Tuesday, June 3, 2014

What happens when you mix DJ Snake & Lil Jon with motion-stabilized Star Trek? (You win the Internet.)

During another one of the Romulans' attacks, the crew discovers that Uhura favors granny panties of the future.

One reason why I used to like glimpsing behind-the-scenes footage of Star Trek: The Next Generation on entertainment news shows in the '90s was because I got to see--from the news cameraman's point of view--what the actors looked like when they shook themselves around on the Enterprise-D bridge or shuttlecraft sets for scenes where the ship was under attack. Without the dramatic camera tilts, the actors looked goofier than Justin Bieber in an oversized baseball cap he stole from Pharrell's hat shop. All that flailing around (without the aid of those massive hydraulic gimbals that the crews of The Hunt for Red October and Crimson Tide were able to afford in order to believably simulate submarine motion) is a huge part of Star Trek acting, which Brent Spiner once described during one of those entertainment news shows as "a cross between Shakespeare and flying around the house with a towel around your neck."

Nowadays, there's motion stabilization software that can take the final versions of Star Trek battle scenes, remove the camera tilts and make those scenes look just like those old behind-the-scenes EPK clips of Star Trek actors shimmying around like crazy-looking white people in a B-52's video. The results of Star Trek getting motion-stabilized are being posted on a subreddit called Star Trek Stabilized. Somebody on YouTube must have noticed that the Star Trek actors' movements without the camera-shaking closely resemble the slo-mo'd thrashing around and twerking during the insane video for the DJ Snake/Lil Jon trap hit "Turn Down for What," which was directed by the Daniels (a.k.a. directors Daniel Kwan, the dancer whose crotch has a life of its own in the video, and Daniel Scheinert).



Now that anonymous somebody has taken Star Trek Stabilized .gifs and mashed them up with "Turn Down for What." The shit is perfect.



All that's missing from "Turn Down for Spock" is the sight of Data yelling "Yeaaah!" and "What!" Lil Jon is the black Jerry Lewis (I keep expecting to hear him yell out "Flavin!" in the middle of a track), and Holodeck Joe Piscopo once taught Data how to do a Jerry Lewis impression, so Data would be Lil Jon/Jerry Lewis in this situation. (Of course, like a lot of soundtrack album collectors, a lot of Star Trek heads are musically narrow-minded, "get off my Salam grass lawn" types who don't understand either trap or the "Turn Down for Spock" video's references to the Daniels' video, so they leave annoying YouTube comments under the "Turn Down for Spock" video like "Music ruined it for me" and "Great compilation, but the soundtrack is crap.")

One of the .gifs in "Turn Down for Spock" is a clip from a Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan battle scene. The title of the classic James Horner score cue during that particular battle scene is "Surprise Attack."



"Surprise Attack" isn't currently in rotation on "AFOS Prime" and "Hall H" on AFOS. But a bunch of other Star Trek II score cues are part of those AFOS blocks, including an alternate version of the Star Trek II epilogue cue that contains neither music Horner had to add at the last minute because of reshoots nor audio of Leonard Nimoy's voiceover (of what is now stupidly known as the Captain's Oath), and that alternate version is worthy of Spock's favorite adjective of "fascinating."

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