E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Space. The New Frontier. JJ Abrams’s new Star Trek film opened recently to spectacular business and critical acclaim. It’s the first time Trek has intersected with the mainstream since the movie First Contact in 1996 but to do so, it had to reinvent itself. This is not the first time that Star Trek has become new. Over the decades, it’s started again several times, to varying degrees of commercial and artistic success. Often, its creative rebirth has been at the hands of outsiders, fresh perspectives bringing new ideas. Let’s go back to the beginning of the final frontier and have a look at those incarnations, bearing in mind that every generation gets the Star Trek it deserves. Or, to put it more positively, Trek does well not just when it’s in touch with the times, but also when it coincides with moments of optimism. Forty-five years ago a former motorcycle cop and fighter pilot, Gene Roddenberry , tried to sell NBC on a show he described as ‘Wagon Train to the Stars.’ As pitch...

The actor who played Sulu in the Star Trek films and TV series is currently having a spat with the actor who played Kirk, in same. Takei and Shatner , according to the great eccentric Canadian thespian on his blog, have been at odds for maybe 40 years or more. Shatner has been lashing out at his friends and foes lately, using the Internet, set to stun, as his weapon of choice. According to Entertainment Weekly , he even complained about not being given a part in 2009's much-anticipated new Star Trek film, starring the guy who plays Sylar on Heroes as the guy with the pointy ears (from Sylar to Spock being a small stretch for man). Meanwhile, the real Spock was given a walk-on. Shatner has been weird science for a while - his poetry and song recordings are notoriously bad, and so is much else in his life. But he's also lived through personal tragedy, and being lampooned for years. His bread and butter has also been his body-hugging hairshirt. My father went to school with Sha...

Sad news. The German science fiction icon, Eva Pflug , has died. Her ultra-modern TV series, Space Patrol , which began the year of my birth, 1966, was the Star Trek of Germany, with all that entails. I didn't know of the show at the time, of course, but came across it 30 years later, in 1996, when I was working for a TV production company in Montreal, Canada, that had been hired to translate the series into English, for possible broadcast on a dedicated science fiction channel in the US. I did some work on the show, and got to know her work then. This retro-memory, like most kitsch, leaves a bitter-sweet taste. Now, 12 years later, 30 seems as far away as some interstellar planetoid - and as likely. Time bends, indeed.

Joseph Pevney , who, among other things, directed several of the great Star Trek TV episodes, was the unlikely model (in some ways) for the Heroes villain, Sylar . Heroes , of course, is filled with nerdy references to Star Trek , and other classic sci-fi product, and pays homage to Pevney, subtly, in the origins of Sylar - who, like Pevney, was born the son of a New York watchmaker. There, the similarities ended.

Eyewear found Heroes (Season 1 has just ended on terrestrial BBC2, Season 2 airs in 2008, and is delayed post-episode 11 due to the ongoing writer's strike Stateside) eye-catching entertainment. However, its hybrid, multicultural plotlines, more than homage to great 60s TV series like Mission: Impossible and Star Trek , and comic books like the X-Men , and Star Wars , was often as not more a quasi-rip-off of ideas from, say, The Incredibles (where another evil-minded maniac kills superheroes to pilfer their powers). However, originality need not be the benchmark for great TV entertainment, and, starting with the straight man Mr. Bennet (and his mutilated-yet-recoverable post- Lolita daughter, Claire, pictured), on to the semi-dumb yet lovable cop who can read minds, it won hearts. Sylar and his murderous moving finger cemented the show's greatness - or maybe the dumpy Japanese bespectacled guy, Hiro, hopping about time, did it. It was also fun to see the cameos from pseud...

Eyewear celebrates the 40th anniversary of Star Trek's first mission, and transmission, on September 8, 1966. Despite the claims from the site below, this televisual classic dramatic series, arguably the Shakespearean-standard by which all other shows must be judged, has not had the deep space impact of " Jesus "; Lennon -sized grandiosity aside, Star Trek is one of the five most significant cultural artifacts of the '60s - along with The Beatles , Mad Magazine , Bob Dylan , and the Viet Nam War. For purists, all the spin-offs (and there have been more than for any other TV creation) cannot duplicate the magic of the Original Series, with its curiously perfect alchemy of personalities, namely, Spock's, Kirk's and McCoy's. Indeed, despite the jokes (boulders light as cotton; disposable lieutenants and ensigns; collisions that threw the crew about like popcorn on the bridge) what remains of the series is love. These characters, rounded, real, and flawed-but...