Yep. I love me a good Harlan video and interview, but he's so wrong about CE3K that it's embarrassing.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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I wish SNW was in a different timeline to get the TOS reboot with the present cast but McCoy would have to take a backseat to M'Benga. Sulu can replace Mitchell and Chekov, not sure where he would fit in.
Rocketeer creator Dave Stevens was born in 1955. So he was hardly making reference to anything from his youth by creating a comic book feature set in 1938.
That was the thrust of Ellison's introduction, that Stevens had SO immersed himself in the time period of the 1930s that it rang true to Ellison, who actually lived through that period as a kid. Ellison got a first hand example of this when he sat down to write the intro while Stevens was visiting him, and correctly identified the obscure 1930s organist Jesse Crawford from just the opening two notes of one of his pieces.
Ellison was arguing that that was the true essence of homage in The Rocketeer. You didn't have to know that the two guys after the rocket pack were Monk and Ham from the Doc Savage pulps. You didn't have to know that Cliff Secord's girlfriend Betty was a dead ringer for 1950s glamor model Bettie Page. And you didn't have to know anything about the history of aviation to appreciate how cool Cliff's Gee Bee racer looked on the pages. If you DID know that stuff, great, but it wasn't essential to enjoying The Rocketeer. It was enough that Stevens knew & cared enough to put those references into the strip.
Just watched the whole clip, and I don't think Ellison is saying anything heinous there. He didn't like CEOT3K, and he's very articulate in explaining exactly how and why. But I guess I don't consider that movie as some untouchable classic.
I find it more objectionable that the host only paid attention to Ellison for eight minutes, leaving his other guest to twist in the wind. Even if Laraine Newman was featured in the previous segment, reintroduce her when you come back from your commercial break. That's Hosting 101.
I loved how upfront Ellison was about his distaste of being so associated with Star Trek, though.
Why is that surprising? Ellison and JMS were friends. You do favors for your friends.
The 1920s and 1930s (and 1940s) would disagree.
While I tend to take Ellison’s side in a lot of disputes, yeah, probably: I’ve seen “Soldier”, and The Terminator is in no way a copy of it, or even particularly similar.
Honestly, it's Cameron's own fault that the studio settled that lawsuit. Cameron was stupid enough to give a quote to Starlog practically bragging that he ripped off a couple of episodes of The Outer Limits for The Terminator, and that was the smoking gun that Ellison's lawyers needed.
lol
Which is weird since, at least in the case of “Soldier”, it doesn’t appear to be true. I’ve seen Ellison saying that Cameron said it; is there an actual Cameron quote cited somewhere?
True. The last time I saw him talk, he was telling everyone to read (the first) League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I've been an Alan Moore fan for ages, but I hadn't heard about that at the time, and basically ran out to get it ASAP.
Arguable. It's certainly not all or nothing, and I'd hesitate to even call it mostly something in terms of respecting and basing things on real science.
Star Trek has always been grounded in getting notes from advisors—going back to Kellam de Forest* and as recent as Erin Macdonald and Mohamed Noor—and then choosing when and how and even if to apply those notes.
I'm sure there have been some stories dismissed for being too "out there" by whoever was in charge at the moment, but generally speaking it hasn't stopped them from doing things like having humans trained to use mental powers ("Charlie X"), a teenager developing the ability to stop time with his brain ("Journey's End"), a transporter making two people out of the mass of one person ("Second Chances"), a transporter doing the same thing but making one "good" and one "evil" ("The Enemy Within"), a machine that makes you "lucky" or "unlucky" ("Rivals"), a virus that makes humans de-evolve into different random species ("Genesis"), planets that end up looking and acting exactly like Earth because budget reasons ("Miri", "The Omega Glory"), whatever "The Alternative Factor" was, and loads of other silly concepts that got by with just a little hand-wavium at most. And that's not even accounting for the numerous cases of "way too advanced for us to understand, so it's probably fine" stuff (Q, etc.).
* And Harvey P. Lynn of the RAND Corporation, who I was going nuts trying to remember while writing this comment, and who I'm now noting after-the-fact in an edit.
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Science!
There is always time for it to still happen. Granted I think Chekov would be to young. I think he must have still been at the Academy in season 1. Granted he had the bad luck of visiting ship during the week Khan showed up, but then it was back to Earth. My cast for such a show would be
Pike
Spock
Uhura
Ortegas
M'Benga
Sulu in Life science
La'an
Gary Mitchell
Moves-With-Burning-Grace who replaces Scotty as chief engineer and returns to the ship.
In a Starlog interview, as I wrote above.
Right, I meant an actual quote, maybe.
I am. Well sort of. I keep forgetting the job he had. What's kind of bad is I watched the episode just two days ago and I already re-forgotten.
If I had the quote handy, I would've included it. I've given you enough information to find it for yourself. I'm not doing homework for you.
A change of underwear.
That seems pointlessly hostile, and “it was in a Starlog interview” is hardly a useful pointer. (And is rather what I’d expect, if you didn’t actually have one.). Peace, and relax.
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