Appreciating the uniquely 1960s genres/tropes in TOS
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There are several galaxies closer than Andromeda. The Canis Major Galaxy is a thousand times closer.
Do you feel that all countries are civilized?
Countries who derive many aspects of their current culture from the same sources, and therefore have common references such as the Bible from which they take given names, metaphors, experiences, etc...
Canis Major is a dwarf galaxy with less than a billion stars where as Andromeda is the closest spiral galaxy to us! For years I've read that Andromeda is the closest and now they're saying it isn't, so I'm guessing at another Mandela effect wave again!
JB
Re Doomsday Machine: Maybe all that time between galaxies is why the darned thing was so hungry!
But actually "it came from beyond the galaxy" is a trope used many times in Trek and other SF of the period, even (as in this case) where it's not necessary. It could have easily come from several thousand light years away and still be scary. I think writers really had a tough time dealing with the actual distances involved.
But actually "it came from beyond the galaxy" is a trope used many times in Trek and other SF of the period, even (as in this case) where it's not necessary. It could have easily come from several thousand light years away and still be scary. I think writers really had a tough time dealing with the actual distances involved.
It's a bizarre qualifier that has nothing to do with where aforementioned names are used.
Was Chekov a Russian because of Sputnik or because of the cold war and they liked the idea of having one of them as a good guy? Which would make sense because it almost connects to having a Klingon as a good guy on "TNG" when they had been baddies up until then.
Jason
Jason
I'm of the belief that Chekov was Russian because Roddenberry wanted to copy the success of The Man from UNCLE's Illya Kuryakin (David McCallum), who was immensely popular with young female viewers and was nicknamed "the Blond Beatle" because of it and because of his moptop haircut. The modern myth is that Star Trek did something groundbreaking by portraying a Russian as a good guy, but in fact, McCallum debuted as Illya three full years before Chekov showed up.
Yes. And that problem hasn't entirely gone away. The movie Interstellar (2014) does the extra-galactic bit too. I suspect they didn't want to be seen as following too closely in the footsteps of Deep Space Nine and Contact.
But I will say, Interstellar is extremely good and worth your time. The whole thing's fx were done with physical models, and it looks fantastic. Amazing spacecraft work.
Not the "whole thing". Nolan used models and practicals wherever possible but there's a megaton of CGI in the film, notably the black hole.
Of the twenty odd galaxies closest to us, Andromeda is the first one you come to that's larger than our own.
Although we're no longer as sure of that, since some research has indicated that our galaxy may be larger than we thought. It's kinda hard to tell from the inside.
Okay, I meant the spacecraft were physical models. That's remarkable for a big-budget film in 2014, and they looked amazing.
It was a real-life fascination too. At the time there had been scientific attempts to study such phenomena. If ESP had turned out to be real, and reliable, then there could have been interesting implications for Cold War espionage.
Kor
The '50s too -- see for instance Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man, about a future society where telepathy has become common, or Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, involving themes of rapid human mental evolution similar to "Where No Man Has Gone Before." As a rule, trends in film and TV science fiction tend to lag a decade or two behind prose SF.
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