New Appreciation for TAS
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
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Here is an interesting letter written by Dorothy Fontana, from The Vault:
Even Space Battleship Yamato: 2199 had an episode which drew heavily from The Time Trap (no idea if it did so intentionally).
I loved ST:TAS back when it aired and still do. Though I have to admit a large part of it is the music cues. I could listen to them for hours (and thanks to a 15 minute YouTube clip, and then LaLa Records managing to release a ST:TAS soundtrack, I can).
Of course it didn't. As Maurice said, "The Time Trap" was just one of many sci-fi dress-ups of the Bermuda Triangle myth that had been around since 1950, plus the earlier body of legends and stories about the Sargasso Sea, supposedly a realm of mystery where ships were trapped forever and (in some stories) their descendants lived on for centuries.
But how many of those have a plot where two ships that are enemies of each other fall into the trap, then work together to escape the trap, with some forces on one ship planning to stab the other one in the back just as they escape the trap?
Stories where the heroes and villains are forced to work together against a common foe or problem are a routine trope. Stories about characters being trapped somewhere and having to escape are a routine trope. And they fit together pretty naturally, so there are lots of stories that combine the two.
Laypeople always assume a similarity between two stories proves direct influence, but the fact is, creators accidentally hit upon the same ideas all the time. We're all working in the same larger cultural context, drawing on the same pool of references and story devices, and there's a certain grammar and syntax to storytelling that guarantees recurring patterns and structures. So it's actually hard for writers to avoid accidental duplication, no matter how hard we try. If we know we're doing something similar to an earlier work, we'll usually try to make it less similar, not more, because nobody wants to be accused of unoriginality. So a close similarity is usually proof that the creators of one work didn't know about the other.
The TAS blu ray is pretty phat. It looks better than the streaming quality I watched previously, but my memory might be hazy on the stream.
I think the voice direction was better in the second season too and although they were often (mostly) not together when recording Bill Reed seemed to be able to get more out of them. I'm glad that he got his directorial credit in the DVDs/Blu Rays!
If you have a good connection the Netflix TAS and the Blu Ray are comparable, in fact they had the HD version before the Blu Rays were released.
As I posted earlier in this thread, Dorothy Fontana largely shot down the idea the actors were record separately in a recent interview (link), saying the cast was together for the Filmation recordings more often than not. Can't speak to the accuracy of that, but it's what she says.
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Yes that interview was conducted by ME :-) There's been a lot of conflicting information, and Dorothy was one of our earlier interviews, but so far no one we've spoken to, including Dorothy, was actually present when the recording happened. We're on hiatus right now but we have some more people in the mix and hopefully will be able to put that whole thing to rest. My suspicion is that it's a little of column A, a little of column B. The first couple at least had at least, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelly and Willam Shatner recording together--there's even a photo of that from the LA Times, but beyond that it's probably a patch work.
ADR might have been done alone, now that they got the feel of their lines by being together and interacting, they then try to replicate that in re-recordings.
Except that in season 1 of TAS, it's often painfully clear that Shatner and Kelley didn't have that much of a feel for their lines. Kelley in particular sometimes sounded like he was just reading the words off the page for the first time and hadn't put any thought into their delivery.
Could the intervening years have something to do with that? Or the fact that they were not performing for a camera and having to focus solely on what they said, not what they're doing with their hands, feet, etc?
Exactly. Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley didn't have the same kind of voice-acting experience that Doohan, Takei, Nichols, and Barrett had, so they gave the weakest vocal performances. They improved in season 2, perhaps because they had more experience, and perhaps because they were more effectively directed in bringing out their performances. Or maybe just because production was a lot less rushed (6 episodes rather than 16), so maybe they had more time to do multiple takes and refine their delivery.
You have to say "Oh-ree-on" JUST right.
ADR is for replacing/adding dialog tracks, not recording them in the first place.
Ah. Thanks. Whatever you call it, then.
I loved that
In my head I always liked to imagine something like that even before I seen the FJ blueprints, because the idea of a second turbolift in the event of the first malfunctioning only makes sense if a power failure doesn't wipe out both lifts and make them both useless 
I liked to imagine maybe Kirk had a little cabin or ready room behind there, too.
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