Small shout-out to the animated 'novelizations'

[Dale Sams]

Especially the better ones like Yesteryear and Beyond the Farthest Star....the eps on their own are good, but the novelizations really enhance the solid sci-fi in the episodes. Well....the good ones. The above two, One of Our Planets is Missing....The Slaver Weapon...that zoo one.

 

[F. King Daniel]

I hated that ADF made "The Counter Clock Incident" non-episode. I'd rather he rolled with the crazy instead of taking the road of pretending it wasn't real.

I really liked the original stuff squeezed in between TAS episodes, like Kirk having a Klingon roomie at the academy.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I love what Alan Dean Foster did to Kirk, Sulu, Spock and Uhura in volume ten......SLAVER WEAPON, wasn't it? Let's just say it wasn't in the cartoon and it had already happened ON GILLIGAN'S ISLAND and THE FLINTSTONES.

They met Ann-Margrock and the Harlem Globetrotters?

 

[Christopher]

I hated that ADF made "The Counter Clock Incident" non-episode. I'd rather he rolled with the crazy instead of taking the road of pretending it wasn't real.

It's just so completely nonsensical that there's no way to make it real. If anything, Foster didn't go far enough -- there's no way Spock would've been fooled into thinking it was real for an instant, because it just made no damn sense on any level.

Anyway, I think the later ST Logs tend to get overlooked as original Trek fiction. People assume they're just novelizations, but the majority of their content is original -- especially in Log Ten, where the adaptation takes up only 20% of the book (50 out of 250 pages)! The problem is that the original content is just under the episode titles, so they don't get recognized or appreciated as distinct stories.

Looking at my copy of Log Seven, I see that my young self actually coined my own title for the followup adventure to "The Counter-Clock Incident." I called it "The Wanderers of Gypsy," which is kind of clumsy in retrospect. I don't seem to have given names to the original adventures in the other three, though. I guess in those cases the followups felt more like direct continuations or didn't have as clean a breaking point. Or maybe there was just less room on the page to write in a title.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

Anyway, I think the later ST Logs tend to get overlooked as original Trek fiction. People assume they're just novelizations, but the majority of their content is original -- especially in Log Ten, where the adaptation takes up only 20% of the book (50 out of 250 pages)! The problem is that the original content is just under the episode titles, so they don't get recognized or appreciated as distinct stories.

I guess I don't have a problem with the Logs expanding upon the animated episodes, I just wish they didn't always use the Klingons.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Worse. They were body-switched. Kirk was now Sulu, who was now Spock, who was now Uhura, who was now Kirk!
Uhura preferred her old self, while Spock was even more dissatisfied. Their balances were way off, for starters. I doubt Uhura appreciated her new stomach.

I'd have rather they met Ann-Margrock and the Harlem Globetrotters.

 

[Noname Given]

I love what Alan Dean Foster did to Kirk, Sulu, Spock and Uhura in volume ten......SLAVER WEAPON, wasn't it? Let's just say it wasn't in the cartoon and it had already happened ON GILLIGAN'S ISLAND and THE FLINTSTONES.

What, they picked up Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space?

 

[PCz911]

These were so important to me as a kid.... I wish I still had them

 

[feek61]

I have them all but these are about the only Trek books that I have not read; sounds like a good time to start. I'm excited!

 

[johnnybear]

I can remember Josie and The Pussycats and it's sequel series in Outer Space and their constant attempts to return to earth even when an alien friend would programme the ship to return home they would bungle up the controls!!!
JB

 

[Relayer1]

I have them all but these are about the only Trek books that I have not read; sounds like a good time to start. I'm excited!

They're generally big improvements on the source material !

 

[Daddy Todd]

I re-read the first six "Logs" in the last couple months (after re-reading the Blish-Lawrence adaptations earlier this year, and Logs 7-10 a couple years ago.)

I'm a big fan of how Foster adapted these. They're great reads. Highly recommended!

 

[PCz911]

Don't kill me but I recently purged all but the sex-changing tenth volume from my book collection. Though, except for SPOCK MUST DIE, I'll always keep the Blish-Lawrence adaptations, and the 1990s reprints of same.

Lol! I just went on amazon and bought them.... probably yours?

 

[F. King Daniel]

Awesomely, ADF is returning to original Trek fiction with the 10-years-delayed Kelvin universe adventure The Order of Peace in April 2020.

 

[johnnybear]

Poor old James Blish, he's been dead forty four years!!!
JB

 

[Commishsleer]

Worse. They were body-switched. Kirk was now Sulu, who was now Spock, who was now Uhura, who was now Kirk!
Uhura preferred her old self, while Spock was even more dissatisfied. Their balances were way off, for starters. I doubt Uhura appreciated her new stomach.

The thing I remember from this novel (I alas don't have it now either) was that I was pretty shocked when I read it in my early teens when Uhura was telling Spock to keep taking her contraceptives while in her body.
Now I laugh when I remember that Spock insists that he'll have no need for them.

The body switch thing has been done on a number of science fiction shows. Was "Turnabout Intruder" the first? Does anyone know?

 

[Christopher]

The body switch thing has been done on a number of science fiction shows. Was "Turnabout Intruder" the first? Does anyone know?

Oh, not even close. The Outer Limits did a body-switch episode in "The Human Factor" in 1963. Gilligan's Island did a body swap episode, "The Friendly Physician," in 1966, and I Dream of Jeannie did it in "Haven't I Seen Me Someplace Before?" in 1968. The Prisoner: "Do Not Forsake Me Oh My Darling" in 1967 used a body swap as an excuse to write around Patrick McGoohan's unavailability while he was filming a movie.

"Turnabout Intruder" itself was explicitly a riff on the 1940 comedy film Turnabout (and the 1931 novel it was based on) in which a bickering husband and wife magically switch bodies. The trope goes back at least to the 1882 novel Vice Versa, about a father and son switching bodies, and that's been adapted for film and TV multiple times as well as inspiring countless knockoffs.

 

[Christopher]

Sandra Smith, while interesting as ''Shatner,'' wasn't directed to imitate his peculiar speech patterns.

Or vice-versa. Shatner didn't try to imitate Smith, just played a '60s man's idea of a generic flighty, petulant female.

And that was one of the episode's many weaknesses. The fun of a body-swap episode is seeing the actors do impressions of each other. Which is why it's best when the swap is between two regular characters, so the actors know each other's mannerisms intimately. Although there have been some cases where it's been done superbly with guest actors, e.g. when Xena body-swapped Lucy Lawless's Xena and Hudson Leick's Callisto -- and then kept Xena's mind in Callisto's body for an extra episode so Leick could fill in for an injured Lawless. Leick did an utterly uncanny imitation of Lawless's Xena, and Lawless was almost as flawless as Callisto, even though the actresses had only worked together twice before on the show.

 

[Christopher]

One missed opportunity in a body-swap episode -- when the original Teen Titans animated series did an episode body-swapping Raven and Starfire, they planned to have Tara Strong imitate Hynden Walch's Starfire and Walch imitate Strong's Raven... but they found that both actresses' impressions were so perfect that they figured the audience wouldn't be able to tell the difference. So they just had the characters swap voices, with Strong playing Raven in Starfire's body and Walch playing Starfire in Raven's body. Which is a shame, because I would've loved to hear their impersonations. And because I hate the Gilligan's Island-style shortcut of having the voices switch along with the minds.

 

[Christopher]

That was the only way for GILLIGAN'S intend audience to realize they'd been switched, I suspect.

Oh, hardly. Their personalities were all so distinctive that it would've been quite easy to tell who was who by the way they acted and the things they said, no matter what their voices sound like. The one speaking coolly in big words is the Professor; the dimwitted, childlike one is Gilligan; the prim, haughty, and clueless one is Mrs. Howell, etc.

But execs back then had little faith in audiences' intelligence, and there were a lot of kids watching, so maybe the people in charge just assumed that people couldn't tell. Or maybe they did it because a couple of characters at the end were switched into animals so their voices had to be dubbed on so we could know what they were saying. Or maybe it's just because it was a cliche at the time in comedies to do it by voice-dubbing rather than trusting in the actors' performances.