An email worm and virus, hgh.exe it looks like, destroyed my computer. Fortunately I have an external hard drive unit I've been using for Polaris, so I hit Best Buy last evening, picked up a faster and cheaper machine with more drive space (it's amazing how everything doubles or better every year or so) and have reconstructed most of my data files on the new machine. Cost me a day's delay.
I suggest reformatting and reinstalling your old machine and use it as a backup machine to copy important stuff to, I've done so for many years already and it has saved me a lot of time and agravation at times.
Yeah, the new machine's having intermittent trouble connecting with the web, though. Hope that'll be worked out shortly.
Given that's where high.exe came from in the first place, maybe that's a good thing! What are you using for anti-virus software? Back in my Windows days, I was very fond of Eset Nod.
I don't know who designed the old Star Trek font, but for what it's worth, the other orthographic change (besides the "E") that took place starting with the second season is the letter "H:" in the first season font, the horizontal crossbar on the "H" was perfectly horizontal, but starting with the second season, the crossbar was slightly diagonal--like the center crossbar on the letter "A." (The old-syle "H" is still retained in William Shatner's credit through all three seasons, however.)
The deal with the "H" sounds like the same as the "E" - those opening credits that existed as art from the first season were left alone, but anything new added included the change.
Fun stuff here; it's great seeing the Phase II Enterprise in action! Not to divert focus from Dennis' great rendering, but if I might suggest, this HAS to be the Phase II theme music: [yt]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h1QRk-dLjUs[/yt] Maybe from 0:38 to 1:13 or so... Yeah, it's the TMP theme but it would so give that late-'70s Dallas (or dare I say Space: 1999?) vibe. If you figure Phase II was going to be relatively low-budget with a lot of then-new video effects, they might have gone with a theme like this. Someone else already put this onto the end credits of TMP, but it might work even better here!
*looks* then keeps on dancing and calls for a Female EMH for sojourner ^__^ no offence but that barfing emote made me lol ^__^
It's definitely got that Mike Post & Pete Carpenter vibe going for it. Maybe if Tom Selleck had been cast as Decker and David Hasselhoff as Xon.
Oh... Man... That is SO freaking awesome!!! Too much disco-goodness! That would have totally been a good theme for a 1970's-era Trek... I'd love to find an .mp3 of this music.
Remember the idea was to envision what TPTB might have done had the show gone on the air as planned in February 1978. To do that you have to set aside 30+ years of tastes, fashions, and sensibilities and place yourself in the time. Disco was still very much in full swing, and its influences permeated practically every aspect of pop culture. Even the "23rd century" designs for Phase II were heavily influenced by the styles and designs of the day; ever seen Mike Minor's concept art for the PII bridge (with Kirk basically sitting in a white "capsule" chair straight out of the decade), rec room, and the Starfleet casual attire that was actually produced (and ultimately ended up in the PII fan production)? Also, the series had to appeal to more than just hardcore Trek fans, so it follows that the creators might take theme music cues from other dramatic shows of the day (e.g. the aforementioned Dallas). And painsticks didn't exist back then either! Without going into too much detail (and not to get too far off-topic), with the 2-hour pilot initially budgeted at approximately $3 million (certainly a lot of money for the day), that had to go a long way: 1. All of the development costs for prior aborted Trek projects (ala TMP) -- estimated at about $500,000 2. Elaborate standing sets that were designed to be durable enough for a multiple-year series run 3. Multiple pay-or-play actor salary committments (with a pretty fair chunk undoubtedly going to Shatner) Had the series gone to production, costs would have been kept in check (whether intentionally or otherwise) through: 1. Extensive use of Doug Trumbull's Magicam video-compositing process to (rather convincingly really) insert actors into miniature environments, drastically cutting set construction and location filming costs (interesting to note that this would have doomed PII to standard definition video only like TNG et al today, although this would not have been anticipated in 1977 like it could have been in 1987, but I digress) 2. No salary for Nimoy (and I firmly believe his planned non-participation in PII was all about money or lack thereof -- another discussion entirely, but notice how fast he jumped aboard once Paramount settled his lawsuit and PII transformed into a big-budget theatrical release? I Am Not Spock indeed!) 3. The Decker character, which was designed to either force Shatner to take a pay cut or be replaced with a less expensive actor 4. Admittedly dated miniature construction and non-motion control VFX techniques (that by all accounts had to be drastically upgraded for TMP) 5. Extensive use of stock footage (this WAS Star Trek after all) So much like Battlestar Galactica at the time, where the budget was heavily front-loaded to create elaborate sets and to rent John Dykstra to create a stock library of visual effects, the PII post-pilot per-episode budget would probably have been much closer to, say, Six Million Dollar Man. Interestingly both Galactica and PII had also planned to recoup their upfront costs via domestic and/or international theatrical releases. I guess the point is that although Star Wars had hit, at the time the suits were not yet convinced that its success could be duplicated. They were persuaded by CE3K, but it is unlikely that even at that point Paramount was of a mind to spend unlimited cash on PII (which they ended up doing with TMP of course thanks to problematic management but that's another story).
There was a great deal made, for publicity purposes, of the seven million dollar budget for the first seven hours of Battlestar Galactica - "a million dollars an hour!"