According to at least one source, Patrick Koluuunahmeheheh Tajnaahme is the fictional novelist referenced by Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode "The City On The Edge of Forever". The reason for the ruins you see littering the City here is another interesting – and dumb – piece of trivia...
Apparently, Harlan Ellison's original script stipulated it should be covered in runes...
And the set designer didn't know what runes were.
Still, it's a hell of an episode, and well worth the quoting... Gemma Brockis has hinted she might, at some point, invite visiting lecturers to her online university to teach something other than the History of the Kiss. In case this happens, I've been considering a Cultural History of Kindness: Bill and Ted's two precepts will go in there, obviously, and maybe Michael Scott's mutant variant, and almost certainly the recommendation of Patrick Koluuunahmeheheh Tajnaahme.
"Let me help – A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous
novelist will write a classic using that theme. He'll recommend those
three words even over I love you."
An excellent oral history of Galaxy Quest can be read here.
A lot of great things are also said in the documentary about its making, Never Surrender. What's left unsaid yet still pleasingly integral to the documentary's structure is how important Enrico Colantoni – who plays the alien Mathesar – might be to letting all the love in.
Somehow, immediately upon seeing him, we know Mathesar's not only a genuine extra-errestrial, but that this is not his real body, and that's a strong start. The alien-as-innocent isn't a new idea, but they'll normally be played as a
kind of child-friendly robot butler. This is not how the Thermians are played. They have the monotone of a B-movie aggressor, but it's playful rather than haughty, a sign of vulnerablity – as if human speech is a frequency they're constantly having to tune in
to. Nothing Mathesar does in the movie will signal anything we've seen before, yet we will understand him perfectly, even painfully.
Like Boris Karloff in Frankenstein, Colantoni successfully imagines the expression of emotion in a body only one day old. Below is the scene screenwriter Robert Gordon said was the moment that he
finally knew what he was doing, before going on to write what David
Mamet apparently descibed as one of only four perfect movies ever made. If you haven't seen Galaxy Quest, it's a very safe film to watch with someone for the first time – as my support bubble happily attested – so if you haven't seen it, like Mamet, I recommend it, but maybe don't watch this next clip. If you have seen it however, you know what's coming, because every decision Colantoni makes here is unforgettable.
Tim Allen's definitely great too, isn't he, faced with this, and suffering what Alan Rickman apparently called "a sudden attack of acting" (though, arguably, Allen seems more comfortable playing a version of himself than Alan.) Maybe Mamet was right. Everyone does seem to get everything right. Like Casablanca, this is one of those films that's Great because it's great. Casablanca though, on top of everything else, had an actual War going on to help with the emotional heft. But Galaxy Quest, on top of everything else, has Enrico Colantoni.
Just while I'm on the subject of what is and isn't progress – and indeed of East versus West – I can't shake the feeling that the depiction of aliens in in The Original Series of Star Trek was actually less xenophobic than their depiction in The Next Generation. I'll admit I haven't seen every episode of either – so you should probably stop reading now – but I'm not just talking about how TOS's smaller budget meant that its Klingons had to look more human...
Obviously aliens don't have to look human, but those encountered by Picard on TNG also had strange, mock-foreign accents – despite the fact they're being instantly translated – and often sleazier moral systems, which the Federation had to cajole like Henry Higgins into its own incurious chess-and-Mozart mainstream.
The aliens encountered by Kirk's Enterprise on the other hand are far less patronisingly depicted. They speak with the same accents as Kirk (when they're not sounding too high-faluting), and regularly occupy a higher place in the cosmic food chain than our heroes. The biggest idiots Kirk encounters often display the powers of actual gods. The problem these aliens pose isn't savagery, unless it's savagery they themselves inspire.
And I know that TNG has its own god-like pest in Q, but he's more New Age than Old Testament. There's nothing blasphemous about Q, he's just a pest. Anyway working out how to deal with a god isn't nearly as interesting as working out how to deal without one. And that, rather than the "tolerating" of those who are "different", seemed the real mission of Spock, Bones and Kirk.
I finally watched the mirror universe episode of Star Trek: the one where Kirk and Bones accidentally beam into an evil universe, and Spock has a goatee – the first instance, I think, of facial hair being used to denote an evil switch. (In 1960, The Two Faces of Dr. Jeckyll had the doctor actually lose a beard to become Hyde. I will always, first and foremost though, associate the evil beard with the twin of Michael Knight.)
As a simple statement of the values of the Federation, Mirror, Mirror works incredibly well, a bit like – now I think of it – how Pottersville in It's a Wonderful Life realises the malevolent effect upon characters we've already met of living in a world similarly gone to shit (although in that darkest timeline, spectacles on a love interest take the place of the goatee). My favourite moment comes about twenty minutes into the epsiode, when we finally cut back to our universe (assuming optimistically Star Trek is set in our universe) to find out what havoc the evil Kirk and company have been committing on the original Enterprise while their counterparts have been attempting to steer the evil universe away from planetary looting and domestic tooth and claw, and it turns out they've committed no havoc whatasoever, but have instead been dragged, almost immediately, kicking and screaming to the brig. Because of course they have. Because what's a utopia without checks and balances? That's how you really tell which timeline you're in: not by looking for goatees, but by seeing who's in prison, and who's walking around still allowed to be in charge.
(A few more telly thoughts: I'm finding it hard to get into The Next Generation. I can't shake the sense that the ideals of the Federation have lapsed into snobbery. You shouldn't be able to ask of a Star Trek "Which character's the curious one?" They should all be curious. Unlike in The Original Series, the aliens of TNG aren't mysteries to be learnt from, but sleazy, third-world-coded fops, there to be taught a lesson. I did finally get into Community
though, hard. Hard, but like Rick and Morty not immediately, having to wait nearly a series for it to bloom from a hate-friendly Scrubs-without-stakes into a hate-friendly Muppet Babies-for-grownups, which is much more my thing.)
As a final Frankenstein Wednesdays postlude, here is one of Bela Lugosi and Lon Chaney Junior's last appearances together (and Lugosi's frist appearance with Vampira, five years before Plan 9 For Outer Space) a shabby sketch show starring a shabby comedian sponsored by something called Geritol. I've only stuck it here to dispel the myth that Lugosi's one foray into live television was a total disaster, and that Red Skelton's improvisations caused him to jeopardise the show because as you can see, that's not what happens at all. Bela forgets a line, but that's it. It's fine. It's even charming. Live theatre was Bela's livelihood, and I know he looks shockingly ill, even standing next to Chaney who looks like Bill the Cat, but it still makes me happy to see him doing work this good with material this bad (including his own mortal tissue). It's nothing like the scene in Ed Wood, is what I am saying. The curtain's not brought down.
I love this movie. But.
Moving on though: What am I going to do for Wednesdays now? I know I didn't aways make the deadlines, and that last Abbott and Costello post went on for eight days, so maybe I should give myself a break and not dedicate Wednesdays to anything for a while. But if I were to, here are some candidates...
Clockwise, from top left:
A box set of the first six Star Trek films: in which the original crew of the Enterprise grow old and realise they've nothing but each other. In trying to wring adventure out of Reason rather than Romance Trek's impact on popular science fiction, and by extension the popular subconscious, might be as deep as Frankenstein's. But do I really want to chunter on in that vein for six weeks? Conventional wisdom says the odd-numbered films are bad and the even-numbered ones are good, so at least I'd be kept on my toes. Or if I wanted to stay in the thirties...
A box set of seventeen W. C Fields Features: I adore W.C. Fields, am always happy to recommend his work, and know there are at least five films in here I'd want to say something about. Also this would let me delve deeper into the thirties, nor do I remember any of them being stinkers. Still five out of seventeen's not a great ratio, and maybe I should be careful how much of the thirties I dabble in. There's always earlier...
A box set of Early Hitchcock. Nine films, all British, some silent. There's a lot here I haven't seen, so that would be one reason to go for this. And I love Hitchcock's early British stuff. But maybe too niche. Maybe I could review some telly instead...
A box set of the Bardathon. Clive James' name for the BBC's televising of every single play known to have been penned by Shakespeare at the time of broadcast, the early eighties. Thirty-nine plays, each about three hours long. So a hell of a project, but I have already watched them all, and enjoyed most of them. Then again, I'm an English graduate. Also I've no idea what these posts would look like. A bit curious to find out. Also piquing my curiosity...
Twenty-two Ingmar Bergman films I inherited from my godfather. Again, a very heavy exercise. I've seen very little Bergman though, so like the Hitchcock this would be an excuse to finally watch something, rather than an opportunity for closer study. And Bergman definitely deserves closer study. And maybe now's not the time. Or maybe he's completely up my alley. I've no idea, this is the biggest blind spot on the current list. Unlike...
The complete Ulysses 31. Space. Robots. God. Bad acting. Good design. Great music. Twenty-six episodes. Last-minute thought. I still haven't read the Odyssey. Back to the thirties...
The Complete Thin Man Collection. William Powell and Myrna Loy get pissed and solve crimes in the thirties. Six films. I love the first two - maybe too much to have anything interesting to say about them - and I haven't seen the last four. Speaking of Powells...
Two box sets of films by Powell and Pressburger. Some absoute wonders here, but I haven't seen them all, so again I'd be using this as an opportunity to cath up. A lot has already been written about the films I have seen though, and I'm not sure I'll be bringing much to this party. And finally...
The complete Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce Sherlock Holmes. Fourteen films, which I love, which is a reason for choosing them. Also I'm not sure I've seen them all, which is another reason for. Also there'll be some continuity of talent with Universal's Frankensteins, another reason for. But I might love every film for the same reason, and there's fourteen of them, so I might not have that much new to say about each. Then again, maybe "not that much" is eactly the right length for a blog.
Okay, just searching for those screengrabs has made me keen to do definitely something. Feel free to make suggestions below.
When I started this blog back in 2007, this was probably the mental image I had of myself: Transmetropolitan's Spider Jerusalem - a twenty-first century Hunter S. Thompson, keeping painstaking track of the traffic below, blowing knee-caps off a worsening world with his cyber truths - but while the world seems to have kept its side of the bargain, I turn out to have kept my head down a lot more than I anticipated, because what I hadn't predicted is that of course everyone else would have the same idea, and there simply aren't enough perches for the lot of us. Even if there were, we're not stuck in the traffic - as the saying goes - we are the traffic.
Transmetropolitan was a utopia of sorts, ultimately*. For example, because I'd grown up so simplistically dismissive of Star Trek, Spider's world was my first encounter with the idea of a "maker" - a machine that could produce anything from nothing, including copies of itself - and therefore my first introduction to the idea of a world without scarcity. A future of abundance. This was also the subject of a superb radio one-off made by James Burke back in December 2017, which I've been meaning to write about for two Decembers, and which you can still listen to here. Burke is an extraordinary speaker. He presented the moon landings on British television in 1969, back when the BBC were choosing Arts graduates to present science shows and Science graduates to present the arts, and his show "Connections",
made fifty years ago now, did an extraordinary job of predicting the
future whilst also offering a revolutionary idea of the past (for example, it wasn't the invention of printing press that revolutionised
literacy, Burke argues, but the invention of disposable linen underwear,
whose recycling could finally facilitate the mass production of paper!) He has form, in other words, but his predictions from 2017 are pretty similar to those made fifty-four minutes into this lecture from 2009, which Joel Morris, Jason Hazeley and I were lucky enough to hear an unforgettable version of at the Royal Society in 2012, all of us agreeing it was one of the best live gigs any of us had attended:
I wonder, though, if Burke's changed any of his predictions in the past two years. Because the one thing he didn't account for, I think, is the one human need no amount of technology can be guaranteed to assuage: attention. In Burke's world of abundance, where no one is now required to interact with each other, no one does. But people do seem to need attention, even more so since the internet has given us such a dangerously unweildy tool for attempting to command it. Which brings me to my second prediction from 2009: an article written by David Mitchell calling into serious question Gordon Brown's assertion that online commenting was "democratising". In it David quotes a superb idea from a mutual friend of ours, Jon Dryden Taylor:
He wants people to post, as a comment, on as many opinion-garnering web
pages as possible, as often as they can be bothered, the phrase: "It
just goes to show you can't be too careful!" It's perfect; it seems lighthearted without being a joke. It's vaguely
pertinent to almost any subject without meaning a thing. It's the ideal
oil for the internet's troubled waters.
Jon's management of online traffic has always been exemplorary. He hardly ever blogs for example, but when he does, my God it's unmissable (there's a link on the right, under "where I get my ideas from"). And I think he's right, as well. This decade has gone to show you can't be too careful, which is something to carry into the new year, along with all the plans we'll make about how to cope with having everything we've always wanted.
*The letters page of Transmetropolitan was responsible for one of my favourite all-time quotes too: "No, you're only entitled to an informed opinion". Good times. People don't like being told off. Fascism thrives on division. Happy Twenty-twenty! X
- I wasn't alone in finding the idea of somebody voluntarily turning up to someone else's house to be eaten funny. My friend Will's favourite detail of the case is Miewes accidentally letting Brandes' severed penis burn on the stove in pepper, wine and garlic because he was so engrossed in a Star Trek novel. Will liked this thwarted attempt at Hannibal Lecterish sophistication. (Ironically, the casting of Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal probably has more to do with the Miewes case than it does any previous incarnation of Lecter. I haven't seen it. Is he into Star Trek?)
- The fox is named "Grace" after the Jeff Buckley album. This line was
cut. Also cut was the line "Drop the cheese", fox slang for
"Show me the money". As I say this was one of my first sketches.
- According to Wikipedia, Miewes has since become a vegetarian.
I mean this whole scene... I had a meeting here, in the BBC's new offices, on Tuesday, with a TV comedy executive (see lampshade). Exciting. It's called Grafton House, maybe so that writers will think it's a pub. It's where the magic happens. The first thing I noticed was all the empty picture frames on the far wall, that you can just make out above. "Hm, it's to suggest potential," proposed Gareth Edwards, whose mere attention to this project has been one of the best compliments it's received. He was along to provide some simple and attractive answers to questions such as "So, Time Spanner; let me be blunt; what's it about?" while I ran through a list of nouns and hums. I had no real answer, but here was the conclusion – the reality's in place, but the fantasy is fudged. I wanted my hero to be given superpowers but hadn't really hit upon why.
However, I think – I hope – I've hit upon the missing ingredient last night, while milling around the sphinxes in Crystal Palace: Danger. The tradition is that the comedy schnook is only promoted because he's going to be sacrificed (Margaret Dumont's numerous elevations of Groucho, I supposem, are the exception rather than the rule) and what I like about this tradition is, it's a two-sided fantasy: there's the child's fantasy of power, but also the uglier and funnier failed adult fantasy of victimhood, a fantasy that the world wants you dead, because secretly that's actually what you want, and now your death will have some meaning. This also makes more sense of the choice of that great burnt offering Laika as a narrator. Anyhoo, I really came here just to post, firstly, this photo of the Beeb's new premises, because everyone seems to be finding new premises these days, and secondly, this page from a Star Trek colouring book signifying the creative process:
Oh, in addition to writing children's books, and producing comedies about space, comas, string theory, swans and Napoleonic gay horses, Gareth also does a blog, and it's very funny.
Apparently, Harlan Ellison's original script stipulated it should be covered in runes...
