Clip Show

Most people know John Williams as the film composer - - the fellow who wrote the Star Wars theme and the Jurassic Park and the Harry Potter soundtracks.


Not too long before he wrote his Jaws soundtrack, Mr. Williams went by the professional name of "Johnny Williams," writer of TV themes. He worked on end credits music for shows like Alcoa Theater and the Bob Hope specials. Much of his work was incidental music, and went uncredited in quite a few series.

One of his most frequent gigs was to write for action/adventure shows produced by Irwin Allen. Although he didn't write the theme to Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, he penned many title tracks for Allen, in shows such as The Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, and Land of the Giants.

Irwin Allen constantly tinkered with shows to maintain his ratings and dazzle his audiences (albeit with a limited budget). An unusual technique that Allen relied on to pep things up was to have Johnny Williams completely rewrite the theme music after a few seasons. One of the most obvious examples is Lost in Space, where Williams had originally crafted an eerie, ominous and echoing theme for the initial two seasons, filled with trumpets, cellos, and piccolos :

By the third season Irwin Allen figured he wanted to stress the action and adventure angle and downplay the alien-ness of outer space. So, he had Johnny dump the old theme and create a more driven,  French horn-stuffed roller coaster of a theme. The new opener threw audiences into the middle of a fast countdown every week, paced by ticking rimshots and  hyped-up trombone arpeggios. It was definitely a new look-and-feel for the established series.

 

Something I didn't realize until recently was that Allen used a similar approach with his 1968-70 series, Land of the Giants. In the show's initial outing, Williams built the theme to underline the ponderous size of the titled Giants on their home world, and the threat they posed to the puny Earth men who had crashed their ship on the Giants' planet.

By the second year of the show, the ratings were dropping, so Allen brought Johnny Williams back to the composing studio to crank out a peppier theme. The new opening would be at a much faster pace, with clashing French horns and bass guitars and syncopated glockenspiels.

The trick worked, and Giants continued for another two years. It's not easy to say that Johnny's new theme "saved" the show, but it certainly didn't hurt the ratings.

Looking back more than four decades at all the work Irwin Allen piled on John(ny) Williams's plate, it's amazing to think about how prolific Williams was beyond his epic movie soundtracks. I can't imagine any current TV theme writers jotting down so many disparate themes and variations for the same shows in the same time frame. Okay, maybe Michael Giacchino - - but is he still doing TV shows after LOST?

Edith Keeler Must Die

Don't copy-paste legends

I saw the midnight premiere of Star Trek: Into Darkness early Thursday morning. The initial 2009 reboot of the franchise was an intriguing blend of classic Star Trek motifs through a 21st Century sensibility, so I thought I'd enjoy this continuation of the new films even more than the kickoff  movie.

 As I soon discovered, that idea was a colossal miscalculation.

Yes, it's obvious that the franchise needs to be geared toward a mass audience, and a market of Star Trek aficionados simply can't pay enough in ticket purchases to offset the costs incurred by Paramount every time the studio mounts one of these productions. The movies, therefore, have to follow a strict diet of predictable action, adventure, pretty people, and explodey stuff in order to maintain ticket sales and repeat business.

This is a mandatory, yet completely unessential, three-second scene that fulfilled
Paramount's requirements for "a sexy new Star Trek."

   Yet, there still has to be something of the heart of Star Trek-type stories to consider these films part of the Star Trek universe. Director J.J. Abrams doesn't seem to agree with this idea, as evidenced by the plot of the latest adventure of Captain Kirk & company.

Abrams famously stated he was never a Star Trek fan growing up, and really never watched much of the series until he was hired to direct the first reboot film. It's almost a matter of pride to him that he had no love for Trek as a child, and this lack of affection seems to percolate through the latest film.

Note: before I continue any further, I want to assure you that I do not want to spoil any plot elements for people who haven't seen the movie, so I'm going to talk in general terms about the problems in this film. My criticisms will probably make more sense after you've seen the movie, but I think it's important to view the film without having any plot surprises ruined for you.

The attitude of the script seems to be that it was written by someone who screened several key episodes of Star Trek and watched a few of the films, but had no idea about the personalities of the characters mentioned in the shows. It's as if they had watched "City on the Edge of Forever," and then decided to rewrite Edith Keeler as a Romulan spy. Sure, everyone in the film is saying  the same catchphrases that resonate from earlier episodes and films, but the screenwriter Damon Lindelof doesn't seem to understand why the characters say the things they do. The ignorance of the why part turns the phrases into gibberish, or worse, unintended comedy.

The Squire of Gothos? Cadet Finnegan? Sure, pick a TOS villain and cast Cumberbatch in the role.

You don't have to be a Trekkie to know the basic rules of Star Trek: Kirk makes bold decisions, Spock's favorite word is "logic," guys in red shirts don't live long. But the characters and their interactions were more complex than superficial features. Even the guest stars on the old TV show had backstories that explained their reasons for doing things: Commodore Decker was driven by guilt over the loss of his crew to attack the Planet Killer in a shuttlecraft; Khan Noonian Singh was the pride-drunk leader of a remnant of 20th Century supermen whose weakness was his arrogance; Commander Balok was a master of deception because his diminutive  race had previous run-ins with aggressive species. The aliens and opponents the crew of the Enterprise faced each week had motives and desires that made sense in the context of the plot of every show. 

May the Force be with you, Frodo. Epic misunderstanding of a franchise.

Star Trek Into Darkness? Not so much. The biggest failure of the film is the outright looting of previous Star Trek characters and situations in order to evoke audience nostalgia for those original TV and film moments. We're given a bad guy named John Harrison (Benedict Cumberbatch) who turns out to be a character from the TV show - - except this character doesn't act anything like the original character. When dialog from the original character's appearance is repeated in this film, then, it doesn't quite make sense with what we see on screen. Imagine, for example, having a Klingon suddenly appear on screen without introduction and shout "HARCOURT FENTON MUDD!" at Mr. Spock - - - it's almost at that level of incoherence.

The motivations of the villains are breathtakingly shallow. They are bad guys simply because the script needed bad guys at certain points in the film. New locations crop up only because the Enterprise crew required a new place for fight scenes scheduled at regular intervals in the movie, and the previous venues had been destroyed during earlier fights. Ships are destroyed, crash, and somehow fly again because they're needed for the next battle scene. In one particularly absurd moment, a starship, already blown up by six dozen photon torpedoes, reappears for another barrage of phaser fire.

Don't worry, it's only a scratch.

The biggest problem (and I'm going to be as vague as I can so as not to spoil anything) is the lack of loss in this film. Yes, there are deaths of characters, but the solutions to otherwise fatal situations are telegraphed so early and often in this film that the audience doesn't care when people fall off the roofs of speeding cars, or get shot, or have their ships blown up around them. There is no peril that can't be erased, and without the high stakes of life or death, character mortality is no more of a concern than losing a turn during a Super Mario Bros game.

I could continue with nitpicking the howling continuity errors, the usurption of the laws of physics, and the over-reliance of jam-packing every single scene with floating debris and shuddering camera angles, but those points don't begin to match the immensity of the ineptness of the script. This is a Star Trek film, mostly in the sense that Paramount owns the intellectual property and that the character names are the same as those used in the original Roddenberry series. It is not a Star Trek film, though, in any aspect where it's supposed to match the quality of the original series' story-telling, or show respect for the characters and their motivations. It's an auto-tuned version of Star Trek, replete with mandatory set pieces to please the ticket-buying audiences of the world. I'm not saying it wasn't a fun movie - - it's just not really about Star Trek anymore. If Edith Keeler must die, the reason shouldn't be so that there's a satisfying explosion at the end of the film.

Let's cram some more merchandise onboard, shall we?

And the stars look very different today

The Internet is agog with the release of Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's video cover of David Bowie's "Space Oddity" - - a musical interpretation filmed almost entirely onboard the International Space Station.

Hadfield is seen floating in the Tranquility module's cupola, the Japanese Kibo module, and the hatchway to a waiting Soyuz spacecraft. A  unattended, velcro-studded guitar spins languidly through the station, while Hadfield sings lyrics of a space pilot surrounded by technology, viewing a Universe beyond all imaginings.

When people think about the "importance" of manned space flight, it's usually about having someone on hand to repair broken equipment and second-guess computer errors far from home. The true reason people are in space, I believe, is for moments such as this video. We need people in space to interpret and humanize the exploration so that we, as a planet, can share the experience. Folks like Chris Hadfield take the known (a Bowie song, a guitar, a piano) and show us the unknown (looking out the window and seeing a planet) with the reference point of our culture. It's why everyone remembers Alan Shepard's golf shots on the Moon during Apollo 14. It's why we still watch archival footage of Dave Scott and Jim Irwin driving the first lunar rover across the Moon's surface during the Apollo 15 trip. It's even why Ron Howard made the Apollo 13 movie - - when something goes wrong in space, the only time we really care is if there are people onboard.

Hopefully, someday before the centennial of human spaceflight, a human being will make a cover video of David Bowie's "Life on Mars?" -- from the surface of that planet. Certainly another cultural moment everyone on our planet will enjoy.

Don't Crush that Dwarf

When I was a kid, comedy albums were all the rage. George Carlin, Richard Pryor, Steve Martin - - all the top  stand-up comedians put out platinum-level blockbuster records that millions of teenagers bought at Sam Goody's and Tower Records stores.

Improv and stand-up routines are clever and entertaining forms of comedy. I've been to comedy clubs and laughed at really witty, observational humor. The folks who can practice these crafts are great at what they do, and I don't think I'd be able to compete in their arena. Stand-up doesn't lend itself well to repeated listening, though. Once you've heard a routine, I don't think it's possible to recapture the same enjoyment level as when you first heard the jokes.

This is not true of my favorite form of comedy album: the scripted "radio show" style, or the immersive worlds pioneered by The Firesign Theater. The four actors of  Firesign (Phil Proctor, Peter Bergman, Phil Austin, and David Ossman) created entire audio cities set in the past and future, where familiar characters bounded on stage, only to rebound again in later albums. The audio canvases deployed by The Firesign Theater were as seemingly real as watching "Lost" or "Star Trek," with buried background sounds noticed only on third or tenth replayings. The characters remain popular with many folks of my age and temperament: who doesn't cackle along with Rocky Rococo, as he taunts Nick Danger, Third Eye? Doesn't everyone follow the word "brough-ha-ha" with "ha ha ha?"

Although Firesign Theater (minus the late Peter Bergman, who passed away earlier this year) continues to produce new shows and recordings, I've missed the days of great radio show-style comedies. Garrison Keillor is a good storyteller, but his shows are mostly monologues, and miss a certain depth present in Firesign Theater tales.

Last month, I discovered a podcast show that I can't believe has evaded my notice for many years: The Thrilling Adventure Hour, hosted by Nerdist.com and written by the team of Ben Acker and Ben Blacker. TAH is a cornucopia of well-written comedy sketches framed in the style of an old-time radio show. The cast is an amazing collection of current TV actors and pop culture icons, including such greats as Linda Cardinelli from Freaks & Geeks and Firefly's Nathan Fillion.

Although it's billed as an "Adventure Hour," the stage show is broken into half-hour "episodes" of varied storylines. Each episode tracks with longer story arcs for their groups of characters. They're all comedies, but in different genres. Here's a quick list of some of them:

Captain Laserbeam: A superhero show featuring the title character (voiced by John DiMaggio, Bender of Futurama fame), the protector of Apex City. With his enthusiastic gang of young Adventurekateers, Captain Laserbeam turns "wrong into right."

Amelia Earhart, Fearless Flyer: Whatever happened to Amelia Earhart? In 1938, she faked her disappearance at sea to serve the American Victory Commission as their one-woman, top secret Air Force. Autumn Reeser, who plays the plucky female submarine scientist Kylie on ABC's The Last Resort is the voice of Amelia.

The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock: Want a steampunk-era comedy? Sit back and enjoy the adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock, the chief of Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria's Chrono Patrol. The Colonel makes sure History happens in the correct order. Craig Cackowski (Officer Cackowski on NBC's Community) is the title character.

Beyond Belief: A little bit of Topper, a whole lot of Nick & Nora Adams from The Thin Man series, it's the story of upper-crust couple Frank and Sadie Doyle, two love-besotted, and generally pickled ghostbusters living in a tony apartment atop the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. The opening lines: "Who cares what Evil lurks in the hearts of men? Unless Evil is carrying the martini tray, darling!" sets the mood for cocktails and ghosts to follow.

Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars: The centerpiece of the entire TAH franchise, Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars is a cross between Firefly, Gunsmoke, The Lone Ranger, and How I Met Your Mother. As he repeatedly points out during every episode, Marshall Nevada (voiced by comedian Marc Evan Jackson) is from Earth, but he "rights the outlaw wrongs on Mars." His faithful (and blue) Martian companion is the onus-obsessed Croach the Tracker (voiced by Drunk History's Mark Gagliardi), a being who doesn't understand human emotions and is quite reluctant to let anyone see his feet. Croach's tribe was saved by Sparks Nevada,  and therefore he must remain a faithful companion for the Marshall in order for Croach to repay his tribe's onus.

The Marshall's friends are many: The Red Plains Rider, an Earth girl raised by Martians, who has a wandering crush on both Croach and Nevada; a saloonkeeper (voiced by Josh Malina of The West Wing) whose only goal is life is to have "no trouble" in his saloon; a rancher/deputy named Cactoid Jim (voiced by Nathan Fillion) whose legendary exploits are immortalized in song as they're occurring. There's also a building that's fallen in love with Croach, but it's a bit difficult to explain all the details about that romance in a few paragraphs.

The shows are miles deep in references, callbacks, and subtleties. Even the routines of each series play out differently each show. For example, Captain Laserbeam usually asks his Adventurekateers whether or not a previous villain has returned: "Is the Ancient Magician... up to his old tricks? Is Kid Kidnapper kidnapping kids for his devilish playgroup?" The gags are obvious, but their cleverness is refreshing.

Best thing about the show is that the podcasts are freely downloadable. There's almost 50 hours of episodes online, and they are consistently hilarious. Check them out at The Nerdist.com's podcast home page.