The curse of narrative thinking.

 

Hello again. I've been away from collecting for awhile, but it's not a bad thing. I've actually been more active in creative fields - both writing and cartooning. And more recently, I've been actively collecting with different focus, so I'll have more to write about shortly.

But right now, today, I want to ask if any writers out there, or even dedicated fans of TV and films, suffer from occasional bouts of narrative thinking paralysis.

Not sure what I mean? It can happen anytime. It happened to me recently:

I was talking with my friend Shelby - or texting, I actually don't remember which - and she asked if my wife and I had any plans for the weekend. We usually don't particularly, but this week we did. But before I could answer, narrative paralysis set in. I thought:

If this is a movie about me, Shelby asking what my plans are is a harmless exposition scene to establish the general path of the film.

...but...

If this is a movie about Shelby, her asking what my plans are will establish why I'm gone, then I come back in act III with either some terrible event from the weekend, or don't come back at all.

...or even...

If this is a horror film about me, something terrible is going to happen to me, AND Shelby is going to get pulled into it in Act III.

Crazy? Trained from structuring out dozens of stories, and also from watching and studying hundreds more, I applied Chekhov's gun to real life. Like, if I say plans out loud, there's a "narrative reason" for it, and something will come of it. 

You know that's not what I mean.

I only  paused a moment, and I did give a real "normal" answer, but I found the thought very interesting. And for the weekend, as we drove out of town in unfamiliar places down unfamiliar roads, I occasionally considered - am I in a narrative?

Has this ever happened to you?

The Second Final Frontier

I recently viewed the latest Star Trek film for the second time. First was in the theaters, second at home on Blu-Ray, much later, much removed from all the hype about whether or not J.J. Abrams was destroying the franchise, or broke the Prime Directive, or any of that. I was watching it as pure entertainment, as a science fiction fan but also a lifelong Star Trek fan.* ("Spoilers" follow if you're actually reading this before you've seen the film).

I thoroughly enjoyed the film. Abrams played it safe - or smart - by setting his Trek in an alternate universe created when the uber-Romulan villain bounced back in time and attacked the USS Kelvin, just as one James Tiberius Kirk happens to be born. So, everything we see in this timeline is completely new and therefore free from any continuity scrutiny you can apply.

Ordinarily, a film set in the formative Star Fleet Academy years of our heroes would require - at least to the hardcore continuity buffs - a look somewhere between Captain Archer's Enterprise and Captain Pike's Enterprise as seen in the original pilot "The Cage" or the two-part episode "The Menagerie." But since the film starts with a disruption to the time stream - a huge, deadly attack by an unknown enemy that never happened in "our" Trek history - all bets are off. Assuming a greater focus on offensive and defensive power for starships after that, there's no reason to insist anything in this film has to match anything we've seen before. Only that brief scene on the Kelvin needs to fit into the original timeline,** and I'm surprised on close inspection to believe that it does:

On Captain Archer's Enterprise (left), the controls are large manual slides and hard buttons, like on a 1980's stereo console. By the time of Kirk's Enterprise (right), controls are very simple and very solid, like a 1960's cassette player. The detail of the Kelvin shuttle from the film (middle) shows nice, hard-wired type toggle switches, like a 1970's mixing board (Ok, I'm guessing on that one). To me, a believable intermediary step. (It was already interesting to note, once the original series was placed in a timeline between the movies produced in the 80s+, and "Enterprise" produced in 2001-2005, both with greater detailing to the sets, it implied there was an intentional decision around the time Captain Pike came along, to make the starship corridors very plain and straight, and consoles made up of simple hard buttons. Maybe one too many "Fire torpedoes" apps froze up when they pressed their touch screens...)

That's the really picky, tech analysis of the film. In any case, I found it very entertaining, and most of the performers captured just enough nuances of the original characters to feel true to them without just spewing bad imitations of the originals.
Simon Pegg's wry half-smile perfectly evoked James Doohan's good-natured performance as "Scotty."

It's an interesting study of the nature of "suspension of disbelief" what is the only part of the whole movie that, as a Star Trek fan, gave me pause: the size of Engineering, when Kirk and Scotty beam into it. It's HUGE.

Huge, with lots of empty space, and apparently a lot of it constructed out of concrete, as well. I know the Enterprise is big, but this amount of space looks like it should literally take up the entire secondary hull and then some. (Some of this concrete construction is seen on the Kelvin, too).

On the original series, Engineering looked big, but believable. You could at times see a couple levels, and maybe a ladder poking up higher, but it looked like it was built with an economy of space (no pun intended) in mind.

This kind of detail shouldn't pull you out of the narrative, but it often does. The truth is, they found some kind of real - world refinery or such to film in, and decided it looked futurey enough to be the Enterprise. Money saved on building a set or even rendering one.
It's not as if the Enterprise is the size of the Red Dwarf, which is established as having thousands of levels, a Huge prison system entirely hidden from the normal crew, and cargo bays big enough to dwarf T-Rexes. Anything goes there, and they often shot in real world industrial plants that looked perfectly like part of the ship.

Not that this is a review, but I enjoyed the film even more the second time than the first, and watchign it at home gave the chance to look closely for all those details of design and performance that you miss on first viewing.
Plus, you gotta love outtakes where you get to see the Vulcans crack up...

*That's, right, Star Trek fan. Not a Trekker, or a Trekkie, just a fan of the whole franchise.

**Okay, bonus points if you wanted to point out that Ambassador Spock's ship is from our timeline too, but since it's from the farthest future point we've ever seen in that Universe (and perhaps ever will?) it's safe from scrutiny too.

Collecting, Depression, and Hoarding 101: an overview

Sorry I've been away so long.

The fairly recent suicides of Marie Osmond's son Michael Blosil and Walter Koenig's son Andrew both seem to have been related to chronic depression. It's a terrible shame to lose them both to that, but it's difficult to understand how extreme chronic depression can be, how it can take over and sour your thoughts. I am lucky enough to have recently realized I was depressed to an extreme point: the depths my spirits had sunk to were far, far more extreme than the situation I found my life in called for. I say I'm lucky to have realized this because I spoke to my doctor and found it easily treatable - I am much better, feeling myself, and able to handle things emotionally in a reasonable manner.

Collectors seem to be more susceptible to depression than your average person. Somewhere on that scale from the casual collector, past the completist, and on to the obsessive hoarder is a point where objects are being accumulated and held onto for emotional reasons - the hoarder can't bare to part with anything because of a great attachment to them. (Of course, I would hope anyone who collects at least does it for the emotional reason "because they like to" but that isn't always the case). It's an easy trap

to fall into: if you have any fond memories attached to it, it becomes easier to just find a box or a corner to shove the item into than to decide to get rid of it. I was holding onto this ratty old Trapper Keeper for decades, just because it bore the name in stickers of the ship from a Star Trek parody comic book I wrote in high school. U.S.S. Apathy. (Get it? Apathy is an antonym of Enterprise. Ha.) When I came across it recently, I was able to chuck it out, but took this photo just in case I ever wanted to gaze on it fondly again. Actually, I found it more useful here in the blog than I feel any sense of nostalgia on viewing it.

Hoarders are interesting, and there's a show on A&E that tries to help a couple of them clean up their act every week. (Be careful with that link - every time I go to the page the preview blasts me with static. Just skip it.) It's a bit heavy handed and grim, and I've found it very repetitive after watching several shows, but it can still be fascinating to look at what people get themselves into. I used to study these shows with a "there but for the grace of God go I" attitude, always finding it easier to clean out the closet a bit after viewing. This image shows the clutter of a beer can collector - over 55 thousand cans in boxes littering his house - being transferred to the shelves long ago made for their display. (Apparently to the psychologist on site, organization is the difference between a collector and a hoarder. I think that's simplifying it a bit...) you can see a clip from this show here. After a short Nyquil commercial. Sigh.

I'm rambling a bit here, but I guess my most important message is if you find yourself extremely depressed, talk to someone, at least your doctor. I'd relate that to collecting, or feeling like a geek, but there's really no reason to qualify it.

Why the Star Trek books up top? When my friend Bruce passed away, I inherited his set of all the autobiographies of the Star trek cast. They each wrote one except for DeForest Kelley, who passed away before they got started. I read them all, and Walter Koenig's just happened to be the best read, followed by James Doohan's, which I seem to have misplaced. George Takei's was okay, but it was written before he came out of the closet, and I was reading it after, so it suffered from obvious omissions of any romantic life at all, and allusions to minor encounters with women as bigger than they were. I honestly think he'd do well to rewrite it in an expanded, more honest version - not sordid or illicit, but, well, if it was tough to be a Japanese-American growing up in mostly hispanic East L.A. after World War II, it must have been even harder to be gay also.

Thanks for listening. I'm always glad to hear your thoughts in comments or at fancollectorgeek@earthlink.net. I will be back with more on a lighter note very, very soon - no more month long breaks!

Images of Comic Con '09

It's truly one of the odd things about Comic Con: you can practically trip over a science fiction legend like Nichelle Nichols without even realizing she was there.

Images of Comic Con '09

If Lego doesn't license the properties you like, make your own.

Images of Comic Con '09

Star Trek guys check out new Star Trek toys.

Aliens in America: A History of The Error Collectible

From Aliens in America episode "Mom's Coma" first aired 5/25/08:

INT-SPORTS COLLECTIBLE STORE-DAY

Justin (voice over): Every year, for my father's birthday, my Mother got him a piece of sports memorabilia from his wish list.  The whole thing had never really made a lot of sense to her.

Mom:What's the deal with this baseball card?

Clerk: It's worth a lot more because they misspelled "Yastrzemski."

Mom:  Well that's just stupid.

Ah yes, the error collectible: when something is rare because they made a mistake in production and some of them got out.  This is an odd sideline of collecting difficult to explain to someone who doesn't have the bug:  "So they screwed it up?  Wouldn't you rather have a good one in your collection?"  (Of course, any decent completist will have both).

One of the most famous error collectibles is the misprinted 1918 "Upside down Jenny" stamp with the airplane printed - you guessed it - upside down.  Only 100 of these were accidentally sold by the post office, all to a single collector at the time.  In 2005 a single one still in good shape sold for over half a million dollars at auction.

In 1987 Count Chocula released a box showing Bela Lugosi as 

Dracula, and some people protested that it looked like he was wearing a Star of David.  The box was pulled and corrected. Ironically, the story hit the news and hundreds (if not thousands) of speculators bought up the "Star of David" boxes before they disappeared, and saved them - but nobody saved the corrected version. It is now rarer than the error - I couldn't even find a scan of it to swipe online!

My own most recent "error" collectible purchase was this "Yoda and Mickey Mouse" Jedi pack of action figures sold near the Star Tours attraction in Disneyland.  Can you spot the Can you spot the mistake?  You can if you're a Star Wars geek...

Yoda's light saber is blue.  It's supposed to be green.

I bought this mainly because I heard about the mistake and 

happened to be down there, so I just couldn't resist.  It now resides in my storage unit.  I can't find a single error set selling on Ebay, so it's either very rare and valuable, or it's so rare that nobody knows about it - and it's kind of worth nothing.  I'll hope for very rare.

One time in my memory, though, an "error" collectible turned out to be nothing special through the simplest of reasons.  When I was a sophomore in college, a bunch of us got teaser posters for Star Trek IV that listed the release date as December 12, 1986.  Sometime later, though, we heard it was changed to November 26th.  Oh boy, we collectively thought, our posters are going to be worth a ton when they print the correction!  

The only problem?  They never corrected the poster, so all the copies of it have the same wrong date, and the "error" status is negated by being the only one available.  Oh well.  Like so many collector's who delight in the value of their items, I had no real intention of ever selling it anyways.

Aliens in America, by the way, is a great show on the CW.  Very funny - and surprisingly touching at times - about being a teen, high school, families, and being a Muslim exchange student in the midwest.  I don't believe it's been picked up for a second season, so try to see it now while it's running repeats, and hopefully the "complete series" will be available on DVD soon.

SDCC 3: Fans for the memory

Since returning from the San Diego Comic Con, I'm posting images sharing some of the odd sights I encountered in and around the convention center...brief moments in the river of time that, but for being caught by the lens of a digital camera, would be lost for all eternity to the gauzy haze of faint memory.

If it sounds like I'm making fun of the convention participants, I have to point out: I drove down to San Diego from Los Angeles FOUR TIMES this year. Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Because I enjoyed it so much. I am a fan, I am a collector, I am a geek.

That said:

Do these people expect us to believe that any self respecting Andorian* would hang out with a bunch of Klingons** in the post-Motion Picture Era?***

*the blue one

**the other ones

***Actually, I have no idea if it was ever established how Andorians and Klingons get along in the time of the movies. In fact, as far as I know, they may all be dressed as Enterprise-era characters, in which case I'm pretty sure the Andorians and Klingons were not happy with each other. Or, they may just be a bunch of friends who are fans of a tv show and like to dress up as characters without letting fictional rivalries ruin their fun.

Curse you Khan Noonian Singh!!!

We're closing in on the San Diego Comic Con.... home of many, many exclusive collectible items.  Comic Con Exclusives are usually very short run, and only available to buy during the four and a half day run of the convention.  (Or, you know, on Ebay forever after).  Last year, I barely resisted getting the exclusive Snoopy & Woodstock Kirk & Spock bobbleheads, above.  I'm sure many collectors of Peanuts, Star Trek, or bobble heads were delighted to snap them up.

I've bought many, many convention exclusives in the past - Stan Lee action figures, silver Boba Fett's, Night of the Living Dead Summer Spectacular Comic Books.  This year, I may just be tempted by the Madd Muggs vinyl "spider sense" Peter Parker.

Comic Con is the collector's mecca to end all collectors meccas, with something like 75,000 people attending on Saturday alone in 2006, before they started rationing day passes.  MY favorite things about it are the chance to buy original art direct from the comic book artists, and to find small, independently produced books I never would have heard of otherwise. 

  More to report after the show this year!

I Go Mego: The Collectible Reissue

As a kid and comic book reader in the 1970s, I naturally was totally into Mego dolls. Mego created the best, most posable action figures in the 70s, hands down. The dolls (they really were dolls) all had real, cloth costumes, and accessories, and originally, big shiny silver buttons at their joints. I had the original, cowl-removable Batman (now worth big bucks Mint) and I'm proud to say I played with it mercilessly and it's a tattered, worn Batman who is buried in a box in my storage space.

After the superhero lines were well established, they did a series of Star Trek dolls that were, for the time, incredibly good likenesses of real people. And, a lot of fun to play with in the back yard. I got all the main guys - Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty (a used one salvaged from another kid - I'll tell that story when I find it and can post a picture) and even Uhura. I even got the Enterprise playset when it was half price at the Woolworth's in downtown Syracuse - I remember they had a big stack of them by the window on the side of the store. Half price means it was probably about six dollars. This is one item I no longer have - I asked my Mom to sell it for me when I was new to Los Angeles and low on money.



I never did get the aliens, though. I got two of the Klingon figure - which was released as part of the "main" series - but I never even saw one of the Aliens on their own cards, like the Mugato here. Unlike the actors, who were good likenesses, these were bizarrely unlike the creatures that appeared on the show. The Mugato, for example, was a wild furry white apelike creature that didn't wear clothes, so I don't know who picked out this outfit for him, probably to "help him sell better?"

As years went by, I heard that the Aliens were selling for as much as 400 bucks apiece. So, when I drove cross-country to Los Angeles in 1988, I had visions of stopping in a drug store in the middle of nowhere and finding Star Trek aliens dusty on a forgotten toy rack still marked at $4.99.

This did not happen.



So recently, when it was announced that Diamond was recreating and reissuing the Mego Star Trek dolls - including the aliens - I was thrilled, and I bought them all to date (and will continue to as they're released). Finally, I had the elusive Romulan, and the Andorian - one of my favorites from the show, for some reason. I think because of the funny blue antennas. Reissues are happening more and more often these days, and it's a great way to get something you always wanted - or a reasonable facsimile, anyways - without breaking the bank on Ebay. (One side effect: the value of the originals often goes down, too, just because there is less of a demand with the copies available).

What's funny, though, is that I displayed on top of my shelves the reissues of figures I had as a kid - the crew and Klingon -
and the aliens I had sought for so long are not displayed at all, but shoved sideways on a shelf below (partly blocking my fictional beverages!).

I guess it's more fun to see the toys I had, and remember playing with friends in the backyard, digging holes as alien landscapes... than to see the toys I sought, later, and remember looking in vain in drugstores for a "collectible deal." I'm glad I got them - no doubt about that. And coming soon - "Mego" versions of Chekov and Sulu - to fill out your collection with two characters who were never available in the 70s...

Gotta have them. It looks like despite myself, I'm a Star Trek Mego completist.

Set Phasers on Stunning!

It seems like in the mid-90s, a lot of different Barbies were suddenly on the market.  These weren't particularly designed to appeal to Barbie collectors, but rather, to get sci-fi comic fans to invest in one of the most popular "collectible" doll lines out there.  I don't really know which came first, but "X-Files Barbie and Ken" and "Star Trek Barbie and Ken" both showed up about the same time - and I snapped them both up.  This was something pretty rare, after all.

Or was it?

Because soon, Barbie was catering to every collector under the sun.  There was "Harley Davidson" Barbie and "Barbie loves Elvis" Barbie and "Addams Family" Barbie and "Barbie and Snoopy" Barbie and "Catwoman" Barbie... well, you get the idea.  I can't imagine many Barbie collectors were really, really excited to see Barbie dressed as Catwoman, but you know that many completists grumbled and bought it - and so did Batman completists, too.  That was the point, top sell to new non-Barbie collectors.

(This is one of the hard parts of being a completists: you are doomed to buy stuff you don't like because it fits the criteria of your collection.  The only real excuse for not buying something, if you're a completist, is because they're charging too much for it and you know (hope) you can get it cheaper later.  Or, because it's more than you can afford no matter what, like a life sized X-Wing Fighter).

It's something that happens often with things made specifically to be collectible.  They make one that's different, and it's interesting - then follow it up with two more, 8 more, 36 more.  Soon, the uniqueness of a different one doesn't feel so unique, if you follow me.  the same thing happened with Monopoly games.

Now I got the Star Trek and X-Files Barbies because I thought they were pretty funny.  Eventually, I sent the X-Files set to my Mom for her doll collection, but the Star Trek set is still on a shelf in my closet (actually, right below the box of James Bond books).  My favorite thing about this set, though, is the picture on the back of the box.  Is it just me, or is Lt. Commander Ken marching Yeoman Barbie off on a strange planet to shoot her in the back?  I hope not.  Of course, she is a red shirt, so any visit to a planet surface is likely to be deadly.

As far as I can recall, this is the only Barbie in my collection, but there are many, many more Star Trek items to share here in the future.  After all, Trekkies and Trekkies are surely the archtypes of modern fancollectorgeeks!