Star Trek 101 and beyond

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock

I have a couple of confessions to make. I run a Tumblr about accidental Star Trek cosplay, but as an adult, I've never cosplayed as anybody, and I don't plan to ever do so. It's just not for me, even though I admire the artistry that goes into a lot of professional cosplayers' recreations of their favorite fictional characters. Also, I do love Star Trek for its progressiveness and the banter between the actors, particularly the original cast members, and I'm enough of a fan that I could rattle off some of the names of authors who received credit for writing the '60s episodes, even though Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry heavily rewrote their shit ("The Enemy Within"?: I Am Legend author Richard Matheson; the episode with Andrea the sexy android?: that was a Robert Bloch joint), but I haven't watched every single thing with Star Trek's name on it.

As a kid, I knew that the third season of the original Star Trek was mostly trash (the budget was clearly slashed, and the actors were told to compensate for the budget cuts by constantly acting as if they were starring in what we now call a telenovela), so I've avoided watching most of that final season. I skipped most of the sixth and seventh seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation when they first aired on syndicated TV, and I did the same with most of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's first season, so there's a whole bunch of Next Generation and DS9 episodes I have yet to catch for the first time. I got bored with Star Trek: Voyager and quit after the first season, although I would occasionally check out a later Voyager episode like "Memorial."

The sci-fi franchise, which celebrated its 50th anniversary earlier this year, has produced so many hours of episodic TV and spawned so many feature films that I now see how it would be intimidating, especially for anybody whose familiarity with Star Trek is limited to the 2009 J.J. Abrams movie, to decide which episodes of the '60s version (or any of its spinoffs) to stream if you want to further understand what all the fuss over Star Trek is about. I just realized how daunting it would be for a newbie to step into that shared universe when I recently told a Harry Potter fan who happens to be the wife of a friend at my apartment building that I found Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone to be a tedious movie when I watched it on DVD in 2002, and it put me off Harry Potter for good.

The friend's wife said she felt the same way about the subject of my Tumblr, Star Trek. So she proposed a deal: she would finally watch a Star Trek episode or movie if I put aside my disdain for the first Potter movie and agreed to watch the rest of the Potter movie franchise. I said, "It's a deal!" The only problem is that I have a novel manuscript that's kind of in the way, so how the fuck can I find the time to watch all eight hours and 17 minutes of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (08/21/2012): Scooby-Doo!, Gravity Falls, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Adventure Time

Looks like Roger Clemens is totally ready for the minors. (Photo source: Haunted Realm)

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

After burning off in a three-week period the first 15 episodes of Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated's second and most likely final season, Cartoon Network has put Warner Bros. Animation's surprisingly clever update of Scooby back on hiatus again. But at least the half-season ended with three of the show's strongest episodes to date.

"Wrath of the Krampus" breaks from the formula of "masked menace terrorizes Crystal Cove/gang tries to trap culprit/gang unmasks culprit." "Heart of Evil" is a fan-servicey (for older viewers who grew up on Hanna-Barbera shows, that is) but enjoyable crossover that unites three different Hanna-Barbera properties: the Scooby franchise, the adults from Jonny Quest and the bionic dog Dynomutt (Frank Welker), whose partner Blue Falcon now speaks in a silly Christian Bale-style rasp supplied by Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes voice actor Troy Baker. Finally, "Theater of Doom," was, unless I'm mistaken, co-written by the same Joe Flaherty who killed it on SCTV in the '70s and '80s and served as ornery dad to frequent Mystery Incorporated guest star Linda Cardellini on Freaks and Geeks.

"Theater of Doom," a.k.a. Chapter 41 (with 11 more chapters to go, starting on God-knows-when on Cartoon Network), mocks bad community theater with the same flair SCTV displayed in its parodies of bad TV and B-movies, so I wouldn't be surprised if that really was Count Floyd who worked on the script with Paul Rugg, the writer/voice actor from Animaniacs and Freakazoid. The half-season finale checks in on Vincent Van Ghoul (Maurice LaMarche), the washed-up horror movie star character originally voiced by Vincent Price on Hanna-Barbera's 13 Ghosts of Scooby-Doo, and ominously predicts that "the dog dies" and will be corrupted Gollum-style by the Planispheric Disk before dying. But which dog? Scooby or his non-verbal girlfriend Nova?

The best of these three episodes has to be "Wrath of the Krampus" because of its delightful major twist: the meddling kids are the culprit for once. A series of monster attacks on Crystal Cove's rowdiest preteens is revealed at the end of "Wrath of the Krampus" to be a ruse orchestrated by Fred and his friends to distract Professor Pericles and his fellow conspirators Mr. E and the Sternums from getting their hands on the Planispheric Disk.

Other than his expertise in setting traps, Fred isn't terribly bright. That's the other trait besides the knack for traps that Fred inherited from his equally dim birth parents Brad and Judy (a.k.a. the Sternums), so I initially couldn't buy that Fred could be capable of being several steps ahead of the four conspirators in "Wrath of the Krampus." Then I remembered the show is set in a heightened reality where dogs can talk and are saved from death by bionic implants, criminals are able to fly because of rocket packs and ancient artifacts cause animals to turn evil, so the gang's ability to outsmart Pericles' team with the help of basically everyone in Crystal Cove makes perfect sense within the Doo-niverse.

***

In "Irrational Treasure," Gravity Falls finally delves into a part of its mythology I've been looking forward to: the history of the strange title town where Dipper and Mabel have been forced by their parents to spend their summer vacation. Looking for a way to take mean girl Pacifica Northwest down a peg after she insults Mabel's tastes for quirky sweaters and nacho earrings and hurts her feelings during the town's Pioneer Day festivities, Dipper and Mabel find their ammo when they uncover evidence that Pacifica's great-great-grandfather Nathaniel Northwest, the supposed Gravity Falls founder, was a fraud. In doing so, the Pines twins stumble onto a government conspiracy revolving around the actual town founder, Quentin Trembley (series creator Alex Hirsch), whose achievements were erased from history because of his disastrous term as the eighth-and-a-half President of the United States.

"Irrational Treasure" writers Hirsch and Tim McKeon go crazy with their alternate history of America, which provides hilarious explanations for Abraham Lincoln's top hat (it concealed a giant head that was shaped like a hand), Mount Rushmore (it's in the Easter egg below) and the replacement of Trembley with William Henry Harrison. In the top-secret government film watched by Dipper and Mabel, the Chris Parnell-voiced narrator tells of an out-of-it leader whose nutso behavior--reminiscent of Parnell's Dr. Spaceman character and his non sequiturs on 30 Rock--earned him the moniker of "America's Silliest President" ("He waged war on pancakes, appointed six babies to the Supreme Court and issued the De-pants-ipation Proclamation").

The gags about silly presidential behavior and old town laws that allow citizens to marry woodpeckers dovetail nicely with a story about Mabel learning that it's okay to be herself and that weirdness has its advantages. Without her weirdness, Mabel wouldn't have uncovered all the evidence that she and Dipper would use to discredit the Northwests. And without all those absurdist gags and hidden messages (speaking of which, this week's cryptogram--"v. kofiryfh givnyovb"--is "E. Pluribus Trembley") or the entertaining way the show deploys those gags to explore the challenges of growing up as a misfit, Gravity Falls would just be a standard Disney Channel show, as forgettable as the '90s "TGIF"-style live-action sitcoms all over the channel's lineup.

***

Damage Control, a construction firm that specializes in fixing the property damage caused by battles between superheroes and supervillains, was Marvel's clever response to the question "How do the regular joes in New York City deal with the aftermath of those battles?" Comics critic David Brothers once noted that Damage Control and its solo miniseries of the same name grounded the Marvel Universe in the real world and re-emphasized the role of the common man in a universe full of gods and superhumans. "Damage Control was a fun twist and a gentle reminder of just how interesting and off-kilter Marvel Comics could get away with being," wrote Brothers.

The firm was one of the most memorable creations of the late comics and animation scriptwriter Dwayne McDuffie, who receives a nice tribute and dedication from his former Ben 10 colleagues, the Man of Action collective, in the collective's otherwise drab Ultimate Spider-Man episode "Damage," which has Spidey and his S.H.I.E.L.D. teammates going undercover as Damage Control workers to apprehend the Wrecking Crew, a team of demolition-themed baddies. Man of Action and "Damage" co-writer Scott Mosier's version of Damage Control reimagines account executive character John Porter as the firm's founder and CEO, renames him "Mac" in honor of McDuffie and gives him McDuffie's face (and as a shout-out to McDuffie's Static Shock animated series, former Static Shock cast member Kevin Michael Richardson voices Mac).

Mac Porter, the head of the Damage Control team on Ultimate Spider-Man, was modeled after Dwayne McDuffie (1962-2011), who created the team for Marvel in the late '80s.