The Lowdown on the Plus-up - A Theme Park Podcast
Kelly McCubbin and Peter Overstreet take on all aspects of theme parks - Disneyland, Walt Disney World, Universal Studios, Islands of Adventure, Six Flags - discussing them in historical context and then finding ways, to quote Walt Disney, to "plus them up!"
No considerations of safety, practicality or economic viability even remotely entertained!
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A Boardwalk Times Podcast
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The Lowdown on the Plus-up - A Theme Park Podcast
Star Trek: Roddenberry's Dream Escapes the Screen
Star Trek is an enduring contradiction. It's strong progressive ideals are often at odds with the fiscal reality of the entertainment business, and its presence in theme parks are no exception.
But the morality of Star Trek, more often than not, wins out.
Pete and Kelly take a look at the franchise's complicated history - from Lucille Ball to Las Vegas to a remarkable Elvis impersonator in upstate New York - and finds profound meaning in the times that America's most resilient science fiction franchise burst into the real world and let us become a living part of it.
IDIC is real.
Live long and prosper.
#startrek
#universalstudios
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Captain's log start date 4121.7. We are en route to Akumal 7, an obscure planet on the border of the Klingon neutral zone. Starfleet Command has directed us to investigate strange signals which have been received from the planet. Although this is a dangerous mission, I am confident in the capabilities of my new crew, who are seasoned professionals, intently serious about their mission, the best assembled crew in the entire Starfleet Command. I am proud to serve with them. Mr Spock has picked up an unusual energy force and emanated to the planet.
Speaker 2:Am proud to serve with them. Mr Spock has picked up an unusual energy force.
Speaker 3:Hello and welcome to the Lowdown on the Plus Up, a podcast where we look at everyone's favorite theme park attractions, lands, textures and novelties. We talk in over about and through our week's topic and then, with literally no concern for practicality, safety or economic viability, we come up with ways to make them better. My name is Kelly McCubbin, columnist for the theme park website Boardwalk Times, and with me, as always, is Peter Overstreet University, professor of Animation and Film History in Northern California.
Speaker 2:So Pete yeah.
Speaker 3:What are we?
Speaker 4:talking about today. Well, hold on a second, let me stop energizers and we'll begin this process here Today. We're going to kind of dip into our nerdy roots here and we're going to talk about the many attractions built around Star Trek. Star Trek, yep, good old Star Trek. Okay, wait, let me de-energize the bridge here. Okay, yeah, more serious here. Yeah, you want to cut power to the bridge?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's fine, wait don't cut life so far, we're going to follow Star Trek. Well, I guess the show started in 1966 and is still going now in some ways.
Speaker 4:I would say like from the late 80s onward, has never really been out of the public eye.
Speaker 3:Just it will not die. And I will say this about Star Trek I am just a diehard Star Trek fan. I just love Star Trek. Yep, I will even the Star Trek shows that I don't love. I'm compelled to watch because I'm so in.
Speaker 4:Got to have it. You know it's like okay, I'll give it a try. You know, like I love Star Trek. I love the original series. I was a big fan of Next Generation, love the movies. I'm even a semi-fan of the Kelvinverse films with Chris Pine, etc. They did some clever stuff. So yeah, we're both Star Trek nerds.
Speaker 3:We totally are. And I will tell you and this is going to come up later I am not only a Star Trek fan, but I am a fan of fan-produced spinoffs of Star Trek. Oh yes, absolutely. Fan-produced spinoffs of Star Trek oh yes, absolutely. Much in the same way and this will come into play later much in the same way that I'm a fan of fan-produced spinoffs of Doctor who. Yes, I find them fascinating. Even when they're bad, I find them fascinating, and sometimes they're quite good.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, doctor who has had its fan bases Even back in the 60s in Great Britain. There has always been some sort of fan base. But it's interesting, I remember when I was growing up, like the 80s and 90s, there always seemed to be this hierarchy of geekdom where Star Wars fans were kind of like these at the time, kind of like, yeah, well, lucas isn't making much more. We only had the three movies and a couple of Ewok TV shows, right, and a Christmas special and a Christmas special and that was it.
Speaker 4:And we had to kind of take what Lucas was, you know, table Scraps was giving us as Star Wars nerds. So they were kind of like, yeah, we like Star Wars, but there's not a lot there and I don't really want to read yet another Timothy Zahn book.
Speaker 3:So I'd read another Alan Dean Foster or Brian Daly book in a hot minute.
Speaker 4:I'd be all over it. Yeah, another splinter of the mind's other eye.
Speaker 3:Yes, that'd be great. More splinters, more eyes there you go?
Speaker 4:That'd be perfect. So Star Wars fans were not really in the picture. Yeah, you had not to the level that they are now.
Speaker 3:No, for sure.
Speaker 4:They have far outpaced the level of fanaticism and financial commitment et cetera. Yeah, to Star Trek fans Almost gotten a little scary about it. Yeah, but it's interesting. Back when I was growing up it was like, yeah, you're kind of in the Star Wars, but it was like Star Trek. Yeah, if you were Star Trek you belong to a crowd. It was like how the fandom is now for Star Wars. Star Trek was the thing. You would go to these fan conventions and everybody would have, you know, batleths and phasers and somebody would be walking around with a replica of Nomad, right, you know, every once in a while you wind up into a William Holden fan. You know M5 is the most perfect computer Kirk. But then the Doctor who nerds were like the outer margins, like they were like the mega nerds. Like we don't mix with those guys, especially here in the—.
Speaker 4:They're the chess club.
Speaker 3:Especially here in the United States, because it was much more rarefied here.
Speaker 4:Absolutely yeah, but Kelly and I are devotees of all you know of Of both. Of both you know, Star Wars eh.
Speaker 3:But yeah, I certainly like Star Wars. I don't want to say anything bad about it, but it's not the same thing to me.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it doesn't have the same emotional tie. Yeah, but Star Trek really does stand out, gene Roddenberry's creation, along with Lucille Ball. Yeah, lucille Ball very important, very important.
Speaker 3:There would be no Star Trek without Lucille.
Speaker 4:Ball. I know so anytime you guys are dissing Lucy. Can you imagine if Lucy was actually on the Enterprise? Oh God, now remember, lassie. You're going to stand here in front of this conveyor belt that leads straight into the warp drive and you're going to be picking out all of the dilithium crystals that are not glowing, and if any of them enter into the warp core it'll call a hull breach. That will destroy the entire Enterprise. All right, go and like Ensign Ethel and Lucy are like shoving dilithium crystals in their mouths and stuff.
Speaker 2:Like I'm in man. Fascinating Captain.
Speaker 4:Redhead seems to be exploding. Yeah, suddenly, like Ethel turns into Charlie X and he gets like silver eyes.
Speaker 3:Whoa, you just went deep.
Speaker 4:Oh, like I said, I'm a Star Trek nerd yeah.
Speaker 3:And I think it's fair to say that you and I were both kind of brought up on the original series. I love a lot of the later series, Sure, but you know my heart has always been with the. Enterprise with no letters after it. Yep.
Speaker 4:Yep, the 1701. There's something delightfully kitschy, optimistic beyond belief. Yeah, there's something delightfully kitschy, optimistic beyond belief. I mean, that's the thing with Star Trek now is a lot of cynicism has kind of spread into it. Yeah, it fights really hard for that identity.
Speaker 3:It comes back, and this is a thing. As I was researching this episode, one of the things I kind of realized is that Star Trek is this sort of constant dichotomy. It's constantly fighting for its own ideals, yeah, and it usually wins, which is remarkable, yeah, and it's just. There's all of these contradictions. Like you know, gene Roddenberry, this kind of amazing visionary, also not necessarily the nicest guy no, no, no, no no. Yeah, I mean no yeah. Cheated on his wife and then cheated on the woman.
Speaker 4:He was cheating on his wife with Don't you think you'd like to rephrase that?
Speaker 3:laddie, I saw a quote from Nichelle Nichols who said that she stopped being involved with Gene Roddenberry because she did not want to be the other woman's other woman. Yikes, wow. But the ideals won out. Ultimately, what lasts is the fact that he did integrate that set. Yes, and he fought for it a lot. He fought really hard and he created a series that was a post-scarcity world where money was no longer relevant. It was stunningly progressive. I don't know if you've watched Lower Decks at all. There's a great episode of Lower Decks from, I think, the last season, where they go to a planet just as they join the Federation and all they're doing is running around tearing up money. We don't need it anymore, hooray.
Speaker 4:I'll give you $800 for it. Is that a lot?
Speaker 3:But yeah the ideals tended to win out, like he kept fighting that Starfleet was not a military institution and there's give and take there, for sure, oh yeah, but ultimately they keep coming back to that, they keep resting on it Like no, no, no, we're exploratory.
Speaker 4:Right, you have to keep it on that in order to really maintain it, otherwise it's just another star. Insert other noun here Stargate, star Wars yes, I mean for me Star Trek. Yeah, it's the optimism. There was a comfort to it, even though, yes, characters would be in danger, especially if they were wearing a red shirt. Yes, but you definitely had this level of comfort to it. Yeah, these were people that you were exploring the universe.
Speaker 4:You could attach to one, maybe a couple of them, as your favorite character and they had enough of a for the 60s, enough diversity where that was possible. People who were Asian American could latch on to George Takei as Sulu or Nichols as Uhura, for African-American. Like Whoopi Goldberg has a great quote where she turned on the TV and she says I saw this black woman. I used to yell out to my mom Mom, you got to see this TV. There's a black woman on TV and she ain't no maid, you know. And that's a great quote because that was a big deal for television at the time. Yeah, you had Bill Cosby on I Spy, but like a black woman who is really making waves and actually having a certain level of authority on board the Enterprise was a big deal I mean just remarkably huge and just women at all in those positions of power was revolutionary.
Speaker 4:Absolutely. And let's just for a moment, let us not forget that Star Trek did dip into the usual sci-fi tropes of women as space sex objects, totally, you know. This is why I say there's constant contradiction. Angelique Petitjean, you know, dressed like a Jiffy Pop, yeah, Off with green hair 500 Kwatlus for the newcomers. So yeah, I mean, you run into that a lot.
Speaker 3:I think it's almost stronger because it's always fighting these contradictions. Yes, and always the idealism wins out.
Speaker 4:But the television show did not last for its entire five-year mission. No, the five-year mission. It barely made three. Yeah, it's five-year mission to explore strange new worlds you know, and it's like seek out new life and new civilizations.
Speaker 4:But it didn't finish and the fans were really upset by this. Yeah, they lobbied, they wrote to CBS and Desilu going what the heck? And they bailed enough water or intergalactic space dust in order to keep it going. Yeah, but it was sadly pulled off the air and the actors were kind of thrown to the wind. Nichelle Nichols went into blaxploitation oh did she? She did. She appeared in a couple of blaxploitation films, mostly as a gun-toting mama, which is really hard to watch actually when you watch something as progressive as Star Trek and all of a sudden you know she's doing jive talk topless with a machine gun.
Speaker 4:You're like, really that's rough, but you're an actor, you got to work and so you can't fault it you know, william Shatner certainly was not doing Shakespeare afterwards.
Speaker 3:No yeah, can't fault it.
Speaker 4:You know, william Shatner certainly was not doing Shakespeare afterwards no, yeah, so a lot of them were just not working. But then a bunch of fans there was a convention that invited a bunch of them on board. George Takei was certainly one of them. Yeah, Doohan, James Doohan. And then, oh, come on, DeForest Kelly. Yeah, they all showed up and they were like, okay, sure, whatever, this will be a lark, I'll meet a couple of people, whatever. It's kind of fun. And they show up in this auditorium and there's like thousands of people giving them a standing ovation and shouting. They felt like we were the Beatles. It was like, oh my God.
Speaker 3:And they had no idea. I mean, this was a different time they didn't know how many people were in it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, early 70s at this point.
Speaker 3:I think it was around 74-ish, I think, yeah, 74.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and it just it exploded, yeah. And I know someone who was there for that convention she dressed, she cosplayed, as a Vulcan, which was pretty fun, oh that's great. But yeah, it was intense and that was kind of that moment Well, let's bring it back. And so there was talk about bringing Star Trek back for a short time in the 80s and that eventually led to Star Trek, the motion picture Otherwise known as three hours of I'm going to stand up for the motion picture a little bit, so I recognize that the second half of that movie is pretty slow.
Speaker 3:The second half yeah, but I was so happy as a kid. This is like 1979. I was so happy as a kid to see all of these favorite characters that I'd been watching in syndication for years.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, like back together and the animated series which had come out before this and just to see them back doing something new, I found it thrilling.
Speaker 3:I thought all the character stuff with them re-meeting at the beginning of the film. I really liked McCoy with a beard, mccoy with a beard, mccoy with a beard.
Speaker 4:That is so great. That is actually a great little piece.
Speaker 3:There's an interesting mythology about that movie and believe me, folks, we're going to get to the theme parks, we're not going to just go through the history of Star.
Speaker 4:Trek no, no, no, no, no, no.
Speaker 3:But one thing does lead to another, so that's why we're mentioning this yeah, there's a mythology that Star Trek the Motion Picture was a bomb. It wasn't. Nope, it actually adjusted for inflation. It had the highest gross of any Star Trek film until the Kelvinverse movies. Really, yes, wow, yeah, it did very, very well. It was expensive, so that was part of the issue.
Speaker 4:Well, they hired the guy who did the effects for 2001. There's a whole Spock entering V'ger sequence, which is very 2001. Oh this is when we dropped the acid. Yeah Right, oh, okay, wow, man, ghost Black.
Speaker 3:You know, they hired one of the most celebrated directors of all time, robert Wise, to direct it, which seemed like an odd choice.
Speaker 4:I was waiting for the whole Enterprise. Yeah, he directed West Side Story, by the way, and the Haunting by the way, the Haunting, which is a masterpiece.
Speaker 3:And Day of the Earth still. Yes, indeed yeah. And he co-directed one of my favorite little horror films, which is Curse of the Cat People.
Speaker 4:Oh, yes, I love that movie. Al Luton, baby yeah, absolutely yeah. So things changed and then it was pitched like, well, let's do Wrath of Khan, but let's do it so, that way it's run silent, run deep in space, yeah, and it was a hit. Like Wrath of Khan came out with phasers blasting, yeah, and it was so good. That is one of my favorite sci-fi movies to this day.
Speaker 3:Yeah, no question, I think it's kind of a masterpiece. They also did it on a very low budget, so they made some money, oh yeah, and they pulled it off brilliantly. William Shatner gives one of the best performances in his career.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah, and it's the death of Spock, one of the best performances in his career. Oh yeah, and you know it's the death of Spock. Sorry, spoilers, but it also features one of the earliest forms of CGI animation generated by a Pixar machine. The Genesis device sequence, oh yeah, was generated at Industrial Light and Magic in their computer graphics department, and George Lucas was like eh, whatever, computer? Well, yeah, yeah, we'll let them have a shot at it. Yeah, no problem, I just want to use models now. Yeah, you know, and I had— I wish he'd stuck to that. Yeah, no, kidding. So Wrath of Khan. I remember Entertainment Tonight had a Save Spock hotline where you would call it like let him die or bring him back, and the calls were like 88%, bring him back, we want.
Speaker 3:Spock back. Yeah, of course.
Speaker 4:Like what are you going to do? So you know, it was a way for the. It was kind of like a weird studio.
Speaker 3:He wasn't Jason Todd.
Speaker 4:No. And then, right around Star Trek 6, in between Star Trek V and Star Trek VI, something happened at Universal Studios, actually a little earlier, Really.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it happens in 1988, which is right after the Voyage Home. Oh, okay, and this actually explains a lot about the timing for it, Because I remember. Well, let's explain what it is and then I'll tell you what I remember. But yeah, in 1988, Paramount so Desilu had produced the original series with Roddenberry's company and, interestingly I just found out, had a third partner in William Shatner's production company.
Speaker 3:So he was actually in profit sharing for the original series. Original series lost a ton of money so he got nothing, but I thought that was interesting that he had enough clout to do that.
Speaker 4:It is interesting.
Speaker 3:But so Desilu basically got co-opted by Paramount. Paramount took over the ownership of Star Trek. They actually offered Roddenberry a chance to buy the property outright. And for those like adjusting, for inflation.
Speaker 4:It was about a million dollars. They were asking Roddenberry's like, wait, let me check my couch for all of the money that my mistresses haven't gotten out of me yet.
Speaker 3:Yeah, he couldn't raise it. So I mean it would have been a deal, man, oh man, it was such a deal he couldn't raise it. So Paramount held on to the rights Right and in about 1988, they licensed the rights to Star Trek to Universal Studios. Yep.
Speaker 4:The theme park, yeah, and that became the Star Trek Adventure, yeah, which coincided also with the launching of Star Trek the Next Generation.
Speaker 3:Right, so Next Generation comes very, very closely. Oh, Next Generation starts a year before Mm-hmm, so 1987.
Speaker 4:Yep, here's what the attraction was. Yeah, so the attraction was in the theme park, up on the upper level of the theme park, near the entrance, actually Not too far from where Jaws the big hanging shark hanging off of the scaffolding, and at the time you could still talk to the talking kit car and sit inside of a car, like have a car talk to you, which I guess for an 80s kid was amazing. But now we're like really, now it's super irritating. Yeah, yeah, it's like no.
Speaker 4:But back then it was like wow, it's a kid. Woo-hoo, yeah, woo-hoo. Not too far from that is the stunt show in which cowboys for many, many like this goes way back into the 50s of a Hollywood stunt show that is largely derivative of Buffalo Bill's Wild West show, yeah, which this type of entertainment is a whole show in and to itself, so I don't want to go too much into it. But across the way from that is a large building, yeah, and so you would have this big open-air stage. You look at it and I don't know what the actual title of it was, but it was a way for the average person to know what it was like to be a stunt person in Hollywood.
Speaker 4:One of the greatest, probably one of the greatest insurance risks I've ever seen in an attraction, because they actually had people do real stunts in this show from the audience. Madness, it's absolutely insane. So here's and I remember doing this I did one of the stunts in the show oh, really, oh yeah. They pull you out. I was like 11 or 12. And they pull you out of the audience and you sign a waiver and you are led backstage. They put a kind of a Velcro costume on you and then you're given cues on stage and it was kind of like what the stunts were like in the silent era, and so they would have a camera.
Speaker 4:It's like, hey, get out, you know, get out there and get upstairs, now look at him. Look at him, now swing the bag at him, yeah, and the whole premise was like there was this granny's bag and there was something shocking on the inside of it and what they would do is they would film all these stunts and then they would intercut all of these stunts onto a videotape with clips from various movies to kind of make this weird little madcap mishmashy movie. I mean there were clips from the Blues Brothers, 1941, godzilla, I mean it was all over the place. But the whole premise was this carpet bag goes from person to person, from stunt to stunt, and then they look in the bag and they're shocked at what they see inside the bag and they throw the bag up. Well, you know, they pull you out of the audience.
Speaker 4:I really wanted to do this because I was like I want to try this, I want to be like I'm in the movies. This is great. It's the magic of the movies which I thought honestly, is part of the charm of Universal Studios is that you felt like you were part of the movie making experience. You weren't were going to be involved in it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I feel like they've lost a little of that over the years.
Speaker 4:A lot of that and a lot of that is gone. Yeah, we talked about this on our Dracula episode, about Castle Dracula. They would pull people out, and this was the thing that I loved about Universal Studios was the big draw. It's like I might be able to pretend to be in the movies for a day. Cool, yeah, they. Yeah, they pulled me out of the audience.
Speaker 4:They put this kind of weird seersucker suit on me and I was supposed to be—no, I was a bandit. They put a Wild West—I did it twice. So one time I was a guy wearing a seersucker suit rowing a boat that springs a leak and then the whole boat sinks underwater. Uh-huh, but you're attached to it. So all of a sudden, you're swimming around. Yeah, the second time I did it was like a year or two older and you got to jump off of a cliff into this giant water tank that was made of plexiglass so you could see underwater. Oh, wow, and you had to be a good swimmer to do it, and by that point I'd had plenty of training. I'd have been in a water polo team. Yeah, I'm like, yeah, I could do this, no problem, but they would put, like this wild west vest on you.
Speaker 4:That was a flotation device, and you were pistol hat and you're wearing a cowboy hat and a bandolero and you would jump off and splash into this and you're swimming around and they're filming. You do this. This is a terrible idea. Yeah, this is insane. Like this is adventure park kind of nonsense yeah, like someone's going to die, and then the whole thing ends with a giant pie fight where everybody gets to throw pies at each other why not?
Speaker 4:and they do this, they did. It was kind of fun because they did some stuff around the theme park where they actually would start throwing pies at Cylons and the Imperious Leader. This shows you what era this was. Then it ends with this great giant pie hitting jaws in the face and it's the jaws from the attraction.
Speaker 4:So that harkens us back to one of our previous episodes. And then you get a videotape of it all mixed together and it was like 20 bucks. You get a videotape, you go home. Look, I made a movie, mom, it was fun. Well, they took that soundstage once they got the rights and they said okay, let's do something a little less risky, let's not actually make them do dangerous stunts. They put flying rig not put flying—they put flying rigs on people. Yeah, they threw them off cliffs, they put them underwater, but it was like well, that's interesting. So they took that apart and with this licensing, they built a replica of the Enterprise, a bridge. That's important to know. Yeah, because it's very deftly based off of the movies and it was a very nice replica.
Speaker 3:So it's the Star Trek, the Motion Picture Bridge, yeah.
Speaker 4:It looks like the Wrath of Khan bridge. It's very beige, lots of beige and maroon Blue lights everywhere, and they would dress people up in the militaristic crimson uniforms that were the motion picture uniform, and then you would either be Federation, or you'd be Klingons, or you'd be these weird brain creatures that would appear, which are the obvious like MacGuffin of. We're the dangerous creatures, but we've actually been testing you the whole time and maybe someday you will be able to learn together, live together in peace. But you got pulled aside. You learn what the process was of going to wardrobe. They put a little makeup on you to make you not so sweaty.
Speaker 3:Now you did this right, I did this one, so you did both the stunt show and the thing that took over.
Speaker 4:I have the videotape somewhere of these stupid things.
Speaker 3:If I ever digitize them.
Speaker 4:God help me, we might put them up for us to look at. We need to upscale. I have to laugh at my acne and my bad 90s mullet. So I was a Federation and all I had to do was walk onto the bridge with a press board clipboard. They didn't even hand me a pad. They handed me a clipboard Like what? But that was the prop you had. You walked on and it had the script. It had the schedule on it, so it was like a backstage clipboard.
Speaker 4:And then I was supposed to do this, this routine of like trying to open and close the door, and because I had good comic timing, they actually wasted a lot of film time on me goofing around with this door, like, and I was gonna open, I was doing like this laurel and hardy shtick with it, because I was already like a big goofball at this time and like I got the audience laughing and this was like one of the first times I realized like I could be funny. Right, it was like my physical comedy was kicking in, yeah, and like they got and they edited it all out, but I must have had like two minutes of goofing with this, this door. Oh, that's great and it was hyster prop guy laughing behind because that was great man, that was so great, that was funny. You're funny, you know. And then you walk off and you watch on this big screen the whole thing edited together.
Speaker 4:They had William Shatner do a voiceover Right, and they have clips from various Star Trek movies two and three, you know, blowing up the Klingon ship and then the Enterprise zipping around and all that. But that was about it and it was. It was entertaining and it was a way to show Star Trek. It was interactive in the fact that, like this is what it's like to make a movie about Star Trek.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you know, it's very interesting narratively because so you begin to see, with Paramount and the Star Trek rights they become very confusing after a while Because Paramount splits kind of into Paramount movies and Paramount television and then later Paramount parks, which we'll come to, oh yeah, and at that point the Paramount movies and the Paramount television divisions don't have anything to do with each other. Oh yeah, so this, this, they hate each other.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, like they actually hate each other.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's actually kind of a fight because the Star Trek movies are starting to really take off, yeah, and Paramount Television's starting Next Generation and so this attraction's right in that spot, like Next Generation's been on for a year. When it opens Mm-hmm, and I remember going—because I saw it. I never got to participate in it, but I only saw it once and I remember, wait, aren't the Klingons our friends? Now, right, right, because Next Generation told us that they were. Yes, but of course we were in the movies with the original cast. Klingon bastard, you murdered my son, right.
Speaker 4:Well, they explained. Like the Uber fans would talk about this later and say, well, actually, you know that's where we act. Forget the Kitterberg Massacre. It was actually this that started the whole process of the Klingons and the Federation, because the brain aliens are supposed to. Maybe the Klingons and the Federation can work together in peace and harmony. That's actually part of the script. So, like the Uber fans are like that's got to be canon because Kirk's actually in it. Yeah, and you know it could be.
Speaker 3:You're like that's got to be canon because Kirk's actually in it.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and you know it could be. So here's my Tribbles might fly out of my butt, yeah, you know, like no.
Speaker 3:As long as you clean up, it's fine. Hold on.
Speaker 4:My tribble.
Speaker 3:I just pulled a tribble off the shelf.
Speaker 4:He's throwing a tribble at me.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually for those of you at home, I actually pulled a Tribble off the shelf.
Speaker 4:It's a redhead, it's a ginger Tribble.
Speaker 3:But it I mean it was actually a pretty fun Attraction. It was fun At that point. There were some walk around Star Trek characters Going on, all Seemingly based on the motion picture timeline.
Speaker 4:Yeah, mostly Klingons, Vulcans and some Federation people. Right, that was about it. Yeah, Mostly hanging around the attraction going go get on the Star Trek thing.
Speaker 3:Right, yeah, because I think it was popular for a few years and then it really faded, it went away quick yeah.
Speaker 4:I think part of that was Star Trek V Well yeah, because I think it was popular for a few years and then it really faded. It went away quick yeah. I think part of that was Star Trek V Well yeah, and also the rising popularity of the Next Generation.
Speaker 3:I think that's really the thing. You know, that first year of Next Generation, it's—forgive me everybody, but that first year's terrible.
Speaker 3:They're finding their feet and it's too obvious they are, and uh, gene roddenberry's still pretty involved and he's gone a little off the deep end that. You know when, when they were setting up the show, he he wanted, uh, marina surdice's character, um, to have like six breasts. There was stuff like that that people were like no Gene, stop Gene. And it was by the second season he had started, he had kind of gotten pushed off into a. You go take your office on the other side of the lot and we'll give you an executive producer credit.
Speaker 4:Yes, you're our executive. Producer, which means go away, yeah, and by the third season, he just wasn't involved anymore. Producer, which means go away, yeah, and by the third season.
Speaker 3:He just wasn't involved anymore and really wasn't much again ever after. No, though I will say just to kind of jump ahead a little his son, rod Roddenberry, is very involved in Star Trek these days and doing a really wonderful job.
Speaker 4:He's also involved. Rod runs the Roddenberry Diving Association or something like that, where it's into scuba diving and into underwater exploration. So I met him when I was being trained as a submersible pilot oh, and a friend of mine was a submersible pilot, he was training me how to do it and then we met up at a convention in Long Beach. He's like, yeah, rod Roddenberry, I go as in like Gene Roddenberry, yeah, it's his son. So I got to meet Rod. We went to the Long Beach Aquarium and we're hanging out by a shark tank and I'm like talking to him about exploration and how he's into diving and scuba and all this kind of stuff. So, yeah, he's very much into like exploring the other 75% of the planet that is still vastly unexplored.
Speaker 4:Wow that's amazing. So like interesting little thing about Rod, but yeah, he's still heavily involved in Star Trek.
Speaker 3:He is. He seems like a really good guy.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he's pretty cool I like Rod and I think so— and he only has one mistress, so that's— no, that's a lie, that's a lie.
Speaker 2:I thought making that up, not true.
Speaker 3:This, barry Jr. No, no, no, no, that's me making a joke. It was tasteless. I'm sorry, but I think you know, as Next Generation starts to take off and by the time they hit the third season they were firing on all cylinders, oh yeah. And it turned into the phenomenon that it became Boy. And just after that we had Star Trek V, which really showed the old cast fading, fading badly, and they got one more hurrah after that. But that attraction at Universal started to seem real outdated, real fast, because we were looking at a show that had already been supplanted by a newer show that was becoming very popular. Oh yeah, oh yeah. But I think that the—oh, before we get away from this, you bought the videotape. Oh, yeah, yeah. So this was the thing with this attraction was that you would go on and do—you would interact on the Enterprise and you'd do whatever to fight the Klingons it was mostly green screen stuff, yeah. And then they would sell you this insanely overpriced VHS tape of what you did.
Speaker 4:Yeah, yeah, I remember distinctly going. I went with my grandfather. My grandpa kind of blanched a little bit and I went I know it's expensive, grandpa. Only once I promise I won't ask for anything else here. Yeah, could you please? And he goes, okay, and he got it. Oh.
Speaker 1:And then he got me some other things too, because he was my grandpa.
Speaker 4:He was amazing. Yeah, he was like oh, there's Frankenstein stuff here. I can't leave this place without getting my grandson something from Frankenstein.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:I'm wearing a Phantom of the Opera shirt right now.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it is. It's a beautiful shirt.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I got that from Ron. Actually, ron Chaney sold me this personally. He was at Midsummer Scream and I got to hang out with Ron Chaney and he's pretty darned awesome. Another descendant of franchises we like, yeah, anyway, but it was quite pricey, but they couldn't make a lot of money on it because you only have like maybe two dozen people buying those videotapes every show, right?
Speaker 3:yeah, if you're lucky, yeah.
Speaker 4:Sometimes they would have a whole family up and only one of them is going to buy the tape.
Speaker 3:So the economics of that were kind of okay, but not so much and you have to imagine the amount of work that was going into it. They were editing that thing on the fly. Oh yeah, you know, to make it work, to make it fit on the videotape and to have them duped and ready to go by the end. It's a lot of work.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you picked it up after like an hour or two, so you had to go off and do some other things and come back around 3 o'clock and pick it up. Yeah, and then you're videotape in your back pocket Right, hoping that the boiling Universal City sun doesn't kill it.
Speaker 3:Isn't going to completely wipe you out.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 2:So it was ruined by all the water from.
Speaker 3:Jaws. The Lowdown on the Plus Up is a BoardWalkTimes podcast. At BoardWalkTimesnet you'll find some of the most well-considered and insightful writing about the Walt Disney Company, disney history and the universe of theme parks available anywhere. Come join us at BoardWalkTimesnet. So you know. That thing's running for a couple of years. It runs into about 93. It's been limping along for a couple of years by that point. Yes, indeed, and Paramount does something really interesting. Paramount decides to form a new division that they call Paramount Parks Yep, and they start acquiring a whole bunch of parks, a whole bunch of theme parks and amusement parks. And so they I think this is maybe a full list, but I'm not sure I've got they acquired King's Dominion in Virginia, yep. King's Island in Ohio, california's Great America, oh yeah.
Speaker 3:Carowinds in North Carolina.
Speaker 4:And Canada's Wonderland. It's such a strange eclectic spread of theme parks.
Speaker 3:It's really strange and I know Baton.
Speaker 4:Rouge Right what.
Speaker 3:Well, and a couple of these are pretty big and strong theme parks. Oh well, paramount's, great America, yeah, which is going to close soon.
Speaker 4:I know, you know, it was Marriott's Great America.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And then it fell into the hands of it wasn't Marriott's, it was Marriott's Great America. And then it fell into the hands of—it wasn't Marriott's, it was independently owned briefly, and then Paramount bought it. Yeah, and having grown up in the South Bay, that was the theme park that you could afford to go to short of a road trip to Disney, or not, yeah after Frontier Village was gone, oh yeah, by the way, folks, if you ever go back to one of our previous episodes we did one on Frontier Village.
Speaker 4:By the way, folks, if you ever go back to one of our previous episodes, we did one on Frontier Village. Yeah, you should check it out. Anyway, great America, I have a soft spot in my heart for it because it really tried. Yeah, but what Paramount really did, you know like I thought it would be great. This story, by the way, a little name droppy, but it's a good one, okay, so around 1993, when this is all going down I was working a haunted house in Mountain View, california, called Gyro's World of Terror.
Speaker 4:It was started by a guy named Dan Nelson who wanted to set up a charity to fight drug abuse in teenagers, because GIRO stands for Global Youth Research Organization. Oh, I never knew that it was founded because, well, I probably shouldn't talk about that. But anyway, let's just say there's some community service involved and I'll just leave it at that. Okay, okay, but anyway, it was very big In its initial years. It was being held in a two-story shopping mall. Wow, and I don't mean a bit of it, I don't mean like we took over Sears, we took over the entire shopping mall. That's crazy. It was almost 800,000 cubic feet of haunt.
Speaker 3:Did they close the stores?
Speaker 4:during that time. No, it was a derelict shopping mall, it was an empty shopping mall. It was an empty shopping mall that was built in the 70s and it was called the Old Mill because it actually had like a water wheel and it was one of those with the big open atrium in the middle with lots of trees. It had a stream running through it. Wow, I mean, you know, cue the dawn of the dead music, totally cue the dawn of the dead music, totally. You know so anyway, uh, but it shut down and nelson had a connection to the owners of the mall and he made a deal with them. We had a lot of volunteers working for him because a he paid for the materials so we could build whatever our imaginations would carry and the.
Speaker 4:The focus of this haunt was fan recreations of our favorite monster movies. We had the obvious stuff. We had Freddy, jason, leatherface, the works. We also had a Queen Alien full-size that we built from scratch. We had an Army of Darkness room that I built. I also built Evil Dead 2 cabin, full-size cabin, with the laughing crazy dead-eyed elk and the grandma in the basement. The whole nine yards, nice, and it was all home-built, it was all fan-based, it was a lot of fun, based heavily off of Bob Burns' Halloween shows in Burbank. But we also had the Enterprise. We joked we gave it a different name, but it was basically a Star Trek Next Generation bridge set. Okay, but we built it. How we made it scary is it was the Borg had taken over. Oh, okay, so the Borg were the bad guys and they were the monsters coming after you. Yeah, and it was this very dedicated group of Star Trek fans that had built this set.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:And they did it for fun and it was like almost screen accurate. It was beautiful. I started at this place in 1990. I was like 17 years old and I quickly worked my way up to I was management by the time 1993 had rolled about. Okay, I was 19 years old and I was already running this massive haunt as an art director. No joke, yeah. I don't know like what was Nelson thinking, right? But sure enough, I gained a lot of knowledge. I made a lot of mistakes. I mean, I'm 19, but I was an art director of this giant show. You learn by making mistakes.
Speaker 3:Absolutely.
Speaker 4:That's the way you do it. Yeah, and I was responsible for this. And so, because of that, we get a phone call. Actually, it was on the radio. They said someone's going to come on by Because Dan Nelson also owned and ran AAA limousines in Santa Clara.
Speaker 4:Because of that, he would transport all the celebrities in the area if they were coming through Santa Clara or San Jose. Well, one night one of them happened to be John Landis, the movie director. Yeah, a guy behind Blues Brothers, the Thriller video, american Werewolf in London, twilight Zone, the movie Trading Places, trading Places, animal House. Yeah, and he was coming through because they were making a movie at Paramount's Green America. Oh, yeah, and so he's being transported from the airport and he found out that Dan owned this haunt. He says, well, I'd love to see it, I love seeing haunted houses. Yeah, they transported him over and he and his wife, they came through and we were supposed to give him a tour.
Speaker 4:Well, the guy who ran the creatureure Shop was this big blowhard guy named James Bynum, big, big guy. He would talk like this you know, peter, you know what I would do. I'd do this, you know how you doing, and he was very egocentric, but he found it in his heart to say hey, pete, go around the haunt, turn everything on, all the music and all the sound effects, so he could see the show for what it really is when it's operating. We'll give him a tour and you can come along on the tour. You get to meet, I go John Landis, the guy directed American Werewolf.
Speaker 2:Heck yeah.
Speaker 4:Yeah. So I ran through the haunt by myself, going to all the, unlocking all the drawers and turning on the stereos and turning on all the lights and getting it all ready. And I came all the way back, I got it all turned on and they were gone. James had already started the tour. Oh, what a jerk. And it was almost halfway done by the time I caught up with them and I was like, oh my God, oh my God, I'm like I'm sweating, I'm like I'm so sorry and John's like what's your problem? I, I'm sweating, I'm like I'm so sorry, and like John's like what's your problem? I said I just ran around turning everything on. I'm sorry, go ahead. And like John's like wow, I really like this room and it was one of the rooms I had designed.
Speaker 4:I said yeah, I based it off of this article I found in Famous Monsters. He goes do you ever meet Forrey Ackerman? I go yeah, I met Forrey one time. We start like clicked with him a couple of times I got to tour the Acker mansion. Oh, he's a great guy. And James started getting like wait a minute, what he didn't know what we were talking about.
Speaker 4:We finally finished the tour and then James, the tour wasn't even done. James was like go back and start turning everything off, and he was my superior. So I had to go do it. So I started turning it off. He was gone. I was so mad. So we had a office manager named Beth Beth Herberger and she said write him a note, I'll see that he gets it. I said I wrote him a note. I'm sorry I wasn't able to meet you. I'm glad to meet somebody who's a famous monster. James Bynum kind of started the tour without me.
Speaker 4:I really wanted to take you through and show you some of the more interesting effects, but I know you're on a busy schedule. But it was really nice meeting you. Thank you so much for your time. Yeah, peter Overstreet. Yeah, 24 hours go by and then Beth walks in with this long tube package tube and this big manila envelope. He says Pete, something arrived for you from Universal Studios. Uh-huh, I said what? It was a letter from John Landis, and I opened it up. It basically said hey, pete, don't worry about James Bond, and he's like you know. You did a great job. I loved your room.
Speaker 4:I love meeting anybody who's a fellow monster kid, if you're not busy this week, I'd love to invite you to be an extra in this new film. I'm working on Wow and I hope that these gifts will make up for not being able to spend more time chatting. Yeah, it was a signed poster of American Werewolf in London. Wow, and of innocent blood, oh yeah. So he sent me two of those and an 8x10. I still have the 8x10. Yeah, but I was like, oh my God, cool, yeah.
Speaker 4:And he says, yeah, show up at Paramount's Great America on Thursday. Yeah, show up at 5 o'clock in the morning and your name will be on the list. Go up to the desk and tell them that you're here and they'll get you fixed up. Yeah, the movie was Beverly Hills, cop 3. And this is supposed to, you know, and the whole thing is supposed to be about. Basically, I think it's Wally World again and it's supposed to be this kind of Uncle Walt-type character in this Knott's Berry Farm thing. It's involved in some sort of murder mystery and Axel Foley has to save the day and it's a snoozer.
Speaker 4:But the best part is the time capsule of what Great America looked like in 1993, complete with George Lucas and Steven Spielberg cameos. Yeah, complete with George.
Speaker 3:Lucas and Steven Spielberg cameos. Yeah, really at its peak right then.
Speaker 4:Pretty much, yeah. And I got to be one of the many, many people in the background when Axel Foley gets his big parade for saving the day. Aw, and it was cool, yeah. But the best part was not just meeting John Landis and being part of the movie, going up to craft services for lunch, mm-hmm. And right across from me is Alan Young. Oh, wow, alan Young, who do not know. He was the original voice of Scrooge McDuck. He was Wilbur in Mr Ed. And I said, mr Young, do you have a moment? He says, oh, okay. I said I'm just a really big fan, I love your performance and he's expected to go Scrooge McDuck, right, you know, mr Ed. And I said I think you have portrayed nobody has ever portrayed a best friend better than you ever have than Philby in the Time Machine. You're so good in that movie. I just wanted to meet you and he goes, oh, and he walked off and that was it. That's all. I didn't get an autograph. I just got a.
Speaker 4:I thank you kindly, and his trademark, scottish brogue, and that was it, and he gave me a wink and I'm like thank you, mr Young.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's exactly what you want.
Speaker 3:And it was a week later that I got my summer job working at Paramount's Great America as a Klingon Wait, you never told me this.
Speaker 4:It didn't last long, they had walk-around Klingons. So Paramount's Great America, you have to understand, is a thrill-ride park like a Six Flags park.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and just to kind of lead up to this, this is what Paramount decided to do when they pulled the IP back from Universal. They said we're going to flood our Paramount Parks division with Star Trek stuff and what that meant to them was putting a bunch of people in Star Trek costumes and having them walk around.
Speaker 4:And that was it. Yeah, you know, you had Star Trek models over fountains, you had a Klingon ship and some sort of and lots of monitors playing the music, yeah, but yeah, I was one of the wandering Klingons for three months, because Santa Clara, if you do not know, gets incredibly hot.
Speaker 4:Oh God, it must have been miserable and wearing a turtle head and full polyvinyl Klingon outfits made me faint multiple times from the heat, oh jeez. So I couldn't do it. But I had some friends like Jeremy Lefferts and several other people who were full-time Klingons and they loved it. It was like a whole culture. Yeah, they loved doing it. It was great, but that was about it. You didn't really have much. It was like Star Trek as a theme park. You're like that's not interactive. I can do this at a Star Trek convention. Yeah, why do I need to pay 50 bucks to get into here for this nonsense? Yeah, it was very half-baked. Especially having just been on the Enterprise at Universal Studios. It's just like how are you going to top this dude?
Speaker 3:Well, right, right, and they were about to.
Speaker 4:So tell us how they did it Kelly. How did they top it?
Speaker 3:So about in 96, they stopped doing this. They were just like oh yeah, it was short lived.
Speaker 3:It was very short lived and someone came up with the idea that they wanted to put a major Star Trek installation in Las Vegas. Now this is interesting. Again, we're talking about contradictions with Star Trek. Star Trek is post-scarcity, it is anti-money and yet the biggest and probably, I think, pretty inarguably the most successful Star Trek attraction ever happened in Las Vegas. Paramount made a deal with the Las Vegas Hilton and what they did and there was some sort of sketchy stuff going on behind the scenes, but what they did was they leased out a huge hunk of the Hilton for what seemed to be an incredibly low price. The word is that the Hilton people who made this deal got fired very quickly after, because Paramount was just paying too little, but they had something like a 10-year contract. So once they were in, they were in.
Speaker 4:This whole thing was a giant hand-washing of Vegas's bad reputation for being mob-related.
Speaker 3:This was that period where they were trying to make things family-friendly 100% yeah.
Speaker 4:This is the family-friendly era of Vegas, when people said, yeah, vegas got neutered and it kind of did on purpose because people were looking too closely at what was going on in Vegas. So they said, well, let's get the kiddies in here. And it was kind of like Human Shield, it's like put the kids in here. We've got the rides, we've got all this stuff here. We have Caesar's magical empire, we've got all this stuff going on here. But it's all a front. And that tells me that something was probably, you know, very similar was going on with the birth of the Star Trek adventure at the Hilton. It's very possible. I mean a lot of people— this is all speculation, by the way, so I don't want to wind up with, you know, concrete blocks on my feet at the bottom of the Potomac. Where's Pete? But this is speculation.
Speaker 3:He's sleeping with the fishes Historical speculation. He's sleeping with the fishes Historical speculation. So they decided that they were going to build an attraction and a pretty massive environment to put the attraction in, and so what they built was crazy. It was it was huge.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the first thing you do when you would walk in on this thing was poop your pants. It was so huge. You're like, first off, it's like the TARDIS, like you fit this in this hotel, yeah.
Speaker 3:Massive. They designed the main portion of it to look like the Promenade in Deep Space Nine, which is what was running around that time. It had recently started and it looks like the Promenade and you can go drink at Quark's and there's some sort of game that they're calling Dabo, which I didn't really understand how that worked, but they had it.
Speaker 4:It was an amazing At least it wasn't that addictive game that Wesley Crusher gets addicted to where you put the ball through the hoop with your brain.
Speaker 3:The game yeah.
Speaker 4:They're so dumb they couldn't even come up with a name for it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And so you would go in Later. There were two attractions, but initially there was just one Right and it was called Klingon Encounter this thing. So it was designed by the Landmark Entertainment Group, which is primarily this guy, Gary Goddard, who we've talked about before Yep, Because he worked on the Terminator Universal Attraction. He worked on Jurassic Park the ride. He worked on the Spider-Man ride. He was also the director of the first Masters of the Universe movie. Yes, yes, so it was. We talked about him in the Conan episode.
Speaker 4:The Universe movie. Yes, yes, you talked about him in the Conan episode, that's right.
Speaker 3:Yep, and he has like a kind of troubling end to his career. We don't really want to get into right now no, that's just oof. But him and this guy, luke Mayrand, who designed a lot of the sets for Babylon 5, designed sets for some of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies, stuff like that. So you know, pretty hard-hitting team of theme park designers.
Speaker 3:Paramount put a lot of money behind it. They got some Star Trek writers to write the script for it. They got Rene Echevarria for one, who kind of if you watched that whole second phase of Star Trek, from Next Generation to Enterprise, you saw his name a lot and Ken Biller, who wrote for Voyager. They also got Michael Westmore back to do makeup, yeah, so they were loaded for bear, yeah, and they built this crazy attraction that still I mean people that went on this thing will still talk about it, you know, in glowing terms, with like the hair standing on edge on their arms. It was astonishing. And I'll describe the first attraction. Then we'll get to the second one, the Klingon encounter. On the surface it looks like it's just another simulator ride, right, but the meat of that ride happens before you get in the simulator and it's nuts.
Speaker 4:Yeah, the simulator is just the finale.
Speaker 3:It's just the finale. Yeah, you would go in and it was set up to look like a standard entrance to a simulator ride. Right, and there was. You know you'd go buy some cool Star Trek props and stuff like that that were neat. I have a picture somewhere of me pretending to cry into a hanky by the spot coffin missile thing Because they had that Nice. You go in and you're standing in these lines to go into what looks like automatic doors to head into the simulator and above it is your standard theme park safety spiels going on right, and then something in the spiel starts to go wrong, right, and lights are kind of flickering and the person who's there that's supposed to be kind of guiding you through is like making phone calls go. I mean, they just go all the way with this.
Speaker 4:Yeah, fully immersive.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they're like something's wrong, yeah, and then it happens what I might describe as the most amazing attraction experience I've ever been through. You hear this familiar noise and you see these little pinpricks of light around you, and you are standing on a transporter pad on a starship.
Speaker 4:Yeah, you literally get beamed aboard a starship. It's unbelievable. It was ridiculously fast. Yeah, it was very hard. I've seen it operating with no lights on. Yeah, I mean with the lights, with no normal work lights on. Yeah. And even that is impressive, on how fast and smooth this transition is.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and how they somehow made it. So I mean the you felt beamed.
Speaker 4:I mean they hit you with CO2 cannons. There was air rushing and you felt like lifted up and you were like whoa. And all of a sudden, how'd they wait? What?
Speaker 3:Yeah, whoa, we got transported man and you're standing there and you're in front of these Starfleet crew who have just beamed you on board Yep and somehow through time, but who knows?
Speaker 4:We don't talk about that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's just incredible. Now, what's interesting is the technology is Okay, disney people are going to come at me here and just please be kind. The technology is almost exactly the same technology that they use for the Guardians of the Galaxy Galactic Rewind attraction in Florida, in Epcot, where you are transported to a ship.
Speaker 4:They did it similarly for a Thor experience where you are lifted up through the bite frost to meet Thor. In what used to be Innoventions, they would have these little makeshift Marvel pop-ups. Yeah, and you did it. It was very clever.
Speaker 3:But the Guardians of the Galaxy version doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It just doesn't work. It doesn't read. Nobody pays much attention to it.
Speaker 3:It's visually too busy to start with so you're not exactly sure what the end result has changed. It's just, it's kind of a mess and I know people love that ride. I really do, but that doesn't work. Do, but that doesn't work. The version that was at the Star Trek experience it is so perfect, so seamless, and I remember my mouth was agape when it happened, so much so that someone that worked there came and asked if I was okay. You see this video of Riker telling you that someone in your group is an ancestor of Jean-Luc Picard and the Klingons want to stop you. So it's Star Trek Terminator. Basically it's Star Trek Terminator. Right, you get on a turbolift, yep, which during a Klingon attack, yeah, so the turbo's shaking and shaking and shaking. Of course it's not going up and down, it's just slowly kind of spinning to give you a different exit. Right, you go out through the turbo lift into then the simulator.
Speaker 4:No, you go to the bridge of the Enterprise, don't you? Oh?
Speaker 3:that's right, you go to the bridge of the Enterprise. Yeah, yeah, well, that's actually where you get. The Riker message is on the bridge.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so you're beamed aboard the Enterprise. Yeah, riker gives you this message, steps over a chair, yeah, and then says, all right, get to the shuttle bay.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, you take, and you're right, you go to the bridge, you then take the turbo lift during a Klingon attack, yeah, and then you know, basically, at that point, it's a simulator ride, sure, but it's a pretty good one.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it's Star Trek tours.
Speaker 3:Yeah, Star Trek tours.
Speaker 4:Howdy folks, I'm Data. Yeah, it's Rex.
Speaker 3:I'm retired from the Star Wars universe, but they put me in here, and you know one thing that's great about this and we're going to see this even more so in the next iteration of the attraction there's a lot of actors, oh yeah, there's a lot of actors that are involved and have to do their parts to get you through this narrative. Oh, yeah.
Speaker 3:And they so, not only for the attraction but for the entire environment, for Quarks and the promenade and all of that. These actors trained for a while. Oh, yeah, big time. They had prior to opening, they had this his name was Captain Dale Dye come out and take everyone that was going to be a performer in this thing and do a two-day military boot camp with them. What? Yeah, like in Las Vegas. So they're out doing push-ups and sit-ups, they're running in the desert. It's crazy, right? Okay, Because the whole idea was that they wanted to open this with the particularly the Starfleet people feeling like they were part of this big organization, Right, that they understood how they worked together.
Speaker 4:They're jogging on. I don't know what I've been told. Fling on foreheads are mighty cold.
Speaker 3:Whatever so they did that. It was like 120 actors that they were working with for two cold Whatever so they did that. It was like 120 actors that they were working with for two days. Wow, it was evidently brutal. There was a guy that was an actor that worked in the experience for like the last four years or so that started doing a whole bunch of filming. Years or so that started doing a whole bunch of filming. He's sadly passed away, but he put out about six hours worth of documentary footage of just what that was like Wow, and including interviews with people who'd been there for the entire run. There were people who were there for the full, like 11 years. It was open, oh yeah, and a lot of them talked about this. This experience of like yeah, it was open, oh yeah, and a lot of them talked about this. This experience of like yeah, it was awful, like we were just, you know, none of us were in that kind of shape.
Speaker 4:It was totally brutal, like that's almost a movie in itself. It is, yeah, like the making of this attraction. It's like, how are we going to make this so awesome?
Speaker 3:It's like and then, you know, at the end of the second day they brought them in, they told them to go put their uniforms on, they brought them all into sort of the grand corridor that leads into the experience, and all 120 actors and Captain Dye went and whispered something in each one of their ears like some inspirational thing for each one of them, and we know that at least one of them, he said just keep up the good work. You know something like that. Oh, okay, but it was some sort of weird like you made it your mother sews socks that smell yeah.
Speaker 3:You know, like what. But you know it was something. You know that was like hey, you really, you made it through this hard thing. Now you're going to go really kill this Strangest thing. I was like this seems excessive, but okay.
Speaker 4:Why is Private Joker out there with a phaser?
Speaker 2:Wow.
Speaker 4:I mean the only time. I mean we had done an episode about the Galactic Star Cruiser, yeah, and Evermore, yay, we're going to get more hits. Thank you, taylor Swift. Evermore If we stay in enough times, we'll get some Swifties. We're past the half hour mark, I'm just saying on YouTube. Anyway, there's not nearly that type of hazing and training that goes into a lot of these actors, yeah, a lot of these interactive attractions, because this is on par with and, frankly, more successful in some ways, yeah, than Galactic Star Cruiser, and I think that they probably should have put those Disney actors through a heavier boot camp.
Speaker 3:Well, one of the things that they did that I think was very wise was that they gave their actors a lot of leeway. They gave them a little bit of character and a little bit of motivation, and then just said you keep track of it from here on, and so the characters would develop, things would happen and their experience would change, and this was over a course of 11 years. I'm sure there were contradictions, I'm sure there was messiness to that, but people that came regularly would talk about the stories as they moved forward and I thought this was really beautiful. When the experience shut down, a couple of the performers decided that they wanted to close out the characters' stories. So they went around and made a documentary film of everyone that they could get who had an ongoing character telling what the end of their story was, and then they showed it at a Star Trek convention in Las Vegas.
Speaker 3:Oh, that's fun. So you got the end to the story. That's really cool, man, I loved being in that environment. And when you came out of actually both experiences and we'll talk about the second experience in a minute when you came out of both experiences, they basically faked a service hallway and said faked a service hallway and said, oh, because things went so wrong you ended up in a service hallway. So there was someone playing a janitor leading you out of the fake service hallway. I mean, that's some dedication to the bit, man, it is it totally?
Speaker 4:is so. I heard that the next experience was originally going to be titled the Big Borg Booty Call. Now, that's nonsense. That is absolute fabrication. So what was the second attraction?
Speaker 3:So the second attraction was the Borg 4D Adventure.
Speaker 4:That's not too far off.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's not too far off.
Speaker 4:Wait, the 4D Adventure, 4d Adventure that's not too far off. Yeah, it's not too far off. Wait the 4D Adventure, 4d Adventure yeah, I don't know. Whenever anybody goes, it's 4D. It's not 3D, it's 4D.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I mean, I assume a lot of this is the interaction with actual people. That's the other D and again, this does end in a simulator, arguably a better one, and it does involve 3D glasses, like a lot of simulators do now, but used to really good effect. So there's your 3D and you got something else.
Speaker 4:You put on your special 3D glasses Protective lenses that will actually protect you Safety goggles. Yeah, safety goggles that will protect you from the mental machinations of the Borg queen, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:And they did—so. There's nothing as cool in the Borg adventure as there is that beaming effect in the Klingon encounter.
Speaker 4:They don't actually assimilate you.
Speaker 3:Well, actually they kind of do.
Speaker 4:Well, hey, you know what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas. I got assimilated at the Star Trek experience.
Speaker 3:And I've been meaning to talk to you about your dedication to the Borg Queen, this one they kind of changed the tack. You know, in the Klingon one it's you are just who you are and you're going on a ride. In this one you're like no, no, no, you're in the Star Trek world, right, and you're going to the Copernicus station because you and all the people around you have a special thing in your DNA that might keep you from being assimilatable. The Peaches did his best to Edgar Kennedy, okay, go on. And of course, the Borg attack the station, right. Can you imagine like the ride is like? You have this special thing and the Borg attack the station Right.
Speaker 4:Can you imagine like the ride is, like you have this special thing and the Borg leave the station alone?
Speaker 3:Yeah, and it's kind of neat. So you're watching this thing, you're watching the doctor from Voyager, robert Picardo, yay, and he's like telling you about this. And then something happens to the screen that you're watching and's very outer limitsy. It's like the board taking over the screen. Oh nice, he gets back on for a second and he's like all right, we gotta all get out of here, we gotta send you to the escape shuttle, and that's where it gets crazy. So you start going through corridors. I mean this is this is almost more a haunt than it is a ride.
Speaker 4:Oh, count me in. Yeah, and so you're going? Wait a minute, this sounds. Huh, this sounds really familiar. Maybe a lawsuit's involved here, because we did do it first. Yeah, all right, I'm just saying Okay, go ahead.
Speaker 3:So you'll be running down a corridor and someone will be, you know, an actor, will be like you got to come this way, you got to come this way. And you'll see a Borg come out and just grab them and pull them off, oh jeez. And so you keep getting sent in directions and then being sent back because you're running into Borg. Oh God, there's an amazing effect. This really took me off guard. Where there's a Starfleet officer that you're going towards and for me it was a she it's just like come this way, come this way. This is how we get to the shuttle and a Borg arm comes out of the ceiling, grabs her and pulls her up into the ceiling Like full entire body disappears into the ceiling. You're like, oh my God, that's cool. And so eventually, like through a bunch of these mishaps it's very cleverly done, a lot of good surprises yeah, eventually you make it to the docking bay. They give you your quote, unquote safety goggles, right, and you get in and do the simulator ride.
Speaker 3:The simulator ride is actually pretty neat because they do something clever that I've never seen anyone try on a simulator ride, because it's 3D. You know how in Star Tours there's the robots and there's controls and stuff and they frame a video screen yeah, so it looks like that. But what you don't really realize is that everything you're seeing is the video screen oh wow, including the controls and the frame around the screen. So they use this to great effect. It's really smart. You get tractor beamed in by the Borg oh wow. And the Borg blow off the front of your shuttle oh jeez. So everything, like all the equipment and stuff, is just gone and you're looking into empty space oh jeez, it's really really great. Then Alice Krieg reprises her Borg queen, of course, yeah, I've never loved the Borg queen concept, but I do love Alice Krieg.
Speaker 4:Yeah, she's great, she's great. The queen as a notion was underutilized and poorly utilized when it was. Yeah yeah, so.
Speaker 3:I just I find the Borg scarier when there's not an intelligence behind it. That seems more frightening to me.
Speaker 4:I just wanted the Borg Queen. I really desperately and this should make you happy I desperately wanted the Borg queen to be Aaliyah.
Speaker 3:Oh, yeah, yeah, that would be amazing.
Speaker 4:You know, she's got the little jewel at her neck and the whole thing. V'ger wants you to be assimilated. I am bald.
Speaker 3:And there is I think there's been some retro canon that has suggested that V'ger was the origin of the Borg.
Speaker 4:Yeah, they did it in. I forget the name of the video game, but it was a canon-based video game that a lot of fans went. That makes perfect sense. Yeah, v'ger went out to the outer limits of space, was an intelligent organic computer that found an alien species and startedilating it to replicate Earth and then just went wrong. So cool, neat. Yeah, not necessary, but it's like okay, that's neat.
Speaker 3:I'll tell you my philosophy of canon.
Speaker 4:It's what you put a ball in with some powder.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah. No. My philosophy of canon is that it's whatever you want it to be. So if you like these novels and these audio dramas and these shows and you want to make your own canon out of it, you win. That's what it is.
Speaker 4:Well, it's John Landis. We'll go back to John Landis for a minute. John Landis once said to Max Landis, his son, how do you kill Dracula? Oh, a stake through the heart, a stake through the heart right. And he says no. And Max goes what do you mean? He says well, how else? He goes well, like you know, holy water no, okay, garlic, no. He says okay. So what does kill vampires? He goes anything you can want it to be, they're made up. Yeah, you know. You know, like that's the point, anything you want it to be, you can you make it up yeah so yeah, I mean, canon can be what you like.
Speaker 4:I I like the notion of alia being the queen, you know, because that would have been like so nerdy oh it'd be great you know, like one step below, like charlie x, suddenly popping up again going yes, I'll, yeah my own world, world it's a little more superior to you, kirk.
Speaker 3:So you know she shows up and you're pulled into the Borg ship, but the entire front of your shuttlecraft is missing. And you can see video of this online, obviously without the 3D, but it's pretty effective. And she's like okay, we're assimilating all of you and so the probes kind of come in towards you and then you start hallucinating. You start Borg hallucinating. You're like going through these corridors with these trippy light effects. I mean it's just you're being assimilated.
Speaker 4:This is what it's like. There's Locutus yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah yeah, and so it's pretty.
Speaker 3:it's actually weirdly beautiful. If you watch video of it now, it's like oh, this is fascinating yeah. And, at a certain point, robert Picardo injects himself into what you're seeing, which is the nanobots in your head.
Speaker 4:He just kind of comes into frame like doot, doot, doot, yeah, I found the analgesic in your head. He just kind of comes into Frayland Doot, doot, doot, yeah, I found the analgesic cream.
Speaker 3:Yeah, if I could just interrupt, yeah.
Speaker 4:Let's interrupt this hallucination for just a moment, please.
Speaker 3:And he shows up, he tells you to resist. He's like we think you can resist. Remember who you are yeah, you know you evidently have this special DNA. Remember who you are yeah, you know you evidently have this special DNA. Right, and you do eventually resist and the Federation comes and saves the day. You sabotage Like Voyager shows up and does something. Okay, but that's not the interesting part.
Speaker 4:This is Captain Janeway. Very good job. Yeah, you have resisted the Borg. Bye, that's my cameo. Where's my cameo.
Speaker 3:Where's my check Right? Yeah, but it's fascinating. I mean, you do get assimilated. You have the front of your shuttle torn off, that's awesome.
Speaker 4:It's pretty amazing. That's pretty terrifying. That's pretty great.
Speaker 3:And then again at the end you kind of wander out a fake service corridor into.
Speaker 4:Quark's again. The janitor is fully assimilated, but he's a good assimilated. Yeah yeah, yeah. Well, you know I'm still missing an arm, but it comes in handy in a lot of ways, ain't too bad, let me tell you, sonny, don't knock Borg till you try it, you know.
Speaker 3:So that was the Star Trek experience. It was amazing. They shut it down after about 11 years for kind of a lot of reasons. Their lease had run out. It seemed like there were some diminishing returns, with people coming.
Speaker 4:Because by the time that the Star Trek adventure was shut down, it was like one of the stalwarts of the family-friendly Vegas. Yeah, because the rest of the stuff that had been installed Treasure Island had all of its pirates stuff, its Bob Gurr sinking ship had been taken out, yeah, and it had been turned into the sirens of TI, oh God. And then you know, the Mirage was not really what it was anymore.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 4:Oddly enough, by the time of this broadcast, the Mirage is now being demolished.
Speaker 3:Is it being? I thought it was just being taken over.
Speaker 4:No, it's being completely torn apart. Oh wow, they are selling pieces of the volcano.
Speaker 2:Wow, the giant bronze sculptures, the naked mermaids that greeted guests and everybody would feel them up.
Speaker 3:All right now on this month at Boardwalk Times, we're talking rumors about the Muppets returning to TV, a new documentary about Chadwick Boseman, my article about the hidden history of South African music in the Lion King and, of course, the news from Destination D23.
Speaker 2:Come check it all out at boardwalktimesnet.
Speaker 3:yeah, and I and I think this the the vegas thing. The star trek experience is really a great example of what we've been kind of selling for a while, which is actors human people, human performers make your environment and they bought in in that experience. Like they put actors everywhere, like those attractions cannot run without many trained actors in them. It was the right thing to do and it made it work and it's why people think about that thing so fondly today.
Speaker 4:Oh, yeah, I mean I've seen video of the day they literally closed the curtain on the attraction and you can see some of those longtime actors there saying goodbye and their eyes are full of tears. Yeah, they are just absolutely distraught that this is gone. Yeah, I mean, the time had come, but it was still very, very sad. It's like, oh boy, it really feels like an end of an era. Well, it's 11 years of their lives for some of them, Absolutely A full decade that you're dedicated to being a member of the crew of the Enterprise. Like, yeah, that's especially if you've gone through boot camp training with Lieutenant F Lee Ermey, you know, taking you out in the desert and making you do push-ups in a Star Trek uniform, you know that's insane, but it worked.
Speaker 4:It made it really feel good.
Speaker 3:That brings us to the last place. I would like to stop on our trip through Star Trek themed experiences, okay, and to get there, I want to talk to you about James Cawley. Talk to me about James Cawley. Talk to me about James Cawley. James Cawley is, I think, my new hero. I love this guy. I spent a good hunk of yesterday just watching videos of James Cawley. He was born about when I was. He's about my age, okay, so 27. Right, he's about 27 for the last 31 years, yeah, but he's done a lot more with his life.
Speaker 3:So far, so far 1984, he's trying to do Star Trek cosplay stuff. He calls up Paramount to ask Bill Theiss, who's the costume designer for the original series, and some of Next Generation for some details on some costumes he's trying to make. Oh jeez, paramount patches him through, of course, yeah.
Speaker 4:Warner Brothers is Paramount. Well, yeah, sure, no problem.
Speaker 3:He becomes a friend of Thijs. Thijs is just like I like this kid Thijs. Sure, he helps him out. And then at a certain point, you know, kali is showing interest in filmmaking, kali is showing interest in making costumes and making sets and Thijs brings him on as an intern. So Kali becomes an intern on Next Generation Nice. He does it for a few years. Thijs ends up leaving because he'd been doing Star Trek for a long time. Sure, kali has discovered his new career. Kali, who is also trying to make it as an actor at this point, has discovered that he is a really good Elvis impersonator. He leaves and becomes a full-time Elvis impersonator.
Speaker 3:A little less transportation a little more shuttle baby, okay go ahead. He is so good as an Elvis impersonator he becomes in high demand. He starts making a lot of money doing it, yeah, okay. At a certain point Bill Theis, the costume designer, passes away. Oh dear, and evidently in his will, are all of the original set design for the Enterprise from the original series. Oh wow, the actual ones they used. Oh, the blueprints, the blueprints, oh jeez. So one day James Gawley gets in the mail all of the blueprints for the original series.
Speaker 4:Okay.
Speaker 3:He decides that he's going to use them and start building those sets. He buys a, rents or something, an old auto repair shop in upstate New York. Right, he starts building the sets in there, invites people in to film Star Trek fan films. Nice, which become Star Trek, the New Voyages, wow, which later get called Star Trek Phase Two for some reason.
Speaker 4:The continuing voyages.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 4:The premise is that these are the other voyages that we didn't get to see, that are the five-year mission.
Speaker 2:Yes, yes.
Speaker 4:Including members of the original cast popping in as cameos. That's right yeah. George Takei Nichelle Nichols.
Speaker 3:I just watched the one with George Takei yesterday. I hadn't seen it before and the first half of it I was like this is not that great. By the end I was crying. I was like this is beautiful, it's really good he starts shooting these things with himself as Captain Kirk, right.
Speaker 4:Because essentially Kirk really is Elvis in space. Yeah, oh yeah, I mean, let's face it.
Speaker 3:And I gather that there's a lot of questions. In fact, I have this great quote, Atholian trap. I have this great quote from him where he says people were like, well, why does Kirk have Elvis hair? And he says and you'd have to explain Well, look, that's my day job. I'm not getting paid to play Star Trek.
Speaker 4:Elvis is paying for me to play Star Trek. Okay, fair enough, yeah.
Speaker 3:So, yeah, he starts, he's building these sets, he starts shooting the episodes, each episode, even though they're like only an hour long. They take about a year. Oh yeah, because they're amateurs, they don't have any money. Yeah, the only money they have is coming from Elvis impersonation gigs, and he's doing pretty well. Evidently there's some talk that early on to finish the sets, it cost about $100,000, which he fronted himself, wow, and then he was paying for the episodes to be filmed. Elvis pays. I guess there was a Wired article in 2005. He was at a science fiction convention in Pasadena.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And he was near William Shatner because he was going to go get Shatner's autograph Right, because Colley, in spite of all of these things, is just a fan, oh yeah. And he's standing there and someone comes up and yells hey, kirk and Collie and Shatner look at the same time. And someone goes not, you Bill him, wow, wow, wow. So he does these for a while. There's a couple other groups that are also doing fan films, yeah, and some of them are pretty good. The Star Trek Continues films. I've watched a bunch of those. They're real solid. Yeah, lou Ferrigno's in one, that's cool. Good old Lou. Yeah, lou Ferrigno's in one, that's cool, good old Lou, yeah. And so this is kind of going on.
Speaker 3:Paramount is just turning a blind eye At this point. I think it's CBS, which is just a division of Paramount, which is a division of Viacom at that point. But CBS is kind of going. It's fine, these guys aren't hurting anybody, yeah. And then Axanar happens. Do you know about Axanar? I do not know about Axanar. So Axanar was ostensibly a fan production. Okay, it happens around what year is that? Around 2015. Okay, and he's still making these things. So he's made about like nine or so of them. Oh, wow, at a certain point Kali drops out of being Kirk and has someone else do it.
Speaker 3:But he's still behind the scenes, oh wow. But in 2015, this other company starts making another, a Star Trek-based film called Axanar, and what they do is they get a lot of money, like they put a lot of money together, they put out a short film called Prelude to Axanar, which they're going to then use to massively crowdfund a big film, and they've loaded the film with professional actors. It's all people from Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 and Star Trek and CBS finally goes. Okay, that's too far.
Speaker 3:You've gone too far, and you know what they say. Like you don't moon the bear, they mooned the bear. Yeah, and don't give the mouse, a cookie, right, yeah, and so. And so the people with accident are, instead of doing what they should have done, which is just shut up and shut everything down, yeah, and say, hey, we're cool, they went to court, oh, no, and so they spent a couple of years in court with CBS. Cbs obviously won. I mean, they own the rights for God's sake.
Speaker 4:Sorry guys, you do not own Star Trek.
Speaker 3:That's all there is to it, and so at this point CBS came out and, to their credit, cbs didn't say you can no longer do Star Trek fan films. What they said was we have some stipulations. And the two biggest ones were no one who's working on our shows can work on your shows. Yeah, okay, fair, Fair, and they can't be longer than 15 minutes. That was a big one that knocked almost everyone out of the field, including Kali's New Voyages, right the field, including Kali's new voyages. Right, kali, on his own, kind of said we were about done. Anyway, we've been doing it for a long time, oh, yeah, a long time. But what he did was he went and rented out what used to be an old dollar store in his hometown of Ticonderoga, new York, and he moved all the sets there, okay, and then he finished the sets. So you know, he just he had built what he needed to film.
Speaker 4:Yeah, he was like but it's cut open in the back and it's kind of you know it's not an actually immersive environment.
Speaker 3:So now, he built the rest of it. That's awesome, and so, as you know, I did this very recently.
Speaker 4:Oh yeah.
Speaker 3:I went to Ticonderoga to experience the Star Trek, the original series set tour. And it, my friends, is like going to Mecca. Oh yeah, it's a big deal, it's so crazy. Go on.
Speaker 3:This is exactly what it sounds like when you're in there. Yeah, so what they do is so. And he made the deal with CBS and because he knew some people there he'd worked on TNGN on Deep Space Nine some people there, he'd worked on TNGN on Deep Space Nine. You know, at one point there was an episode of Enterprise where they actually named one of the ships, the USS Ticonderoga, as a tribute to Kali.
Speaker 4:Nice, yeah, that's cool.
Speaker 3:He appears briefly in the 2009 JJ Abrams film. He's on the bridge at one point. Yeah, so you know he's got some connections and he's like, hey, we'll be cool, can we do this, can we open it up to the public? And CBS, totally to their credit, said, yeah, that's fine. The only thing we ask is that you don't make any films, don't let anyone film in there. Okay, they can take pictures, that's okay. Just no moving films. We don't want anything that looks like a film.
Speaker 4:Yeah, okay, it's okay, reasonable. Yeah, so Kelly went and he kept sending me photographs of this and of course he wore a mustard yellow sweater, so he would be command crew.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and I had a. I totally busted him on it.
Speaker 4:I had an insignia. Oh yeah, I totally busted him on that one, and that's fine, because I probably would have done the damn same. Yeah, only I would probably been, you know, probably be blue, because I would be more of a science officer or something. Actually, no, I'd be, I'd probably be a red shirt, but you know, because that'd be funny too, because, yeah, because you gotta die sometime.
Speaker 3:Anyway, so I tell sometime anyway. So I tell you about like it's. It's a great experience. It's taikon. Dorog is a town that um, obviously it used to be next to a military fort or taikon dorog.
Speaker 3:It became a milling town. The mills eventually all shut down. It's been hard on its luck, yeah, for a while. Uh, one of the things that I saw an interview with collie where he was talking about it and he said you know, after we put this in people and people weren't sure that this was a great idea, but we put it in and we started seeing that people would travel there to see this. And he's like, and I'm starting to see the Main Street in my hometown wake up main street in my hometown, wake up and he's like, if this is all I can do is just bring back my childhood main street, that'll be enough.
Speaker 3:And I'm like God, I love this guy.
Speaker 4:That's so sweet, like that's pretty great. If you can do that with creativity and a love, with a passion of what you love, like that's pretty incredible. Yeah, like you know, like we live Kelly and I live not too far from a little. You know, we live in Vallejo, california, and we live not too far from a place called Mare Island, which was also a military base and the actual aircraft carrier. The Enterprise was actually built at Mare Island. Yeah, yeah, the Enterprise was actually built at Mare Island. Yeah, yeah, but there's some talk that Roddenberry had been talking about using Mare Island as the actual building spot for the Starship Enterprise. So there has been some talk locally like maybe we could do something Star Trek-y out here.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know most people know it's going to be in Iowa. You know where it's built Any canon followers.
Speaker 4:But again, it could be whatever you want. There's nothing actually Star Trek related in Ticonderoga, New York, except Kali making it part of that mythos. So fine, who cares? That's really, really sweet and that type of fan dedication is what I love. I love seeing that.
Speaker 3:I do too, and you know there's this quote and I actually read this to Pete earlier, but I'll say it again. I saw an interview with Kali where he was talking about the downtown. But the other thing he said and this kind of relates to what you were saying before is someone asked him about following his passion and he said if you let people tell you that your passion is foolish, you're going to destroy yourself, you're going to go down a dark path. And he just he didn't. He followed his passion. He said I'm interested in Star Trek.
Speaker 3:I'm going to call the guy, I'm going to be on the sets, I'm going to build my own Star Trek sets, I'm going to start impersonating Elvis, I'm going to make my own Star Trek show. But I'll tell you about going to this experience. So you're in downtown Ticonderoga, which is a struggling city, and you kind of go there and there's this storefront and there's video screens showing you episodes outside, and then there's this whole thing of like biological images of different kinds of Tribbles, and part of this, part of their Tribble centricness is because David Gerald, who wrote the Trouble with Tribbles, lives not far from there and tends to go down and do events all the time.
Speaker 4:So, okay, little back back a little bit to Gyros. Remember when I mentioned earlier that it was inspired by Bob Burns and his Halloween shows. What was the writer's name? Again, david Gerrold. David Gerrold and DC Fontana were friends of Bob's and would actually help him with his Halloween shows.
Speaker 3:Wow that's amazing DC.
Speaker 4:Fontana actually met her future husband, one of the Skotek brothers, while building a replica of the alien from 19,. You know Ridley Scott's Alien? Wow, and they were building and, like the Skotek brothers, are like big Star Trek nerds, they're like hey, you know, diane Fontana's here working over there. And finally, we're like man, I wonder who this DC Fontana? I can't find anything about who this is. And finally, like she invited him over to take a look at a VCR that she had just bought.
Speaker 4:Ooh, and they were both tech nerds and they fell in love. Yeah, and it's like I'm dating DC Fontana. His brother's like shut up. Yeah, that's really cool. What a little love story, right, but they would do all these crazy shows. You know we should do an episode actually about Bob with Haunted Houses and replicas. Yeah, maybe that'll be a future show. We can go into the wonderful world of Bob Burns. Yeah, because that's an experience all on its own. But anyway, yeah, but that totally falls in line with what's going on in, you know, ticonderoga. I'm not surprised that he's helping out, because that's right up the same level of fan dedication as Bob would have shown with some of his shows.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and you just you go in. You buy a ticket ahead of time, you go in, and I'm going to say this very carefully. So my tour guide was wonderful it was. I mean, there was a group tour, but I had kind of bought the special photo tour, which was like $10 more. It wasn't a big deal. So it was just me and a tour guide. She was terrific. She just knew so much about these sets and stuff. So I'm not being disparaging when I say this. When you walk in, there's this area with a bunch of kind of low, a little bit ratty couches and there are. When I walked in there was maybe six people like five women, one man, all dressed in original series Star Trek uniforms, lounging and looking at you and it feels a little bit like walking into a nerdy cat house.
Speaker 4:Which Ensign would you like?
Speaker 3:And there very much was. Like I kind of walked in and people sort of looked at me and then they looked back to what they were doing. I was like, okay. And then I walked into the next room and told the woman about my reservation and she was like oh, okay, you have the photo tour. I would have reservations too, and one of the women stood up and she was like I got him, I'll take him.
Speaker 4:I'm Trixie. I'm your ensign for today.
Speaker 3:And that said, it just looked funny, but the shoe is incredibly nice, incredibly knowledgeable.
Speaker 4:That's cool.
Speaker 3:And they set it up so that when you come in, you don't see any of the sets. You see this, uh wooden wall with writing on it. This is property of desilu studios nice, and so it's set up to look like a studio nice okay and when you're in there, everything's to the dimensions of a studio okay, and so you can see. You know if you look the right way. In certain places you can see like lighting rigs and stuff above you that's cool yeah, like that they really worked hard at it.
Speaker 3:You just you go through this thing and it is they have like craft services over there with a huge ashtray.
Speaker 4:That'd be great cartons all over the place and you, just you go through.
Speaker 3:They do the same thing that you experienced with the doors, like she would go reach behind and pull the little cord and open the automatic doors for me. And I got to sit in the doctor's chair and I got to operate the transporter and I just, you know, it's every set that you see of the Enterprise from the original series. It's beautiful, it's an amazing experience and just you get these kind of constant factoids that you didn't know before, because they're all deep production information. Sure, you know, some of the things in there were screen used from the show. Some of them they built. It's just incredible and, of course, it all climaxes with you going onto the bridge. Yeah, and since I was in the special photo tour, I, you got to sit in the chair.
Speaker 3:I sat in the chair alone, you know, and got to survey everything around. It was just General order 25.
Speaker 4:Yeah, blow them all up.
Speaker 3:So you know, so it's you know. It's a combination of this kind of in-depth experience and it's it's something that that would have fit very well in early universal, where it's like you are part of this production.
Speaker 4:Yeah.
Speaker 3:You know you, you are seeing behind the scenes, but you were also in the scenes.
Speaker 4:Yeah, I mean, I kind of like that because it builds you up to the imagination. Part of it, yeah, and it's like you know, it's one thing to immerse you into that world with not a single nod that this is still fun. Yeah, it actually. For me it was actually even more important the fact that I could see the plywood, I could see the coats hanging off of the back of the you know the flats and stuff, and then all of a sudden you're on the Enterprise. It's like I don't care, I'm on the Enterprise. Yeah, this is great, I'm here, man, like, show me a Romulan, let's go. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 3:It's just remarkable how quickly your mind will flip Like I'm seeing backstage. I'm seeing backstage, I'm in space.
Speaker 4:And Kelly, I'm in space. And Kelly, I have to say the photographs that he sent me the first thing, and I'm going to make him smile here, because he was on another trip and he hadn't had a chance to shave yet. I immediately started making Commodore Decker jokes. It's like start freaking out. Look, it's the Doomsday Machine, dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun machine.
Speaker 2:Overacting Sweaty guy.
Speaker 3:All right, pete. Yes, I think we have reached that time. Yes, yes indeed.
Speaker 4:Unless you have anything more you'd like to say about Ticonderoga or Las Vegas or the Klingon encounter, or you'd like to make fun of Guardians of the Galaxy or Elvis. There was one attempt to kind of make this type of immersive thing one more time. There was a traveling exhibit. It was like the science of Star Trek. Oh yeah, I kind of recall that. It was like the science of Star Trek. Oh yeah, I kind of recall that. That went rambling around the United States and it was a pop-up traveling exhibit. That was early 2000s kind of thing and I'm not sure where any of the. I don't know who designed it, I don't know what company built it. Yeah, or if any of the props and anything were like taken from Vegas, it would certainly make sense that some of those props would, you know, go from hand to hand and wind up from Vegas into this exhibit or whatever.
Speaker 4:Yeah, it was okay, you know it hit all of the right marks for all the Trek nerds, but it was mostly just like look at these props and sets from the show, yeah, and some science was thrown in there. Yeah, kind of like yeah, you know space there you go.
Speaker 3:Am I right? Am I right yeah?
Speaker 4:space. Final Frontier, who cares? Okay, let's look at Klingon stuff. You know, like, all right, they did have Chancellor Gorkon's outfit from Star Trek VI. That was kind of cool. Oh, that's neat. David Warner's weird. You know, the poofy pants Klingon outfits, yeah, that everybody hates, but I actually kind of like it looks good on Admiral Chang. Right, christopher Plummer, he looks amazing in his poofy pants outfit. Yeah, I don't know if it was. I found it was suitable for him to wear that because he's supposed to be. You know, he is this great Shakespearean actor from Canada, yeah, and they make this big deal about. You've never experienced, you know, hamlet until you've seen the original Klingon. The original Klingon, yeah, and I think it's actually kind of fitting that he has this semi-puffy Shakespearean look to his outfit. Yeah, I find that slightly suitable. Like it's almost like you're watching A man for All Seasons, but it's Klingon.
Speaker 3:Have you ever heard that great quote Christopher Plummer said about Sound of Music.
Speaker 4:He said watching Sound of Music is like being beaten to death with a Hallmark card. Yeah, pretty much, Pretty much. I love it. So yeah, so on that note, let's beat our audience to death with something else. Yeah, this is the part of the show where we talk about how to improve or how to plus up, shall we say, these attractions, or at least this notion of an attraction, without any thought of safety or budget or time constraints, and let's just let our brains go wild. Yeah, who goes?
Speaker 3:first on this one If you've got something, go for it, because I'm still fabricating. Right now, my brain is like a 3D printer and it's going real slow.
Speaker 4:You know, oddly enough, I actually did kind of come up with this while we were talking about the Ticonderoga, okay, and I thought first off I mean I was only I thought it'd be.
Speaker 4:I've seen this happen at Star Trek conventions and I think a much more quote-unquote official version of this could actually be very interesting.
Speaker 4:Yeah, we have the technology to do this at relatively small budget and this would be fun for a lot of mom-and-pop places like Ticonderoga to actually do, and this would be fun for a lot of mom and pop places like Ticonderoga to actually do, in which they would at some of these conventions they will set up two conference halls, so that way they put a television monitor like a projection screen, so you've got the and they kind of set up rudimentary little stations like you're on a bridge, yeah, and then they have space battles and interact with each other as if they're on board these ships.
Speaker 4:Oh, nice, and it's clever. Yeah, I think it'd be kind of cool to actually have a couple other fanboys out there. Yeah, maybe set up another version of the Ticonderoga Like hey, send off. You know, find another group of dedicated fans who want their version of it. Yeah, send it over and let them get copies of those blueprints and they build their Enterprise set with the notion that the Ticonderoga, on certain days, is actually hooked up to that other bridge and they have scenarios between each other.
Speaker 3:Oh, interesting, or maybe one's a.
Speaker 4:Klingon ship. Go see the Klingon ship over in Kentucky, the Kentucky Klingon ship, whatever, and then you can actually have ship-to-ship. But you're actually like state-to-state interactive. Right, it's like a you know, star Trek, zoom call, yeah, but you set up like interactive scenarios where, like, the events on one ship affect the other.
Speaker 3:Oh, that'd be awesome.
Speaker 4:Back and forth for a couple, couple of hours and you just play at it and have fun. Yeah it's, you know it's like doing cops and robbers, but just for nerds. Yeah, like, and I say that with all affection, absolutely. So I think you know it'd be goofy, it'd be fun, but it'd be kind of goofy, but I like it. Yeah, so that'd be the closest thing I have to a plus-up, because it'd be pretty hard to top the Star Trek experience at the Hilton.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that was just a remarkable thing in a remarkable time.
Speaker 4:And it hits a cultural milestone because it was right in the middle of the perfect timing for the zeitgeist to hit.
Speaker 3:For me, the tricky thing about putting Star Trek into theme parks is that you are sort of pressured into action-adventure Mm-hmm, because that's what a thematic experience is usually. Sure, it's like you have some sort of dramatic rise. You have some sort of conflict. You overcome the conflict, you get out. Yeah, but that's not really the nature of Star Trek. Star Trek can do it. Wrath of Khan is proof of that. Yeah, but that's not really the nature of what makes that franchise great. I agreed. So I would like to see something that was more an environment than an adventure. Yeah, I can see that we love adventures, but more of an environment than an adventure. Yeah, I can see that, like, we love adventures but more of an environment. And I'd love to see some sort of environment that kind of deals with the history of the Federation and instead of like attaching to a character and saying we're going to go do this and fight this guy, we get led around to like important scenes of the Federation or Federation science or you know, you know how. Welcome to the Daystrom Institute.
Speaker 4:I am great, you are great.
Speaker 3:I will show you around, kirk. Destroy my work, kirk, you remember, like Space Station X-9 or the 20,000 Leagues exhibit at Disneyland, where you're just going through and kind of experiencing what that environment was like? Yeah, and if you're lucky, they did something. This is my nerdery.
Speaker 3:They did something really clever in the third season of Star Trek Discovery, which is they put them in a time where the Federation had died out oh yeah, gone, oh yeah. And then challenged the characters to live up to its ideals without all the support systems. Wow, and it was brilliant, really brilliant, wow. And so I would like and it's very inspirational, like I've talked to people who were like I got choked up about this because I reinvigorated in my mind why the Federation was a great idea and I would like to see something that does something like that, where you get and they can fabric, they can make up events, it doesn't matter, sure, just have someone like led through a history of the Federation Museum and maybe at the end, you know, captain Archer gets to give his big speech that they should have let him give at the end of Enterprise, but they didn't Right, they talked about all episodes and then you never saw.
Speaker 4:He just reaches into his pocket and pulls out Ziggy and cleans out Quantum Leap style.
Speaker 3:But I think that would be my thing More like an attraction, that was more of an environment that gave you a sense of what it would be like to live in the Federation.
Speaker 4:That's cool. I like that, yeah, bringing the hopefulness back.
Speaker 3:That's it, exactly Everything that we've talked about. I love Star Trek, the Experience. I thought the Star Trek Adventure at Universal was a lot of fun, but it's all about conflict and violence. Sure, and you can have some of that for sure. But let's do something hopeful and positive.
Speaker 4:Well, we live not too far away from Alameda, where they keep the nuclear vessels.
Speaker 3:The nuclear vessels.
Speaker 4:That would be. You could probably do it in Alameda.
Speaker 3:I don't think they keep them there anymore oh that's too bad.
Speaker 4:I'm keeping the enterprise. Well, here we are. We are at the end of another episode, I think.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I think so too.
Speaker 4:In our next episode we'll take you to other regions beyond, shall we say so. Thanks a lot for listening. My name's Peter Overstreet.
Speaker 3:Yes, and I would like to say live long and prosper, Pete.
Speaker 4:Yes, indeed, you as well. I have been and always shall be your friend.
Speaker 3:That's right, there you go. Of all the people I've met in my travels, his was the most human.
Speaker 4:On that note I'm Peter Overstreet, I'm Kelly.
Speaker 3:McGovern, you've been listening to the Lowdown on the Plus.
Speaker 2:App.
Speaker 3:We hope you've enjoyed this episode of the Lowdown on the Plus Up. If you have, please tell your friends where you found us, and if you haven't, we can pretend this never happened and need not speak of it again. For a lot more thoughts on theme parks and related stuff, check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at boardwalktimesnet. Related stuff check out my writing for Boardwalk Times at boardwalktimesnet. Feel free to reach out to Pete and I at Lowdown on the Plus Up on Blue Sky, mastodon, instagram and all the other socials, or you can send us a message directly at comments at lowdown-plus-upcom. We really want to hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. To hear about how you'd plus these attractions up and read some of your ideas on the show. Our theme music is Goblin Tinker Soldier Spy by Kevin MacLeod at incompetechcom.
Speaker 2:We'll have a new episode out real soon. Why? Because we like you. The Joy of the Wild, Softly, without blame. The joy is over the white gun beneath the rose door. Oh, I've lost you. Yes, I've lost you. I can't reach you anymore. We are too tall to know. Now the reason can't stand and move forth from the night. Sex should like. The baby will be crying and you will stumble Sleeping to the door.
