{"id":1010,"date":"2012-01-21T14:28:54","date_gmt":"2012-01-21T20:28:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1010"},"modified":"2012-01-21T14:28:54","modified_gmt":"2012-01-21T20:28:54","slug":"exploring-the-universe-one-b-movie-at-a-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bmovienation.com\/?p=1010","title":{"rendered":"Exploring the Universe, One B-Movie at a Time"},"content":{"rendered":"

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ALMOST exactly 40 years after the original TV series was canceled by NBC for low ratings, the 11th feature film based on or spun off \u201cStar Trek\u201d has arrived on a wave (I suppose I should say a photon wave) of excitement and fanfare. This latest \u201cStar Trek\u201d movie, a deft effort to reboot the franchise, reintroduces the old characters \u2014 Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy and Lieutenant Uhura and the rest \u2014 as sexy young cadets setting out on the first mission of the starship Enterprise. Re-imagining their origins in a prequel, rather than depicting their further adventures in another sequel, is a cheeky act of cultural retro-activism, and perfectly in keeping with the \u201960s show. \u201cStar Trek\u201d was, from the start, more nostalgic than futuristic.
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\nTed Mcgrath<\/p>\n

Related
\nTimes Topics: Star Trek<\/p>\n

The original series was never really about the 23rd century or outer space; and to think of it only in those terms is to misunderstand the show and ignore its real legacy. Despite its technological gimmickry \u2014 the flashing light bulbs and the transporter beams and the cafeteria dispenser that synthesizes the atomic structure of any lunch order \u2014 the series was essentially a trek around the past, and not even the real past, but the past of vintage Hollywood movies. Its fictions always had less to do with science than with popular entertainment itself.<\/p>\n

The show appeared at a signal moment in the progression of pop culture literacy. In 1966, television viewership was exploding, and stations around the country found that they could fill hours easily and cheaply by broadcasting old movies. New York\u2019s Channel 9, which I watched when I was young, would often run the same film twice a day, three times on weekends, for seven days in a row. Thus, the children of the \u201960s became the first generation to grow up on the whole catalog of American movies, not just the films of their own day; they were the first to have a free education in pop history and to develop a hardy appetite for kitsch.<\/p>\n

\u201cStar Trek\u201d was an early manifestation of our contemporary absorption with the pop culture of the past. The show\u2019s creator, Gene Roddenberry, was a gifted hack writer for TV Westerns like \u201cHave Gun, Will Travel\u201d and cop shows like \u201cHighway Patrol,\u201d and \u201cStar Trek,\u201d though set in a nominally stylized future, was essentially a Western cop show. In fact, Roddenberry pitched the series to NBC as \u201cWagon Train\u201d to the stars; and, as Captain Kirk noted in his log, the ship would venture out on \u201cpatrol,\u201d cruising the galaxy like a city beat.<\/p>\n

The Enterprise\u2019s five-year mission, famously cut short by the network after three years, was ostensibly to seek out new worlds and new civilizations. Yet, with some exceptions, what Kirk and his crew encountered matched nobody\u2019s conception of alien species inhabiting extra-solar worlds. The ship zipped from planet to planet as if flitting from channel to channel, essentially landing each week in a different old film.<\/p>\n

Certainly, few living astronomers expect to find Planet 892-IV, the gladiator-movie planet, where Spock and McCoy were forced to battle in Roman games. Or Ekos, the Nazi-movie planet, where Spock ended up discomfortingly sympathetic to the fascists. Or the unnamed orb in Melkotian space, the Western planet, where the crew literally re-enacted the gunfight at the O.K. Corral. Or Tarsus IV, the Shakespeare-movie planet, where everything was just frightfully dramatic.<\/p>\n

\u201cStar Trek\u201d was shot for Desilu Productions, on the lot its founders, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, bought from RKO Radio Pictures, the prolific studio that had made \u201cKing Kong,\u201d \u201cCitizen Kane,\u201d the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers musicals and countless B pictures like \u201cI Walked With a Zombie.\u201d In time, the series moved to Paramount and if it seemed as though Kirk and his crew were venturing from old movie to old movie, Roddenberry and his crew were traveling literally from old-movie set to old-movie set.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe majority of story premises …can be accomplished on such common studio back lot locales and sets such as Early 1900 Street, Oriental Village, Cowtown, Border Fort, Victorian Drawing Room, Forest and Streamside,\u201d wrote Roddenberry in his original pitch. \u201cInteriors and exteriors temporarily available after an \u2018Egyptian\u2019 motion picture, a \u2018horror\u2019 epic, or even an unusual telefilm, could be used to meet the needs of a number of story premises.\u201d
\nRelated
\nTimes Topics: Star Trek<\/p>\n

The creative re-use of studio sets may have begun as a way to keep costs down. But the show made a kind of loopy pastiche pulp art by appropriating, referencing and recombining ideas from film history, going imaginatively \u2014 and, yes, even boldly \u2014 where many had gone before.<\/p>\n

I can still remember the first time I saw \u201cA Piece of the Action,\u201d which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?<\/p>\n

Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the \u201cStar Trek\u201d I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called \u201cThe Roaring Twenties\u201d; and three, the clownish \u201cSoupy Sales Show.\u201d<\/p>\n

I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister\u2019s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of \u201cStar Trek.\u201d Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.<\/p>\n

Ultimately, then, \u201cStar Trek\u201d was prescient not for its futurism, with the Enterprise crew using communicators that look like flip-phones, but for exploring a universe absorbed with pop-culture history. The slogan for the new movie may be \u201cThe future begins,\u201d but what \u201cStar Trek\u201d really says is, the past continues. <\/p>\n

David Hadju New York Times