“It is over three hours long, and it is like a cross between Noel Coward and The Terminator” – Ivor Benjamin describing the original version of “R.U.R.”Last Wednesday I went to see an adaption of Karel Čapek’s play “Rossum’s Universal Robots”, presented at the British Library. | There was one question from the audience that…
Around 1990, when I was studying for my MA at the University of Virginia (and also working as a writer/editor for the engineering school), I sometimes had 30 people over at my place for “Star Trek parties.” The local TV station aired the show at midnight Sunday. My friends and I would rotate through different locations, but…
I was watching classic Star Trek with my son a few days ago when I came across this scene, from Assignment Earth, which is set on Earth during the 1960s (when the original show aired). This episode featured the adventures of a human raised by apparently benevolent aliens who want to stop Earth from destroying…
“This movie has so many cliches in it,” a boy said when Colonial Marines disembarked the drop ship and made their way through rainy darkness to enter the alien-infested colony. My son told him, “This movie was made in 1986. It invented all the cliches.” Another of his friends was impressed by the “personal data transmitters”…
Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m…Jesus Christ SuperstarFor the Uniform #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 13) Sisko…
Leonard Nimoy, the sonorous, gaunt-faced actor who won a worshipful global following as Mr. Spock, the resolutely logical human-alien first officer of the Starship Enterprise in the television and movie juggernaut “Star Trek,” died on Friday morning at his home in the Bel Air section of Los Angeles. He was 83. — NYTimes.com. Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek…
The concept for a Doctor Who set came from the Lego Ideas website where fans can submit suggestions, which are then put to the vote.The winning design created by Dr Who fan, Andrew Clark, featured a mock-up of various doctors, including David Tennant and Tom Baker, alongside Billie Piper, K9 the robot dog, and versions…
I remember wanting to like Voyager a lot more than I did. The first episode showed some promise, but I remember being disappointed with the first season. Looking back, I can see I was equally disappointed by the first Star Trek movie and the first few seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Some moments from the show…
I read this short story as a kid. Not sure how I came across it, but details from this story are burned pretty deep in my head. Jon’s orientation came from the screens. As he grew older, he became aware of the world beyond—the real world outside the Learning Maze. The world which had once…
Mr. Sulu, set phasers to delicious! Which makes no sense, but hey, it’s a gingerbread starship Enterprise. Gingerbread USS Enterprise – Imgur. Similar:By Inferno's Light #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 15) Dominion / Cardassian edg…In Purgatory's Shadow #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 5, Episode 14) Garak's answers a code…This morning I awoke to YouTube’s live…
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…