Posts

Showing posts with the label Star Trek franchise

A response to 'Why do people have to choose between Star Trek and Star Wars? Why can't we just love them both equally?'

Image
I have never understood why  some  science fiction/fantasy fans insist that  there has to be an “either/or” choice  and that one has to like one franchise but not the other. I was three years old and living outside the U.S. when  Star Trek: The Original Series  premiered on Sept. 8, 1966, and the show did not air in the South American country where we were until 1970. Thus my introduction to Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the voyages of the  Starship Enterprise  was not under the most optimal of circumstances. We only had black-and-white TV (even if you owned a color set, that country didn’t yet broadcast in color), and of course the series was dubbed in Spanish. I was a kid who had forgotten any English that I’d learned as a toddler, but even at the age of seven I noticed one detail about Latin American TV: every imported American show used the same voice actors to dub the Spanish-language audio track. As a result, the US shows, which at the time included  Star Trek, Hogan’s Heroes, T

Book Review: 'The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future - Fourth Edition' (2016)

Image
Over the past quarter century, the publishing world has released four editions of Michael and Denise Okuda's The Star Trek Encyclopedia: A Reference Guide to the Future. The first three editions were published by Simon & Schuster imprint Pocket Books, the same license holder that has produced hundreds of paperback and hardcover books based on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek: The Original Series since 1979.    The first edition of The Star Trek Encyclopedia was published in May of 1994, just as Star Trek: The Next Generation's seven-season run in syndication wound down. Due to the vagaries of the book's production schedule, this edition - co-written by the Okudas with Debbie Mirek - covers Star Trek: The Original Series in its entirety, the first six theatrical films, most of Star Trek: The Next Generation (but not much of Season Seven), and part of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's premiere season. This edition was published as a hardcover (which was tough to find i