TV And Films

The shows and movies I like (or don’t).

📚 Cadet Kirk by Diane Carey

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16/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

The final and best of this YA series. The main trio finally end up all adventuring together, as a simple shuttle hop gets sidetracked by mercenaries. Overall, while all of the books have a certain amount of overly-convenient happenstance to get the characters together, they’re a quick entertaining read as one “what if?” version of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy’s Academy days.

A note on the illustrations: Oddly, it kind of felt like the illustrator just skimmed the plot, if that, particularly with this book. Much of the action takes place aboard a shuttle, clearly described as an early version of the TOS “box on two cylinders” shuttlecraft, but the cover and one of the interior illustrations shows a more angular, TMP-style shuttle with warp sled (but the sled is outfitted with the cylindrical TOS nacelles rather than the flatter TMP style). And towards the end, a character described in the text as human (at least in appearance) is drawn as a TOS-style Klingon, complete with gold sash. Odd mistakes to make (and while the target audience for these books might not notice these things, they do stand out to me).

Me holding Cadet Kirk

📚 Aftershock by John Vornholt

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15/2024 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

A few years after the first book in this TOS Starfleet Academy trio, McCoy is at the Academy’s medical program and ends up being paired with cadet Spock for a disaster relief mission. But somehow these earthquakes don’t seem to be entirely natural…. Not bad, though both McCoy and Spock perhaps felt a bit too much like their adult selves rather than less mature versions.

Me holding Aftershock

📚 The Prisoner of Vega by Sharon Lerner and Christopher Cerf

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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).

Me holding The Prisoner of Vega

Year 50 Day 281

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Me tucked in bed, reading an old Star Trek children’s book.

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.

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📚 Mission to Horatius by Mack Reynolds

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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.

Me holding Mission to Horatius

🎥 Haunted Mansion

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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.

🎥 65

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65 (2023): ⭐️⭐️

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.