Christmas 2011 approaches!

I put the Christmas tree up. Decorating it was quite carthartic after the eventful weekend. Even though I collect and date two new ornaments for the tree each year, I realised how many extra ornaments I have, tucked into my Christmas gift by my Mum.

Of course, last year, it was impossible to put up a tree when the lounge room was full of dog cage!


Christmas 2011


Closeup on my customised Spock angel tree topper

This year's new ornaments are:


Wild Thing and Max


Mary Poppins' umbrella


Hallmark View-Master ornament from 2008, not a normal size View-Master!

I couldn't resist buying one more this year! This is a teeny, tiny Hallmark limited edition Keepsake ornament from 2008, not a normal size View-Master, but the 3D specialist mail order firm I deal with found a few in their warehouse. They are sure to vanish quickly, though. The three reels feature "A night before Christmas" in 21 stereo pairs.



And this powder blue Andorian koala turned up in the mail from an old "Star Trek" friend on Friday!

Redefining a collection

Over at The Star Trek Prop, Costume & Auction Blog, Alec Peters discusses his ever-expanding Star Trek collection of costumes and props from Paramount Studios, as sold by It's A Wrap!, and attempts to redefine his hobby.

While my collection of screen-used props is minute by comparison, Alec's analysis was well-timed. I've just spent about three weeks trying to re-hide the most bizarrely random piles of collectibles that literally exploded out of my so-called "Star Trek Shrine", a room dedicated to housing my Star Trek collection but usually also the room into which my aforementioned bizarrely random piles of collectibles get shoved, unceremoniously, as the dinner guests start arriving.

Collecting is an addiction, for sure. It comes with all the same intense highs, intense lows, withdrawal symptoms, and a chronic habit for diverting funds needed to buy food or household bills into buying more stuff, as an addiction to other substances! There is also the overwhelming challenge to "own everything", seek out "first editions" or "lowest numbers" of "limited editions", display it well, and the conundrum of whether to keep things in "mint in mint packaging" condition or just open and play with the items.

Alec says that there are "a few good questions you should ask yourself as you continue to build your collection".

What is your theme or themes?
Do you have one? Do you just buy random stuff you like, or do you have specific collecting interests?

Mmmm. Well, there are the collectible, nostalgic items from my childhood - things that were not considered to be collectibles when they were bought as gifts - such as my game of "Green Ghost", an original "Mousetrap" game, a model of the Dastardly & Muttley's Mean Machine from "Wacky Races", a hand-knitted gonk (the coveted Christmas gift of 1965!) and a glow-in-the-dark "Kooky Spooky", the current eBay prices of which always shock me.

There are also the items I remember allowing to slip from my grasp, in particular my full set of "Batman" gum cards, based on the 60s feature film of the TV series. Sigh.

And the ones that nearly got away: how well I remember the lone radio advertisement... "'Number 96' paperbacks just ten cents each" at a huge Grace Bros. book sale in 1978!

Thus, my "Number 96" memorabilia consists of eight very trashy novelisations, the original novel I had no idea even existed until the night of the "Tonight Live" reunion show in 1993 (when they had it on display, sending me off on the ultimate challenge to find it), several copies of the "'Number 96' Cookbook", with the bound-in iron-on logo still intact, a script in the book "Zoom In", several actual scripts from the set, and my recent purchase of Abigail's 1973 autobiography. I also own Giovanni Lenzi's green deli jacket, bought from the 1977 auction at Channel Ten.

Not long after that, I found myself collecting "View-Master" stereo picture reels, and this interest in 3D led to buying a Nimslo 3D camera, which accompanied me on my 1983/84 US trip.

And, of course, there are my Star Trek collections: (first edition) novels, novelisations, cards, model kits (some never assembled), LP soundtracks (most now duplicated as CDs), action figures (almost all are set free from their packaging) and customised action figures.

And my Star Trek comics led me to an appreciation of other comic titles: "Teen Titans"/"New Titans", "Fantastic Four", "Crisis on Infinite Earths" and "Dreadstar" to name a few.

What is your collecting philosophy?

Probably it has to do with collecting what you like. So many people collect as an investment, but that is so hit and miss. The most unlikely things end up being worth the most.

I'd also maintain that if you stop collecting, you'll definitely lose interest. I'm heard of so many people draw a line in the sand to stop themselves splurging, and they always end up selling, or simply giving away, all that wonderful stuff.

Deja View-Master

I've long wanted to do a piece on View-Master stereo and 3D picture reels and viewers, and with this week's mention of "The Omega Glory" (TOS) and "Yesteryear (TAS) Star Trek View-Master products on TrekBBS, I'm feeling a burning need to bring something together.

Today I actually saw the newest packaging, still carded on blister packs, as they have been for about 20 years, but now much closer in size to the traditional, square, paper envelopes of the 60s and 70s. I'd been hunting for "Superman Returns" ever since that movie came out last year, and eventually ordered one (on the US rectangular blister pack) via the Internet, but today I actually saw European "Superman Returns" sets on the new square blister pack. (A little underwhelming, though. Most people wouldn't even know to open the minimal packaging carefully so the reels could be stored safely.)

I've been collecting View-Master reels since Christmas 1974, when - at a loss as to what else I wanted on my Christmas want list - my mother bought me a viewer and several reel sets (of her own choosing): "Adam-12", then a current US TV police drama; animated old-time family favourite, "Top Cat"; "Insect World: Entomology"; "Pan Am's 747" and "France". I was quite impressed with her selection. "Insect World: Entomology" looks amazing in stereo pictures! "Pan Am's 747" gave me itchy feet for my first aeroplane ride. And "France" was highly suitable to a then-high school student studying French.

Sadly, what has reduced over each change to the View-Master format is text. Originally, most View-Master envelopes came with 16-page illustrated booklets, which described each of the 21 sets of stereo pictures. In the 80s, the tall, rectangular blister packs came with several paragraphs on the reverse of the packet, synopsising the production contained on the 3D reels (although European-released versions often had to reduce font sizes to squeeze in multiple translations).

In recent years, the three reels in each rectangular pack have had foil character stickers added to their reverse, and these now face outwards - but there are no instructions on how to preserve the blister pack as a "convenient storage container". The new square blister packs really have no text synopses at all, and appear to be quite disposable. Sigh. (I guess you're supposed to buy up several vinyl View-Master collectible, zippered storage containers!)

Star Trek has been quite well-represented in View-Master reels over the years, much to my delight:

* "The Omega Glory", a live-action episode of TOS (The Original Series). Famously, this one features a specially posed an AMT model kit starship alongside the larger model used in the upening credits, to enhance the 3D effects.

* "Yesteryear", as "Mr. Spock's Time Trek", from TAS (The animated series from Filmation). This set also came out as a Talking View-Master version in a large, flat box.

* One image of 21: TOS USS Enterprise filming model at the Smithsonian Institution's "National Air and Space Museum", Washington DC.

* "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", one of the first sets with recreated "3D" images, rather than stereo pictures shot on-set. The b/w booklet has trivia and "foto-fun" rather than a text description of each image.

* "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan", one of the first rectangular blister packs - no more booklets! Sigh.

* Recently found! One image of 21: life-size TOS wax figures on the bridge of USS Enterprise at "Movieland, Buena Park, California". This set of reels was on the new, rectangular blister pack, too. Two earlier releases, which I already owned, were in the traditional square packets and don't feature Trek.

* "A Matter of Honor", an episode of TNG (ie. "Star Trek: The Next Generation").

* Two images of 21: "A Star Trek Adventure" (including the bridge and "beaming up") on the revamped rectangular blister pack version of "Universal Studios, Hollywood, Set 2: Entertainment Center".

I hadn't really thought about the View-Master "Yesteryear" images not being actual stills and cels from the show itself, until the matter was raised on TrekBBS. Of course, all those old View-Master "Peanuts" (Charlie Brown and Snoopy) animated specials, and "Bugs Bunny" cartoons were reels of images recreated with little three-dimensional statues and amazing table-top dioramas, and filmed with a stereo camera! Checking out "Mr. Spock's Time Trek" anew, some frames have over seven layers of 3D action! Like the now-rare Tuttle & Bailey TAS collector cels (including the six-fingered Spock from "Yesteryear", and Arex and M'Ress with "The Jihad" aliens), and the ones provided to Japanese "Starlog" (eg. Arex and M'Ress interacting with the kzin Chuft-Captain), it seems that Filmation was happy to create special, all-new images (below right) for these TAS tie-ins. The booklet in the View-Master pack seems to have newly-created artwork, too, and different to what's on the reels.

Additional work used to be done for live-action View-Masters of the 60s, too. When the View-Master cameras visited the live-action sets of "Batman", "Mission: Impossible" and "Star Trek", for example, they took stereo photos alongside the guys filming the episodes! And the USS Enterprise and USS Exeter in orbit was a shot re-created with the three-foot shooting model of the Enterprise and a licensed AMT plastic model kit (for Exeter). The set-up (below left) was photographed in stereo in View-Master's own studio. It's not a still from the episode made 3D, it's a recreated shot made with physical models. (By the 80s, View-Master wasn't using on-set stereo cameras at all, but simulating the 3D effects by manipulating 2D images of studio publicity photos. Sigh.)

I did once read an interview (in "Starlog"?) with someone who described the day View-Master came visiting Desilu to shoot "The Omega Glory". They had to snatch their moments - at rehearsals and after the film cameras moved off to other locations, but they weren't any more obtrusive that the Desilu stills photographer who turned up all the time. There's one amusing bridge shot of Sulu and Uhura, supposedly talking with Kirk on the planet, but Nichelle Nichols' script is sitting on her lap!

I was always flummoxed as to why they didn't choose a more colourful episode, like the alien-filled "Journey to Babel", but essentially View-Master had to take pot luck with all the TV production sets they went to in the 60s and 70s. They were actually due to visit "Star Trek" the previous week, but Gene Roddenberry kept putting them off, which seemed weird in retrospect since Gene Roddenberry was rarely down on the studio floor and was busy prepping Art Wallace's "Assignment: Earth", the Gary Seven/Roberta Lincoln "back door" pilot, which was due to film the next week. But, of course, moving View-Master's appointment by a whole week meant that it was a pure (even if not good) Gene Roddenberry script that was adapted, and not DC Fontana and Laurence N Wolfe's "The Ultimate Computer". So Gene picked up yet another royalty: adaptation rights for the little View-Master booklet based on his script! (Mind you, DC Fontana had her revenge, as it was her TAS episode that was adapted by View-Master a few years later.)

Fascinating stuff, and how great that View-Master continues into the 21st century?

Images from "The Omega Glory" (TOS) and "Mr. Spock's Time Trek" (TAS)

SF author, Robert J Sawyer, briefly discusses "The Omega Glory" View-Master SPFX shot on his blog.
TAS View-Master frame originally scanned by Kail Tescar. )

The TOS: "The Omega Glory" and TAS: "Yesteryear" sets were also available in the "Spacemen Theatre In The Round" cylindrical cardboard tub, which included "Flash Gordon" and "Buck Rogers" reels, a 2-D projector and a 3-D viewer. The "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" set was alternatively available in a "Gift Pak & Poster" tub, complete with a 3-D viewer, a double-sided movie poster and customised cardboard 3-D glasses (to view the 3-D side of the poster). 30 drawn and colored 2-D animation-style images, based on publicity stills from "Star Trek: The Motion Picture", were available on a small cartridge (Set 3158) made for the View-Master "Show Beam" push-button projector (below), which resembled a long plastic torch.

There was also an Indonesian adaptation of Filmation's "Yesteryear" episode, "Mesin Waktu Mr Spock", based on the View-Master reels for "Mr Spock's Time Trek". The 1979 Cypress book is in the same format as the popular "Little Golden Books" series. IIRC, the images are all printed in reverse.

Do you know the way to ShiKahr?

American television audiences channel flipping for random episodes of original Star Trek (TOS) in syndication are enjoying all-new special effects footage, which is being recreated/repaired/enhanced with CGI in remastered, high definition versions of the episodes. Although current syndication advertisement ratios require extensive cutting of popular lines and (sometimes) whole scenes, there is an intention to release uncut HD DVDs of the "remastered" TOS.

TOS was made on film, not videotape, which means that it looks amazing on HD TV, but the FX made in the 1960s are simply not up to scratch, due to the number of composite film layers required to produce SPFX footage of transporter effects, phaser beams, ship passes and matt paintings. The episodes still look good on regular TVs, but DVD already shows up problems (the joins on Nimoy's pointed ear tips, for one) and HD TV and DVD will show up many more faults, especially in the old SPFX.

While some fans have been angered by any attempt to meddle with a cultural icon - especially the attempts to recreate CGI versions of the Enterprise's rotating nacelle caps, and the artists putting miniature, moving versions of themselves in the new computer-drawn matt paintings - the CBS SPFX team are doing an amazing job, from the still and moving examples I've seen so far.

But last week, CBS unveiled its remastered version of "Amok Time". Suddenly, that well-known scene of Spock and Kirk's battle for T'Pring, Spock's intended bondmate, has been elevated, literally, onto an impossibly precarious land bridge, similar to those seen in "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock"! And, in the distance, we can now see a CGI recreation of Spock's home city of ShiKahr, which had previously been named and visited in the Filmation animated episode, "Yesteryear" (TAS).


Left: ShiKahr in TAS; Right: a distant ShiKahr in TOS-R.

While most of Filmation's TAS was shunted out of "canon" via a Star Trek Office memo in 1989, several names and events from "Yesteryear" (plus Captain Robert April of "The Counter-clock Incident") are embraced by the "Star Trek Encyclopedia" and the "Star Trek Chronology", with Gene Roddenberry's approval. Unfortunately, Spock's city of birth is misspelt "ShirKahr" in those publications, and that pesky error has permeated TAS mentions in other licensed Star Trek products.

Oh, and if you're wondering about the moon-like object in the sky over Shikahr in the "Yesteryear" still, that is "T'Kuht", coined in the 70s by fanzine identity, Gordon Carleton, to explain the misleading TOS quote, "Vulcan has no moon, Miss Uhura" (in "The Man Trap"). Jean Lorrah once wrote Sarek & Amanda fanzine stories for T'Kuhtian Press.

The TAS error in "Yesteryear" (ie. Dorothy Fontana had scribbled "remove moon" on the art she approved for Filmation, but it wasn't noticed by the animators) was retconned as "Vulcan's twin planet" in the booklet accompanying View-Master's "Yesteryear" adaptation, "Mr. Spock's Time Trek". The planetary body was also shown to dominate the Vulcan sky in "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" (TMP) in 1979 (below), although it was eliminated for the director's edition DVD.



Several years later, the planetoid turned up in a Pocket Star Trek novel as T'Kuht in "The Vulcan Academy Murders" (below) by Jean Lorrah, acknowledging Gordon Carleton for the name and explanation. The planetoid is even on the cover of "The Vulcan Academy Murders" (below left) and Michael Jan Friedman's "New Worlds, New Civilizations" (below right).



The name is spelt "T'Khut" in Diane Duane's "Spock's World", Jeri Taylor's "Voyager: Pathways" and the books "The Worlds of the Federation" and "New Worlds, New Civilizations". It's called "T'Rukh" in AC Crispin's novel, "Sarek", with an explanation that the name changes are seasonal. It's T'Kuht again in "The Needs of the One" a DC Comics story in its TOS Special, Series II, and Geoffrey Mandel's book, "Star Trek Star Charts".

With the animated series often considered the bastard child of the Star Trek phenomenon, it's always a thrill to me to see TAS acknowledged. With the new version of "Amok Time", ShiKahr and TAS take a new step towards legitimacy and acceptance!

On the eleventh day of Christmas

There has been considerable discussion on "the boards" (TrekBBS) lately, to debate Vulcan's controversial twin/sister/planetoid. We first saw the orange Vulcan sky during "Amok Time" in the 60s, but it was in the first episode aired, "The Man Trap", that Mr Spock revealed that "Vulcan has no moon, Miss Uhura." Uhura is "not surprised".

However, the Filmation background artists on "Star Trek: The Animated Series" (TAS in the 70s) did not notice a handwritten comment, "Remove moon", by DC Fontana on her sign-off of preliminary artwork for "Yesteryear" (above left, image from the View-master reels packet of the episode). Thus, Vulcan did get an orbitting planetoid - or perhaps, a sister/twin planet. When "Star Trek: The Motion Picture (TMP, (above right) was hurried into release in 1979, with the film barely dry enough to show on premiere night, the planetoid survived. (Only to be removed for a different interpretation of Vulcan's sky for TMP's "Director's Edition" DVD.)

Filmation's TAS wasn't removed from the official "Star Trek canon" until 1989, when the tie-in licences were renewed under tighter restrictions, and the licensees of the "Star Trek" novels, comics and roleplaying games (RPGs) were asked to refrain from referencing TAS. (That memo, of course, has slowly ceased to have influence since Roddenberry's death in 1991. See the many TAS references in other "Star Trek" tie-ins my webpage Toon Trek.)

"Spock's World", a hardcover ST novel by Diane Duane, came out with much publicity and critical acclaim in 1988. The planetoid was spelt T'Khut in "Spock's World", and also in "Voyager: Pathways" by Jeri Taylor, "The Worlds of the Federation" by Shane Johnson and "New Worlds, New Civilizations" by Michael Jan Friedman. The planetoid's name was given as T'Rukh in the hardcover novel, "Sarek", with an explanation from the author, AC Crispin, that the name changes are seasonal. (Like the names for the phases of Earth's moon, I guess.)

But - before all that - the planetoid had already appeared in another Pocket novel set on Vulcan, entitled "The Vulcan Academy Murders" (1984). Here it was called T'Kuht, and the author Jean Lorrah acknowledges fanfic identity Gordon Carleton for coining the planetoid's name, and his effort to explain its appearance in "Yesteryear" and TMP, and thus reconciling the old (canonical) TOS quote from "The Man Trap". Because, according to that old memo, if it's live action and its onscreen then its canonical.

Hope that clears it all up. Yes, it's four days into the New Year and I'm still mooning you.

Today's Christmas ornaments are:



Above left: For 1986, the wooden Santa Claus is riding in a hot-air balloon. A cool way to deliver presents to hard-to-visit places? This ornament was a gift from my mother, who, over the years, has been determined to undermine my "only two items per year" policy, and often tucks crafty ornaments into my Christmas gifts. The carolling penguins caught my eye while wandering through the now-defunct Waltons department store adjacent to Bankstown Square.

Above right: For 1985, the three white ceramic geese were quite expensive and came from Grace Bros., Roselands. Obviously these geese are half of the famous "Six geese a-laying..." from the song, "The Twelve Days of Christmas"? The wooden Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was a gift from my friends Karen and Tim; a souvenir from their trip to Katoomba, in the Blue Mountains, the week of the premiere of "Star Trek III: The Search for Spock". Karen and another friend, Eric, took Tim (a Star Trek club member visiting from Perth) to do some touristy things when I was stuck at work.