Star Trek

[JediTricks]

You could call Leonardo as cop a disguise, but what's the excuse for the TMNT as Star Trek figures other than Playmates held both licenses?

I remember those! I always thought it was so strange they made the Turtles in Star Trek uniforms... Like you say, there was no reason for it.

Apparently they were there to make cash money out of 2 different types of collector suckers.

Except that the Maquis had escalated from rebels protecting their homes to terrorists running raids on Federation facilities as they became more desperate. The Starfleet officers with them went from sympathizers to traitors by doing so.

When did the Maquis raid Federation facilities? Other than 3 Starfleet Officers stealing some things when they revealed themselves to be Maquis sympathizers I don't recall the Maquis ever going after anything from the Federation. In general, the Maquis pretty much avoided the Federation as much as they could. Eddington got a little bold by raiding some raiding some freighters but they weren't exactly Federation.[/quote]Stealing the Defiant. Eddington also attacked the Defiant and another ship, which is what prompted Sisko to take drastic (overreaching IMO) actions like poisoning entire planets. Those seemed like actions taken on the backs of other, similar actions we just heard whispers about - Ron Moore would eventually confirm that offscreen during Voyager's run.

"It's a FAKE!" is still one of my favority lines from Trek ever. And that really was a great episode. It showed a commander doing what was needed to win the war while finding a way to deal with the morality of what he was doing. Heavy stuff but very interesting.

It's a FAAAAAAAKE! The line read on hat was so funny at the time to me, the whole episode was played "big" and that line fit, but man the read just had me dying at the time. I'd just draw it out even longer and longer every time I remembered it.

To me, while it is a good episode of tv, it's not a good representation of Star Trek - Sisko does what he does and plays into the conspiracy because it's easier, it's a "now" way of dealing with a complex problem. Sisko bribes someone to keep a stabbing quiet and that bribe involves the passage of illegal goods onto the station, trades a lot of a dangerous Federation substance, convinces a friendly nation to pardon a caught criminal, and ultimately condones and succeeds from the outright murder of 2 people. Are we to become a people so easily outmaneuvered into war that our only answer is to become sleazier than the enemy, or are we going to strive to go beyond such acts, to succeed on inclusion and peace rather than duplicity and war? Are we going to remain a society that thrives only on destruction and a government of "dirty tricks"? I sure as hell hope not.

Supernova series, yeah I think you're right, the chrome Locutus was the only other one. I remember seeing that at some point and wouldn't mind owning one if to just have another borg around. Although, on my Worf it says "Holodeck series". Hm.

"Holodeck Series" was their name for all the figures that weren't normal universe figures but expressed through the Holodeck, I think both Supernova Series figures were on that Holodeck card essentially because the chrome made them not screen-accurate.

I remember FAO being overpriced on just about everything. I mean, why should I buy POTF Vader for 15$ there when I can go across a parking lot and get one at Toys R Us for 8$? They really didn't know what they hell they were doing. KB wasn't much better and they suffered for it too. I'm just glad there were no Playmates FAO exclusives. I know Spencer Gifts had a few, Target had some and I think Toys R Us? Maybe? I dunno, the exclusives just started to piss me off after a while. It's like Playmates just started saying "Hey Trek fans! No, not you, the RICH Trek fans! Buy our stuff that's exclusive and it's gonna be worth a ton of money some day!" Riiiiight. It's a bit like card collecting. I have a crap ton of Star Trek cards and I can garuantee that it's a big pile of worthless. Still, got some neat looking cards out of it though.

The worst was being a Trek collector AND a Star Wars collector where they were both pulling that crap at the same time.

And I'm almost through Season 2 of TOS. So far, I've noticed a much higher death count this season than last. And, more of them are red shirts than other colors. Season one only had I think one actual red shirt that stayed dead (the others came back or were restored somehow by the end of their episodes). It was mostly yellow and blue shirts that stayed dead. Season 2 has so far seen about 13 dead reds and 1 blue. I'm also noticing that there were actually two different models used for the Enterprise at any given time. One with the forward part of the nacelles with "points" on them and no lights and vents on the back, and another that has no points and lights on the front and instead of vents on the back it has those round silver "ball" looking things.

I think that was a byproduct of NBC wanting more action.

I think the one with the points and no lights on the Bussard collectors was reused footage shot during the original the pilot, and that they only had the 1 model which had been altered from that look.

I am thinking we need a "Playmates TMNT figures all suck" thread.

Nah, Wild West Donny and Mike were cool figures (even if Mike's figure is borderline racist).

Many of the accessories were....crap that had nothing to do with the comics. This was especially true early on in the line.

Toy Biz half-assed making complete teams in one unified look. You could only make complete teams if you accepted characters in uniforms that did not match and/or in off-scale sculpts. (Did they ever make a complete set of X-Factor for example?) Good luck getting all of Freedom Force. Hell, even the 4 guys they made did not fit together. Pyro was bigger than the Blob. And, the Crimson Commando was in his post-FF costume.

Toy Biz Marvel only had 2 scales, the original 4.5" scale and the later 6" scale, they completed teams in both in current costumes I'm pretty sure. Pretty sure you're wrong about TB Blob being smaller than X-Force Pyro, but Blob wasn't as tall as he should have been either.

That kind of thing saved me a huge amount of money as a kid.

So even as a kid you were an anal wart?

Well, it beats having tea with the Dominion, which is the solution that TNG would have used.

Picard wouldn't have putzed around the Gamma Quadrant for 6 years avoiding dealing with the Founders head-on. And he sure as shit wouldn't have done it in a RUNABOUT for the first 3 years.

Oh, that does not sound like bad fanfic at all....

That was Voyager in a nutshell.

I was just throwing out a way that the show could have avoided the crew shortage problem and still be cavalier about high body counts in every episode.

Talking about bad fanfic. Using the transporter to make copies is a cheap out, I get what you're saying, they could have come up with an excuse for why they just cavalierly killed 300 crew members on a ship that only held 120, but maybe a better idea would have been to not cavalierly kill off so many damned crew members in the first place instead of trying to put a bandaid on it.

The thing is that there are people who *really* like that writing style. There are people who want the predictable set-up and resolution. They like plots that they can keep time to.

Yeah, there's people who like to have pudding mashed into their genitals as well. Just because you like something doesn't automatically make it GOOD. Generally, the people who like lowest-common-denominator-level simple writing are the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, they are the people who cannot understand complex things like 2 storylines intertwining, or who follow which character does what minute to minute without really obvious instructions because they're either too stupid or too easily-distracted to get what's going on. We should not let those who pander to the lowest common denominator dictate what does and doesn't get produced, those people have no interest in telling important, passionate, interesting stories - they just want to sell soap and Chevrolets and Pepto Bismal and McDonalds, they just want to get paid fast and hard, and they get paid by fooling the masses into seeing low-quality material dolled up to look like better material. Van Helsing wasn't very good, it made back its big budget twice. Batman & Robin also made back its big budget by double despite being utterly insipid commercial garbage. X-men Origins Wolverine made $220 mil despite being watered-down nonsensical pap. Even Wild Wild West actually made money despite being just inept and dull. Somebody went to those movies, somebody probably even liked them, yet that alone doesn't make them good in any way.

While doing a little research writing this post, I came across mentions of Kes, whom I had entirely forgotten about being on Voyager. The way they mishandled that character was atrocious, but the way the blundered her leaving and final return was mind-numbing.

?

I honestly don't have the strength to handle that one, if you haven't suffered through Voyager yet, it's too complex to explain, just skim this: http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Kes

Class snobbery, plain and simple. They were banking that people of a certain class would spend extra money to avoid shopping with the rabble and masses. Of course, most of the people with FAO levels of money, (paying over $10 for a SW in the late 90s would be like paying around $20 now), did not have kids or buy toys. And, toy collectors are pretty economical about their hobby. (Yes, we spend money on non-essentials. But, we try to be cheap about it.)

I don't think that's what it was. FAO was known for taking great care to focus on exactly what they felt was their customer base's needs, their customer base was parents who wanted more than just the average cheap toys, they wanted more quality and more uniqueness. FAO was a boutique chain, they didn't have many locations in their heyday, they were simply a retailer of a bygone era, they had a business model that didn't really fit with downscale malls and internet discounts. Ultimately, they expanded when times were good too far, and when times got tougher for the market they didn't contract fast enough. But they didn't have the buying clout of a Toys R Us or Target or Walmart or even Kaybee in the late '90s, hence "boutique". They took their industry more seriously and more from a "whole customer" viewpoint, which is how they justified their pricing.

-was not sorry to see FAO fail.

I was sorry to see their flagship and near-flagship level stores fail, not because I wanted to spend that much, but because those stores were magical because the people who worked there took toys and toy buyers seriously, they created an atmosphere where toys were special at a time when other retailers - even TRU - were treating toys as a gimmick to sell clothes and diapers, "come in for the toys, then buy paper towels" type of thing. FAO's big stores had great displays and hands-on experiences you couldn't get anywhere else, even seeing FAO's New York store on TV was great enough to fuel dreams. Their mall stores simply couldn't replicate that, so I didn't give a crap about those. Now the brand is a meaningless name on boring toys sold at TRU and that's tragic, my grandmother used to tell stories of her visits to the original FAO.

How did Harry Kim wind up being alternate universe Harry? I don't think I've ever seen all of Voyager apparently. As for such a thing sounding fanficish, I kind of expect that from Trek anyway. There have been so many deus ex machina resurrections throughout Trek history that such things should be taken as the norm. Actually, one of the card series I have is the "Doppleganger" cards which show "alternate" versions of various characters. Ranging from characters in disguise to those same characters from alternate timelines.

Sparky's explanation below your post is good. Harry Kim Alternate being the main show's Harry Kim was the only time I can remember them ever pulling a character switch like that, HarryAlt even comments on things feeling different since his Voyager had taken a different path with different adventures, but by the next episode we had forgotten all about that.

MLP is an awesome show. I honestly never thought I'd say that but there you have it. I like the fact that it finds the conflicts we often have in our every day lives as opposed to the usual 80's standby of "good vs. evil". I mean I think we've all had deadlines we've nearly missed but how many of us have had to fight Decepticons? Or Romulans.

Wow, this whole MLP fandom thing is so weird as it keeps growing. BTW, I liked the episodes of Trek and TF where they had to work with the enemy or just handle a situation rather than fight the big enemy war mission - nobody can relate to unending wars.

Sisko didn't have to kill him. That was all Garak, and Sisko was extremely angry when he found out that had been Garak's plan all along.

Yeah, but Sisko then admitted to himself that he was fine and dandy with it, he could live with Garak killing the Romulan and the holo forger and all the other misdeeds done in the conspiracy. At that point he became Nixon pulling dirty tricks for what he considered the greater good. Ultimately, that means Sisko condones those actions, and by allowing Garak to remain unanswered for those acts (and even taking Garak in as a trusted strategic advisor) Sisko becomes an accessory after the fact, a conspirator, and thus de facto murderer.

Is it just me or did she blow the ship up a lot? I think she self destructed in "Year of Hell", She threatened to in that one where the invisible aliens were experimenting on the crew, and I'm sure there were probably others.

It's not just you. According to funtrivia.com, the ship was destroyed 5 times throughout the show. I can't find any statistics on how many times she threatened to destroy the ship, but I'm sure it would add to that number.

I think she only blew up the ship 3 times, each time to reset a timeline and make things better for the audience's main Voyager. Year of Hell she actually blew up the ship by running it into the time-ship. She crashed the ship into a planet in an episode where future versions of Chakotay and Harry have to find the wreck and send info back to the past to ensure it doesn't crash in Timeless. And the aforementioned "Deadlock". She also threatened to blow up the ship a bunch more times.

And now I'm on to season 3. Which started off with my favorite original series episode just for the sheer stupidity of it: Spock's Brain. Seriously, the whole plot is that Spock's brain is missing. This just cracks me up to no end. Other than that, it was captain Kirk's "kill the computer of the week" episode. He does that a lot. M-5, Nomad, That lizard head shaped one on that one planet, and now this one. And that just barely scratches the surface.

Computers seemed a lot more threatening back then, the idea that we were giving them all this power over us and the ability to think for themselves to a certain degree, the average person didn't really understand what limitations that would really have. Computers of the '60s were big and scary to most folks, they were the power to think anything in the blink of an eye and then eventually do that.

Spock's Brain is so awesomely bad, season 3 is such a cheese-fest.

So I finished the Original Series. There were a lot of interesting ideas presented although it did come off a little preachy sometimes (particularly the "space hippies" episode). There are some episodes that I found myself hating more than before while others that I disliked before were not so bad this time around.

Huh, that's interesting. Space Hippies was really preachy, although I thought the nuance between Chekov and Irina I thought made it less unbearable.

And I started watching the Animated series. Got three episodes into it and started watching Voyager because Voyager had finised downloading and I wanted to see if I could jury rig it to be watchable on my tv in the living room. Turns out routing it through the xbox works perfectly. And it can access it off an external hard drive so I don't have waste space on either my computer or xbox.

Good job getting your xbox into being the media hub, that's cool. Animated is a tough cookie, I ended up buying it and I enjoyed the fact that it's "more Trek", but it's also painfully cheesy even by TOS standards and it buries ideas in some of the cartooniest stuff, and they overuse Doohan and a few other voice actors in multiple characters. I definitely wouldn't recommend Animated to just any Trek fan, it doesn't add to their experience beyond a laughable curiosity. You kind of have to be a mega-Trekkie to let it work.

But anyway, yeah, Voyager. I'm already into season 2. Season 1 had some good set up and presented some plot threads that would bear fruit later but I can see what people like JT mean when they say they half assed it. Or at least certain aspects of it. Kes and the Ocampa in particular I find the main offenders on that scale since they seem to be a "kitchen sink" alien. This is especially bad in Elogium. Yes, it's a season 2 ep, but it's so bad, I had to stop watching it. So let me get this straight: Ocampans can only have ONE kid EVER in the entire 9 YEAR EXISTENCE and when they do the female grows weird shit on her back, eats everything within a foot of her mouth, the lovers have to be glued together for like two and half days and she sweats so profusely that she looks like a strung out crack whore? Oh, and as if that wasn't bad enough, at some point during this massive bone a thon her feet need to be massaged... BY HER PARENTS?!! Yeah, at that point I moved on to the next episode. Done.

Ugh, my condolences, you seemed to have absorbed a lot of that stuff.

-When I get home, I'm going to see who wrote "Elogium" and boycott watching anything by that person. Ever. Ugh.

I just looked, you are hosed, the Kes part was Jeri Taylor, she had her hands in a lot of TNG and DS9 as well as VOY, you are going to have an incredibly difficult time viewing around her work. It's also her fault that Kenneth Biller was given this as his first job, so you may not want to hold it against his later Voyager works (although since it's Voyager, I would understand it if you easily did ). Truly though, you have suffered so others who read your post will not have to.

[Onslaught Six]

And I started watching the Animated series. Got three episodes into it and started watching Voyager because Voyager had finised downloading and I wanted to see if I could jury rig it to be watchable on my tv in the living room. Turns out routing it through the xbox works perfectly. And it can access it off an external hard drive so I don't have waste space on either my computer or xbox.

The 360 is cool like that, but it can't run everything. Look into a program called TVersity--what it does is basically turns your computer into a media server, and it'll actually convert anything the 360 can't natively play into a format it will, on the fly. For example, I downloaded the first season of Home Movies a while back and it was in (I think) .mkv format, which the 360 was outright like, "No, I will not fucking play this." So I finally looked back into TVersity, got it to work (took maybe an hour of finangling with things, but worth it) and now I can watch 'anything.'

(But if you don't want to do that, the 360 will run any AVI with DivX or XviD encoding.)

-When I get home, I'm going to see who wrote "Elogium" and boycott watching anything by that person. Ever. Ugh.

I thought you didn't pay attention to writers?

You could call Leonardo as cop a disguise, but what's the excuse for the TMNT as Star Trek figures other than Playmates held both licenses?

I remember those! I always thought it was so strange they made the Turtles in Star Trek uniforms... Like you say, there was no reason for it.

Apparently they were there to make cash money out of 2 different types of collector suckers.

I still don't think that's it. Playmates would routinely go to Eastman and Laird and basically go, "Hey, got any ideas? What goofy outfits can we put the Turtles in this week?" Laird, big fan of Trek (especially TOS), said, "Don't you guys own the Star Trek license? Can we put the Turtles in Starfleet uniforms?" Playmates said, fuck it, sure, it'll sell like anything else, and there you go. I think it's just Laird jocking his own strap. (Which is, in a way, fine, because he created them.)

The thing is that there are people who *really* like that writing style. There are people who want the predictable set-up and resolution. They like plots that they can keep time to.

Yeah, there's people who like to have pudding mashed into their genitals as well. Just because you like something doesn't automatically make it GOOD. Generally, the people who like lowest-common-denominator-level simple writing are the LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR, they are the people who cannot understand complex things like 2 storylines intertwining, or who follow which character does what minute to minute without really obvious instructions because they're either too stupid or too easily-distracted to get what's going on. We should not let those who pander to the lowest common denominator dictate what does and doesn't get produced, those people have no interest in telling important, passionate, interesting stories - they just want to sell soap and Chevrolets and Pepto Bismal and McDonalds, they just want to get paid fast and hard, and they get paid by fooling the masses into seeing low-quality material dolled up to look like better material. Van Helsing wasn't very good, it made back its big budget twice. Batman & Robin also made back its big budget by double despite being utterly insipid commercial garbage. X-men Origins Wolverine made $220 mil despite being watered-down nonsensical pap. Even Wild Wild West actually made money despite being just inept and dull. Somebody went to those movies, somebody probably even liked them, yet that alone doesn't make them good in any way.

There's nothing wrong with occasionally tweaking something so that it's easier to follow. I remember many years back being told about the "television and movie five minute rule." In any given piece of media, you should be able to walk in at virtually any point in the movie or show and be able to figure out what's going on within five minutes. This is the protagonist. This is what he's doing. He's going to go fight the bad guy, or stop the bomb, or return the ring to Mordor, or whatever. And it doesn't have to be done in a bad way, or necessarily reiterate the main goal every five minutes or whatever. But let's take, for example, the recent TF: MTMTE book. (The Rodimus one.) Skids doesn't appear at all during the issue but he's mentioned and brought up--Skids is there and he's crazy. This way, if someone picks up this as their first issue of MTMTE, when they pick up the next one, and Skids is in it Being Crazy and Doing Crazy Stuff, they won't go, "Well, who's that guy? Why is he acting crazy?" That's Skids. They said he was crazy. (Now, not everything can be done this way. For example, let's say that a protagonist in a movie's wife was killed in a flashback that we see at the beginning, but it isn't really brought up. Then, at the end, the bad guy is all, "I'm the guy that killed your wife!" Someone coming in in the middle might not necessarily know that the protagonist's wife is dead, but that's fine, because the bad guy says it right there.)

-was not sorry to see FAO fail.

I was sorry to see their flagship and near-flagship level stores fail, not because I wanted to spend that much, but because those stores were magical because the people who worked there took toys and toy buyers seriously, they created an atmosphere where toys were special at a time when other retailers - even TRU - were treating toys as a gimmick to sell clothes and diapers, "come in for the toys, then buy paper towels" type of thing. FAO's big stores had great displays and hands-on experiences you couldn't get anywhere else, even seeing FAO's New York store on TV was great enough to fuel dreams. Their mall stores simply couldn't replicate that, so I didn't give a crap about those. Now the brand is a meaningless name on boring toys sold at TRU and that's tragic, my grandmother used to tell stories of her visits to the original FAO.[/quote]

I believe the first NES ever sold was at an FAO. (It was, alongside all 15 or so games in the initial lineup, to someone who worked for a competing company.)

[Sparky Prime]

Stealing the Defiant. Eddington also attacked the Defiant and another ship, which is what prompted Sisko to take drastic (overreaching IMO) actions like poisoning entire planets. Those seemed like actions taken on the backs of other, similar actions we just heard whispers about - Ron Moore would eventually confirm that offscreen during Voyager's run.

Thomas Riker stealing the Defiant, as I said, was a case of a Starfleet Officer revealing himself going rouge. And Eddington never raided the Defiant. He only attacked the Defiant out of defense and did so in a way as to only disable the ship. As for poisoning entire planets, the Maquis made it so Cardassians couldn't live on certain planets, but was still habitable for humans. Sisko retaliated by making a Maquis planet or two poisonous to humans but still habitable to Cardassians.

Oh, that does not sound like bad fanfic at all....

That was Voyager in a nutshell.

Voyager was not that bad. Sure there were some really bad episodes, but in general it was still a good show.

Yeah, but Sisko then admitted to himself that he was fine and dandy with it, he could live with Garak killing the Romulan and the holo forger and all the other misdeeds done in the conspiracy. At that point he became Nixon pulling dirty tricks for what he considered the greater good. Ultimately, that means Sisko condones those actions, and by allowing Garak to remain unanswered for those acts (and even taking Garak in as a trusted strategic advisor) Sisko becomes an accessory after the fact, a conspirator, and thus de facto murderer.

I wouldn't say he was fine and dandy with it. Sure, he concludes at the end of the episode he can live with it, but clearly he still wasn't happy about it. After all, he says at the start of the log entry he needed to justify what happened and try to see where things went wrong.

I think she only blew up the ship 3 times, each time to reset a timeline and make things better for the audience's main Voyager. Year of Hell she actually blew up the ship by running it into the time-ship. She crashed the ship into a planet in an episode where future versions of Chakotay and Harry have to find the wreck and send info back to the past to ensure it doesn't crash in Timeless. And the aforementioned "Deadlock". She also threatened to blow up the ship a bunch more times.

1. "Dreadlock" - Duplicate Voyagers are created. The Vidiians attack one and that Janeway self destructs the ship to save the other Voyager.
2. "Year of Hell part 2" - Voyager rams into the Annorax time-ship trying to destroy it to prevent them from erasing any more history. With the time-ship's destruction however, time is reset and Voyager is restored.
3. "Course: Oblivion" - Voyager creates an upgraded warp drive to get home faster, but the radiation from the new warp drive causes their biomemetic structures to break down. They realize they're actually the duplicates from the "Demon Planet" the real Voyager encountered. Eventually the ship is destroyed and everyone is lost just as they catch up to the real Voyager.
4. "Timeless" - Using the Quantum Slipstream drive to get home goes wrong and Voyager crashes on an ice planet. Harry manages to send a message back in time to change history, preventing the ships destruction.
5. "Relativity" - Voyager is destroyed by a temporal bomb in an act of revenge from Captain Braxton. The crew of the 29th century ship 'Relativity' works with 7of9 and eventually Janeway to find the rouge Braxton and disarm the bomb to prevent a time paradox and save Voyager.

[Dominic]

I was sorry to see their flagship and near-flagship level stores fail, not because I wanted to spend that much, but because those stores were magical because the people who worked there took toys and toy buyers seriously

Magical my ass. Toys are a consumer good, like any other.

Do I like them? Hell yeah. I also like comics. But seriously, FAO had the gimmick. They worked people in to paying higher prices for the "experience" of buying toys at FAO Schwartz.

A case could be made that FAO prices mroe realistically reflected the "real costs" of toys in terms of economics and trade deficits. But, we all know that was not what FAO was up to. They were working the marks.

even seeing FAO's New York store on TV was great enough to fuel dreams.

Okay, so they made good commercials and had a strong media push.

JT, I know you are smarter than this.

Sisko does what he does and plays into the conspiracy because it's easier, it's a "now" way of dealing with a complex problem.

Sisko did what was necessary. The Federation was losing ships, personnel and territory to an enemy that was well supplied, ruthless and clearly intended to take over the entire Quadrant. Sisko's actions saved Federation lives and resources.

And, that was part of what made the episode great. Sisko did the right thing. He took care of the Federation.

But, along the way, he had to make compromises. From then forward, Quark would have known Sisko was at least open to making deals. There would always be a change that Garak would need a favour.

The Romulan was fair game. The holo-forger is a bit murkier. (He likely would not have gotten involved if he knew that he would be killed.)

How is it un-Trek-ish to set up a scenario where the good guys have to make tough moral choices? DS9 set up a different type of scenario, and did not McGuffin it away at the end.

Talking about bad fanfic. Using the transporter to make copies is a cheap out, I get what you're saying, they could have come up with an excuse for why they just cavalierly killed 300 crew members on a ship that only held 120, but maybe a better idea would have been to not cavalierly kill off so many damned crew members in the first place instead of trying to put a bandaid on it.

Fair point. But, I was coming at it from a "assume that the problem is already there" angle. Yeah, it is a cheap way out, and it raises questions about creating life that "Voyager" may not have been intellectually equipped to handle. But, it would have been a possible solution.

And, to expound on that....

Yeah, there's people who like to have pudding mashed into their genitals as well. Just because you like something doesn't automatically make it GOOD.

You were not supposed to tell anybody about our secret rendevous in Pasadena! What the hell man? What? The? Hell?

We should not let those who pander to the lowest common denominator dictate what does and doesn't get produced, those people have no interest in telling important, passionate, interesting stories - they just want to sell soap and Chevrolets and Pepto Bismal and McDonalds,

Creatively, I agree. But, objectively, why not?

Soap and Chevy and Pepto need to be sold. People need to make money in order to survive. I do not like most TV. So, you know what? I do not watch much of it. Guess what? Neither of us are a profitable market. Even if I had money, I would not spend it according to advertisers.

But, that lowest common denominator you mention? They are more likely to part with their money and they are more likely to sit through a television show. So, it kind of makes sense to pitch to them.

If people want pudding smeared on their junk, then dammit you sell them pudding.



Dom
-pudding on the privates JT?

[Onslaught Six]

If people want pudding smeared on their junk, then dammit you sell them pudding.

Marketing 101.

[Shockwave]

So I started watching DS9 recently (I know, I'm all over the place with this. Next post I'll tell you I've been watching TNG). Anyway, as one might expect, I have some thoughts. Major Kira is a little grating in the first few seasons. It's all anti-Cardassian this and that and she seems so 1 dimmensional as a result. She gets better as the series goes on but it's a rough start. I love Garack. From the first line uttered, he's been pure gold. Especially the verbal sparring between him and Bashir. I'm also wondering how they reconcile Bashir later on with him being genetically engineered with how he's portrayed now as young and naive. Dax has a bit of a rough start as well, often coming off as having a superiority complex because of her several lifetimes of experience. Quark and Odo are fantastic, often providing some much needed comic relief to the tension on the station. Overall, I think it took DS9 a few years to find it's footing, but once it did, it really got good.

[JediTricks]

The 360 is cool like that, but it can't run everything. Look into a program called TVersity--what it does is basically turns your computer into a media server, and it'll actually convert anything the 360 can't natively play into a format it will, on the fly. For example, I downloaded the first season of Home Movies a while back and it was in (I think) .mkv format, which the 360 was outright like, "No, I will not fucking play this." So I finally looked back into TVersity, got it to work (took maybe an hour of finangling with things, but worth it) and now I can watch 'anything.'

(But if you don't want to do that, the 360 will run any AVI with DivX or XviD encoding.)

What's the point of turning your PC into a media server so you can pump it through the 360 when you can just bypass the 360 and HDMI-out to the TV? That's what I do, although now that Netflix and Amazon Prime Video are both on Playstation 3, I don't really use my PC HDMI that way anymore (now mostly it's to show guests stuff from the PC without looking over my shoulder at the monitor).

If you want to ONLY convert media, a decent free program is Oxeleon Media Converter, just make the files on PC, then put them on flash media and stick it in the 360.

There's nothing wrong with occasionally tweaking something so that it's easier to follow. I remember many years back being told about the "television and movie five minute rule." In any given piece of media, you should be able to walk in at virtually any point in the movie or show and be able to figure out what's going on within five minutes. This is the protagonist. This is what he's doing. He's going to go fight the bad guy, or stop the bomb, or return the ring to Mordor, or whatever. And it doesn't have to be done in a bad way, or necessarily reiterate the main goal every five minutes or whatever. But let's take, for example, the recent TF: MTMTE book. (The Rodimus one.) Skids doesn't appear at all during the issue but he's mentioned and brought up--Skids is there and he's crazy. This way, if someone picks up this as their first issue of MTMTE, when they pick up the next one, and Skids is in it Being Crazy and Doing Crazy Stuff, they won't go, "Well, who's that guy? Why is he acting crazy?" That's Skids. They said he was crazy. (Now, not everything can be done this way. For example, let's say that a protagonist in a movie's wife was killed in a flashback that we see at the beginning, but it isn't really brought up. Then, at the end, the bad guy is all, "I'm the guy that killed your wife!" Someone coming in in the middle might not necessarily know that the protagonist's wife is dead, but that's fine, because the bad guy says it right there.)

There's nothing right with using "dumbing it down" as a guideline though. Lord of the Rings movies didn't need to constantly hit you over the head with what other characters were doing every 5 minutes, nor did it need to ram down our throats explanations of who the protagonists were. The more a writer clings to rules like that, the more it's product rather than creative expression; framework can help a writer, but it can also hamper one.

Thomas Riker stealing the Defiant, as I said, was a case of a Starfleet Officer revealing himself going rouge.

Riker's theft of the Defiant is a Maquis operation, he's even got members of the Maquis with him.

And Eddington never raided the Defiant. He only attacked the Defiant out of defense and did so in a way as to only disable the ship.

Eddington planted a virus which disabled the Defiant and then strafed it when its systems were down, that's not out of defense. And Eddington set up a trap for the... let me look it up, the USS Malinche, which is hardly defense.

Voyager was not that bad. Sure there were some really bad episodes, but in general it was still a good show.

We'll have to not see eye to eye on that, I found Voyager fairly insipid and not at all a good show, beyond production values; it LOOKED like Trek, but the writing was pretty bad and the directing was generally poor, leading to stilted acting.

I wouldn't say he was fine and dandy with it. Sure, he concludes at the end of the episode he can live with it, but clearly he still wasn't happy about it. After all, he says at the start of the log entry he needed to justify what happened and try to see where things went wrong.

He cheers up when he admits that he can live with it, he's not dour anymore, he's content by the time he deletes the log entry. But ok, he's not fine and dandy, I'd argue though for this show he was as close to fine and dandy as it got for Sisko's angsty ways.

1. "Dreadlock" - Duplicate Voyagers are created. The Vidiians attack one and that Janeway self destructs the ship to save the other Voyager.
2. "Year of Hell part 2" - Voyager rams into the Annorax time-ship trying to destroy it to prevent them from erasing any more history. With the time-ship's destruction however, time is reset and Voyager is restored.
3. "Course: Oblivion" - Voyager creates an upgraded warp drive to get home faster, but the radiation from the new warp drive causes their biomemetic structures to break down. They realize they're actually the duplicates from the "Demon Planet" the real Voyager encountered. Eventually the ship is destroyed and everyone is lost just as they catch up to the real Voyager.
4. "Timeless" - Using the Quantum Slipstream drive to get home goes wrong and Voyager crashes on an ice planet. Harry manages to send a message back in time to change history, preventing the ships destruction.
5. "Relativity" - Voyager is destroyed by a temporal bomb in an act of revenge from Captain Braxton. The crew of the 29th century ship 'Relativity' works with 7of9 and eventually Janeway to find the rouge Braxton and disarm the bomb to prevent a time paradox and save Voyager.

The episode is "Deadlock", not "Dreadlock".

Those are 5 times it was destroyed, but the question was about Janeway destroying the ship, #s 3 and 5 aren't Janeway's fault in any way (and I really don't count #3 since it was never a real Voyager to begin with).

I was sorry to see their flagship and near-flagship level stores fail, not because I wanted to spend that much, but because those stores were magical because the people who worked there took toys and toy buyers seriously

Magical my ass. Toys are a consumer good, like any other.

Do I like them? Hell yeah. I also like comics. But seriously, FAO had the gimmick. They worked people in to paying higher prices for the "experience" of buying toys at FAO Schwartz.

A case could be made that FAO prices mroe realistically reflected the "real costs" of toys in terms of economics and trade deficits. But, we all know that was not what FAO was up to. They were working the marks.

First off, I said the stores were magical, captain trollsalot. Secondly, by that argument insulin is a consumer good, human kidneys are consumer goods, babies and sex slaves are consumer goods; there has to be some context to the goods to justify them - "if a tree falls in the woods and there's no one around...". A toy is whatever the consumer imbues with it, and that is what can give them life and meaning - haven't you seen Pixar movies?

That is not what FAO was about.

even seeing FAO's New York store on TV was great enough to fuel dreams.

Okay, so they made good commercials and had a strong media push.

JT, I know you are smarter than this.

You really are coming off like someone with their head up their ass right now, just arguing for the sake of being an internet troll. Guess what? FAO never advertised in Southern California.

Sisko did what was necessary. The Federation was losing ships, personnel and territory to an enemy that was well supplied, ruthless and clearly intended to take over the entire Quadrant. Sisko's actions saved Federation lives and resources.

And, that was part of what made the episode great. Sisko did the right thing. He took care of the Federation.

But, along the way, he had to make compromises. From then forward, Quark would have known Sisko was at least open to making deals. There would always be a change that Garak would need a favour.

The Romulan was fair game. The holo-forger is a bit murkier. (He likely would not have gotten involved if he knew that he would be killed.)

How is it un-Trek-ish to set up a scenario where the good guys have to make tough moral choices? DS9 set up a different type of scenario, and did not McGuffin it away at the end.

Sisko did what he thought was right in place of the wisdom of the Federation laws (Starfleet had sanctioned most of the plan, but not assassinations), the fact that Sisko saw this as the ONLY way to do "what was necessary" is what makes this a "now"-way of dealing with the situation, that the writers went with the dark CIA-esque path instead of an enlightened one makes DS9 a deconstruction rather than upholder of Trek's ideals. What cost is too great for Sisko once he sanctions the killing of others for his side's betterment? It's not un-Trek-ish to set up scenarios where the good guys have to make tough moral choices, it's un-Trek-ish to have them give in to the weaknesses of amorality as the answer.

Creatively, I agree. But, objectively, why not?

Soap and Chevy and Pepto need to be sold. People need to make money in order to survive. I do not like most TV. So, you know what? I do not watch much of it. Guess what? Neither of us are a profitable market. Even if I had money, I would not spend it according to advertisers.

But, that lowest common denominator you mention? They are more likely to part with their money and they are more likely to sit through a television show. So, it kind of makes sense to pitch to them.

If people want pudding smeared on their junk, then dammit you sell them pudding.

Because objectively it is a contrasting goal, and while there is some mitigation to have commercialism and creativity meet in the middle to afford one the other, the more you push towards commercialism, the more you damage the creativity; these days, most creative product is more product than creative. Advertising is everywhere, it is overwhelming the human experience. As Futurama put it:

Leela: "Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?"
Fry: "Well sure, but not in our dreams! Only on tv and radio... and in magazines... and movies. And at ball games, on buses, and milk cartons, and t-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky. But not in dreams! Nooosiree!

Anyway, the existing advertising methods for TV aren't even effective, they just use a loose shotgun blast of vaguely-aimed ads to get the lowest common denominator, so it's a self-fulfilling prophecy of failure: you advertise to the lowest common denominator, and that's the only audience you'll get. Advertisers could support better shows if the system targeted specific audiences better, but instead they play the big bureaucracy game. You watch Star Trek, they advertise mops and tampons and crappy cars, you don't want or need mops or tampons or a poorly-built car, so you don't support their product, the company sees less advertising return for their revenue and either pulls their ads which hurts the show or asks the show to cater to more mop-buyers and tampon-buyers and suckers who will buy crappier cars.

If people want pudding smeared on their junk, then dammit you sell them pudding.

Marketing 101.

Marketing is pervasive and greedy, but now it's also incredibly stupid and wields too much power over the media it sponsors. It used to be that a potential advertiser saw a show they felt spoke to an audience their product could also speak to, now it's far less of that - advertising steak to Hindus and romantic comedies to football fans.

So I started watching DS9 recently (I know, I'm all over the place with this. Next post I'll tell you I've been watching TNG). Anyway, as one might expect, I have some thoughts. Major Kira is a little grating in the first few seasons. It's all anti-Cardassian this and that and she seems so 1 dimmensional as a result. She gets better as the series goes on but it's a rough start. I love Garack. From the first line uttered, he's been pure gold. Especially the verbal sparring between him and Bashir. I'm also wondering how they reconcile Bashir later on with him being genetically engineered with how he's portrayed now as young and naive. Dax has a bit of a rough start as well, often coming off as having a superiority complex because of her several lifetimes of experience. Quark and Odo are fantastic, often providing some much needed comic relief to the tension on the station. Overall, I think it took DS9 a few years to find it's footing, but once it did, it really got good.

Sounds about right. They don't do a good job tying young Bashir to the later version, it's not a very good retcon.

[Dominic]

DS9 fast became, and has remained, my favourtie 'Trek series.


There is an early episode that largely gets Kira past her hatred of Cardassians. (O'Brien's, while more muted, is never fully resolved.)

Bashir was engineered to have enviable intelligence and ability. But, he still had to learn. His problem in early episodes was that he had little field experience. He expected DS9 to be a grand frontier adventure, which is why he was such an easy mark for Garak. (Besides being the only good "very special episode" of anything, "The Wire" is a great example of this dynamic between the two. Bashir does nor realize how deep in he has gotten until he visits Tane at the end of the episode.)

Dax is supposed to be snooty. That is the point.

What's the point of turning your PC into a media server so you can pump it through the 360 when you can just bypass the 360 and HDMI-out to the TV?

Maybe it was a quick and easy way to make it work? (And, hey, it sounds like something Scotty would do.)

Secondly, by that argument insulin is a consumer good, human kidneys are consumer goods, babies and sex slaves are consumer goods; there has to be some context to the goods to justify them -

Toys are a wholly discretionary item that can be lived without. People need to be convinced that they want them. I am not going to credit a store with being magical because they sell toys. I went to Boston's FAO more than once. Yeah, their big bronze teddy bear was a land mark. But, aside from a madness inducing song ('welcome to our world of toys..." emanating from a disturbing sun looking clock), they were like any other toy store...but with higher prices.

Advertising and marketing consist of more than just paid commercial spots and the like. It is about cultivating an image and a brand. FAO did a good job of presenting themselves as a high-end toy shoppe of the sort kids imagined and heard about in the halcyon days of cities, where even urban squallor had a patina of glamour.

FAO did not pay for ad spots. But, they certainly had a brand and an image. But, utlimately, they were a toy store, in the business of selling toys for money.

In the most idealistic, food or medicine or shelter are exchanged for money so that the people who provide food and medicine can procure shelter or other necessary goods. Those are social and communal products. But, wholly consumer goods, such as toys are a different story.

You really are coming off like someone with their head up their ass right now, just arguing for the sake of being an internet troll. Guess what? FAO never advertised in Southern California.

I am pointing out that, aside form the economic damage and job loss caused by *any* company going under, the end of FAO was not a great tragedy. Frankly, given their practice of over-pricing everything, it is hard for me to be upset about them going under. (Objectively, I have not problem with a free market. They had the right to price toys as they saw fit. But, it irked me to see it dressed up as anything other than exercising free market rights.)

What cost is too great for Sisko once he sanctions the killing of others for his side's betterment? It's not un-Trek-ish to set up scenarios where the good guys have to make tough moral choices, it's un-Trek-ish to have them give in to the weaknesses of amorality as the answer.

It was not a question of weakness. It was a question of necessity. Sisko consistently tried to look out for the Federation and others he was responsible to. Part of DS9 was to take Federation officers out of paradise. Sisko did not have the resources of the Federation at his disposal. But, he still had a job to do.

the creativity; these days, most creative product is more product than creative. Advertising is everywhere, it is overwhelming the human experience.

Advertising and commerce pay the bills. Creativity, much less so. That is the simple reality.

I agree that there is too much advertising. Commercials are omni-present and ever more intrusive. There are now web-sites that work against banner blindness by making it harder to parse content from advertising.

But, I cannot expect people who farm money in the media to do something that makes less economic sense...unless more people demand higher quality content (which makes that more economically viable and would balance the lack of advertising revenue).

Advertisers could support better shows if the system targeted specific audiences better, but instead they play the big bureaucracy game

Fair point. But, target ads are also particularly intrusive when done wrong.


Dom
-interesting that we touch on the human condition in a "Star Trek" thread.

[Sparky Prime]

Riker's theft of the Defiant is a Maquis operation, he's even got members of the Maquis with him.

But that episode was still the revelation that Thomas Riker had joined the Maquis. And throughout the episode they constantly point out how Riker still thinks like a Starfleet officer rather than freedom fighter. It was his operation more so than the Maquis working with him on it.

Eddington planted a virus which disabled the Defiant and then strafed it when its systems were down, that's not out of defense. And Eddington set up a trap for the... let me look it up, the USS Malinche, which is hardly defense.

Eddington was merely trying to escape when he triggered that virus, and all it did was disable the ship. No was was hurt, and nothing was done to the ship that couldn't be fixed. Purely a defensive tactic. Same thing with the trap for the Malinche. They only disabled the ship to prevent it from chasing them anymore. Again, nothing that couldn't be fixed and no one was hurt.

We'll have to not see eye to eye on that, I found Voyager fairly insipid and not at all a good show, beyond production values; it LOOKED like Trek, but the writing was pretty bad and the directing was generally poor, leading to stilted acting.

How much of Voyager did you watch?

He cheers up when he admits that he can live with it, he's not dour anymore, he's content by the time he deletes the log entry. But ok, he's not fine and dandy, I'd argue though for this show he was as close to fine and dandy as it got for Sisko's angsty ways.

He might be content with it, but I would say he's still dour about it. There's no real cheer in his voice as he says they're throwing the Romulans a 'welcome to the war party'. He sounds sarcastic as he says it, faking the enthusiasm for it. He's happy for the support the Romulans give them in the war, but he's still pissed at how they got it.

The episode is "Deadlock", not "Dreadlock".

It's a typo, deal with it.

Those are 5 times it was destroyed, but the question was about Janeway destroying the ship, #s 3 and 5 aren't Janeway's fault in any way (and I really don't count #3 since it was never a real Voyager to begin with).

With #3, duplicate or not, they still possessed the memories and personalities of the real crew, to the point they were indistinguishable. And it was Janeway's decision they should keep headed toward Earth, even after they'd realized they weren't the real crew. Chakotay spent a great deal of time arguing with her on that decision. So yes, it is her fault Voyager was destroyed in that episode. If they'd turned around sooner, maybe they could have returned to the Demon planet before they all died. Or found the real Voyager sooner to get their help.

And #5, Braxton blamed Janeway for ruining his life. Not exactly something she could control, but it's still a consequence of some of her decisions.

[Shockwave]

What's the point of turning your PC into a media server so you can pump it through the 360 when you can just bypass the 360 and HDMI-out to the TV?

Because not everyone has a main tv capable of that. The one I have in the living room is really big, really old and the words "HDMI" and "USB" weren't even invented when it was built.