Kitty Wake's blog

Star Trekkin' Across the Universe... in 2009.

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I was tired, grumpy and headachy. The last thing I wanted to do was go out for a movie - particularly as I'd just spent £60 on repairing my glasses. But my parents callously roused me from my slumber and delivered me to the house of a friend who frequently takes me to the cinema to see movies. I still didn't want to go. He'd proposed seeing Star Trek. I responded with the assertion that I'd rather run through the city centre naked, painted blue and shouting "DEATH TO THE ROMANS!" than go and see a movie whose audience would probably be full of Trek nerds. But said friend - Movie Boy, let's call him that - is rather persuasive, and after accidentally letting his dog escape from his house, prompting a frantic and curse-filled chase round the local area, I relented. I had to, to apologise for the dog.

But I insisted on buying popcorn, just in case I didn't like the movie. I was vaguely familiar with Star Trek. My primary school, in one of its stranger decisions, decided that "Star Trekkin'" (see below) was a song we absolutely had to learn during our sing-song lessons. A horde of seven-year-old kids, who had no idea who William Shatner was or what a Klingon is, singing a song made up almost entirely of the famous catchphases of the original series (He's dead, Jim; Ye cannae change the laws of physics; It's life, Jim, but not as we know it, etc). Awww! Then somewhat later, BBC2 decided to put on repeats of Star Trek: The Next Generation right after The Simpsons, and I watched them with a sort of detached amusement. So this is what the Americans had instead of Doctor Who, I thought, as Picard ordered tea off the replicator or Geordi LaForge did Indy Rolls and other manoeuvres which were pretty impressive for a guy who only sees, like, microwaves. Hey, wouldn't you think a guy called "Jean-Luc Picard" would be, you know, French? And not English-with-Yorkshire-idioms? ...And that was it. The Simpsons moved to Channel 4, and well before that BBC2 had replaced Star Trek: TNG with The Fresh Prince of Bel Air (and then Top of the Pops 2, and then bloody Hollyoaks on Channel 4!). Apart from casual encounters whenever I tangentially interacted with the Nerd World (by watching The Big Bang Theory or the like), I forgot it ever existed until Movie Boy took me out to see it.

I won't lie. I was unwilling while driving to the cinema, I was unwilling while waiting to buy popcorn (though at least 75% of my disgust was due to the fact that the girl in front had her hands apparently inside her boyfriend's underpants - I pitied the popcorn seller who had to take their money), I was unwilling while navigating a crowded theatre trying to find a seat while twenty-foot-high adverts for Gillette Razors and Jaguars blared behind me. I was unwilling during the opening sequence. Big space battle. Mass evacuation. Ordered by a captain who knows he's going to die. Oh look, there's a baby being born! How cute! NOT. I know movies are meant to be about action, but you can't just slam a novice, like me for instance, into a space battle with a bunch of angry bald tattooed people with extreme interrogation techniques, can you? And now there was a bit of husband-wife-new baby mushiness, designed, I cynically thought, to appeal to the wives and girlfriends, if there were any, of the Trekkies. I wasn't one of this unwilling periphery audience - now I like a good action-packed space adventure as much as anyone, but frankly, I'm often confused by big-budget explosions and the ham-fisted approach to emotionality used by sci-fi movie-makers. Why, of course girls won't like a film if it doesn't have love and babies in it! You have to have a Y chromosome to enjoy sci-fi! Silly!

Turned out that at least 50% of my problems were down to the fact I didn't know much of anything about Star Trek (the other 50% was due to the fact that I don't like the first fifteen minutes of any movie, due to my chronic confusion at action-packed movie openings). I was all at sea. I had no idea this was meant to be a reboot of the original 60's Star Trek series, which of course I knew nothing about anyway. All I knew was that the scene had changed from "spaceship heading to certain destruction in a black hole or similar space hazard" to "ten-year-old boy driving a car... in the 23rd century". All righty then, it's a weird movie. I can cope with weird movies, can't I? I sat through Curse of the Were-Rabbit. Hey, Nokia's still around in the future. This film's going to be short, I thought; the kid'll never brake in time to avoid the mysterious chasm that's just opened up in the Flattest State in America, Iowa.

Of course he got out in time, escaping a messy but exciting death. That's because the kid was JAMES TIBERIUS KIRK. Who, as you know, is Captain Kirk, and therefore pretty essential to Star Trek. Then we get Spock, an emotionless half-Vulcan child who is bullied by his totally Vulcan classmates. Now bullying is Serious Business - believe me, I know. Vulcan bullying, on the other hand, is more like being victimised by a computer which is desperately trying to emulate a human. I felt guilty giggling, because, you know, poor little Spock is being bullied for having a human mother, but the bullies are debating amongst themselves on how to provoke an emotional reaction from the poor kid in an intensely logical way. If only real bullies were like that; I'd've dropped a Logic Bomb on mine. The bullying doesn't stop there; Vulcan elders don't like Spock the half-human Vulcan either... but he gets his own back by joining Starfleet. Kirk, meanwhile, grows up into a ne'er-do-well who gets involved in a bar fight over a very attractive and intelligent girl... who turns out to be Uhura, a really really smart Starfleet student. Captain Pike recruits Kirk into the Starfleet Academy, along with a depressive, pessimistic recent divorcé doctor. No, not my mother - she isn't divorced, for a start. She's also a woman. And she was a teacher. No, this is Doctor Leonard "Bones" McCoy, the grumpiest man in the 23rd century.

Little did I know it, but they were gathering the original crew together. Life goes on in the Academy - Kirk unsuccessfully pursues Uhura and successfully sleeps with a Green Skinned Space Babe who just happens to be her roommate - until there's some big Space Emergency somehow related to Kirk's dad's demise and a bunch of green cadets are parcelled off into various ships, including the new USS Enterprise. Uhura bargains with her instructor Spock - the First Officer under Captain Pike - to get on it, because she's really, really smart and awesome. On the bridge we meet a new helmsman who drives a Starfleet vessel a lot like I drive a car - forgetting to do something really kind of important, like letting the clutch out or putting the car in a numbered gear. This was Sulu, who was clearly better at fighting with a cool Japanese sword than doing what he was, um, meant to do, like releasing External Inertial Dampeners. But give him a break! He's been summoned - juuuust after his graduation from Starfleet Academy - to pilot Captain Pike's vessel in a possibly world-ending emergency. And then they introduced just the sweetest little Russian whiz-kid ever, Ensign Chekov. Complete with his "nuclear wessels" accent and all that. And how did ne'er-do-well Kirk get on this ship of Really Bright Starfleet Graduates, given that he was prone to messing with computers to win tests? McCoy pretends he's a medical emergency by injected him with some Trek-babble-ariffic vaccine which makes his hands look like Feathers McGraw's chicken disguise.

We're on a Starfleet ship! Now the adventure begins! Now you've either seen this film, or you haven't. (If you haven't, you must be living on a space colony or you just don't like Star Trek, or possibly you've been in a coma.) Suffice to say that by this time in the film I was, surprisingly, totally engrossed. The characters! I loved them! Bits of old Star Trek trivia flashed through my mind - it seemed that I knew much about this nerdiest of subjects as did the chracaters on The Big Bang Theory. And somehow, this wasn't bothering me. "Live Long and Prosper"? You know, that Vulcan hand gesture is kind of cool. And Scotty's babbling away in Trek-nobabble - something about warp core and beaming objects at warp speed! And McCoy protesting that he's a doctor, not prepared to assume any other role! This was all so familiar! And the main plot - some Romulans with a spaceship that violates every health and safety law in the book decide to go and drill through as many planets as possible, thanks to a gross misunderstanding and untimely use of Applied Phlebotinum, and it's up to a hastily thrown-together yet plucky young crew under the non-leadership of Captain Pike (he's too busy being tortured by the aforementioned Romulans to, um, even BE on the Enterprise, poor man) to put an end to the entire thing - seemed oddly... ah... familiar. Not in the sense that I knew what Romulans were. But yes - it was reminding me of stories that I'd read many times before...

About halfway through the film, it struck me that I was watching Hornblower... In Space!. Or maybe Aubrey-Maturin... In Space!. Seriously, you have the hero - he gets women, he gets glory, he has a certain charisma, he's not, apparently, averse to a scrap. And he's the captain of some form of ship travelling through some kind of ocean (because as we all know, space is an ocean. You can only travel in one plane). Kirk is Aubrey. Spock is Maturin, clever sciencey guy who's a bit of an outsider because he's a despised half-breed. And McCoy's just Maturin's medical and emotional side split into another person so we can have a Power Trio on the bridge. Sulu's the ship's master/coxswain-equivalent, Chekov's the very keen, very talented young midshipman who gets promoted to Acting Lieutenant, and Uhura's the competent and skilled signal lieutenant who, vitally, knows Other Languages so the crew get into 37% fewer misunderstandings with foreign craft from different countries/quadrants. And Scotty - gosh, I don't know. Wooden warships don't tend to have much machinery, and they certainly didn't have warp cores (if they did, the Napoleonic wars would have been over in about five minutes). Sorry, Scotty. It's ship's carpenter for you. And the plot? Replace "Romulans" with "French" and "mission to stop several planets from being totally destroyed" with "relentless pursuit/series of small frigate actions/rescue mission for captured officer/mysterious foreign ally" and it's your standard exciting Hornblower, Aubrey/Maturin or Ramage plot. No wonder I loved it.

At the end of the film, sitting next to Movie Boy, I was asked by said companion what I thought of the film. I murmured that I really, really wanted to join Starfleet. Seriously. Equal-opportunity workplace, excitement, my education would be appreciated, unlike in the real world. Why did it have to be fictional? Why couldn't I time-travel to the 2200s and join Starfleet? The answer is, of course, that it's fictional, and Gene Roddenberry deliberately set it 300 years in the future because we're still not all that close to flying in space, wearing pyjamas as quasi-military uniforms, or, for that matter, getting on with each other regardless of skin colour, gender, disability and place of origin. Still, I guess I could freeze myself so that future generations can revive me, bring me up to speed on biological breakthroughs and take me on a bizarrely-shaped spacecraft as a scientific expert... In Space! :) Well, I can dream.

So I'm not going to be able to actually be a Starfleet crew member, but a lot of other people with the same lively ideas as me have built up a massive fandom around Star Trek, ever since the original series aired. It's a bit of a surrogate life for the thwarted real-life Starfleet recruit. Lots of fanfiction, for a start, in addition to the official novels. Fanart, much of it by truly talented people. Star Trek conventions, which I'd heard of before but had always assumed to be populated by people like the Comic Book Guy off The Simpsons. (Now, of course, they're sounding kind of... fun.) Fan films - go one further than a fan fiction; film your own story! Meta disussions. Before the Internet, with is boundless capacity for fan fiction, fanfic was published in printed 'zines, and that was where that most archetypal of Slash pairings, Kirk/Spock, got its start. (At first, after watching the film, I was all ready to spurn that in favour of Kirk/McCoy, but on my second watching of the film, now I see where the Kirk/Spock people are coming from.) And then there's audio plays, cosplay, kink memes, parodies, manga, comics, models, you name it. The dedicated Trek fan is set for life.

And that's nice. I've made the mistake before of falling for media where there's no-one who cares. Captain Harlock comes to mind. (70's anime just isn't cool.) Having a large fandom with your new media interest is kind of like... I don't know, like going to a smart students' summer school. You've instantly got a lot of people you may well bond with because they like something you like. It's like you've got one of those super-special secret languages you made up with your friends when you were seven! You can say "Kirk/Spock st-reboot slash h/c PG-13 kthx amirite?" and you and your three million fannish friends across the globe know exactly what you're talking about. And the outsiders, more importantly, don't. It's Instant Best Friends formula, particularly if you're unluckier than me and don't have flesh-and-blood Trekkie friends.

So now I think I'll move on to my favourite moments. And a short list of complaints. I think I'll have an easier time writing the complaints, not because I secreted hated the movie, but because I'm British and complaining is our national sport.

Complaints:
- MORE LADIES! We get Uhura, Gaila the green chick, a couple of bridge crew mothers, some stoically silent admirals with nametags, and bunches of cadets and redshirts. And yes, I love Uhura, but for a world that usually doesn't give any mind to anything but personal merit, we kind of need more women on the crew, especially the bridge crew. Personally I was in favour of hitting Chekov with a Gender Ray, but... well... didn't want to unleash the furious wrath of the fanboys, y'see... And come on... they could have given Spock's mother a name! She gave birth to the pointy-eared, green-blooded brainiac!
- Why only one green-skinned cadet? All I saw was a sea of flesh-coloured faces, with barely a slate-grey, blue or green complexion in sight. Somebody said that Gaila was probably smuggled (in some spacelike equivalent of an underground railroad) off her planet Orion, where she was nought but a seductive temptress, and so she was very lucky to be able to study at Starfleet at all, and we shouldn't expect more than a very few Orions... but surely there's got to be other green-skinned space babe planets out there? And what about the greyish insectoid cadet? She must've felt lonely. Granted I'd expect a lot of humans at the academy because it's in San Francisco after all, but still, more aliens. It's a multi-planet federation after all!
- Was it me, or was Olsen the Designated Red Shirt British? ("I can't wait to kick some Romulan arse!") Thank you, American film makers. Two British characters and you kill one of them. Admittedly he was a bit crazy, possibly kamikaze, and he was dressed in a red shirt - a death sentence - but how can you kill the guy who wants to kick Romulan arse?
- Kirk is a bit of a cocky jerk, isn't he? And he gets promoted awfully quickly for a guy who was a) in front of an academic tribunal and b) sneaked on board by his best mate. I don't know; maybe Pike just likes him. But personally, I prefer Spock for the leaderly stuff, even if he does look a bit of a geek in his mother's hand-knitted jumper. (OK, I'll give Kirk a bit of a reprieve, given that some of the plot hinges on him deliberately being provocative.
- "Ye cannae change the laws of physics!" Oh, Scotty. Why didn't you say that? I am a bit of an astrophysics geek, prompted in part because I was the best in the school at the subject during my A-levels. (Though I had a stiff competition of, ooh, nineteen other people.) Scotty's right, of course. I can't say much more without spoiling the film, but ye cannae change the laws of physics, nae even in Star Trek. Really. (Even though they do have warp cores and the like.)

Now we've got that over with - who and what am I cheering for?
- Well, I did say I wanted to join Starfleet. I was that sucked into the world. I want to put on a blue shirt (science person, natch) and step onto that ship and work. With. Spock. And do exciting things, and survive unimaginable danger, and travel through space (preferably not time - I leave that to the Doctor in the blue box), and, and, and...
- Captain Pike. Look, any bloke who's spent ages being strapped down, tortured by evil bald tattooed people who want to destroy multiple planets, being fed a space scorpion that acts as a combination of a truth serum and a neurodegenerative agent and goodness knows what else, and can still use a phaser accurately... well, he deserves respect.
- Spock. Spock is just... Spocktacular. I want to hug Little Spock. And Adult Spock. And Leonard Nimoy Spock. I'd be jealous of Uhura, if Uhura wasn't ten thousand times more awesome than I am.
- Uhura - see above.
- McCoy. I... um... I kind of like grumpy old men. Although I guess he wasn't actually that old, but he was grumpy enough!
- Sulu and Chekov. Sulu for his retractable katana, and Chekov for being as cute and enthusiastic as a little puppy, except considerably smarter. Also, if you think about it, without Sulu there would be NO FILM.
- Scotty. He's a non-violent Scotsman! And he knows more Trek-no-babble than anyone else!
- The music. Yes, I've downloaded the soundtrack (Amazon are the best about this, by the way. Good price.) If you can listen to the end credits without experiencing some emotional reaction, you're a Vulcan.
- Casual invocation of catchphrases. You can't have Original crew Star Trek without Spock mentioning logic or giving the "Live long and prosper" signal, McCoy telling Spock he's out of his Vulcan mind, Scotty wailing "If I give her any more, she'll blow!". They just needed Chekov claiming something incongruous was invented in Russia, and McCoy saying "He's dead, Jim", and my happiness upon the second viewing would have been complete.
- Kirk is initially a ruffian who makes good. I've mentioned it before - but that's my favourite plot point! It's plot crack to me!
- George Kirk's brave sacrifice at the beginning. Ohhhhh....
- I've now started watching Old School Star Trek - including the original series. It's good. Though some bits I've seen... they make me wonder whether everyone in TV was stoned during the 60s, or whether everyone on TV just wanted the viewers to think they were stoned. It's good though... very good.
- Look, it's just great! Go and see it! Live! Love! Complain! You know it floats your boat!

Linky time. Stuff you should see.... apart from the obvious, like the imdb page.

Memory Alpha - Wiki for Star Trek. Everything, no matter how tangentially related to any of the series, is in there. The HMS Victory gets a mention because Geordi LaForge built a model of it once.

The main Star Trek Livejournal community - has a lot of stuff. I like the My Little Spock Pony.

Every new fandom spawns a kink meme. Frequently naughty (I suggest browing at home), often hilarious and sometimes just amazing. Here's the del.icio.us pages for the fanfiction meme and the art meme for the new film.

Here's another art meme that's safer to browse.

A couple of articles on Cracked. com. Use your discretion...

The Firm - Star Trekkin'

See the song in that video? Yes, I learned to sing it in primary school. It was a UK number 1 for two weeks in 1987, possibly due to mass hysteria or a nationwide conspiracy to be regarded as even more eccentric than usual. Actually, it is pretty funny. Why is everyone a potato?

The Nuclear Wessels?

I have a friend, see? Tchaikovsky boy is his moniker as far as this blog is concerned. Nice kid. Has a healthy interest in Russia. Was very interested when I told him Leonard Nimoy has Ukrainian Ancestry, just like me :) Anyway, he complained that Chekov's accent was totally unrealistic. A) it isn't unrealistic as such, just really hammed up, and B) that was how Walter Koenig did it in the original series, and if you mess with Trek law, then WHAM! you have 50,000 fanboys baying for your blood (or the director's blood). This is a scene from the 4th Star Trek film - in the days when every odd-numbered film was bilge but the even-numbered ones ranged from "watchable" to "great" - where Chekov and Uhura ask a bunch of American where they can find some "Nuclear Wessels" to save some giant space whales or something (the plot sounds like crack). They used real passers-by to film this. Now imagine. It's the 1980s, the Soviets are threatening a nuclear strike, and your country has nuclear weapons of its own. How are you going to react to a guy with a hammed-up Russian accent asking you where he can find "nuclear wessels"?

Star Trek: Redshirts

This is how I, and 98% of the population of the world, knew that Olsen would buy it. Redshirts drop like flies in a conservatory in August.

He's dead, Jim!

"Bones" McCoy's response to the above video.

I've been saving a bunch of these to my Youtube favourites recently. Youtube is a goldmine if you like Star Trek.

Roundhouse - for real, this time

I'm trying a new method here: writing under a time limit. The reason for this is that I don't want to deliberate any more. I discovered Dr. Wicked's Writing Lab when I was doing NaNoWriMo last time, and it was alifesaver in more ways than one. Particularly if you're writing in public. I mean, who wants to hear the sound of an inexpertly played violin when they're trying to construct a semi-coherent plot? (Or, for that matter, a semi-coherent blog entry that will later be transformed into a totally coherent one.) If your impetus includes not subjecting the people who surround you to a screeching violin or an annoying 80s pop song etc., then you have all the more reason to keep your fleet little fingers dancing across the keys.

So. Anyway. Roundhouse. I promised Roundhouse last time. I've watched most of it - but the reason that I didn't watch

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it all will become apparent later. I must start at the beginning. Roundhouse was a kids' show aimed at 8-14-year-olds (all I can say is that the 8-14-year-olds of yesteryear must've been a hell of a lot more sophisticated than today's lily-livered bunch) that aired on Saturday Night Nickelodeon (henceforth abbreviated as SNICK) back in 1992-1994 or thereabouts. It was  funny show. It was a hilarious show. It was fantastic. At least, the first three seasons were. Then 1994 set in along with the continual replacement of cast members, and, well...

It was a sketch show. Every episode followed the same basic format; the cast introduced an issue that would be of terribly important importance to the target audience - something like trying out for a school play or being rubbish at sports or obtaining a pet dog - and then  Mom and Dad would make an appearance. Dad, played by John Crane, was more or-less permanently attached to a motorised armchair which had several Dad-related attachments: a fridge, a grill, and the all-important TV. (The TV is important.) Dad was a sitcom dad. Lazy, incompetent, a sub-par parent all round, but not without the odd moment of kindness. Mom - Shawn Daywalt, as she was in her normal life -  was a different kettle of fish. She kept the family together. (For a start, they would have no income without her, because how far does a 12-year-old's paper round money go?) She cooked, she cleaned, she made sure the kids went to school and kept up with the seemingly endless round of demands inflicted on a young teenager in the 1990s. And then there were the kids, picked semi-randomly from the remaining cast; said kids packed teenage insecurity and teenage confidence into a tightly wound little ball of energy. The show is fun. All I can say is that I'm glad that my parents decided to come back to England before they had me. Not just because Peoria is the closest thing to a living death, at least according to them; because I don't think I could have coped! OK, I realise I am taking all my American cultural cues from a kids' TV show, but still... There'd be a number of sketches and dances and songs around the issue, and then the entire show would be wrapped up with a moral - or, as TV Tropes has it, an Aesop.

So, let's take a random episode. Let's see... let's see. Let's choose the school play episode, season 1. Now school plays don't seem to be terribly popular in England, not in my experience. We had choir, which I participated in for the free trips to the opera and various musicals in London; we had band, which I did not participate in as my tastes in instruments lean towards the stringed, and you were only welcome if you played something useful like the clarinet or saxaphone; but I don't recall a play. Oh, I recall desultory drama lessons, a desperate teacher trying to encourage the students to explore their creative side while the students either ran riot or sat in a shy and sullen silence, trying not to be noticed because who wants to be creative in front of the class bully. (Hmm... maybe that's why we didn't do plays.) But auditions! Here you are, a hormonal teenager who's chronically shy, and nearly all the extracurriculars (apart from, say, chess club) require you to have the confidence to stand up in front of people and do something. Those Americans must be made of sterner stuff. I'd have crashed and burned in that environment.

Forgive my digression. We have a fictional school play. And the story of one young boy who wants to make a career on the stage, starting with treading the boards at his school, depicted as a place of universal torture and comedy approaching wildly from all angles. Actually, it was depicted as a single set, mounted on a movable cart, with a map and a couple of other educational accessories; it was the merest depiction of a school. (Same with the home set, which was basically the kids' bedroom i.e. a portable dump, which doubled as the sitting room. The Anykid Dad's motorised armchair may count as a third set, simply because it had more personality than many of the cast members who came in after Season 1.) I have to mention now that I don't think all the cast members were hired on the basis of their acting ability - they were good dancers, they were good singers, but in many cases the acting was hammed up. Badly. And poorly researched. (Earth to Mark David: no Irishman would say "you bloody git". No human would say "you bloody git".) So it was understandable that there wasn't much actual serious acting going on. The show couldn't have handled it. It would have imploded under the weight of Simply Not Being Much Good. Instead, there were:

- Sketches around the theme of the episode. Some took the form of commercials (see below to find out exactly what can be commercialised). Some were the main 'kid' talking to the often spectacularly unhelpful parents. School sketches, of course. American school, which is still alien to me (though now I'm in my twenties, I will never have to be incarcerated in such an institution). American home life - or at least, American media home life. And, naturally, bunches of kids hanging out together. These sketches frequently segued into...
- Commercials. Yes, this TV show had many, many spoof commercials. Two cast members would hold up a large prop "Cardboardvox" TV, while some other cast members would act out a commercial for a product which fit the theme of the episode. Plenty of appropriately convenient products. These were often the best parts of the show, because they were often incredibly funny - that stuff would never get aired now. F'rinstance, the Racism episode. They had ads for "Talcum X" (made black babies reading to fight against racism at the age of about three months), Apar-Tide (a laundry detergent that encourges you to seperate light and dark clothing - shouldn't you do that anyway if you don't want all your clothes to end up an unfashionable grey?) and... god damn. Would that stuff get televised today without a flood of letters coming in? (For the record, there were black cast members, who were also the ones happily participating in these sketches.) Oh! And since I'm talking about the School Play episode: "Whities" cereal. The cereal that makes you dance like a white person and play golf. (This was before Tiger Woods.) Otherwise, there was The Sympathiser, which chirped sympathetic parent-like phrases at teenagers ignored in favour of a baby sibling, and a series of school notebooks that dealt with 'extracurricular' activities... such as form notes for passing - for the lazy popular person - and endless homework excuses. Very useful...
- Dance "bumpers". I'm not a dancer, due to an extreme lack of coordination. I can only hope that's an appropriate term. Three or Four of the cast members would engage in a 90-second-or-so dance routine near the commercial breaks. (Two commercial breaks in a show whose episodes lasted about 30 minutes! Another reason I'm glad that my parents moved back to Britain and the ad-free BBC. Culturally Ad-free!) These were impressive. And sometimes involved somewhat risque pair-dancing. In a show aimed at the young and unmoulded. Yes, that would have gained a lot of Concerned Parents for America letters too, I bet. This was the section that made me develop mini-crushes on Dominic Lucero and Ivan Dudynsky, the two boys who participated most frequently.
- A song. There was always a song or two. I confess I often didn't watch the songs, apart from the notably funny numbers like the ones in the first-season episode "TV". This was the part where the moral of the show was often delivered; smoke would roll out across the stage (oh come on! It was the early nineties!) and one of the girls (OK, occasionally one of the boys) would sing a heart-rending song that drove home the point of the episode, usually something about being yourself/being happy with the real you - but sometimes a bizarre, thematically-related song about buses, TV, you name it. The first song of the episode would be the light-hearted one; the second was more likely to be the 'serious' one... and the one most likely to date badly.
- "Reprise the theme song and roll the credits!" Want to wrap up a show? Say these eight magic words, and the cast will break whatever character they had and rush to the centre of the stage to reprise the theme song, and the crew will superimpose the credits over the ending dance. Then you can move onto SNICK's next offering. (Oooh, Ren and Stimpy! Clarissa Explains It All!) Unless you say "Reprise the theme song and roll the credits" as an attempt to get out of a sticky and serious situation. That'll leave you all alone with a cricket-chirping background track.

The school play episode featured Jody, the protagonist, pitted against her friend 'Melissa' in the competition for the lead role in the play. Melissa had the secret weapon - Stage Mother! (David Sidoni in drag.) Who will win? Will Jody take advantage of any of the advertised products to get the edge over Stage Mother'd-up Melissa? Will openwindows shun watching the final song videos in favour of checking on Dragoncave dragons?  No, I'm not giving away spoilers. Go and locate the episodes yourself! Watch them all! Rejoice!... at least for a bit.

So the first season - probably the best season. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed cast, lots of new ideas, everyone was smiling at universal studios. The show could go anywhere from there, as the theme song promised. And it did. It covered home life - how to cope with your family and why you shouldn't reject them for a robot family (as the robot family will malfunction in the rain), how to cope with being the new kid at school (just remember you won't be the new kid if another, newer kid arrives; the school community's tricks will all be transferred to him), how to cope if you're picked last for the school sports team (live with it, but remember your sister's the family star now she's on the track team - whatever that is). Even though the props were made of cardboard - and to think some people mock the British for having a show like Doctor Who, which featured quite a lot of polystyrene walls and bubble-wrap monsters - it was good, much better than the fare for the 8-14-year-old set I sometimes catch these days.

I have to say, in a slight interlude, that seeing these episodes of Roundhouse prompted me to join a gym so I could be as athletic and lithe as those dancers, even if I would always be considerably less willing to turn somersaults. See, TV is good for you!

Second series. Cast change! This prompted an immediate frown. How could they get rid of Dominic Lucero? (Turned out it was no human force. Not even his own.) And Crystal Lewis! Gone, just like that! She wasn't even in the credits, and she was the chick with the great voice, and... and... well, at least we still had the very cute, very blond, reasonably Ukrainian Ivan Dudynsky, with his supposedly badass tattoo. Arguably badass, though, I suppose - it was the Ukrainian trident-like symbol, and depending on how badass you think Ukrainians are (very, if you've read War and Peace), Ivan Dudynsky's badassitude is through the roof (and mine's about halfway up). The show changed a little; at least, it changed for me. It was just a little tiny bit more muted, a little bit less funny (but still way funnier than kids' TV now!). They'd moved on to other subjects. Like Pets, and why twenty-odd-year-olds pretending to be 14 shouldn't own anything more complicated than a sock dog. And Gang Violence, and why TV shows that were otherwise light-hearted - the morals never beat you over the head - shouldn't suddenly get heavy on you. It gives you mood whiplash like whoa. Though I have to say it's infinitely preferable to being totally insipid. No matter how weird Roundhouse got, it never didn't make sense on some level. (Also, this season had the pleasingly appropriate sight of Ivan Dudynsky pretending to deliver newspapers... so I'll recommend it.

Third season. Another cast change! They drafted in a Replacement Hispanic Guy, and a Scrappy. Now I won't mention the actress' name, but she's... how do I say this?... not well-loved by the fandom. I decided to give her a chance. I watched a few episodes of the third season and realised just why she wasn't well-loved. The producers had decided to shove her in the spotlight of every show where she could showcase her minimal acting talent. I'll admit she was a decent singer, but the acting! No! And it was in our faces, every episode, while the other, more talented members of the cast were stuck in the background. Roundhouse also started moving away from its slice-of-life sketches: now they were doing things like parodying The Wizard of Oz. And the Simpsons, which came off as a little Sour Grapes-like. I longed for the glory days of Season One again. Or even Season Two.

Still, I pressed on to Season Four, which had a live episode in it - should be interesting, I thought, comparing this live episode to the ones that were just filmed before a live audience. But I never actually got that far. Some of it was due to just moving on from watching a show which was aimed at people ten years younger than me - only natural. And as the DVDs seemed to be deteriorating in quality, I found myself unable to make out half the dialogue, and combined with iffy picture quality, that was near the limits of my patience. But most of it... well, cast changes again. Three new cast members from my calculations. At least Bad Third-Season actress was gone, but they'd taken on this guy I could only refer to as "Scuzzbucket" because not only could I not identify him from the credit sequence, he just looked scuzzy. Mark David and Ivan Dudynsky managed to rock their earrings and occasional flirtations with facial hair. They looked almost cool, even to my twenty-first century eyes. Scuzzbucket didn't. I watched about four episodes in an increasingly disinterested way (wow, it's amazing how much tapestry work you can get done with a DVD on in the background!) and then ejected the DVD and stored it neatly in a zip DVD case.

Maybe I'll pick it up again sometime. I've started a new tapestry project now. Maybe someday I'll be in the mood for cool dance bumpers and feeling like a kid again. But heaven knows I won't start with Season Four! I'll cosy myself up with Season One and sing along to the TV Head song all over again, and I'll know this for certain - I'll like it. So, I'll say to you, watch it. Especially if you're a Newsies fan - you can binge on Newsies dancers, well, dancing.

Link time, I suppose...

The Easychair Expressway - now I've already linked this, but it deserves to be linked again in a Roundhouse-specific entry. Bit hard to navigate unless you've actually watched the show and know it backwards, but you'll be able to find season guides and link pages with a bit of, um, imaginative clicking.

Where I got the DVDs - Paypal accepted.

Roundhouse screenshots - my album of screenshots. First season only, until I get the impetus to play the DVDs again.