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?

Accidental Star Trek Cosplay is my new Tumblr about the fascinating subject of people who unintentionally dress like Star Trek characters

The Star Wars franchise had quite an artistic comeback last winter. Not everyone was over the moon of Yavin about The Force Awakens, but when even my former colleague Richard von Busack--the Metro Newspapers film critic who prefers the Bond movies and Alexander Salkind's Superman movies over the Star Wars franchise as '70s and '80s tentpole entertainment and has found the Star Wars flicks to be too much like bad '70s Sid and Marty Krofft kids' shows--considered parts of The Force Awakens to be genuinely moving and more akin to something like Robin and Marian rather than a Krofft show, you know it's an above-average Star Wars installment.

I found The Force Awakens to be satisfying as well, even though the film totally wasted Gwendoline Christie (Game of Thrones reduced her screen time as Brienne of Tarth last season for this, a role where she never says anything memorable and never takes off her helmet?) and Raid stars Yayan Ruhian and Iko Uwais. You don't hire Mad Dog and Rama to just stand around and become people-shaped snacks for a giant space monster two minutes later. You hire them to smash people's noggins in with their knees and break motherfuckers' legs with their bare hands.

Now it's Star Trek's turn to experience an artistic comeback as a sci-fi multimedia franchise after a major low point, and the timing for its potential comeback is perfect because 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the original Star Trek's premiere on NBC. I don't know why Paramount doesn't acknowledge 1964 as Star Trek's birth year: that was when Lucille Ball, who was breaking ground as the female head of an indie TV studio, took a chance on Star Trek, and Ball's Desilu studio, writer/producer Gene Roddenberry and director Robert Butler began filming "The Cage," the first of two pilot episodes for Star Trek. So Star Trek is actually 52 years old, but who's counting--aside from Poindexter in a basement somewhere in Yonkers, who claims to be the world's only expert on the exact time and date when Roddenberry first started typing up the "Cage" writer's bible about "Captain Robert M. April"?

Paramount has two major Star Trek projects on the horizon: Justin Lin's Star Trek Beyond in July and an hour-long Star Trek anthology show from Hannibal showrunner Bryan Fuller for the CBS All Access streaming service in 2017. I'm a fan of the episodes Lin directed for Community and the Lin movies Better Luck Tomorrow and Fast Five, so I have some faith that Star Trek Beyond won't be atrocious, especially when--in addition to a director who grew up watching the original Star Trek on KCOP and isn't going to turn Trek into godawful 9/11 truther propaganda--the threequel is co-written by cast member Simon Pegg, whose past writing credits include the terrific Cornetto trilogy. The current J.J. Abrams-produced Trek movies appear to be echoing the path of the Mission: Impossible movies: the first one is a highly entertaining action flick, unless you're a hardcore fan of the source material who can't stand the changes that have been made to the material; the totally dumbed-down second one sucks ass; and the threequel appears to be a soft reboot after nobody--not even a lot of the more casual fans of the franchise--would admit to liking the second one, despite the second one making a shitload of money.

Star Trek Beyond (Photo source: Wired)

But I'm more enthusiastic about Trek's return to TV--the medium where Trek can be as cerebral as it wants to be and it doesn't have to dumb itself down in order to satisfy international audiences, who have always been indifferent to Trek movies--because Nicholas Meyer, the director of two of the best Trek flicks, The Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country, is attached to the project. Also, Fuller--who wrote for both Deep Space Nine and Voyager before going on to create several short-lived and weird but enjoyable shows and envisioning, as he was working on those cult favorites, a nicely progressive take on Trek in which Angela Bassett would get to be the captain and Rosario Dawson would be her first officer--is the perfect person to be at the helm.

I like three of the seven Star Wars movies and Genndy Tartakovsky's Star Wars: Clone Wars animated shorts, but my heart belongs to Trek because at its best, Trek has a lot more on its mind than just action sequences and space battles, and it cast Asian actors in major, non-stereotypical roles, long before Star Wars did the same this year when it cast newcomer Kelly Marie Tran in a leading role for the eighth installment. Though I like Trek slightly more than Wars, I don't believe in pitting these two sci-fi franchises--or any other pair of sci-fi franchises--against each other as if they're Drake and Meek Mill, which is why I've rolled my eyes when Scrubs star Donald Faison, a Wars nerd, publicly bashes Trek to create beef between the Wars contingent and the Trek heads, or when Kevin Church, a writer who runs They Boldly Went, a Tumblr about the '60s Trek, uses his Tumblr to bash Doctor Who. A person can like both Wars and Trek at the same time (or Trek and Who at the same time), just like how someone doesn't have to be a Nas person or a Jay Z person. Can't a motherfucker be both? Nas and Hov are about the same quality-wise. They've both had the same amount of above-average material and lousy material. The same is true about Wars and Trek.

That being said, Trek, its first three spinoffs and nine of its first 10 films are also home to some of the ugliest futuristic clothes ever stitched together in Hollywood (the outlier out of the 10 films is First Contact, which marked the first time when, thanks to Deborah Everton, the costume designer for The Craft, Trek's ideas of futuristic attire looked sensible and GQ-ish for a change and they didn't suck). Trek costume designer William Ware Theiss' offbeat work on the '60s show isn't totally ugly. I'm a red-blooded male--I like looking at the female guest stars slinking around in skin-baring costumes created by Theiss. Those costumes are the highlights of Theiss' work. But the uniform tops Theiss designed for Starfleet, especially the male officers, don't look like uniform tops made for a futuristic space Navy. They look more like softball ringer T-shirts. I keep expecting to see Spock run out a bunt. The brightly colored Starfleet uniforms were intended to capitalize on the rise of color TV and showcase NBC's visual advances as the self-proclaimed "Full Color Network," but in 2016, the cartoony and cheap-looking velour shirts just look strange and can occasionally take attention away from the drama during a dead-serious, non-campy and exemplary episode like "Balance of Terror."

At least the '60s uniforms aren't as hideous as costume designer Robert Fletcher's Starfleet uniform redesigns in Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Sure, it's great that female officers finally got to wear pants again, 13 years after "The Corbomite Maneuver" threw away their pants and required them to wear only miniskirts, but otherwise, the Star Trek: TMP outfits are the ugliest clothes in all of Trek. Entertainment Weekly's Darren Franich, who's been reassessing each of the Trek movies because of the franchise's 50th anniversary, came up with a great description for the epic fail that was the TMP revamp of both the uniforms and the Enterprise set design color schemes: the beige, gray, light brown and off-white clothes look like furniture, and the furniture looks like clothes.

If you think GoodFellas and The Wolf of Wall Street are inspirational stories of triumph, you need professional fucking help--and a lobotomy from Thelma Schoonmaker

Thelma Schoonmaker

When I recently wrote about The Wolf of Wall Street, I said, "A lesser filmmaker would rain down judgment on Travis [in Taxi Driver]... or he'd make Rupert [in The King of Comedy] and Belfort... experience a personality change and become remorseful after their short prison time. But not Scorsese. He wants to sit back, let the audience judge Travis/Rupert/Jordan for themselves and see what happens. If many in the audience squirm over their behavior and the repercussions, that's great. If others view them as their hero or spirit animal--like how several Homer Simpsons out there cheered The Wolf of Wall Street on as if it's School of Hard Knockers... to the dismay of those who completely sympathize with Belfort's victims--that's great too. It's weird but great. As for a man named John Hinckley..."

Right-wing film critic Kyle Smith definitely belongs in the "It's weird" category. If you stayed away from Twitter all last week like I've been frequently doing lately, you might have missed the appalled reactions to Smith's umpteenth attempt to troll everyone: "Women are not capable of understanding GoodFellas," his so-ridiculous-it-could-be-easily-mistaken-for-a-ClickHole-parody New York Post op-ed.

It's funny how--like a clown--the New York Post published Smith's op-ed the day after GoodFellas re-entered my consciousness when I stumbled into the film's 25th Anniversary Blu-ray in a rack of Blu-rays at Target, and I became worried that I'd have to double-dip because the new Blu-ray contains a cast and crew commentrak with Scorsese, Ray Liotta, Lorraine Bracco and Paul Sorvino (I was relieved to find out a few days later that my copy of the 2004 GoodFellas DVD contains the same commentrak). In his article, Smith says things like "To a woman, the GoodFellas are lowlifes. To guys, they're hilarious, they're heroes. They rule the roost." Remember Henry Hill's coke-fueled meltdown on his last day as a wiseguy? Yeah, that was really heroic.

Fans of GoodFellas, both male and female, went apeshit on Twitter over Smith's sweeping statement--his op-ed is such a hacky '80s stand-up routine about the differences between men and women that I can practically smell the brick wall--but they went apeshit in sardonic and entertaining ways that made nuance-free, often way-too-shrill-and-humorless-for-my-tastes Twitter worth reading again.

That NY Post GOODFELLAS article akin to having someone explain to you that BREAKING BAD was all about how Walter White is the man.

— Alison Willmore (@alisonwillmore) June 11, 2015

it's not a gender thing, NO ONE is gonna "get" Goodfellas unless theyve already seen the animaniacs pigeon cartoons it was based on

— gregory erskine (@cat_beltane) June 11, 2015

Sexism, sure, but the worst thing about that Kyle Smith article is that he makes Goodfellas sound like Entourage.

— Scott Beggs (@scottmbeggs) June 11, 2015

Hold on. Did @rkylesmith compare #Goodfellas to #Entourage? It would appear that you, sir, are the one who doesn't understand Goodfellas.

— Olivia Raeann (@goudyliv84) June 11, 2015

Shout out to the editor of GOODFELLAS pic.twitter.com/eZovHNFLy6

— Annapurna Pictures (@AnnapurnaPics) June 11, 2015

Pretty sure Thelma Schoonmaker understands Goodfellas considering she fucking edited it.

— Neil Mitchell (@nrm1972) June 11, 2015

Yo @kylesmith, the crew of Goodfellas: Exec. Producer: Barbara DeFina Editor: Thelma Schoonmaker Casting: Ellen Lewis I think they got it

— Charles Clymer (@cmclymer) June 11, 2015

Why do right-wing film critics often misread gangster movies as endorsements of gangster behavior, just like how so many right-wingers misinterpret rap lyrics? Smith's misreading of one of his favorite mob movies as Entourage with guns (I'm looking forward to someone--with way too much time on their hands--mocking the much-ridiculed Smith article by replacing GoodFellas' dialogue with dude-bro dialogue from Entourage) reminds me of when Armond White, who currently writes for the right-wing National Review, panned Better Luck Tomorrow in 2003 because he was dissatisfied with what he thought was the Justin Lin film's endorsement of the Asian American friends' slide into crime and bloodshed. Better Luck wasn't endorsing and fetishizing the murder in the garage towards the end of the movie, you old conservative fuck. Same to you, Mr. Rosso lookalike who prefers his entertainment to be Pollyannaish and, like White, condescendingly accused Lin of selling out his own people by making an "empty and amoral" portrayal of Asian Americans in Better Luck.



What GoodFellas and Better Luck--and in a not-as-gory way, The Wolf of Wall Street--are doing is initially reveling in the allure of a gangster lifestyle (for me, the most alluring part of the gangster lifestyle in Better Luck was Roger Fan's sociopathic character beating up at a party a racist jock who needed his ass kicked). Those films have to do so in order to sell you on why these characters are attracted to crime--Scorsese once described the Copacabana sequence in GoodFellas as a moment when the gangster lifestyle seduces Henry--but then they kick the seat from under you and switch to focusing on the downsides of such a lifestyle. Unlike the boring lifestyle porn of Entourage, those films intend to undermine the gangster fantasy they introduced.

GoodFellas excels at its hard right-hand turn into the downsides of its characters' behavior by not stupidly opting for the bad-movie-screenwriting route of having a character--or an on-the-nose pop song--flat out say, "This is bad, mmm-kay" (Scorsese's terrific use of existing songs to comment on a scene, but only "in an oblique way," was partly why existing songs from GoodFellas like "Monkey Man" were all over the playlist for the now-defunct AFOS block "Rock Box"). The pre-MTV Films, pre-DJ Shadow cut of Better Luck excels at that hard right-hand turn as well. The MTV Films cut? Uh, not so much. Lin, perhaps more rattled by Mr. Rosso's outburst at Sundance than he'd let on, tweaked the ending in the MTV Films version so that the characters, including a pre-Fast and the Furious Han Seoul-Oh, ended up being a little more remorseful about their actions.

Of course Smith wouldn't be aware that a woman edited GoodFellas because he strikes me as an idiot who never reads the credits on the boxes of things. Last time I checked, reading the credits of things is one of the requirements of being a film critic. The outcry over the New York Post article is a good time--hell, it's always a good time--to reassess or pay more attention to longtime Scorsese editor Thelma Schoonmaker's pivotal role in making GoodFellas a classic of adrenalized pacing, rock n' roll filmmaking and moral ambiguity (my favorite line from Schoonmaker about the editing of GoodFellas was her reply to someone's bafflement over how such a demure and unassuming lady could be the cutter of Scorsese's most violent works: "Ah, but they aren't violent until I've edited them").

Scorsese and Schoonmaker's partnership ranks as one of the all-time greatest director/editor partnerships. Without Schoonmaker in the editing suite, I don't think Scorsese would have been able to take four hours' worth of material he shot for The Wolf of Wall Street and whittle all that material down to three hours. Yeah, three hours can be demanding on someone with a weak bladder, but that's why I never buy any beverages at the movie theater or drink anything before the feature presentation.

The outcry over the New York Post article is also a good time to remember that all Rupert Murdoch's right-wing daily is good for is lining a bird cage. One of the 4,080 things I learned from listening to Public Enemy in its prime was to never take anything published by the New York Post seriously. Like Chuck D said, it ain't worth the paper it's printed on.

Thanks to AFOS shuffle mode, I wonder what a Batman sandwich or a Star Trek sandwich would taste like

Even though it can occasionally be a hassle to try to keep track of 17 hours and 28 minutes of music, which is the average amount of music I calculated from the current total track lengths of the eight different playlists I keep in rotation for the "AFOS Prime" block (plus the extra hours of music that make up the five other blocks on the AFOS station schedule), running AFOS is a pretty simple task. I just hit "Shuffle" and Live365.com does the rest.

Often, weird things I have no control over take place during the shuffle mode I've set for AFOS, which is how I've regularly referred to the station since 2007. It's AFOS. No bloody FOS or FFOS. It's always been AFOS. I've always wanted to shorten the station name to just AFOS because the acronym evokes the four-call-letter names of the terrestrial radio stations I grew up listening to: KFRC, KMEL and so on. But instead of a K as the first letter, it's an A. Also, the acronym can stand for many different phrases besides A Fistful of Soundtracks, and I once jotted down a list of 12 of them. Examples include "Ample Focus on Scores," "All Fantastic Original Scores" and my personal favorite, "Asians Fucking Owning Shit."

Anyway, shuffle mode causes all these fantastic original scores to form either unintentional sets of two or three tracks by the same composer or "sandwiches," which is how I refer to cases where two tracks written by the same composer or emanating from the same movie or TV franchise appear to be sandwiching a completely unrelated track in the "last played" section of the AFOS Live365 site. I often take screen shots of these accidental sets or sandwiches.

Star Trek sandwiches happen frequently on AFOS. Mmm, Star Trek sandwich. I wonder how a Star Trek sandwich would taste. Maybe it would be like Chief O'Brien's "Altair sandwich" with no mustard from Deep Space Nine. Some Star Trek head who can't spell has defined an Altair sandwich as "three kinds of meet [sic], two cheeses, and any number of other additions." Whattup, future Super Bowl Sunday dish.

Batman sandwiches also happen a lot on AFOS. I wonder what a Batman sandwich would taste like. I figure it would be like the Batman Diner Double Beef at McDonald's in Hong Kong.

(Photo source: Geekologie)

Hold up. An egg in a burger?! I hate eggs if they're not scrambled, and even though it's scrambled in this case, eggs don't belong in burgers. I'll pass.

Occasionally, there are spaghetti western sandwiches on "AFOS Prime." Is there such a thing as a spaghetti western sandwich? Apparently, there is. Somebody blogged about a spaghetti western sandwich shop in Rome. Some of its sandwiches are named after characters from Terence Hill and Bud Spencer's Trinity movies.

(Photo source: Afar)

Here are more screen shots of shuffle mode weirdness I previously collected in 2011, joined by some new and never-before-posted screen shots of more weird music sandwiches and combinations.

There have been unintentional time travel movie theme double shots.

Mel Gibson, who's so famously fond of Jews, gets followed by a Jew.

Yeah, I like "Eye of the Tiger" too, Live365, but I don't like it as much as you do apparently.

Same thing with the movie Wild Things...

... or the end credits music from the first Thor flick.

"The Whitest Block Ever" on AFOS is being renamed "Color Box"

The annual Oscar luncheon attended by all the acting nominees will be so white this year the menu will experience an 80 percent increase in mayonnaise. (Photo source: YOMYOMF)

The AFOS weekday morning block name "The Whitest Block Ever" is supposed to be a joke. The block is far from the whitest thing ever. It consists of original themes and score cues from films and TV shows directed by Asian American filmmakers and other directors of color. Jokey name aside, the two-hour 10am block is a way to celebrate these directors' efforts to break into and succeed (or in the case of Asian American YouTube content creators like Wong Fu Productions, to persevere on their own) in a largely white--and often discriminatory--industry that sadly doesn't reflect how most of the rest of America is headed towards becoming a more diverse place.

Bear McCreary's "Courthouse Brawl" and "Stop Running" from Human Target are part of the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist because African American director Kevin Hooks directed the Human Target episode that contains those cues, and the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme is in there because Debbie Allen directed the Fresh Prince pilot. Black, Latino and Asian directors aren't the only directors who are celebrated in "The Whitest Block Ever." BC Smith and ULALI's "Forgive Our Fathers Suite" from Native American director Chris Eyre's 1998 work Smoke Signals is part of the playlist, so Native American directors are celebrated as well.

David Oyelowo and his Selma director Ava DuVernay

But when no actors of color were nominated for this year's Oscars--an overly long-winded award show I stopped caring about years ago because of how frustrating its annual snubs are--and it resulted in the 2015 Oscar acting categories literally being the whitest block ever, the name "The Whitest Block Ever" isn't so amusing anymore. In fact, it's become rather depressing. David Oyelowo's quietly powerful performance as Dr. Martin Luther King during his non-oratorial moments in Selma was overlooked by the 94 percent white, 77 percent male Academy, as was director Ava DuVernay's work on that riveting historical drama, which received from the Academy only Best Picture and Best Original Song nominations. Had DuVernay been nominated for Best Director, she would have been the first black female director to be nominated in that category. I like what Selma co-star Wendell Pierce said about moviegoers' frustrations with the snubs: "The people's reaction speaks for itself. To me, it's what the reaction would have been had Marlon Brando not been nominated for Godfather, if Rod Steiger had not been nominated for The Pawnbroker, if De Niro hadn't been nominated for Taxi Driver. That's what you felt this morning when David Oyelowo was not nominated for an Oscar."

Also, the time for a name change for "The Whitest Block Ever" has been long overdue. So because of those two reasons, I'm dumping the "Whitest Block Ever" name and renaming the 10am block. "Color Box" begins life under its new name with a new addition to the playlist. That addition is the song from the film that's the very thing on the minds of those who have trended #OscarsSoWhite, a tune that won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song last Sunday and is now up for an Oscar: "Glory," the anthemic Selma end title theme that ties the activism in Selma and Montgomery together with the activism in Ferguson and reteamed Selma cast member Common with John Legend, his guest vocalist from one of my favorite Common tracks, "They Say."





You can call it what you want to: "Oh, the Selma snubs were because of the negative publicity created by the smear campaign by LBJ's camp about Selma's portrayal of LBJ" or "Oh, it's because Paramount bungled Selma's Oscar campaign and didn't time it so well." But the Selma snubs are simply industry ignorance about anyone who's neither white nor male. The snubs are one of several ways that white Hollywood basically sends a message that writers and directors of color and their stories--especially stories that are told from the points of view of people of color for a change and aren't marred by the presence of a white savior character to misguidedly make the stories more palatable to white audiences--matter little to them.

It's the same kind of industry ignorance that causes a so-called reporter at the Television Critics Association winter press tour to ask both Eddie Huang--the celebrity chef whose book about growing up in a Taiwanese family, Fresh Off the Boat, has been adapted into an eagerly anticipated and promising-looking ABC sitcom where he provides voiceovers as the off-screen narrator--and the Fresh Off the Boat cast the following question: "I love the Asian culture. And I was just talking about the chopsticks, and I just love all that. Will I get to see that? Or will it be more Americanized?" I would have loved for Huang, who proved twice that he's not one for mincing his words, first in a Vulture tell-all piece about his frustrations with ABC's sitcom version of his own childhood and then again later on in that same TCA panel, to have replied with "That's a stupid fucking question" or--had that person in the audience not been female--"You love chopsticks, right? How about you go shove one up your ass? You'd love that, right, B?"

So let's set aside those two depressing headlines from last week for now and look at where the new AFOS block name "Color Box" comes from. I named "Beat Box," the 7am AFOS block, after an Art of Noise track. That's why it's spelled "Beat Box," not "Beatbox." The "Beat Box" name continues an AFOS block name template that began with "Rock Box," a now-defunct AFOS block that consisted of existing songs that were used in movies by the likes of Martin Scorsese and Edgar Wright and shows ranging from The Wire to The Boondocks. "Beat Box" has double meaning: there's the connection to the Art of Noise instrumental and then there's the fact that the block is literally a box of beats on the Live365 Broadcast Scheduler grid. "Color Box," another continuation of the station's "Blablabla Box" name template, also has double meaning: it refers to both the directors of color whose works are being represented from 10am to noon on AFOS and the color boxes in Photoshop and Windows XP, which contain as much diversity as the "Color Box" playlist.

What else is in the future for "Color Box"? I'm adding a musical number from The Book of Life, Mexican animator Jorge R. Gutierrez's recent 3D-animated feature film about Día de los Muertos, to "Color Box" rotation later this month. And if Justin Lin--who's represented on the "Color Box" playlist by Semiautomatic's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, Brian Tyler's score cues from Finishing the Game, Ludwig Göransson's score cues from the Lin-directed Community episode "Modern Warfare" and a few themes from Fast Five and Furious 6--doesn't end up exiting the 2016 Star Trek threequel that Bad Robot beamed him up to direct after Roberto Orci was kicked out of the captain's chair, maybe some Star Trek score cues will be added to "Color Box" some time in the future. What would be especially cool is having those cues sit beside the Fresh Prince theme, Eric B. & Rakim's Juice theme and Dre and Snoop's Deep Cover theme.

Sure, I love it whenever a person of color like Lin directs Star Trek (before the hiring of Lin, Next Generation regular LeVar Burton and Voyager regular Roxann Dawson both got their starts as TV directors helming episodes of their respective shows). But after the empty-headed Star Trek Into Darkness, a misfire that proved how ill-suited the Bad Robot version of Star Trek is in handling terrorism and war, two subjects Deep Space Nine previously tackled with much more nuance, Star Trek needs to be cerebral again. Bad Robot's own show Fringe, which had its protagonists constantly thinking their way through the sci-fi predicament of the week, was closer to the cerebral and exploratory spirit of the '60s Trek and its spinoff shows than Bad Robot's Trek movies themselves have been. I like Lin as both a director and an Asian American creative mind who's both conscious of and candid about industry racism, but his signature movies have been a high-school gangster melodrama with an action-flick aesthetic (Better Luck Tomorrow, still my favorite movie of his) and four action flicks that were sometimes flavored with gangster-melodrama elements (the Fast and the Furious sequels). The latter isn't exactly the cerebral direction I've been wanting Trek to return to. I'd be more thrilled about Hannibal showrunner and former Voyager writer Bryan Fuller--who always wanted to cast Angela Bassett as a starship captain and Rosario Dawson as her first officer, which I'd watch in a heartbeat--getting the chance to helm a new Trek project for TV, the medium where Trek works best. But we shall see what happens with this Trek threequel. At least Lin--who would be reunited with his Better Luck Tomorrow cast member John Cho--in the director's chair is far better than allowing Orci the crazy 9/11 truther to direct. I'm glad Paramount basically said, "Beam us up, Scotty. There's no intelligent life on Orci's planet."

"The Whitest Block Ever," a new AFOS weekday block, begins Monday, April 29

The start of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month is the perfect time to introduce AFOS' new late morning block, which will consist of original themes and score cues from films done by Asian American directors and other filmmakers of color (like Spike Lee, pictured above with frequent musical collaborator Terence Blanchard during a Miracle at St. Anna scoring session) who have worked on films or TV series episodes I've admired or enjoyed. I'm calling this block "The Whitest Block Ever."

Justin Lin, a co-founder of the much-buzzed-about YOMYOMF Network and director of the upcoming Fast & Furious 6 (which was scored by Lucas Vidal instead of Brian Tyler, who's pictured above with Lin), will be represented on the "Whitest Block Ever" playlist by Tyler's scores from Finishing the Game and Fast Five and Akiko Carver and DJ Ropstyle's original music from Better Luck Tomorrow, particularly "Eat with Your Eyes."

And if you tune in to "The Whitest Block Ever" and wonder why hip-hop producer CHOPS' "Chinese School" is on the playlist, "Chinese School," the opening title theme for the 2007 sports comedy Ping Pong Playa, is on there to represent the work of Jessica Yu, who directed Ping Pong Playa and is best remembered for her 1997 Oscar acceptance speech, in which she joked about her Oscar outfit costing more than the documentary she won for. The decision to censor characters' F-bombs with basketball dribble sound FX in Ping Pong Playa sort of ruined that film for me. (Remember the original Bad News Bears? Now imagine that flick with some of the shit-talking covered up by baseball bat crack sound FX--that's how dumb the decision to self-censor the dialogue in Ping Pong Playa was.) But I enjoyed both CHOPS' original tunes during Ping Pong Playa and a lot of Yu's other works, like the West Wing episodes she directed, the 1992 short film Sour Death Balls and the 2012 short doc Meet Mr. Toilet.

The current generation of Asian American YouTube content producers will also be represented during "The Whitest Block Ever" by some of George Shaw's score from the 2010 Wong Fu Productions/Ryan Higa collabo Agents of Secret Stuff. "The Whitest Block Ever," which celebrates the efforts of both these YouTube stars and the filmmakers of color who must have inspired them (and in the case of Lin, are now partnering up with them as part of YOMYOMF), airs at 10am-noon on AFOS every weekday, starting Monday.

Here's one more little taste of "The Whitest Block Ever": the Robert Rodriguez/Tito & Tarantula theme from both Grindhouse's fake Machete trailer and Rodriguez's first Machete movie (Machete returns to entertainingly piss off much of the far right again in Machete Kills on September 13).

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.

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Fast Five (gear two)

Because Universal was founded 100 years ago today by nickelodeon owner Carl Laemmle, I've chosen to focus today's "Ask for Babs" mix-related blog post (which is the last of these posts) not on an article about a blockbuster from Universal's past like Jaws or Back to the Future but on a piece about a Universal film franchise that hints at the studio's future, as well as the future of American cinema in general.

Boston Globe film critic Wesley Morris' 2011 essay "Fast forward" insightfully discusses why Universal's Fast and the Furious movies, including the Justin Lin-directed series highlight Fast Five, are so special, particularly to moviegoers of color like myself and Morris who have always wanted to see someone make some good action films that reflect the multiracial world we live in and opt to treat "race as a fact of life as opposed to a social problem or an occasion for self-congratulation":

Go on and laugh your Benetton, Kumbaya, Kashi, quinoa laugh, but it’s true: The most progressive force in Hollywood today is the “Fast and Furious” movies. They’re loud, ludicrous, and visually incoherent. They’re also the last bunch of movies you’d expect to see in the same sentence as “incredibly important.” But they are—if only because they feature race as a fact of life as opposed to a social problem or an occasion for self-congratulation. (And this doesn’t even account for the gay tension between the male leads, and the occasional crypto-lesbian make-out.) 

The fifth installment, “Fast Five,” comes out Friday, and unlike most movies that feature actors of different races, the mixing is neither superficial nor topical. It has been increasingly thorough as the series goes on—and mostly unacknowledged. That this should seem so strange, so rare, merely underscores how far Hollywood has drifted from the rest of culture. 

The movies have often dealt with race, of course, and when they do they tend to treat it as a serious and unwieldy problem... 

That is the loose history of race as a subject in Hollywood: the province of a liberal white industry that wanted to promote fairness and equality, often at the expense of realism and sometimes at the cost of the black characters’ humanness. Movies about race still tend to be self-congratulatory (“Crash”) or mine tension for comedy, the way “48 Hours” and its offspring have... 

The “Fast and Furious” movies, by contrast, are free of this angst. They’re basically a prolonged party for a ring of street-racing urban car thieves... 

It was a place the movies had never precisely seen before: gangs of young people of different races unified by automotive exhilaration. There were blacks, Asians of all kinds, Mexicans, Michelle Rodriguez, and whatever Vin Diesel and Jordana Brewster are... 

Since then, the series has spiraled even further into a world that’s post-racial, post-American, post-almost every category you can think of, including coherent... “Fast Five” sends the gang to Brazil, brings back Tyrese, and invites the half-black, half-Samoan Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson to chase Brian and Dom around Rio... 

It’s a strange thing to see these movies as a novelty in 2011, and not because Barack Obama is president. The series has grossed just under $1 billion, and for the young and youngish people who’ve bought tickets (and rented and downloaded it), this is just how the world looks. And it’s how a lot of pop culture looks, too. Last February’s Grammys telecast was a cross-racial bonanza, whose highlight was the team-up of Janelle Monáe, B.o.B, and Bruno Mars, two black artists and one half-Hispanic, half-Filipino, all popular, who, for one evening, tinkered with pop, hip-hop, and rock so that the music they made no longer had a genre. 

The movies, meanwhile, have become lucrative in their segregation. While most major-studio productions feature white casts, Tyler Perry has capitalized on the void... From this, the major studios have taken perhaps the wrong lesson: more all-black movies. It’s a development that appears to obviate a need for more integrated ones... 

You wouldn’t draw much of a popular audience, mixed or otherwise, to a movie about race, of course. And that is the accidental genius of the “Fast and Furious” movies. They’re not about race. Race—and casualness about race—is just their hallmark. They’re about something else, a great American unifying principle: sexy cars that everybody wants to drive. 

Even (or maybe especially) when they’re demolishing the Dominican Republic or tearing up Brazil, these films couldn’t be more American. If we don’t know where race is headed in this country, or where in the movies it ought to be, perhaps we should climb aboard. In the end, it might not be Barack Obama who drives us into the future. It may just be Vin Diesel and The Rock.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

And now, something interesting someone else wrote about a work that's represented in my "Ask for Babs" mix: Fast Five

Director Justin Lin and Vin Diesel on the set of Fast Five.

Last May, playwright Philip W. Chung of the You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog (and upcoming YouTube channel) reflected on the box-office success of director (and You Offend Me founder) Justin Lin's Fast Five and what it could mean for future films directed by Asian Americans. Since Fast Five's release, another Asian American director, Step Up 2 the Streets helmer Jon M. Chu, was also handed the reins of an action movie franchise, Paramount's G.I. Joe, which had a mediocre first installment (The Rise of Cobra from Mummy director Stephen Sommers). Now we'll just wait and see if G.I. Joe: Retaliation, which is directed by someone who grew up with G.I. Joe and wanted to make the second installment more closely resemble the beloved '80s G.I. Joe comics and cartoon, will live up to its exciting trailers and outstrip its predecessor in the same way that Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan compensated big-time for the mistakes of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Most sequels that are the fifth installment of a film franchise show signs of creative fatigue. But thanks to a bigger emphasis on the heist flick elements of the original Fast and the Furious and perhaps additional star power (Dwayne Johnson, who, between Fast Five and G.I. Joe: Retaliation, has turned into Hollywood's go-to guy for rescuing critically drubbed action franchises), the fourth Fast and the Furious sequel became one of the few fifth installments to receive better reviews than the first film and perform so well at the box office:

Hollywood has always been behind the rest of the arts when it comes to reflecting the world in which we live. You look at other fields like music where out and proud Asian Americans like our friends Far East Movement and Bruno Mars are at the top of their game and it’s clear it’s only a matter of time before the movies have to start reflecting that reality too or it’ll go the way of fax machines, VHS and CDs. Hopefully, the success of something like Fast Five will give Hollywood a big push in the right direction. 

But where this reality is truly reflected is online where the young and Asian American generation of YouTube stars like Wong Fu, KevJumba and Ryan Higa are already the rock stars and pioneers… 

It reminds me of the early days of Hollywood when most people dismissed the new medium of motion pictures as a fad and something that was beneath them (sound familiar?). It was Jewish immigrants (or children of Jewish immigrants) who became the pioneers and leaders in what would become one of the largest industries in the world because they got involved from the beginning when no one else would and saw the potential that others didn’t. 

Well, we’re in the same place today with YouTube and new media and Asian Americans are the new Jews—we were able to see and utilize the potential in this new form before others did and now we have the power to really create a new model that can potentially transform the business. The only difference is that back then, the Jews who ran the studios had to “hide” their cultural identity and make films that did the same because they didn’t think the mass audience would be supportive (and they were most likely correct). But this new generation of Asian Americans are proud of their identity and they know their multicultural audience is ready and willing to embrace that too. And that’s a very good thing. 

So let me proclaim right here that it might just be the most exciting time to be an Asian American in this crazy business. To see the success of a film like Fast Five, to see the FM boys move up the charts with each new song, to see these young YouTube guys being greeted with Beatles-like fandom wherever they go, to see so many TV pilots this season featuring Asian characters—it does feel like a perfect storm is brewing and it’s fucking exciting! Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. 

Am I saying everything is perfect and we’ve made it? Of course not. No one knows more than those of us in the trenches the real obstacles we face everyday (Yes, Justin still gets mistaken for the Chinese delivery guy on the sets of his own movies), but I think no one else also knows better that the world is such that we now have the power to affect real change. We have to get out of this 20th Century mentality of victimhood—boo hoo, Hollywood doesn’t care about us. So fucking what? It’s the 21st Century now. It’s time to move beyond that. We’ve been on the defensive for too long. It’s time to play some kick ass offense and we now have the players to do that.

Ask for Babs (Universal 100th Anniversary Mix) by Dj Afos on Mixcloud

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: The Skyflakes, "Talk About Today"

Song: "Talk About Today" by the Bay Area-based Filipino American indie band The Skyflakes
Released: 2001
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's featured in frequent Fast and the Furious sequel director Justin Lin's 2002 breakthrough film Better Luck Tomorrow, a landmark moment in Asian American indie cinema that I referenced in the following webcomic.

Which moment in Better Luck does "Talk About Today" appear?: It turns up during the sequence where Ben (Parry Shen), an overachieving teen athlete striving to get into both an Ivy League school and the pants of unattainable cheerleader Stephanie (Karin Anna Cheung), hangs out with Stephanie (the below photo is from this sequence) and teaches her how to shoot a basket, which she nails on her first try.

The tune, which is about a snotty overachiever who can't let go of high school ("That's him/Still living in his glory days/Oh no that's him/Still talking about his SAT's"), was a perfect song choice for this film because "Talk About Today" foreshadows what Ben and the band of wannabe gangsters he's fallen in with will be like after college. I think they'll act as if high school never ended and continue to be the same amoral, power-hungry hustlers we saw on display in Better Luck, as hinted by laconic, Tim Riggins-ish Han's post-high school career choice of illegal street racing in Lin's Fast and the Furious installments (Sung Kang's Han character in those films--like the upcoming Fast Five--is the same character Kang played in Better Luck).

As someone who's seen The Skyflakes perform live and also carries around "Bad Thoughts" and "Things to Do" in the iPod, I was jazzed to hear one of their tracks turn up during Better Luck. I can't help liking a Fil-Am band that consists of "movie buffs with a sense of humor," according to an SFGate article that mentions the tracks they've written about movie characters (but the characters they chose aren't typical ones that are written about by most bands--"Cellar Door" is about Donnie Darko, while "Now What Do We Do?" references the Ellen Burstyn character in Requiem for a Dream). The band's Cardigans-esque penchant for dark lyrics underneath a deceptively sunny sound is enjoyable too.

Hear The Skyflakes choose to live in the now at my SwiftFM site.