• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

News Bill and Ted Face the Music Officially Announced

Gov Kodos said:
Yeah, the only remotely camp moment of Galaxy Quest was Rickman still wearing the Dr Lazerus headpiece while at home.
Click to expand...

The clips we saw of the in-universe Galaxy Quest TV series were definitely campy, but that was to set up the cast members' embarrassment and disdain toward the show, an opinion they changed due to the movie's events.


Awesome Possum said:
That’s exactly what camp means. It’s about loving something not despite its lack of quality, but because of it.
Click to expand...

I suppose it can be done that way, but that's not its intrinsic definition. Camp is something that makes fun of its own characters and situations, particularly when the characters themselves are not in on the joke. But the whole point of Galaxy Quest is to take something we're used to making fun of and show us, and the film's own characters, that it's actually valid and worth believing in. Its endpoint is sincerity, and that's not true of camp.
 
Christopher said:
The clips we saw of the in-universe Galaxy Quest TV series were definitely campy, but that was to set up the cast members' embarrassment and disdain toward the show, an opinion they changed due to the movie's events.




I suppose it can be done that way, but that's not its intrinsic definition. Camp is something that makes fun of its own characters and situations, particularly when the characters themselves are not in on the joke. But the whole point of Galaxy Quest is to take something we're used to making fun of and show us, and the film's own characters, that it's actually valid and worth believing in. Its endpoint is sincerity, and that's not true of camp.
Click to expand...
You have no idea of what you’re talking about.
 
Christopher said:
The clips we saw of the in-universe Galaxy Quest TV series were definitely campy, but that was to set up the cast members' embarrassment and disdain toward the show, an opinion they changed due to the movie's events.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say those episode clips were campy any more than Star Trek clips would be. The cast embarrassment is based in their careers having been stymied by typecasting in the wake of the show as Rickman expresses at the convention about having been an actor once. The whole movie is a perfect send up of Star Trek and its stars.
 
Gov Kodos said:
I wouldn't say those episode clips were campy any more than Star Trek clips would be.
Click to expand...

Oh, their cheesiness was definitely more exaggerated than that -- e.g. the space-monster effects where you could see the wires, more Irwin Allen than Star Trek but chintzier even than that. That's what I mean by camp -- exaggerating the badness or absurdity of something in order to poke fun at it.


The whole movie is a perfect send up of Star Trek and its stars.
Click to expand...

People always focus on that and ignore all the other '60s and '70s SFTV it homages. The in-universe show is startlingly similar to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century season 2 -- a Trek-like spaceship show from c. 1980 with a macho lead played by a spotlight-hogging actor, his alien-warrior sidekick who's the last of an extinct race and has a skullcap-based makeup, and an eye-candy female lead with an ill-defined shipboard role. Plus Laredo the boy-genius navigator resembles Gary Coleman's two-time guest character in Buck season 1, as well as evoking Lost in Space's Will Robinson. I mentioned the Irwin Allen-style FX cheese, and there are also a couple of resonances with Space: 1999 -- Alexander Dane, the distinguished British actor embarrassed by his sci-fi role, resembles Barry Morse more than Leonard Nimoy, and Tawny repeating the computer's reports resembles the job of 1999's Kano (although at least he was reading from printout tapes). Plus there were references to things common to numerous works of vintage TV and film, like the last-second countdown, the hall of arbitrary deathtraps, and the yellowface casting of Tech Sergeant Chen. Those last two are not things that Trek did.
 
Christopher said:
Oh, their cheesiness was definitely more exaggerated than that -- e.g. the space-monster effects where you could see the wires, more Irwin Allen than Star Trek but chintzier even than that. That's what I mean by camp -- exaggerating the badness or absurdity of something in order to poke fun at it.




People always focus on that and ignore all the other '60s and '70s SFTV it homages. The in-universe show is startlingly similar to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century season 2 -- a Trek-like spaceship show from c. 1980 with a macho lead played by a spotlight-hogging actor, his alien-warrior sidekick who's the last of an extinct race and has a skullcap-based makeup, and an eye-candy female lead with an ill-defined shipboard role. Plus Laredo the boy-genius navigator resembles Gary Coleman's two-time guest character in Buck season 1, as well as evoking Lost in Space's Will Robinson. I mentioned the Irwin Allen-style FX cheese, and there are also a couple of resonances with Space: 1999 -- Alexander Dane, the distinguished British actor embarrassed by his sci-fi role, resembles Barry Morse more than Leonard Nimoy, and Tawny repeating the computer's reports resembles the job of 1999's Kano (although at least he was reading from printout tapes). Plus there were references to things common to numerous works of vintage TV and film, like the last-second countdown, the hall of arbitrary deathtraps, and the yellowface casting of Tech Sergeant Chen. Those last two are not things that Trek did.
Click to expand...
Its always been a homage of Star Trek. Wiki cites many examples and more can easily be made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest#Relation_to_Star_Trek

Even the actors happily acknowledge the homage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galaxy_Quest#Reaction_from_Star_Trek_actors
 
Gov Kodos said:
Its always been a homage of Star Trek.
Click to expand...

Yes, of course it was. That's the part that's obvious and well-known already, so I don't need to talk about it. What I'm saying it that it was an homage to other things as well as Trek, not instead of it. Any good parody references multiple things, not just one. Galaxy Quest is a fun Trek homage, yes, of course, but it's also an homage to most of the other cheesy sci-fi shows I grew up watching as a kid. Most people today have forgotten those shows, so they don't recognize that they're also part of what's being parodied.
 
If you must divert to a discussion of camp, this seems more useful than Homer Simpson: https://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Sontag-NotesOnCamp-1964.html

Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy. Like most philosophy it can seem like most time is spent arguing over definitions. And like many of Plato's dialogues the discussion can end unresolved. But whatever consensus might emerge in the academic journals, people will either not know the academic definition, or misunderstand it, or forget it if they did, or misuse the term for rhetorical advantage. Camp, cheese, chintz, kitsch, schmaltz, these are not so much facts as feelings. Trying to attribute a definitive meaning to them is like trying to claim "boring" is an intrinsic attribute, a fact.

In practice, as near as I can tell, "camp" is often used as a synonym for "melodramatic" when the user seems to equate "melodramatic" to "stagy" or "hammy." Musicals are melodramatic (literally, melo, as in melody, melo-drama.) Many, many people viscerally reject musicals as a genre. (I've even seen someone write musicals are too campy.) John Waters is not enlightening on the role of insincerity, either on the part of the creator or the audience. The cartoon seems to advert to authenticity as a criterion. But, to state the obvious, camp is associated with gay. Camp may even be said to have one meaning as a synonym for "drag." When a drag diva does a musical performance, what is the role of the artifice, a man dressed as a woman, have in the aesthetic experience?
 
Christopher said:
Not making a value judgment, just clarifying what "camp" refers to. A lot of people seem to use the word for things it doesn't fit.
Click to expand...

And this is where the thread went sideways. Nothing good ever comes from a thread that becomes consumed with semantics.

BTW, as far as the in-universe Galaxy Quest clips, I think the reason you can see parallels with Buck Rogers is that because of the year the film came out they had to place the show no further back than the early 80s and so they adopted that aesthetic, even though storywise they were really spoofing on where the TOS actors were in their careers in the mid 70s before PhaseII/TMP.

It would have been interesting had the movie itself been a period-piece in which case the original show would have looked more like TOS but then it would have been that much more on-the-nose. So shifting the timeline forward had the effect of making it a little less derivative as well as grounding it in the (then) present with internet, etc....
 
Last edited:
Awesome, the stuff with Death was one of the best parts of the first two.
 
I didn't realize we were going to be meeting their daughters.
I'm not familiar with either of the actresses.
 
JD on May 29, 2018...

JD said:
I wonder who they'll get to play their daughters? I'm assuming the girls from the first two movies are their mothers, so I wonder if we'll see them again too? I just checked and they were played by different actresses in each movie, so I don't know how they'd want to handle bringing them back.
Click to expand...
JD today...
JD said:
I didn't realize we were going to be meeting their daughters.
I'm not familiar with either of the actresses.
Click to expand...

;)

I just love that Bill named his daughter after Ted and Ted name his daughter after Bill. I wonder if they're going to have similar personalities or if they'll take after their mothers? :lol:
 
So probably Billie and Thea are the "Little Bill" and "Little Ted" we saw as babies at the end of Bogus Journey. The actresses are both approximately the right age, within a few years.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top