The contrast between Curtis' outgoing personality versus the character she played reminded me a bit of Jeremy Brett playing Sherlock Holmes. I would think one's native personality would peek through the stoniness of the role from time to time, regardless.
At one point Dunn was considered by Gene Roddenberry for the part of Spock in The Cage. He was also originally considered for the role of Balok in The Corbomite Maneuver, but that part eventually went to Clint Howard. (source: These Are the Voyages)...
At turns fascinating, insightful, heartbreaking, heartwarming, infuriating and even savage, it’s certainly the most interesting ST-themed interview I’ve ever watched / listened to....
I both liked and disliked this series. I thought it so impressive that they got most of the original cast back together, had DC Fontana running it, and had some really top-notch writing talent. Also, with animation, there was the promise of doing all kinds of interesting special effects that weren’t possible with TOS.
The problem is that the animation budget was so limited! I didn’t mind that sections of scenes were recycled, something which also happened here and there in the original series, but that the Filmation art & technique was just so mediocre. As in, not nearly as interesting as some other studios were putting out, such as Depatie-Freling. Even some H-B series had far more interesting art & backgrounds, like Scooby Doo.
Another problem is that the weak budget meant that poor Jimmy Doohan had to voice virtually every male character outside of the core cast. Similar with Nichols & Barrett having to do all the extra female characters. It got pretty identifiably ridiculous even just a few episodes in, and was a shame, because Hollywood’s always had an amazing stock of versatile voice actors that worked surprisingly economically. (Mark Evanier’s blog is a good place to read about that sort of thing)
OTOH, I sort of enjoyed the animation bloopers, and there were many. One of my favorites was the way background characters would sometimes be larger than foreground characters. So, interesting to read that many of such ‘bloopers’ were in fact by design:
“There were also only so many layers you could use before the colors started changing. Sometimes, you’ll see a missing leg or something like that. It’s not always a blooper, it’s just that they only had so many cells that they could use.”
“If they wanted to have an animation on top of whatever was happening, sometimes they’d have to sacrifice something that maybe nobody will see this,” states Harvey. "At one point, Scotty’s doing something and he has no legs. He’s just a floating torso. For me, that’s part of the charm. It’s just the idea that this wasn’t just like, ‘Oh, we’re being caught careless.’ It was, ‘We have to make a decision on how we’re going to do this.’ That was the process. That’s a very abbreviated version of that process.
Haha, I think maybe I feel you on that.
Filmation worked so much better when it came to shades of comedy & farce, and for me, there was a tonne of understated comedy & farce in He-Man, hearkining back to lots of H-B farce. (never watched Godzilla personally, have no interest at all, sadly or unsadly)
So Filmation to me were mostly disappointing (and again, the damn limited budget) when it came to TAS, but they also had to walk a sort of line, just like Rankin-Bass with The Hobbit, and then the “Return of the King.”
The first one was fairly charming (and the songs were absolutely awesome), based on a children’s book, but the latter?
Yeah, that shizzle just didn’t work for a serious fantasy epic. Okay, I’ll admit it had its points, but Rankin-Bass was so not the animation studio to do RotK, other than bringing back the super-charming… Glenn Yarbrough (sp?) as the narrator-singer.
Because the title leaves out the fact that Kirk’s native character was actually inspired by Horatio Hornblower, not Cook. Also, Hornblower was such a complex character that his attributes got split up in to both Kirk and Spock, evidently.
His birth father died when Brent was less than a year old, so he took his adopted father’s name “Mintz” from 1955-1975 before finally reverting back to “Spiner.”...
I thought that was a big part of how Spiner made Data just about the most interesting character in the series-- the understated little flourishes, tics, and burblings of emotion showing through.
To me a very clever variation on Nimoy’s amazing work on Spock in the series before, but of course Brent made the character wholly his own to the point that it barely registered that he was cut from the ‘Spock template.’
Sequoia Brussels sprouts are delicious but it’s pretty hard to finish one.
Yes, it’s a pretty obvious riff on the main joke, i.e. entertaining the idea that Brassica sequoia is a real thing, based on the fact that brussels sprouts, like cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi, cabbage and others, are all cultivars of B. oleracea.
If you didn’t know that last bit, I can see getting confused about the alt-text.
Alternative (Alt) Text is meant to convey the “why” of the image as it relates to the content of a document or webpage. It is read aloud to users by screen reader software, and it is indexed by search engines. [Harvard link]
Oh, I see what you mean! So strictly speaking, alt-text should be used for the intended purpose, i.e. in order to help certain users and searches, etc.
Fortunately or unfortunately, I suspect most webcomics makers, and no doubt others, are going to keep using it the way they are. I’m not sure there’s a real issue in this case, but maybe in others…
I thought his smugness worked… for a while. He’s been right on a great many things across his career, and was able to frame his scathing critiques in fairly unique, clever ways. (and/or his writers were) Indeed, at one time I admired his ability to look at things from pretty daring angles, even if he was sometimes way off.
Problem is, he’s not the same anymore. Sort of like Joe Rogan, who at least started out with honest, interesting, amusing takes in a sort of ‘college student+’ kind of way. But something seems to have happened to these guys across the years. Not just the wealth, but the growing insulation from reality and… the normalisation of right-wing extremism. Something like that, anyway.
Still, I can’t just forget that Maher was killing it for plenty of years, there, even if he did rub people the wrong way.
Robin Curtis Looks Back at Star Trek III: The Search for Spock For Its 40th Anniversary ( www.startrek.com )
Michael Dunn cracks up Leonard Nimoy (**TOS**: ***Plato's Stepchildren***) ( i.imgur.com )
At one point Dunn was considered by Gene Roddenberry for the part of Spock in The Cage. He was also originally considered for the role of Balok in The Corbomite Maneuver, but that part eventually went to Clint Howard. (source: These Are the Voyages)...
What was the best guest-acting role on TOS, and do you have any runner-ups? ( m.media-amazon.com )
I’m going with William Windom:...
Oh dear... here's Captain Picard singing ***The Alphabet Song (psychedelic version!)*** ( www.youtube.com )
Looks like it hasn’t been posted here yet, so… I’ll do the deed....
David Gerrold's amazing two-part interview covering Roddenberry, Fontana, TOS, TAS & TNG: ( www.youtube.com )
At turns fascinating, insightful, heartbreaking, heartwarming, infuriating and even savage, it’s certainly the most interesting ST-themed interview I’ve ever watched / listened to....
Pff... a 'typical' Romulan ploy! ( www.youtube.com )
Get the heck out, could you please?...
Unearthing Secrets from the Making of Star Trek: The Animated Series ( www.startrek.com )
TIL the name James Kirk was inspired from James Cook. ( historycollection.com )
Brent Mintz, professional dog, duck and squirrel photographer, as played by a young, bearded Data in 1972, on the show ***To Tell the Truth***. (skip to 1:46 for his entrance) ( www.youtube.com )
His birth father died when Brent was less than a year old, so he took his adopted father’s name “Mintz” from 1955-1975 before finally reverting back to “Spiner.”...
xkcd #2827: Brassica ( imgs.xkcd.com )
xkcd.com/2827...
Being Mean to Scabs Is Working ( www.motherjones.com )
Drew Barrymore and Bill Maher are now not resuming their shows amid strikes.