gillian that they didn’t have money in his own time.

The concept got fleshed-out a bit more (interestingly after Roddenberry’s passing in 1991): the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

In 1991, I saw the teaser for Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, with narration by Christopher Plummer (who would turn up in the film as the villainous General Chang). To this day it remains, for me anyway, the single greatest bit of promo for a Star Trek movie. And it perfectly encapsulates everything that Star Trek is supposed to be about when the work is at its finest.

Fast-forward to this past Friday, when I went to see Cloverfield – which was created by J.J. Abrams – on opening day. And Paramount wisely decided to attach a teaser for the upcoming Abrams-directed Star Trek movie.

It’s not quite as epic as the Star Trek VI teaser… but I’ll be darned if I didn’t say that this thing gave me shivers while watching it.

If you want to see it (without resorting to watching a crappo-quality bootleg) the ...

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Chris Knight's avatar

It’s 2:53 a.m. in the morning and I’m up making tea and working on a new website and some other stuff at this way late hour. Thought I’d make a post to chronicle the past few days developments…

Ever since Friday night a wazoo-load of e-mails and phone calls have been coming in from good folks who caught my school board commercial on E! Television’s The Soup. I’m still a bit overwhelmed by the attention the ad seems to have gained lately, now over a year since it ran (for only a week and a half on WGSR Star 39 in Reidsville). One neat thing that has happened because of it is that I’ve been hearing from a lot of people that I’ve somehow lost contact with over the years. I honestly had no idea that The Soup was so popular! I’d heard of it before but until now ...

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Remember the classic episode “A Piece of the Action” from the original Star Trek TV show? That was the one where Kirk and Spock beam down to the alien planet that had its entire culture based on 1920s Chicago mob wars. What happened was another Federation ship had come years earlier and accidentally left a book about the Chicago mobs behind and the aliens on this planet, being curious and innovative, re-engineered their world around what they learned from that book. It was a great episode with a lot of humor (and not entirely unplausible when you think about it).

Anyway, someone has taken the “A Piece of the Action” episode and turned it into a parody of The Sopranos intro! It’s also got a “Scientology” spoof commercial at the end. I think it’s one of the most hilarious things that I’ve ever seen on YouTube! Check out “The Spockranos”…...

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