Good Behind the Scenes Books

[Vagabond Elf]

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.

By which you mean West End Games.

All the modern "canon" names for aliens and planets and whatnot, if not actually mentioned in the film, were created by WEG when they wrote the Star Wars Role-Playing Game. Twi'lek, Rodian, Ithorian, all of that came from WEG. Post Prequels, many character names came from Hasbro when they decided to release a figure based on that character.

Quoting myself from Astromech.net:

In an interview with FanthaTracks, Bill Slavicsek, the Editor-in-Chief of West End Games during the late 80s and early 90s, notes that the WEG RPG supplements “were the first products to add to the Star Wars mythos since the original trilogy had wrapped up three years earlier. And they were the first Star Wars products to give names and back stories to the various aliens that inhabited the background of the films. Suddenly Hammer Head was an Ithorian, Bib Fortuna was a Twi’lek, and Greedo was a Rodian. The universe was more real. Later, novelists and comic book writers and action figure makers and creators of the animated series would use the names I had come up with. But at the time, all I was trying to do was add context and believability to the universe we all loved so much. “ He also notes that “...novelists would call me or reference one of our game products ...” and that “...we wrote the various entries, passed them around the office for comments and review, and eventually sent them to LFL for final approval. “

Link to interview broken out for clarity:

https://www.fanthatracks.com/interviews/vintage-interview-bill-slavicsek-19th-september-2012/

 

[Set Harth]

Too bad they didn't hire somebody at Lucasfilm to name their dumb aliens for them.

Have you... heard some of the names Lucasfilm put out there?

 

[Just a Bill]

Have you... heard some of the names Lucasfilm put out there?

Oh yeah, some are horrible, especially in the extended universe (which I was never a fan of; so much cringe). My comment was really just an off-the-cuff snarky response to David's point about the tendency in the late 70s to try to imitate Star Wars, which made me think, well, at least the alien names known at that time (in the first film) were leaps and bounds better than the stupid ones the TMP soundtrack booklet seemed so proud of.

 

[FredH]

at least the alien names known at that time (in the first film) were leaps and bounds better than the stupid ones the TMP soundtrack booklet seemed so proud of.

Aaamazzarites?
Arcturians?
Betelgeusians?
Kazarites?
Megarites?
Rhaandarites?
Rigellians?
Saurians?
Shamin?
Zaranites?

I’m just curious which ones struck you as stupid, and why. (I could see it for Saurians, but Trek has plenty of descriptive alien names. And I could see it for Shamin, since they’re priests, but I like their costume design.)

 

[Just a Bill]

Aaamazzarites?
Arcturians?
Betelgeusians?
Kazarites?
Megarites?
Rhaandarites?
Rigellians?
Saurians?
Shamin?
Zaranites?

I’m just curious which ones struck you as stupid, and why. (I could see it for Saurians, but Trek has plenty of descriptive alien names. And I could see it for Shamin, since they’re priests, but I like their costume design.)

Well hands-down, Aaamazzarites is mind-numbingly lame. Jamming in extra letters to make something "look alien" is always weak sauce, and it's also weak to make alien names out of overused noise words like "amazing" and "mega." Hey, while we're at it, where are the Coolarites and the Ultimites and the Decimites? It's repetitively unimaginative that so many of these names end in -ites. Additionally, why are so many named for their stars instead of their planets... are we humans called Solarites and do we live on the planet Solan?

Probably we could pick out a few that would sound okay if they were separated from the massive sea of sameness presented in that soundtrack booklet. In isolation, Rhaandarite is not bad, and Rigellian sounds just as Trekish as Orion does. Unfortunately, Rigelians (with one L) were already established in Journey to Babel, and they were supposed to be physically similar to Vulcans. So although the name is good, Fletcher both misspelled and misused the reference. Or worse, he created a completely different alien race with essentially the same name.

And sure, in one sense, Shamin "makes sense" for a race of priests, but it's way too on-the-nose. Again, the lack of imagination (good, craftsmanlike imagination) flies off the page. Alien naming should be done by writers that are good at naming things, not by a costume designer who is not good at naming things (and in my opinion, not great at costume design, either; the vast majority of frocks in this movie have always looked pretty dreadful to me, even when I was a kid who was excited to get brand-new Star Trek until he started seeing how shoddy it was).

YMMV, of course. But that list of aliens sucks. Maybe they were all named by the Suuuckkkxarites.

 

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[Maurice]

^^^Good stuff, but 30 years their recollections were sometimes a tad questionable.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Well hands-down, Aaamazzarites is mind-numbingly lame. Jamming in extra letters to make something "look alien" is always weak sauce, and it's also weak to make alien names out of overused noise words like "amazing" and "mega." Hey, while we're at it, where are the Coolarites and the Ultimites and the Decimites? It's repetitively unimaginative that so many of these names end in -ites. Additionally, why are so many named for their stars instead of their planets... are we humans called Solarites and do we live on the planet Solan?

I'm also not a fan of some of the alien names prose writers come up with, where they're overly long, look like the writer's cat just walked across the keyboard, and have a million apostrophes jammed in there. It just gets exhausting to read a name like "Kkkk't'lll'skyll'dwalis'pk'pk" dozens of times over the course of a novel.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

@JonnyQuest037 another for the "Author Habits that annoy you" thread.

 

[Just a Bill]

I'm also not a fan of some of the alien names prose writers come up with, where they're overly long, look like the writer's cat just walked across the keyboard, and have a million apostrophes jammed in there. It just gets exhausting to read a name like "Kkkk't'lll'skyll'dwalis'pk'pk" dozens of times over the course of a novel.

If I can't read a name and know how to pronounce it, I'm annoyed and it takes me out of the story.

Also annoying are those names (in visual media, not written) that are a normal word spelled wacky, especially when most of the audience probably doesn't even know about the weird spelling. (It was years before I knew Teal'c had an apostrophe in it. A dumb, pointless apostrophe that does not affect the pronunciation in the slightest. In fact, it suggests a pause or missing vowel that doesn't actually exist. Don't get me wrong, I love that show and that character, but the spelling is stupid.)

The worst is when you finally learn how the author wants the name pronounced, and it's not compatible with the spelling.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

@JonnyQuest037 another for the "Author Habits that annoy you" thread.

Yeah, I probably will post it over there soon.

 

[DeepSpaceYorks]

Really enjoyed reading through this thread today and it flagged up a couple of books I'd like to buy and reminded me of a couple I used to religiously take out of the library.
Anyway, I wanted to mention this:

REVIEW — Official Guide to STAR TREK’s Animated Series

We dig into the new guidebook to the second STAR TREK television show, the 1970’s-era ANIMATED SERIES!

blog.trekcore.com

It's well worth a position in any discussion of Trek history.

 

[SteveJRogers]

50 Year Mission’s section on TOS is a solid overview.

 

[Maurice]

50 Year Mission’s section on TOS is a solid overview.

Much of it based on long after-the-fact interviews.

 

[SteveJRogers]

Much of it based on long after-the-fact interviews.

Not sure if you mean this as a negative or not. While time can cause memories to be fuzzy* it can sometimes be a good way of getting more measured and structured opinions and thoughts than the more passionate, and at times promotional statements from the surrounding time that the things being discussed were active concerns.

*ie I swear a table setup for a television in my childhood home, and still my parents’ home, was in a completely different spot in the room literally 40 years ago (based on memories of where I was watching important games in the 1986 baseball postseason) than it has been for decades now, and I seem to be the only one that thinks this.

 

[Firebird]

Not sure if you mean this as a negative or not. While time can cause memories to be fuzzy* it can sometimes be a good way if getting more measured and structured opinions and thoughts than the more passionate, and at times promotional statements from the surrounding time that the things being discussed were active concerns.

It tends to be a negative when it comes to Star Trek-related journalism, as the original documentation (i.e. memos, call sheets, production reports, and scripts, not press-releases cleared by the studio) proves many of the recollections from the cast and crew to be faulty. The opinions on the situations are secondary and unreliable for documenting what actually happened.

 

[Maurice]

Not sure if you mean this as a negative or not. While time can cause memories to be fuzzy* it can sometimes be a good way of getting more measured and structured opinions and thoughts than the more passionate, and at times promotional statements from the surrounding time that the things being discussed were active concerns.

*ie I swear a table setup for a television in my childhood home, and still my parents’ home, was in a completely different spot in the room literally 40 years ago (based on memories of where I was watching important games in the 1986 baseball postseason) than it has been for decades now, and I seem to be the only one that thinks this.

Oral histories and first-person narratives are fine, and very useful, but one has to aware that those are recollections of lived experiences, colored by emotions, ego, rewritten with retellings, subject to faulty human memory, etc. So when Shatner says the Alexander the Great pilot he starred in was a two-hour pilot for which he trained for a year, but the versions listed for TV broadcast all ran in an hour timeslot, and there's only 21 minutes of music, and his casting was announced only a few months before production, we can't take him at his word; we have to dig to see if he's right or not.

I don't grok your point about "the more passionate, and at times promotional statements from the surrounding time that the things being discussed were active concerns." There's little promotional or passionate about shooting schedules and daily production reports after all.

Speaking only for us Fact Trekkers, we don't actually start out trying to debunk oral histories; we start off trying to verify such stories, but often the primary sources (if available) don't line up with all those recollections.

 

[willa6276m]

The "These are the Voyages" books are often criticised for being inaccurate. But specifics aren't given. Can someone please give specific examples of inaccuracies? And/or a category? For example are his Nielsen analyses off base?

I've read them. And I dont expect a 2,100 page book series to be perfect. But I like the interviews, and the info revealed in the memos.

 

[Maurice]

The "These are the Voyages" books are often criticised for being inaccurate. But specifics aren't given. Can someone please give specific examples of inaccuracies? And/or a category? For example are his Nielsen analyses off base?

I've read them. And I dont expect a 2,100 page book series to be perfect. But I like the interviews, and the info revealed in the memos.

A few examples:

1. The author pushes this idea that Star Trek was more successful in the ratings than it was, conflating Nielsens, Trendex and TV-Q ratings in the effort. We have the actual Nielsens for the whole series run. He's wrong.
2. He manufactures narratives. We caught him making up a story about the staging of a stunt for "Spectre of the Gun" that never happened, as is obvious by the script changes and the daily production reports (which he had access to).
3. He printed fan-made artwork created by The Lensman on this board as the cover of an actual book, and, when confronted about it, refused to admit he'd made a mistake.
   

   Especially annoying for me was that IndySolo (iirc) engaged Cashman on Facebook over it, with screencaps of me saying that the cover was created for a TrekBBS art contest and instead of just saying "oh, I goofed". He blathered on more about a "lost book" then after IndySolo kept at it, Cashman essentially said that I had manufactured "a hoax".

   (see this post).

That's just off the top of my head.

 

[willa6276m]

A few examples:

1. The author pushes this idea that Star Trek was more successful in the ratings than it was, conflating Nielsens, Trendex and TV-Q ratings to push this idea. We have the actual Nielsens for the whole series run. He's wrong.
2. He manufactures narratives. We caught him making up a story about the staging of a stunt for "Spectre of the Gun" that never happened as is obvious by the script changes and the daily production reports (which he had access to).
3. He printed fan-made artwork created by The Lensman on this board as the cover of an actual book, and, when confronted about it, refused to admit he'd made a mistake.
   
   (see this post).

That's just off the top of my head.

Thanks very much.