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.

A fan-made Star Trek: The Motion Picture trailer from 2013 does a better job of selling Robert Wise's mixed bag of a film than the original 1979 trailers did

(Photo source: My Star Trek Scrapbook)

Mission Log is an excellent Star Trek podcast I've previously written about here and more recently here. Hosts Ken Ray and John Champion have undertaken an ambitious mission: to analyze every single episode of Star Trek and its TV and movie spinoffs, from 1965 to 2005 (I'm not sure if they'll reach 2009 and 2013, but I already know bits and pieces of what Ray thinks of 2013, and I assume a lot of it is going to be him saying, "Orciiiiiiii!").

The two Star Trek fans want to find out which older Trek episodes stand the test of time, especially in the age of both the antihero on cable and more sophisticated sci-fi shows like former Deep Space Nine writer Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica, former DS9 writer Ira Steven Behr's much-missed creation Alphas and the current BBC America hit Orphan Black. Anyone who either currently writes for TV or is, like me, considering transitioning to that kind of career ought to listen to Mission Log. The audience gets to learn a lot from Ray and Champion about the things episodic TV from any era does effectively and the things episodic TV--especially TV in the '60s, long before the game-changing, novelistic Hill Street Blues or Game of Thrones--didn't do so effectively. For instance, if the '60s Trek were made for TV today, Edith Keeler's death at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" would have deeply affected Kirk's character for the rest of the series, and exploring his grief and guilt over Edith's death would have been a much better move than how the '60s Trek handled her death afterward, and that was to oddly brush Edith aside and completely forget about her as if she were yet another dead Cartwright bride.

Ray and Champion have reached the '80s Trek feature films by this point, and after they did their analysis of Robert Wise's Star Trek: The Motion Picture last week (Ray doesn't think the 1979 film stands the test of time, while Champion thinks it still does), a Mission Log listener from Norcross, Georgia named Alex Bales posted on the podcast's Facebook wall a fan-made TMP trailer he produced. Unless it's made by the people behind the Screen Junkies channel's Honest Trailers series or Ivan Guerrero, I don't care for fan-made movie trailers, but Bales' trailer is a rare fan-made trailer I actually like--and even more so than the 1979 film itself.



TMP is a mixed bag of a film. It's a rehash of concepts from both the 1967 Trek episode "The Changeling" and 2001: A Space Odyssey that were better executed in those '60s productions. TMP ripped off 2001's "evolution into a superior life form" finale (the film even recruited 2001 visual FX genius Douglas Trumbull, who was also involved with Close Encounters, a smash hit that, along with the success of Star Wars, spurred Paramount to rush a Trek feature film into production). I get that Wise and Gene Roddenberry wanted to make the last great old-fashioned space epic (TMP was one of the last Hollywood epics that opened with an overture before flashing the studio logo), and while I kind of appreciate how TMP chose to emulate the contemplative and moody 2001 instead of the then-frequently duplicated Star Wars, plopping crowd-pleasing heroes like Kirk and Spock and quippy secondary characters like McCoy and Scotty into the clinical tone of 2001 is like asking Kendrick Lamar to rhyme over polka music. It's not going to work.

We want to see Kirk, Spock and McCoy wittily sniping at each other and debating over serious ethical dilemmas or fighting their way out of trouble like they frequently did on the '60s show (and would later frequently do in Nicholas Meyer's superior Trek films). We don't want to see them gawking silently for 15 minutes at pothead-friendly laser light show FX. Even Wise's previous '70s sci-fi procedural, the equally clinically toned but much superior Andromeda Strain, had more humor and personality than this film, McCoy snarking about Spock being "warm and sociable as ever" aside.

Scottish Daily Dot writer Gavia Baker-Whitelaw runs Hello, Tailor!, a blog that analyzes costume design in geek-friendly movies ranging from TMP to the Marvel Cinematic Universe blockbusters, and in a biting Hello, Tailor! critique of TMP costume designer Robert Fletcher's ugly Starfleet uniform redesigns that's a must-read, she summed up TMP best. She called it "a three-hour screensaver interspersed with shots of William Shatner emoting into the middle distance."

Watching Bales' well-edited fan-made trailer made me notice that Paramount and whatever trailer house it hired in 1979 had no idea how to work around the weak material of this three-hour screensaver and market the film effectively, as evidenced in its Orson Welles-narrated teaser trailer and final trailer. Sure, the film wasn't finished and Jerry Goldsmith's incredible score--the strongest element of TMP--hadn't been recorded yet when the trailer house worked on the teaser, so they didn't have much footage to choose from. But aside from that still-amazing-looking model of the refitted Enterprise in drydock, they chose the least interesting footage--and the least enticing score music, some atonal, THX Deep Note-style synth piece.



Good God, Lemon, the Irwin Allen disaster flick music and the synth church organ cue in the final trailer are even worse than the THX Flat Note. And the announcer who's not Charles Foster Kane is the worst announcer in an illustrious history of Trek trailer and promo announcers that's included Welles, Hal Douglas, Christopher Plummer, Ernie "The Loooove Boat" Anderson, Don LaFontaine and Phil Terrence. The announcer in the final trailer has all the gravitas of Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space. I think maybe it is actually Derek from Teenagers from Outer Space.

Radio that's far more entertaining than my pathetic excuse for an Internet radio station

AMN Radio

And now, a rundown of the "Radio radio" link roll that's located on the right side of this blog.

AMN Radio

L.A.'s Radio Korea, or as stand-up and Walter & PK Show co-host Walter Hong twangily pronounces it, "Radio KOH-rea," has been experimenting with a nightly block of English-language programming for Asian American 18-to-34-year-olds, which is unprecedented in terrestrial radio. Why the hell hasn't this type of programming happened sooner?

I don't live in L.A., so I wasn't aware of the existence of the AMN (Asian Media Network) Radio block until Korean American indie rapper/stand-up Dumbfoundead got his own weekly AMN program, a show that's slightly reminiscent of a podcast he's guested on, Shots Fired, the Earwolf hip-hop industry talk podcast hosted by Nocando and Jeff Weiss. SCRAM Radio, which, like other AMN programs, is archived in podcast form on the AMN site, is a pretty good industry talk show about the indie hustle (take a drink every time either one of Dumbfoundead's guests or one of the mostly teenage guest callers nearly curses on-air), with occasional interludes of ill scratching by DJ Zo.

"Zo is half-Filipino, half-Italian," says the K-Town king of battle rap at the start of SCRAM Radio's premiere episode from June, "which equals..."

"Mexican," jokes Zo.

SCRAM Radio, which gets its title from a track off Dumbfoundead's 2012 EP Take the Stares, has gotten me listening to a couple of other AMN programs, like The Walter & PK Show, which Hong hosts with another stand-up, Paul "PK" Kim (I haven't checked out AMN's K-pop program yet, but I'll get there). Walter and PK's whole entire hour about the abundance of white male/Asian female couples, a chat that also includes input from female hosts of other AMN programs, is one of the funniest and most entertaining discussions I've heard regarding a subject that can be such a heated and humorless one for Asian guys (many of whom resent being desexualized by everyone, whether it's the mainstream media or Asian women who prefer white men over Asian men). Nobody's safe during this frank discussion of WM/AF couples--not even Asian guys. Both guest caller Dumbfoundead and Irene Hsu, co-host of the ESL Show (by the way, the recent ESL Show episode where co-host Yvonne Lu recalls an awkward moment when Oliver Stone, who's known for having an Asian fetish, creepily hit on her is funny as well), refer to Asian guys as sloppier and dumber than white guys when it comes to attempting to hide their infidelity from their wives or girlfriends.

"All the Asian girls I know that date white dudes--[the white dudes] all look wack. They look like Mark Zuckerberg," notes Dumb hilariously at another point in the WM/AF couples episode. "All the white dudes that Asian girls date wear TOMS Shoes."

TOMS Shoes are nowhere to be seen during Dumb's clever video for "New Chick."



The Dork Forest

I've grown bored with WTF with Marc Maron-inspired comedy podcasts where the guests discuss at length the L.A. stand-up scene and how they got started and the thing God would say to them when they arrive at the pearly gates if heaven exists and so on. I've found myself drifting towards comedy podcasts with a different and slightly tighter focus. One such podcast is stand-up Jackie Kashian's The Dork Forest, where, instead of yakking about their career trajectories, her guests, who range from other stand-ups like Aisha Tyler to non-stand-ups like Fatale creator Ed Brubaker and Portlandia star Carrie Brownstein, yak about arcane subjects they have a buttload of expertise in. For example, Dana Gould is a Planet of the Apes nerd, so there's lots of talk about Charlton Heston, Roddy McDowall and Apes memorabilia during his first guest appearance on The Dork Forest.



Although I went through a brief phase of collecting baseball cards as a kid because I thought the cards I bought at the time would be valuable someday (they most likely aren't), I really don't give a shit about baseball (because I'm from the Bay Area, I care about baseball only when the San Francisco Giants or the A's are in the World Series). When you're a kid, baseball can be fun to play, but it's such a slow goddamn sport to watch. I've seen C-SPAN telecasts that are more energetic. But when Greg Proops, a Giants fan and a Negro League history buff, talks at length about a favorite old-timey player of his (like Satchel Paige or Dock Ellis, who astoundingly once pitched a no-hitter while on LSD) or when he drops science about a really obscure bit of baseball history, baseball suddenly becomes fascinating.

Proops has his own podcast, The Smartest Man in the World, but his most entertaining bit of podcasting took place not on his own show but on The Dork Forest. Kashian got Proops to school her and the listeners on old-timey baseball history (for instance, did you know Babe Ruth called everyone "kid," or as the Babe strangely pronounced it, "keed"?). Proops rarely cracked jokes during his Dork Forest baseball episode, but the episode is enormously enjoyable, as is Proops' later Dork Forest guest appearance regarding the Roman Empire and other periods of ancient history. Like Howard Zinn, Proops is the history teacher you always wanted.





Garth Trinidad

You know you're listening to a decent DJ when he or she plays a track or two that makes you say "Who dat?" A terrific DJ causes you to say "Who dat?" during every single track he or she plays. Trinidad is frequently the latter. I like how a typical Trinidad playlist on KCRW is made up of lots of new, not-so-well-known neo-soul joints or deep cuts that catch my ear, and only two or three tracks are ones I'm familiar with, like "No Thing on Me (Cocaine Song)" off Curtis Mayfield's Superfly soundtrack.

If it weren't for Trinidad, I wouldn't have fallen in love with:

The hard-to-find Towa Tei remix of En Vogue's "Whatever."

"Consequences" by Bugz in the Attic.

"Sincerely, Jane" by Janelle Monáe.

"Jerk Ribs," the new Kelis single produced by TV on the Radio's Dave Sitek.



Mission Log

Rod Roddenberry, son of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, hatched a podcast idea that's hardly new: a series of discussions between a pair of Star Trek heads about a different episode of his late father's classic show each week. But there's a twist to this format: hosts Ken Ray and John Champion intend to cover every episode of every screen incarnation of the franchise in chronological order, including even the least-loved spinoff shows (the horribly animated Star Trek: The Animated Series from the '70s and the didn't-hit-its-stride-until-late-in-its-run Enterprise). So far, Ray and Champion have finished reviewing the first two seasons of the original Trek. They won't reach Enterprise, the last TV series that was set in the Trekverse before J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise, until about 11 years from now.

Produced by both Roddenberry Entertainment and Nerdist Industries, Mission Log isn't as boring as it sounds on paper, thanks to a pair of hosts who aren't too off-putting personality-wise and are able to say way more than just "Dude, that phaser array is awesome" or "Dude, Spock's such a rock star." (Have you ever listened to Zack Snyder talk? All he says during interviews or commentary tracks is "Awesome" or "So-and-so's such a rock star.") Ray and Champion take their episode discussions into interesting directions by spending more time on the characters' ethics and moral dilemmas than on gushing over the show's ships and gadgets.

Ray and Champion also tackle a question that's been asked about the '60s show from time to time: do the show's first two seasons live up to their vaunted reputation or are there episodes before "Spock's Brain" (widely considered the '60s show's nadir) that actually don't stand the test of time? "The Alternative Factor," the "anti-matter universe" episode about a mad scientist with hipster facial hair who slips and falls down a lot, is, for example, one such pre-season 3 episode that's a pain to sit through without downing a fifth of Romulan ale.

They're also willing to criticize some of the '60s Trek's outdated approaches to handling gender and race, a criticism that I appreciate hearing (yes, the show gave us Sulu, but it also chose to slap brownface and Fu Manchu staches on the Klingons to establish them as evil). I'm so looking forward to when Mission Log reaches the Deep Space Nine highlight "Far Beyond the Stars," where Captain Sisko experiences life as a black sci-fi author in the '50s and by the time of that 1998 episode's airing, the franchise had progressed to the point where it could look back and say, "Yes, that early Next Generation episode about that all-black planet was dumb and racist, and it never should have been filmed."

Ray's observations about the '60s show's outdated elements have led to some negative feedback from fanboys who think Trek should be immune from that kind of criticism. I wish Ray would tell those neocons to fuck off, but he's probably too polite to do so. Die-hard Trek heads aren't known for "colorful metaphors."

Secret Agent on SomaFM

San Francisco's SomaFM devotes an entire station to tunes that are either selections from '60s spy genre music cover albums or electronica and acid jazz tracks that channel the '60s spy genre sound. These tracks are interspersed with quick soundbites from 007 movies (and occasionally, Barbarella and Roman Coppola's CQ). Despite these 007 soundbites, SomaFM founder and Secret Agent music director Rusty Hodge rarely puts the themes from 007 movies into rotation. Film score music-wise, Hodge prefers more obscure Italian giallo or poliziotto score cues like Stelvio Cipriani's "Papaya" from 1975's La polizia ha le mani legate (The Police Have Their Hands Tied). Despite not being from the spy genre, these score cues are part of the station playlist because, as Hodge wrote in the station bio, they, like all the non-score tracks on the playlist, are all music that would fit a scene in any spy film.

In the mid-to-late '00s, I would frequently log on to Secret Agent, but I don't do it as much anymore. That's because the playlist doesn't seem to get updated that much, so I've heard everything that's on it. (The soundbites don't seem to be updated either--when I hear those soundbites, it's as if the 007 movie franchise never moved past Pierce Brosnan.) But there are lots of nifty obscurities on the playlist, like this one particular little-known track about Paris I lost the name of after my most recent PC died and took with it all the info I typed about that track on WordPad. I got worried about never being able to find the track again because ever since I first heard it on Secret Agent five years ago, I've been crushing on the breathy voice of the American spoken-word artist who chuckles over her memories of Paris. I wasn't able to Shazam it because I currently don't have a smartphone. I have what I call a dumbphone. The phone is an older Samsung that's not sophisticated enough to carry Shazam, so it took me a whole week to Google it.

The track turned out to be 1996's "Paris" by the German jazz group Trance Groove.

Damn, I feel like I'm in bed with this lady.