With respect to the 4-year gap between the two series: I'd always assumed that the Cleese-Booth divorce (and their ultimate decision to continue writing together nonetheless) was part of the reason. Can anyone enlighten?

I think it was TNG and later series that displayed an overdependence on humanoid aliens with face (mainly forehead) makeup. The original series tried harder to show really alien aliens; I can think of at least three cloud-shaped aliens, two rock monsters, assorted disembodied brains, etc.

I don't have the patience to look it up, but in the 1968 book The Making of Star Trek, there's a description of an early script that included a long sequence of commands involved in turning the ship around. Gene Roddenberry crossed it all out and gave Captain Kirk the line "Reverse course."

Did you know that Mulgrew wasn't the original Janeway? They started shooting "Caretaker" with Genevieve Bujold as Janeway, and she was even more ill-suited to the part than Mulgrew was. YouTube has a clip of her in the role.

Not only that, but it crossed that threshold even before the series began to be broadcast! That is, "The Naked Time" (which ends with a time warp, chronometers going backward, etc.) was filmed in summer 1966 and was the fourth episode to air that September.

I saw exactly three Voyager episodes, all first-run: "Caretaker," "The 37s" (first full-season premiere, fall '95, with Sharon Lawrence as Amelia Earhart!), and the notorious "Threshold" (look it up), which put me off the series forever. In my opinion this was a bad series idea badly executed.

Not a woman but married to one. All too conventional - except for having a master's degree in harpsichord performance, perhaps.

Well, you see, this argument underscores my point exactly: People who don't know the baroque repertoire (i.e., just about everyone) simply assume, as the've tended to do for hundreds of years, that the modern piano came into existence 150 years earlier than it really did, and that it's inherently superior to the…

I've liked Tambor ever since …And Justice for All in 1979, but I feel compelled to note that his praise for David Mamet ("That’s, like, if he played piano, he’d be up there with Bach") is a little misguided. Bach tried out the early pianos that began to appear in the early 1700s, but not until decades later, after his…

If so, I'd like a 10-minute-long "Jews in Space" finale, please - Brooks' equivalent to "You Can't Stop the Beat," perhaps.

Any movie that dares to draw overt comparisons between itself and The Wrath of Khan - and Into Darkness is the second (or third) such movie, not the first, according to which Trek fan you listen to - is fighting a losing battle from the beginning. Who was it who didn't or couldn't say to JJ and his writers, "This is a…

Subterranean Press, with Bradbury's participation, published a "complete" Martian Chronicles a couple of years ago. It was a very small edition and includes a number of previously unrelated Mars stories such as the novella "The Lost City of Mars" (1967) as well as two different versions of a screenplay by Bradbury.…

Sounds right to me.

Yes, the Jerome Bixby story (from 1953) is a real classic of the short-story form. Economical and beautifully told. The following (from what appears to be a correct version easily found online) is from just before the end:

My apologies, doctor.

By July [1960], it had moved from a regional to a national phenomenon and topped the Billboard charts, beating Elvis and the Sound of Music soundtrack and selling more than 200,000 copies…

Maybe we are talking about the same version; it's in E major with backup singers, horns and strings, and there is a five-note repeating organ lick, but the five notes aren't the same ones heard in the Monkees' version, and moreover the organ is barely audible - it gives off no melodic content to speak of. The…

The version of "I'm a Believer" I'm talking about is the one discussed at

Thanks!

The 5-note organ phrase that begins the Monkees' version of "I'm a Believer" and keeps reappearing during each chorus, interwoven with the vocals (Bb-Bb-A-A-G descending, if you're in the key of C), is completely absent from Diamond's own studio version. Whose arrangement contributed that? It really seals in the…