Giant Freakin Robot

For fans who got hooked on Star Trek’s original run on NBC from 1966 – 1969, the sting of cancellation left them with many dark years before Gene Roddenberry’s creation rose from its ashes as 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture. And this was before the internet, so keeping track of any glimmers of a future for Trek required you to keep up with fan magazines, gossip at conventions, or kidnap and interrogate Roddenberry inside a windowless van with a shirtless Captain Kirk emblazoned on the side. But if you did one of those things, you might have heard tell of Star Trek: Phase II. Before The Motion Picture was a thing, Phase II was set to pick up the Enterprise’s story with a second five-year mission. It fell by the wayside along with plans for a proposed “Paramount Television Service,” but Phase II’s passing left many relics behind, including this concept art by Mike Minor.

Halloween is coming, and while there’s always a lot of talk about potentially awesome costume designs, every year people don and assortment of truly questionable outfits. To help steer your holiday in the right direction, we’ve compiled a list of sci-fi themes you may want to steer away from to ensure a smooth, hassle free night of handing out candy and getting wasted.

You might remember a while back when we ran a story about a mad genius who fiddled with footage from from Star Trek: The Original Series to show us what it would have looked like as a widescreen Cinerama presentation. He basically found scenes that included a long, one-take camera pan and edited them into a single widescreen image. The results were bloody gorgeous, and now artist Nick Acosta has done the same thing for The Next Generation, with equally stellar results.

Music matters when it comes to movies. Like, a lot. That truth was brilliantly demonstrated by that video a while back where somebody stripped all the John Williams score out of the medal ceremony that wraps up the first Star Wars movie. With Williams’ music in place, a simple scene becomes truly epic. Without it, it’s soooooo very awkward. So, taking that thesis into account, what would happen if you took music created for one movie and dropped it into another? Obviously, the majority of the time this would probably result in a huge mess, but one enterprising fan decided to take a bit of Star Trek and merge it with a bit of Star Wars. You can see the results below.

We love it when our favorite sci-fi franchises crash into one another, and today we’ve got news that two biggies are colliding in one small way, as Star Wars and Star Trek are coming together. Specifically Star Trek: The Next Generation is bumping into Star Wars Rebels, with Brent Spiner officially joining the cast of the new animated series from Disney and Lucasfilm.

This isn’t the first we’ve heard about Spiner, who is best known for his portrayal of Lieutenant Commander Data, the sentient android on TNG, joining the Rebels crew, but it’s official now. Reports confirm the rumors we first heard earlier this year, and Spiner’s first appearance will be in the upcoming episode “Rise of the Old Masters,” which is an ominous sounding title.

One of the smartest things director J.J. Abrams did with his Star Trek reboot films was enlisting the considerable talents and fan cachet of Leonard Nimoy, returning to the role of Spock which made him an icon. Regardless of how well you think the films themselves were handled, having the classic Spock appear essentially bestowed his blessing on Abrams’ take on the franchise. With William Shatner now rumored for an appearance alongside Nimoy in Trek 3, many have been wondering what other familiar characters might someday pop up in the new Trek timeline. What about the Next Generation cast, for instance? Well, they have a few things to say about that…

Most of the core Next Generation actors were reunited last weekend at the annual New York Comic Con. Shatner hosted the panel, which included Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn, Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby, and Q himself, John de Lancie. A fan asked the assembled Enterprise-D crew if they’d consider visiting the new Trek universe, and their responses (via IGN) ranged from snarky to diplomatic.