Memories of the Times

In January 1984, this then-young Aussie on his first trip to New York City was advised by well-meaning friends to stay at the classy Gramercy Park Hotel, but it was twice as expensive as I'd anticipated. After one night there, I checked my finances, admitted defeat - and a local tourist advisory service recommended the Times Square Hotel on 43rd Street, instead, as "a place where Aussies often stayed when they couldn't afford the usual NYC prices".

My NY penpal was kind of horrified when she heard my new location. When I told Carolyn that I'd switched hotels she said, "New York's fine, so long as you stay away from Times Square. So where are you staying?"

Me: (in high pitched voice): "Times Square Hotel."

Yes, I couldn't have gotten much closer to Times Square itself if I'd tried! I must say that the Times Square Hotel's revolving door, quaint old foyer, cashier window, rickety elevator, incredibly noisy water pipes (at 3.30am every morning, like clockwork), a friendly maid who thumped on the door to clean the room at about 6.30am, the portable b/w TV with "rabbit ears" aerial (that had to be supplemented by touching the TV and raising one arm), the pathetic pigeon sheltering on a window sill from the blizzard outside, and not to mention the little mouse who visited me every night... Wow! What a way to get to know the real New York! I loved every second of it!


COMMON GROUND

I was under the impression that the hotel may have been demolished, but a bit of Googling today revealed that the Times Square Hotel is alive and well! Now a subsidised block of apartments, it is owned and operated by COMMON GROUND an organisation that develops solutions to homelessness.

According to a current resident, The Hotel Times Square "was built in the mid 1920s. It was a moderate-priced alternative to the great hotels in the neighborhood, the Hotel Astor (demolished) and the Knickerbocker (converted, still standing on B’way and 42nd St. The Hotel Times Square is very famous, since it was the neighbor to the New York Times building for much of the 20th Century. The NY Times moved to a new skyscraper a few blocks downtown, on Eighth Ave.

"The Hotel Times Square is on 255 W 43rd Street, at Eighth Avenue. It has a very grand lobby, a nice mezzanine, and a fine rooftop terrace/garden. It is not open to the public, but one may walk through the revolving door and have a quick look without trouble.

"There is an art gallery on the mezzanine. Most of the artwork is not terribly distinguished; but it is one way to get into the building. Ask to see the art gallery." (The New York Times' In Transit blog.)

Very cool! I must go through my album of pics. Somewhere I have a 3D photo of my little friend, the New York pigeon, who huddled on the opposite window's sill every night. I snapped a great picture the night of a freezing blizzard and I was thrilled to get a photo of "3D snow"! January 1984 now seems so very long ago, but almost like yesterday.

Ah, found it:



And here's why I couldn't find Times Square Hotel on Google Earth "street view" last year! The building's front was being renovated (2009)!

Free Maltz!

As I mentioned recently, I've uncovered a cache of old and fading videotapes from my ASTREX Star Trek club days. I've been without a VHS recorder/player for some years now - in this DVD age, when the VHS breaks doown one just... ignores it - but I bought a new VHS machine, hoping to find the time to make DVD copies. One day?

Meanwhile, here are some quick freeze frame images of me from the "Free Maltz" Star Trek fan film, as created, directed and produced by Ian McLean (and the Harpic Productions team) for the "Galactic Senate Elections" campaign at "Eccentricon", 5th National Australian Science Fiction Media Convention (3rd - 6th July, 1987). Maltz, of course, was originally portrayed by John Larroquette in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock" (pictured left in the trio below), and was the only Klingon left alive at the end of that movie.



At the same time, I was studying for a university media course in a graduate diploma program, and we had to submit a short film to pass the course. I received permission to make this film instead, while my teaching colleagues did something more suited to primary (elementary) teaching. I also had to develop a script and storyboard. For a separate assignment, I did an illustrated procedure on how to make a life-mask out of plaster, which I had to do "for real" to make the Maltz latex forehead appliance.

My premise for this film, and to fit with Eccentricon's theme of the "Galactic Senate elections" being taken over by the anti-heroes, was that Maltz escaped from his Vulcan detention cell, ran away as fast as possible, hitched a ride back to the 20th century with Kirk and his crew ("Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home"), ran into an Eccentricon flier (advertising the Senate elections), caught a jet to Sydney, ran past various Sydney landmarks, and ran all the way to the convention. In other words, Maltz was running for election. It was the ultimate running gag:



Maltz behind bars on Vulcan. He is a Klingon of destiny...



... Saavik slips him a phaser; stock footage from ST IV on rear projection follow's Maltz's
escape to Earth and the 20th century, where a stray convention flier is found.



In the post-9/11 world, one could never get away with filming a rogue Klingon in a convict uniform in an International Air Cargo Terminal, but it was easy in 1987. (We asked permission and they just shrugged, "Sure!") Note the tiny figure, who has just emerged from inside the building, as indicated by the blue arrow. Thus, Maltz is "running" for the Galactic Senate.



Maltz is still running for the Galactic Senate. The yellow arrow indicates
an Eccentricon convention flier taped to the college sign.



Now Maltz runs into trouble with a 20th automobile - note the angry driver's
hand gestures; soon Maltz is again running for the Galactic Senate.



Maltz collapsed with exhaustion (not shown) as we fade to a promotional slide for the campaign; Maltz as Eccentricon compere, in footage of the convention coverage on the Nine Network's "Today" (6th July, 1987).



Maltz meets showbiz reporter Bob de la Lande from the "Today" morning show.

Maltz: I was a prisoner for three months in a Vulcan detention cell, but they let me out..."

Bob de la Lande: Ah, why?

Note that Maltz's unique calling card is a "Malt" cookie. We added the "Z" in black Texta.
People received them with all the "free maltz" (ie. malted milkshakes) they ordered/made donations to obtain.

So, did Maltz win the election? Nah, he came in third. But he did pronounce himself "Charity Queen" after raising the most money - by a huge margin - thanks to his hard-working election team's highly successful milkshake-making operation.

Therindipity

I was asked yesterday, "Why do you like Andorians so much?

I dunno. I think I first read about them in Bjo Trimble's "Star Trek Concordance" and I related to her brief, yet tantalizing, description, based on DC Fontana's script notes from "Journey to Babel" (TOS). I guess I related to the mention of blue skin, antennae, a calm exterior hiding their warrior traits, and Shran having a slight lisp?



I didn't get into organised Star Trek fandom until seeing "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" in December 1979 and, after seeing the film about three times, I made it my mission to find the two Andorian crewmen featured in publicity stills, and (when they finally invented video freeze frame for VCRs) the three Andorian extras playing ambassadorial staff in the San Francisco scenes.

The quest to see an Andorian in an actual episode of TOS was my next passionate mission. Star Trek wasn't screening on Aussie television at that time, but we did have a guy who ran Star Trek Marathons throughout the 80s, at ANZAC House - five monthly episodes on the big screen! It was there that I eventually saw "Gamesters of Triskelion" and "Whom Gods Destroy". The second marathon I attended was a costumed affair, so there was only one choice by that point (see my icon pic, which was my 1980 dress rehearsal shot before the big day):



I started reading all the Blish novelizations, and when I bought my "Mr. Spock's Time Trek" View-master reels, that was the day I realized I'd already seen "Yesteryear" (yay Thelin!), and the brief cameos of Andorians in "The Time Trap" (Filmation's Star Trek Animated series, aka TAS).

I put the screws on the marathon guy to screen "Journey to Babel", but he apologised that the only print he owned was badly damaged: green scratch lines down the middle of most footage, and huge bits missing from many scenes. (Every time Amanda went to speak the scene changed!) However he did run the twenty minutes,or so, that he did have, during the lunchbreak of one marathon - I'm sure that's the origin of the misremembered Bjo Trimble anecdote (about censorship of Star Trek Down Under) in the TOS DVDs bonus features. One of my first conversations with Bjo, when I met her in 1984, was telling her that I'd only just been able to see a badly-chopped 20-minute version of "Journey to Babel" back home!



(I also once joked I'd play a new Andorian at a ST convention: a "Bob Johnston print Andorian": complete with green stripes down the face!)

When news was breaking on the ST II film project, I decided that my perfect Andorian villain (or hero) for a ST movie would be... John Phillip Law (Pygar of "Barbarella"), but alas, Andorians weren't even glimpsed again until ST IV. And then all but ignored in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" (TNG). "Deep Space Nine" (DS9) and "Voyager" (VOY) offered only a few stray references in dialogue.

You can imagine how pleased I was when "Enterprise" (ENT) announced "The Andorian Incident", which was to feature Jeffrey Combs, in what became a frequently recurring Andorian role. With moving antennae to boot!

Double dipping

The complaints have begun. CBS Consumer products has announced that the first season of the 1960s Star Trek on DVD, with the recently-enhanced special effects via CGI, will have a US recommended retail price of $218. Now, we all know no one will be selling them for that premium price, but that it will also be a dual high definition (HD)/regular release set, with new bonus features.

Many collectors already bought the first versions of the DVD season sets, with 60s effects made on 16mm film stock, run through multiple passes of a SPFX camera. There will be buyer resistance to the new DVDs, with fans are saying they'd prefer just the regular TV sets, but with new CGI FX, be available separately.

There'll also be resistance from people who won't want HD TV as well, but what happens the prices of HD TVs fall so low they can't resist buying one? Then they'll feel a need to buy the HD TOS sets to play on it, but they'll already have the regular version. They'll yell at CBS for "double dipping".

Don't want HD TV? Eventually, when everybody else has had one for a few years, the more stubborn viewers (or technology laggards) will start to notice that their expectations - of what an acceptable level of clarity is - have changed. When colour TV came to Australia in 1975, you know, my paternal grandmother used to say that colour TV hurt her eyes - until we bought her one of her own.

I really don't understand the anger towards companies who "double dip" their DVD releases. That only infers that the producers of all DVDs should make people wait much longer for any DVD to become available for sell-through, as the various studios scramble to make the first (and only) issue of each movie and TV show a once-only double-disk-multi-commentary-100-bonus-extras version, and then promise to never ever release a second version in our lifetimes.

When i hear the complaints, I find myself thinking: divide $218 by the number of episodes in the set, and then contemplate how amazing HD TV is. Deduct the cash you make selling your old set on eBay. Think about the wages of the SPFX guys who've been churning out the new CGI FX sequences for syndicated, repeated TOS episodes on a weekly basis for the past year. And, remembering back to the bad ol' early 80s, I remind them that a double episode of TV TOS on VHS (or Beta!) was over $70 each.

School is: OUT

Here I sit, with the school vacation finally here - two weeks, yay! - and I can't think of anything to post.

I even went through a whole stack of old photograph albums, hoping for inspiration, but every photo I thought of wasn't in the stack that happens to be on hand, or it features someone not easy to track down to ask about putting their photo on the Internet. It's been a long time since I saw some of these wonderful people, and I'd prefer that our first emails in yonks isn't an angry "Take down that pic!" demand. Just because one owns a photograph doesn't mean one took it oneself, owns the copyright or has permission from everyone in it to share it with the world in an electronic medium that wasn't even imagined when the photograph was taken.

Plus, I'm reminded about the terrible condition of my 70s and 80s era photograph albums are. No photo corners of the 60s, all of my albums were sticky-page and transparent plastic albums, and the years have either fused the photos permanently to the album pages, or the stickiness has all dried up the photos slide out onto the floor as the pages are turned. Some of the old Polaroids have turned dark, some of the regular pics have drastically altered colour - and the 3D photos from my old Nimslo 3D camera can't be scanned. (To show those, I'd have to find the negatives and order regular prints from them first, or scan the negatives on my scanner.) And I also get into a panic wondering where a few missing photo albums ended up during the big move of January 2000.

The thought of transferring all my photos to new albums is daunting beyond believe. There are also recent piles and piles of photos, all over the house, that have never been lovingly stuck in albums, or even dated and captioned.

In addition, another visit to my Sitemeter today shows me that each mention of my Andorian costume eBay purchase in the month of June brought in a record number of page views to the blog (for about a week or so), but these new visitors don't necessarily convert into regular viewers. Do I just talk about Star Trek stuff in an attempt to keep them? Furthermore, the 70s photo of Aussie actress Abigail (from her 70s autobiography) continues to be the main way people find this blog.


Sydney's Luna Park - a random, favourite photo

The Fantastic Four and the slippery slope

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

A super power would have been very useful for my trip to Westfield Penrith Plaza, today, to see "Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer". I originally planned to see a different film, but my friend was unavailable, so I saved up "Shrek the Third" and "Pirates 3" for next week and decided to enjoy a solo FF fix.

I took my usual shortcut, realizing only at the last minute that (a) it was probably going to be muddy or flooded at the end of the shortcut, and (b) I was wearing the wrong (white fabric) shoes. As I stood at the muddy, sloping edge of my shortcut, pondering whether to leap, or take a detour through perhaps worse conditions, I felt myself sliding helplessly towards oblivion. Splat!

With both hands, one arm, and one buttock cheek now thickly covered in fresh mud, I continued on to the Plaza. After a quick clean-up in the rest room (which thankfully had both paper towels and full-length mirrors), I secured my cinema ticket and filled in some time - shopping, of course - before the film started.

I really enjoyed the movie. It has received some very mixed reviews but, in my view, if you liked the first film, then this is more of the same. Some great lines, very likable characters, and amazing special effects, especially the Silver Surfer himself, and the Fantasticar. And some clever script seeding - in that the FF's power-swapping phenomenon was put to very good use (giving Michael Chiklis a little screen time as human-looking Ben Grimm), and Doctor Doom was able to be resurrected so easily, as both Doom and Julian McMahon (son of a former Australian Prime Minister, no less).

And it's heaps better than the quickie "Fantastic Four" movie that was made, but never released, in 1994. I once saw a bootleg copy from eBay, something I don't usually condone, but there was no other way to see it and I'd been quite intrigued by the casting - and the costumes, which were the same blue/white ones I'd used when we did "Perfect Botch" (a live convention game show) as the Fantastic Four in the 80s. Mind you, to give the 1994 film its due, in a list of the "50 Top Comic Movies of All Time (...and Some So Bad You've Just Got to See Them)", Wizard magazine ranked this film higher than "Batman & Robin", "Steel", "Virus" and "Red Sonja", all of which did get a theatrical release.


Michael Bailey Smith as The Thing, Rebecca Staab as Invisible Woman, Alex Hyde-White as Mr Fantastic
and the former "Boy Who Could Fly", Jay Underwood, as the Human Torch.

This pic has autographs from Smith, Staab and Joseph Culp, who played Dr Doom. The signatures were collected as a surprise for me from Glenn Ford of The Phantom Zone comic shop, who attended the big US comic convention that promoted the movie, with the actors unaware that there was no intention by the producers, including Roger Corman and Bernd Eichinger, to actually release it.

Here's the trailer Glenn Ford would have seen at the convention:


(The trailer's soundtrack lifts music from "Battle Beyond the Stars".)


So will the real Mr Fantastic please stand up?

Flashback to 1987: Cooking with Strop

A satirical presentation about "V: The Series" at Eccentricon, a science fiction media convention (1987) at Richmond, NSW, Australia, took its lead from the classic "Twilight Zone" episode, "To Serve Man". Yours truly, Ian McLean, plays Strop, a Visitor from the Sydney mothership (ie. from television's then-current "V: The Series"). The hapless audience member was supposedly selected "at random". Hehehehe.


Strop says, "Here's one I prepared earlier..."



"Room for one more..."



THE END!

Neato!

Over at Drift, Nash is pondering quirky, antiquated, everyday phrases.

My younger brother used to get into trouble in the late 60s/early 70s for saying "Fab!" all the time - and it took me years to realise that Mum was assuming he was using "Ffffffab!" as a swear word, ie. as an alternative to a certain four-letter word. (And I guess he was, but it was all quite innocent, in that he was just repeating his friends' schoolyard catchcry. As soon as she banned "Fab!", he substituted "Fit!" instead, and still got into trouble. (The two girls who lived next door used to say "Sssssugar!" and "Schweppes!" as their secret swear words.)

I can recall "The Brady Bunch" repeats on TV keeping "Groovy!" in vogue long beyond its "Use By" date.

In the 70s, "gay" was definitely not yet in vogue as an alternative for the term "homosexual". More often, someone was said to be "camp". There was a fascinating article in an old "TV Week" or "TV Times" that talked about Joe Hasham (who played Aussie homosexual lawyer, Don Finlayson in "Number 96") having a gay time at a party. ;)

"Neato!" I first heard during a one-night stopover in Hawaii in December 1983. I was able to meet up with an art class fellow student, who happened to be there to run in the annual Hawaii Marathon, and he explained it was the current "in" word. I started using it myself all 'round the USA - complete with phony American accent, and I was surprised that it did end up in use in Sydney a few years later - but usually just as "Neat".

And "Neat!" was totally overshadowed by "Sad!" (meaning "Good") in the 80s, "Cool!" (or indeed "Kewl") in the 2000s, and "Sick!" and "Fully sick!" in 2006.

Any faded surfers out there?

I have a really great idea for a piece of fiction I'm working on, and I'm hoping to find a few genuine Aussie surfies (from the 70s or 80s) with whom to have some dialogue.



Is there anyone reading this who was heavily into that unique subculture in the late 70s, and through the 80s and early 90s? I'm interested in learning about you, your surfing techniques, "rules" of the "tribes", the beach fashions of the day, and hairstyles. Perhaps I can also build up a glossary of surfer terms, but specific to the 70s and 80s, please, and examples of comradeship with other surfies. Even surfie games and initiation rites would be excellent, or is there a code of silence like that of biker groups and freemasons?

I could read a book on Australian surfing culture, I suppose, like "Puberty Blues", or rummage some second hand bookshops for old surfing magazines, but I'd rather hear something first hand, and from the male perspective. (Frankie Avalon/Annette Funicello beach party movies aren't going to be much help for what I have in mind.) Please let me know...