Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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Neuropol said:
And if you were the right age, it was cool. The Black Hole was boring, Something Wicked This Way Comes was confusing, but Tron was pure Wizard of Oz energy distilled into something for 5 to 8 year old boys alone.
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Being of that age, I couldn't agree more. I'm more sympathetic to the Black Hole, but it was both too boring, but also too scary for the target age demo (the masks off reveal for the drones and merged Maximilian/Reinhardt in hell at the end were nightmare fuel for young kids, assuming they stayed awake for it). Something Wicked was a nothing-burger to me, being cursed with that boring Bradbury style that only 5th grade English teachers could endorse.

Tron had none of these weaknesses. It was an adventure perfectly suited to the continuous VHS replay of a young 80's nerd child. Light cycles and disc fights. Fuck yeah!

Star Trek TMP suffered from many of these same 70's defects as Black Hole, but at least had the cool ILM special effects to overcome the underwritten story. The Wrath of Kahn, on the other hand, was a peak VHS rewatch product.
 
Tasty Tatty said:
The irony of the guardiansofthegalaxification of sci-fi and related media is that the Guardians don't act like this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XEJ-7NvWiHI
They do sound and act like a professional team of, in this case, galactic guardians. IICR, Peter was originally an astronaut. That's some discipline right there.
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Peter Quill's original origin back in an issue of Marvel Preview as conceived by co-creator Steve Englehart was pretty dark and I think in an interesting way, imagining a character arc where he went from "being a jerk to the most cosmic being in the universe", starting off as a great NASA astronaut candidate hampered by his arrogance, drive for vengeance and lack of social etiquette that alienated people around him but then Englehart left Marvel soon after that, and Quill's follow-up sporadic appearances sanded off some of the rougher edges, somewhat more mellowed out but this early version of Peter Quill's stories tended to be more dramatic, even somber in tone than one would expect from the modern, post MCU-version, and the "Annihilation"-era Quill and GotG come off like a totally different group, tonally than the MCU version. Sure, there were one-liners and such exchanged, but there wasn't a lot of that hyper-quippy garbage that seems to infect the MCU and in many cases, the post-MCU Big Two comics, and media in general, where dramatic moments are often undercut by being followed by a hack sitcom-level zingers.
 
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Phillip Green said:
Being of that age, I couldn't agree more. I'm more sympathetic to the Black Hole, but it was both too boring, but also too scary for the target age demo (the masks off reveal for the drones and merged Maximilian/Reinhardt in hell at the end were nightmare fuel for young kids, assuming they stayed awake for it). Something Wicked was a nothing-burger to me, being cursed with that boring Bradbury style that only 5th grade English teachers could endorse.

Tron had none of these weaknesses. It was an adventure perfectly suited to the continuous VHS replay of a young 80's nerd child. Light cycles and disc fights. Fuck yeah!

Star Trek TMP suffered from many of these same 70's defects as Black Hole, but at least had the cool ILM special effects to overcome the underwritten story. The Wrath of Kahn, on the other hand, was a peak VHS rewatch product.
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I actually tried to give The Black Hole a go a few years back and it really is a snorefest. There's some neat ideas in there but it almost feels like it would've worked better as an episode of the Twilight Zone more than a feature-length film.

It kinda reminded me of the Dr. Who 1960s films with Peter Cushing, though a far more boring experience.

Tron on the other hand feels exactly like something that would've been super popular ala Star Wars but simply never took off. I could absolutely see a world where Tron-o-mania was a thing and every other kid had a tron-branded frizbee disk in their closet somewhere like how basically every kid has at least one of those thick telescoping lightsabers from the early 2000s that always caught the corner of your hand when you forced them to close back in because they got stuck in the extended position.

TMP I can't even explain. Special effects that are great mixed with special effects that look like complete dogshit, bizarre cinematography, the absolute worst of 70s retro-futurism when it came to the designs (of anything besides the ships) and wardrobe, one of the new protagonists being played by a nonce, glacial pacing, goofy voice effects, and a copy+paste plot taken straight from the TOS episode "The Changeling" all mixed into a experience that still feels 40 minutes too long.

How in god's name do you manage to make a scene where the characters are literally going at warp speed and have to blow up an asteroid with a photon torpedo feel slow and uninteresting?

I appreciate it's place in cinema and Trek history but I simply can't get though that movie. The only way I've ever gone through the entirety of TMP past the first time is when I watch it with my dad and we crack jokes MST3K-style the whole time.
 
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Tasty Tatty said:
The irony of the guardiansofthegalaxification of sci-fi and related media is that the Guardians don't act like this.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=XEJ-7NvWiHI
They do sound and act like a professional team of, in this case, galactic guardians. IICR, Peter was originally an astronaut. That's some discipline right there.
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It's especially weird when you watch the Avengers Assemble cartoon. In the first season, the Avengers team up with the Guardians to help evacuation efforts on a planet about to be eaten by Galactus, and the Guardians look and act like the way they were portrayed in Earth's Mightiest Heroes.
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But by the time they appeared in the second season, there were plans for a Guardians of the Galaxy cartoon based off the movie for brand synergy, so the Guardians now look and act like they do in the movies.
1765547433452.png
Granted, a lot of random changes in this show boil down to "because one of the movies is doing it", but I digress.
 
I don't mind the retards in space trope (Farscape) but it just doesn't fit the trek universe. Can't wait for that starfleet academy show to bomb and for everyone involved to brush off all responsibility and call trekkies chuds.
 
gaysexenjoyer said:
I actually tried to give The Black Hole a go a few years back and it really is a snorefest. There's some neat ideas in there but it almost feels like it would've worked better as an episode of the Twilight Zone more than a feature-length film.
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It's got a ton of nice effects shots and it helps if you're amused by robots.
But yeah the Totally Not A Reskin For Space Mountain parts take forever
 
Xev said:
I don't mind the retards in space trope (Farscape) but it just doesn't fit the trek universe. Can't wait for that starfleet academy show to bomb and for everyone involved to brush off all responsibility and call trekkies chuds.
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They're already calling Trekkies chuds.
 
Travoltron said:
One thing I find amusing in the first Tron is that they outsourced the grunt FX work to China and at some point in the ending credits it just switches to the Chinese language.
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It was all the rotoscoping of the footage to do the glowing lines. A couple hundred people in china getting big frames of Tron to rotoscope out the bits that would be transparent for the glowing look, probably with no fucking idea wtf it was they were doing and why.
 
Screamer_2 said:
It was all the rotoscoping of the footage to do the glowing lines. A couple hundred people in china getting big frames of Tron to rotoscope out the bits that would be transparent for the glowing look, probably with no fucking idea wtf it was they were doing and why.
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The documentaries on the Movie's production are fascinating, and not just for all the Syd Mead concept art. So much of the "high tech" look depended on very low-tech and labor intensive traditional filmmaking tools.

Tron also heavily relied on a lot of the same masking and animation techniques that older Disney films used to combine cartoon and live-action elements, like in Mary Poppins or Bedknobs and Broomsticks. Even the few CGI generated scenes required an agonizingly slow process of computer rendering, printing to slide, and then projecting and filming each frame one slide at a time.
 
Quarterback Rex Grossman said:
Didn't she have to go back to her old hometown to take care of her mom or something? I think it was a cost-cutting measure because the show was starting to die in the ratings. According to Jim did the same thing, with Courtney Thorne-Smith only popping up for random skype cameos.
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Yeah she went back to Wanker County but afaik it was pregnant reasons not budget?
 
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