Geek Bits: Star Wars, Star Trek, Alien, Star

Here are ten links to things you may have missed this week.

Trivia Question (Answer at the end of the post)

What was the original 17 word long working title of Star Wars?

Last week’s bonus trivia question winner! 

What is the name of the lizard that Obi-Wan rides on Utapau? “Boga! And Tony’s answer for last week is awesome.” – Alex J Cavanaugh

1. Star Trek Vulcanology has an interview with actor Tim Russ who played Tuvok on Star Trek: Voyager. In part of the interview he said he’d play Tuvok if the timeline is correct and says how he blew up Vulcan long before J.J. Abrams.

Would you watch Tuvok on the big screen?

2. Back in 1966 Isaac Asimov wrote a scathing attack on the scientific inaccuracies of Star Trek: the Original Series. Roddenberry was hurt and wrote a letter in response. He said they spent a lot of money working with physicists trying to make the science accurate. In part he said:

“In all friendliness, and with sincere thanks for the hundreds of
wonderful hours of reading you have given me, it does seem to me that
your article overlooked entirely the practical, factual and scientific
problems involved in getting a television show on the air and keeping it
there. Television deserved much criticism, not just SF alone but all of
it, but that criticism should be aimed, not shot-gunned. For example, Star Trek almost
did not get on the air because it refused to do a juvenile science
fiction, because it refused to put a “Lassie” aboard the space ship, and
because it insisted on hiring Dick Matheson, Harlan Ellison, A.E. Van
Vogt, Phil Farmer, and so on. (Not all of these came through since TV
scripting is a highly difficult specialty, but many of them did.)”

Do you think the science in Star Trek was hopelessly inaccurate?

3. Revenge of the 5th has a picture of Stormtroopers in a lowrider

4.  A creepy behind-the-scenes video of Bolaji Badejo, who played the Alien in Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece, has been found online. It proves once and for all that he would have been creepy even without the costume and make-up.

What do you think of the alien without the costume?

5. Peter Berg says the reason Battleship sank at the box office is because of The Avengers. But he says it’s still possible to make a sequel. “The
movie kicked butt internationally, but we kind of ran into a wall when Avengers refused to go away.” Berg said, “So what I need everyone to do is go see Battleship now that they’ve seen Avengers five times. If they do that, we can definitely make a sequel.”

Are you planning to watch Battleship? Did The Avengers stop you from seeing it?

6. For John Carter fans, HeroPress shared several maps of Barsoom! The guy was a master at world-building.

7. Blastr has 10 unlikely relationships in sci-fi like Friefly’s Mal and Jayne.

8. Alex lists his brief thoughts on movie remakes

Total Recall – it’s not even be set on Mars anymore!

RoboCop – why?

The Evil Dead – now that is just wrong!

Godzilla – this one is needed.

Judge Dredd – also needed.

Excalibur – Cool when I was a kid, little dated now. This one might work.

Highlander – no one can replace Sean Connery!

The Crow – did they learn nothing from the dismal flops of the
sequels? You can’t take Brandon Lee out of the equation. Or director
Alex Proyas.

Do you agree?

9. Spacerguy explains why, like many of us, he believed Star Trek was real.

Did you believe a science-fiction movie or film was real?

10. PT Dilloway explores the difference between Form and Function in superhero costumes. I’d still wear a cape though.

Trivia Answer

“Adventures of Luke Starkiller, as Taken From The Journal of the Whills, Saga 1: The Star Wars.” Lucas wrote a treatment of the film that would become Star Wars in 1973 called “The Journal of the Whills.” The original hand-written story outline for the script started with “This is the story of Mace Windy, a revered Jedi-bendu of Ophuchi, as related to us by C.J. Thorpe, padawaan learner to the famed Jedi.” Frustrated that people found it hard to understand he wrote a 13-page treatment which was much closer to what we know today.

Later, Lucas changed Luke’s name to Skywalker and altered the title to simply The Star Wars and finally Star Wars. When he produced The Empire Strikes Back he renamed the original film Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.”

When Lucas began work on Episode I, he took the original “Journal of the Whills” out of the Lucasfilm archives, and re-read it. He wrote the first handwritten script for the first prequel with this document sitting on his desk.

Bonus Trivia question: How many people did it take to manipulate the puppet for Jabba the Hutt??

What did you think of this week’s news?

[Image Source: http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/disney-star-wars-weekend]

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