pendell

Current Hyperfixation: Wizard of Oz

  • He/Him

I use outdated technology just for fun, listen to crappy music, and watch a lot of horror movies. Expect posts about These Things. I talk a lot.

Check tags like Star Trek Archive and Media Piracy to find things I share for others.



These things are referred to as "Starfleet Academy Briefs," I believe they were produced in 2009 for all of the Star Trek films' respective blu-rays, and I can't stand them.

The premise is that this woman here stands in front of a bad green screen and describes the entire plot of the movie in the dry, bland, "events and dates" manner of a teacher, while you I guess roleplay that you're a student in Starfleet Academy who is for whatever reason being taught about whatever that particular film was about.

Sometimes they make sense in the context they're going for, like yeah I could believe there being a lesson about V'Ger or the Whale Probe, since those were pretty serious events that directly affected everyone on Earth, but one of these is about Khan Noonien Singh, like, him specifically. If you're going for this "Starfleet Academy History Class" vibe, I think Khan would be a footnote in the chapter on the Eugenics Wars. And for ST3, it's all about the Vulcan mysticism and the katra and stuff, and I'm sorry, but unless you're taking the Vulcan Studies elective course, I just don't think you'd be taught much about that.

Also they're just really annoying so I'm sparing y'all honestly.


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in reply to @pendell's post:

I realize that I'm probably more pedantic than its target audience, but I think the first one annoyed me by forcing a year onto The Motion Picture's events from the official corporate timeline. I mean, the average person watching probably doesn't care, but it seemed sloppy to claim that it happened in 2271 (because the timeline says that the five-year mission ends in 2268), despite it also happening more than three hundred years after the Voyager program. And sure, maybe their Earth's history had a much earlier Voyager program, but I kinda doubt that the writers of the short gave it that much thought...

I don't think anybody gave these shorts much thought. It's indicative of the entire package they were included in. The 2009 blu-rays were downright bad in almost every sense. The recent 2022 blu-rays/UHDs aren't perfect (why won't Paramount let me hear the original theatrical audio track for any of these movies?! I don't want your 7.1 channel Dolby Atmos whatever the hell!), but they're a vast improvement.