I´m watching TAS for the first time and have seen the first two episodes so far. Is it me..or is the dialoge style somehow different to TOS? Everyone seems to express themselves way more "compact" then I`m used to from TOS. Kirk seems to have a way more.. abrupt...command style. I´cant put my finger on it..but something about the style of the lines given to the characters just seems...off...somehow.
TAS - Different dialogue style?
- Thread starter FreddyE
- Start date
The delivery could be a factor too. The three lead actors weren't used to voice acting and many of the recordings were done at whatever local recording studio was available, so they didn't have consistent voice direction. So Shatner, Nimoy, and Kelley don't give very good performances in the first season. They do much better in the second season (the final 6 episodes).
Part of it must be the writing...the german dub (which is an almost word for word translation) gives me the same feeling. And that was done by the same voice actors who dubbed TOS / the TOS-Movies (also they used Spocks movie voice actor instead of the TV one...which is a weird combination to hear him together with TV-Kirk).
It's a new theme by the TAS composers Ray Ellis and Norm Prescott (under the pseudonyms Yvette Blais and Jeff Michael), done as a pastiche of Alexander Courage's TOS theme. But then, the TOS theme itself was a pastiche of "Beyond the Blue Horizon," pretty much.
In some ways, it's almost an "inversion" of Courage's score, a high note where he'd have a lower note and a low note where Sandy would have a higher one. Obviously, not note for note, but in general feel. At least, that's the way it registers within my fetid mush of a brain.
Yeah, that's kind of how I think of it too.
Yeah, but whatever it is - I've never liked the TAS main score since I first heard it at age 10 on Saturday morning. To me it always sounded like an orchestra tuning their instruments live.
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Well, I've always loved it. But then, I discovered TOS and TAS maybe within a few weeks of each other at most when I was 5 years old, so they were about equal parts of my formative experience with Trek. And the "Blais & Michael" scores for Filmation's shows throughout the '70s were the soundtrack of my childhood.
Boy is that a stretch. I took a listen on Youtube and I hear almost no similarity whatsoever. If that was used by Courage as inspiration, it sure went off in its own direction.
All the Filmation music is sort of a post-60s acid jazz. Sometimes the atonality and dissonance is very very harsh.
Well, of course. Pastiche doesn't mean a copy, it means a stylistic homage. In this case, the similarities are in the chord structure and progressions, although Courage melded it with a bossa nova-style rhythm. Sometimes two pieces of music can have very different melodies but identical chord progressions (musicians call them "changes"), so that if you play them simultaneously, they fit seamlessly. (If "Blue Horizon" doesn't work for you, try "From Out of Nowhere." I believe Dennis McCarthy used it in the holodeck scenes of "The Big Goodbye" as an in-joke because its melody and chords were so similar to the Courage ST theme.)
I still remember when my musician father pointed out to me that the Flintstones theme had what jazz musicians call "Rhythm changes," i.e. the same chord progressions and structure as the song "I Got Rhythm." The melodies are very different, and I'd never noticed a similarity, but if you play them (or imagine them) simultaneously, they mesh neatly, with the notes in one fitting into the gaps in the other, essentially.
I also remember when Serenity came out, and people were hoping the original Firefly theme song would be included in it. And there was an instrumental piece at the end of the closing credits that some fans swore was the Firefly theme but other fans swore was nothing like it. That's because it had the same changes but a different enough melody to be legally a different piece of music. So people whose ear for music was based more on melody heard two different songs, while people whose ear was based more on harmony and structure heard two variations on the same song. I tend more toward the latter group, so it took me a few listens to figure out what was going on there.
Interesting. I grew up with that music, but I never thought of it as jazz -- and I don't even know what "acid jazz" is. (My father probably knew, but I guess we never really talked about the stylistic influences of Filmation music. Which is surprising, since I talked about my fondness for that music quite a bit, and he loved explaining stuff about music.)
Although different Filmation scores from Ellis and Prescott had different influences. I'd say Flash Gordon and Blackstar were influenced by classic movie-serial scores, The New Adventures of the Lone Ranger by Westerns, The New Adventures of Zorro by Latin music and again by old movie scores, etc.
I really like the ship designs too.https://cdn.thingiverse.com/renders/41/62/7b/8c/a9/FlashFilmation2_preview_featured.jpg
Nearly every design element of Flash Gordon was either an extrapolation of, or lifted directly from the original art by Alex Raymond, Al Williamson and Mac Raboy. This includes costumes, props, and yes, ships too.
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