The article doesn’t actually answer the question about this TV show, which ended in 1998. It was the last series I ever made time in my schedule to watch. Unlike Star Trek, which I watched so many times as a kid that I have whole episodes memorized, I’ve seen very little Babylon 5 in 15…
While watching classic science fiction films like Alien and 2001: A Space Odyssey, do you find yourself distracted from the plot because you spend so much time studying the typography of the computer displays, the signs in public areas, and whether Ripley’s name really appears in Pump Demi in a nameplate in the main cabin…
Be still, my nerdy heart. (The other heart can go on beating.) Written by Christopher Kidder-Mostrom and Sasha Warren, A Klingon Christmas Carol is the first play ever to have been performed entirely in the Klingon language. The made-up tongue was developed for the Star Trek universe by Marc Okrand from basic elements created by…
See the Enterprise. See the Enterprise go boldly. Go Go Go, Enterprise! Go Boldly! Join Kirk and Spock as they go boldly where no parody has gone before!Description Since the 1930’s, the book Fun with Dick and Jane and its various adaptations have helped children learn to read. It’s inspired several parodies and movie and…
“In which the origin of the word “robot” is traced, precursors and context are briefly examined, and the Human soul is displayed for your consideration.” Karel Chapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) coined the word ‘robot,” which in the play was applied to an artificial worker, a living being manufactured with a chemical substitute…
I wish I understood Russian, so that I could make sense of this 1935 Russian film featuring a mechanical man remote-controlled via saxophone. Apparently the capitalists take control of the invention and turn it on the workers, at least temporarily. The climax features the workers gaining control of the machines and using them to fight…
The current commander of the International Space Station initially designed a mission badge that paid homage to Klingons. Too bad that design didn’t fly. Swanson, who currently is commander of the International Space Station, collaborated with his daughter to create an insignia for the outpost’s Expedition 40 crew. What he and his fellow astronauts and…
In the Star Wars films, the empire is evil to the core. But TIE Fighter let you see the empire from a new perspective. The game didn’t make you feel like a bad person doing bad things, but like a pilot who might reasonably have believed that what he was doing was in the galaxy’s…
The B-movie shoddiness of actors and aesthetics in Star Wars is often what critics don’t like. But even setting aside the fact that the effects charm precisely because they’re marvelously fake, there’s something original and profound in the films’ vision of time not as progress, but as a continued borrowing from the past.
The show was awash in quick, smart wisecracks, not to mention cultural references that ran the gamut from Zsa Zsa Gabor to Miles Davis to Lancelot Link, Secret Chimp. Watching MST3K was like hanging out with a trio of underachieving-genius best friends. At a time when depictions of geekery were limited mostly to Urkel and…
Grail to the Thief stars a thief from the future named Hank Krang, who “recently had a self-aware time machine called the Time Excursion Digital Interface, or TEDI, fall into his lap after a poker game. He has decided to use this technology to go throughout time, stealing priceless artifacts.” His first destination? Arthurian times,…
30th anniversary refit of the cruel, cruel text-adventure game. The game is still the same wonderful piece of interactive fiction that Douglas Adams wrote and Steve Meretzky programmed, but in finding it a new home, a few changes needed to be made. The old Flash game would not work on the new servers, and in…
Shaenon K. Garrity – New Smithson!.
Amusing, if cynical, reaction to some of my favorite third-season episodes. (I suggested that my sister name her dog “Gem,” after the name McCoy gives to “The Empath,” and through high school and college I wished for the ability to speed myself up to meet deadlines, so it’s a bit of a challenge for me…
In an alternate universe George Lucas never made Star Wars because he was able to get the rights to Flash Gordon. See, that was Lucas’ original intention, and he even went to meet with King Features Syndicate, who held the rights, to talk with them about making a movie based on the classic comic strip…
My son showed me #PacificRim. Liked the child actress in the flashback. Enjoyed the feuding scientists. The rest? Flashy, soulless CGI.
“He likes Lord of the Rings, Star Wars *and* Star Trek!!” — my nerdling daughter, eyes shining, about a new friend.
…she’s pretending to be “Spock in a Tree on Omicron Ceti III.”
The observation car Pearl sings of her love for Rusty, in the “Like ‘Cats’ but with Trains” show “Starlight Express.” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ma4FusuIgSM By the way, that’s a Star Wars Stormtrooper outfit, with pink accents added by my wife. Post by Stage Right.