Wouldn't you like to be a V-ger too?

People have been telling me I need a new banner. This physician banner is something I knocked together a few days ago ...

Yeah, I know. I'll work on it.

It's raining today, thank goodness. I mean hell's bells, Mother Nature set a new precipitation record for March, here in the Central Valley, but that's no reason why she should rest on her proverbial laurels. Keep raining! More rain! Push on through July! You can do it!

I got up this morning, and saw my dog Daisy on Bunny's bed. She looked at me and I looked at her, and Daisy was all like, 'It is so warm and snuggly right here, and I swear I do not have to pee. Pleeeease don't make me go outside ...' So I left her there. Good Pam!

BB and I watched Star Trek: The V-Ger Movie the other night. It's hard to believe, as nuts as I ever was about Star Trek, that I never saw this silly thing! It came out in 1979! But I'd always heard it was a bomb, and in my grief I avoided it. But apparantly they re-released it? or something? and included a major DC re-edit for free? Anyway, BB says it's ten times better now.

The Beeb acted as my host, giving his annotations throughout. "Now long about here," he murmured forty minutes in, "we were sick and tired of William Shatner's toupee."

"Did you shout things at the screen?"

"No, this was Star Trek, not Rocky Horror. But we did talk amongst ourselves."

Anthony, darling, we missed you terribly, and spoke of you with great reverence. Nobody can imitate the alien Ilia, walking around like a robot and saying "V-ger, V-ger" in a short little tunic, like you do.

Comments

[Anthony]

There are actually TWO DCs of Star Trek: The FX War (as our friend Vance called it). One is a no-longer available VHS version (unfortunately in Pan and Scan) and the other is the Robert Wise sanctioned DVD version, a somewhat shorter DC but spiffed up and looking quite good even today.
I possess a fondness for ST:TFXW that is perhaps greater than its actual worth. Never again did the writers of ST handle such a literally HUGE scale of operations or idea (V-Ger would have bitch-slapped the Borg into last week if they tried to assimilate it) and I happen to like the oh-so-Tristan and Isolde ending as Decker (honestly, was it any worse than being on 7th Heaven for Christ's sake?) and Illia merge into cosmic bliss in a shower of it's-pure-white-so-it-must-be-cool FX! And yes, I do a dead-on Illia impersonation ("V-ger says it has a headache tonight so do not touch") but I stopped wearing the white mini-mini ages ago and opted for a more sensible coture a al Deanna Troi or Major Kira.
And V-ger is BAD ASS. I have a sneaking Promethean fondness for ships larger than Antarctica and twice as chill. People complain about the interminable "fly-over" sequence in the film but rarely has any scene so-captured the astonishing immensity of an alien vessell quite as well.

[pam]

BB says Doug Trumbull (2001) is responsible for some of the more drawn-out sequences, and that critics hated them but the fans in the theatre dug it. You suppose the fans were stoned? I forgot to ask.

Read the Wikipedia entry:

"... the film was regarded by critics as ponderous and boring, especially in the second half, which included lengthy scenes of the Enterprise flying through the interior of the cloud, with the awed reactions of the crew. However, the ship's lengthy transit is also widely perceived by fans to have profound symbolism, akin to human fertilisation and conception."

Funky!

[Anthony]

OK, the version I heard was that there was a lot of competition in the FX department between John Dykstra (Star Wars physical miniatures New Kid On Block Big Pimp Daddy ridin' high at that point in post SW mania) and Douglas Trumbull (venerable 2001 acid-head stargate scene guru and past master of trippy luminescence-based visual effects [and really urine-impoverished director of "Silent Running" and "Brainstorm" alas]) and that the more excessive moments of the film were the result of those two running rough-shod over Robert Wise. Nonetheless, when Wise issued the "official" DC DVD a few years ago, many of the over-the-top moments were still there, so I guess he must have liked them!
"Please, V-ger is feeling much better now and will allow carbon-based units to take her out for a drink and maybe a Quentin Tarantino flick."
Persis Khambatta: great name, great look (Deltans were always my favorite under-used ST race cause they were like, you know, sluts and all--shut up Beavis--huh, you said 'slut'....) I wonder what went wrong with her career?
I've always thought the coolest ST story imaginable would be a very Warhol 60s/Factory/Richard Linklater influenced thing were the Enterprise just went about through space doing nothing important until it encountered an alien probe of known origen and imaginable power and then just flew past it. It could run 8 hours like Warhol's "Empire State Building" film and would have endless disconnected shots of various crew members doing mundane activities. How much would you pay to see that?

[minnie]

my cats name is v'ger.
heh.

[Aaron Agassi]

Yes! A wonderful movie concept. Especially since nothing should be less mundane than the mundane daily activities of humans, let alone aliens, living centuries in the future.

Indeed, the connection between the disjointed sequences would gradually unfold as the audience continues to observe.

Unless, of course, the activities portrayed will be, indeed, mundane and anachronistically familiar and contemporary to us. A frequent disappointment on Trek, forced to compromise so that contemporary audiences can relate.

In which case, the effect might be one of parody.

The late Hal Clement used to jest that the truly alien episodes of Star Trek where produced, but where only beamed out into the galaxy to whomever the audience that could understand them in context!