Sometimes you wakeup and got nuthin' to say. So you start typing and hope by the time you finish what you're typing your brain will get to where it needs to be and you can start putting together a well written and insightful post.
Nuthin'.
Oh there it is.
Red Letter Media is filming a series about their favorite Star Trek TNG episodes. We strongly suggest them, as we watch Mr. Plinkett's Star Wars Prequel reviews once a year as kind of a warning. One can learn a lot by watching people who actually understand movies take apart the work of a man who does not.* One can glean many creative insights from Red Letter Media. They're a big influence.
And so is Star Trek: TNG. During the summer of 1984 we'd stay up late and watch the old Trek on WPIX Channel 11. We were a fan of the original but ignored TNG for the first few seasons. A good thing actually, because the two seasons run by Gene Roddenberry totally sucked. Roddenberry pretty much just got the band back together, and they wrote episodes like it was 1967. The results were out of place, disastrous cringe-fests.
Thing really got good during season three. One evening in 1990 we turned on the TV and saw was a bunch of people standing on the lip of a crater. This was the first episode in TNG's two part Best of Both Worlds, in which The Federation fights off a Borg invasion. We were hooked. But more importantly, we were inspired.
That was the moment, the spark across the sky. That's when we saw something we liked so much we wish we had written it. That's when we knew we wanted to write for a living. And so we do.
*George Lucas is a talentless pudge-boy who made an awful movie that was saved in editing by his wife and Richard Chew, who won and Oscar for his trouble. Lucas mostly stayed away from Empire and Jedi, which explains why they're so good. God bless Irvin Kershner and Richard Marquand.
