I made that article!
I can't say I'm the least bit surprised
By way of penance, hopefully
This one will work for you.
"
This video contains content from EMI, who has blocked it in your country on copyright grounds." But thanks for trying
Comics still offer a lot more room. Even Muppets are limited by technical capacity.
This is true, and perhaps the limitations of practical effects helps to explain the zeal to embrace CGI IOTL - for better and for worse.
Interesting - EMI refused to publicise the song when it was first released because they said it encouraged the home taping of music. It looks like they're still applying that policy
Apparently so! And it wouldn't happen in a TL where Britain and Canada have stronger trade relations
NCW8 said:
That's good. As Star Trek is one of the influences on Blakes 7, I'd like to see how you think it will be affected by a more successful original ST series plus the presence of the new mini-series.
Fair enough, although many of the shows I'll be covering have far more mundane settings,
and far more mainstream audiences.
NCW8 said:
There's also the effect of the Dr Who "Yank Years" on the BBC special effects dept. Has a couple of years of having Desilu responsible for effects caused the BBC in-house ability to atrophy, or has the increased quality encouraged the Beeb to raise their game ?
Excellent question, but there's only one way to find out!
And then the Actor Stallone decided that he should be able to remove the Helmet to make Dredd more Human.
Actors seem to be pathologically fearful of having their faces off-camera whenever they're onscreen. It's the same reason why no table has chairs that face away from the fourth wall, and why all the living room furniture is pointed at it (or, rather, the television set up against it) as well. Consider Topher Grace as Venom in
Spider-Man 3. A ridiculously common complaint against the character was that he would always undermine his intimidating costume by pulling it back to reveal his (wimpy) face.
I do remember the FASA RPG. It helped get me into RP books as reference tools. (I didn't know people to play it, so...)
I also remember an old Star Trek arcade game, in which you directed the Enterprise to dock with a starbase while fighting off Klingons. I saw the cabinet in an exhibition at Discovery Place in Charlotte back in the 1990's.
That's some good stuff, Orville_third! Thanks for sharing that with us
Random semi-related fact: As a favor to a friend I worked this past NYC ComicCon managing the line for George Pérez, who is a very cool guy. He did the cover to the first issue (and some other issues, of course) of DC's ToS comic from the 80s.
Wow, that's actually a pretty huge deal, getting to meet a giant of the Bronze Age
as a favour to a friend, no less! Some people have all the connections...
Very true. As to crowdfunding old computer games, what sort of insane person would do such a thing? Just for nostalgia's sake? Ha! Ahem. Not me of course. <looks nervously towards Wasteland 2 kickstarter> Ahem. Yes, well... Okay, I give up, let's just say I have been suckered by more than a few pitches for games (video and pen and paper) that were from my youth. To be fair, though, I do consider Wasteland to be the greatest game I have ever played, and gave up hope on a 2 decades ago.
Boy, did
they ever choose the right time to pitch a sequel! Post-apocalyptic
anything will sell like hotcakes. Frankly, I don't see the appeal, but to each his own!
e_wraith said:
Oh yes. Wing Commander made my buy a Soundblaster, as a matter of fact. I guess even the first two foreshadowed the FMV future, since they were so devoted to expanding the envelope in terms of sound and animation. I can recall getting the voice disk for WC2 and how cool that was. Ah, before CD-Roms were all the rage, you had to pay for sound pack expansions... Then CD-Roms just included them as part of the main game, and of course there was room for video...
Ah yes, the finer nuances of the floppies vs. the CD-ROM versions. Funnily enough, since you mention voice discs, they were included with the two PC
Star Trek games I mentioned before,
25th Anniversary and
Judgement Rites. They actually brought back the
entire original cast to voice their characters (mind you, this was the early 1990s, so they all sounded
really old, despite the fact that both games were set during the original five-year mission). Worth noting is that
Judgment Rites, released in 1993, marked the final appearance of DeForest Kelley as Dr. McCoy
ever, in
any medium - all six of the other regulars reprised their roles later on, in the flesh.
e_wraith said:
I really, really love to read, and while doing school and work there is just so little time to read things I enjoy as opposed to what I need to for class or work certifications... Well, it will be nice to be done at least! This is all as opposed to undergrad time, when I seemed to have all the time in the world. Where did that time all go?
Hey, at least you're not going for a doctorate, right? Those take
twice as long, and I'm sure they're even
more expensive
e_wraith said:
I wanted both of them as a kid! Because, you see, all the big kids had them and talked about how much better they were than the Atari systems. I got a C64 instead eventually, since my parents believed video games were dead at that point. Which, in the long run, was actually the better option for video games.
Not to mention that, if you want
longevity, you certainly can't beat the Commodore 64! They were
still in school computer labs by the mid-1990s.
e_wraith said:
The SNES was the first video game system I owned that I bought with my own money. (Maybe I should just say it was the first video game system I owned, since the blink and you missed it Atari 7200 dubiously holds that claim.) It is still hooked up to a small CRT TV in my parent's house. I own one game for it, because I had lots of friends who had the system before me so I just borrowed their games.
And, of course, you could always
rent games from the
video store back in those halcyon days. (Why the heck is this thread making me nostalgic for the 1990s?)
e_wraith said:
Wait, what? That game couldn't have existed! Had I known about that one I think I would have demanded an Intellivision! It looks awesome.
It was
really good - and a real trailblazer, as noted. It makes me lament the OTL Crash interrupting the potential there for taking that nascent genre and running with it. If only I knew someone who was writing a timeline with a focus on video games which took place in that era, to whom I could make some kind of appeal...
e_wraith said:
And yet, the porn industry largely decided the course of the VCR battle, and indeed has had quite an impact on the Internet. So much can be said there about baser instincts driving advances in technology and society, I guess.
As
Boogie Nights proves, there's some really fascinating topics of discussion to be mined from the history of pornography, but somehow I don't think a proper timeline focusing on that would yield any fruitful results, especially on
this board
(And no, I'm never going to be covering it as part of
this timeline, either.)
e_wraith said:
Well, in reality they're available on Netflix (US, at least, not sure if they have made it to other markets yet) in that form and sometimes you take what you can get.
I believe that there's an option to switch
back to the
proper effects shots, and I urge you to investigate how that would be achieved on a Netflix release.
e_wraith said:
Second best sport! (I realize I am in the minority to put baseball as number one even in my own country, but I will none the less.) No offense to Canadians, of course. Aactually, someone very dear to me is Canadian and she doesn't care for hockey at all so I guess that stereotype is a bit played out. Curling, however...
Even here, (the Canadian variation of) gridiron football is very popular - easily the #2 sport behind hockey, maybe even #1 in some places (like Saskatchewan - which has a CFL team but no NHL teams). I have no objection to your ranking baseball higher than hockey, of course, but from a historical perspective, it was the quietest of the four major league sports throughout the duration of this timeline IOTL, so there won't be as much opportunity to discuss it. But hockey, on the other hand...
e_wraith said:
Ah yes, 1980 is approaching... You can destroy all of history I guess by changing an ice related event there. Change the course of the Cold War forever! Destroy the free world as we know it! Condemn the world to darkness and fear for all eternity! Well, from a US perspective at least.
I actually wasn't talking about 1980 (much sooner, in fact!), so you'll see what I have in mind when the time comes.
e_wraith said:
Ugh! Islanders? ISLANDERS?!! I'd sooner root for the Devils! Or Philadelphia's goons... No sir! These days I am not sure there are many who would admit to being Islanders fans, maybe that will change after they move. But historically speaking I think you are right. My house liked to be contrary. Or just liked to root for all the losing teams, I guess.
Ah yes, and when you were very young, the Islanders were enjoying their dynasty. And funnily enough, speaking of their pending move to Brooklyn, I've heard a rumour that they might change their name (even though Brooklyn is technically on Long Island) to the Americans (or Amerks), in reference to
the last pre-Original Six team to be dissolved.
e_wraith said:
Hey, does Chuck E. Cheese still exist? It was the most successful and enduring original component of Atari for a long time...
Bushnell has been too busy running Syzygy to dabble in other ventures. He
might have had more time, had someone akin to That Wacky Redhead taken a more active role on the Board of Directors, but alas, it was not meant to be. I'm also obviously going to avoid comment on your
other questions.
e_wraith said:
I also hate typing Syzygy.
Your complaint has been noted and logged, and will be summarily ignored
If it doesn't contradict what you've already set down, I had some ideas about Star Trek based on re-reading one of the books about production (can't remember the title). You mention Star Trek gets a higher budget and better SFX later on. When he designed the Enterprise, Matt Jeffries originally had ideas for a sleeker and more detailed model but the funding wasn't there. (This is actually where the movie-era Enterprise design comes from, in the fundamentals it dates back to the 1960s). When he gave the ship its registry number, he said it came from "the 17th design of cruiser, number 01" (i.e. the Enterprise was meant to be the first ship of her class, which was later changed of course to make the 00 ship the class ship). Very interestingly, he also added a note saying "use 1701A for future upgraded version". Which of course was later used in the movies for its successor ship. But it strikes me that in your setting, perhaps they would use their increased budget to change the Enterprise's design in this way between seasons and justify it in-universe by calling it an upgrade? However I suppose they might not be able to do this just because they wouldn't be able to use their old stock footage (which was clearly important because they notoriously kept using stock footage of the old pilot version of the ship even after they made significant changes, like the backs of the nacelles changing from vents to spheres).
They're not going to totally revamp the
Enterprise. Remember, we're dealing with the studio that
invented the rerun. Two radically different
Enterprise models would be problematic, considering how strongly the ship is identified with the show, and even considered shorthand for same.
That said, I'm willing to endorse Jefferies making further small revisions to the core design, as he did IOTL (as you note), perhaps culminating in the construction of more models from the same basic blueprints.
Thande said:
Also, a less dramatic one they could do is get the money to build the sleeker shuttle they originally wanted rather than the boxy one they ended up with. Maybe use the boxy Galileo at first but later switch to the other one, much like later happened on TNG where they had that little shuttlepod for a while as they waited to build a bigger set.
However, I
am willing to endorse a new shuttle, for the very simple reason that the
original shuttle model had, very prominently displayed, the insignia of the
Galileo, which was lost midway through the
first season (in the episode "The Galileo Seven"), and which the show, IOTL,
finally addressed late in the
third, unimaginatively renaming it the
Galileo II.
Some of the
Star Trek Phase II ideas would be good as well. I suspect that Nimoy would be one of the actors who doesn't return for the mini-series. He's probably more interested in directing at this point and is probably even more fed up than OTL about being identified with Spock. So the character of Xon as a new Vulcan Science Officer could be introduced
Well, as we know, Spock
did appear in TMP IOTL, despite adamantly refusing to appear in
Phase II (to the point that the actor cast as Xon, David Gautreaux, had to accept a very minor part in the film, and obviously had no further involvement with the franchise). That's something to bear in mind ITTL.
NCW8 said:
OTOH, it would be neat to include different aliens in the main cast. Maybe if the character of Thelin was introduced in the episode
Yesteryear, he could be brought back as the new first officer.
I can indeed confirm that - as in the OTL episode - the Andorian Thelin (with an improved makeup job!) appears as First Officer of the alternate
Enterprise.
Jim Henson will probably have a field day here.
He definitely made his name as a "legitimate" effects creator on
Star Trek ITTL, which is part of the reason that Solow convinced That Wacky Redhead to take a gamble on his variety show idea (remember that
every other production studio in Hollywood turned him down, IOTL). Their science-fiction parodies would thus have a certain extra edge ITTL.