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Favourite 'season one' aspects that get dropped early on

You did a Warehouse 13 novel? I can't find it! (I did find a bunch of your books and stories I want to add to the tower of reading material I can't afford and can't keep up with, so...thanks for that...:p ;) )

It comes out this summer . . . .
 
Scrawny71, that was indeed a good scene, and of course Memoria is surely the highest art the show has ever done, but the show kinda killed Lionel for me when it revealed that he'd murdered his own parents. I wanted him to be an awful guy with just enough decency to be horrified at what Lex would become; instead, he was made to be just as bad as Lex if not worse. So yeah, S3 had its moments, but... ;)
 
The synthisized music of early TNG. I know most everybody hated it, but I didn't.

The music in TNG's first three seasons puts everything heard afterwards, and that includes most the music in DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, to shame.

Yeah, the music in the first season does sound dated today, and you can certainly tell it comes from the 80s, but at least it stands out. Unlike the auditory wallpaper that later became Trek's background music.
 
The synthisized music of early TNG. I know most everybody hated it, but I didn't.

The music in TNG's first three seasons puts everything heard afterwards, and that includes most the music in DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, to shame.

Yeah, the music in the first season does sound dated today, and you can certainly tell it comes from the 80s, but at least it stands out. Unlike the auditory wallpaper that later became Trek's background music.

Okay I have to ask, everybody these days makes this comment "Yeah, it's dated now". And it's always in the context of putting it down. So what? What's so bad about that?

And yeah Wormhole, I know you were just responding to me and not putting the "dated" stuff down. I just don't understand why this is a problem for some people.
 
^Agreed. Like I said in the Superman discussion thread earlier today, I'll never understand that notion that something can be good in one decade but bad in another. If something has quality, that quality should be timeless. Being concerned with how current or recent something is has nothing to do with aesthetics, only conformism.

I think the perception of older electronic music as "dated" may be based in the fact that it was more recognizably electronic back then, not as good at simulating orchestral sounds. But for me, that's not a drawback. I find electronic music that tries to sound orchestral to be a poor substitute for the real thing. I prefer it when electronic music is openly, unapologetically electronic, adding something new to the palette of musical sounds rather than trying to approximate what already exists.

For that matter, when Ron Jones's music was new to me back in the '80s, I liked his electronic music more than most I heard in that period, because his choice of sounds was interesting and unusual. Today, listening to his scores on the recently-released CD set, I find that the ratio of electronics to orchestra in his season 1 & 2 scores was higher than I remembered or would've preferred, but the combination of the two was better than the modern tendency to use synthesized music as a cheap substitute for an actual orchestra.
 
The synthisized music of early TNG. I know most everybody hated it, but I didn't.

The music in TNG's first three seasons puts everything heard afterwards, and that includes most the music in DS9, Voyager and Enterprise, to shame.

Yeah, the music in the first season does sound dated today, and you can certainly tell it comes from the 80s, but at least it stands out. Unlike the auditory wallpaper that later became Trek's background music.

Okay I have to ask, everybody these days makes this comment "Yeah, it's dated now". And it's always in the context of putting it down. So what? What's so bad about that?

And yeah Wormhole, I know you were just responding to me and not putting the "dated" stuff down. I just don't understand why this is a problem for some people.

I see your point that being "dated" is not necessarily a bad thing, but it is somewhat distracting while watching sci-fi. After all, we're watching something that's supposed to take place a couple of hundred years in the future and it is reminding of us a time in the past. Not really a fault of the show or anything, in fact I realize that popular sci-fi of recent years, like BSG or Stargate or whatever will be labeled "dated" in about 10-15 years. But it is still distracting all the same.
 
That's precisely the only time it really bothers me -- when something set in the future screams of its production period to the point that I have to struggle to ignore it. Doesn't really happen too often, though.
 
Strangely enough, the only time I am actually bothered by how dated something looks is when I'm watching DS9 and I see all the tube screens everywhere. On the station, on the runabouts, even a few on the Defiant. Tube screens are outdated today, they're going to be ancient history in the 2370s.
 
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According to the show, Allen would put lots of time and money in the pilots for his shows, then start cutting corners once they went to series.

Certainly seems to be the case. Just look at The Time Tunnel. In the pilot, there are all these elaborate miniatures and matte paintings representing the vast, secret underground base where the time-travel project is operating (ludicrously vast, in fact, like 8000 stories deep or something). In particular, there's one matte shot that reveals the larger context of the main set, showing that it's a freestanding platform within a much larger, deeper chamber. And yet for some reason, unless my memory fails me, we never saw any of that footage again, even though it would've been easy just to reuse the shots from the pilot as stock footage. You'd think it would've been more economical to spread out the cost of creating those shots throughout the season rather than blowing it all on shots that were only used in the pilot.

That matte shot of the tunnel control area was re-used briefly in two further episodes - the second episode, "One Way To The Moon", and later on in "Night Of The Long Knives."

But in reality you're right. They spent a lot of time and effort to make the complex look big in the pilot, but that all became unimportant in the general episodes.

Harry

tictoc.jpg
 
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Thanks for the picture. That is one cool matte painting. Shades of Forbidden Planet, just a bit. Is it known who did the paintings for the show?

Looking at the painting more closely, though, I can't help but wonder: what's holding the Time Tunnel up? We see a thick pillar supporting the control-room platform, but there's just blackness further back.
 
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