I've always been fascinated with Vasquez Rocks since the original airing of Arena. I had wondered if there were actually "sparkly" rocks near the base of the outcropping as shown in Arena. Then, in the early '70's we (The High Desert Science Fiction Society) made a movie on location there based on an old Ditko comic called "Shade, The Changing Man." I played the co-star. No, the rocks are just rocks and the effect was either colored alluminum foil or colored cellophane.
The main thing I remember about the rocks from my visit there was that there were some odd little round holes in them just above ground level, maybe 6-8 inches across, IIRC. I was wondering whether those were natural formations or something dug by film crews to store pyrotechnic charges in or something. My cousin told me that there are restrictions on what film crews are allowed to do to the site, it being a national park and all.
Since that time I've been interested in the usage fo Vasquez Rocks in TV and movies and have collected several captures from them. I was even going to support a site all about it but gave up when I realized that there are hundreds of instances where it was used.
It was used all the time in
Power Rangers when that show was produced in LA. In the original five seasons, the Rangers' "command center" was a combination of two popular locations; they took a shot of the Brandeis-Bardin Institute's "House of the Book" building (also seen as Camp Khitomer in ST VI, Lore's Borg complex in TNG: "Descent," etc.) and superimposed it on top of the Vasquez outcropping. VR itself was often used as a location for desert planets. The fifth season ended with a massive action sequence that used both VR and the House of the Book as filming locations.
So this brings me to ask you all; Have any of you been to Vasquez Rocks? ... Tell us your story.
I've already told some of it. When I went out to LA a decade or so ago to pitch story ideas to the producers of
Deep Space Nine, I got my cousin to drive me out to VR. Most people going to LA would probably make a point of visiting the Chinese Theater or Hollywood Boulevard or the Universal Tour; my priority was Vasquez Rocks. Yes, I'm an unrepentant sci-fi geek.
I took a lot of pictures of the rocks and geeked out from standing where Captain Kirk had stood, but I was too timid to climb up the big cliff. After a while, my cousin (a professional bicyclist) went off to do some solo mountain-biking and we agreed to meet back at his car. When I'd trudged back to the car, I waited a while and he didn't show up, so I went back to the main area to see if I could find him there. No luck, so I went back to the car, and still no sign. I was afraid he'd fallen down and hurt himself and I'd be stranded there in the desert. I was running back and forth along the road, calling his name, and eventually his car drove up behind me. As usual, I'd panicked over nothing. (In my defense, I hadn't gotten more than two hours of sleep in the preceding two days. One thing I learned on that trip is that I can't sleep on a futon.)
When I saw "Arena" again after my trip, it was interesting to see how fluid their use of the space was. What was edited to look like continuous movement across the landscape was really cut together from various discontinuous shots in different places with characters moving/facing in different directions, or actually being in different parts of the same area when they were supposed to be far apart. And as I said, the same thing was done in the
Flintstones movie. I'm sure it happens all the time, because it's really a relatively small location that often has to pass for something much larger -- even two separate planets in the case of "Arena."
Which was what made it so interesting to see that
Wild Wild West episode that used both the cliff and fortress parts of the location and made pretty good and accurate use of their real spatial relationship.
