PopCult: December 2002 Archive Page

"Mr. Serkis is the human actor behind the computer-generated (CG) character Gollum, a wizened Hobbit who's part manlike, part evil beast. More than just giving voice to the character, Serkis provided all its movements and facial expressions, which were later 'painted over' by animators." Gregory M. Lamb --The Rise of "Synthespians"CS Monitor)

Gollum is a Hobbit? Tolkien hints at the possibility, but in the book it remains only a hint. More amusing is the article's reference to the most recent Star Wars movie as "Episode 11" rather than "Episode II". At any rate, for more on computer-generated acting, refer to the Miranda sequences in Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age.

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a Dark Lord in possession of a desire to rule the world must be in want of a ring." --Austen writes Lord of the RingsPemberly.com)

Hmm... that's a bit of a stretch... "a Dark Lord in possession of The Ring must be in want of the world." But it's really the women in Pride & Prejudice -- and chiefly Mrs. Bennett -- who so passionately desire marriage and thus "the ring". So the delicious irony of Austen's opening quotation was sacrificed for shallow parallelism. (I'm certainly overanalyzing this. Sorry.)

"We love these programmes not only because they show us how curious the products of evolution are, but also because they remove us to a parallel planet, the Garden of Eden before the sixth day of creation, when God went and messed it up by making man.... Today, conservation officials in Kenya often concede that traditional grazing could be permitted in the parks and reserves without driving out the wildlife. But the local people must continue to be excluded because the tourists 'don't expect to see them there'. The tourists don't expect to see them there largely because the television shows them that healthy wildlife habitats are places without people. By presenting the natural world as something apart from humanity, it creates the impression that conservation means exclusion." --Planet of the Fakes: Wildlife TV shows portray a phoney Garden of Eden...Guardian)

Charley X
Well-punished laughter,
Token of a child's longing:
Beehive disappoints.
--Star Trek HaikuWeasel Breweries)

This page presents every episode of classic Star Trek, reduced to a single haiku. Thanks for the link, Rosemary.

Hey... there's no haiku for "Turnabout Intruder". I'll fix that...

His gold-tunic'd bod
Enraptures Dr. Janice
She swaps hers for his

"[T]he command bridge of the Enterprise? Give me a break. Does it have to look like the control room of low-wattage Midwestern TV station? All those little blinking lights? What, is there a fly-into-space knob that has to be set to ON to get the thing to move? Then the fly-into-space light lights up, so we know we're in space. And there must be a cool-sounds knob, too, and a what-Third-World-airport-did-they-loot-to-get-all-those-freakin'-plastic-lounge-chairs knob, too, and that one's set all the way up to 10. Then there's that ersatz techno-yammer. 'Sir, aft shield down to 40 percent efficiency. And we've fired all our photon torpedoes!' Damn the photon torpedoes, I say, full rant ahead. The waxworks sense of it is cloying. It's like visiting an old folks' home when none of the old folks have any connection to you. Demographically, the whole 'Star Trek' shebang must skew toward the Alzheimer's generation. We ain't in a country of young men. The movie is almost utterly devoid of youth; the two babes (Marina Sirtis as Counselor Deanna Troi and Dina Meyer as Commander Donatra) could be your grandma, and most of the guys look like they need oatmeal twice a day because their teeth and gums hurt and they want to stay regular. I kept waiting for Norma Desmond to walk in as Miss Space Station, Stardate 10002. And the sparks...." Stephen Hunter

--Hilarious Washington Post Anti-Star-Trek RantWashPost [resgistration; will expire])

I don't normally link to the Washington Post anymore, since the site now requires registration and the pages all expire after a few weeks. But this rant is priceless.

"For the first hour, all the opening doors on the Enterprise are accompanied by a nice door-opening sound effect stolen from Star Trek. But by this point in the movie, the Turkish audio engineers have lost interest. Now whenever someone walks into a room, somebody off camera makes the sound 'swwwsh!' with their mouth two to three seconds after the door opens. For some reason this seemed more riveting to me than Nancy running around the ship licking people's faces and disguising herself as different crew members." --Turkish Star Trek Rip-Off... Or SomethingThe Wave)