Classic Star Trek now remastered with added lens flares

This YouTube video by user "partmor" cracked me up--it's the vintage 1967 trailer for the old-school Star Trek episode "Space Seed," but what if it were filled with the lens flares that cinematographer Daniel Mindel (Enemy of the State, Mission: Impossible III) made heavy use of during J.J. Abrams' Star Trek(*)? Someone was obsessed with Holly Valance's naked "Kiss Kiss" video, All Saints' "Never Ever" video and Jay-Z's "Jigga What, Jigga Who" video while working on the new Star Trek.



[Via Geeks of Doom]

And this concludes today's edition of "Stuff That's Funny Only to Cinematography Geeks."

(*) Abrams' Trek is the best Trek feature film since 1996's First Contact. Michael Giacchino's exciting Trek score is a nice throwback to the epic sounds of '80s Trek film composers Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner after years of yawn-inducing, tinny-sounding musical wallpaper by Rick Berman's stable of composers. Giacchino's "That New Car Smell" cue (track 13 on the Varèse Sarabande score album) is straight out of those '80s Goldsmith/Horner Trek scores.

New AFOS episode: "All This Has Happened Before"

Because Battlestar Galactica's fourth season is finally in full swing, episode WEB93, "All This Has Happened Before," will feature highlights of Bear McCreary's terrific music from the show, and it will begin streaming Tuesday, April 15 (midnight, 4am, 10am, 3pm, 7pm and 11pm). I wish all the tunes on the episode's playlist could be Galactica score cues, but because the Internet radio airplay laws only allow me to put four McCreary tunes on the playlist, I had to pad it with selections from scores to other remakes (Ocean's Eleven, 3:10 to Yuma).

All the Galactica score cues during this ep come from the show's season finales. WEB93 will conclude with McCreary's intriguing cover of "All Along the Watchtower" from last season's stunning cliffhanger, "Crossroads, Part II." (McCreary discusses recording the "Crossroads, Part II" score here.)


During WEB93, I mention that the Galactica producers didn't want the music during their remake to sound like what Stu Phillips wrote for the previous incarnation of Galactica. As Galactica miniseries composer Richard Gibbs said in the liner notes for the miniseries score CD, he avoided typical space opera score elements like a "sweeping, swooping orchestra, strong melodic themes, incredibly detailed flourishes," and it's an approach McCreary emulated when he took over as composer in season 1. What I like most about the music of the current Galactica is that it still manages to sound exciting even without orchestral bombast (example: the powerful taiko and strings combo in the "Prelude to War" theme from "Pegasus"). McCreary seems to understand that minimalism doesn't mean you have to turn the score into musical wallpaper, which is what happened with much of the original music on the Rick Berman Star Trek shows.

McCreary's score for the latest Galactica ep, "Six of One," was really good, particularly during the officers' farewell to Apollo on the port hangar deck. Frak! I wound up with a lump in my throat. (The next Galactica will feature something equally sob-inducing--a naked Dean Stockwell. Great. It's like we're being punished for seeing Grace Park dance around topless this week.)

Also during this AFOS ep about scores from remakes, I snark about Hollywood's creative bankruptcy. Speaking of which, a Ben-Hur miniseries is apparently in the works. I'd rather watch a remake of the SCTV Ben-Hur.

Next AFOS episode: The feature film score music from Galactica's tonal opposite--Star Trek.

Coming Soon to a Theater in an Alternate Reality Near You

What if the Marvel feature films never got out of the C-list ghetto?:

What if Paramount allowed Rick Berman to continue running the Star Trek franchise (into the ground)?:

Leonard Rosenman (1924-2008)

Some sad news from Jeffrey Wells' Hollywood Elsewhere blog: film composer Leonard Rosenman has died. He was 83.

According to a 2004 Film Music Society article, Rosenman suffered from frontotemporal dementia (FTD) for several years, but despite the FTD, he continued to write music.

Rosenman was best known for being unafraid to go atonal on Fantastic Voyage and Beneath the Planet of the Apes. I know the outspoken Rosenman was not well-liked in some circles. Film music fans hated the choral chants of "RoboCop! RoboCop!" during Rosenman's RoboCop 2 score ("No matter what audio format you hear it in... Rosenman's score from RoboCop 2 is still an abomination!" complained Film Score Monthly and The Aisle Seat reviewer Andy Dursin) and Star Trek fans are split on his Oscar-nominated Star Trek IV score (some enjoy the lightweight, change-of-pace Trek IV score, while others think it sounds too much like his 1978 Lord of the Rings score).

I always liked Rosenman's contribution to the Trek film series--the Trek IV score LP was given to me as a Christmas present from a family member when I was a kid and it was one of the first soundtrack albums I ever owned.

I prefer Rosenman's score over Dennis McCarthy's banal work for Star Trek: Generations, which is the weakest score in the Trek film series (blame it on Rick Berman and his hatred of leitmotif and anything that sounds energetic), despite a spectacular rendition of the Trek fanfare at the end of the Generations opening titles.

I'm also fond of Rosenman's East of Eden overture and main title theme.