First act of ‘Star Trek: Of Gods and Men’ released online

FROM JASON’S COMMAND CHAIR — What is it about Trekkies that makes them obsess over ill-conceived time-travel plots?

Andrew and I just finished watching the first installment of Star Trek: Of Gods and Men, the extremely low-budget, convoluted mini-series being produced by various Trek alums as a “40th anniversary present” to fans.

We are perplexed, to say the least.

Directed by Tim Russ (Tuvok from Star Trek Voyager and a terrorist from that TNG episode where Picard wants to go horseback riding but crawls around the Enterprise’s innards instead), part one weighed in at 26 minutes, 12 seconds. Each minute had us scratching our heads and asking, “WHY? FOR THE LOVE OF KIRK, WHY?!”

The plot (as it is): Charlie Evans — from the second episode of season one in 1966 — returns. As a young and powerful psionic 40 years ago, Charlie tried to take over the Enterprise after he was rescued from the surface of the planet Thasus.

Now he’s back with a grudge against Captain Kirk. He shows up on the bridge to confront Uhura (Nichelle Nichols reprising her role), Chekov (Walter Koenig), John Harriman (Alan Ruck — Cameron from Ferris Beuller’s Day Off!), Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), and Kirk’s nephew — who is now in command of the good ol’ NCC-1701.

Charlie uses The Guardian of Forever (from the second-to-last episode of season one, The City On the Edge of Forever — you know, the one with Joan Collins) to go back in time, presumably to assassinate Kirk as an infant a la The Terminator.

As Doc Brown can tell you, changing the past changes the future. Charlie’s actions spawn (as far as we can tell) an alternate time line. It’s not the Mirror Universe that both TOS and DS9 visited several times. In this one, Harriman — an EVIL, Orion slave-girl owning Harriman — captains the Enterprise. Instead of the Federation, he is a member of the Galactic Order.

He captures a Correllian Corvette separatist ship and imprisons Princess Leia this time line’s version of Chekov, who heads the Rebel Alliance resistance against the Galactic Empire Order. Then Grand Moff Tarkin Harriman fires an Death Star beam Omega device at Alderaan Vulcan because it supported secession from the Order.

Overall, the plot seems muddled, the CG is kiddie-grade, the Federation-time line sets are straight out of the 60s instead of the darker 80s movie versions, Ruck’s alternate time line shirt is nice and glittery, and Garrett Wang is… well, Garrett Wang. With a wig.

All that said, it’s still Star Trek and we’ll still watch Act II of Of Gods and Men as soon as it’s released — if only to laugh at it.

I already linked to it, but again: Watch the movie here.

Don’t miss such great dialog as:

“It’s deja-vu all over again.”

“I’m sorry, I was just… (dramatic voice) remembering.”

“So, at last. The Fox has been outfoxed.”

YouTube Cinema: Super Mario Bros. (1993)

Trust the fungus.

 

FROM JASON’S 8-BIT DREAMS — So it’s come to this. In the 14 years since the debut of the very first video game movie — Super Mario Bros. — we’ve made very little progress. The sets are still ass-cheap, the characters are still cardboard, the plots are still riddled with plot holes.

And we’re still watching them. Today, audiences are lining up to see the CG-laden crapfest that is Hitman, based on the awesome game of the same name. French director Xavier Gens (who’s never directed anything worth note) is responsible for this latest travesty, but the video game-to-silver-screen genre has suffered its fair share at the hands of Uwe Boll, director of such low-budget, high-octane no-brainers as Bloodrayne 1+2, Alone In the Dark 1+2, and Dungeon Siege.

Other adaptations have resulted in Mortal Kombat, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, the Resident Evil trilogy, Lara Croft: Tomb Raider and its sequel, Doom, and Silent Hill.

They’re all horrible, and that wonderful, undeniable guilty pleasure tradition of watching them all started with the granddaddy of modern video games in 1993.

Andrew and I watched this one Sunday night over the web from Virginia and Ohio — a strange habit we picked up a few months ago. Every second was Chinese water torture.

Where to start? I guess the thing that bothered us most was that when boiled down to its core components, the movie had almost nothing to do with the Super Mario Brothers. Oh sure, their likenesses were there. But since when the Mushroom Kingdom a Blade Runner wanna-be dystopia? Where did all the post-industrial sets and Mad Max hairstyles come from?

Even the color pallet was strange — Mario games are always bright and cartoonish, but the movie skips World 1-1 in favor of 90 minutes of World 4-2 and World 5-4.

It’s clear that Allied Filmmakers and Cinergi Pictures were just trying to raise the spirit of the Grand Almighty Cash Cow. SMB was the ultimate cross-marketed brand, with 40.2 million copies of the NES game saturating the market. With Mario sleeping bags, coffee mugs, action figures, pajamas, Happy Meal tie-ins, Underoos, cereal, The Super Mario Brothers Super Show cartoon, and Spaghetti-Os, a movie was just the next big ka-ching at the register.

That in mind, I don’t the producers cared too much about plot, and it shows. In truth, the video game was far too surreal to be cobbled into any viable film. There’s no way to take magic mushrooms, floating bricks, flower power (the flower is conspicuously absent from the movie), or a dino-bad-guy work on a serious level.

What we get is an archaeological dig — in the middle of Manhattan no less — that opens a doorway to (gawd, here it comes) a PARALLEL DIMENSION! The Mushroom Kingdom and Earth are two divergent realities that sprung into being when an asteroid hit the planet 65 million years ago. On Earth, it killed the dinosaurs. But in the other reality, reptiles rose to be the dominant species. Somehow the evolved from scary scaled monsters into bipedals that look just like humans.

But the Mushroom world has a problem. The king (Princess Daisy’s father) was de-evolved into a huge fungus and Koopa took over. He’s not a very good ruler — during the last 20 years or so, the entire planet has been leeched into an enormous desert and only a huge, grimy city remains. Koopa wants Earth’s abundant resources and plans to merge the two dimensions together again using a shard of the original asteroid.

Daisy has the shard, and Koopa has her kidnapped. Luigi is infatuated with her and rushes to save her, with Mario at his side (let’s hear it for role reversal). From there, if it can be believed, the movie goes downhill:

 

The goombas are all small-headed giants with rocket launchers. In one scene, Mario and Luigi escape their clutches by getting the goombas to dance.

There’s a car chase in which we see that all automobiles in the Mushroom Kingdom run on a bumper car electrical grid.

An excruciating sequence shows a wind-up bomb-omb walking slowly toward its target over a five-minute period.

Koopa gets de-evolved for about 4 seconds (SPOILERS ZOMG) into a T-Rex.

Mario uses a mattress to rescue half a dozen Brooklyn girls kidnapped by Koopa. They slide down the frozen insides of well-lit pipes.

 

About the only saving grace was a much-appreciated cameo by Yoshi.

What is so surprising is that while the movie looks like it was made out of cardboard props, toothpicks, and masking tape, the studio spent millions on its talent. Bob Hoskins as Mario, John Leguizamo as Luigi, and Dennis Hopper were all slumming.

Also, watch for B-movie idol Fisher Stevens (My Science Project, Short Circuit, Hackers) as a Koopa henchman with the coolest sideburns evar. The other goomba thug was Richard Edson, the parking garage attendant who took the Ferrari for a joy ride in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

The Battle for Wesnoth: Freeware at its best

NAVIGATING THROUGH THE TRENCHES OF ANDREWS DEEPEST THOUGHTS — Rarely do you find a freeware game with as much polish and detail as the turn-based strategy The Battle for Wesnoth. Published under the GNU General Public License, Wesnoth is available for Windows, Mac, and tons of Linux distributions.

Boasting a strong 200+ unit count, 16 races, and 6 factions, Wesnoth provides a deep and rewarding experience.

A fantasy based strategy game, it has players recruit armies from a myriad of races, the usual Tolkien influenced bunch, to battle for control of a hex based map. Within the default era, the available factions are Undead, Rebels (Elves), Loyalists (Humans), Knalgan Alliance (Dwarves), Northerners (Orcs and Goblins), and finally Drakes (Dragons).

Each race as a bunch of units, each with it’s own specialty and traits. Additionally, each unit can gain experience which will allow you to level up your base units into more distinct and powerful units as they fight and survive battles. You must learn their units and utilize their strengths against their enemies weaknesses if you ever hope to be successful.

space

Several players battle for control of a critical village(Click for full image)

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The basic aim of the game is to protect your commander while you navigate the hex grid map, seizing control of villages that not only provide you with gold, but a stronghold to defend key points on the map. Featuring a vast collection of land types, all with heir own movement modifiers that limit a unit’s ability to travel distances, the playable maps always provide an interesting change in tactics and you move to position your units to the best vantage points.

It also boasts a robust and complex battle system, which is balanced precisely while maintaining very asymmetric factions. However, it may take players a while to grasp the full complexity of the system.

Wesnoth provides players with both single and multiplayer modes. Not only does the game come with six excellent default campaigns, but players can easily download hundreds more from the official add-on server, easily accessible from the main menu. User-created content is one of the most compelling reasons to play this game. Not only can you download more campaigns, but you have access to new eras (which provide more races and units), tons of multiplayer maps, and even total conversion mods. Wesnoth was built from the ground up to be modular, user friendly, and encouraging to the community to help contribute. In fact, the developers welcome new additions to the game and usually include high quality content in future releases.

Finally, the game looks beautiful and can be run on almost any machine, old and new alike. The sprites and animations are detailed. Taking a look at the screen shot archives on the website, you can see how the game as progressed visually over the years, and thankfully for the better.

PROS:

Tons of units and factions.

High-quality user-created content.

Complex, balanced battle system.

CONS:

Steep learning curve.

Games may take a LONG time to finish.

PURCHASE IF:

It’s free, just download and try it already.

AVOID IF:

Your name is Jason and you suck at it.

Old Star Trek press photos unearthed

FROM JASON’S RECENTLY CLEANSED NEWSROOM — So my company is building a new $6 million office, and today reporters were drafted to help purge the old digs of tens of thousands of obsolete documents.

Three decades of photos, police reports, sports statistics, and public meeting agendas were quickly sorted. The trash was tossed from second-story windows into a fleet of dumpsters.

I rescued some of the nerdier loot. My inner Trekkie wouldn’t let these promotional photos go to the landfill (CLICK THUMBNAILS TO ENBIGGEN):

Star Trek: The Original Series

The big three This 1968 TOS shot of Kirk (William Shatner), Bones (DeForest Kelley), and Spock (Leonard Nimoy) was provided to newspapers over the wire when Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry died in 1991. The slug briefly outlines how Roddenberry, 70, succumbed to a heart attack at Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home

Kirk has an Austin Powers thing going on I would give just about anything to be Dr. Gillian Taylor (Catherine Hicks, regrettably later of Seventh Heaven fame) in this shot. Is it strange to have a man-crush on The Shatner? I don’t think so. I feel obliged to point out that Hicks’ TV husband on Seventh Heaven, Stephen Collins, stars in Star Trek: The Motion Picture (aka Star Trek: Driving Through Space For Two Hours).

Just sing Mr. Bo Jangles already Spock loses the ears for a while to get behind the camera. Nimoy directed The Voyage Home (aka Star Trek: The One With the Whales) as well as Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. He wrote Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. I think ST:V really could have used a Nimoy touch. Maybe then the Kirk wouldn’t have killed God by shooting a photon torpedo at him.

Clearly a superimposed still on a model Spock, McCoy, Sulu (George Takei), Uhura (Nichelle Nichols, Scotty (James Doohan), and Kirk use a shuttle craft — instead of a handy transporter for some reason — to navigate through Starfleet’s Space Dock on their way to the Enterprise (NCC-1701-A).

Prepare the flux capacitor… ENGAGE! The Klingon Bird of Prey carrying the Enterprise crew loses power as it swoops under the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco. I guess it’s time to go find the nuclear wessels so Doc Brown can recharge the Delorean and Marty can get back to the future. Call me cynical, but IV was such a BTTF rip-off that I’ll bet they originally thought about making Kirk meet and sleep with his own mother.

Look what I learned at business school, Mom The Klingon ambassador demands Federation cooperation in the extradition of Kirk. He has teh mad Powerpoint skillz.

You could tell he was gay in 1986 Look at Takei hamming it up in the middle there. Geez. Newsflash, Sulu: YOU’RE NOT A VULCAN. It may look old, but this shot was distributed as part of a 1991 press junket even though it was from the 1986 promotion of ST:IV. I think the sepia tone has something to do with a chemical treatment of the negative.

Are they in, or are they out? I remember the 1980s. I remember French cuffs. I do not recall, however, waistlines that covered my rib cage, wide belts over blazers, or tucking pants into my boots. The only one with an excuse here is Spock. The rest had better hide from Heidi Klum and Tim Gunn.

Star Trek: The Next Generation

Behold, the second coming I’m a child of the TNG all the way. Sure, I watched reruns of the original series as a very young boy; they would run in syndication on Sunday afternoons. But the launch of NextGen in 1987 was life-changing. I contend that Star Trek makes you a better person, and I say that Picard was as good a father figure as any. This 1991 promo shows Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Data (Brent Spiner), Guinan (Whoopi Goldberg), La Forge (LaVar Burton), Worf (Michael Dorn), Troi (Marina Sirtis), Picard (Patrick Stewart), and Crusher (Gates McFadden).

Yeah, he totally Riked her If TNG was the second coming of Star Trek, then Riker was the second coming of Kirk. It seemed The Mighty Beard nailed just about every femalien in the Alpha Quadrant before season three finished, then had to start again. Frakes didn’t stop there, though; he convinced writers to star him as his twin brother, Thomas, so together they could Rike (that’s a verb now) twice the women. I have dedicated my face to duplicating the Riker beard: Mark II.