Radio, the Final Frontier, or To Go With Some Reasonable Measure of Boldness Where I Myself Have Not Personally Managed, Entirely, to Go Before
Chris Klimek
My first radio story will be broadcast today. You can listen to it here right now. The process of assembling and editing it was not all that much different from making these. Although in this case I had expert help -- WAMU managing producer Tara Boyle -- to make the piece sound better. The piece is about the starship Enterprise. That is, the impressively large, now-49-year-old model that appeared in every episode of Star Trek, 30 years before computer graphics became Hollywood's defacto visual effects methodology.
I initially imagined this segment as a Daily Show-style news package wherein I would feign indignation that an artifact as significant as the civilization-seeking, boldly-going Enterprise rates a spot only in the basement of the National Air & Space Museum. (Apparently they also have some spacecraft there that have actually flown in space.) That approach proved to a be little ambitious for my first time out of the gate.
I haven't spent enough time with the various spinoff series to get much of a read on them, but original-flavor Kirk-Spock-McCoy Star Trek is a thing I love. My favorite formal thing about the story is that I managed to use, chronologically, music from three eras of Trek: Alexander Courage's 1966 theme for TV series, two snippets of James Horner's score for The Wrath of Khan from 1982, and finally, Michael Giacchino's theme from the 2009 Trek reboot directed by J.J. Abrams.
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