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Every time the warp engines would go down, Captain Picard would make Geordi do 20 push ups.
Kevin Peter Hall was the predator. Didn't realize he was dead. Very sad, according to wiki got HIV from a tainted blood transfusion, was only 35 when he died.
Anyone?
Right, in the Star Trek universe sports in general and baseball in particular have become niche endeavors as humanity has turned its eyes to space and become a semi-communistic, less individualistic society, and yet the Vulcans not only know of the game but are really good at it. Right.
SABR-Nerd analogy well before its time.
Picard: "Geordi, can you get the warp-core back online?"
Geordi: "Always bet on black!!"
Picard:...
More "Vulcans are arrogant bastards and this one felt the need to put baseball-loving Captain Sisko in his place".
They also did an episode about Sisko's son trying to get a rare baseball card for his father, where they mentioned that the Hall of Fame was still around in Cooperstown.
In my scifi universe, made up of the toys I played with growing up (and eventually put into simulation leagues), Vulcans are not quite this good. The race with the best natural baseball playing talent is the Jawa. They have far superior hand eye coordination and reaction speed. That allows them to swing from the heels all the time and still make contact, mitigating their stature. Pretty much a species of cloaked, glowing eyes, Dustin Pedroias. My league has 42 players in the Hall of Fame, 8 are Jawas.
I would pretend water-picks were phasers and zap holes in my baseball cards.
But I still think you win.
Star Trek is a show about, essentially, the military of the Federation. One weakness of the Star Trek universe is that there is very, very little discussed or shown about the man on the street. It's a show about the warriors, explorers and intellectuals of 23rd century humanity. As much as I love Trek, as I've grown older, I really regret that they didn't do more with the larger society of the time.
Slightly related to my slightly related link, my favorite theory behind the Prime Directive is that its real purpose was to prevent someone like James Tiberius Kirk from pretending the far ends of the Alpha Quadrant were Gaul and building a fleet more loyal to him than the central government. Presumably, that would make the Sol Asteroid Belt into the Rubicon.
All of the Neutral Zone is divided into three parts...
In all fairness, that happened on the Original Series quite a bit. How many times did they run into a rogue federation officer who dropped onto a primitive planet and made himself supreme leader? (Okay, usually this was so they could make use of existing lots so they didn't have to build sets for "Gangster Planet" or "Roman Empire world.")
Since then, have watched Star Trek movies II, III and IV. I would say that all the characters' depiction in the reboot movie is very similar to the original characters, except Captain Kirk. Was surprised in the movies from the 80s to see that he is not an arrogant and shallow hotheaded doushebag. Why did JJ Abrams choose to remake him as one?
What about the Sand People? They're tough and hardy from living in the desert, if they can swing around those Gaderfii sticks you know they can swing a bat. I suppose pitching might be a problem, those robes could be restrictive.
Yeah, he took all of Kirk's well-known traits - womanizer, somewhat impulsive - and just said, #### it, let's crank it up to 11 and go. Definitely the weakest part of the movie for me.
This is my current pitch. Feel free to comment/criticize.
The new series begins with a small Federation vessel -- a frigate, say -- escorting a science mission to investigate stellar anomalies (insert alternative technobabble here). While on the mission, something happens (make up your own explanation -- subspace distortion, Romulan secret weapon, Q) that knocks the ship into a wormhole (yes, I know, keep reading it's not what you think) that propels the ship forward into time (again, yes, I hate time-travel in Star Trek too, but it's important in this case) about 50 years.
When the crew recovers, the captain sends out a subspace signal to Star Fleet Command reporting what happened. Only there's no answer, just subspace static....
The crew discover that in the preceding 50 years, the Federation collapsed, due to internal disorder and external attack. The Klingons and Romulans (and Ferengi, etc.) are feasting on the remains and fighting each other over the scraps. Earth itself has been bombarded back into a reduced technological state, and is under occupation. A bunch of former Federation colonies and planets became independent in the chaos of collapse and maintain a precarious existence between the warring powers, all looking out for themselves.
Faced with this situation, the crew of the U.S.S. Whatsit take upon themselves a monumental task: rebuilding the Federation, from scratch, with little in the way of resources except their ingenuity and resourcefulness. Bit by bit, over the course of the series, we see them forging alliances between independent worlds and human resistance movements, instilling hope and reintroducing the essential Star Trek values of cooperation and peace to a fractured universe.
In the hands of a good writer (not me), that would be a gangbuster premise.
Well, he was (supposed to be) a teenager. Weren't most somewhat impulsive adults cranked up to about 20 as teens?
For fairness sake I guess the Q and the Dowd could only be umpires. Chris Bosh has taught us that Cardassians make good basketball players, but how would they fare on the diamond? I can see Gul Dukat being a solid third baseman for some reason.
Because the teenage audience the movie was aimed at only knows Kirk from endless parodies, not the actual show, so he has become a caricature in popular culture.
James T. Kirk was the youngest captain in Starfleet, based on Horatio Hornblower, a military genius and a prodigy who was smart enough to beat Spock at chess.
Wasn't there a Kevin Sorbo-driven Saturday morning sci-fi show with that plot a couple years ago?
Andromeda I think
Edit: Goro is seen here glaring and gesturing at the umpire a la Josh Beckett.
Yeah...something's wrong when the lead actor is the comic relief.
LOL, I didn't know that but I knew he was Harry from Harry and the Hendersons.
Here he is on TNG.
They round the bases in single file, to conceal their numbers.
Yea, you'd definitely want a wookie on the hill instead.
Could work really well as a TV series though. I think one of the best advances in the past decade or so is TV's ability crank out a well done drama across a season or two. With the technology that allows for better FX and a willingness to challenge audiences more than in the past I think properly done episodic TV can be better than a movie in many cases. A friend and I were discussing recently that the Harry Potters probably would have worked better as a 24-25 episode TV season than as 8 - 2 1/2 hour movies. The extra 4-5 hours would have allowed more of the background stuff that made the books so good to be included.
I think your idea could similarly work well. A lot of detail could be integrated and make for a really compelling story.
I remember Andromeda. It was completely unwatchable. I tried viewing a few episodes. A big part of the problem was the gigantic ship with a crew of 4. And the muppet.
Anyway, setting it in the Star Trek universe gives everything a lot of depth since we're already familiar with the milieu, although the premise turns a lot of what the audience expects on its head.
And this is why I am tenatively excited about the Song of Fire and Ice TV series. Especially the whole one book=one season idea. We'll see if the execution keeps up the high level of quality the books have (and if GRRM gets the fifth book out before they catch up to him).
That sounds more like Farscape.
Another wookie, Lowbacca, played RF a while ago. Great arm and power but didn't hit for any kind of average.
One Sandperson has played in the league, a center fielder named Johnny Tusken. Played well as a rookie in 2008, but really fell victim to the sophomore jinx.
Instead of Enterprise, I would have gone with a spy series following Section 31. Less ship-to-ship fighting, more sneaking around. Would probably involve techniques of questionable morality. Maybe the cast would fly in a ship with the illegal interphase cloaking device like the Pegasus.
I love the idea of the protagonists taking the realpolitik, down-to-earth, Richielu sort of position.
"The treaty is only there to make the Klingons think we're not re-arming. We AND the Romulans both knew that the treaty was bupkis when we were signing it!"
Am I ever on the same page as this. I know GRRM is a big fan of Rome so that gives me some hope. I remember about 6-7 years ago looking at fantasy cast lists for a Song of Ice and Fire movie and thinking...you nerds are dreaming!
But Sean Bean as Eddard Stark...that sounds like it could be pretty bad ass.
I agree with this. Also optimistic because the series will be on HBO, so no editing for content.
So it's going to start out with a 12-episode season, and expand to 36 episodes by season 4?
I always get my unwatchable sci-fi series mixed up.
Just so you know Sean was horrible in Sharpe's.
And speaking of Babylon 5 . . . whoever mentioned Jeremiah in the last TV thread should be shot. I've watched half of the first season so far and it is horrible. That show was ten years behind the times when it aired. It is like a sad parody of Quantum Leap or MacGyver coupled with the lame production values of ST: TNG.
I know that is a joke but it actually raises a very good question. The books increased in complexity as they went on to the point where he has had to split up the story into several books just to cover the same time without creating megabooks and it is likely this problem will continue. It will be interesting to see how HBO resolves this and if they do so in a manner that makes for good TV. I'm guessing a lot of stuff gets streamlined and even some stuff/characters get left out entirely or severely diminished/merged.
I also can't see HBO footing the bill for all of the episodes required to do the books justice. This series has got to be an expensive project and I can't really see HBO staying with it for 5, 6, 7, or more seasons nor can I really picture them going much past 12 episodes a season. Look at Rome look at Deadwood. They just aren't going to pay the tab on this one to do it properly.
Ouch.
Sean Bean's Sharpe is how I got into Bernard Cornwell. I have the entire DVD set.
Granted I was 13 or 14 or so when I first saw them.
As for stuff that can get streamlined without killing it too much...
Greyjoys? Though they are kind of being set up to play a major role soon.
Frankly I'm more worried about Father Time catching up to Martin before he's done.
Anybody NOT annoyed at GRRM at this point?
I think I am the only person on record hoping his series never ends.
You might get your wish but not in the way you are hoping. His series might never end as in he doesn't write anything else past book 5 not as in he writes 30 books about these characters.
I don't need closure but I would like more books and not have it take a decade for the next book to come out.
Plus don't they suffer from the Peanuts flaw of having arms that don't even reach the top of their head?
It's Nerd^2.
And it is too awesome for words. Can we have a link and a write-up? Seriously, that is front-page material.
Dunno. I thought the major problem was the writing. I don't think Bean was wonderful or anything. I'm just not sure anybody could have done a substantially better job with the material.
I was really looking forward to them. Major let down.
Speaking of storyline bloat (and I'm a GRRM fan don't get me wrong) any of you who bailed on The Wheel of Time will be pleased to know that Brandon Sanderson appears to have matters pretty much in hand. Sure it's going to take 3 books to finish everything off, but the first of them shows he's willing to be ruthless in the trimming.
I think there should just be a show called Bird of Prey that focuses entirely on a Klingon crew.
That was my alternate idea for a new series, but in the end I felt the concept wouldn't support an entire series. The Klingons are interesting as foils for humans, but the audience just wouldn't identify with them enough to become emotionally invested.
Can't be done.
Sure it could. What don't you think would work?
Well, his character is older in the 80s movies. One of the main recurring themes set up by II is Kirk coming to grips with aging and mortality. The first 30 minutes of that movie is basically a middle-aged Kirk feeling sorry for himself.
Which part?
The perfect future world where all forms of racial and sexual discrimination have not only been eradicated, but no one is bigoted or prejudiced?
All aliens look, talk, think and act like us?
All economic problems have been solved?
or the fact that we are the most advanced- socially- economically- and scientifically people, in our neck of the woods?
One idea I like in B5 (fro a space opera) was that as the series went on you realized that Humans, as opposed to the Star Trek Universe (Or Star Wars or Asimov's Foundation and Empire or the universe of Dune or going all the way back to EE Smith's Skylark series)were a minor power at best...
That one actually didn't bother me. Racists are probably too worked up about Klingons and Ferengis and whatnot to spend too much time worrying about black people or Jews.
Relating B5 to Star Trek:
Human = Cardassians
Minbari = Vulkans
Centauri = The Romulans
Narn = The Klingons
Vorlons = The Dominion
The Shadows = The Borg
Brakiri = Bajorans
Pak'ma'ra = The Packleds
Drazi = Ferengi
Seems prohibitively expensive given the large cast of characters and the diverse sets. I don't think the narrative would work well on screen -- a lot of my favorite parts of the novel were digressions and footnotes, and DFW's beautiful prose. For example, I loved the side notes about the history of video telephony, or the ballet of drug addicts lining up at a soup kitchen, or that moment of hilarious realization when I figured out that "Year of the_____" was because they started selling sponsorship of the years, etc. History of the game Eschaton. How do you translate that stuff effectively to the screen?
Concur.
Racism still exists.
Worf is totally racist towards Romulons. See Birthright, Part II.
And Chief O'Brien hates the Cardies pretty good, too. I bet if Molly brought home a Cardy, O'Brien would be none too pleased...
The large cast isn't that big a problem - other shows have had giant ensemble casts before, and you aren't going to need everyone in every show. There are lots of locations, but not too many that would be that expensive to build or maintain (except maybe for the stadium bits with Orin). A lot of it is "a tunnel under the school" or "some dude's house" or whatever.
You could get around some of the issues with the prose by selectively adding narration. Maybe even a visual cut to an omniscient narrator meant to be DFW (or MP, maybe?), delivering the bit in question, or to some other amusingly obtrusive narrative device like a CNN-style textual crawl on the bottom of the screen. And stuff like the history of Eschaton would work fine as a flashback. You've got so many flashbacks and such a fractured chronology already, who's going to notice a few more?
I really think it could be done.
I don't know. I always (in TNG) found them at least as interesting and relatable as our putative heroes. The Klingon-focused episodes of TNG were amongst their very best, and the Klingon characters were compelling on their own terms.
Yes, but you're a nerd. We're talking about a mass audience here.
I guess it's more a question, to me at least, of whether it could be done well, and what exactly we would gain from a TV version.
I love love the book, and I thought its surreal hilarity worked really well in my imagination. Why take DFW's prose out of the equation? You'd need some director with an amazing visual style to make the project aesthetically worthwhile, IMO.
So who do you think could handle directing/adapting the project? (Honest question.)
Or as Londo Mollari put it, in one of my favorite quotes from that show: Arrogance and stupidity all in the same package. How efficient of you!
Seconded. If Kerouac's sim games can get published, and that Cosmic Baseball Association can have a website, you deserve at least as much attention.
I thought Kirk was done pretty well in ABRAMS-Trek . I mean, think about it, he's just a wet-behind the ears kid (and to add to that this is a Kirk from a timeline altered by Nero's time-traveling, so he grew up without a father figure to guide him). Yes, SHAT-Kirk was not the arrogant, womanizing hothead-- well, not usually, but you definitely got this feeling that he could have been before he first saw somebody die near him, or first had his heart broken. You sort of see this near the end of the movie, where Kirk offers to rescue the Romulan crew. That's something totally like the Shat-Kirk. He's growing up.
My idea for a Trek show: Star Trek meets CSI. In the TNG era shows they always were talking about how crime was basically nonexistent. To me, I'd have to think that would mean that every murder or major crime that wasn't solvable immediately would be a big deal. And since crime is so low there wouldn't be many actual detectives anymore, so there'd be a Federation-wide investigative service or something- probably attached to Starfleet, since that seems to be the only police organization around. I think it'd be a good show because it could allow for looks at the Star Trek universe we don't see very often, while still sort of staying in the pseudo-military organization focus. Admittedly, the fact that the technology is so good would make for easy deus ex machina, but that could be overcome with good writers.
And on the question of what fictional race would be best at Baseball, this shouldn't even be a question. It is, of course, the Kryptonians.
Well, an awesome TV series. That's a pretty good prize, right? And maybe also greater popular recognition of DFW's work, by people who would otherwise have been daunted by the length and scope of the book.
Werner Herzog? He does well with black humor and stories about obsessive types, and IJ is nothing if not a story about obsessions. Or maybe Soderbergh? Good with ensemble casts and complex multi-location shoots, and some experimental tendencies, which might work well with the novel's unconventional style. Both have done TV work in the past, too.
If you gave it to the wrong guy, you could definitely end up with a Cimino-style disaster. But I still think it's worth the attempt - if it turned out well, it'd turn out VERY well.
Like Dune.
0. Not only that, he was never close. These are his won/loss records when he was fired:
52-40
55-40
91-71
91-54
40-28
If you're talking a TV series, there's not going to be one director for all the episodes of a series.
That's not how TV series generally work; the director is usually a fairly fungable part of a TV series, someone who can produce an episode on time and on budget.
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