Talking Simpsons - Bonus New Year's Episode - Talking Futurama "Where No Fan Has Gone Before" (With Andrew Jupin)

Episode Date: January 10, 2024

The Talking Simpsons Network is taking a week off for the holiday season, so to fill the content gap, we've decided to post an episode of our Patreon-exclusive Talking Futurama podcast miniseries! If you like this episode and want to hear the rest (with more to come every month), head over to Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and sign up at the $5 level. Once you do, you'll have immediate access to all of our limited miniseries, covering animated shows like King of the Hill, Mission Hill, The Critic, and Batman: The Animated Series. So visit Patreon.com/TalkingSimpsons and sign up today!

Once again, television has given me a reason to live. Good news everyone, it's Talking Futurama, the podcast that's touchingly pathetic. I'm your host, the nerd with a skin problem Bob Mackie, and this is the Talking Simpsons Patreon's chronological exploration of Futurama, who is here with me today as always. Hey, it's Henry Gilbert, and I dab my own friends and credit cards and keys. And who is our special guest on the line today?

Andrew Jupin, and I'm starting this by saying Shatner's Log. And this month's podcast is all about the episode where no fan has gone before. You can't let a TV show be your whole life. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.

Anyway, this episode originally aired on April 21st 2002 and as always, Henry will tell us what happened on this mythical day in real world history. Welcome to the world of tomorrow. Good news, Bobby. Toonami expands to three hours

for more Dragon Ball. TLC's Lisa Left Eye Lopez passes away tragically, as does Lane Stanley of Alice in Chains. And Dan Castellaneta releases the comedy album I Am Not Homer. And if that sounds familiar to any listeners, that's because it's aired the same night as Gump Roast, the last clip show of the simpsons not great episode and it's connected to the leonard nimoy book i am not spock exactly that's

that's also why i picked it yeah the or that is one of the facts yeah it's uh uh andrew i don't know how familiar you are with the cast lenetta album i am not homer i'm learning about it right now so he basically uh you know dan before he became the voice of homer simpson he was and still is a improv comedy performer and a very good one and so he did a whole album of basically sketches that he wrote with his wife and writing partner deb la lacusta and that the cover of it, though, the statement is, I am not Homer because it's no Simpsons stuff until the one song at the end. Isn't he doing the Vulcan greeting on the cover, and there's a little Homer head between his fingers?

So it's a parody of the Nimoy book, I am not Spock's cover, except he's doing the, there, I can do it. But he puts a Homer between it uh we're all doing it we're all doing it uh but unlike uh nimoy he did not later release an album called i am homer because nimoy did put out i am spock he's getting close to the age nimoy was when he put that out so it's not too late he can still do it and tsunami is this the saturday block without all the anime in it uh it's no it's a regular daytime okay oh sorry I'm thinking of Adult Swim I apologize yes

I guess by now right I mean he's still doing it of course he's still doing the voices like Castellaneta has to have come to terms just like Nimoy with like yeah dude you are Homer Simpson like that's okay you know and his

Dan's version of directing star trek two uh four three and four is being an executive producer on the show who's like in the writer's room for some episodes so is that happening now or is that something that was years ago it's actually been for about 20 years now on the show is that right it shows you how much i've kept up on like quote unquote modern simpsons or whatever. I had no idea. I believe he and his wife have written a number of episodes together. Including Gumpros. Including Gumpros, yeah.

Not the best one to kick off the career. No, actually, the Days of Wine and Doses was their first episode. Yeah, the Barney Gets Sober episode was basically their fan script that they got turned into an episode. Much like the policy with the star trek back in the day you they accepted uh unsolicited uh scripts and a few of them got published even if you're walter koenig they'd accept it well so i know william shatner wrote uh several star trek books i believe tech war everybody oh yeah uh but yeah toonami uh was expanding to three hours it shows you that at this point uh in the early 2000s anime has fully taken over with the kids like it's the hot thing and uh you know soon like you said futurama on adult swim will be sharing the same

night as uh like cowboy bebop like it'll be like futurama at 10 cowboy bebop at like midnight yeah yeah what is what a strange block but hey we all live through it yeah and r.i.p left eye lopez and uh as lisa lopez and lane at stanley r.i.p but who's the last guy uh the allison chains lead singer okay but they weren't in the same car no no these were all separate thank you thank you uh but joining us today andrew dupin from we hate movies andrew The Alice in Chains lead singer. Oh, okay. But they weren't in the same car. No, no. These were separated. Thank you. Thank you. But joining us today, Andrew Dupin from We Hate Movies.

Andrew, you're here because we love you. You're very funny. But also, on the We Hate Movies Patreon, you do a sideshow called The Nexus in which you cover both the original series of Star Trek and The Next Generation. So you are our Star Trek scholar for this episode. Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. Yeah, The Nexus, we've been doing for God knows how many years, probably close

to six, maybe five, six years, and we're like almost done with TOS. So we got to figure out format-wise what happens after that, but I think that's like eight months from now, so that's future We Hate Movies problem. And when we asked you to be on this,

Andrew, you told me that you really have no experience with futurama can you talk about what your futurama relationship is yeah it's kind of crazy and you know i was even having kind of like this moment watching this episode last night like what the hell was i thinking but i remember when it came out and i was excited for it i was like oh boy oh boy, you know, the Matt Groening new show. Cool. I love the Simpsons. And I just never, it wasn't like a, there wasn't like a dislike of it really. I watched some of maybe the first season and kind of just fell off. I, you know, I don't really know. And it's something about it never really clicked with me, but like you guys, I know, love it. I've

several friends who are way into it um yeah i just sort of totally missed the missed the spaceship on this one but having watched this episode i'm like prime now to go back i think i'm now finally 20 some odd whatever years later ready to to really dig into futurama well you know andrew you're very lucky because as of this recording it's about to be rebooted for a fourth time so it's kind of like when you discover a new podcast and realize it's been going on since like 2011. Right. You have a lot of homework to do is what I'm saying. Exactly.

Yeah, it's nuts that Futurama came back as first DVD movies and then as a Comedy Central seasons. And then it's taken about eight years off and now it's back again as a Hulu series for more episodes. And I remember when that was all going on because there was the dust up because they didn't want to give What's-His-Face the bender role. And so is he back? Is he on it for this thing? Did they sort that out? Yes. Everyone agreed to take less money because Disney, this whole place is just falling apart.

They got no money for it. We got buckets on the floor because the ceiling's leaky those poor people it's so hard for bob eiger probably had to get a slightly smaller yacht this year than the yacht he planned does bob eiger have a gofundme should we promote this up front no actually bob eiger made more money this year than any previous year yes uh well i i mean uh andrew too i'm curious like do you feel do you feel the love uh legitimate love in this episode for the especially the original series uh coming through in here i do because i was very much finding myself vibing with this particular love for Star Trek which is I think the the right way to love Star Trek which is to be able to love it for what it is but also like be conscious enough

that you can kind of poke fun at it and you know I think that's true of like any fandom um but you know something about science fiction and Star Trek folk you know you can get real too hardcore like I've seen those documentaries. That's a sad state of affairs. But this is right, the writing on this is right where it needs to be. Like, this is great. You know, I grew up with it. Clearly, like, you know, the writer of this episode loved it.

But also, like, it's goofy. It's Star Trek. You can poke holes in it. And in poking holes in it, like what we've found on however many years of the Nexus, the better part of a decade, like, it's fun to poke holes in stuff like this too. So yeah, loving it but not taking it too seriously is a life and death thing. Really loved the writing all throughout this one. It's a great episode because it's a love letter, but it's not an unconditional love letter.

It is critical of Star Trek. And my main exposure to Star trek tos andrew is through your podcast and what fry says in this episode 79 episodes about 30 good ones that is the great description of star trek because there are about 30 good episodes of that show absolutely and then you've got like six of their movies of which like four are pretty rocking you know and maybe even five are pretty rockin um and including some like really like i think truly excellent displays of of science fiction but that original tos run yeah fry's ratio there is pretty accurate i mean especially like you get into the third

season where like you know paramount was gutting the show's budget they had no money to do these episodes and you're looking and it's like you know like we just talked about this one episode You know, Paramount was gutting the show's budget. They had no money to do these episodes. And you're looking and it's like, you know, like we just talked about this one episode that's coming out. Well, this episode will air way after our episode comes out. But it's an episode where like they're like, oh, what can we do? We have no money. How about Kirk goes through the transporter and when he comes back, he's also on the Enterprise. But everybody's gone.

It's like like how can you save set money how can you save makeup money they really really start taking the copper wiring out of the enterprise and uh yeah so that you know fries ratio completely accurate it's uh that's that's funny because yeah for me with star, I am a casual Star Trek enjoyer. I've definitely watched more Trek than Bob, but not as much Trek as his wife. But, yeah, I grew up, my mom was a Trek fan, though casual, not hardcore, of original series. And I watched the movies. I watched all the movies multiple times growing up.

And I watched TNG pretty regularly as well when it was new. watched the movies i watched all the movies multiple times growing up and i watched tng pretty regularly as well when it was new and but as far as my relationship to the original series like i've came like my first exposure to it i think was the trouble with tribbles episode and i thought like oh so is every episode like a silly thing like a silly thing happened it's all i didn't realize that was like the joke episode of the show or one of the sillier ones. And then as I grew up, I watched most of the big ones that everybody tells you like, oh, you got to watch this one. You got to watch, you know, Amok Time and all that.

And as a comic book nerd, I also really got into the works of Harlan Ellison. So then around that time was when they were releasing like the original script and here's how he saw it and you got to know all of that lore of city on the edge of forever so was henry was um was the trouble with the triples like you saw that first was it in conjunction with that 30th anniversary d DS9 episode where they put the cast into that episode? It was a few years before that because I think it was when Nick at Night was trying out doing Star Trek.

Oh, okay, yes. And I think maybe, not knowing what it was, I watched random episodes of the Star Trek animated series that aired on Nickelodeon for a brief period in the 80s, too. Actually, I recently saw that Deep Space Nine episode in which they take the crew and kind of force gump them into the original episode, and it works pretty well. I think it works pretty well. I love that line where they ask Worf, like, well, wait, why do Klingons look like that?

And he's like, we do not talk about that. Yeah, we sure don't no uh and well yeah and it's funny now that tng was like a current issue i mean it would it had been off the air for a few years when this episode aired but i was thinking like back then oh sure you can make fun of the hokiness of the original series but tng that's gonna stand up to time and now like so much of it is like so dated I just watched another video of somebody recently pointing out how in the HD era you can easily see

all the flaws in the background in the next generation sets and everything covering some of the shinier things with paper so they don't reflect yeah yeah that's the big one I noted yeah well I want to do some scary math up front because this episode airs 36 years after star trek tos begins as of this recording we are

now 36 years after star trek tng started wow yes that hurts so i want to get the scary math out of the way so oh them looking back at star trek tos in 2002 is like us looking back at season one of tng today wow yes that that uh that season one of tng by the way that's a rough one that's a real like oh wow how did this show last for seven seasons that's uh it's it's those are some of the rougher edges storytelling wise too just some real like roddenberry holdover vibes like not good like 1960s holdover vibes you're like it's it's a credit to the cast really that they could put up with that i i was thinking of that too because like on family guy they do their own version of this with the next generation cast and i was thinking like wait they're not old enough for

that and i'm like no they are yeah they are old enough for that yeah and andrew you're talking about how in season three of tos which is the last season it was being really mistreated by the network the same is true for futurama which at one point in its in its life had a very star trek style uh lifespan in which fans loved it network hated it just pushed around constantly and canceled before its time i think futurama in the beginning had 70 episodes and Star Trek had 79. And this is how badly it was being treated. In May of 2002, this is the season

finale. It won't come back until November. So it's off the air for six months until Crimes of the Hot debuts in November of 2002. So not the sign of a hit show when you're just nowhere on TV for six months. That's pretty tough. And that's also like a weird

like a November start date at that point. Like I don't know. It's like coming into school in the middle of the semester. Like just wait till January. Like such a weird you're like weeks before like you know holidays start in America and there's all sorts of other counter-programming that will have to be

dealt with. Yeah, that's pretty insulting. Well, it's all kinds of sports. Like Fox will have to be dealt with yeah that's pretty insulting it's all because of sports you want to see baseball for two months right that's right I forgot totally it's funny how they relate it to the show in there in that way then the

first reunion movie like the Bender's big score is the star trek the motion picture of the uh these movies too so it's like super trippy and like chasing after 2001 a space odyssey's popularity and so on well it's definitely trying to show off like here's what we would have done if we had the money and it's in the motion picture it's all of the big special effects. In Bender's big score, it's nudity. They're like, well, we would have

showed Lila's butt way more if we could have. Those prudes at the Fox Network. And this episode has a writer who is new to the show, David A. Goodman. I put together a little bio about him. So let's talk about David A. Goodman. And by the way, you will not hear Andrew Jupin because we're recording this segment after we got off the line with him and the episode went great so get

ready for a great episode you're gonna laugh laugh laugh but now it's time for cold sober facts no laughing at all yes imdb hard truths are gonna be coming at you so david goodman he joined at the very beginning of production season four only stuck around for that season which makes sense because futurama wasn't in production for like five or six years before the DVD reboot so he joins Futurama at a late time I'm assuming because Lou Morton leaves I think that opens up space for another writer and also there's another new writer in the season two Mike Rowe we'll talk about him later so I think people are on their way out as the hope seems lost for this show it seems like it's about to end.

And if you're a dude with Lou Morton's background, for instance, you're like, I can write a script, but I got to get on. I got to staff on a new show that'll have a next season. Unlike you guys. Yes. Undeclared. It will definitely last for more than one season. He jumped from one fire to another fire in that case. So this is David Goodman's only episode of

the fox run but his second and last episode so far was a freelance one from the comedy central era titled related to items you viewed and when i saw that in imdb i'm like is this a mistake but no that's the name of the episode so that's the uh and it sounds like an alexa type dealie there or like amazon or something i didn't watch it yeah yeah but uh i hey it's always good to see one of the ogs come back for another one but yeah we're recording this uh right before it goes live on fox or sorry fox hulu five days before it goes live on hulu so we don't know who's writing what yet yes yes sorry guys we'll uh next soon enough you'll hear our thoughts on the new season though yeah let's

talk about his career so he started as a story editor in the mid to late 80s on golden girls where he also wrote the teleplay of one episode then he jumped over to fox where he worked for the ribald one season sitcom babes oh man that's a simpsons uh well yeah it goes drexel's class then babes right i think was the usual schedule or like sometimes babes directly followed it yes i recall watching the entire first season of babes because of the simpsons or something um and the premise of babes is what if there were three rosannes oh yes yeah but they're all sisters who yeah yeah they and they're not ashamed of their bodies for some reason if you like uh wendy joe sperber you got

to go to babes that's marty mcfly's sister and back to the future though they all all the babes get the boot by the next year for old martin it's time for martin to take things over and he was very successful and it brings me no joy to report there is only one surviving babe oh that does that is sad but i'm sorry folks so he goes from old ladies to big ladies uh-huh yeah okay all kinds of ladies big old short young you name it doesn't sound like the background of a guy who's gonna be writing star trek uh parodies for the futurama in the future not really especially when you see the other things he wrote for uh including from babes he goes to obscure incredibly obscure mbc sitcoms like flesh and blood and rhythm and Blues so these are real

one season nobody knows what they are wow yeah those are nothing to me and I was a TV addict then man he also went back to Fox to write for the Tia not Tia Carrera Tia Leone there we go sitcom Flying Blind which was like what she did before the naked truth okay when you were saying to alieni sitcom i was like the next words bob says are going to be the naked truth but no there was the one right before it and also he wrote for uh dream on and of course wings i assume with uh ken keeler oh right that's with the the wings wings had a lot of uh future simpsons and and futurama writers on it. Yeah. And actually, Goodman mentions Keillor on the commentary, and it gives you a sense of who Keillor is, in which he said Ken Keillor wanted to write this episode, didn't get a

chance to, and he applauded Goodman by saying, oh, you put in everything I would have put in. And he said, getting a compliment from Ken Keillor is rare, is what he said. And even this compliment is just like, you did this as good as I would have me ken keeler ken keeler yes uh i i'd love to interview him uh someday because he seems like a real he seems like he could be one of our pricklier interviews but also a funny guy yeah so uh david goodman uh co-created a show before this he is one of three credited co-created a show before this. He is one of three credited co-creators of the late 90s Knight Rider reboot, Team Knight Rider, and he is one of three

writers on the movie Scooby-Doo and the Witch's Ghost. I believe that's a sequel to Zombie Island, correct? Yes, yeah. Someday we'll do Witch's Ghost. I love Witch's Ghost because the Hex Girls are in it and they are such a cool band. Yeah, I love them. And also it has great anime stuff in it and they are such a cool band uh yeah i love them and uh and also it has great

anime stuff in it though i uh if i recall correctly from uh zombie island the zombie island producers did not like witches ghost all that much production wise because they felt that they had non-cartoon people shoved onto them to write the script the right way. I mean, they're feeling, they're like, but we did a great job with Zombie Island, and our reward is you want to fix us by hiring a Hollywood writer to do it. And so- I think Goodman was one of those guys. He was one of those Hollywood writers.

They didn't like this. This is my half. Someday we'll do Witch's Ghost. But yes, that's what i recall i want to finally see it i've only seen the hex girls music video you know those are the best parts of it absolutely yeah so i'm not going to go over every writing credit from david a goodman there's a lot he's had a 30-year career in tv writing but here are more interesting ones so this is uh a dilemma for me because i'm not sure which came first. Because of how long Futurama episodes were delayed and how Family Guy was canceled twice,

I'm not sure which came first. But he was a co-executive producer on the third season of Family Guy. And then he was an executive producer for the 2005 reboot. And he continued to work on Family Guy in some capacity until 2017. So I'm not sure which came first season three production of family guy or season four production of futurama but he was on both i could see him taking a freelance script or a you know a script on this and then heading over to family guy for more long term but i could also see family guy uh the way they sat on season three of Family Guy it sounds like I would bet Futurama would come first

though because it feels like Futurama's production took longer in general than Family Guy's. Yeah but these were really close to each other. So after Futurama he goes right to work on Star Trek Enterprise the least beloved Star Trek show which makes perfect sense for

him to work on a Star Trek show and on the commentary he says and that'll be the next show I put in the ground which it's not his fault but that show didn't last very long to know it was coming I mean it wasn't a favorite of UPN it felt like at the time but I I love that Cohen is saying like if you Trek nerds think that he wasn't the right guy to hire for this he's writing for star trek for real now so he's the real deal he definitely found himself in the right place um now get this he is also the writer of the first two fred movies now henry are you aware of fred only because of a pro wrestling reason oh really he's he's an annoying youtube personality of the aughts right uh i'd say late aughts early

2010s but no that's close enough i mean the the first time i saw fred was the first time i i felt old because i was like what is this shit that is how i feel i i believe the only other information i know about fred is that the actor who portrayed portrays him uh came out of the closet like whenever famous celebrities come out I usually keep a note of it and so people are like well I don't know Fred is but I guess he's gay but I mean now Fred looks like a Fellini movie compared to what Generation Alpha is watching yeah that's true have you seen the Skibidi Toilet Man videos no I haven't seen that I've been seeing well I think they're great but I've been seeing the tiktoks of just people going like yum yum yum okay hello gang gang ice cream

so good ice cream so good yes i've been seeing those ones but the the reason i've heard of fred is because a joke in the fred movies is that his dad is john cena and so it's on a list of things like you've never heard of this but john, the pro wrestler has appeared in these things. I was like, oh, all right. Okay. Maybe younger listeners can let us know more about Fred, but I looked more into Fred. And I guess the joke is it's someone, it's a teenager playing a six year old and they just pitch his voice up really high. And that's the part that really irritates me the most well i mean as as long as he hasn't had any grooming allegations against him like other youtube personalities of his day uh i've recently had

that miranda sings lady the ukulele apology lady well i think he's safe but i'm not gonna check yeah no i don't i don't want to know uh and wrote the fred movies that's a weird thing to go from family guy too i guess they're like well this teenager can't write movies get the get a family guy writer in here yeah figure it out i'm sure paid all right yeah and uh david a goodman was the co-creator of the primetime fox cartoon murder police which you might forget about because it never aired 13 episodes were produced and apparently no other network wanted to touch it with a 10-foot clown pole because i'm guessing uh this is the reason why but during production that was when the murder of trayvon martin happened and i assume like we don't want a funny murder cop show right now even

though george zimmerman not a cop but obviously he thought he was yeah i mean it was when the black lives matter movement started in earnest and people, for a brief moment, and we just had another one of those, even Democrats were saying, maybe the police aren't good at their jobs or whatever. And so it's, ever since then, it's been a tough time to sell your police comedy show and then on top of that the i believe conceptually the idea of the show is that it is about homicide detectives but the title is then murder police and it could sound like it is an incitement to violence as well as uh which if you are on the right side if you're worried about right-wing reactionaries mad about your show you don't want to be a network that puts on a tv show that's called murder police if it's a subversive fox cartoon i have to assume it's not pro cop but i also assume that they didn't want any like violent

cop comedies yeah and well like i i think if you're fox you're like or what a republican's gonna come for us for saying like you guys hate the cops so much you're making a show called Murder Police. And you can watch the intro on YouTube. And it's funny because one of the first comments is, how did you get this? I worked on this intro and I never saw it before. I have heard about the show, too, from a podcaster I like, Sean Clements. He also wrote on it. And he's mentioned before he seemed

to imply i could be misremembering but he seemed to imply that like it was done and done like it was like this is arable and it simply was not because it's an animated series they were they completed many episodes before the season was done yeah so it just can't be seen i mean you made 13 it's been over a decade just drop it all on hulu and be like here's a new thing we just made you'll never know ain't getting any safer for murder police no and by the way this is different than the louis ck cop cartoon which was just called the cops which was canceled because louis ck was canceled so there were two cop cartoons from the 2010s that never made it onto the air for various

reasons and around the same time donald glover was going to make a deadpool show that then got revoked as well but marvel decided they didn't want to have a deadpool tv show and a deadpool movie at the same time and too many quips yeah we couldn't we'd be all quipped out and to bring the david a goodman story to a close he was a showrunner on all three seasons to date of the orville makes perfect sense he wrote for a star trek show and he wrote for family guy what if both shows were the same show well that's the orville from that guy yeah yeah it makes it makes total sense every time we talk about the orville i say oh it's probably i hear it's probably good whatever but uh i did see on his imdb too he had something for star wars detours as well right yeah i didn't

go over everything but is that is that notable well that is notable because it's just like i noted it because it is just like murder police in that it is a completed animated series that has never been released what's the story behind that it is that and i know i knew this a little before but our pal griffin newman or should i say the george lucas talk show they talk about this a lot because george lucas one of his last things before selling to disney was he wanted to make basically after working a ton with seth green he wanted to just instead of allowing robot chicken to make a Star Wars thing, hire Robot Chicken

to make a Star Wars animated series full of jokes. So it was a fully made Robot Chicken style series of sketches animated in its own style and I believe fully CGI, not stop motion, like on Robot Chicken.

They released like a five minute video of a bunch of sketches for instance um admiral akbar goes into a place and he says things that rhyme with it's a trap but it's not a trap he's like oh look out it's a snack look out it's a wrap like i might have seen this i might have seen it and there was questions of how much of it was made but before it could be released, Disney bought Star Wars. And they said, we do not want Star Wars jokes anymore. We want Star Wars serious.

And so the George Lucas talk show people have been given full episodes of Star Wars detours secretly from people who worked on it. Wow. And only when they had been out on international waters for like a a cruise did they show it to a group of people like and don't anybody film this where it's just for people here but we're going to show you an episode because on a on one of their streams they've like here's a screen of one episode that's never been released and then they put it back down so we need to restore uh sammy season two of baby blues murder police star wars detours we need all of these lost animated shows and these the the number of lost animated shows is only growing

from now on as they get delisted but yeah so that i i'd not to take a detour of our own here but yes he he also wrote for star wars detours so a lot of goodman's um content has not been seen by the world unfortunately and i forgot he was also the showrunner of alan gregory that's why uh that must be why sean clements worked with him because sean clemens and uh hayes davenport as a writing team wrote for alan gregory and they've told funny stories about how they thought well we're on the next simpsons it's called alan gregory it's gonna be a huge deal so yes quite a career for david a goodman so yeah i do want to go into a few more preamble things we are very preemptively show and i apologize in advance but you've heard us before you know what we're about so uh on the 20 plus year old commentary mac reigning says

that at that point in time he had never seen an entire TOS episode all the way through but someone in his lifetime did drag him to the first movie and they are all shocked by that and their opinion is that's not a good thing to see if you're into Star Trek I think history has changed and minds have changed I mean personally I tried giving that movie a chance and there are things about it I like but ultimately I didn't have a good time but I know Andrew you and the guys are big boosters of that movie. But they're all shocked that the only TOS thing Matt Groening had seen is the first movie. Yeah, that makes total sense to be shocked about that because it is not like an accurate representation. I mean, so much of it is different.

The vibes are just completely shifted. And, you know, I, the first time I tried to watch that when I was a kid, because actually the movies were my gateway into TOS, not the shows. Because I had, similarly, Henry, I had an uncle who was very into TNG.

So that was like my entry into Star Trek. But the movies, I think I saw like Khan first, which is, you know, kind of a great introduction to these characters. But then I was like, oh, there's this one before that, and it's just not really like Star Trek

feeling at all. And I feel, it's like advanced level stuff. But if you're trying to like get someone to become a fan of this franchise, it is most certainly not the thing you start out with. But I think it's kind of surprising that Groining uh avoided it did he did he give a reason as to why 60s too like it's just such a strange thing i think because he was always kind of a hipster i mean he started in old comics i think he just avoided the popular things like i really don't feel like

he was a star trek a star star wars fan either no i think or also when they did the well also he's like 10 years older than cohen so when they did the charlie and the chocolate factory episode two he's just like i never watched this thing like he was too old for it when the wonka movie came out the original one yeah i i think it's that feels like an intentional choice his whole life to never to avoid it and yeah i mean the motion picture for that to be your first one it's like that was supposed to just be the payoff of you've watched these in reruns for like over a decade now we're finally going to do this with a real budget and also it's them pretending nobody aged and so it's and that's

kind of ridiculous in it as well it's also this like weird oh we were trying to do this like second generation tv show and then we scrapped that and turned that idea into what became star trek the motion picture um yeah still would totally recommend that movie but like with you know some fun green colored substances by your side at all times for sure a lot of it is a screensaver where you're going into an anus but some of the best movies feature that the director's the director's cuts even longer right uh yeah by uh i don't know by how much but it is a little bit longer and i'm like this is this will tell you like the level level of Trek obsessive that I am nowadays. I bought, there was a set on 4K of like one through four.

And I was like, yeah, Star Trek on 4K, awesome. And then didn't even think, maybe I should wait for five and six to be packaged. Bought those separately when they came out. And then this remastered director's cut came out and it's like longer there's some alternate scenes there's like alternate credit color and font and everything and i re-bought that all so i have there right now in this studio where i'm recording this there are two separate 4k copies of that movie wow i i just re-bought the back to the future trilogy because it's released every five years now,

and I have to skip every other cycle I skip buying it again. Now, Walsley, I guess, too, Andrew, where do you stand on how the original series has been re-released with, you know, it got special edition-ed up with fancy new special effects to to match with the hd rescans sure well those effects you know were like for it's like what like 1996 technology like it's they look terrible they look absolutely terrible and you watch those that's what's on like paramount plus or the you know the updated version'm like, I don't know, man.

Show me that puppet. Show me the little model on a string. That is part of, I don't know, what I like about Star Trek. It never had a huge budget. Yes, it got slashed even more. But for what it had was still kind of like nothing. There was a charm to that. And this, the thing thing that's kind of it's almost like they should do it again because that updated effect like is already super dated so you watch that stuff now

and like it's almost like a distraction on top of a distraction because it cuts to a thing that wasn't there in the first place but then that thing also looks shitty because that's also like you know edging on 30 years old so just it feels like someone inserted clips of reboot into your Star Trek episode oh my god Bob yes it looks so much like reboot sometimes like we just covered an episode where they have they it's it totally wasn't even

in the original broadcast of it but they're like oh in the story a shuttle is pulling into the Enterprise shuttle bay and now we can show that. And it is just the most garbage, like mid-90s CG animation. Every time I look at it, I'm like,

I have to go now. My planet needs me. Keep that crap in Babylon 5 is what I say. Yes, exactly. Really just unpleasant to look at. I don't care for it. And this episode started where they had this idea where they wanted a reunion with just Shatner and Nimoy. And in some version of it, they thought there'd be a giant battle like King Kong versus Godzilla of a giant Shatner fighting a giant Nimoy.

But once they got Shatner and Nimoy, they decided like, oh, who else can we get? So they tried to get everybody. They didn't get Scottyty James Dewan we'll talk more about that later and the original title of this episode is we got everybody but Scotty uh and apparently Shatner was very reluctant to do the episode I mean Nimoy had been on Futurama before as did Nishnell Nichols she'd been on the show before but Shatner really wanted to know like i did that get a life sketch on snl in 86 how are you guys doing this different why should i do this again and he talked to matt graining i believe he talked to the other showrunner he even talked to billy west he was kind of lightly grilling everyone saying let me know that i should do this because he was being

very selective and then he also said goodbye to uh to kirk Generations. So it was a big deal for him to do this. Yeah, it definitely sounds like he was kind of also getting a little tired of everybody's like, well, let's hire him for a joke for everything. But then again, now I'm thinking of how 20 years later, Shatner will do literally anything, it seems like like if like the payday's there he'll show up for it oh absolutely i mean he's got there's some it's on netflix now it's like the unexplained with william shatner and it's like fell off the back of the truck unsolved mysteries like it's really not great but like i've kind of tuned in a couple times because

it's shatner like a lot of the times just sitting on a stool the guy is like you know almost 100 years old uh he's definitely in his 90s doing tv still but like there's just like a charm about it but i think it is a thing now where like the plug is pulled from the dam like he had a thing even that was like oh i'll never do podcasts what's a podcast and then like one day he was on wtf and then i felt like within the next week there were two or three other podcast appearances booked so i think that's all like if you go on to write this guy a check for anything he's down to clown at this point he better not start a star trek recap podcast he can't god uh he can't do

that i just hope who's ever controlling tommy chong doesn't also get uh william shatner and put him on all these weed gummy ads i'm seeing oh that's all i'm seeing on twitter these weed gummy ads i don't know if that's what the uh twitter is showing you these days andrew but tommy chong has started a weed company have you heard uh yeah i did see that and it's kind of funny because it's like yeah cheech and chong like cbd and thc products but there's also like you know on on like legitimate websites there's always the part where it's like garbage stuff from other fake websites and you know under the guise of like you might also be interested in and i don't know if this is like a a result of like ads things that people put up on their websites to kind of make money through

clicks and whatever but there's one that i've seen on like huffington post and like other news websites where it's like tommy chong talks about the deadly reality of cbd and like that thing is still going around while the dude is also hawking stuff with cheech it makes no sense but i don't click on that article because i don't want my computer to be destroyed by malware so i'll never know what that tommy chung cbd story is or is not like i guess at this point you have to be 70 to be a sincere cheech and chong fan so maybe the the the gummies are just for your various pains yeah that's right but well also that reminds me of speaking of getting old it's like now now like you said of the timeline like this kind of big reunion thing just happened with the next generation and i it did get me in the same way i'm just like oh they're they're all together again

yeah and it's not a joke it's just sincere yeah yeah i i loved that third season of picardo show that i otherwise do not care for uh for the most part i think like in those first two seasons you got maybe like two or three kind of cool things but that third season really got me i felt like it was like the movie send off that they never got. Cause nemesis is awful. Um, yeah, that got, that got me in all the fields and it's the right way to do it. A continuation thing. It's like, yeah,

it's been two decades. How have they changed? Let's look at that. Instead of just like bringing them back in, you know, that nineties show or one at one of those kind of, or family guy or, or sure.

Yeah. Yeah. And sorry, one final preamble thing i wish they talked more about it on the commentary but this seems to have been very difficult to do from a legal perspective because fox broadcasting company does not own star trek so all of these actors are playing themselves in these colorful uniforms they're wearing well who knows what show that could be from there's no insignia on them they They never say Spock or Kirk or...

They say the guy who plays Spock. Yeah. They say that, but... But when they're wearing their uniforms, they're not those characters. I mean, but in our heads, we know, but there's a very trickle... Sorry, tricky legal dance.

Especially Ain't No Pointy Ears on Leonard Nimoy when he transforms. Yeah. Yep. Yeah, it's... Oh, and I loved hearing, though, in the commentary, too, how the director, Patty Shinagawa, she jokes that, like, transforms yeah yeah it's uh oh and i loved hearing though in the commentary too how uh the

director patty shinagawa she jokes that like she said it sounded like she faced a little professional jealousy from some uh some of the male animators on the staff who were like i should have directed this star trek episode not you see and that's the shit that i'm talking about it's that stuff with star trek fans get fucked dude like you didn't get picked for it whatever you know what i mean like And that's the shit that I'm talking about. It's that stuff with Star Trek fans. Get fucked, dude. You didn't get picked for it. Whatever. You know what I mean? That's the stuff.

The toxic sci-fi fan nonsense. Guys like Melvar. Exactly. Yes, yes, exactly. So our opening joke here is a weird one because it's just the title of the episode. So I feel like they wrote that first and then just said, oh, let's just make this the episode.

The where no fan has gone before. It's late in the season. Let's just do that. They've already been canceled or on the brink of being canceled. Opening cartoon is we're back to Hiss and Makeup, which we saw in Jurassic Bark. And don't worry, folks. We have two more appearances of Blackie the Lamb coming around the corner before the Fox show comes to an end.

As they were being canceled, they were not working as hard to find new cartoons we got to prove this other cartoon let's just show another shot from it yes the ship is going down so we open with some classic tos parody music and we see the planet express ship has the enterprise's very iconic propulsion units attached to it and then we hear a very familiar voice though not one from this show. Shatner's log, airdate, unknown. The impossible has happened. It would take days to recount the events I've witnessed. So, settle in. It all

began... Quiet, you! This court-martial is now in session. The honorably sexy Zat Branigan residing. Bring in the accused! Oh! Oh, my... Philip J. Fry, you stand Bring in the accused! Oh my... Philip J. Fry, you stand accused of traveling to the forbidden planet Omega-3. A crime punishable by 12 concurrent death sentences.

Do you understand the charges? One beep for yes, two beeps for no. Yes, so noted. Do you plead guilty? Double yes. Guilty. I will now carry out the sentence. Kiff, my gun. Wait, he pled not guilty. Order. Order in the court.

Very well then, Mr. Fry. Please recount the events that led you to be guilty. It's a great reveal later when you find out no one is impaired in any way. You just climb in that box to give testimony in Moore's Code. That's a great reveal later when you find out none no one is impaired in any way you just climb in that box to give testimony in moore's code that's a great joke yeah i'm making that face is just a choice he's making for some reason to of course look like captain pike we really you know in character you know which i you know what i feel like if i had the opportunity to

sit in one of those things i'd probably try to do it you know character specific or at least as character specific as i could get it and hit the beeps with your foot i've uh i have a tale to tell later but i've i've seen uh film accurate or sorry episode accurate multiple pike wheelchairs uh and at the star trek oh i bet yeah uh but it's this is all amazing like this is like 10 references packed together to point out all of them but yeah one of them is very minor the on the commentary the writer says the impossible has happened is actually a reference to something kirk says in an episode it's apparently the very first line of the first captain's law oh really wow okay yeah but but air date unknown is a joke about how fox does not respect futurama and then isn't it amazing so you know uh that andrew you

may not know this but like zap branigan was invented to be their parody of kirk like he is the ridiculous version of kirk he wants to seduce ladies but he's actually like fat and has a comb over you know totally different from william shatner of course oh yeah but but now william shatner's on the show and he is cut off by zap branigan the parody character who's talking over him like that it made me realize that zap branigan in in design is uh a shatner type but his voice is way more like sulu yes you're right you're right yeah and and they hit the oh my very early in the show too i feel like you have to because everybody's waiting for it you know i mean they're like takei made some money off of oh my i feel in one way or another and so you get that out of the way

and then everybody can focus on the episode instead of saying you know well when's takei gonna say it he is monetizing that better than ever now like actually i say like shatner does anything i'm like well uh george also takes a whole lot of a lot of jobs these days but hey he should all of these people got totally screwed over in the the money for this show like they didn't everything right actors are fighting for at the time of recording this over residuals and whatnot is because they got to see the generation of actors like the trek actors who made only their payments on the show and it was new which was not much it became a huge success in syndication and they didn't get a nickel

out of those like that's why they had to go to the pasadena star trek conventions whether they wanted to or not right yeah totally and you know those the convention the convention like world i find fascinating we always joke on we hate movies like if we got invited to conventions we would 100 go um and i i get it's like very, you know, time consuming and tiring, especially when you're like an old timer and you're having to go to these things. But like, I would imagine that those things, they're making more money than they were doing episodes of this show. Like, you know, you want Koenig to show up somewhere, he'll do it.

But, you know, you get the checkbook out so that guy can, you know, coast for four months or something yeah it's sort of like if jason killed you once in a movie you were making 80k a year doing like 30 horror cons a year totally yeah absolutely you had to travel around the world doing this thing and then on top of that like you every day i'm now just thinking of the movie galaxy quest but like tim allen's character just every every day he's there, like people go up to him and say, you're the greatest and I love you and you made my life worth living. And he's like, hey, thanks. I am the greatest.

Let me tell you that my favorite story is about making this show. Absolutely. That was the James Doohan story that he told about conventions where this woman, you know, was telling him how she was like suicidal and, you know, Star Trek saved her and whatever. And he was like, you know, I want to see you at the next convention I'm in in your town and like made sure that she was there and stuff. So the fandom also has like that whole angle to it, too, which comes with its own weight and stakes and and stuff of that nature no i feel uh i i think as time has gone on i've heard many creators of shows be told like sometimes it's a lot of pressure to be told like hey i'd kill myself if you stop making tv shows or if you stop doing things you really need a canned response for that yeah when it happens uh so i wanted to

go over star trek reunions really quickly because we are now just down to william shatner george takei and walter koenig as of this recording this episode goes live in six weeks i can't tell you what will happen to men who are 90 years old or older okay folks do not respond if anyone passes away so this is a rare example of uh the duck man did it phenomenon because in the August 23rd, 1996 episode where no Duckman has gone before, James Doohan, Leonard Nimoy, and Marina Sirtis guest star in an episode length Star Trek parody that is revealed at the end to be a live action nightmare that Leonard Nimoy is having. right ah that was a fun cutaway i thank you now i forgot all of that other stuff but when you told me the leonard nemo cutaway in live action like ah there's the now my memory's whoa you know i watched a fair amount of duck man back in the day i don't remember that episode i'm gonna have to seek that out it was one of the later ones that probably aired on monday at midnight so you really had to find it back in the day but I honestly think the last times that the entire principal cast reunited to play their characters was in two video games.

So there was a 1992 Star Trek 25th anniversary CD-ROM game. And the sequel to that was called Judgment Rites. I think that was the last time the entire principal cast had reassembled to at least voice act all the characters again and i guess we all took it for granted but that was really the final time it happened because you know um deforest kelly passes away in 99 james dewin i think 2004 uh they're not all in generations so it was very very rare and this is why this is so special right now yeah yeah it's very special that you know and you reminded me bob Bob, that intro, like the cold open of Generations,

is like not what they even intended it to be. Like it was supposed to be the core three, like Kirk, Spock, and McCoy. And then, you know, Nimoy and Kelly just didn't want to do it. And that's why you have Scotty and Chekhov there. And it's kind of weird when you watch that movie because like checkoff's got like all this medical knowledge out of nowhere and you're like wow that kind of sounds like it was supposed to be mccoy and then you read up and it's like oh it definitely was and they didn't bother to rewrite it like at all and i think the beginning of the movie is like

well here's a becky sulu to talk about her dad yeah yes that's right that's right well also i i believe i had heard in the the star snoop at the time that you know that uh that's where the real problems between shatner and james doing especially began like he uh doing felt on generations that shatner was big time in him kind of and was not treating him as an equal but uh yeah i i guess uh yeah the the specificness of parodying tos like even in o2 is starting to feel like little dated or not dated but like definitely extra retro because like oh we we'd just gone through you know more than 10 years of current star trek so if you're going to make star trek references you'll reference current star trek not not the old thing though uh around the same time the south park show also very into

original star trek like i'd say that uh trey parker is a giant or og tos fan and like for example in cannibal the musical one of the first lines the character says in the movie is but that's not how it happened at all and he says it exactly the way shatner says it in some episode of tos oh that's weird and this double yes joke i'm not saying south park ripped it off but in 2004 they did the same joke in the episode preschool. Oh, there's the there's a teacher who is horribly burned in a fire and becomes a Captain Pike type. And somebody asked, like, so did this person do it? And then she's saying no with two beeps. And then the guy says, yes, yes.

All right. Take it. Interesting. When you really care about someone, you shout it from the mountaintops. So on behalf of Desjardins Insurance, I'm standing 20,000 feet above sea level to tell our clients that we really care about you. We care about you.

We care about you. Home and auto insurance personalized to your needs. Weird, I don't remember saying that part. Visit Desjardins.com slash care and get insurance that's really big on care. Did I mention that we care? So we're in Fry's testimony now. We fade to a few days earlier at Rent-A-Wreck video, and we have Fry, Lila, Zoidberg, and Bender all renting movies because the professor who was not seen in this episode is taking a short nap, and they need to rent about six movies to get them through that time period.

I love video rental stores still exist in the year 3000 in this vision of the future. They look like VHS tapes. Yes. Some great reset happened. I mean, we saw Civilization fall a few times when Fry was frozen. That's true. Yeah. I'm thinking now thinking now too of how those uh another reason i probably rewatched we watched those original episodes at first as a kid was it would have been the like 25th anniversary and then they were heavily advertising like the best of star trek on vhs like you know tapes with two

episodes on it and they say like and these are the unedited because kids grew up watching to then were adults in 1991 grew up watching the syndicated cuts that took away scenes so it had tons of scenes many people had not seen for for years and years which when you watch those now like you're hitting like 52 minute long episodes there's a reason stuff was cut folks like you're going through this stuff and it's like this episode is dragging why oh because it's 52 minutes long and it should be between 46 or 47 you totally feel it it's kind of like when twilight zone became an hour-long show right oh yeah that fourth season the dreaded fourth season of the twilight zone which does have some bangers in it um but not only that i think on top of going to an hour-long show, right? Yeah, that fourth season, the dreaded fourth season of The Twilight Zone, which does have some bangers

in it. But not only that, I think on top of going to an hour, they also started shooting it on early video, at least some of it, and it looks drastically different. Yeah. Good move going back to what was working in season five.

But when this was written, I think we were clearly in James... Sorry, James. Jim Carrey's Reign of Terror what was working in season five but when this was written i think we were clearly in uh james sorry james jim carrey's reign of terror because uh bender wants to rent six jim carrey movies and tape over them uh and fry fry has a very accurate statement in my opinion he's like you know what six movies average out to one really good movie the first six star trek movies so uh i know you like them more andrew but uh i like that they can be a little catty about star trek while still having all the cast involved and being on board with these jokes absolutely and that's the way to play it because it's just a television show folks

i do feel like there's uh the nostalgic respect is is stronger now like i i mean i also think about how on the simpsons their joke about about, you know, so very tired, the Star Trek movie. Oh, yes. They are cruel. Dude, yeah. We talked about that. I don't know where the heck that came up at some point. And there's the really horrible James Doohan fat joke in that where he can't, like, reach the control because he's so fat.

And you're just like god that's fucking like needlessly cruel um but what is there is a good joke in that though where uh shatner goes uh as kirk goes uh again with the klingons because like if you look at those movies like they're messing with klingons in at least three of them in one way or another. And two of them, three and six, like the Klingons are like the main villain in one way or another. Well, 92 Simpsons could not predict that we'd be dealing with 80-year-old Picard and 80-year-old Indiana Jones in the future. That's true though now you know in these things when people come back basically unlike in 1990 they don't hire back then they did not hire personal trainers for

james doing to make him be as thin like how you know i uh the late carrie fisher joked that they didn't want to get her back for princess Leia. They wanted her minus 40 pounds is what they wanted. So they make these people. They do not hand you the big contract without making you lose weight to be in movies now. So we find out that in this timeline, the words Star Trek are forbidden. And sirens start blaring. Security cameras start turning towards Fry. They jam them. Which is not how it was in previous episodes they've said star trek out loud in other episodes i have

i have the examples okay uh because yes they make this so this is the list of times they've said star trek they've made references like we've had a pike style guy before we've had the reference to a muck time before with zoidberg and fry fighting in the arena but uh in the pilot uh fry sees these sliding open doors when he gets to the future he goes just like on star trek and that's when they close on his face uh in branigan begin again hermes describes the democratic order of planets as oh just like the federation in your star trek program and in that's lobster tainment we have a parody titled star trek the pepsi generation so at least three times the word star trek have been uttered so yes they're just making this up

but it's still funny it is hey it's great i love it but yeah the they're terrified of being of hearing the word star trek and it is a banned religion in this future which is pretty great uh everyone else is getting involved now because we cut back to the present zap is intrigued and wants to hear this from someone with sexily seductive voice i like how the camera lands on nichelle nichols and then pans over to george takei with pleasure i mean his voice is amazing it's a wonderful voice we were talking about this before we got online with you uh andrew i really think the takei becoming a character was really because of howard stern because i remember he would go on stern and

he would just talk about the life of being a gay man in his like 50s or 60s they would just be so tickled and that's and on their soundboard they would have oh my oh that would play constantly so i think that's what really brought him back in people's minds is like a fun, older gay guy with a life outside of being Mr. Sulu. Definitely. I remember being, you know, much younger and listening to those Stern episodes and just being it was like one of my first exposures to like a dude just talking about being gay. And like that was just his life. And it was on, you know, the same radio program where we were talking about, you farting into microphones and sitting on sibians and all that good stuff as well but like there were also these like really legitimate and it was a thing too where like he was telling you know his life and there wasn't ever like nastily making fun or like they were all like really open and like hell yeah man like tell us about how you live and i thought that was like really genuinely sweet especially at a time when like that you just could

not find that on mainstream radio or anything like that i i feel uh i feel a fool that i did not realize he was doing all this stuff i and i i checked in on stern though i i didn't watch stern on the e versions like every night but yeah i missed that with i think with tk ah man he must have done it more publicly before this but i remember it really sinking in when he did the shatner celebrity roast and all his jokes were about being gay remember he said like if my boyfriend sucked as much as you i'd never leave my chateau it's a fun voice to do yeah and uh yeah takei was on the simpsons uh before this i think shatner turned them down and it might have been because of that so very tired parody

and then it's funny that uh then takei turns it down because they're going to make fun of monorails and then and then they get nemo i i think i definitely get the feel that nemo has a better sense of humor about these things or it's more accepting to do this stuff and uh then shatner is on these things i think i i also remember they really do play up and they say on commentary too i want to believe it's real but maybe andrew you know this if not but like that they were friends in real life like nimoy and shatner really were like frowns because to me that always sounded a bit like you know they fake like they want us to

think they're friends but they don't they aren't friends yeah i mean i think the proof comes down to like when nimoy passed and Shatner skipped the funeral. And he had some like bogus excuses. It was a really, it's like, I had a horse event. Like there's something that it was like, dude, you're supposed to like, you know, friend and co-worker of 60 years passed away. Like, what are you doing? You know, I don't know i i think there is truth in like everybody hating that dude and it's a weird like always the weird thing that you get with star

trek and this is through other star trek shows as well like actors being like you know my character should have got a promotion at this point or i should be a captain of my own ship and like to an extent i get that but also like you're just playing a role man it's not like you're getting passed over for an actual promotion like what does it matter if like so and so never rose above being an ensign or like whatever the case was but i think a lot of that also played into it because i guess i don't know maybe with ranks that also then equates to like screen time and that just maybe then boils down to money I don't know but I feel like a lot of these folks don't didn't or you know still don't care for others of them yeah yeah I forgot to mention up front that one of the

reasons they got Shatner to come on board is they said he could record in person with Nimoy and when they're acting together they're in the same room and I honestly feel like this episode is very touching to me as someone with not a lot of affinity for this original series because it feels like fan fiction with the premise being what if they all liked each other and that's very sweet there's some touching moments in this now that some

of them are gone that are wholly fictional and we know so many people dislike Shatner and his attitude and his ego yeah i was just wondering if maybe the way they treat everybody if you start bossing them around on set because you're a higher status character on set that's just like the the version of the uh experiment we're like oh stanford prison experiment yes yeah i just like well no i'm i play your boss in the movie so i'm gonna boss you around and so right

he's been their captain for 40 years 50 no 60 years almost now so yeah i could see they're just like the uh shatner bill it was a it was a character you you're not my boss you know but it is kind of funny because you think about if you contrast that against uh the tng crew you will see like because of course i'm a huge geek i follow all of them on you know instagram and whatever else like you will see jonathan frakes or uh you know lavar burton and like refer to patrick stewart as captain like they will do it in real life and say like you know happy birthday my captain you know all that stuff so i feel like there is that love there that i don't think shatner ever really got from his from i mean i i had a tear in my eye reading interviews with lavar burton and brent spiner talking about how they're like we get to act together again and this is my best friend and he was the he was the best

man at my wedding and it's just like yeah i in this case i want to believe they're all great friends and this is not them just saying something for pr this is not marketing yeah uh john lewis picard is a cool guy patrick stir that's his real name so zap is intrigued and uh this is when takei talks about uh the star trek wars different than the star wars trek which they have not made an episode about. That's a great line. To hear Nichelle Nichols especially say like, no, that was the Star Wars Trek.

That's so great. And more VHS tapes as Nichelle uses her robot arms from her head jar to push a VHS tape in to explain what the Star Trek wars were in our next clip here. By the 23rd century, Star Trek fandom had evolved from a loose association of nerds with skin problems into a full-blown religion. And Scotty beamed them to the Klingon ship where they would be no Tribble at all.

All power to the engines. As country after country fell under its influence, world leaders became threatened by the movement's power. And so the Trekkies were executed in the manner most befitting virgins. He's dead, Jim. He's dead, Jim. He's dead, Jim. Finally, the sacred texts were banned. The last copies of the 79 episodes and 6 movies

were dumped on the forbidden world, Omega 3. Along with that blooper reel where the door doesn't close all the way. Thus, Star Trek was forever scoured from human memory. Another classic science fiction show cancelled before it's time.

So, a lot to go over here. The obvious Scientology reference up front with the sci-fi religion that doesn't take all your money that's great that's great uh a reference now i know all this stuff because of your podcast andrew so uh reference to christine chapel the nurse from star trek absolutely we have the half black half white aliens from let that be your last battlefield the last episode you covered as of this recording so when i saw this i was like oh that's frank gorshin probably yeah one of those guys is frank gorshin sitting in that star trek church that's so funny uh germany

has been renamed nazi planet episode land which that's such a funny man also to know in this world of like oh yeah so when we banned religion we killed every adherent to it of like wow that's pretty pretty extreme in the future here that's some brutal stuff uh the the nerds are wearing the shirts that say beam me up scotty there's no intelligent life here and i feel like we are also on the cusp of the nerd identity changing and that now everything is made for nerds nerds are such a broad term now that it really doesn't exist anymore and the most popular movies are uh marvel movies i feel like nerd stuff being a niche interest is gone so this is just a relic of the time right before everything changed that's a time you kind of miss don't you just a little bit just a little star trek still isn't that mainstream every

every couple every decade or so they keep trying to be like, hey, this can be as big as Star Wars, too. But it has a wider cultural, I'd say, impact than Star Wars. And it makes money over time of Star Wars numbers. But if you want Star Trek to be a billion-dollar movie franchise, that's not what it's made to be no absolutely not and like i'm fine with those those abrams movies as like sci-fi action movies um especially that star trek beyond the one that i think justin lynn directed which is fun but it's like it is a straight up action movie um so you have to sort of take that for what it's worth i think what's funny is like yes star trek as a religion in this future right is being banned and outlawed or whatever but when you sort of think about like the tenets of star trek like if people on this earth

like adhered to those ideas we would kind of be better off than we are right now so it is kind of funny that like whatever this society was like on the show looked at all that was like i don't think so that's that's not for us fry says it later in the episode but i have a friend who definitely adheres to this the biggest star trek fan i know in my irl he is one of his biggest problems with there being no trek for so long he's just like you can't imagine a happy future without star trek like star trek is like everything's just an abysmal depressing future of like oh well it's going to be you know like a fucking zombie apocalypse or whatever that's our future you need his big statement of like for for the human imagination you need star trek to be popular so people can see a bright future an example of things somehow getting better yeah that's why enterprise was so sad like that

show that they put out started in like 2001 or whatever which is a it's a prequel show to tos and they were really i think kind of chasing that Battlestar vibe. It's just that really low-fi. Their technology isn't there yet in the timeline. And a lot of that is kind of darker and more mechanic-feeling and cold and stuff. And it doesn't feel like Star Trek to me. I've seen very little of it, actually. Biggest reason is it's the only Star Trek show that has

lyrics with its theme song. You can get that right out of town. Big mistake. It sounds like contemporary FM radio. It'll make you change the dial so fast your head will spin. And if you look at that door not opening correct blooper reel on YouTube,

multiple comments are like, Futurama brought me here. i left this up because of futurama uh and of course uh yes they're they're executed with he's dead jim and i was looking up like how often did bone say this he said it or some variation of it 20 times in tos to the point where he wouldn't say it in wrath of khan uh deforest kelly said i'm not saying this it's a joke now so So they gave that line to Scotty. It works so much better that Scotty says, I mean, it would have been insane if he says that over Spock's body. Like, it's a laugh line.

It would kill the scene for sure. Absolutely. So Zap clucks his tongue and he reports he's never heard of such a brutal and shocking injustice he cares so little about. We move on to the next witness. And this is when we realize that fry was not catatonic he gets out of the uh the whatever the the pod it says it's all yours buddy it's so cute how he does that and then yeah and then he's called buddy and then bender's like i only met this guy fry once before but i didn't like him oh yeah he's also forced use the beeps yeah so for some reason you can't actually speak during this uh test when you have to do this in norse code and of course this is the menagerie like which is a trial that then tells flashbacks

to show scenes from the unused pilot and all that they needed uh to reuse that footage so they found a way to do it uh so we go to the head museum which is where all the heads are kept and fry arrives that's where leonard nimoy is that's where he wasn't the pilot and he came as soon as we heard what had happened centuries ago but nimoy plays dumb and fry has to get him to break by describing star trek and that's where we get our 79 episodes about 30 good ones and he can't and because the word he's being watched like the the camera's on him he's like he can't just say star trek so he has to talk around it and i love that nimoy this is a joke about how they are forever like fry says you're doomed to be followed by this forever

like this is you'll always be spock while meanwhile he's trying to say i did so many tv shows i did lots of stuff that wasn't this you want to talk about that he's like i'd rather talk about my books of poetry and yes nimoy wrote seven books of poetry that's a lot of poetry he was real shutterbug he did some black and white photography as well he was also on mission Impossible the TV show for quite a while. And he directed a lot more than just Star Trek movies. I also remember in my youth when there was

the, they did a new season of Outer Limits and he directed an episode that remade the Robot Trial episode of Outer Limits that he's in and his son is in it. Nimoy's son was in it. It was a big deal like Nimoy coming back to Outer Limits.

That's funny. Adam Nimoy is like a director himself these days. He directed a doc about his old man, which you better believe this guy talking right now is crying throughout. Very touching documentary. And of course,onard nimoy directed

the number one movie of 1987 three men and a baby which you guys covered on your podcast that's him yeah classic and i forgot that and i remember like going back to re-watch it for the show and i was like directed by who i was totally shocked uh so fry is trying to get him to break and he describes the episode where uh he got high on spores and smacked Kirk around that is this side of paradise and Nimoy lets it slip by saying oh you must be thinking about my one man show about Vincent Van Spock I mean Van Gogh and yes

he had a one man show about Vincent Van Gogh called Vincent it was performed in 1979 but there was a TV version from 81 that you can watch on YouTube I gotta look this up to the internet performed in 1979 but there was a tv version from 81 that you can watch on youtube so i'm gonna look this up yes to the internet yeah and i mean i think acting is magical but whenever i see a one man show i'm like how do you remember all that i mean different uh abilities people have but it

seems magical to me that one man shows can exist yeah no i remember thinking that we saw um fleabag when she was doing that here in new york and i remember watching it like what in the world like how is she doing this i have i do not have the the brain capacity for that whatsoever that's why i have 3 000 words uh worth of notes in front of me for this episode if i if i had a one-man show i'd forget everything after the words oh i didn't see you there i remember that part but then everything uh so in our next clip here we find out what happened to the other cast members of star trek aha you can't escape it no you're right i can't uh geez don't get upset i mean okay i outwitted you but no it's my fellow cast members

300 years ago, they left Earth behind. This planet doesn't appreciate us anymore, Leonard. Bill, you are and always shall be my friend. But I just signed a six-month lease on my apartment. I can't walk away from a commitment like that. Farewell, my friend. So, yeah, there's a little joke in there, and they're quoting Wrath of Khan, I believe, right?

But it's a very sweet little exchange between two guys who had a pretty rocky, you know, working relationship, of course. But I find it very sweet. It's also nice hearing him, you know, call him Bill, too. Like, using their first name. Leonard Bill.

Yeah. Bill sounds natural, unlike the L-Dog nickname they have him say later. Also, as someone who just signed a one-year lease on a new apartment, I feel Nimoy there. You can't walk away from commitments just like that. It's so funny he leaves them behind. But is also sad of like oh look there's a little window there for nimoy in the for the other heads in it it's it's i mean yes and again this all this stuff here is just like of course it feels a lot heavier when so many of them are dead now like sure well

that i mean you know that's sort of the i'm sure you guys will get to it but the elephant in the room for this episode is poor deforest kelly yeah that was a weird i mean i i get you want to have them all there and animate it but if you already don't have doing like maybe not do the dead guys just drawn and never says anything it's weird that he's just silent and occasionally fighting bender it's their version of the flash movie oh god yeah i'd say it's more respectful because they're not like scanning a corpse yes yeah that's right yes so we go back to the head museum nimoy's very sad he's weeping that the world turned their back on the cast's obvious greatness fry is literally angry with rage love that line uh and even though the co-stars are gone fry vows to get the episodes back so the whole world can

see them and he takes nimoy out of the museum frakes was hiding behind him the entire time i think that's really him that's right yeah definitely sounds okay it's i i love jonathan frakes i think he is an amazing voice actor to this day. He's also great and also a director. I think that is a smart thing, too, of if there's anyone in the TNG cast that has this career most like Leonard Nimoy's, it's Jonathan Frakes. Yeah, totally. Had a very varied career and is a professional director of non-Star Trek things and Star Trek things. Yeah, and nimoy did that in search of show and frakes did that beyond belief show wow yeah that's actually the same show

isn't it kind of yeah and also john and frank's i've said before he's a hilarious interview uh look up any interview with him that he did in picard he he uh says stuff that you're like oh that's funny it's like he he craps on insurrection a movie he's like in he cracks i didn't and also he directed i think that's right yeah and and also he in the year 2020 he did a great cameo for my mom he's worth the money if he's got open slots on cameo he was very nice she she my mom had a bit of a crush on him uh as well so that makes total sense i have a bit of a crush on him now who wouldn't uh so we're back in the planet express ship lila very upset about fry going to the forbidden planet she forbids him that's so great i forbid it and like you said henry fry tells her uh the point of star

trek is to give people hope for the future. Leela points out it's set 800 years in the past. On the next clip here, Fry explains the value of Star Trek. Because it taught me so much, like how you should accept people, whether they be black, white, Klingon, or even female. But most importantly, when I didn't have any friends, it made me feel like maybe I did. Well, that is touchingly pathetic. I guess I can't let you go alone. I'll go too.

With Leonard's permission, of course. We're entering the Omega System. Warning. You are now in forbidden space. Forbidden smershmaden. What are they going to do? Write a letter? Ooh, I'm so scared.

I've lost control of the ship. You've lost control of the ship. Sorry. I had to leave in the John DiMaggio frantic screaming. It's so good. He screams it so good. He's like, you've lost control of the ship. And he's like. Those are basically tasmanian devil noises he's making he's the

funniest but i couldn't possibly identify with what fry was describing there about having no friends and the tv show made him feel like he did we got obsessed with another tv show yes yeah yeah no i i i love his little speech like though it does there were a couple times the episode where i was like well it works for this episode but fry is just like he is an idiot who watches too much television but never has he been a super star trek expert like this is not this is not consistent with his character i'd say Maybe he's felt shame about it. That's true. You never know.

I certainly was a closeted Star Trek fan when I was a kid. Absolutely. Because it was, you know, nerd shit. And, you know, none of my friends watched it. It was a real, like... And I didn't even... Aside from my uncle, who did not live in the same house as I did, I didn't have any family that cared either.

So it was me like VHS tapes, watching those movies alone, watching, you know, the syndicated TNGs totally alone. Like I, yeah, that line kind of hit me.

I also like benders. Like what are they going to do? Write a letter. Of course, Star Trek got a third season due to a letter writing campaign. Oh, you're right yeah that has to be a reference for sure yeah yeah i i i should say these testimonials from

star trek fans so i once worked at a star trek convention in the year 2016 i've uh listeners may have heard me say this before but i my the company i was working at at the time surprised me like hey this weekend fly to vegas and be the be work our booth basically at the star trek convention in vegas for 2016 and part of my job was they wanted to get interviews with a wide breadth of star trek fans like cross generations no pun intended about why they love the show and they were like literally they i was crying as seeing people cry of just like you know this this woman in her 50s saying like me and my daughter watched all the time and it's we were so connected with it or you know this this nerd who this dumb nerd talked about how much he loved it but no he he was crying about it it was great he there was also a woman who uh she she was a very attractive

older woman but also she was like she said oh yeah did you notice that i'm dressed just like marina sturtis's character and i still just look just like her too and and her daughter was with her and just kind of rolling her eyes like yes mom you still look like you still look like troy even in your 50s yes mom but i got it she did look she still was pulling off troy this this grandma was looking good and you know this company that sent you to this convention henry that i work for too how did going there make any money i have no clue exactly i have no clue how it made money uh they it was working with the roddenberry family company which had its own thing yes and uh and i got to hang out most of the time next to a full recreation

of quarks bar from ds9 okay that's were they actually serving liquor they were they were that's pretty cool i'd get shit faced at quarks bar and also i got to hear chase masterson sing a bunch of songs so uh yeah the uh it was it was a weird time and uh i have one more funny story from it as well but yes hearing hearing fry fry sad story is like i i I had to hear like a dozen of those from filming it with people who felt Trek very deeply. So we crash on a desert planet here and we exit the ship to see an old west town. Fry, oh dip, Spock, dip indeed. I don't know if we're saying dip anymore, but there's a ton of references because we pan across this landscape. The old west stuff is from the specter of the gun you see the roman planet stuff from who mourns for adonais

the three brains under the glass are from the gamesters of triskelion the old timey cars from a piece of the action the m5 computers from the ultimate computer and the time portal is from the city on the edge of forever the the point of all of these references is, this is like the last time you could really do this on TV, but you have seen enough reruns in which you could know what all these things are. It's sort of like in the mid-90s when those Brady Bunch movies came out, the idea was you have seen these reruns enough, you will understand when we're recreating things ironically.

Right. But yeah, you're right. Now there's just so much stuff that you can't keep track of it but the you know at that star trek convention they did have a full life size creation of several of these including the city on the edge of forever portal that you could you know take instagrammable pics in front of it i did that's pretty fucking cool actually now i wish i was at this convention that's the harlan ellison episode right yes or at least one of them the the the great one that yeah which is uh

probably one of the most heavily referenced one uh probably science fiction television shows of all time not even just star trek it's a it's a fabulous piece of writing it's so good i mean it's like it's not like it's not outrageous to say like it's it could possibly be like the best star trek episode of all time and just like a genuinely rocking piece of science fiction and you know if you go to that uh you guys should uh maybe see if you get your podcast booked at that uh still continuing las vegas star trek convention because the other nice thing about it is well well, if you don't like Las Vegas, then it's not a nice thing. But when you step out of the convention,

instead of being in like boring old San Diego, you're in frigging Las Vegas and you can hit the tables or you can go see a show. Shots fired at San Diego. I had no idea. San Diego is so boring it's so i mean you could go down to tijuana for fun i guess but no i've i have covered san diego comic-con eight different times in my life and the city of san diego is boring as shit and it only exists to

house comic-con once a year prove us wrong san wrong, San Diego. And the Navy. It has the Navy also, but other than that. Well, now the Navy's going to get us. Let's hear the reunion in our next clip here. So many cardboard sets. So many memories. If only the others... I guess that's my cue. Bill!

El Doug. Hey, this is wonderful. Oh, man. I feel like is wonderful. Oh, man. I feel like hugging you. Well, I would, except you have no body. And we're both men. Michelle. George.

Walter. DeForest. Welchie. Welchie? We did some musical reunion specials in the 2200s, but the guy who played Scotty had trouble yodeling. Ever since then, Welshi has been a welcome participant in our escapades.

Aye, do we want a mud one whirl? I can't believe it. How'd you all end up here? We were on our way to Welshi's cousin's house to stay in the guest room when our ship was pulled down to this planet and crashed, just like yours. When we woke up, we had these bodies.

Say it in Russian. Then we woke up, we had these bodies. Now say nuclear vessels. No. Boy, I mean, Kane makes eye enough on all this, but it makes it seem like he really hated Star Trek. Yes, I love that so the James doing stuff apparently they asked him

I hear the response from his agent was simply no way and that was all they heard back and I mean he was on the way out his Alzheimer's diagnosis was revealed in 2004 and I have to assume an agent is booking all these things

for him and he sees like oh a cartoon you don't want to do this and i feel like he didn't know what it was right do you think that's really too like that the rest of the the rest of the living gang was uh participating do you think that was part of the the cell or do you think this dude just kind of like maybe didn't even bring it to him, just like cartoon? Nah. I feel like a lot of agents feel like they're diving on a grenade for you

because the story I heard about Sigourney Weaver, she didn't do that Ghostbusters game in 2009 and she was the only holdout. And that's why Alyssa Milano plays a new character instead of her being in it. And then when it came out, she didn't know, like, I didn't know everyone was part of this.

I would have been in this game. Why didn't anyone tell me? So I feel like an agent's like, she's not doing a video game. Yeah. Then, yeah. Well,

I've heard, I've heard agent tales as well, like that, where once they say no, and then they realize like, ah, crap, I should have said yes,

that they can't admit they made a mistake also because their client might you know fire them if they sure about that so that uh yeah i feel i feel like doing could have easily been in this they've been like an afternoon for him at most just to record it like it's it's really too bad though the plus side is by having welshie here it lets them do red shirt comedy oh yes that's right yeah they're still doing the scotty fat jokes because when welshie comes out of the portal or whatever you hear the big thud yes well she and i mean it's funny too of like oh so instead of scotland we're going south to wales instead to get a Welshman. And by the way, he does speak accurate Welsh. Apparently, he says, I am very drunk.

I mean, the exposition doesn't matter, but I totally forgot. Shatner says, we're on our way to Welshie's cousin's house to stay in the guest room. To stay in the guest room, which is awesome. Like all of them in there like sardines is really a funny image. I guess his heads heads they don't need too much space but i guess that's true we're getting their heads in jars i do also i i mean so much of this episode still works great for me but yeah it's full of ref jokes that the similar territory the galaxy quest covers so well that i'm like oh yeah well i keep making these comparisons to galaxy

quest but it's because their red shirt comedy in it is hilarious because sam rockwell is the guy who the whole movie is terrified he's like no i'm a red shirt i'm just here to die you don't even know my name do you so in this uh world they all have bodies everything is provided for them uh uh sulu has very nice abs just like in the 60s he i think he had the best body of the whole cast whatever that episode is where they they all get like various degrees of space madness for some reason and sulu's running around with the sword like takei's got his shirt off and you're like good gravy look at that guy. And that's in the 60s when even having, like, two abs was like, hey, whoa, you're an Adonis here?

Like, you're a professional bodybuilder. They really oiled him up for that scene. I can see the scene of him with the sword in my mind, right? He's got a sword, like a fencing foil, I think. Yeah. And, yeah, apparently, according to Shatner uh they're used to this kind of treatment so they never thought about it like why this is happening to them yes i i also love uh caning hating being to do this stuff is that was also on the viva variety show where he was the guest and he was

like no i'm a real actor i'm not doing star trek stuff and but it was all a joke because then he's like, okay, you know what? I'll do a Chekhov play. How about that? And so it starts with him doing a Chekhov play, but then a Klingon invades and they're like, well, you'd have to fight him. And he's like, all right, fine. And I didn't know until listening to the Nexus, Andrew,

that Chekhov was a character added to the show because the monkeys were popular. And he is wearing a monkey's wig for a character added to the show because the monkeys were popular and he is wearing a monkey's wig for a large portion of the show I had no idea he's got this Davy Jones rug on man and yeah it was like we want to get the youth like a close

approximation to a teenager should be part of the cast in some way so in comes Chekhov which also creates the hilarious like goof in um wrath of khan where checkoff is the one that remembers khan but khan is a first season episode so there's you know it's like oh maybe he was on the show i think we have a joke like when we talk about that on the nexus or maybe on our khan episode where it's like oh yes you know he ran into him in the bathroom line or something because like like they have him be like oh that planet why does that planet sound familiar oh no it's

con and it's like dude you weren't there you were not part of the space seed dude what are you talking about he was uh somewhere in the back you can't see him but yeah exactly you know he hadn't graduated yet to the i also yeah we watched your live show about star trek 4 so we know all about nuclear vessels oh absolutely i think it's funny that they have him doing all of those jokes when like if you look at the tally of who's participated in what and i'm not like you know ragging on his reasons for doing them or anything but like he's the dude that's like, you got a fan film, he's in it. You got some garbage animated thing that will only see YouTube, he will be a Chekhov descendant of some kind,

which is why I thought it was so nice that they included him in that finale of Star Trek Picard. He's playing a descendant of Pavel Chekhov named Anton Chekhov, which is also a reference to of course uh anton what's his face who passed away yelchin there we go yeah no he just died when he had he had died like within a month of that con i went to and it was oh really it had a whole wall of remembrances of him which was rather sad i think koenig realistically knows that he is on the bottom of the tos totem pole in fact the writer said that when he met them his canned line was i was i played seventh banana

on the show so uh we do meet the villain of the show uh melvar with three l's and uh purposely made to look very cheesy the artist had different things mind, but they were asked to dial it way back to make it look convincingly like a Star Trek effect, although it looks way better than a bad Star Trek effect because it's made in 2002. Yeah, but it does look a little like a rear projected blue screen thing and that Bender calls him a cheesy effect.

Like that's such a, I love that line. And it is also fun because you know, LaMarche doesn't mention it too much on this commentary he is a huge star trek nerd as well he does an amazing shatner too yes yeah he's uh he actually uh he he acts out another of the famous william shatner tapes of him messing up something or the the sabotage oh the sabotage uh video yeah that poor recording room engineer is that where it sickens me comes from yes he he's uh it seems like he's a tough guy to direct though i bet it helped them on this one that they had leonard in the room who's like god bill i can vouch for him don't be a dick to these guys. And so Shatner maybe wasn't

a jerk. I think, yeah, Nimoy could have been the Bill Shatner tamer, you know, just calm him down, get him ready to take direction from nerds. Now I'm picturing Leonard Nimoy like holding a chair and a whip, like holding off William Shatner. That's how he directed

Star Trek 2, 3? 3 and 4. 3 and 4, that's right. So star trek uh two three three and four three and four that's right yeah uh so they doubt melvar's powers that's when he kills welshie welshie's corpse will be blasted more throughout this episode because there's only one red shirt so they have to kill him multiple times and fry has great affinity for welshie despite only just meeting him uh so we're on to act two here uh lila is uh giving some very sensual testimony and we cut back to the planet melvar shows off another power different than the one they saw earlier uh and it hovers over leonard nimoy's jar and turns him back into his late 60s self and he remarks hey a

body buff tan yep this is mine all right so he is back to normal and in our next clip here fry demands some answers from melvar all right you gas what's the deal centuries ago the videotaped adventures of the enterprise crew rained down upon my planet over and over i watched them especially the five with the energy beams i am melvar seer of the tapes, knower of the episodes. Tremble before my encyclopedic knowledge of Star Trek. Tremble? I laugh. Nobody knows more about Star Trek than me.

I beg to differ. Long have I waited for the one who played Spock. At last, we can begin. Cool, a Star Trek convention. Melvar, can you give us some idea of how long this is going to last? Until time stops. You can't do this. Now, we have a full schedule of events.

Can people who hate Star Trek leave? Good question. No, you have to stay even longer. Oh, that's great uh i mean uh i just i really enjoy the characterization of kate a cure good question good question and just the the nervous petulance of melvar is great he's he wants to assert authority but he's still just a nervous uh non-confident nerd he's yeah and then also he's used to being the biggest star trek fan anywhere so fry challenging him it's why you know sometimes

having a shared love of something like star trek can connect you with another person other times it puts you at odds with them because you have to prove you're the bigger uh expert than the other person uh in uh in nerd circles again something i would know anything about that's not my life it is the nerd reaction to think uh oh someone who knows about things that i like the the reaction is you're an enemy now yes yep totally nowhere does it cross their mind like oh we could be friends and like joining this uh shared thing that we both love no no no no fuck that guy he's going down price says like no one's a bigger star trek expert than me it's like that's that's his reaction to hearing melvar say he's the knower of all star trek information and melvar zaps well she's body

again when he's mad at friday uh so we cut to this autograph session and uh i think it's to k who says i think i've done enough conventions to know how to spell Melvar. They probably have written every name 800,000 times. And I think it was Anthology of Interest 1, there's a joke at the end of one of the segments in which it's Al Gore, the creator of D&D, Fry, and Nichelle Nichols are stuck in the end of eternity for all existence. And she's like, great. It's just like the Pasadena Star Trek convention all over again.

She relished saying that line. There's something about it being in Pasadena that makes it funny, too. Of all places, that's where the most famous Star Trek convention is. The Vegas one i went to is in competition with that pasadena one like is that true oh wow yeah i think it's them trying to be like we're gonna be the bigger one we're in a better city to go to and vegas has given us all this money but uh though i think they also set it up there originally because at one time there was a star trek experience in las vegas like uh yeah a whole themed thing

that's right which is central to the plot of the elvis movie by the way really okay not exactly central to the plot but one of the first things you see to date when you're seeing elvis's manager in his death throes is that he's living in vegas and you see the Star Trek the now gone Star Trek restaurant advertised in an establishing shot so but yeah the also these photos again I've been to a lot of cons I've been to wrestling cons I

my husband paid for it but I have done I have had pictures taken with professional wrestlers I enjoy to and there is especially though with um people who do it with uh people they find attractive they're like hug a hug is implicit like hey you're gonna you know put your arm around me right attractive woman who is on a thing i enjoy and it's it's weird i do not like i think we're still in the era in which we have the COVID plexiglass between the you know, the picture seeker and the celebrity.

So the the faux camaraderie can't even exist anymore. You're just kind of like on opposite sides of a wall paying $125 with this woman professional wrestler, and I can't even stand next to her. I have to have a sheet of glass between us, and it's just like, oh, man. Like, why is that so concerning for you, dude? Like, why are you upset? Please articulate that and if it's not creepy maybe we'll take the glass away but I gotta feel that glass ain't

going anywhere pal so in a real written in 2001 joke we get Shatner doing a spoken word performance of the real Slim Shady so at this point I think we had all seen the clip online but it was no longer an insider thing

it was a reference to him doing a cover of a rocket man during the 1978 saturn awards so we've all seen it family guy basically did the whole thing with stewie i think around this time or before this slightly before this had within a year yeah yeah yeah that's i'll tell you that's the futurama versus family guy difference and look i i i'm not as much of a family guy hater as i used to be the not that i love it but the futurama difference is like okay we all think that rocket man thinks funny let's do a new update on it that let's add something to it family guys like hey wasn't rocket man thing funny let's just do that like one of our characters do the exact thing yeah it's easier than writing a joke yes yeah i have

not thought about that in a really long time i'll say i don't think i've seen an episode of family guy in like 19 years or so um whenever it was i remember the exact moment I checked out of that show was it's so maybe not as long but there's an episode where Peter buys a mentally challenged horse and I was like you know what let's flush that toilet and I never went back I

could not tell you the last time I saw a Family Guy episode well it's quietly and it's what like 25th season now or something or 20th something like that they're over 400 episodes now yeah it's nice uh but i forgot that shatner reclaimed this in his 2011 album seeking major tom he redid this uh rocket man performance but i listened to it on youtube it's way too subdued you need the intensity of 78 shatner being kind of pissed off in that moment. It seems we're just playing it up.

I mean, there's, there's an intense need to that where it's like a man that's full of just energy, just sitting there and smoking a cigarette as he's doing this. His, his cigarette acting is second to none in that sequence too. Yes.

Yeah. Well, that's, you know, 1978, like that's a kind of a tough time for Shatner. You know what I'm saying? Like the, the movies had, what's, you know, 1978, like that's a kind of a tough time for Shatner. You know what I'm saying? Like the movies had, what's the motion picture is 79.

Yeah. So that hadn't happened yet. TJ Hooker hadn't happened yet. This is a dude that is just, you know, he was doing like B movies and things like that. But now I'm hosting the what? Great. You know, I feel like that is the vibe going into that rocket man performance yeah i think at that point nimoy at least had the ballad of bilbo baggins or

something going for him who's speaking of bad music that's uh that's an interesting listen great video though i love it i'm pretty sure women are doing the monkey in that video or something he outwitted the trolls a magic ring he stole i didn't even know that many lyrics every wow uh so we go to ambassador serek's trivia challenge even i know that's spock's dad because he was in an episode of tng you guys recently covered that's right cleverly titled serek i saw that before i saw him in the original context i saw i saw serek's death episode before i saw his original episodes too those that uh two-parter on tng is some classic stuff where it's him and nimoy also returned like admittedly to promote

undiscovered country because he had like back-end interest in that financially um but it it wound up being like awesome star trek though all the same i love that two-parter and it was the big return of uh tashi r's daughter impossibly aged daughter yes that's right that's right but uh well okay here's the part that reminds me of what a stressful nightmare time in my life were you a real gamester of triskelion henry i did run a star trek trivia thing so okay the reason i yeah so here's what happened the reason i had to go to that vegas thing is basically my boss learns that the company at that website agreed to host a trivia thing because the company owns uh alpha memory uh memory alpha that's it the the the star trek wiki so because the company owned it they're gonna host a trivia thing now they instead of like asking around like two days before the flight i am told hey henry could

you fly down to vegas and and host this with to Vegas and host this with your coworkers and just do that? I was like, well, I don't really know Star Trek. And they tell me, don't worry. The trivia is already all written. You just have to read the questions. So then I have to do it three times a day, three days in a row. On the first day, I don't check those questions. I just read them three questions

are wrong and let me tell you who doesn't like hearing trivia said wrong star trek fans yeah and i get booed like i'm booed by like a crowd of like 40 people wow because i and i just say like i didn't write the questions so then to avoid that the next two days i stay up all night and uh fact check the questions off of wikis and there were like five more wrong ones i had to fact check wow yeah and and so i don't get too embarrassed but i will say i should have looked up how you pronounce uh klingon names because every time there was a klingon name in it i say it wrong and i still get booed and i'm like i'm sorry this is not in your job description i know but many things we did there were not in our

job description oh and i didn't get paid any extra for it i did get to have two expensive steak meals and inexpensive but i had to work all weekend for free basically that was oh that's bogus dude yeah you know here's the thing i i guess i can see their point about like trivia stuff like the questions because like if points were on the line or whatever but like i'm sorry man pronunciation of klingon names let's all come back to reality for two seconds like who gives a shit let this trivia contest just continue because the sooner it continues the sooner it can be over with i i basically also kept trying to steer it into things i was an expert on of like if say there was a tng related question for an episode i did

know i'd be like oh we all remember that and i'd quote it but then i'd say hey and does everybody remember the gargoyles tv show where that had most of the tng cast i did get a little of that too yes but so so seeing this trivia contest it only reminds me of unhappiness uh but i mean the real joke is here is to set up a question where the answer is con so shatner who i assume it's him doing it can scream con like he did in the wrath of con he's doing pretty for him and in 2002 does a good scream not not 1982 level con scream but a good scream and now the surprise is essentially what this episode is doing they're all going to perform a fan script written by the ultimate trek fan which is the writer of this episode was the best trek fan on on futurama so they're kind of already doing that but now they're

doing it within the context of him already writing the episode it's very complicated so funny i love that i also andrew as as a trekkie, what is your preferred form of fake currency? Quatloos or gold press latinum? Oh, yeah. Well, I guess that sort of purist, like what's Picard's great line in First Contact where he's like, basically, he's like, we don't have money. We work to better ourselves. That's what I would love society to be, but that's not the reality. Gold press, latinum.

That's got to be the quark Ferengi currency that's all over DS9. That's got to be my fave. Can you only spend them on Triskelion or what? I guess so, right? I'll give me $1,500 worth. I feel likein them is basically the

euros of the federation right uh so it's it's fan script time melvar uh is is getting them passed out apparently there weren't enough copies of the script so uh george and walter have to share and apparently this is a reference to uh two of Star Trek where George Takei only appeared in half the episodes due to scheduling, which is why the invention of Chekhov happened. So I guess that is why. And because of that, they often had to share a dressing room when Takei became available. So this is deep Star Trek production knowledge. Takei was in some, you film like some world war two movie i think during the run yeah yeah he's on like a war show thing at the same time because

he thought star trek was gonna die i thought i read but i i looked up online like it is a limited number of episodes that has the full cast like everybody who you think of as Star Trek. Yeah. It's usually just. I mean for the most part. It's always Kirk, Spock and Bones. Right. They are the Frey Leland Bender of Star Trek. Big time. Yeah.

It also shows you how. You know. At this time. Fan fiction was the more preferred term. In fan circles of making up your own stories. But they're using the more you know. 70s fandom style term in fan circles of making up your own stories but they're using the more you know 70s fandom style term of fan script uh which this is an uh it leads to an amazing parody of star trek fanfic was is the core of fanfic like at least from an american standpoint it all it all

goes back to star trek yeah in the year 2001 when this is written we don't like terms like fanfic and cosplay are known within nerd circles but you can't put that on a broadcast show so i understand why like fan script you know what that means don't you uh but lila comes up with a ruse to escape to the shape she basically tells melvar you don't want us hearing the ending it'll ruin your play for us and so that's when they're able to escape fry briefly wants a 600 quad lose but lila pulls them off screen and um let's hear them abandon the star trek cast get ready for las vegas style action at bet mgm the king of online casinos enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same vegas strip excitement mgm is famous for when you play BetMGM Casino. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly.

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This is wrong. We shouldn't have abandoned them there. I don't know. I'm feeling pretty good about it. I didn't want to leave them either, Fry. But what were we supposed to do? Well, usually on the show, someone would come up with a complicated plan, then explain it with a simple analogy. Hmm. If we can reroute engine power through the primary weapons and reconfigure them to Melvar's frequency, that should overload his electro-quantum structure. Like putting too much air in a balloon! Of course! It's so simple! Alas, my ship, whom I love like a woman, is disabled. Oh, Lord.

Fascinating, Captain, and logical, too, that we need some help. Look, Captain, Melvar will help us. Captain, I hope he will whelp our vessel. Vessel! No. You're not acting hard enough! Melvar, you have to respect your actors. When I directed Star Trek IV, I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much.

And when I directed Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much. That's great. And I am proud of William Shatner for doing that line at his own expense. Yeah, it's such a great... I mean, it's not them fully crapping on Star Trek V, which is the worst one, but also that it's a joke about his pomposity

that he's like, oh yeah, I didn't care about directing other people, nor does he say he respects anyone else in the cast. It's also a weird thing where it's like, I don't even think he particularly cares about directing. What he cared about was that Nimoy did three and four, and he didn't do a thing that Leonard did. And they had that like tit for tat contractual thing where it's like if he does a thing, then, you know, Nimoy does a thing and vice versa. But like, dude is not a director. It's a bad, bad movie that I have seen 30 times. And I think I think later, Andrew, I think you might have played the clip on your show. But Shatner took credit for teaching Nimoy how to direct on TJ Hooker or something crazy like that yes it's oh I forget what the the specifics are but he's like you know Leonard was my disciple and I taught him everything he

knows and you're just like what fucking planet are you on now Captain Kirk that's nuts so this fan writes this ultimate fan script of course he is the hero of the script. And even though he knows the characters well, they're all just doing their bits. So like when he has to write for Spock, Spock goes, fascinating, Captain, and logical too. And then Chekhov, he has no character, so he just talks about Wessels.

Wessels. And I mean, yes, Melvar coming in is the main character in it. The reason the term mary sue exists oh is because that was the name of the woman who wrote very famous star trek fan scripts a long long time ago and wrote her character into it and everybody loves her and she saves the day and it's i mean it is now we just call it the self-insert or the fan-insert and everything. And you can tell it a mile away in somebody's fanfic that you're like, in the rare times I've read fanfic and a character just starts talking

about a thing they never talk about, I'm just like, oh, well, that's something the writer really loves. So, like, all of a sudden this character's really into really into like you know the beatles or something like that but but yes that melvar shows up to save the day it is it is them directly making fun of of mary sue now they're not doing slash fic though uh in this or they don't get far enough in the script maybe to see i think slash fic also comes from uh star trek fanfic it was the kirk sp slash fic, and that's where the term came from, I believe. Yes, yeah, yeah. That's why they started it with it.

Yeah, I mean, it's called slash because you would write Kirk slash Spock. That's where it comes from. Though now the Internet is obviously greatly helped by this and now the most of the internet is just slash fic of some level like people i in many fandoms a danger is people are more addicted to their belief of what the story should be or their fan stories than any future thing that happens that's why there shouldn't be more say ghostbusters because everyone has imagined what their next ghostbusters is so you can't make more ghostbusters all i could think about during this whole sequence was that really uh awkward but funny uh mad men

uh star trek uh gag did you guys watch Men? I didn't see that one. There's an episode where one of the guys, one of the sort of lower level fellas, Paul, I think the character's name is, he writes a spec script for TOS and it's called the Negron Complex. And he's

explaining it, I think to Don, he's explaining what the story is and he's like, but here's to don is he's explaining like what the story is and he's like but here's the thing it's called the negron complex but the twist the negrons are white people and you're just like oh my god that is like the caliber of these like fans submitted the cold call policy at paramount like yeah well look at your script and you're getting like how many fucking negron complex type episodes uh also that i mean this recreation of the original bridge many people have built this in the real world like there's i think the trekkie movie has the dentist who built it yes oh the dentist yes oh that's awkward there's even a recent VR game maybe it's

five years old now where it's just called Star Trek Bridge and it's a VR game where you're on the bridge everybody wants to be on the bridge yeah now I played that at a demo event for it and the game actually is really fun to play if you have

five people who own VR headsets and are all fun to play if you have five people who own vr headsets and are all ready to play along with it not a solo experience really it can be but it really the fun is so i was sulu in the sulu seat and the captain only has so much information and only every place can do the thing so if you're in the captain's seat you're like you need more power to the shields but you can't control that you have to ask the person who controls the shields to do that so you say it out loud is a clever idea it was really a clever idea i don't i don't think it was that successful because nobody owns v not enough there there isn't a big enough market for vr games And Star Trek fans don't have four friends.

Yes, there's that. There's that difficult part. I kid. What platform did that come out? As I'm sitting here, there's a meta headset behind me on the shelf here. I'm like, can I get that? Was it PSVR? I think it might be for Oculus slash meta.

It was definitely on PSVR was where I played it. But I bet it's, I think it's on Oculus meta as wella. It was definitely on PSVR where I played it, but I bet it's I think it's on Oculus Meta as well. Okay, I might check that out. And by now it's probably like $6 or something. Exactly. So we're back on the ship.

We have some fun junk science as Bender finishes reconfoobling the energy Motron. He's like Scotty in an episode. Yes. i love the joke with lila where she points her finger in the air says fire and then brings her finger down on the fire button great gag that as she is captain has to fire her own lasers i and yeah that the too much air in a balloon like that that was also in next generation as well like every every time they'd have to explain uh something scientific it would be that

that way too i actually felt like that was way more of a tng thing i was sort of sitting there like last night watching this wracking my brain like how often did they do that like soft explanation after like the tech talk in that way on tos but like tng is super inundated with that like they have like levar bur Burton say that all the time. That's a dipshit thing Wesley would do all the time. Oh, God, yes. We just spat out a bunch of techno babble, and now someone's going to explain it for the human beings watching this show.

But in this case, their plan backfires because Melvar actually draws energy from the ship's weapons, like a balloon and uh something bad happens right as uhura is about to fall in love with him and his fan script i would guess it probably gets a little r-rated if that scene had continued oh no far uh uhura slash fic yes i i also like uh yes that this does follow how many star Trek episodes happen where at, you know, the 25, 30 minute mark, they're like, we definitely have this situation under control. Okay, let's execute it.

Hey, it all worked. Oh no, it didn't work. And then they have their problem for the final act. We do have six minutes left. So Melvar basically turns into a long hand and grabs the ship, brings it back down to the planet. They essentially just are fine and kind of slide out from underneath the ship. And Melvar, they approach Melvar in the Star Trek cast.

And Melvar finally recognizes the true space heroes in our next clip. So how's rehearsal going? Lousy. Here I've been admiring a bunch of actors while you, a crew of genuine space heroes, risked your lives to save them. Hey, we've done heroic things too. Yeah, in the third season I kissed Shatner. Silence! My whole world is turned upside down. I have but one option. Keep them and let us go? No! To determine who is more worthy of my fanatical devotion, I shall pit you against each other in So he blows up Walsh's body. I was getting to that one! So he blows up Welch's body.

Rule of threes, he was killed, zapped, and then blown up. And whoever, I mean, David Goodman who wrote this, had to have a Star Trek episode guide next to him that listed things in production order because all these numbers are correct if you go by production order. So 19 is Arena, 46 is the Game Shift of Triskelion, 56 is Specter of the Gun 77 is the savage curtain and 66 which fry mentions is day of the dub and they are all episodes with that kind of premise baked into it boy what kind of nerd goes by

production order instead of the air order what kind of dork would do that well futurama's air order is nuts yeah and what every every episode of talking simpsons we say in a production order this is this uh that uh green hand is a is a wild uh trek reference to oh really yeah from from the episode who mourns for uh denise or however you say that it is a ridiculous episode with that literally happens to the ship. A hand-shaped thing comes up from a planet and holds onto the ship and they go down to check it out. And it's an episode all about,

it turns out the Greek gods that were worshiped here on Earth were actually ancient aliens who went to Earth for a short amount of time, were worshiped by everybody and then got bored and left and wound up on this other planet and apollo is the only one left living so the whole episode is this dude like yeah i'm apollo and you're like is it the actual god or is this because there's all that always happens in star trek where someone's like lying about being someone else like

there's uh well that's star trek 5 the alien is like lying about being god uh there's a spaceship yeah exactly there's an episode of tng where this woman's like i'm the devil but it's just like some alien but actually in this case the episode ends by telling you like yeah that was apollo the great god and now he was actually an alien that was on this this other planet across the galaxy or whatever it's a ridiculous episode uh other gods aliens jesus christ real real guy from earth i i love too that this now becomes melvar is now a online poster who's just like so who'd win in a fight futurama or star trek that is true yeah he's it's just a fan going like instead of having a new obsession he has to pit them to the death in a in a battle if disney buys paramount uh we could find out

when disney buys let's pray it never happens why i mean all uh well first discovery definitely is gonna sell the warner properties to disney after like they just fuck up about three more years. They're going to be like, why do we even own all these Warner movies? Disney's offering us like 70 billion dollars. Let's just take that. And so Disney will own that, too. And it'll be all great because then Spider-Man can meet Superman in a movie, Bob. And that'll make everything worth it.

And some kind of reanimated Nimoy can be there. Yes, yeah. As the new Uncle Ben. Oh, no. make everything worth it. And some kind of reanimated Nimoy can be there. As the new Uncle Ben. Oh no! And then just wait for the Easter eggs with Space Jam 3. It's going to be jam-packed. They're all going to be in the audience. Every dead person you've met. Oh, I hate it.

So we go back to the trial. Zap is assuming no one survived Melvar's battle to the death. And we see that this this uh this pike pod is basically works like an old-timey sewing machine we see lila's barefoot peeking out from underneath pressing down on a pedal a little foot action here from old lila i think it was an innocent foot trying yes yes but it's not taken that way these days definitely not i'm sure this exact frame is on wiki feet right now oh absolutely i don't even want to go to the lila page here so melvar announces the battle to the death has begun and everyone has to basically use what they find to do this battle to the death and no one can start

until he gives a signal then he goes okay start and then the entire star trek cast hides in the wild west area caning remarks i don't have much experience with fighting except with you guys and i i like how shatner pre-rips his shirts that's such a great i forget which one the the ripped shirt comes from it's definitely in the gorn fight right like he's shirtless in that yeah yeah i think there's there's torn clothing a couple of times and that's the great gag in in galaxy quest unintentionally during his fight with the rock monster his shirt is torn off and then alan rickman character tells him like you just had to take your shirt off but but shatner here is just pre-ripping it just he's like hey you know what i'm gonna show off i'm back i'm back to my 60s body it's time to show it off and a little

more uh dumping on doing here where uh shatner's asking like wasn't there an episode where i threw my shoe at the enemy and nimoy says you mean doing and they both laugh at scotty who is not long for this world it's a little sad yeah but uh yeah that uh in divorce kelly just standing around saying nothing during the whole thing yep but very weird gets hit with a with a boot to the face Shatner just goes, my foot's cold. That feels like perfect Shatner writing that I feel like Shatner didn't get that they were making fun of him.

Shatner does not apologize for how he hurt a cast member. He just is letting you know his foot's cold if he doesn't like that. So Leela, very resourceful, has gathered sticks to make spears. Fry has gathered caterpillars to tie together to make bow strings for bows and arrows bender pulls a giant machine gun from behind a rock and says and we can use this machine gun to shoot them and he fires every bully out of

it sorry every bullet out of it and then she goes that was fun so that's definitely from a piece of the action that that machine gun for sure that i was writing like that had to be from the gangster planet yes yeah god that episode is so funny i remember seeing that in a class it was one of those really burn off the semester classes where i took a class on the 20s it was a summer college course and one uh day we just watched that episode of star trek oh yeah i thought like i'm paying three thousand dollars for this class. Come on. Our next clip here, though, the Star Trek cast has its own plans. What if I distract them with my famous fan dance?

Oh, that's good, good, good, good. And then, George, you give them a karate chop. I find that offensive. Just because I'm of Japanese ancestry, you assume I know karate. Have I ever led you to believe I have studied karate well no but you never talk about yourself maybe if you showed a little interest well here goes nothing hello boys there's no right way to hit a woman then do it the wrong way fine apparently that's another kirk line i that one i looked up it's apparently from the episode charlie x

of of tos but uh yeah the the fan dance that was uh that that is a classic moment from from the fifth film correct uh yeah it's a real like how do we how are we gonna like get into the base with all of these guards around or whatever and like oh maybe we can uh find some sort of distraction and yeah there's there's uhura dancing it up looking fabulous by the way that was a real like growing up i had two and five on vhs i don't know how i came into possession of just those two but i re-watched like i said 30 times at least i've seen that movie and that fan dance man the formative scene for a young a young sci-fi lad no and she was looking at you know all these other guys in their girdles and stuff in the movie and

she is doing like a a shadowy uh implied nudity fan dance here totally shown a lot of leg uh yeah it's great it's it's probably one of the better parts of that movie should it be in her mid to late 50s i'm guessing too so pretty daring for 1988 89 something like that yeah that one i actually did see in theaters as a kid by the way because i think i think i just watched two on television and then my mom's like well there's a new star trek movie now i saw i saw five and six in the well actually from five onward i saw every star trek movie in theaters oh nice going forward but until nemesis i actually did the reviews were so bad for nemesis i was like i got i'm waiting till tape but i was i was working at a multiplex at the time that nemesis came out so that was a four free five had the absolute funniest uh like ad campaigns it came out in the summer it was like released in like late june or something

and the ad was like this summer movie theater seats are going to need seatbelts because Star Trek 5 is coming out. It's an action-packed roller coaster, I guess. I don't really know. I've watched you guys sing campfire songs. Oh, yeah. You want all your fave characters to sing Row, Row, Row Your Boat. Isn't that great? That was summer of 89, the same summer as Batman and The Last Crusade.

Yeah, I saw that. And UHF. UHF was the only one of those I didn't see in movie theaters. 89 the same summer as batman and uh the last crusade yeah and uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh uh and uh lila fighting her sorry shatner this is not kirk yeah they even do his fun little weird kick thing and oh and his clasped hands that hit yeah i love yeah pro wrestling that's called a double axe handle but oh yeah i guess when we talk about that shatner punch on the nexus i think we call it like the hammer punch or something i i love 60s theatrical fighting stuff. I mean, it's the same Batman, the Adam West show, also from 66, did it intentionally sillier. But even when Shatner's like, you know, when Kirk is fighting Khan, it's a very silly fight if you look at it with like, you know. Honestly, when Bruce Lee started movies and people could see those movies, they're like, oh, these TV show fights look ridiculous.

They're not like West Side Story fights. Yeah, right. So everyone is brawling. Leela has toppled Shatner. Fry is fighting the voiceless bones. Bender is taking on Takei, caning in Nimoy all at once. Nichols backflips onto Fry's shoulders and slams him onto the ground. I think that's many men's fantasy is for that to happen.

They weren't as horny drawing that as they were her fan dance. But they even to Nichols' credit as well, I love her basically like Xena style shouting as she lands on top of him.

And Nimoy's Vulcan nerve pinch does not work on Bender and Bender swings him in a circle smacking him into koenig and uh to k i love the exchange here because they have to share lines and scripts i i mean the way he says my face too has has stuck with me ever since i i love that i he also is right to be offended that uh it feels very real that shatner would assume he knows karate as well but then he does it he does the karate show yeah uh so shatner tries to be chivalrous here with lila and then she takes his hand flips him over is about to kill him with

a huge rock until he finally pleads to end this madness. Please. This is exactly what Melvar wants. We're just pawns in his diabolical game of checkers. Can't we resolve our differences some other way? Melvar! Dinner time! But Mom! I'm playing with my collectibles! No! All this time we thought he was a powerful super being. Yet he was just a child.

He's not a child, he's 34! Ah, right, Koenig! I've wanted to do this for years! Bender, wait! This is our chance to escape before Melvar comes back. But we all need to work together. I love it so much. Hello? We've decided to work together. I love it so much. Hello! We've decided to work together. So did they.

Now, how do we escape? We can't use our ship. We have life support, but the engines are wrecked. Ironic, because our engines work, but our life support systems don't. Hey, if your engines work... And your life support systems don't hey if your engines work and your life support systems work stop you're just going around in circles i do think that fry now thinks like i have to think of a plan they immediately just cut to the plan they talked about uh it's it is such a great gag they get in there that not only does kirk seemingly save the day with a big speech as he often does but also another of the many jokes you do with about star classic star trek is

captain kirk has sex with alien with oh yeah that's a big part of it and i like his little murmur like i love you so much yes yeah and you know what le Lila? The reason Lila sleeps with Zap Brannigan in his first appearance is also a reference to this. Yeah, I never thought of that. That makes a lot of sense. So I think it shows, too, that Lila has a type that she'll have a one-night stand with at the very least, like a quickie. But I have a feeling it wasn't going to be a long-term thing with Shatner.

Though, of course, also, I you know he's a handsome guy and also lila has uh has had boyfriend trouble for a while now she's probably uh you know hey if a hot guy is is is offering it up in the middle of a fight i could see lila going for it let's go for it it's better than getting beat up yeah i and boy the way that it's a sexy makeout drawing of both of them. And it's, oh yeah, it's equal opportunity. We get to see both of them putting their shirts back on as well. So they're about to escape here. They're too heavy. They have to lose some weight.

So we see all of their bodies being chucked out the side of the ship. We're back inside. Everyone is back in their jars. Fry wheels in the Star Trek tapes and tells Leonard they're light enough to keep them. And he wants to know, isn't that great? And Nimoy just says, I'm living in a gefilte fish jar. It is pretty horrible end for all of them. They're like, oh, well, you know, your perfect bodies, you got to leave those behind.

Back to being a head in a jar. Which is hell on earth, we've heard. It's a horrible state of living death. Yeah. And I love the design we saw it from the start but now that it's joined together that it is the hybrid ship uh signifying a perfect crossover and not violating copyrights right right more importantly that bird of prey it's pretty close to uh paramount copyright yeah that's true uh they celebrate but they're in

danger very soon because melvar materializes behind them in a ship that he had to take out of the packaging it was in mint condition so he's even more pissed off and this is when we join back up to the framing device because lila sees branigan ship she announces we're saved and branigan appears on the view screen saying you're under arrest prepare to be boarded and then zap asks for more details we cut back to the president and lila says uh you started the stupid court martial that's what happened next and we you know get we gotta go fight melvar i love what a great reveal that it's like yeah we've been doing this during the fight scene yes oh

i was i i had a big like laugh out loud moment at this turn that's so great because like it's also kind of a reflection of a lot of tos episodes like that are kind of on the more boring side there are several episodes where it's like testimony because this thing happened and now we gotta have a trial and we're basically doing like a court case on the enterprise because you know again that's i think partially like you're saving some money you know like we're getting to the bottom of a mystery but it's just like a law show so much of that is in tos and for them to be like like to throw that to the wind like this is ridiculous you're stopping the episode because of your stupid court martial case like let's get on with what people actually want to see i think is a very meta bit of writing yeah it's like enough of this trial

we need to actually have the space fight some more right yeah let's hear it in our next clip here one more hit and we're done for let's take them out with us do you guys have a self-destruct code like destruct sequence 1a 2b 3 thanks a lot to ki. Now everybody knows. If I can't have the original cast of Star Trek, no one will. Prepare to die. Wait! If they mean that much to you, why do you want to kill them? Because I... I... I don't know what I'd do without them. Melvar, you can't let a TV show be your whole life. You can do anything you want.

Look at Walter Koenig. After Star Trek, he became an actor. Not just an actor, but a well-rounded person with my own friends and credit cards and keys. Well, I guess I could move out of my parents' basement. Maybe get a temp job. Whoa, whoa. One step at a time.

I thank you, Fry. You know, you and I are of a kind. In a different reality, I could have called you friend. Episode 10, Balance of Terror. More like episode nine, loser! In your face, victory is mine! Ha ha ha ha ha ha!

So, Melvar is technically correct, the best kind of correct, because even though it aired 14th in production balance of terror is the ninth episode produced so there you have it yeah hey that's the rules we go by on this futurama podcast too so that uh i looked it up too that self-destruct code is said in let that let this be our our last battlefield your last the last battlefield one that yes it's uh It's a pretty ridiculous sequence too. And this is,

it goes back to like what I was talking about, that 52 minute thing. Like this is a real, like it's a thing where like the alien is sort of threatening to take over the ship or whatever. And Kirk's like, fine, I'll destroy it.

And you watch three people give full self-destruct code initiation things and you're like sitting there tapping your foot like just blow up the ship at this point it's insufferable and they try to do it like as a drawn out tension thing and it just really didn't work it's bad but funny

I saw this is where like the one deleted scene in the episode is too. Yes. And I feel like it was taken out to be nice to Shatner because Zap is on the ship. This is like maybe nine seconds long. Zap is on the ship. He says to Leela, this situation calls for testosterone. Straight up, no cleavage.

Anything else would be sabotage. So he does the sabotage thing. Sabotage. And maybe they thought like, I think Shatner might get mad if he sees this he probably doesn't like that clip of him yelling at a man being popular yeah uh i could see i i would bet that maybe there's other deleted scenes with the with the voice cast and they wouldn't have the rights to put that on the dvd maybe but i i i would though then again with how heavily this is planned you would think they're like we're not if we're gonna record them saying a line it's not going to be something we're cutting but yeah in that line

the checkup sorry the uh koenig line about having his own like car keys and everything they gave that to him later because they realized they were self-conscious about not giving him enough attention they realized like he had one fewer line than than to k so they gave him that one at the end which also kind of humiliates him it's nice they spread it out though but but like you said andrew that is kind of like the the game they had to play to get all of the cast in the movies because they knew well you got to have us all don't you and so if you're gonna have me in the movie give me a promotion to make me a captain of my own ship or or just give me a fan dance or something like let us let us do something that actually i don't know if that was her give me a head injury subplot that takes 20 minutes to resolve you know also a

little after a little before this episode aired that's when tk was trying to get his own spinoff tv show made for for upn him, him captaining that ship. They did a whole pilot for it. I think they repurposed into a Voyager episode, I think. So, yeah, so that's a weird. There's an episode of Voyager. Funny enough. So in that same year of the 30th anniversary celebration, you had both DS9 and Voyager were on the air.

So DS9 did the Tribbles episode and what Voyager did that I actually think is kind of better is there's an episode where Tuvok does a mind meld with Captain Janeway and they go back in Tuvok's consciousness to the time when he was actually

serving on the Excelsior when Sulu was captain of it which is what you see at the beginning of Star Trek VI. That's how the cold open is. Sulu's the captain of that ship. And so that episode goes back to that moment where they encounter this mysterious, oh, the Klingon moon's going to explode.

That's what the sort of inciting incident is in that movie. And so they're dealing with the shockwave of that. And Takei came back and was playing Sulu. And it's pretty cool i have to say uh it was pretty rad i actually just i'm going through voyager right now because i never actually finished it when it was on the air so i'm doing like full-on rewatch and i just passed that and he's magnificent like it's so cool seeing him do it again i would have watched that like you know why not like sulu it's a cool ship okay by me but now they kill for a show that a tv show hosted by sulu absolutely it's just the wrong time in the ip yeah and now uh not to prolong this very long podcast i feel

like we are in another star trek renaissance uh it was kind of a back burner thing for what felt like maybe 15 years but now we have uh we had picard uh strange new worlds lower decks and then like there's something else i'm forgetting but i feel like there's a lot of oh discovery thank you yeah the kid show that just got kicked off of paramount plus yeah yep well and um we'll see if that happens but they they star trek really hit the lottery with an oscar winner who's technically supposed to do a new star trek show with michelle yo is supposed to do a star trek series for streaming is that right it was a spin-off of the character she was in uh they created for her but i think they're trying to negotiate that down to like a movie that she doesn't have to do an entire TV show.

Yeah, she was on Voyager at the start of it. And a very cool character. And they wound up doing some cool like Mirror Universe stuff with her. I would say this new run of Star Trek stuff, like I'm all for it, except for those first two seasons of Picard. But Voyager, I think, is awesome.

What they decided to do with the setting of that show after a couple seasons, I think, is really smart. And it's kind of a spoiler, so I won't say it on the air. But that Strange New Worlds is primo stuff. And I feel like a lot of fans responded real well to it because format-wise, it's more like your TNG and your TOS. It's like episodic. There's no super arc to it because format wise it's more like your tng and your tos it's like episodic there's no super arc to it like voyager uh you know had its own arc but was kind of episodic but ds9 super arc story once like the third or so season hits like whenever wharf gets on i think is

when that sort of connects and whatever but But yeah, this just like cool episodes. The production design is great. That's another thing, too. Like we're talking about, you know, the reach of these franchises like Trek versus Star Wars. Paramount puts so much more time and money into their shows than Disney clearly does. Strange New Worlds is one of the best looking shows on TV. You think it has the budget and maybe it does of like prestige, like HBO Showtime stuff.

Like it can't be cheap and the writing's great. Would totally hardcore recommend it. But yeah, it's weird being in a Trek Renaissance right now. I have to say, never thought I'd see the day. Paramount does seem like the least evil studio out of the main evil ones. They're not as evil as Disney or Discovery.

I'm sure there's a lot of evil there that I'm overlooking, but like I said, least evil. Yeah, least. Least, yeah. No, and I do like that how this new, there's some new blood in the Star Trek world. So there's new, like the new generation of actors are connecting with the older generation. One of my favorite interviews with Frakes I just heard recently was from, it was Paul F. Tompkins with Tawny Newsome, who's the co-lead voice in the Lower Decks show with Jack Quaid. And yeah, it's really, it's she,

Tawny Newsome's excitement for interviewing Jonathan Frakes, like she is a hardcore trek fan uh herself and oh cool and bring so much to it she uh i believe for some reason the lower deck characters uh appear in live action recently i was i was actually just gonna bring it up because of course you guys run we hate movies talking about the live action Garfield. That episode has yet to air, but they had it in some teasers. You saw Quaid, and I think Tony Newsom's in the shot too. Like they beam onto the Enterprise for some reason.

So I'm very excited for whenever that hits, but there are only like four episodes into the new season at the time of us recording this in late July. And it's been banging, man. If you're looking for like a new Trek thing, if you're curious listeners out there, I cannot recommend Strange New Worlds enough. And you don't need to have watched,

even though it is technically a spinoff of Discovery, you don't really need to know anything about Discovery at all. It actually doesn't matter due to a really crucial piece of writing that is a spoiler, so I won't talk about it. But singular, you don't need to know anything. You can go in cold and have a total blast.

Well, we have to wrap up very soon, so let's hear that final clip. I wonder, my friends, was he really such an evil energy gas? He did give us eternal youth. 24-hour laundromat. A full assortment of rum, both spiced and regular. Truly, it was a paradise. And all you had to put up with was one really annoying Star Trek fan. Let's get the hell out of here.

That's the final line in City on the Edge of Forever. Oh, really? Okay, wow. David Goodman, writer. That was a really good one. Dug deep for every line of dialogue here. Whenever I go to a liquor store by the way if I see spiced and regular

rum next to each other I think of this line me too I heard this line before I ever tasted rum so oh wow yeah I will now yeah but I guess we have to go very soon here but final thoughts on this one again not a

big TOS fan but I do appreciate this now more than ever because A it's very funny on its own but B it is a very heartwarming reunion of people who cannot be together anymore for various reasons and I also like the fan ficky quality of what if they liked each other but kind of disagreed on some

things so I feel like this is one of the last times this could ever happen and it does feel so special to me and I love this episode very very much uh andrew how about you yeah no i mean big thanks to uh you guys for thinking of me for this because it was totally sweet i had no idea that this episode of this existed i did not know that they reunited for this so i i thought that was really cool uh very very special um and it's funny like this really this was like my you know as an adult eye opening like no you will like this show like go back and watch it uh so yeah i i i had a blast with it also quick to k thing because he's he's

my fave and he's a great human being there's a doc that came out god probably almost 10 years ago or something like 2014 i think called to be to k and it's just about him his life like all through like internment camps up through coming out and it's fucking awesome like up there with the nimoy like i was crying the whole time through it like a real cool guy uh i would recommend checking that out if you're a trek fan who wasn't aware of it really awesome gets into like his activism and yada uh but no this this was great i had a ball with it yeah i uh i really like this one as a tribute episode we've every show does tribute episodes to everything now and and nostalgia feels cheaper to me now

and i maybe thought this wasn't as special when it first aired because they were all still alive and it was like i've seen galaxy quest i've seen all this other stuff but it feels so much more special now and they earned they earned the right to get all of them they put in the legwork and they put in so many references down to the credit sequence of putting in that shot of kiff that looks like the balox puppet i have to look that up uh but to even have that shot the to look like the famous memorable shot from the end credits of the original series every second is a beautiful tribute to uh one of the most important sci-fi shows of all time so you know what the most important sci-fi show of all time not red dwarf who oh yeah

we could throw dr who in a bucket of filth dumping into a river but yeah i love i love this episode yeah uh but yeah that's been our episode we uh this is a patreon episode so you know where to find us but andrew jupin our special guest please let our listeners out there know more about we movies and the nexus on your patreon yeah totally so uh we hate movies it's a comedy show where we goof on movies uh for 90 ish to two hours um and that airs every tuesday wherever you get your podcasts and then yes we do the patreon uh which is patreon.com slash we hate movies and uh yeah one of the shows we have on one of our tiers is called the nexus we go through an episode of toOS and an episode of TNG. Throughout that show's history, because we do an annual listener request month kind of thing,

some episodes we've drawn have come from DS9 and Voyager as well. But it's mainly TOS and TNG, and it's a blast. And again, it comes from that place of everyone on that show is a huge fan of Star Trek in one generation or another. Right. Like Steve and I are more like and Chris are more like the TNG guys. Eric's grew up as a TOS kid, but we all kind of come together to celebrate the show, go through it. And also, yeah, kind of poke fun at it because it's just a it's just a science fiction property, kids. It's okay to make fun of it. We've got a bunch of other side shows on there too.

So go check it out should you feel so inclined. But thanks again for coming on the show, Andrew. We'll see everyone next month for The Sting. I'm Slim Shady. Yes, I'm the real Shady All you other Slim Shadys are just imitating So, won't the real Slim Shady please stand up? Please stand up?

Please stand up? How can you do a spoken word version of a rap song? He found a way