During a 1992 demo of the NeXTStep 3.0 operating system , Steve Jobs showed off an app that allowed users to run DOS programs inside an application window. He opened Lotus123 (one of the many early spreadsheet apps that Excel crushed out of existence) and manually typed in the command-line instructions to open a specific file. "Wonderful user interface" he sarcastically remarked. To Jobs, it was…
WARNING: This article contains spoilers for Star Trek: Picard Season Three, which as of this writing has been out for the better part of a year. In the spring of 1994 Star Trek fans were treated to the wonderful TNG finale "All Good Things". It was a little technobabble-heavy, but it was still an affectionate send-off to the TV adventures of the Enterprise- D crew as they made the jump to the big…
By most people's reckoning, Star Trek will be 57 years old this September. To put things in perspective, Superman hit his 57th anniversary in 1995, by which time he'd already gone through one hard reboot and numerous softer ones. Not even the most ardent fanboy would've expected the character and his world to maintain a single unbroken continuity from 1938 to 1995. But that's exactly what some…
Since the very beginning, Star Trek has had rules. Mostly this was done to keep things within a TV budget and make the world of the show seem believable; it was never really something that viewers were supposed to obsess over. But it turned out that Star Trek's fans love to obsess over things, and attention to detail quickly became a major part of the whole franchise. And yet, during its first 20…
You may recall that I was a wee bit critical of Star Trek: Picard 's first season on account of how the story didn't make any sense. Of course I wasn't angry at the show. It didn't hurt my feelings. I was just disappointed that I wasn't able to enjoy something I thought I was going to like. Now, I'm going to talk a lot about story and character and all that stuff, but I should point out that I am…
Sometimes I wonder how the people who are always complaining that Discovery isn't "real" Star Trek would react to a big-screen reboot of The Next Generation that reimagined that era's starship Enterprise as a warship captained by a grim, revenge-obsessed Captain Picard. What if it was more darkly violent than any previous Trek film, and relegated the optimistic Roddenberrian message to a…
As I write this we're less than 24 hours away from Star Trek: Discovery 's season four premiere in the United States. Discovery was the first Star Trek show to completely break away from the episodic format. Rather than tell 13 different stories every season, Discovery (and its sibling, Picard ) tells one story broken up into 13 pieces. In an online discussion, someone pointed out that Dr. McCoy…
"The Paradise Syndrome" may be the most racist episode of Star Trek. There are more popular choices like "Code of Honor" or "The Omega Glory", but in those cases the racist stereotypes were depicted as imaginary alien cultures. Not so with "The Paradise Syndrome". Its embarrassing Native American stereotypes are depicted as actual Native Americans transplanted to another planet by benevolent (but…
I haven't set foot on Disney property since 2011. That's 10 years ago for those of you playing along at home. So I'm definitely not qualified to talk in detail about the new Disney Genie FastPass Monetizer or whatever it's called. I've never worked in the theme park industry, so I'm sure my opinions on how they should be run are thoroughly uninformed. What I'm trying to say is that you should…
The other day I watched the Malice at the Palace documentary on Netflix, and it helped to crystallize a lot of thoughts I'd been having about the sports league I've enjoyed since I was 11 years old, and my opinions toward its much-lauded former commissioner, David Stern. What follows are those thoughts and opinions: When David Stern took over as NBA commissioner in 1984, the league was in trouble.…
As incredible as it seems, there were other things going on in 1960s pop culture besides Star Trek. For example, these guys: The Beatles were kind of a big deal in the '60s, in much the same way that dinosaurs are a big deal in Jurassic Park. Since Star Trek was a product of that decade, it was inevitable that someone in the cast would have a Beatle-esque hairstyle. You see, Gene Roddenberry or…
While Disneyland was closed for the pandemic, they made some changes to the Snow White ride that apparently some people are outraged about. I don't know what the complaints are about and honestly I don't care enough to find out. But it DID get me thinking about how deeply weird the story of Snow White is. I've only seen the Disney animated classic one time, during my junior year of high school in…
NOTE: The dollar amounts in this article are approximate and inflation-adjusted. It's pretty well-known that the only reason we even have Star Trek movies is because of Star Wars. Paramount Pictures tried to make a low-budget Star Trek film a couple of times in the mid-1970s before giving up, concluding that there was no Star Trek story "big enough" for the cinema. But when George Lucas's crazy…
Over the last few years, the bad behavior of lots of men in show business has come to light. For ages, guys like Harvey Weinstein, Kevin Spacey, Matt Lauer, and Bill Cosby were able to shush all the stories about their awful rapey behavior (which often included actual rape) and for the most part the public went along with it right up until they suddenly didn't. Exactly why people suddenly decided…
When EPCOT Center opened in 1982, the Disney company worked hard to make it look like their new theme park was exactly the thing dreamed up by Walt in the 1960s. The definitive EPCOT Center bible , Walt Disney's EPCOT Center: Creating the New World of Tomorrow, even opened with this picture of Walt Disney taken from the EPCOT infomercial he filmed shortly before his death in 1966, accompanied by a…
“Encounter at Farpoint” is the Phantom Menace of televised Star Trek. You see, when Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered with “Encounter at Farpoint” in September 1987, it was the first new live-action Star Trek TV episode in almost 20 years. Sure, we'd been getting a new movie every couple of years since 1979, but the fans were desperate for more. The idea of a new weekly show helmed by The…
Way back in the prehistoric mists of 1999, the creative team behind Deep Space Nine closed out the show's seven-year run with a ten-episode finale arc. It was a ridiculous challenge, especially with the hectic pace of 1990s TV production. The writers had never done a ten-episode arc before, and this one had to not only be internally coherent but also wrap up all the threads from the previous seven…
When Star Trek: Voyager premiered in January 1995, 16-year-old me was excited for a new Star Trek show. But I also remember being a little worried. During The Next Generation 's final season it became obvious that the writers were out of ideas. And now, a scant eight months after TNG's series finale, the same people who worked on that show were launching a new one. Would Voyager's new characters…
Back in the 80s, George Lucas used to say in interviews that he originally conceived of the Star Wars saga as one complete story, but then he realized he had too much for just one movie so he split the story into multiple parts. Kids of my generation believed him. Of course, as we got older and started delving into the various behind-the-scenes books and early script drafts we realized that Lucas…
For future readers who stumble across this and wonder what the heck it is, it's a parody of this article that was the Most Important Thing Ever on Disney Twitter for about an hour and a half before 2019's D23 convention. It all started in mid-2008. We were only weeks away from the global economic meltdown that would see millions turned out of their homes, leave lasting scars on an entire…
Star Trek has endured for over five decades. Society has changed a lot during that time, so naturally some once-beloved entries in the franchise are weird and creepy by modern standards. Today we're going to talk about one such story from the much-maligned third and final season of the Original Series: "Requiem for Methuselah". It starts promisingly enough (for a third-season episode, anyway). We…
As I write this there are two kinds of movies virtually guaranteed to make a billion trillion zillion dollars at the box office: Marvel Comics movies released by Disney, and Star Wars. But a funny thing is happening to Star Wars: the last movie ( Solo ) only made a billion trillion dollars as opposed to the expected billion trillion zillion . YouTube is full of people eager to look into a webcam…
"Let the past die. Kill it if you have to." In the early 1970s, a young George Lucas started to develop a vague idea he had for a swashbuckling space-opera movie inspired by the Flash Gordon film serials from his childhood. One of the first things he did was try to purchase the rights to make a straight-up Flash Gordon movie. He failed, but later concluded it was for the best: "I realized that…
From the beginning, Star Trek: Discovery alienated a small but very loud segment of the Star Trek fanbase: middle-aged men who obsess over "canon" with a near-religious fervor. Now, I'm not knocking anyone for disliking a TV show; if Discovery 's not your thing that's perfectly okay and there are definitely fans of previous Treks who have decided to sit Discovery out. But there's a lunatic fringe…
Not too long ago everyone was talking about the 50th anniversary of Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood , one of the first TV shows my parents allowed me to watch. When I was a kid in the 1980s, most of the shows aimed at my age group were half-hour cartoons/toy commercials with names like Sgt. Dirk Fistpunch and the Justice Kommandos. These shows were all the same, and they went something like this: SGT.…