You may have read in the New York Times that Pal-for-Life Glen Weldon and I gave a "sparsely attended" talk about the origins and legacy of 2001: A Space Odyssey at the National Air and Space Museum on Saturday night. An official talk. Inside the museum. We weren't just accosting passersby on Independence Ave. and bloviating at them or anything like that. Heaven forfend! Ready Player One was showing in the Lockheed-Martin IMAX theater right after Glen and I finished, so I thought it would be thematically sympatico with that film for me to challenge our audience, sparse or otherwise, with some low-stakes nerd trivia, pertinent to 2001.Those who answered one of these questions correctly after raising their hands and being called upon—this is not 'Nam, there are rules—won a free copy of the September 2016 issue of Air & Space / Smithsonian (where I was then and still remain employed as an editor) featuring my cover story on the 50th anniversary of Star Trek. The cover should have said Warp Corps, and I apologize again for the fact that it does not. I lost that fight. It's been two goddamn years and I'm still not over it.
Anyway, here are my trivia questions.
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Over at my day job yesterday I got a sneak peak of a unique exhibit opening at the National Air and Space Museum on Sunday: an installation by artist Simon Birch that reconstructs the mysterious Louis XVI-era bedroom from the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey at 1:1 scale. Because yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of the film's release, I wrote a piece about it. I drew heavily from Michael Benson's new making-of book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, which I've already plugged on Pop Culture Happy Hour but which I'm glad to plug again here.
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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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