About Author: The Viewscreen

Posts by The Viewscreen

5

Announcing the Remastered Star Trek Re-Watch!

By
The Viewscreen
– April 1, 2011 12:01 amPosted in: Re-Mastered TOS Re-Watch

The biggest obstacle in re-watching a show like Star Trek is that it’s, well, old. Forty-five years old. It’s hard to believe anyone was even alive back then. And while the show deals with timeless themes of identity, loneliness, moral responsibilities, and the yearning for a better future, it looks and feels about as slick and cool as your grandparents’ answering machine. This unfortunate truth breaks our hearts. We love the show so much and we want to bring it to our peers: a younger, hipper audience, who aren’t so inclined to pick up musty-smelling ’60s television.

But it’s not just that. Our re-watch is quickly aging out of the desirable demographic. At nearly two years old, the early posts just didn’t have the advantages of the amazing new technologies we have today. How do we attract new readers, who like explosions and snark and Twitter, when all we have to offer is boring academic and cultural analysis? And then we realized, the fount of all knowledge is still in Star Trek. What would Star Trek do?

So starting today, we’ll be remastering the re-watch. The proprietary, obscure remastering process will make our re-watch more relevant and more modern. But chillax, dinosaur fans: we want to do it with class and with style.

What you have to look forward to:

  • NScan me!ew and improved episode reviews!
  • Exciting bells & whistles!
  • Commentary tracks by the creators!
  • Modern special effects!
  • Contemporary pop culture references!
  • Behind-the-scenes gossip!
  • Correction of anomalous canon!
  • More accurate warp ratings!
  • Seamless social media integration!
  • More exclamation points than ever before!

The best part is that we’ll be bringing this to you at no charge.

Technology has come a long way since 2009. We are absolutely thrilled to say, definitively, that now you can see our Re-Watch as it was truly meant to be seen.

Enjoy.

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13

Announcing: Laugh Treks!

By
The Viewscreen
– February 3, 2011 12:00 pmPosted in: Laugh Treks

Last July, Eugene and I were mourning the end of Season 2 and trying to come up with a way to survive the third season. We also wanted some kind of gift for our readers and other TOS fans, many of whom have had to choke down Season 3 for over forty years. We tossed around a bunch of ideas, but we kept coming back to one: why not just make fun of the damn things?

“Spock’s Brain” seemed an obvious target and we got to work. Turns out these things are hard. In addition to the technical challenges of recording that kind of precise podcast, there’s always the realization that you’re not as funny as you think you are. The real tragedy was that we had to watch “Spock’s Brain” countless times. (Literally. We lost count.)

This took a lot of time and mental energy over the course of the last six months. We hope it was worth it! We are very proud to present to you our first Laugh Trek: “Spock’s Brain.”

5

Coming soon…

By
The Viewscreen
– January 27, 2011 1:00 pmPosted in: Laugh Treks

Some of you may remember that last summer we alluded vaguely and excitedly to a secret surprise for the third season. We wanted to give you all a reason to go on–something to help you through the pain of these dismal, dismal episodes.

We came up with Laugh Treks.

Details will follow next week. Until then, enjoy this little preview!

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dl2X9WGOUvw

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18

The First Duty

By
The Viewscreen
– October 21, 2010 6:00 amPosted in: Uncategorized

Since our launch two weeks ago, we’ve received a number of public and private inquiries about our reasons for moving our Star Trek Re-Watch to The Viewscreen. We probably should have addressed the topic earlier and we’re sorry for the confusion and concern that arose as a result.

We wish we could say it was because of a bold desire to strike out on our own, but unfortunately that wasn’t the case. Just after we completed Season 2, we received a new blogger agreement from Tor.com. Without getting too specific, it asserted a view of our intellectual property that we weren’t comfortable with. We presented our concerns but alas, the new contract was non-negotiable, so we reluctantly chose to resign as bloggers.

The rights associated with our work are as important to us as the work itself. We decided to launch our own site and release all of our writing under a Creative Commons 3.0 Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. Likewise, we’re using the open-source platform WordPress with the Arras theme, as designed and modified by Torie.

We always planned to finish the series we began over a year and a half ago. As for the continuation of the re-watch on Tor.com, we were as surprised as many of you were. It is of course their right to do so and we wish the new bloggers well.

To those of you who have found us here: thank you. This is now solely a labor of love. It means a great deal that so many of you enjoy our little project and we’re delighted to share it with you.