NV (book)?
Good Behind the Scenes Books
- Thread starter Ceridwen
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NV (book)?
I'm one of those people, despite being born almost a full decade after it was published. "Visit to a Weird Planet Revisited" really stuck with me after reading it as a teenager.
Same. It's truly remarkable. Hands down one of the best TrekLit stories.
I've been calling it "Phase II" since late August, 1977, because that's what Roddenberry called it during his presentation of concept art and preliminary set construction photos during his local stop on his 1977 "World of Star Trek" lecture tour, even if the name of the project had already been changed internally and officially to "Star Trek II" by that time.
I'm fine with it being short-handy. I do object to using it as the title in supposed history books without a simple note to the effect of "we'll refer to it as its briefly-used initial title, 'Phase II,' to disambiguate from the Star Trek II feature film."
This is the first I've heard of this. Tell me more.
Exactly! And its follow-up volume Star Trek: The New Voyages 2 was also pretty great. A nice thing about these stories today is that they're not full of cultural or franchise anachronisms that the Original Series never heard of. [Getting too "evolved" is the only thing I don't love about Star Trek Continues.]
Nitpick: the Bantam paperback came out in March 1976, and ST TNV 2 was January 1978.
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Yes, that's what I meant. Sorry, I should have been more detailed in my response. I went for shorthand.
Assuming the smiley doesn't indicate sarcasm, there really isn't much to tell.I'm fine with it being short-handy. I do object to using it as the title in supposed history books without a simple note to the effect of "we'll refer to it as its briefly-used initial title, 'Phase II,' to disambiguate from the Star Trek II feature film."
This is the first I've heard of this. Tell me more.
Around the time I started sixth grade in 1977 . . . which started in late August that year instead of its customary post-Labor Day start . . . I pestered my parents to take me to an appearance by Roddenberry at the Norfolk (Virginia) Scope arena billed as "The World of Star Trek." There was a massive line outside the doors pre-opening. There was a costume contest. A question and answer session in which Roddenberry talked about Star Trek's incipient return on Paramount's proposed fourth network as "Star Trek Phase II," showed some pre-production art and sets under construction (which have since been published elsewhere), gave a quick rundown on the new characters, Decker, Ilia, and Xon. He recounted what I believe to be the usual anecdotes about growing up a weird kid in Texas reading science fiction, and about creating Star Trek and struggles with the networks, and the the network and test audience's (now debunked) alleged resistence to the Number One character. The selling points of his appearance were, of course, his showing of his 16mm b&w print of "The Cage" and the bloopers. Local television and radio ads hyped the bloopers, in the publicity for the event.
Of course, I have no documentation for any of this and am well aware how memories cheat and are unreliable, so this anecdote will probably be useless to you for any possible future FACT TREK article you may be contemplating. I do remember a few years back stumbling onto a radio air check on Youtube of stations in the Hampton Roads area that contained an ad for the event buried deep within it that would help narrow down the date, but I don't remember which Youtuber posted the air check or the specific video.
I lived in Norfolk from about 1995 to 2020 (moved there to work for Decipher Inc., who published the Star Trek CCG). The Scope sometimes hosted the Farm Fresh Extravaganza, an event that brought in a few TV celebrities. The one year I went, in the late 90s, there were three guests: one I can't remember now, Ann B. Davis from The Brady Bunch, and Gowron himself, Robert O'Reilly.
Attendance was light, and my daughter and I were able to walk right up to the celebrities' tables and basically take our time talking to them. Davis and O'Reilly were both kind and down to earth. I had never seen O'Reilly before and was surprised that he looked like an unassuming middle-school English teacher. It gave me that much more respect for his ability to imbue Gowron with such incredible screen presence.
I grew up across the river in Portsmouth and Chesapeake, but moved as an adult to Fort Worth in '91 for a handful of years, then spent almost a decade in southern West Virginia, overlapping with the first part of your tenure in Tidewater, before relocating to New Mexico a little over 21 years ago. After that, I was like, "I am NOT moving cross country again."
I'm generally not a big con attendee, though I've been to a few smaller ones over the decades. I have no interesting Star Trek celebrity stories to impart. The closest would be grabbing a bite with Gareth Thomas of "Blake's 7" and Michael Craze from "Doctor Who" with Paul Cornell at a Chicago Denny's the evening before Visions '95 opened.
I'm never sarcastic about history stuff. We don't have an agenda to debunk everything. We just want to be as historically accurate as possible given oft shabby evidence trails.
This event right here, August 21, 1977. It comports with the event you describe.
We are, in "Fact", writing a piece about where the various titles used in fandom came from, but we're not interested in shooting people down. Where and when these names got into fandom and how is the subject.
As the Number One and test audiences, there actually may be some truth to that. My Fact Trek
work husband" is writing on a piece about audience testing and how that worked for Star Trek, and it wasn't just audiences reacting to the program live. We don't always take Herb Solow at his word where Roddenberry is concerned.
If you're conflating anything about the talk—and I'm not saying you are—it could be the memory of seeing set photos rather than concept art, since the set plans we've seen mostly post-date August 1977. The Sept.-Oct. Inside Star Trek/Star Trek Trektennial News newsletter 23 says "Construction has already begun on Stage 9, where the new Enterprise is being built, although at present it only appears to be a giant jigsaw puzzle of plywood and boards," and we assume this was written in August given Harold Livingston had been hired, so it's possible some early construction photos were around by the time you saw Roddenberry speak.
But it would be two months hence, in the Nov.-Dec. newsletter, which printed photos of the sets under construction.
Maybe one of these?
‘There’s even a button denoting exterior skin temperature!’
Is that the kind of thing fans went wild for back in the day?
Is that the kind of thing fans went wild for back in the day?
Yep, it was definitely that August 21st event.I'm never sarcastic about history stuff. We don't have an agenda to debunk everything. We just want to be as historically accurate as possible given oft shabby evidence trails.
This event right here, August 21, 1977. It comports with the event you describe.
We are, in "Fact", writing a piece about where the various titles used in fandom came from, but we're not interested in shooting people down. Where and when these names got into fandom and how is the subject.
As the Number One and test audiences, there actually may be some truth to that. My Fact Trek
work husband" is writing on a piece about audience testing and how that worked for Star Trek, and it wasn't just audiences reacting to the program live. We don't always take Herb Solow at his word where Roddenberry is concerned.
If you're conflating anything about the talk—and I'm not saying you are—it could be the memory of seeing set photos rather than concept art, since the set plans we've seen mostly post-date August 1977. The Sept.-Oct. Inside Star Trek/Star Trek Trektennial News newsletter 23 says "Construction has already begun on Stage 9, where the new Enterprise is being built, although at present it only appears to be a giant jigsaw puzzle of plywood and boards," and we assume this was written in August given Harold Livingston had been hired, so it's possible some early construction photos were around by the time you saw Roddenberry speak.
But it would be two months hence, in the Nov.-Dec. newsletter, which printed photos of the sets under construction.
Maybe one of these?
The only thing my eleven year old eyes could really make of the photos of sets under construction were wooden frames and plywood and what looked to be the beginnings of a nondescript corridor, if that helps, and it was a only mere handful of slides projected on a large screen. What he showed was nowhere near the stage of completion of the pictures in the newsletter. If I'm conflating anything, I suspect it's my memory of the Mike Minor painting of the Bridge with the huge captain's chair being shown.
I feel more secure with memories of little things Roddenberry said, like Chekov's new weapons station being in a little bubble on the perimeter looking out into space and the bridge having two elevators. I also recall him saying that in the new series, we might learn that there's another power behind the Klingons.
Again, I'm pushing sixty, and this was almost a half-century ago, now. I wish that I could remember more what he said rather than extraneous things like the mirrored disco ball used to simulate speeding stars in the darkened arena as the theme played over the soundsystem before they started the showing of the blooper reels and "The Cage" or my first time seeing what we now commonly call glowsticks. (I was a sheltered kid who didn't get out much.)
Fans weren't asking for it, but Lee Cole had worked at Rockwell, and she applied some thought to the control panels and what sorts of readouts would be there.
The captioned photo in question is actually the Science Station, but the Environmental Engineering Station
did feature an External Skin Temperatures readout (not button) on the overhead panel. You can see it at the upper left here: https://www.cygnus-x1.net/links/lcars/blueprints/efm/efm-page-4.jpg
I’m guessing there was some sort of misunderstanding somewhere, like that it’s referring to a person’s skin, maybe some kind of double-entendre, rather than a thermometer telling you if the outside of the ship was about to melt off.
Considering the context, I thought a thermometer that measured the exterior hull temperature is exactly what was meant?
"Enviremental control center" [sic] sounds more like they thought it was life-support, to me.
I sure didn't. I also saw GR speak at a convention in Portland, Oregon in the lead-up to TMP. I was probably 15 or 16, and I remember him seeming so proud and happy that the Enterprise would now have ... sonic showers!!! I didn't care about any of that kind of stuff, because this show was not about the tech (even though I loved a lot of it); Star Trek was about the people, the relationships, the risks and dangers and clever solutions. The camaraderie, professionalism, and solving problems as a team. All the things Gene forgot about when money was thrown at him to make a movie. The tech has always been the carrier for the drama, the canvas upon which the stories are painted. I didn't understand why he was so hyper-focused on the canvas.
It also didn't help that the soundtrack showed the entire crew on the bridge and it was just all so drab and colorless; my heroes in crew-neck pajamas, poised to embark on the greatest pillow-fight of all time.
ᴛʜᴇ ʜᴜᴍᴀɴ sʟᴇᴇᴘᴏᴠᴇʀ ɪs ᴊᴜsᴛ ʙᴇɢɪɴɴɪɴɢ
I understand now that Gene was a relentless (and not-always-honest) self-promoter. He was throwing literally every scrap he had at us as often as he could to generate interest. But his scraps didn't do that for me; they just made me wonder what the hell was happening to my favorite universe. As it would turn out, all of these somewhat empty details were foreshadowing fairly accurately that Gene's big movie would focus so much on its canvas that it would forget to tell a satisfying and enduring story. Humans evolving into machines or energy beings seems to have been a favorite trope of GR, but it was never his best move. And certainly an hour and a half of glowy lights followed by a human evolving into a machine and an energy being was a weird way to start a movie franchise. So self-indulgent. I walked out of the theater literally thinking well, that's the end of Star Trek movies. I was shocked a few years later when one day I walked past the TV and saw the cast on Merv Griffin showing a clip from TWoK, the movie that righted the ship and made the earlier pain worth it.
All in my opinion, of course. I know I'm just a neanderthal idiot who doesn't understand true art or the religious importance of Star Trek as a predictor of humankind's cosmic destiny... and I'm okay with that.
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From what I've seen of vintage (sorry) promotional material, starting with Star Wars up into the mid-'90s, it seems like everyone in filmed science fiction was fixated on outdoing the Star Wars cantina scene. Just a smorgasbord of weird, different aliens, each weirder and more different than the last, yet also only weird and different for being weird and different's sake.
There's a certain point where variety becomes noise, and TMP was soon enough after Star Wars that they were still dialing that in.
Yeah, I figured that was probably a factor. Too bad they didn't hire somebody at Lucasfilm to name their dumb aliens for them. I can see where Amaze-arite could take hold as an internal working name, but you don't publish it, knuckleheads. That's some Gold-Key-Comics-level doofussery there.
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