Category: News

Well, no, not really. Still, this is an impressive fan trailer:

In comments: identify all the places that the creator borrowed from. (Hat tip: Jenifer Rosenberg.)

It is most logical for Paramount Home Video to be flooding the shelves with product capitalizing on the release of [[[Star Trek]]]. We’ve been treated to the various Best Of sets, the first season of the original series and now the first six feature films all making their Blu-ray debut. The first question is always, why should I upgrade from DVD to Blu-ray? In the case of the television, there was little doubt. Here, with the films, the answer is less clear cut.

The sextet of films featuring the original crew of the [[[U.S.S. Enterprise]]] was, at best, an uneven affair. It all began when Paramount floundered throughout the 1970s, unsure of how best to capitalize on the growing fan base for the canceled series. It made sense to launch a fourth television network with a revived Star Trek but when that was derailed, it took a while for them to figure out what to do next. George Lucas and [[[Star Wars]]] changed all that. Unfortunately, the corporate handwringing over the next two years meant we were presented with a turgid film that may have featured the cast but lacked the feel of Gene Roddenberry’s series.

The Motion Picture’s costumes were monochromatic bores, much like the performances wrought by director Robert Wise, and the crew were never really given much a chance to show that they still liked one another. Instead, we’re given some new faces to dilute the story and the conflict between the Enterprises new captain, Stephen Collins, and his predecessor, William Shatner, is never fully developed. Nor is the story about Spock and his search for something beyond pure logic. Instead, we’re left gazing at some kinda nice visuals as V’ger comes to menace Earth. It’s slow, ponderous and more than a bit of a mess. For $44 million, Paramount expected something more satisfying and profitable.

Turning the franchise back to the television division and asking for a fresh start with a quarter of the budget was perhaps the most inspired move. Veteran Harve Bennett was given the show to run and did so by combining with director Nicholas Meyer to give us the single best feature of them all. Why? Because it had everything from nifty one-liners from the crew, a philosophical debate over a truly important matter, a memorable villain and a good guest cast.  Killing Spock to accommodate Nimoy also meant the status quo could change which was a good sign.

The next two films, though, suddenly turned the solid [[[Wrath of Khan]]] into the beginning of a trilogy that really doesn’t hang together. [[[The Search for Spock]]]was crafted to allow Leonard Nimoy back on board but did so without
giving us anything but the most stock of Klingon villains. The
philosophical and moral debates from the previous film are gone and
Kirk watches the son he just met die for no obvious reason. Robin
Curtis, replacing Kirstie Alley as Saavik, wasn’t given enough to show
she could be as interesting a character. Nimoy also made a nice debut
as a director although the film felt claustrophobic and shot entirely
on sets which didn’t help.

[[[The Voyage Home]]] wisely changed the tempo and look. Nimoy
grows as a director and the humor is all character-based which is
terrific. The fish out of water theme nicely works as does the
ecological message. A fine way to bring everyone home and reset the
mission parameters.

Of course, Shatner has to be given a shot at directing but his
ham-fisted story development and desire to search for god without
really exploring how everyone views the deity is a notion that arrives
stillborn.  Shoehorning Sybok into the Spock family tree doesn’t help
matters nor does the lackluster performances by the guest cast. And the
humor here is more slapstick than necessary and the supporting cast is
ill-served.

As a result, Meyer was brought back for what everyone acknowledged would be the final original cast film, [[[The Undiscovered Country]]].
Given an opportunity to go out with a bang, the story is strong but the
execution isn’t quite as sharp as it should be. Overall, it was a
pretty fine way to go out, leaving us wanting more.

Today, we get that in the case of the DVDs with hours upon hours of
extras. Most noteworthy among them is the extra disc with a roundtable
discussion between Shatner, Nimoy, Patrick Stewart, Jonathan Frakes and
moderator Whoopi Goldberg. Here’s a preview:

Each disc comes with its own set of extras, many of which are
already included on the DVD versions. New commentaries and featurettes
freshen each film’s experience. I can quibble that Blu-ray should have
allowed Paramount to include both the original Motion Picture
and the more-recently released director’s cut. The discs collect the
High-Def features plus the special two-disc DVD features, so all
together, you get 2.5 hours or so per film of goodies. New commentaries
are added with the previously released comments which could enhance
your enjoyment of the films, although little will improve [[[The Final Frontier]]]. Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman, from the new film, provide some fun commentary on [[[The Voyage Home]]].

Each disc has a link to BD Live with additional features such as quizzes.

Of the six films, only the best, The Wrath of Khan was given
a complete restoration. The rest look better merely because they’re
being watched on Blu-ray. All six, though, sound better than thanks to
Dolby TrueHD 7.1. Dialogue, sound effects and score all sound vastly
improved.

While not as good as the original series season one on Blu-ray, it’s
the best these films will look. While the Human Adventure may only be
beginning, the revamping and reworking of the films may well be a work
in progress so either get them now or wait until some undetermined
future date when remastered versions may arrive. The consensus seems to
be that the lack of a director’s cut or slightly modified edits of the
other films may well mean a new and improved set is in Paramount’s
plans.

Nikki Finke has gotten her hands on the book proposal for Jon Peters’ autobiography. Peters was a producer for, among other films, the Michael Keaton Batman film franchise and Superman Returns. The details are unbelievable, if for no other reason that Peters seems to be burning every bridge behind him, including the one that he’s on. A few choice quotes:

“Batman was a box office bonanza, among the highest grossers
in history. Jon took a lot of credit for that hit, especially in his
heroic efforts to sell Jack Nicholson on playing the Joker. Jon had
bonded completely with Jack and partied hard with him on The Witches of Eastwick;
now Jon had to top himself. With the help of Madam Alex and Steve
Ross’s jets, Jon took Jack on a whore and drug fueled global joy ride
to see the Batman sets in London that was one of the most
expensive and decadent junkets in cinema history. Jon basically turned
staid Claridge’s into the Playboy Mansion, with strippers, hookers,
masseuses, coke dealers, and more, plus champagne and foie gras room
service that put Adnan Khashogghi’s stays to shame. Jack couldn’t say
no to a good time like this, and he succumbed to Jon’s relentless
charms.”

“During the Batman shoot in London in 1988, Jon had his first
high profile post-Barbra [Streisand], post-Christine [his 2nd wife] movie star
tabloid affair, with Kim Basinger, whom Jon had cast as Vicki Vale in
the biggest role of her career. Kim’s tall blonde beauty and her inner
turmoil were very much in the mold of Jon’s mother. Another shared
similarity was that Kim was also part Cherokee. Otherwise, she was pure
screen goddess, the hottest women on celluloid at the time. The Georgia
belle was a Ford model, the Breck girl, a Bond girl, the cover of Playboy.
She had rung up every milestone possible in the pulchritude
sweepstakes. And now she was Jon Peters’s girl, and, thanks to the
breathless London yellow press, the world took note. The affair with
Jon may have ended Kim’s nine year marriage to a makeup artist (again,
the beauty shop connection), but it did not result in marriage to Jon.
Like so many on-set affairs, the honeymoon tends to be over soon after
the premiere.

And we won’t even talk about Superman Returns, where the best guess is that Peters caused the film to cost $50 million dollars more. Instead, we’ll let Kevin Smith talk about it:

See also our previous story about Jon Peters and his parole violation for drunk driving— which apparently, if I’m reading this right, was on the way to the premiere of Superman Returns. Oh, and just for good measure, the book’s been pulled from major publishers at this time, as everybody appears to be ready to sue..

It’s a world gone a little mad where we tell you How To Be A Super Villain, plus Terminator falls short, Millie The Model is back and she brought Tim Gunn along in an Iron Man suit and Bazooka Joe is headed to the big screen!

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Take the time today to remember them in your own way.

It’s a holiday weekend, and you know what that means… new Doctor Who!

Okay, it’s an American holiday, not a British one… but that’s okay, we’ve got an American in it. Take look…

As the 1970s dawned, I was 12 and no longer as interested in Saturday morning fare. There was Little League which was either in the morning or afternoon and I found myself drifting more towards the [[[Bowery Boys]]] shorts that ran on channel 5 after the cartoons wore themselves out.  My younger siblings watched, but not with the same passion I had shown just a few years earlier.

For me, the Saturday Morning Cartoons: 1970s Vol. 1
, coming tomorrow from Warner Home Video, was more introductory than revisiting my childhood. Having just finished the 1960s volume, it was startling to see how rapidly things had changed. Spies and super-heroes were rapidly supplanted by large gaggles of people either playing music or solving mysteries or both. The disc opens with a cheat, an episode of [[[The Jetsons]]], which may have run in the 1970s for the umpteenth time, but was emblematic of an earlier era, stealing time from something more current.

The success of [[[The Partridge Family]]] in prime time and [[[The Archies]]] on Saturday mornings certainly explained by there was so much music, without a single top 40 tune to emerge from any of these groups.

The mysteries could be ascribed to the wildfire success of [[[Scooby Doo]]], the series that straddled the decades by being introduced in fall 1969 and becoming the most imitated series of the 1970s.

The stories were also vastly different. By 1970, concerns over violence seemed to have begun taming the stories so the level of danger was different. The villains tended to be stupider and more bumbling, prone to slapstick ways of taking themselves out than being subdued by the crime fighters.  Groups of teens were proving to find mysteries, stumbling across problems and then fumbling their way through the investigation until the culprit was exposed and then apprehended as much through dumb luck than effective law enforcement.

Scooby Doo, a series I never warmed to through the years, is represented here in an episode from The New Scooby-Doo Movies that guest-starred the Harlem Globetrotters, which had their series so it was a nice but of cross-promotion. The Globetrotters were at the height of their fame around this time and this was a fun brand extension even if none of the players actually did their own voices, leaving that to the likes of Scatman Crothers. In this case, there are too many people caught up in a fairly mediocre story concluding with the guest stars strutting their stuff on the court, doing things that only work in animation. That it needed a laugh track, cueing kids when to laugh speaks volumes of how unfunny this could get.

We are shown just how many imitators there were with episodes from [[[Goober and the Ghost Chasers]]] and [[[Funky Phantom]]] that also featured groups of teens and their pets solving cases. One thing that was never clear, even after watching these, is why these people were friends. Look at Fred and Daphne, the homecoming King and Queen, who in the real world would have nothing to do with Shaggy or Velma. We’re just presented them as an ensemble and the stories move forward. Goober and Funky Phantom are pale imitations with stock stories, stock characters and even overly familiar voice artists doing variations on their characters, especially the great Daws Butler recycling his Snagglepuss for the Phantom.

Other imitators were [[[Josie and the Pussycats]]] which came in 1970, just two years after The Archies. The music was certainly incidental to the story and this one had a vile Captain Nemo who played an organ coming to hate the pop stars and their music.

The one variation that was weird was [[[Amazing Chan and the Chan Clan]]] which was more a “how done it” than “who done it”. In a nice special feature, actor Jamie Farr talked about the series where he wrote three episodes and explained how the network insisted the Clan each had a distinct personality all had to have something to do and each case featured a song from the children’s band. Oddly entertaining with nice voice work from Keye Luke as the famed Chan.  It’s also interesting to note that a show with a predominantly Asian cast made it to Saturdays before any African-American series.

The Asian influence was also seen with [[[Hong Kong Phooey]]], where a dog working as a janitor at the local police station was also the feared martial arts pooch – reflecting the then hot genre of martial arts films. The animation is among the weakest offerings but had its moments.

An oddity was [[[Yogi’s Gang]]], a show that collected all of the Hanna-Barbera characters from the previous decade and put them on a flying ark. Each episode used different collections of characters, by Yogi, and had adventures. Based on the episode here, the story seems designed to shine the spotlight on each character to say their favorite line or do a character bit. The story, though, had a nifty twist ending which made it satisfying, especially compared with the rest of the stories collected here.

Perhaps the most original series on the two-disc set is [[[Roman Holidays]]] that tried to replicate [[[The Flintstones]]] formula in a Roman era setting. It was about a nuclear family and their exploits – it didn’t look like any of the competition and had some of the best writing, so it’s sad that it lasted a mere 13 episodes.

By the latter part of the decade, Scooby’s imitators were fading fast and CBS was ready to try heroes once more. While ABC was still running[[[Super Friends]]], there hadn’t been much in the way of heroic adventure but in 1977 they hired Filmation to bring back [[[Batman]]] and try their hand at [[[Tarzan]]]. The former featured Adam West and Burt Ward reprising their prime time roles and both needed better direction because they over-emphasized the phrases or sounded constipated rather than dramatic. With cartoon violence even further de-emphasized by this point, actually fighting the criminals was out so the cases were contrived so the Dynamic Duo could triumph over the likes of the Joker with their wits and equipment. They added Bat-Mite for comic relief and it didn’t work at all. Filmation’s animation recycled much of their earlier Bat-efforts and there isn’t much entertainment to be found. Tarzan, with nice design work from Bob Kline, tried to make Edgar Rice Burroughs’ world palatable to kids and it largely worked.

The final extra on the set is a short piece looking at how odd Funky Phantom was with modern day animation folk such as Paul Dini trying to figure out how and more importantly, why it got made.

Here’s a quick preview… enjoy!