Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The shows and movies I like (or don’t).
12/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
Another late-70s children’s book. The Enterprise arrives at a planet to sign a trade treaty, only to find the planet captured by Klingons! Only apparently the illustrator had never watched Star Trek; the main character likenesses are shaky, and the Klingons look hilariously unlike Klingons (and much more like 1950s Sci-Fi villains).
11/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
A late-70s children’s Star Trek adventure. The Enterprise receives an SOS from a lifeless planet, only to find a crowded city being attacked by dinosaurs – or is something more sinister afoot? All the early-reader excitement you can fit in 41 illustrated pages. ;)
Day 281: Just a little light reading before going to sleep. Read both of the two Star Trek children’s books (exclusively produced for libraries in 1977) in my Christmas haul tonight; they were just as good as you’d expect. As long as your expectations weren’t very high, at least. One of them at least had decent artwork; I’m not sure the illustrator of the other had ever actually seen Star Trek.
10/2024 – ⭐️⭐️
This is not a good Star Trek book. The Enterprise, with a crew at risk of what’s essentially violent cabin fever, is dispatched to the Horatius system to investigate a distress call. There, they find three planets: one with a stereotypical Native American civilization (“backward savages”, of course), one with a mid-20th century American civilization, and one with space Nazis. Oh, and there’s a “B story” involving a plague-infested rat loose on the ship. So, no, as a Star Trek adventure, there’s not much to recommend it.
However: It’s the first officially licensed Star Trek novel, and therefore gets a bit of leeway…or at least recognition that the treklit landscape was far different (nonexistent, actually) in 1968 than it is today. Not really recommended unless you’re a collector, but if you are and can track it down (especially if you can find an original rather than the 1999 reprint), it’s a quick read and kind of fun to see where the print side of Trek began.
Haunted Mansion (2023): ⭐️⭐️⭐️
Cute, mildly amusing, and inoffensive. Not outstanding, and certainly not likely to get multiple sequels like Pirates of the Caribbean did, but for a theme-park-attraction-turned-movie, it wasn’t bad. Though I’m mystified by the costuming choices for the kid — I mean, okay, it’s convenient shorthand for “odd socially inept geeky child”, but it was really pushing the concept harder than necessary.
My Fair Lady (1964): ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Henry Higgins is such an ass, Eliza Doolittle is a joy, and the movie, as it always has been, is delightful. It had been quite a while since I’d watched this, and it was a lot of fun revisiting it and refreshing myself on all the little details and moments.
Weirdest Princess Bride remake ever.
(Damsel in distress being rescued by a mysterious stranger, reptiles of unusual size, geysers/fire swamp complete with roasting the ROUS, lightning sand with a dramatic rescue just after immersion, a rope climb up the cliffs of insanity….)
Admittedly, it is somewhat more successful as a SF adventure than it is as a Princess Bride remake, but not by much. Of course, many of the big action set pieces are done in the dark and/or rain, so actual visibility of what’s going on definitely wasn’t a priority. And Adam Driver seems to have forgotten how to smile, which really seems like it would make it difficult for him to bond with the young girl he rescued.
All in all, we spent about as much time rolling our eyes at this and having fun pointing out the surprising number of Princess Bride parallels than we did actually watching.
Day 244: The books under the tree this Christmas got me to an exciting (for me, at least) milestone: I now have a complete* collection of Star Trek: The Original Series novels, as tracked by this spreadsheet based off of Wikipedia’s List of Star Trek novels page. From 1968’s Mission to Horatius to 2022’s Harm’s Way, and with 2024’s Lost to Eternity pre-ordered. (“Save the whales! Collect the whole set!”) I haven’t read them all yet, though it likely won’t be terribly long before I hit that milestone as well.
I didn’t originally have this as an actual goal. I’m just a Star Trek fan who reads a lot and tends to keep his books, and at first, the amount of books out there was so overwhelming that on the few occasions I considered trying to get them all, it didn’t seem realistic. But then the years went by, and I realized it was getting harder and harder to find books on the shelves that I didn’t already have, and turned to ordering more online…. Until this year, when I realized as we were doing our annual pre-Christmas book buying binge that I was surprisingly close to having them all. And so, here we are.
(I also have complete collections of Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, and Prodigy novels. However, those are new enough and there are few enough that that’s less notable of an accomplishment. The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, and the various spin-off series are in various states of completion, but all slowly working their way forward.)
* A few caveats for the hard-core collectors: I’m counting “complete” by the content, not by the various editions.
While I have no great drive to go out and get the “missing” editions listed above, I have to admit, if someone out there were to send them my way, I wouldn’t be terribly put out. But I’m not going to go chasing them down.
(Thanks to my wife for taking the photo, for the shirt, and for putting up with my hobbies and my monopolizing the staircase today.)
Here’s a closer look at the collection:
72/2023 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️
It felt rather rushed and busy for a good portion of the book, as there were several different threads going on that the authors switched among rather quickly, and while the details took some time to come to light, the basic mystery as to what was going on wasn’t all that mysterious, being obvious to the reader (if not the characters) within the first couple chapters. Not a stinker, but not a standout, either.
Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023): ⭐️⭐️
Having now watched the purported fifth film in the Indiana Jones franchise, the best thing I can say about it is how glad I am that, much like Star Wars, the creators knew that they could never recapture the magic and success of the originals and never tried to make anything beyond the original trilogy. (Highlander also falls into this category, though it had a single self-contained story rather than a trilogy.)
Too long (that did not need to be a nearly three-hour movie, and tightening it down to right around two hours would have helped the pacing greatly), not nearly the humor of the originals, and felt very much like it was made due to cynical studio greed in an effort to pander to Gen X-ers rather than out of any real love for the franchise or strong belief in having a good story.
Really, the best thing about this is that I now know that when I get around to upgrading my Indiana Jones DVDs to Blu-Ray or 4K, I can just get the trilogy films individually and not bother with any sort of full collection box set. Might save me a little money that way.