And Bob, you've won.. A NEW CAR!

A "fix" it was not:

Our own Bob "The Doctor" Picardo was on hand for appearances at Comic*Con and, lo and behold, got entered in NBC's daily Heroes tie-in car giveaway... and won the Friday drawing!

This week Bob tells me: "See? Work for free and God finds a way ... See you in Vegas." No plans yet for the car, he says—but stay tuned.

And thanks to Highlander Films' producer Len MacLeod for the head's-up on-site...and for entering Bob in the first place!

Bob's 3rd annual charity auction/dinner for Habitat for Humanity that climax the weekend of the Creation Vegas bash is on again for Aug. 9.

Comic-Con candids!

SAN DIEGO (LN.COM)—Star Trek itself did not plant a big footprint at Comic-Con, but Treklanders were all over...

Like David Goodman, his Enterprise writing stint over not long before he became Seth McFarlane’s head honcho for Family Guy—a Comic*Con favorite of the big rooms, of course—and these pages, too....













..or the big room crowd Rod Roddenberry (fourth from right) and Co. had for the debut of the Days Missing comic with Archaia Comics …













… Or the Trek vets who are swelling the ranks of the writing staff of fantasyland on Legend of the Seeker, like head writer Ken Biller (on the big screen)…
… plus fan2pro Mike Sussman, here (second from left) with fellow Seeker writers—but absent former science advisor-turned-scripter Andre Bormanis, who just came aboard for Seeker’s Season 2.

Star Trek itself? There was the Paramount Home Entertainment booth—always busy this year. Here, Wrangler Joyce heads up a line of over 100 (!!) patient fans on preview night: with her souvenire foam Vulcan hand in, uh, hand, she’s about to take them in small groups from the back wall staging area over to the PHE booth 8 yards away, where …

..they stand in line for a seat in the Kirk Prime chair—before the Kirk Sub-Prime bridge backdrop?—a pic with more Orion slave girls, and a shot at more freebies!

We missed the pics, but Saturday morning also featured a twin bill: Ron D. Moore and the next generation of Galactica via Caprica, as Brannon Braga meanwhile helped preview his new series Flash Forward (with John Cho). And all those other Trekland actors? They were everywhere.


UPDATE: ... including Robbie McNeill, part of our big Trek2Chuck connection … and that lucky duck, er, doc, Bob Picardo …

Apollo 11 was not alone

What can I add to the celebrations and remembrance Apollo 11 so richly deserves on its 40th anniversary?

Not much--but allow me this pet peeve with the media:

There were six moon landings—increasing robust, increasing outfitted, increasingly ambitious. A dozen moon walkers in all. And, of course, there were to have been two more on a seventh landing--not counting the last two missions cut early on for budgets when "the new wore off" for the public and lawmakers already blasé about it all.

But as we celebrate once again Apollo 11's incredible testament to humanity's abilities, let's not negate all that was achieved and equally honorable by all the rest.

Note to the media: Honor each and all with accuracy.

It's not THE moon landing, it's the FIRST moon landing.

They were right: RIP Walter Cronkite

It was only a few weeks ago we broke hiatus to help make sure the word was out....

And now comes news that we have indeed lost him. It's assuredly a blessing in the end for "Uncle Walter" and his family, but what a loss and a time of reflection for all of us.

You will of course pardon this intrusion into Trekland, for Walter Cronkite was a resident, too—and we noted before.

What sad, ironic timing with the Apollo 11 anniversary. Weeknights growing up, we watched NBC and Huntley-Brinkley, my maternal grandparents watched Walterand CBS--but for the space shots, where you have Frank Reynolds on ABC and Frank McGee on NBC as the usual anchors, we surfed but usually stayed with CBS. (That's Cronkite above during Scott Carpenter's Mercury shot.)

Oh, how we need old-fashioned, unmoney'ed media and his kind of straight-arrow reporting now. All those colleagues rushing to praise him would do well to stand back and remember not just the sound bite moments such as Apollo and JFK's murder, but the really tough times he delivered not just the usual news but the extremely—and thus powerful—on-air rare editorial, like the post-Tet Offensive summation. Or connecting the dots of Watergate in prime time when no "mainstream media" would touch yet the story out side of the lowly Washington Post.

Say something, Wally, I'm speechless.


And now, back to our regular Trekland programming ...

Amazing find: TMP behind the scenes film

There's some amazing, never-before-seen footage from an obviously "official" making-of documentary on Star Trek—The Motion Picture that just popped upon YouTube—as Part I and Part 2.





David Fein, producer for Robert Wise on the DVD Director's Edition, just alerted me to it. Persis' infamous and emotional haircut to be Deltan-bald is worth the price alone... Fascinating!

The mystery is, how did no one know of this for so long, and how did it turn up now?

Stay tuned!