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This article contains spoilers for "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" showrunners Akiva Goldsman and Henry Alonso Myers are mindful of "Star Trek" canon. They have to be, since this is a prequel series that must lead into "Star Trek: The Original Series." At the same time, Goldsman has admitted that "Strange New Worlds" sometimes looks at canon as more of a loose guideline. The writers aren't out to change too much, but "ultimately, story wins."

The loose canon is most apparent in how "Strange New Worlds" has been handling the aliens known as the Gorn. Introduced in classic "Star Trek" episode "Arena," the Gorn are an aggressive reptilian race that destroys a Federation outpost. Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is forced into a one-on-one trial by combat with the Gorn ship's captain.

In "Arena," the Enterprise...

The Vasquez Rocks Natural Area Park is located in the northern part of Los Angeles County, about a 45-minute drive from Hollywood proper (depending on traffic). They are a popular tourist destination because the layered rock formations jut out of the ground at strange, wild angles, giving them an alien look. They were named after Tiburcio Vásquez, a notoriously clever Mexican bandit who hid out among the rocks while eluding the cops back in the 1870s. Hikers have been hiding out among the rocks ever since, admiring their otherworldly beauty. 

Vasquez Rocks has been a popular shooting destination for dozens of major films and TV shows, largely because they're such a short drive from all the production offices in Los Angeles. It's easy to bundle the cast of "Star Trek" into a van, dress three stuntman as a Gorn character, and go to the Rocks to film actors pretend-fight each other.

This week on the Film Stories Podcast Network: American idols, almost birthday girls, Oscar hopefuls and more. Here’s what we’ve been up to…

Podcast-616

Suit up as the Marvel Cinematic Universe kicks off perhaps its most important year since the endgame, with Hugh McStay and Robert Clark teaming up to look at Captain America: Brave New World…

Modern Horror

Listen to the episode talking Longlegs nowwwww, with Aj Black, Hugh McStaaaaay and Dan Owen, and it’ll be nice, but if you don’t listen nowwwww, then we’ll have to make more episodes, not onnnnce, not twiiiiiiice, but as many times as we liiiiiiiike!

Academy Watch

You can practically smell the Oscars coming off Bo Nicholson’s podcast as this week, he chats The Brutalist with Ian Buckley, The Wild Robot with Craig McKenzie and Dune Part Two with Sam Stokes, but what are their chances?

Writers...

Star Trek: The Cruise VIII is now underway with fans celebrating the 30th anniversary of Star Trek: Voyager. Celebrities will include most of the Voyager cast, and based on a report from Trekmovie, the first day is off to a grand start. As always, the celebrity guests for next year's cruise have already been posted on the Star Trek: The Cruise website and it's no wonder there are a lot of Star Trek actors and surprise guests aboard.

Next year will be the 60th anniversary celebration of the beginning of Star Trek. Star Trek: The Original Series debuted in 1966, and both William Shatner and Walter Koenig will be aboard to help celebrate. Also included from The Original Series are Sean Kenney who played Captain Pike in The Menagerie, Sandra Gimpel, who portrayed the Salt Vampire in The Man Trap, and Bobby Clark who played the Gorn in Arena. This could...

Even non-Trekkies likely know the "Star Trek" episode "Arena". That's the episode wherein Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is chosen by a godlike alien species to go to Vasquez Rocks in California -- I mean a distant alien world called Cestus III -- to fight a lizard-like alien called a Gorn. The Gorn captain was voiced by Ted Cassidy and played by stunt performers Bobby Clark, Gary Combs, and Bill Blackburn. The fight between Kirk and the Gorn is notoriously cheesy, with the two performers making awkward and slow movements that are about as thrilling as watching two people wrestle with shopping carts at their local grocery store. 

In order to best the Gorn in combat, Kirk must employ some long-forgotten geological knowledge, creating flash powder and explosions from compounds in the local rocks. He constructs a rudimentary mortar cannon out of a bamboo shoot and manages to blast his foe...

Did you know that the Gorn have lips? 

Evidence presented in the 1967 "Star Trek" episode "Arena" might stand counter to that assertion, as the mask worn by (alternately) Bobby Clark, Gary Combs, and Bill Blackburn didn't have an articulated jaw or mouth. Indeed, the Gorn mask has been widely giggled at by Trekkies and non-Trekkies alike. The fight between the Gorn captain and Captain Kirk (William Shatner) is usually considered broadly campy, what with its stiffness and slowness. 

But the Gorn -- an aggressive reptilian species -- actually do speak their own language. In "Arena," the Gorn captain (voiced by Ted Cassidy) spoke to Captain Kirk using a miniature, hand-held translation device. He explained that the Federation had set up a colony on Cestus III, which was unknowingly a Gorn world. The Gorn, rather than negotiate or file a complaint, merely laid waste to the colony and killed everyone living there.

This post contains spoilers for "Hegemony," the season 2 finale of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds."

Although it takes place in a vast, exotic galaxy full of high-tech starships, strange aliens, holodecks, and food replicators, "Star Trek" has often functioned best when it's straining against a budget. Not that plain green monochrome skies looked good, or that styrofoam rocks added texture and dimension to the drama, but the franchise's writers tended to find more interesting stories when limited to six starship sets and a handful of dedicated actors. When the show did want to visit an alien world, the studio typically bundled the cast and crew onto vans and drove to a natural preserve just outside of Los Angeles to shoot. Kirk (William Shatner) famously fought the Gorn captain at Vasquez Rocks. The planet from "The Paradise Syndrome" was merely the Franklin Canyon Reservoir. The locations are well-known to SoCal residents.

Mayor of Kingstown co-creator Hugh Dillon first pitched the Paramount+ series to his fellow co-creator Taylor Sheridan when the latter was his acting coach in 2008. Dillon starred on CBS’ Flashpoint for five seasons, and Sheridan coached him throughout all 75 episodes. The duo became fast friends in the process, prompting Dillon to bring up the idea for Kingstown, based on his own experiences in Canada’s “penitentiary city” of Kingston.

Sheridan then put pen to paper for the first time, as Mayor of Kingstown was developed long before Sheridan received critical acclaim as the screenwriter of Sicario (2015) and Hell or High Water (2016). Riding high on the success of those two films, Sheridan proceeded to make his directorial debut by way of the Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen-led Wind River (2017).

Oddly enough, Dillon and Sheridan had always envisioned Renner in the starring role of Mike McLusky on Kingstown, so Sheridan put...

The teen sex comedy craze kicked into overdrive in the spring of 1982 when Bob Clark's semi-autobiographical raunch-fest "Porky's" stunned the industry by racking up 105 million for distributor 20th Century Fox at the U.S. box office. The nation's critics shredded it, but the film's target audience didn't care. They identified with the characters' unabashedly juvenile antics, and kept going back for more.

You'd think rival studios, which rushed their own hormonally addled high-school comedies into production, would've been fine with this critical/commercial trade-off, but Universal had serious misgivings about their August 1982 release, "Fast Times at Ridgemont High." In fact, according to director Amy Heckerling and star Judge Reinhold, they nearly shelved it.

Too Hot For Theatrical?

In a 40th anniversary article for The Hollywood Reporter, Reinhold, who plays the wincingly overconfident Ridgemont senior Brad Hamilton, alleges that executive resistance to the material was fierce. "We were really heartsick,...

"Star Trek: Strange New Worlds" features the third television appearance of the reptilian Gorn. It also marks the development of the third method used to bring the scary lizards to life.

The original Gorn, the villain of the classic "Star Trek" episode "Arena," was portrayed by stuntmen Bobby Clark and Gary Combs. The pair wore a rubber get-up designed by Wah Chang. When the Gorn reappeared almost 40 years later in the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "In a Mirror Darkly," the crew used CGI and motion capture instead. In "Strange New Worlds," the crew combined practical and digital effects, using puppetry and CGI...

The post How Star Trek: Strange New Worlds Brought The Gorn to Life appeared first on /Film.

This is one for the C-movie connoisseurs among you.

For those of you who don’t know (you won’t), there’s a new sci-fi spoof on the way called Unbelievable!!!!! It stars Snoop Dogg, 42 former Star Trek actors, Michael Madsen, and a ficus on a skateboard. That ought to answer all of your questions.

In the can for what appears to have been an eternity (some of the footage dates back as far as 2013), the film does at last have a release date. I say at last, but I’m not sure it was at the top of anyone’s list of movie treasure troves. Anyway, if you’re feeling particularly trashy (there’s no shame in that), sit down for Unbelievable!!!!! in an online premiere this August 1st. The premiere will also come with a virtual convention.

Two more items on the agenda to go through. One is the trailer,...

Indie Rights has acquired domestic distribution rights to Unbelievable!!!!!, the Steven L. Fawcette-helmed sci-fi film that stars Snoop Dogg and over forty former Star Trek cast members from the movies and TV series. The company will also launch foreign sales at the Virtual Cannes Film Market on June 24.

The pic stars Kirk Stillwood, a puppet created by the Chiodo Brothers. It follows the crazy exploits of four off-beat astronauts (one is a marionette) who travel to the Moon on a rescue mission to determine the fate of two Space Agency comrades who have not been heard from in several days. The individuals they find at the Lunar Base are not who they appear to be and, through acts of trickery and deception, nearly succeed in killing them. Soon the astronauts find themselves trying to save the Earth from Plant Aliens!

Additional co-stars include Michael Madsen, and Gilbert Gottfried, with cameos from Robert Davi,...

A super-classic receives a super ‘Olive Signature’ Blu-ray release. CineSavant clears up some online rumors complaining that the disc producers didn’t do a full restoration. The original release Superscope version of Don Siegel’s soul-shaking chiller has been handsomely remastered — and with the extras we’ve awaited for 12 years.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Blu-ray

Olive Films

1956 / B&W / 2:1 widescreen / 80 min. / Olive Signature Edition / Street Date October 16, 2018 / 39.95

Starring Kevin McCarthy, Dana Wynter, Larry Gates, King Donovan, Carolyn Jones, Jean Willes, Virginia Christine, Whit Bissell, Richard Deacon, Bobby Clark, Dabbs Greer, Marie Selland, Sam Peckinpah.

Cinematography Ellsworth Fredericks

Film Editor Robert S. Eisen

Original Music Carmen Dragon

Written by Daniel Mainwearing from a magazine serial by Jack Finney

Produced by Walter Wanger

Directed by Don Siegel

One of the greatest of 1950s science fiction films transcends the genre so neatly that many don’t see it as Sci-fi at all,...

It’s a Trekkie delight. No idea why so many Star Trek actors thought this was a great idea, but they did. Snoop Dogg seems to be the furthest thing away from sci-fi as you can get, but he’s one of the stars Unbelievable, a parody film that uses a puppet for James T. Kirk. Watch the trailer for below.

The original score was written/composed by Emmy-winning, Oscar-nominated Gerald Fried — the last living composer from the original Star Trek series.

Snoop Dogg executive produced the film from writer-director Steven Fawcette that also stars Nichelle Nichols (who also co-produced), Angelique Fawcette (also a producer), Michael Madsen and Robert Davi. Also in the film are Casper Smart, Sam Asghari, Gilbert Gottfried and newcomer Katarina Van Derham.

Here are some of the 40-plus Star Trek actors who also appear: Garrett Wang, Chase Masterson Tim Russ, Armin Shimerman, Vaughn Armstrong, Gary Graham,...

I don’t know about you, but I keep forgetting to watch Star Trek: Discovery.

I don’t know about you, but I couldn’t wait for each episode of Star Trek Continues.

As I’m sure you know, CBS, through the complicated Hollywood system of it’s mine, it’s mine!, owns the television rights to Trek and in its infinite wisdom stupidity decided to launch Discovery on their streaming network. Which you have to pay for.

Star Trek Continues, a continuation of the five-year mission of the Constellation class starship USS Enterprise Ncc-1701, captained by James Tiberius Kirk, is a love-fast to the original series. It is available for free on YouTube and its own website.

Stc was co-produced by the non-profit charity Trek Continues, Inc., Dracogen, Far From Home LLC and Farragut Films, and was partially funded by Kickstarter, in an incredibly successful campaign of crowd sourcing.

In September 2015, local agencies responded to a neighbor’s call about a mobile home in the remote Arnold Valley section of Rockbridge County, Virginia, according to courthouse officials.

Investigators discovered a terrible scene of filth and violence at the home, where half-siblings Robert Eugene Clark, 39, and Samantha Simmons, 30, were sexually abusing two girls, about 4 and 8 years old at the time, authorities alleged.

This week, Clark and Simmons were sentenced to prison after he entered an Alford plea — a type of guilty plea in which the defendant maintains their innocence — and she pleaded guilty.

Here are five things to know about the case.

A brother and his half-sister were convicted Tuesday of sexually abusing two girls, which the prosecuting attorney described as the most disturbing sex crime he has ever encountered.

“There’s no other way to describe this than as a family orgy,” Jared Moon, the chief deputy commonwealth’s attorney for Lexington city and Rockbridge County, Virginia, reportedly said during his closing argument.

After being convicted, 39-year-old Robert Eugene Clark was sentenced to 130 years in prison (with 65 suspended) on nine counts, which include rape, aggravated sexual battery and taking indecent liberties, People confirms.

Clark’s half-sibling Samantha Simmons, 30, was sentenced to...

One thing I can’t get enough of are comic book conventions. I started attending eight years ago and haven’t looked back. If you’ve never been (and are at all interested in comics) I encourage you to check out at least one if it’s within a reasonable distance. I promise, you won’t experience anything like it as they have an energy all their own.

This passed weekend Wizard World delivered their comic convention to Toronto, Canada. It was an inaugural event here in Canada but there were no shortage of attendees. While the list of guests was not as huge as I would have liked, there were some interesting names. Firefly’s Jewel Staite, Battlestar Galactica’s Kandyse McClure and Luciana Carro, Buck Roger’s Gil Gerard and Erin Gray, and Caprica’s own Magda Apanowicz.

A couple very notable appearances were made by Bob Clark,...

Everybody's asking the question: "Who's going to serve as the villain or villains in the sequel to last summer's Star Trek?" Now that we're in an alternate Trek timeline, writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman are free to tell stories that incorporate familiar faces but combine them in new and interesting ways.

Which got us thinking: who's likely to make the short list, and what sort of possible stories/combinations might we see? Will the filmmakers choose to go the route of borrowing once more from canon...or will they elect to craft an entirely new story with entirely new antagonists?

Since new antagonists are impossible to predict, we decided to look to the original canon and have offered a list of possible villains from which Orci and Kurtzman could choose. We've divided the categories up into four groups:

The Heavy Hitters

The Middleweight Contenders

The Individual Narcissists

And finally:...

I arrived at WonderCon around mid afternoon and walked the floor to see what they had. It is a lot more low key than the San Diego Comic-Con and the focus is so much more on comics and video games.

The hall is only 2/3rds full of vendors and booths today. It’s odd to see so much empty floor space in a convention like this. Is the economy hitting even here? I’ve been told that the Con filled the hall last year.

There were quite a few folks signing autographs. Most were character actors like Bobby Clark, the man who wore the Gorn suit on Star Trek and Anthony Forest, the storm trooper who said “These aren’t the droids we’re looking for” in Star Wars.

The bigger draws that I saw were the likes of Richard Kiel and Mark Hamill.

When I tried to get a snap of Kiel,...