So What Are you Reading?: Generations

Now re-reading Dreadnought. Kind of interesting, having a Gorn ensign as a minor character, after being exposed to the SNW version of the Gorn. I wonder if the Captain Flynn briefly mentioned is indeed Vonda McIntyre's Mandala Flynn. (For some reason, I somehow had her conflated with Captain Hunter.)

In light of certain events that have not yet faded from memory, it seems surprising (no, make that refreshing) to see a hard-libertarian (Piper) and a fascist (Rittenhouse, who regularly does all the usual extremist things, like ascribing his own motivations to his enemies) on opposite sides.

The very first time I saw Star Trek Into Darkness, Admiral Marcus immediately jumped out at me as an apparent "expy" of Rittenhouse. Although now that I think about it, Marcus probably isn't the only Admiral we've seen (maybe Dougherty, from Insurrection?) who looks a lot like an expy of Rittenhouse.

I wonder if DC ever saw Animal Crackers (yes, I mean the Marx Bros. movie, and the Kalmar/Ruby/Kaufman/Ryskind musical it was based on). It's the only other literary or dramatic work I'm aware of with characters named Rittenhouse (Mrs. Rittenhouse, played by Margaret Dumont, and her daughter Arabella, played by Alice Wood on Broadway, and by Lillian Roth in the movie).

 

Doubtful, given that both books are set in the late 5-year mission, so there wouldn't be enough time for Lt. Cmdr. Flynn to get promoted to captain. It's not like Flynn is a rare name.

Political/military leaders seeking to engineer coups are a trope much older than Dreadnought! See Seven Days in May, for one. There's no reason to assume one Trek character is based on another Trek character just because they play equivalent roles. Trek writers have plenty of influences beyond Trek itself.

The evil organization in NBC's Timeless was called Rittenhouse. It's not a rare name either. William Rittenhouse was a German immigrant who established the first paper mill in North America. His descendant David Rittenhouse was an 18th-century astronomer/mathematician who was the first director of the United States Mint, and he had a Philadelphia park and a WWII naval vessel named after him. If anything, I'd say Carey would've been far more likely to draw a name from a naval vessel than from a Marx Brothers movie.

 

All quite true about Flynn (there's also Kevin Flynn, creator of Space Paranoids, co-protagonist of the TRON franchise), and about Dougherty, Rittenhouse, and Marcus being instances of a trope that's older than ST.

And just because the name "Rittenhouse" makes me think of Margaret Dumont and Lillian Roth doesn't necessarily mean anything.

I will note that of all Marx Bros. movies, Animal Crackers is probably the best known. (I do have a soft spot for The Big Store.)

 

Not Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera?

Heck, I recently read an entire non-fiction book on Duck Soup alone.

 

I'd put Animal Crackers very slightly ahead of Duck Soup and A Night at the Opera in terms of public recognition, simply on the strength that people who've never seen a single Marx Bros movie (and don't know that Leonard Marx's moniker is pronounced chick-o, not cheek-o) still recognize "Hooray for Captain Spaulding" (which of course took on a life of its own, thanks in part to You Bet Your Life). How many people recognize ""Just Wait 'Til I Get Through With It" (Duck Soup) or "Cosi-Cosa" (A Night at the Opera)?

Hell, thanks to fairly recent covers by Michael Feinstein (album: Pure Imagination) and Joan Morris (album: Bolcom, Morris & Morath sing Yip Harburg), "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" (At the Circus) is probably better known than any of the original songs from Duck Soup or A Night at the Opera.

 

I knew that one more from The Muppet Show than from At the Circus. And from my father singing it at the slightest provocation.

Songs aside, I'd imagine the most famous Marx Bros. bit is probably the mirror routine from Duck Soup.

 

How did my offhand remark about Rittenhouse in Dreadnought vs. the Rittenhouses in Animal Crackers turn this into a thread about the relative merits of Marx Bros. movies?

Incidentally, some years ago, I encountered a checkout clerk at a local Home Depot. Her name was Lydia, and she sported several tattoos. And she looked like if you were to break into a chorus of "Lydia . . ." she would hurt you.

Funny thing is, even though my family watched The Muppet Show in first run (I was a big fan of Statler and Waldorf, and of Bunsen Honeydew and Beaker), I cannot for the life of me remember "Lydia . . . " putting in an appearance. Who sang it?

(I first heard it myself from the Feinstein cover, which included the line about ". . . when she sits, she sits on HITLER," which had been discarded from the movie version because the producers figured people would be more likely to remember Grover Whalen than Hitler; I wasn't aware that it was a Groucho song until years later myself!)

 

I saw the mirror routine from the episode of I Love Lucy called "Harpo Marx." I would guess that the Lucy episode is shown on television much more frequently than Duck Soup.

I am rereading Star Trek: Cathedral from the DS9 post-series fiction. Of the Mission: Gamma books, I think Cathedral has the strongest pairing of A and B plots. Readers are given strong reasons to care about the plights of Ezri, Julian, Nog, Ro, and Kira.

 

There are so, so many things that people know only from Looney Tunes or Tom & Jerry cartoons that were actually references to 1940s pop culture like radio shows, movies, vaudeville routines, etc. Like, I saw someone on Twitter not long ago praising the "creation" of Foghorn Leghorn, apparently unaware that he was a straight-up imitation of the Senator Claghorn character from The Fred Allen Show on radio. For my own part, it was ages before I learned that Warner Bros.' Abominable Snowman and other characters with the same persona ("Which way did he go, George?") were modeled on Lon Chaney Jr.'s Lenny in Of Mice and Men.

 

That was true from the very beginning of Warner Bros. cartoons (which were originally farmed out by Warner Bros. to independent producer Leon Schlesinger, before they bought Schlesinger's animation studio outright in 1944). The early cartoons were mostly created to "plug" the latest songs from the music division of Warner Bros. 1931's Smile, Darn Ya, Smile (starring an obvious Mickey Mouse knock-off named Foxy) had a whole segment of animated parodies of what, at the time, were familiar advertisements commonly posted in streetcars, (which became a running gag, and I'm pretty sure there's one whole early cartoon that's nothing but advertising spoofs). And the more familiar 1946 classic Baseball Bugs pokes fun at the then-common tobacco tag-line, "Does your tobacco taste different lately?"

 

Then there are all the WWII references in the cartoons, like "Is this trip really necessary?" and the one where the crashing plane stops in midair because its gas ration ran out. Took me years before I understood that joke.

 

And I once again got through Chapter 7 of Dreadnought!, with Piper delivering her multi-page hard-libertarian tirade (and Sarda agreeing with her), without throwing the book across the room.

 

I read The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah. It was likable but… different. Essentially a Sarek-centered romance novel set entirely on the planet Vulcan. My biggest problem with it is the story is a little boring (lots of hanging around the house, hanging around school, driving around town, eating meals, talking about feelings), and Kirk isn’t very bright (nor is anyone else, really). But I thought it was cool to get a better sense of Vulcan and Vulcans. She painted a very vivid picture of them, which I think was really her goal.

 

I love The Vulcan Academy Murders. And Ms. Lorrah's sequel, The IDIC Epidemic isn't half-bad, either. I would put JL right up there with DD and DCF (and way ahead of AC), in terms of really good Vulcan-centric novels.

And I'm now reading Battlestations!, DC's sequel to Dreadnought!

The Banana Republic has arrived at Argelius, and evaded an uncontrolled transwarp wave.

I'd forgotten that shortly after Spock comes aboard the Banana Republic, and explains the situation with the transwarp prototype theft, he effectively delivers a diatribe against the anarchist who'd stolen it. And Piper agrees with him. So either DC isn't quite as hard-libertarian as she seems, or an editor leaned on her to present a counterargument in the sequel.

 

Now about 10% into Jeter's Warped. Wanted to know if it's really bad enough to be rated as worst, and all I could remember was that Jeter hadn't impressed me.

Feels, so far, like what had been (up until the Dominion War) my least favorite DS9 episodes.


*******

I'd so completely forgotten this opus that before I started re-reading, I was certain that it involved some reality-warping effect similar to how DC described a malfunctioning transwarp drive in Battlestations!, rather than some nutjob using holosuites to breed homicidal-suicidal nutjobs.

This is quite possibly the only ST novel in which the word "turd" appears. And just noticing that reminds me of the old George Carlin line that (at least as of 1972) "You can't say 'turd' on television, but who wants to?"

The holosuite plot reminds me of "The Game." And also of the "Janus Jewels" from ADF's Orphan Star. (And I fully expect [and welcome] CLB to come along and point out even earlier examples of the trope, maybe even including ones I'd encountered, but never noticed.)

Page 68: "Major, I have yet to meat a Bajoran that I wouldn't consider dangerous." Two simple words: Opaka Sulan.

 

I'm reading The Enterprise War and it's important you all know that while Spock is on a snowy part of a planet I'm picturing him in his earmuffs from that Paramount+ commercial.

 

Star Wars the high Republic: Cataclysm, fun book so far. But damn do the Jedi fight stupid.

 

Lattes and Legends by Travis Baldtree.

A cozy fantasy novel about an orc who retires from pillaging to open a coffee shop.

 

I think you mean, "Legends & Lattes." And the whole premise has me ROFLMFAO. Even more after looking it up on Wikipedia. And I see that most or all of the local B&Ns have it in stock. Along with what appears to be a sequel.