Latest / Movie Meltdown / Rick Sternbach: Drawing Rings around the World

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Rick Sternbach: Drawing Rings around the World · Movie Meltdown

• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Hey everybody, my name is Jonathan Frakes and you're listening
• 0:10
  Speaker 1: to Movie Meltdown.
• 0:13
  Speaker 2: Movie Meltdown.
• 0:33
  Speaker 3: This episode is rated M for Misty. Yes, that's right,
• 0:36
  Speaker 3: this is a Misty episode, so it will be laced
• 0:38
  Speaker 3: with profanity even more than usual. If you're not comfortable
• 0:42
  Speaker 3: with this level of profanity, perhaps this isn't the episode
• 0:45
  Speaker 3: for you. But we have many other episodes to choose
• 0:47
  Speaker 3: from that do not feature Misty and will probably be
• 0:49
  Speaker 3: far less offensive. Okay, maybe. With that having been said,
• 0:54
  Speaker 3: on with the show.
• 0:55
  Speaker 4: It's showtime.
• 0:56
  Speaker 5: Our nuclear reactor pumping out one million kilowatts of power.
• 1:26
  Speaker 6: To provide more cooling in the containment chamber.
• 1:28
  Speaker 3: To your sentries, we have rebelled.
• 1:30
  Speaker 7: Greetings, Starfighter.
• 1:32
  Speaker 6: You have been recruited by the Star League to defend
• 1:35
  Speaker 6: the frontier against Xur and the Kodan Armada.
• 1:38
  Speaker 1: Get ready.
• 1:39
  Speaker 3: Prepare for blasto.
• 1:49
  Speaker 7: What's up and welcome to Movie Meltdown. I am Brian.
• 1:52
  Speaker 8: I am Misty.
• 1:53
  Speaker 7: And we are once again coming to you live via
• 1:55
  Speaker 7: digital recording from right in the middle of Wonderfest.
• 1:57
  Speaker 8: Yes we are.
• 1:58
  Speaker 7: So we've wandered around. We've seen people.
• 2:02
  Speaker 3: Lots of people. Some costumes. Not as many.
• 2:05
  Speaker 7: We were trying to decide if it's just people in general.
• 2:07
  Speaker 7: Like when I remember them hitting here it was kind
• 2:11
  Speaker 7: of when it was novelty at all of them. When
• 2:13
  Speaker 7: it just started getting to be like a thing to
• 2:16
  Speaker 7: be a cosplayer and like I feel like we got
• 2:18
  Speaker 7: to bunch of them at every convention including this one
• 2:21
  Speaker 7: and now i think those people just kind of got
• 2:23
  Speaker 7: tired and like wandered off or they have 40 other conventions.
• 2:26
  Speaker 8: Like the biggest wave was when the new star wars
• 2:28
  Speaker 8: movies came out like like late like prequels yeah like.
• 2:33
  Speaker 7: The prequel that's confusing these days but prequel times yeah
• 2:37
  Speaker 7: probably somewhere in the middle there like early 2000s so
• 2:41
  Speaker 7: that would have been towards the end of the third
• 2:43
  Speaker 7: maybe and I.
• 2:45
  Speaker 8: Thought Anakin was really good.
• 2:46
  Speaker 7: Yeah, that's true.
• 2:47
  Speaker 8: He was probably better than the actual Anakin in the movie.
• 2:49
  Speaker 7: Don't be talking smack about poor Hayden. He's got enough
• 2:51
  Speaker 7: to deal with these days. So, yeah, we've been wandering around,
• 2:58
  Speaker 7: looking at things, talking to people, seeing Chuck. We always
• 3:02
  Speaker 7: see Chuck at everything. Every convention we go to, it
• 3:05
  Speaker 7: feels like we see him. It's sad that we have
• 3:08
  Speaker 7: our little roaming family of people we only see at conventions.
• 3:11
  Speaker 9: We saw Chuck.
• 3:11
  Speaker 8: We saw Larry. We saw Larry.
• 3:13
  Speaker 7: Yeah, we see all of our normal convention-y friends. So,
• 3:18
  Speaker 7: have you seen any movies lately?
• 3:20
  Speaker 9: I did watch.
• 3:21
  Speaker 8: I watched a movie. When we were in the Maryland state,
• 3:26
  Speaker 8: we went and saw Deadpool 2.
• 3:29
  Speaker 7: All right.
• 3:29
  Speaker 8: In a fancy theater that had the recliners.
• 3:32
  Speaker 7: Oh, see.
• 3:33
  Speaker 8: I was just waiting for that to be an issue.
• 3:34
  Speaker 8: Because I knew boyfriend was going to fall asleep at
• 3:35
  Speaker 8: any moment. But he did not. I think he stayed
• 3:36
  Speaker 8: awake the entire time.
• 3:38
  Speaker 7: I kind of... The one I kind of go to
• 3:40
  Speaker 7: regularly now kind of always has those. So I'm pretty
• 3:43
  Speaker 7: used to them now.
• 3:44
  Speaker 8: This was my first experience in a recliner having theater.
• 3:46
  Speaker 7: And did you go to sleep?
• 3:47
  Speaker 8: I did not. I was too busy laughing at this movie.
• 3:49
  Speaker 8: Because I'm not going to lie. This movie was fucking awesome.
• 3:52
  Speaker 7: You were a fan of the previous Deadpool.
• 3:54
  Speaker 8: I loved the first Deadpool. And this one did not
• 3:56
  Speaker 8: disappoint me. It was hilarious. I loved it. And I'm
• 4:00
  Speaker 8: still baffled as to when the fuck Josh Brolin got hot.
• 4:04
  Speaker 8: He's always just been kind of Josh Brolin. I mean,
• 4:06
  Speaker 8: he was just there, and that's all. I'm like, holy shit,
• 4:09
  Speaker 8: he got hot.
• 4:11
  Speaker 7: I think it's two things. I think there are some
• 4:14
  Speaker 7: dudes that just get old hot. It just sets in.
• 4:18
  Speaker 7: They'll be normal dude most of their life. It's like
• 4:22
  Speaker 7: how Liam Neeson decided to be an action star when
• 4:24
  Speaker 7: he was like, 57 or something like he'd been around
• 4:27
  Speaker 7: he just looked like a normal dude nobody would ever
• 4:30
  Speaker 7: cared about starting to fight with him and now people
• 4:32
  Speaker 7: act like he's the second coming of evil and he's
• 4:35
  Speaker 7: going to destroy you so it's like it's that kind
• 4:38
  Speaker 7: of weird thing that like at some point in some
• 4:40
  Speaker 7: guys careers they take this weird turn and they become
• 4:43
  Speaker 7: like a badass or they become hot or they become
• 4:45
  Speaker 7: like everybody gets like this weird second wind not everybody
• 4:49
  Speaker 7: But certain actors get this weird second wind that kicks
• 4:52
  Speaker 7: in that like, yeah, it just changes your whole career
• 4:54
  Speaker 7: from that point.
• 4:55
  Speaker 8: Well, that and for a long time he insisted I
• 4:56
  Speaker 8: have a facial hair, which I am not a big
• 4:58
  Speaker 8: fan of.
• 4:58
  Speaker 6: That's true.
• 4:59
  Speaker 7: It's not your thing.
• 4:59
  Speaker 8: The facial hair is gone now and you can see
• 5:01
  Speaker 8: his face and I'm like, holy shit, that's a good face.
• 5:03
  Speaker 7: He's all chiseled-y.
• 5:04
  Speaker 8: He is. He is gorgeous now and I'm just like.
• 5:07
  Speaker 7: He doesn't have that Thanos thing going with his chin.
• 5:09
  Speaker 7: That's not a turn on for you.
• 5:10
  Speaker 8: That's not. That does not flip my boat. I'll tell
• 5:12
  Speaker 8: you that right now.
• 5:13
  Speaker 7: I don't know. It's pretty hot.
• 5:16
  Speaker 8: Yeah, not so much.
• 5:17
  Speaker 7: And he's got to be the villain in every superhero
• 5:19
  Speaker 7: movie from here on out.
• 5:20
  Speaker 8: He wasn't really villainy in this one. He started off
• 5:24
  Speaker 8: kind of villainy because you got to figure out why
• 5:26
  Speaker 8: he's doing what he's doing. And once you figure out,
• 5:27
  Speaker 8: you're like, oh, dude, I get it. I'd kill the kid, too.
• 5:30
  Speaker 8: But that's just, you know.
• 5:32
  Speaker 7: I can't wait till he's the new Catwoman.
• 5:34
  Speaker 8: That'd be pretty hot.
• 5:37
  Speaker 7: Leather clad. smacking people with his tail.
• 5:41
  Speaker 8: I have no idea what you're talking about. Is he
• 5:44
  Speaker 8: actually going to.
• 5:44
  Speaker 7: I have no idea. I don't think you bought into it, though.
• 5:48
  Speaker 7: I'm just picking every villain, so at some point he's
• 5:52
  Speaker 7: going to have to be Catwoman.
• 5:52
  Speaker 8: I'm like, okay, I'd see him in leather. I don't care.
• 5:55
  Speaker 7: Again, there's a fan fiction out there waiting for you to.
• 5:59
  Speaker 8: I could probably Google.
• 6:00
  Speaker 7: You could Google it right now, and it would probably
• 6:02
  Speaker 7: be there's at least a dude in a Catwoman outfit
• 6:05
  Speaker 7: right now waiting for you. Whether or not it's josh
• 6:08
  Speaker 7: probably went downstairs might be we'll have to go look
• 6:11
  Speaker 7: later you can you can make these dreams come true
• 6:14
  Speaker 7: but yeah so other than the hotness what else is
• 6:19
  Speaker 7: your take.
• 6:19
  Speaker 8: On the old i love all the characters i mean
• 6:22
  Speaker 8: they have dude did you have a surprise which i'm
• 6:24
  Speaker 8: pretty sure they've actually was surprised they didn't blow it
• 6:26
  Speaker 8: in the trailer which i could i guess i could
• 6:28
  Speaker 8: say it now if you That's not really a big surprise.
• 6:31
  Speaker 7: Don't overly spoil it since I haven't watched it.
• 6:33
  Speaker 8: I mean, okay. I think they've actually been showing pictures
• 6:37
  Speaker 8: of it now, so I don't think it's the big
• 6:38
  Speaker 8: surprise that it was. Because all during the movie, they're
• 6:42
  Speaker 8: teasing that there's this big, super.
• 6:44
  Speaker 7: Oh, is it a cameo?
• 6:45
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 6:46
  Speaker 7: I did hear.
• 6:46
  Speaker 8: No, not that cameo.
• 6:47
  Speaker 7: Okay. I heard about that cameo.
• 6:49
  Speaker 8: The Brad Pitt one?
• 6:50
  Speaker 4: No.
• 6:51
  Speaker 8: Oh, there's a Brad Pitt cameo.
• 6:52
  Speaker 9: Nice.
• 6:53
  Speaker 8: I was talking about the Juggernaut.
• 6:55
  Speaker 7: All right.
• 6:55
  Speaker 8: The Juggernaut. Because there's this whole scene in prison, and
• 6:59
  Speaker 8: they have this one cell where this super bad guy is.
• 7:02
  Speaker 8: And so most of the movie, you don't know what
• 7:04
  Speaker 8: the fuck's in there. And eventually it's the Juggernaut. At
• 7:08
  Speaker 8: no point does he say, I'm the Juggernaut, bitch.
• 7:12
  Speaker 7: So are they existing in the same universe as the
• 7:15
  Speaker 7: cheesy third X-Men movie?
• 7:18
  Speaker 8: I'm not really sure.
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: I don't know.
• 7:20
  Speaker 7: It's been so long since I've seen that. It's such
• 7:21
  Speaker 7: a weird, different varies and streams. And I can't tell
• 7:26
  Speaker 7: what goes with what anymore.
• 7:27
  Speaker 8: But yeah, there are so many cameos in this movie.
• 7:29
  Speaker 8: I don't know. Which cameo are you referring to?
• 7:31
  Speaker 7: I thought we got a Hugh Jackman cameo.
• 7:33
  Speaker 8: You get the entire, like, X-Men cast.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 7:35
  Speaker 8: Because, like, when they're in.
• 7:37
  Speaker 7: But, I mean, he seems like he's the get for
• 7:40
  Speaker 7: an X-Men-related anything.
• 7:41
  Speaker 8: Well, because they go to the school, and he's bitching
• 7:45
  Speaker 8: about how you never see any of the other X-Men,
• 7:47
  Speaker 8: and as he walks by.
• 7:48
  Speaker 7: That was just in the last movie.
• 7:50
  Speaker 8: And he's still bitching there, because all they're getting is
• 7:53
  Speaker 8: the Negasonic Teenage Warrior.
• 7:54
  Speaker 7: Who is adorable, by the way.
• 7:56
  Speaker 9: Her girlfriend.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: Oh.
• 7:57
  Speaker 7: Super adorable.
• 7:58
  Speaker 8: You don't even know.
• 7:59
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 8:00
  Speaker 8: Your head will explode by how cute she is.
• 8:01
  Speaker 7: Probably.
• 8:03
  Speaker 4: Um.
• 8:03
  Speaker 8: And he's bitching and he's walking through the hall. They
• 8:06
  Speaker 8: walk by an open doorway and there's like everybody. And
• 8:10
  Speaker 8: he's standing by the doorway and they just kind of like.
• 8:12
  Speaker 7: Close the door.
• 8:14
  Speaker 5: That's pretty.
• 8:16
  Speaker 8: Awesome.
• 8:17
  Speaker 7: See, that didn't even ruin it. It kind of makes
• 8:18
  Speaker 7: me want to go see it now.
• 8:19
  Speaker 8: I'm telling you. There's another cameo that I caught that
• 8:24
  Speaker 8: Jay and Randy didn't really immediately caught. There's a scene
• 8:26
  Speaker 8: where there's two rednecks. Standing there talking about toilet paper.
• 8:31
  Speaker 8: Because Josh Brolin comes in.
• 8:32
  Speaker 7: Which is bound to happen.
• 8:33
  Speaker 8: I think Josh Brolin comes in because after he time
• 8:35
  Speaker 8: warps into their time, he has to have a vehicle.
• 8:37
  Speaker 8: And it's two rednecks. And I'm like, I recognize one
• 8:40
  Speaker 8: of those rednecks. That's Alan Tudyk. I know it is.
• 8:43
  Speaker 7: So it is our crossover team.
• 8:48
  Speaker 8: There's no, the other guy's not in it. Because from
• 8:51
  Speaker 8: what I heard, they were trying to say that the
• 8:53
  Speaker 8: other redneck is actually Matt Damon, but I'm not sure
• 8:55
  Speaker 8: that I'm buying it. But I'm not really sure.
• 8:57
  Speaker 7: I think I may have heard that too.
• 8:59
  Speaker 8: That one wasn't immediately recognizable to me.
• 9:01
  Speaker 7: He does love to do dumb cameos for no good reason.
• 9:04
  Speaker 7: In movies, I don't even know why he bothers with.
• 9:07
  Speaker 8: In the Thor movie, or was it the Thor movie?
• 9:09
  Speaker 7: Oh yeah, he's in the last Thor movie. He's in
• 9:11
  Speaker 7: a lot of weird cameos. It's his thing now, I guess.
• 9:14
  Speaker 8: Was it Thor or was it Avengers?
• 9:16
  Speaker 7: I can't remember. No, he was in the third Thor.
• 9:19
  Speaker 8: Then there's the Brad Pitt one, which is fucking hilarious.
• 9:24
  Speaker 8: I'm going to spoil it for everybody. It's already been
• 9:28
  Speaker 8: written in articles and everything.
• 9:29
  Speaker 7: Spoilers for Brad Pitt's existence.
• 9:31
  Speaker 8: No, because apparently at a time before Josh Brolin got
• 9:36
  Speaker 8: the role, there was a big rumor that Brad Pitt
• 9:38
  Speaker 8: was going to be the cable character.
• 9:41
  Speaker 7: The fourth Wally.
• 9:43
  Speaker 5: So.
• 9:44
  Speaker 8: When they have all their tryouts for their new X, whatever, X-Force.
• 9:49
  Speaker 8: Because they do decide to have little tryouts if you
• 9:51
  Speaker 8: can be in their X-Force. And they have one guy,
• 9:54
  Speaker 8: I can't even remember his name, but he's invisible. So
• 9:57
  Speaker 8: you don't really see the character. through 98% of whatever
• 10:02
  Speaker 8: screen time he's supposed to have and there's one point
• 10:06
  Speaker 8: spoiler alert when he I can't even say it without
• 10:10
  Speaker 8: like ruining it anyways he gets electrified and that second
• 10:15
  Speaker 8: that he's electrified you see Brad Pitt like for like
• 10:17
  Speaker 8: a split second and you're like.
• 10:18
  Speaker 7: Oh Did you hear him the rest of the time?
• 10:20
  Speaker 7: And it was Brad Pitt.
• 10:21
  Speaker 8: No, there's no voice.
• 10:22
  Speaker 4: He doesn't speak.
• 10:24
  Speaker 5: Oh, my God.
• 10:25
  Speaker 7: Deadpool's so tired.
• 10:28
  Speaker 8: I don't think he had any speaking lines, or if
• 10:29
  Speaker 8: he did, I totally blocked him out or forgot him.
• 10:31
  Speaker 8: But he's just there. And I can't even remember what
• 10:35
  Speaker 8: his name is at this point. The Disappearer or something.
• 10:38
  Speaker 8: Vanisher or some shit like that. The not-there person, anyways.
• 10:42
  Speaker 5: Oh, Lord.
• 10:43
  Speaker 8: I'm sure there's more cameos that I probably just can't
• 10:46
  Speaker 8: think of right now, but the Brad Pitt's epic, Alan Tudyk,
• 10:50
  Speaker 8: if you don't know who you're looking for, it's not
• 10:52
  Speaker 8: like a big role.
• 10:53
  Speaker 7: But he's such a geek fan thing, like most people
• 10:56
  Speaker 7: at Deadpool are going to know.
• 10:58
  Speaker 8: But yeah, this movie is pretty fantastic.
• 11:01
  Speaker 9: Peter.
• 11:02
  Speaker 8: Gotta watch it for Peter.
• 11:03
  Speaker 7: Everybody loves Peter.
• 11:04
  Speaker 8: Dude, I'm telling you. Again, he's taking tryouts for his ex,
• 11:10
  Speaker 8: and Peter shows up.
• 11:11
  Speaker 7: I just saw the ad.
• 11:12
  Speaker 8: You saw Peter?
• 11:13
  Speaker 5: Yeah. He's in the trailer.
• 11:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 11:15
  Speaker 8: He's just a regular dude.
• 11:16
  Speaker 9: I just saw the ad.
• 11:17
  Speaker 8: He still has no superpowers whatsoever.
• 11:20
  Speaker 7: I mean, I want to join the ad for sure.
• 11:22
  Speaker 8: Yeah, this movie's awesome. I would recommend, if you've not
• 11:26
  Speaker 8: seen it, see it. If you've seen it, see it again,
• 11:28
  Speaker 8: because it's awesome, and there's stuff you're going to catch
• 11:30
  Speaker 8: the second time that you missed the first time. Which
• 11:34
  Speaker 8: I'm talking shit because I've only watched it once myself.
• 11:35
  Speaker 8: It's all lies.
• 11:36
  Speaker 7: It's all lies.
• 11:37
  Speaker 8: But it's awesome. When it comes out on DVD, I'll
• 11:39
  Speaker 8: buy it and I'll watch it probably like another at
• 11:41
  Speaker 8: least twice. It's got good rewatch value. I liked it.
• 11:46
  Speaker 8: I enjoyed it. I seriously didn't know what to expect.
• 11:50
  Speaker 8: But it's awesome. So, yes, watch it. You haven't seen
• 11:53
  Speaker 8: it yet, have you?
• 11:54
  Speaker 7: Not yet.
• 11:54
  Speaker 8: Watch it.
• 11:55
  Speaker 7: I have watched the first one. I'm getting to the second.
• 11:58
  Speaker 8: You should totally see it.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: I did.
• 12:01
  Speaker 7: When I was downstairs, I saw several versions of one
• 12:04
  Speaker 7: of these characters that reminded me and I mentioned one
• 12:07
  Speaker 7: of them. I was like, oh, yeah, we need to
• 12:08
  Speaker 7: talk about that upstairs. So I watched the new Lost
• 12:13
  Speaker 7: in Space series.
• 12:15
  Speaker 8: Oh, how was that?
• 12:16
  Speaker 7: I'm pretty pleased with it. Like, I've heard a little
• 12:19
  Speaker 7: bit of fanboy complaining from the, you know, just old
• 12:22
  Speaker 7: school fans.
• 12:22
  Speaker 8: There's always a little bit of fanboy.
• 12:24
  Speaker 7: I know, that's what I'm saying.
• 12:25
  Speaker 8: And I mean, hell, half the time I'm that fanboy
• 12:27
  Speaker 8: complaining about stuff.
• 12:28
  Speaker 7: That's probably true.
• 12:31
  Speaker 8: It is. It can't be any worse than the movie
• 12:33
  Speaker 8: that had Matt LeBlanc in it.
• 12:34
  Speaker 7: That's one of the ones that I saw downstairs was
• 12:36
  Speaker 7: I saw that robot and I saw the original robot
• 12:39
  Speaker 7: that I have that toy of that reminded me. I
• 12:41
  Speaker 7: was like, oh yeah, I should talk about the new
• 12:42
  Speaker 7: one because if you need a selling point, like the
• 12:44
  Speaker 7: new robots, Pretty badass. So if you need to see
• 12:48
  Speaker 7: a giant robot being pretty cool most of the time.
• 12:52
  Speaker 8: Does it have a Mr. Smith?
• 12:53
  Speaker 4: What?
• 12:54
  Speaker 8: Is it the same guy?
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: That's the thing.
• 12:55
  Speaker 8: Is it the same guy? Did they bring him back?
• 12:56
  Speaker 8: Because I hate that guy. Isn't he like weighted?
• 12:59
  Speaker 7: You're talking about the original? Yeah. Not Gary Oldman? No,
• 13:04
  Speaker 7: that's what put it over the edge for me. Because
• 13:06
  Speaker 7: I remember, I mean, it was such a big release.
• 13:08
  Speaker 7: They were showing trailers for the series in the theater
• 13:11
  Speaker 7: in front of movies. They showed a trailer for the
• 13:13
  Speaker 7: Netflix series coming up. And I'm watching it, and I'm like,
• 13:16
  Speaker 7: the visuals on this looks pretty good. I'm like, I
• 13:18
  Speaker 7: might watch this. And then I got this flash, and
• 13:20
  Speaker 7: I'm like, oh, my God. Was that Parker Posey?
• 13:24
  Speaker 8: Oh, good Lord. Parker Posey is Mrs.
• 13:27
  Speaker 4: Smith?
• 13:27
  Speaker 7: Parker Posey is Dr.
• 13:29
  Speaker 10: Smith.
• 13:29
  Speaker 7: Dr.
• 13:29
  Speaker 5: Smith.
• 13:30
  Speaker 7: Oh, my God. She is Dr.
• 13:31
  Speaker 5: Smith.
• 13:32
  Speaker 7: Kind of. Watch the series. But she is, for all
• 13:36
  Speaker 7: practical purposes, the Dr. Smith in this series. And, oh,
• 13:39
  Speaker 7: my God, if there's anything... that i love it's crazy
• 13:43
  Speaker 7: parker posey and does she have any other there is
• 13:45
  Speaker 7: no other mode and that's why i'm like this is
• 13:48
  Speaker 7: perfect because this version of dr smith is awesome as
• 13:52
  Speaker 7: much as even in the original series he started a
• 13:55
  Speaker 7: little dark and then became nothing but comedic relief and
• 13:58
  Speaker 7: over-the-top silliness and like and even i mean they tried
• 14:01
  Speaker 7: to do darker and with gary oldman but you know
• 14:04
  Speaker 7: that movie had its own set of problems so like
• 14:06
  Speaker 7: in this one we get a very different version of Dr.
• 14:09
  Speaker 7: Smith and for different reasons. And as you get into it,
• 14:12
  Speaker 7: like crazy level of Parker Posey is so perfect casting
• 14:17
  Speaker 7: that I'm just like, Oh my God, this is, that's
• 14:19
  Speaker 7: my favorite part. The other thing that's cool is the
• 14:22
  Speaker 7: rest of the, mostly the kids, because we spend so
• 14:24
  Speaker 7: much time with the kids, like the little boy, like
• 14:27
  Speaker 7: that can be your weak link. Like there's a lot
• 14:29
  Speaker 7: of bad kid actors and I'll call them out. Like,
• 14:31
  Speaker 7: I don't want to be mean to the kid in
• 14:32
  Speaker 7: the real world, but I'm like, as an actor, I'm
• 14:33
  Speaker 7: going to call you out.
• 14:34
  Speaker 8: I'll trip them.
• 14:35
  Speaker 7: You will, you'll, you'll push them down and steal the candy. But, I'm, like,
• 14:39
  Speaker 7: on screen, like, I'm, like, selling it. I'm going to
• 14:42
  Speaker 7: call you out for it. And I'm, like, the little
• 14:43
  Speaker 7: boy's good. Like, and he's got a lot of screen time. So, like,
• 14:46
  Speaker 7: he could have been the tipping point. But, like, he's
• 14:48
  Speaker 7: really good. And Penny is pretty damned awesome. Like, no
• 14:52
  Speaker 7: offense to the older sister, but Penny's so much fun. Like,
• 14:56
  Speaker 7: she's still kind of the, like, kid of the, well,
• 14:58
  Speaker 7: the teenager and having teenager issues along the way.
• 15:01
  Speaker 3: So.
• 15:02
  Speaker 7: Yeah, Penny's pretty awesome. The little boy's cool. So, like,
• 15:05
  Speaker 7: everything else is, like, pretty well balanced. And Mom's, like,
• 15:10
  Speaker 7: smart and wants to be a badass and is kind
• 15:12
  Speaker 7: of in charge. And the other thing I think that's
• 15:14
  Speaker 7: kind of cool is it's not the perfect little, like...
• 15:17
  Speaker 7: I mean, it was sort of like Leave it to
• 15:18
  Speaker 7: Beaver in Space, that first run. Like, they were the
• 15:20
  Speaker 7: perfect little all-American family, and then they just set it
• 15:23
  Speaker 7: in space. This one, they're more of the perfect, in quotes,
• 15:28
  Speaker 7: modern family, because... they're having horrible marriage problems. And then
• 15:33
  Speaker 7: the space thing is going on. So like, it is
• 15:36
  Speaker 7: interesting that like you start getting like kind of flashbacks
• 15:38
  Speaker 7: into what's going on in the family life. And you're like,
• 15:41
  Speaker 7: Oh no, this is a way more relatable family for
• 15:44
  Speaker 7: a lot of people. So I think that kind of
• 15:47
  Speaker 7: adds a nice, like realistic grounded, dramatic edge to it
• 15:50
  Speaker 7: that you probably didn't get these last two times out. So,
• 15:54
  Speaker 7: again there's people that are gonna nitpick but i thought
• 15:57
  Speaker 7: it was pretty well done i mean they do if
• 15:59
  Speaker 7: you want to have a ridiculous level like every episode
• 16:03
  Speaker 7: they get into something that is like they're all gonna
• 16:06
  Speaker 7: die how long of a series is this it's like
• 16:09
  Speaker 7: 10 episodes i think and like every episode you're like
• 16:12
  Speaker 7: oh my god this is the biggest problem in the
• 16:13
  Speaker 7: world and they'll like find a way out of it
• 16:15
  Speaker 7: and then another problem equally as huge will immediately happen
• 16:20
  Speaker 7: like it is sort of ridiculous the level of trouble
• 16:23
  Speaker 7: that they constantly get into but again that's the fun
• 16:26
  Speaker 7: of it like there's no if they're just sitting around
• 16:28
  Speaker 7: being bored and watching them like read it's it's you
• 16:31
  Speaker 7: know nobody needs that so yes you have to kind
• 16:33
  Speaker 7: of throw that out the window as far as realistic
• 16:37
  Speaker 7: levels of things that happen sometimes two things in the
• 16:39
  Speaker 7: same episode that is enough to kill most people but
• 16:43
  Speaker 7: if you let that stuff slide the rest of it's
• 16:45
  Speaker 7: a lot of fun so i i thought it was
• 16:47
  Speaker 7: pretty good but did you have one more I did
• 16:50
  Speaker 7: watch another movie. I think you watched a movie you
• 16:52
  Speaker 7: said you wanted to talk about.
• 16:53
  Speaker 8: I did. I did watch a movie that I'd not
• 16:55
  Speaker 8: heard a lot about, but I'd heard really good things
• 16:58
  Speaker 8: about it.
• 16:58
  Speaker 5: I've heard good things.
• 16:59
  Speaker 8: So I sat down, which it put me in distress.
• 17:03
  Speaker 8: straight out stress mode just to begin with because it's
• 17:04
  Speaker 8: a christmas movie and when i start watching christmas movies
• 17:07
  Speaker 8: outside of christmas time i get stressed out because of
• 17:09
  Speaker 8: where i work and oh.
• 17:10
  Speaker 7: God christmas flashbacks christmas flashbacks.
• 17:12
  Speaker 8: You don't even know i get like this i get
• 17:14
  Speaker 8: this like cold fear in my heart and just that
• 17:16
  Speaker 8: it's just it's an awful feeling it's.
• 17:19
  Speaker 7: A weird time of year for a lot of people
• 17:20
  Speaker 7: you being one.
• 17:21
  Speaker 8: Of those so anyways yeah i sat down to watch
• 17:24
  Speaker 8: a better watch out so it just.
• 17:26
  Speaker 7: Came out uh this past year i think.
• 17:29
  Speaker 8: It was made like two years ago yeah.
• 17:30
  Speaker 7: But i feel like it just got it or i
• 17:32
  Speaker 7: just started hearing about it this previous christmas yeah i'd not.
• 17:35
  Speaker 8: Heard a lot about it i just i'd watch the
• 17:37
  Speaker 8: trailer once and i'm like that looks really good i'll
• 17:39
  Speaker 8: put it on my netflix list and the next movie
• 17:41
  Speaker 8: on my netflix list was something that i really didn't
• 17:42
  Speaker 8: want to watch but i just bumped this one up
• 17:44
  Speaker 8: to the top just for funsies um yeah i was
• 17:47
  Speaker 8: actually really surprised about this and i don't really know
• 17:49
  Speaker 8: how to talk about it without spoiling it so.
• 17:51
  Speaker 7: This one i feel like a lot of people haven't
• 17:53
  Speaker 7: seen so we probably shouldn't overly spoil it so just recommendation.
• 17:58
  Speaker 8: Reasons I'll give you the IMDB for it if you
• 18:00
  Speaker 8: want to hear.
• 18:01
  Speaker 10: Oh, God.
• 18:01
  Speaker 7: There's always trouble on the show.
• 18:03
  Speaker 8: On quiet suburban street, a babysitter must defend a 12-year-old
• 18:06
  Speaker 8: boy from intruders. Only discover it's far from a normal
• 18:09
  Speaker 8: home invasion.
• 18:11
  Speaker 7: I've heard it was sort of a twist on... Because
• 18:14
  Speaker 7: home invasion is such a sub-genre of horror in most
• 18:17
  Speaker 7: movies now that it is its own weird little twist
• 18:20
  Speaker 7: on that entire thing.
• 18:22
  Speaker 8: And for the most part, it had a cast that
• 18:23
  Speaker 8: I had never... I didn't know any of these people.
• 18:25
  Speaker 8: At least the main people. Like, the little boy's parents,
• 18:28
  Speaker 8: I ID'd right away. Because I'm like, Patrick Warburton, you
• 18:32
  Speaker 8: can't hide from me. I know where you are. I mean,
• 18:35
  Speaker 8: I love Patrick Warburton.
• 18:37
  Speaker 9: I do.
• 18:37
  Speaker 8: I adore him. I think he's hilarious. Even, like, I
• 18:42
  Speaker 8: hate David Spade. But he's on that Patrick Warburton show.
• 18:46
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 18:46
  Speaker 8: Whatever the name of it is.
• 18:48
  Speaker 9: Yeah.
• 18:49
  Speaker 8: I love that show. I can't remember the name of it.
• 18:51
  Speaker 7: I blocked it out. It's David Spade related.
• 18:54
  Speaker 8: But more importantly, it's Patrick Horbert. And he is so
• 18:57
  Speaker 8: fucking hilarious. But he was the dad of the little boy. Which, again,
• 19:01
  Speaker 8: he's just the dad. The whole point is they're leaving
• 19:05
  Speaker 8: the kid with the babysitter. So all you get is
• 19:08
  Speaker 8: the mom and the dad at the very beginning. And
• 19:10
  Speaker 8: a little bit at the very end of the mom
• 19:12
  Speaker 8: is Virginia Madsen.
• 19:13
  Speaker 7: Oh, yeah. Yeah.
• 19:15
  Speaker 8: So that's, like, the only recognizable people for me, because,
• 19:17
  Speaker 8: I mean, for the most part, it's, like, the babysitter
• 19:19
  Speaker 8: who's playing, like, she's 16 in the movie. I don't
• 19:21
  Speaker 8: know how old she is in the real world. No,
• 19:22
  Speaker 8: she's not 16. She's 17, because she's five years older
• 19:26
  Speaker 8: than the boy who's 12.
• 19:28
  Speaker 7: But it's totally going to work, don't worry.
• 19:30
  Speaker 8: According to him, he thinks it's... That's how it always works.
• 19:33
  Speaker 7: I know this math.
• 19:34
  Speaker 8: Did you watch the trailer?
• 19:35
  Speaker 7: No, but it's, like, a 12-year-old boy, I mean. That's
• 19:38
  Speaker 7: totally going to work.
• 19:40
  Speaker 8: And then she's moving, so he thinks this is his
• 19:41
  Speaker 8: last chance.
• 19:42
  Speaker 7: Oh, yeah.
• 19:42
  Speaker 8: This is his last chance to, you know, for this
• 19:46
  Speaker 8: to happen.
• 19:47
  Speaker 7: It'll totally work. Don't you worry.
• 19:48
  Speaker 8: That's what he's pretty sure. So there are plans put
• 19:52
  Speaker 8: into motion.
• 19:52
  Speaker 4: I would hope so.
• 19:54
  Speaker 8: And, yeah, they do put a twist on the, you know,
• 19:58
  Speaker 8: I'm pretty sure telling you there's a twist is going
• 20:00
  Speaker 8: to make you realize.
• 20:01
  Speaker 7: Every movie has a twist.
• 20:02
  Speaker 4: It's fine.
• 20:03
  Speaker 8: But, yeah, I mean, the kids are fantastic. You know,
• 20:06
  Speaker 8: I don't like kids.
• 20:06
  Speaker 7: Yeah, yeah.
• 20:09
  Speaker 8: And there are some points where you have to suspend
• 20:10
  Speaker 8: your belief a little bit.
• 20:12
  Speaker 7: In Santa Claus? Yeah. Oh, okay. It was holiday themed.
• 20:17
  Speaker 3: I thought there was a Santa Claus.
• 20:19
  Speaker 8: I don't think there was any appearance by Santa Claus,
• 20:20
  Speaker 8: although there were carolers. Like I said, it was actually
• 20:25
  Speaker 8: really good. Again, the twist has a twist.
• 20:28
  Speaker 7: Extra twisty.
• 20:29
  Speaker 5: Yeah, extra twist.
• 20:30
  Speaker 8: Twist on a twist.
• 20:32
  Speaker 7: Twist in the middle. If not before, definitely put it
• 20:35
  Speaker 7: on your holiday list for next year.
• 20:37
  Speaker 8: Maybe we can watch it for Christmas.
• 20:38
  Speaker 7: Maybe we can. Pencil that in right now.
• 20:42
  Speaker 8: By then, everybody else will have done it already.
• 20:45
  Speaker 7: Who cares?
• 20:46
  Speaker 8: We do what we want. Hell yeah. By then, you're
• 20:48
  Speaker 8: changing your mind and you want something else done.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: We'll see.
• 20:51
  Speaker 7: But we don't have a Life Day episode this year,
• 20:54
  Speaker 7: I guess, so we may need to do our regular
• 20:55
  Speaker 7: Christmas since they already did this star wars movie they
• 20:59
  Speaker 7: used to do it in december every time and for
• 21:01
  Speaker 7: some reason this year they bumped it up to the
• 21:03
  Speaker 7: summer which is really pre-summer but so i don't know
• 21:07
  Speaker 7: i guess we have to come up with an old
• 21:08
  Speaker 7: school christmas uh holiday special so we can make this
• 21:12
  Speaker 7: happen all right with that i say we go wander
• 21:18
  Speaker 7: around wonderfest some more maybe check in with this week's guests.
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: You better watch yourself.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: You better watch yourself. You better watch yourself.
• 21:35
  Speaker 7: I got my eyes on you.
• 21:39
  Speaker 3: Well, you steal my heart.
• 21:45
  Speaker 6: Golden, pure, creamery butter. Rich, flavorful, satisfying. That's what it
• 21:49
  Speaker 6: takes for the finest buttered popcorn, and that's what we use.
• 21:52
  Speaker 6: See for yourself why there's no showtime treat to equal
• 21:55
  Speaker 6: the crisp, delicious flavor of hot popcorn that's bathed in
• 21:58
  Speaker 6: real melted butter. It's at the concession stand now.
• 22:03
  Speaker 9: Woke up this morning feeling low where my loved one
• 22:09
  Speaker 9: used to live.
• 22:10
  Speaker 6: Hey, Jacqueline.
• 22:11
  Speaker 3: Hi.
• 22:11
  Speaker 5: Guess what?
• 22:12
  Speaker 7: What?
• 22:15
  Speaker 6: We're broke.
• 22:15
  Speaker 7: Yeah, we definitely... I'm turning my.
• 22:25
  Speaker 6: Pockets out right now.
• 22:40
  Speaker 7: Nothing that's what i'm saying i do that every week
• 22:43
  Speaker 7: and yet i'm trying to produce this show for you
• 22:46
  Speaker 7: guys listening right now yeah freeloaders i'm just saying you
• 22:50
  Speaker 7: know if if you want to keep this thing rolling
• 22:53
  Speaker 7: it'd be kind of awesome if you go to our
• 22:55
  Speaker 7: patreon page and like kick in like seriously like two bucks.
• 22:59
  Speaker 5: I mean you're gonna do like netflix for like 9.99
• 23:01
  Speaker 5: and you get.
• 23:04
  Speaker 7: And you're probably not going to watch it all month
• 23:05
  Speaker 7: like I do.
• 23:06
  Speaker 5: Yeah, you need our commentary to figure out what to
• 23:09
  Speaker 5: watch on Netflix.
• 23:11
  Speaker 7: I think so. It's like a companion piece to all
• 23:13
  Speaker 7: your Amazons and Netflixes and all of these things. So
• 23:18
  Speaker 7: just think how much you don't make use of your
• 23:20
  Speaker 7: other streaming services.
• 23:22
  Speaker 9: But every week.
• 23:22
  Speaker 7: We're loading up a whole new episode of us going in-depth,
• 23:27
  Speaker 7: more than you may want, about whatever movie we've decided
• 23:30
  Speaker 7: or bringing in some awesome guests. So I'm just saying...
• 23:33
  Speaker 7: Two bucks. It's not so bad.
• 23:35
  Speaker 6: Two dollars.
• 23:36
  Speaker 7: You won't even notice it.
• 23:37
  Speaker 5: And you'll look at your bank statement and be like,
• 23:38
  Speaker 5: two dollars.
• 23:39
  Speaker 7: Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
• 23:40
  Speaker 5: I'm supporting an artist that I like.
• 23:43
  Speaker 7: That's all I ask for. Trying to keep this thing rolling.
• 23:47
  Speaker 7: And all we need is your assistance. So go to patreon.com
• 23:51
  Speaker 7: slash movie meltdown. Or if you can't remember all that,
• 23:54
  Speaker 7: go to movie meltdown.com. The link is right there at
• 23:56
  Speaker 7: the top of the homepage.
• 23:57
  Speaker 9: That's all you need to do.
• 23:59
  Speaker 7: I contribute more than two dollars a month. Because you're
• 24:02
  Speaker 7: awesome like that.
• 24:03
  Speaker 6: I don't remember.
• 24:03
  Speaker 7: Why don't you be awesome like Jacqueline? I'm just saying.
• 24:05
  Speaker 7: I mean, really, though. I mean, you can't be that awesome, obviously.
• 24:10
  Speaker 7: But you can get closer. You can climb the ladder
• 24:12
  Speaker 7: a little bit. Just saying. Patreon, go support us.
• 24:17
  Speaker 4: All I do, all day long.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: Fall down on my knees and pray She come back
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: home for.
• 24:27
  Speaker 4: Me The human adventure is just beginning.
• 24:44
  Speaker 1: William Shatner. Take us out. Is Captain James T.
• 24:48
  Speaker 10: Kirk.
• 24:50
  Speaker 1: Leonard Nimoy is Mr.
• 24:52
  Speaker 4: Spock.
• 24:55
  Speaker 1: DeForest Kelly is Dr. Leonard Bones McCoy. James Doohan is
• 25:01
  Speaker 1: Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Scott. George Takei is Lieutenant Commander Sulu.
• 25:09
  Speaker 1: Majel Barrett is Dr. Christine Chappell. Walter Koenig is Lieutenant
• 25:15
  Speaker 1: Pavel Chekov. Michelle Nichols is Lieutenant Commander Uhura. Stephen Collins
• 25:24
  Speaker 1: is Commander Willard Decker. Percy's combatter is Lieutenant Ilia.
• 25:32
  Speaker 7: Star Trek.
• 25:58
  Speaker 4: The Motion Picture.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: Gene Roddenberry's production of a Robert Wise film. Coming this
• 26:06
  Speaker 1: Christmas from Paramount. Don't just shake your head, explain why
• 26:10
  Speaker 1: the coffee's so good.
• 26:11
  Speaker 4: Good taste.
• 26:13
  Speaker 6: That makes me think of a particular coffee shop in town,
• 26:16
  Speaker 6: because we're not advertising, right?
• 26:18
  Speaker 7: Uh, depends. Is it Heine Brothers?
• 26:19
  Speaker 8: It's Heine Brothers.
• 26:20
  Speaker 7: Because... Of the few good things that have happened in
• 26:24
  Speaker 7: life ever, we're now sponsored by Heine Brothers Coffee.
• 26:27
  Speaker 9: Oh, my God.
• 26:27
  Speaker 8: Thank God, because I am sponsored by Heine Brothers Coffee
• 26:30
  Speaker 8: in general.
• 26:30
  Speaker 7: Well, we all should be because Heine Brothers is awesome.
• 26:33
  Speaker 7: It actually really is. I'm drinking Heine Brothers Coffee right now.
• 26:36
  Speaker 5: I am right now.
• 26:36
  Speaker 8: We're drinking Heine Brothers Coffee.
• 26:37
  Speaker 7: That's all we drink in this house. This is another
• 26:39
  Speaker 7: caffeinated movie geek.
• 26:39
  Speaker 8: This is a Heine Brothers House Coffee.
• 26:42
  Speaker 7: Once again, you should go right now. Go get yourself
• 26:45
  Speaker 7: a bag. You can have it shipped directly to your house.
• 26:48
  Speaker 7: And that meltdown code is going to get you a
• 26:50
  Speaker 7: little discount.
• 26:50
  Speaker 9: Just saying.
• 26:51
  Speaker 8: You got a code?
• 26:52
  Speaker 7: We got a code. So I'm proud to announce that
• 26:55
  Speaker 7: Movie Meltdown is now working with Heine Brothers Coffee. Heine
• 26:58
  Speaker 7: Brothers was founded in 1994, and as most of you
• 27:01
  Speaker 7: regular listeners out there know, I'm a big coffee drinker,
• 27:05
  Speaker 7: and one of my very first regular coffee shops that
• 27:08
  Speaker 7: I started to hang around was that first longest avenue
• 27:11
  Speaker 7: location Heine Brothers opened. It's been a long road and
• 27:14
  Speaker 7: a lot of cups of coffee, but I'm glad to
• 27:16
  Speaker 7: be working with them all these years later. And as
• 27:19
  Speaker 7: we kick things off, I want to tell you about
• 27:21
  Speaker 7: the Heine Brothers coffee subscription. Wherever you are, home, work,
• 27:26
  Speaker 7: or out on the road, you deserve great coffee. And
• 27:29
  Speaker 7: the Heine Brothers subscription plan gives you top quality, organic,
• 27:32
  Speaker 7: fair trade coffee delivered right to your home or office automatically.
• 27:37
  Speaker 7: You select the frequency, the quantity, and the variety of coffee,
• 27:41
  Speaker 7: and Heine Brothers will take care of the rest, shipping included.
• 27:44
  Speaker 7: So just order online at hineybrotherscoffee.com slash subscription and use
• 27:47
  Speaker 7: the offer code MELTDOWN for $ 5 off any gift subscription.
• 27:51
  Speaker 7: And if you're not familiar with Hiney Brothers Coffee or
• 27:53
  Speaker 7: the spelling or any of that that might make it
• 27:56
  Speaker 7: a little harder, just go to moviemeltdown.com and look on
• 27:58
  Speaker 7: the right-hand side of the page and you'll find a
• 28:00
  Speaker 7: link to take you right to hineybrotherscoffee.com. That's right, the
• 28:03
  Speaker 7: Meltdown Caffeinated Movie Geeks are hooking you up, so get
• 28:06
  Speaker 7: your subscription started today.
• 28:08
  Speaker 3: Attention, shoppers!
• 28:11
  Speaker 7: I trust you've got credit cards to pay for all
• 28:13
  Speaker 7: that stuff.
• 28:15
  Speaker 10: Hi, this is Captain Mary Stewart, and you're listening to
• 28:18
  Speaker 10: Movie Meltdown.
• 28:20
  Speaker 9: Get her, boys!
• 28:23
  Speaker 2: It's part of.
• 28:29
  Speaker 6: Your problem, you know.
• 28:30
  Speaker 5: You haven't seen enough movies.
• 28:32
  Speaker 6: All of life's riddles are answered in the movies. And now,
• 28:36
  Speaker 6: on with the show.
• 28:56
  Speaker 7: All right, so for this segment, we have special guest
• 28:59
  Speaker 7: Rick Sternbeck. So thank you for joining us.
• 29:02
  Speaker 9: Great to be here.
• 29:03
  Speaker 7: And of course, it's Wonderfest, so our reluctantly adopted cast member,
• 29:08
  Speaker 7: Eric Chu, has joined us once again. And we were
• 29:12
  Speaker 7: talking beforehand, and I'm like... we've talked about all your,
• 29:15
  Speaker 7: like we've addressed your whole life. So I'm like, what
• 29:18
  Speaker 7: do you want to do? And I'm like, just, let's just,
• 29:20
  Speaker 7: you sit in with us and just, we'll talk to
• 29:22
  Speaker 7: somebody else. So you're just co-hosting now.
• 29:25
  Speaker 4: Okay.
• 29:25
  Speaker 7: All right. So you can grill Rick on all the
• 29:28
  Speaker 7: questions you want as well. So, but I guess if
• 29:33
  Speaker 7: we go back much like I did with you, uh,
• 29:35
  Speaker 7: years ago, Eric, I usually try to get at the
• 29:38
  Speaker 7: very beginning and kind of figure out how everybody found
• 29:40
  Speaker 7: their way into whatever arts and entertainment end that they're
• 29:44
  Speaker 7: interested in. So I guess going back to when you
• 29:46
  Speaker 7: were a kid, were you immediately drawn to art in general,
• 29:50
  Speaker 7: or was it something that kind of came as time
• 29:52
  Speaker 7: went on?
• 29:54
  Speaker 9: Well, when I was two and a half, my architect
• 29:57
  Speaker 9: father put a pencil in my hand. so you know
• 30:00
  Speaker 9: that was the start of it yeah and for you
• 30:04
  Speaker 9: know for for a lot of years he carried around
• 30:06
  Speaker 9: in his wallet a tiny scrap of paper of my
• 30:10
  Speaker 9: drawing of a race car which was like two circles
• 30:13
  Speaker 9: and two little lines and that was that was one
• 30:16
  Speaker 9: of my first drawings right so i mean you know
• 30:19
  Speaker 9: the the uh the drawing things yeah i mean came
• 30:24
  Speaker 9: from my dad um and uh So I learned how
• 30:27
  Speaker 9: to draw all of the guy stuff, okay, you know,
• 30:32
  Speaker 9: cars and tanks and naval vessels and airplanes. And eventually
• 30:39
  Speaker 9: I got drawn into science fiction movies on television. You know,
• 30:49
  Speaker 9: so some of the doodles that I was doing involved
• 30:52
  Speaker 9: things like flying saucers and and spaceships going to the moon.
• 30:58
  Speaker 5: Now, was he actively trying to instruct you how to draw?
• 31:04
  Speaker 5: Or was it just, here, here's some paper and pencils,
• 31:06
  Speaker 5: and this will keep you busy for a while?
• 31:08
  Speaker 9: Well, it was a little bit of both. It was
• 31:10
  Speaker 9: a little bit of both. I would draw things at
• 31:14
  Speaker 9: home or draw things in elementary school on construction paper. And,
• 31:20
  Speaker 9: you know, robots burning cities and, you know, just all
• 31:24
  Speaker 9: the cool things that I was starting to see as
• 31:26
  Speaker 9: a kid growing up in the 50s. And, you know,
• 31:32
  Speaker 9: he would draw for me, you know, at home and
• 31:35
  Speaker 9: I would watch how he would like do the lines
• 31:39
  Speaker 9: and shading. And he actually, one of the cool drawings
• 31:43
  Speaker 9: he did for me so I could see how he
• 31:46
  Speaker 9: was doing it. he copied one of the flying saucers
• 31:49
  Speaker 9: from the Mars Attacks trading cards.
• 31:53
  Speaker 7: Nice.
• 31:54
  Speaker 9: Okay. And, you know, and he put the dome over
• 31:57
  Speaker 9: the top and he had the little Martian guys in
• 31:59
  Speaker 9: there because when I would go to school, okay, I
• 32:03
  Speaker 9: would stop at the little convenience store on the way
• 32:05
  Speaker 9: home and get, like, you know, hostess cupcakes or something
• 32:12
  Speaker 9: and a couple of packs of cards. And, yeah, I
• 32:16
  Speaker 9: picked up, you know, baseball cards because everybody was into baseball, right?
• 32:20
  Speaker 7: There wasn't a whole lot of other cards at that point. Yeah.
• 32:22
  Speaker 7: Mars Attacks was pretty early on.
• 32:23
  Speaker 9: But Mars Attacks, you know, I bought as much Mars
• 32:27
  Speaker 9: Attacks as I could, you know. So, yeah, I was
• 32:31
  Speaker 9: into lots of different fun things. You know, we made
• 32:35
  Speaker 9: trips to some of the local airports back in Connecticut.
• 32:39
  Speaker 9: I got to see airplanes flying around, and we went
• 32:42
  Speaker 9: to the, you know, we went to– shipyards and stuff
• 32:46
  Speaker 9: we were very close to new york city uh and
• 32:50
  Speaker 9: uh you know so i i got i got i
• 32:52
  Speaker 9: think a very well-rounded uh kind of art experiences as
• 32:58
  Speaker 9: a kid uh but you know specifics started to gel
• 33:05
  Speaker 9: in my in my head.
• 33:06
  Speaker 7: Um On your own were you finding? Just things that
• 33:10
  Speaker 7: were sticking for you?
• 33:12
  Speaker 9: Well, okay, remember back in the 50s, and I love
• 33:15
  Speaker 9: telling people this, I was around as a kid when
• 33:19
  Speaker 9: there was nothing in Earth orbit. Nothing. Okay, the moon
• 33:23
  Speaker 9: was out there, but that was it. Satellites hadn't gone up.
• 33:27
  Speaker 7: For kids now, yeah, that's crazy.
• 33:28
  Speaker 9: I mean, satellites hadn't gone up yet. So I would
• 33:31
  Speaker 9: watch the TV news at night. And they were talking
• 33:36
  Speaker 9: about things like Sputnik and Vanguard and Explorer 1 and,
• 33:41
  Speaker 9: you know, all of the satellites and things that were
• 33:45
  Speaker 9: coming along and being sent up into space. And I
• 33:49
  Speaker 9: sat there and I'm going, oh, man, this is so cool.
• 33:54
  Speaker 5: And now there's a Tesla car in space.
• 33:56
  Speaker 9: Yeah, and there's a Tesla car, you know.
• 33:59
  Speaker 7: He can do everything. It's fine.
• 34:01
  Speaker 6: Sure, sure.
• 34:02
  Speaker 9: But the– One of the things that really got my
• 34:09
  Speaker 9: interest going was the TV show Men Into Space, 1959,
• 34:15
  Speaker 9: one season, black and white. So it was okay. We
• 34:19
  Speaker 9: didn't have a color set yet. So I watched every
• 34:23
  Speaker 9: episode of Men Into Space on a big RCA black
• 34:27
  Speaker 9: and white TV. And I was hooked. I was totally hooked.
• 34:32
  Speaker 9: You know, Colonel, I got a rip in my suit. Or,
• 34:34
  Speaker 9: you know, hey, we have to finish the space station.
• 34:38
  Speaker 9: You know, we're going to build a base on the moon.
• 34:41
  Speaker 7: It's a very hard science. Just tape up your suit.
• 34:45
  Speaker 5: It'll be fine.
• 34:46
  Speaker 6: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:46
  Speaker 9: I mean, you know, sure. But it was.
• 34:49
  Speaker 5: Just hold your breath.
• 34:50
  Speaker 8: Yeah, yeah.
• 34:50
  Speaker 10: You'll be fine.
• 34:51
  Speaker 9: It was only two years before we really started sending
• 34:55
  Speaker 9: people up. You know, both us and the Russians. Yeah.
• 34:58
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 34:59
  Speaker 9: And it was just an exciting look at what looked
• 35:06
  Speaker 9: like real space activities. Okay, yes, with the drama thrown in.
• 35:13
  Speaker 9: There were other shows like The Man and the Challenge,
• 35:16
  Speaker 9: which was all about human factors research. I just gobbled
• 35:22
  Speaker 9: that stuff up. And I also gobbled up watching multiple...
• 35:28
  Speaker 9: multiple viewings of Destination Moon and Forbidden Planet and Day
• 35:34
  Speaker 9: the Earth Stood Still and things like that. So, you know,
• 35:38
  Speaker 9: I got both sides. I got the science fiction and
• 35:40
  Speaker 9: I got the real space.
• 35:41
  Speaker 7: And then started drawing it. That's kind of what I was,
• 35:45
  Speaker 7: what you were kind of getting into, Eric, was like
• 35:47
  Speaker 7: the guiding the kids. Because I've seen, I was going
• 35:50
  Speaker 7: to ask what you're doing. You're kind of in that situation.
• 35:52
  Speaker 7: But I'm kind of watching my niece now and she
• 35:54
  Speaker 7: loves drawing. But she's so like, unlike there are no
• 35:59
  Speaker 7: rules still in the way that she does it. And
• 36:02
  Speaker 7: in a way I'm like, I want to like try
• 36:04
  Speaker 7: to guide her. But at the same time, I'm like,
• 36:06
  Speaker 7: I kind of like what it ends up with. Like
• 36:08
  Speaker 7: she has such a weird original approach that like, she'll
• 36:11
  Speaker 7: do like a weird thing. Like, I want this to
• 36:13
  Speaker 7: be a night scene and just scribble all over the
• 36:15
  Speaker 7: page to make it night. And I'm like, you know,
• 36:19
  Speaker 7: maybe I should just shut up and let you figure
• 36:22
  Speaker 7: out what you want your thing to look like. Because
• 36:24
  Speaker 7: her stuff ends up looking very different than even other
• 36:26
  Speaker 7: kids stuff. So I'm like, I think there's a part
• 36:29
  Speaker 7: of finding your own way and figuring your style.
• 36:35
  Speaker 5: I just want to interject. One of the reasons that
• 36:40
  Speaker 5: I ended up getting into being comfortable with drawing is
• 36:45
  Speaker 5: that my mother, also at a very, very early age,
• 36:48
  Speaker 5: gave me a whole stack of paper, a bunch of pencils,
• 36:51
  Speaker 5: and just said, go to it. And I think that
• 36:54
  Speaker 5: got me comfortable with using a pencil. It gave me
• 36:58
  Speaker 5: the practice with coordination. Also, we grew up on a farm,
• 37:05
  Speaker 5: so there really wasn't all that external stimulus.
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: No distractions.
• 37:11
  Speaker 5: No distractions, not much TV. We would spend hours just scribbling.
• 37:18
  Speaker 5: Even scribbling helps to advance.
• 37:25
  Speaker 5: Your artistic sense. So I think that for the parents
• 37:32
  Speaker 5: out there who want their kids to pursue, or at
• 37:38
  Speaker 5: least they don't necessarily have to pursue an art career.
• 37:43
  Speaker 5: I think an artistic sense is useful for any career
• 37:49
  Speaker 5: they go into. It's helpful. to be able to visualize something,
• 37:54
  Speaker 5: draw it down, even if it's not a beautiful piece
• 37:56
  Speaker 5: of art, but, um, it's a communication tool.
• 37:59
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 38:00
  Speaker 5: You know, so I, I, I, I do think that, um, give,
• 38:04
  Speaker 5: give them a lot of chance to, to, to experiment,
• 38:08
  Speaker 5: to play with paper, play with pencils, get that pencil
• 38:11
  Speaker 5: in their hand and let them go, let them go,
• 38:13
  Speaker 5: let them do as much as they want and encourage them.
• 38:17
  Speaker 5: You know, don't, don't, don't put in any, um, uh,
• 38:21
  Speaker 5: you know, restrictions just yet, you know, don't say, well,
• 38:24
  Speaker 5: that doesn't look like a car. Well, that's, that's not,
• 38:26
  Speaker 5: that's not helpful. I mean, but, um, but, uh, yeah, um, uh,
• 38:32
  Speaker 5: encourage them and, uh, and let them find their own way.
• 38:36
  Speaker 5: And I think that, that, that will go a long
• 38:38
  Speaker 5: way to, um, fostering an interest in, in drawing and, uh,
• 38:45
  Speaker 5: and other things too.
• 38:46
  Speaker 9: I think if you show them a few techniques, and
• 38:51
  Speaker 9: maybe every so often kind of nudge them this way
• 38:54
  Speaker 9: or the other about, well, hey, if you try this
• 38:57
  Speaker 9: with the charcoal stick, you might get this kind of
• 39:01
  Speaker 9: an effect.
• 39:03
  Speaker 7: Just open up new avenues.
• 39:04
  Speaker 9: Yeah, give them things to... I did a lot of
• 39:08
  Speaker 9: finger painting. I had big pots of poster paint in school. And, yeah,
• 39:16
  Speaker 9: we were allowed a bit, you know, some freedom to experiment,
• 39:20
  Speaker 9: to blop colors together and see what happens.
• 39:23
  Speaker 5: And let them get messy. Let them splash things all
• 39:26
  Speaker 5: over the place. It's not the end of the world.
• 39:29
  Speaker 5: You can always clean up.
• 39:30
  Speaker 11: Later.
• 39:30
  Speaker 5: You don't have to teach them to be clean right now.
• 39:33
  Speaker 5: Let them free.
• 39:35
  Speaker 7: And it's amazing what sometimes they'll pick up on in
• 39:39
  Speaker 7: ways that you won't. I was at someone's house lately
• 39:42
  Speaker 7: and they had a bunch of grandkids and they had
• 39:44
  Speaker 7: all these different ones and you could tell different ones
• 39:46
  Speaker 7: were from different kids, just slightly different artistic style. And
• 39:50
  Speaker 7: there was one of them that, like, it was still
• 39:52
  Speaker 7: stylized enough that it was a young kid, and you
• 39:55
  Speaker 7: could tell, but it was, like, a squirrel, but he was, like,
• 39:59
  Speaker 7: at a weird angle that, like, most kids wouldn't know
• 40:01
  Speaker 7: how to do the angle yet. And, like, he was
• 40:03
  Speaker 7: over top of, like, a puddle, and his reflection was
• 40:06
  Speaker 7: in the puddle. I'm like, this kid's, like, advanced. Because
• 40:09
  Speaker 7: it still looked like a kid, but he was already
• 40:10
  Speaker 7: picking up on perspective and, like, the ideas that you
• 40:14
  Speaker 7: normally won't get to for way later, so... Like every
• 40:17
  Speaker 7: once in a while, there's these kids that kind of
• 40:18
  Speaker 7: like are getting it on a different level, like right
• 40:20
  Speaker 7: off the bat. So it's kind of cool to let
• 40:22
  Speaker 7: them discover what it is they're going to find their
• 40:25
  Speaker 7: way to anyway. So I guess back to yours. I mean,
• 40:29
  Speaker 7: you're getting into drawing. Is it that you're kind of
• 40:34
  Speaker 7: drawn towards spaceships and stuff more than other stuff at
• 40:37
  Speaker 7: that point? Or is it equally as much cars and
• 40:39
  Speaker 7: planes and explosions? Yeah.
• 40:42
  Speaker 9: Well, you know, I try drawing lots of different things.
• 40:46
  Speaker 5: And that's always a good idea anyways.
• 40:48
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, you know, I think my
• 40:52
  Speaker 9: artistic output was a product of the times. And, you know,
• 41:00
  Speaker 9: a person launching on the top of a rocket was
• 41:03
  Speaker 9: a big deal. And, you know, we got to watch
• 41:06
  Speaker 9: a couple of launches, you know, while in school. You know,
• 41:10
  Speaker 9: they would roll the TV in and we watched, you know,
• 41:13
  Speaker 9: John Glenn going to orbit and that kind of thing.
• 41:17
  Speaker 7: That was the thing. They were still kind of doing
• 41:19
  Speaker 7: that when I was in school. And I'm like, it's funny,
• 41:21
  Speaker 7: that's not even like... And nobody would even consider that
• 41:24
  Speaker 7: kind of stuff.
• 41:25
  Speaker 9: Yeah, I mean, back when I started drawing a lot
• 41:28
  Speaker 9: of these things, you know, these space efforts and whatnot,
• 41:33
  Speaker 9: we were witnessing, we were seeing the first... that happened,
• 41:40
  Speaker 9: multiple firsts, okay? You know, first American in orbit, you know,
• 41:45
  Speaker 9: and things like what the Russians were doing, you know.
• 41:50
  Speaker 9: So I got to experience as a kid spectator watching
• 41:56
  Speaker 9: the Mercury program, watching the Gemini program. I took a
• 42:02
  Speaker 9: transistor radio into the coat closet in school... during one
• 42:07
  Speaker 9: of the Gemini missions, and I'm sitting there, and very
• 42:11
  Speaker 9: quietly I'm listening to the transistor radio of these two
• 42:17
  Speaker 9: guys in orbit. Because to me, that was important. It
• 42:21
  Speaker 9: was important to experience that, to witness that history, and
• 42:29
  Speaker 9: to show you just how extreme things got. I graduated
• 42:33
  Speaker 9: high school in 1969. um, just before Apollo 11 took off.
• 42:41
  Speaker 6: All right.
• 42:41
  Speaker 9: So I got out of high school, uh, was ready
• 42:44
  Speaker 9: to go to the university of Connecticut as an art major. Okay.
• 42:48
  Speaker 9: But I told my folks, I have to go to
• 42:51
  Speaker 9: the Cape. I'm sorry. I have to go to the Cape. So, uh, I,
• 42:57
  Speaker 9: I went down to witness the launch of Apollo 11
• 43:00
  Speaker 9: to see the first, you know, people head for the moon, uh, Well,
• 43:06
  Speaker 9: I mean, Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 orbit in the moon, right? But,
• 43:10
  Speaker 9: you know, 11 was the first landing, okay? And it was,
• 43:15
  Speaker 9: you know, one of the first opportunities I had to
• 43:19
  Speaker 9: witness a launch live. So me and, you know, a
• 43:23
  Speaker 9: million other people were about nine miles away from the pad. But,
• 43:27
  Speaker 9: doggone it, I saw them take off, all right? Now,
• 43:32
  Speaker 9: I couldn't make it down to the Cape for Apollo 12.
• 43:35
  Speaker 9: but I got a press pass for Apollo 13. Nice. Okay? And,
• 43:40
  Speaker 9: you know, in the Apollo 13 movie, you know, they
• 43:43
  Speaker 9: made a point of saying, well, you know, people aren't
• 43:45
  Speaker 9: interested anymore, so that's why the TV wasn't covering it
• 43:50
  Speaker 9: and all this. And I think that's part of the
• 43:52
  Speaker 9: reason why NASA gave, you know, me, you know, who
• 43:56
  Speaker 9: am I? You know, they gave me a press pass
• 43:59
  Speaker 9: through my local newspaper.
• 44:01
  Speaker 1: Hmm.
• 44:01
  Speaker 9: And I was three and a half miles from the
• 44:03
  Speaker 9: launch pad, and I saw these guys go up. You know,
• 44:09
  Speaker 9: flew down on a Thursday, took a press tour of
• 44:12
  Speaker 9: the Cape on a Friday. Saturday was the launch. Sunday,
• 44:16
  Speaker 9: I went home. Monday, the thing blew up. And I
• 44:19
  Speaker 9: didn't get back to sleep until Friday when they landed
• 44:22
  Speaker 9: back on Earth. Okay, now that's crazy dedication, okay? I
• 44:28
  Speaker 9: was basically living on the couch... Watching things on the
• 44:32
  Speaker 9: TV because nobody knew if these guys were coming back.
• 44:35
  Speaker 7: Yeah. I mean, statistically, they probably should be without everyone working.
• 44:40
  Speaker 7: It seems like, especially at that time, I don't know
• 44:44
  Speaker 7: that we're much better off now technically, but to make
• 44:47
  Speaker 7: it back with that level of problems being thrown at
• 44:50
  Speaker 7: them is pretty amazing. Yeah.
• 44:51
  Speaker 9: So these sorts of things followed me all through college.
• 44:54
  Speaker 8: Hmm.
• 44:55
  Speaker 9: And I took a lot of the necessary courses like
• 45:02
  Speaker 9: English and math and so forth. And as an art major,
• 45:07
  Speaker 9: I took a lot of art history, a lot of
• 45:10
  Speaker 9: studio sketch courses and things like that. And then for
• 45:13
  Speaker 9: some wacky reason, after my second year, I decided to
• 45:17
  Speaker 9: switch my major to biology. I was just nuts about
• 45:22
  Speaker 9: marine mammals. And I wanted to learn more about cetaceans
• 45:28
  Speaker 9: and pinnipeds and all this sort of thing. I'm not
• 45:32
  Speaker 9: sorry I took the science courses that I needed for that.
• 45:36
  Speaker 9: Organic chem, inorganic chem, invertebrate zoology and all this. Because
• 45:42
  Speaker 9: as an artist, I think artists can use any kind
• 45:47
  Speaker 9: of information that comes in. So if I needed to
• 45:51
  Speaker 9: paint a weird alien... I would have at least a
• 45:54
  Speaker 9: little bit of bio background, you know, to do that
• 45:57
  Speaker 9: sort of thing. All right. You know, cause I, I
• 45:59
  Speaker 9: ended up doing a lot of science fiction illustrations.
• 46:01
  Speaker 7: And undersea creatures are about as close as you get.
• 46:04
  Speaker 7: Like there's plenty of weird tentacles. Right.
• 46:06
  Speaker 5: Of course.
• 46:07
  Speaker 9: So, uh, um, I, but I, I didn't finish, um, I,
• 46:13
  Speaker 9: I didn't finish my, you know, my bachelor's stuff because
• 46:16
  Speaker 9: I got involved with people who were, uh, putting together, uh, uh,
• 46:22
  Speaker 9: space conference projects and got to meet up with a
• 46:27
  Speaker 9: number of publication editors and just started doing illustrations for
• 46:36
  Speaker 9: science fiction on one side and astronomy magazines on the
• 46:40
  Speaker 9: other side. And to me, they're kind of separate, but
• 46:45
  Speaker 9: they're not kind of separate. It's all... In a way,
• 46:50
  Speaker 9: it's all one big creative thing.
• 46:55
  Speaker 7: I feel like that with all of this. Again, that's
• 46:57
  Speaker 7: kind of why I like discussing this because it all
• 46:59
  Speaker 7: like crosses over, especially when you're young and everything is–
• 47:03
  Speaker 7: it's all part of that same big artistic learning experience.
• 47:06
  Speaker 7: And then you eventually sort of find your place maybe
• 47:10
  Speaker 7: or several of them. But yeah, I think it's kind
• 47:12
  Speaker 7: of cool that where it all comes from and how it.
• 47:15
  Speaker 9: And the fact that they were paying money, you know,
• 47:18
  Speaker 9: they were paying good money for illustrations. It's like, okay,
• 47:23
  Speaker 9: all right, now I know what I'm doing.
• 47:24
  Speaker 7: I mean, that was already kind of pre-existing from pulp
• 47:30
  Speaker 7: novels and stuff. Like, it had already started to become, again,
• 47:33
  Speaker 7: it wouldn't be appreciated as an art form for years.
• 47:36
  Speaker 7: And even now, it doesn't kind of get the level
• 47:39
  Speaker 7: of appreciation that it probably should. But yeah, it was
• 47:41
  Speaker 7: already kind of becoming its own little niche thing of
• 47:43
  Speaker 7: like guys that are just really good at doing that
• 47:47
  Speaker 7: kind of thing. So, I mean, it, I guess, is
• 47:50
  Speaker 7: that specifically like what you were looking to do was
• 47:53
  Speaker 7: just like, I want to figure out either the science
• 47:56
  Speaker 7: end of it, or was it more of like, I
• 47:58
  Speaker 7: want to come up with really weird artistic takes on
• 48:00
  Speaker 7: like a different planet or something I've never seen before?
• 48:03
  Speaker 11: Well, yeah.
• 48:04
  Speaker 9: I mean, a lot of it was, was dictated by,
• 48:06
  Speaker 9: let's say the, the manuscript that I got. Okay. So
• 48:10
  Speaker 9: the publisher had to, you know, or the, the book editor, uh,
• 48:14
  Speaker 9: or the art director would have some specific ideas, and
• 48:18
  Speaker 9: I would do rough sketches of things. And even in
• 48:23
  Speaker 9: my science fiction illustrations, I was more of a hard
• 48:28
  Speaker 9: science guy. So I really loved illustrating works by folks
• 48:33
  Speaker 9: like Larry Niven. Larry, I got to know back in
• 48:40
  Speaker 9: the 70s, and Del Rey Books had me do like
• 48:44
  Speaker 9: five of his covers. Um, and I, I, I consider
• 48:47
  Speaker 9: myself amazingly lucky to have fallen in with this, with
• 48:52
  Speaker 9: this group of, of creative writers and artists, uh, um,
• 48:57
  Speaker 9: you know, started showing my, my work at the science
• 49:00
  Speaker 9: fiction conventions.
• 49:01
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 49:02
  Speaker 9: And it was, it was a wonderful accepting crowd, uh,
• 49:07
  Speaker 9: I mean, I got to know people like Gordy Dixon,
• 49:11
  Speaker 9: Joe Haldeman. Joe's been a friend for like 40-something years.
• 49:16
  Speaker 9: Isaac Asimov. I got to meet Arthur Clark. Paul Anderson.
• 49:24
  Speaker 9: Al Sprague de Camp. Ted Sturgeon. All of these people
• 49:28
  Speaker 9: who are, you know, they're.
• 49:31
  Speaker 5: For us, they were like rock stars.
• 49:33
  Speaker 9: Exactly, exactly. But... to get to go to a room
• 49:37
  Speaker 9: party where Joe, Joe Holden was playing guitar and Gordy's
• 49:42
  Speaker 9: talking to pool Anderson. And, uh, you know, I sat
• 49:46
  Speaker 9: there and I'm going, Oh my God, this is just,
• 49:51
  Speaker 9: this is just amazing. But after a while it, it,
• 49:53
  Speaker 9: I can't say it became routine because it was never routine,
• 49:57
  Speaker 9: but it was always like, Hey, you know, how you doing?
• 50:00
  Speaker 9: You know, just passing, you know, passing through a hallway
• 50:03
  Speaker 9: at a convention. Um, getting to know people like Jack
• 50:08
  Speaker 9: Williamson and.
• 50:09
  Speaker 5: Do you still feel yourself to be like a fanboy
• 50:11
  Speaker 5: around these people?
• 50:11
  Speaker 9: A little bit, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 50:14
  Speaker 7: I think it's good to always have a level of that.
• 50:18
  Speaker 9: Hal Clement, who wrote, you know, Mission of Gravity, which
• 50:20
  Speaker 9: was brilliant. Okay. Hal Clement was his pen name, but,
• 50:27
  Speaker 9: you know, we knew him as Harry Stubbs. And, you know,
• 50:33
  Speaker 9: a lot of these authors... They had really good science backgrounds,
• 50:38
  Speaker 9: you know, engineers like Robert Forward. Bob Forward, you know,
• 50:46
  Speaker 9: I got to illustrate his stuff and talk to him
• 50:49
  Speaker 9: about laser light sails. He used aircraft, you know, and
• 50:54
  Speaker 9: the Air Force would, like, pay him to, like, play
• 50:57
  Speaker 9: with future concepts. And it's like, oh, man, when I
• 51:00
  Speaker 9: grow up, I want to be Bob Forward. I got
• 51:02
  Speaker 9: to know Robert Broussard. who developed the interstellar ramjet concept.
• 51:13
  Speaker 9: There was a lot of crossover with physicists like Greg Benford.
• 51:19
  Speaker 9: I've known Greg for eons and have illustrated his stories.
• 51:26
  Speaker 9: I gravitated toward the space exploration stories, the hard science stories.
• 51:34
  Speaker 9: but I also read a lot of SF. Um, Oh God,
• 51:39
  Speaker 9: you know, going back to, uh, going back to elementary school,
• 51:42
  Speaker 9: high school. Uh, I, I totally gobbled up, uh, the
• 51:45
  Speaker 9: Lensman series by, uh, uh, E.E. Doc Smith. And I'm
• 51:50
  Speaker 9: sorry I never got to, to, to know, you know, uh,
• 51:54
  Speaker 9: Smith himself. Um, but, uh, yeah, I mean, I, I
• 51:59
  Speaker 9: ate up his writings and, uh, you know, everybody else
• 52:03
  Speaker 9: that I've mentioned, you know, that really kind of shaped
• 52:07
  Speaker 9: what I was doing in like the 70s and 80s.
• 52:11
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 52:11
  Speaker 7: I mean, at that point, you're already kind of working
• 52:15
  Speaker 7: in that part of the industry. And that is, and
• 52:18
  Speaker 7: certainly then, I mean, now it's probably a little harder
• 52:20
  Speaker 7: working in physical media. But yeah, I mean, doing covers
• 52:25
  Speaker 7: and illustrations and magazines and stuff like that, you could
• 52:28
  Speaker 7: just stay there. Did you already have it in your
• 52:30
  Speaker 7: mind of like, I want to cross over into the
• 52:33
  Speaker 7: film world. I want to work in TV. Was that
• 52:36
  Speaker 7: stuff already kind of planted in there?
• 52:38
  Speaker 9: I will tell you the crazy story. In 1974, a
• 52:44
  Speaker 9: bunch of things happened in the early 70s, but in 1974,
• 52:48
  Speaker 9: I was living a couple of towns away from New Haven, Connecticut,
• 52:55
  Speaker 9: and doing some illustration work, taking the train into Manhattan
• 52:59
  Speaker 9: and delivering my art. And I found out that Gene
• 53:05
  Speaker 9: Roddenberry was coming to Yale University to screen The Cage,
• 53:10
  Speaker 9: the pilot film, and do a Q & A afterwards.
• 53:13
  Speaker 9: And I did the craziest thing I've ever done. I
• 53:18
  Speaker 9: cold-called Paramount Pictures, and I asked his assistant, I'm an
• 53:25
  Speaker 9: illustrator in Connecticut. I understand Gene's coming to Yale. Could
• 53:29
  Speaker 9: I maybe meet with him for five or ten minutes
• 53:31
  Speaker 9: after the screening? And they agreed.
• 53:37
  Speaker 5: Were you nervous when you made the call?
• 53:39
  Speaker 9: Was I nervous? Probably not so much nervous as just
• 53:44
  Speaker 9: giddy and wanting to take the risk. So I got
• 53:52
  Speaker 9: to meet him after the screening. And they set up
• 53:55
  Speaker 9: a room for him at the campus housing and stuff.
• 53:58
  Speaker 9: So he tromped back there. And we talked for two
• 54:02
  Speaker 9: and a half hours about space, about science fiction, about
• 54:07
  Speaker 9: Star Trek. He wanted to pitch a new film or
• 54:12
  Speaker 9: a new series.
• 54:13
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 54:14
  Speaker 9: Uh, and that wouldn't happen for another four years.
• 54:17
  Speaker 6: Yeah.
• 54:17
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 54:18
  Speaker 7: Was he set on, like, was he leaning more towards
• 54:20
  Speaker 7: the series or was it still possibly.
• 54:22
  Speaker 10: Just going to be a film?
• 54:24
  Speaker 9: To me, it sounded kind of, kind of nebulous. The, the,
• 54:26
  Speaker 9: you know, he wanted to, to revive Trek in some way. Okay. Uh,
• 54:32
  Speaker 9: the thing that struck me was, you know, his enthusiasm, his, his, um,
• 54:36
  Speaker 9: his genuine desire to, uh, you know, to, to talk
• 54:41
  Speaker 9: about space and to, uh, uh, you know, to do
• 54:46
  Speaker 9: a dramatic, uh, kind of production, um, you know, with
• 54:50
  Speaker 9: space as, as, you know, the place. Um, and as
• 54:55
  Speaker 9: I say, it would, you know, that the, the project
• 54:59
  Speaker 9: that he wanted to do wouldn't happen for another four years.
• 55:03
  Speaker 9: By that time I had moved to Los Angeles.
• 55:07
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 55:08
  Speaker 9: But not for Star Trek. Um, um, In 1977, I
• 55:16
  Speaker 9: did a scouting trip to L.A. for a couple of weeks,
• 55:19
  Speaker 9: stayed with friends. I got to talk to a number
• 55:22
  Speaker 9: of art directors at some of the different studios. Okay, MGM,
• 55:26
  Speaker 9: I met with the people at Paramount who were trying
• 55:30
  Speaker 9: to do Star Trek II, the second five-year mission of
• 55:35
  Speaker 9: the Enterprise. And it was going to be a TV production.
• 55:38
  Speaker 9: So something had happened. Okay. while I was, I was,
• 55:44
  Speaker 9: you know, getting ready to, to head to LA. Um,
• 55:48
  Speaker 9: and I met with the folks at Paramount, uh, left, uh,
• 55:52
  Speaker 9: you know, left some, some visual materials with Joe Jennings,
• 55:55
  Speaker 9: who was their, uh, production designer. And Joe was old school.
• 55:59
  Speaker 9: He was just the nicest guy. Um, but he said,
• 56:03
  Speaker 9: you know, we don't, don't have anything for you.
• 56:05
  Speaker 5: Okay.
• 56:06
  Speaker 9: It was, uh, nothing, you know, there was nothing really
• 56:11
  Speaker 9: happening with the series at the time. Well, at the
• 56:15
  Speaker 9: same time, I had been contacted to work on Carl
• 56:23
  Speaker 9: Sagan's Cosmos. Now, I got to know Carl some years before,
• 56:29
  Speaker 9: and I got to know John Lomberg, who became our
• 56:32
  Speaker 9: chief artist on the series. And Carl and John had
• 56:37
  Speaker 9: worked on a number of book projects together and so forth. Well,
• 56:41
  Speaker 9: John ended up being one of the principal people behind
• 56:45
  Speaker 9: the golden record on the Voyager spacecraft. So John, being
• 56:52
  Speaker 9: the chief artist, invited me and a number of my
• 56:56
  Speaker 9: space art colleagues to work on the series. And we
• 57:03
  Speaker 9: pretty much... invented the universe you know in visual effects
• 57:09
  Speaker 9: uh uh over like two and a half year period
• 57:13
  Speaker 9: were you.
• 57:13
  Speaker 7: Doing just like still artwork or creating actual image.
• 57:17
  Speaker 9: We did models we did uh planetary models we did
• 57:21
  Speaker 9: uh um uh cell animation using cells that were 27
• 57:27
  Speaker 9: inches wide and shot with a motion control camera and
• 57:31
  Speaker 9: that sort of thing um Before we got into, you know,
• 57:36
  Speaker 9: I apologize for jumping around in the timeline a bit,
• 57:40
  Speaker 9: but before we got into really dense production on Cosmos, okay,
• 57:47
  Speaker 9: I did like seven months on Star Trek Emotion Picture. Yeah.
• 57:52
  Speaker 9: So Joe Jennings, who I mentioned, you know, I had
• 57:57
  Speaker 9: left my material with, one day he calls me up
• 58:02
  Speaker 9: and he says, they're announcing the feature in the morning.
• 58:04
  Speaker 9: Do you want to come in? I would have been
• 58:08
  Speaker 9: a total fool to say no. Um, you know, so
• 58:12
  Speaker 9: Star Trek, the motion picture happened. And right after that, I,
• 58:16
  Speaker 9: I launched back into cosmos.
• 58:19
  Speaker 7: So what did you do on the motion picture?
• 58:22
  Speaker 9: Um, My work on the motion picture was mainly adding
• 58:28
  Speaker 9: to a lot of the control panel graphics. We had
• 58:34
  Speaker 9: a gal named Lee Cole who set the style for
• 58:39
  Speaker 9: all the displays around the ship. And she had done
• 58:42
  Speaker 9: things like she worked on the B-1 bomber, those sorts
• 58:45
  Speaker 9: of projects. So she knew her stuff.
• 58:50
  Speaker 7: The real version of it. Yeah.
• 58:52
  Speaker 9: And, you know, I did some sketches in support of
• 58:55
  Speaker 9: some of the set design that was going on. Joe
• 58:59
  Speaker 9: Jennings left to work on Shogun. Well, you know, a
• 59:04
  Speaker 9: big thumbs up to Joe for that one. And Harold
• 59:06
  Speaker 9: Michelson came in to be production design. And Harold had
• 59:11
  Speaker 9: worked with Hitchcock on films. He had done wonderful storyboards.
• 59:20
  Speaker 9: He was an absolutely amazing teacher. I got to learn
• 59:25
  Speaker 9: perspective set projections using blueprints as a starting point. So
• 59:32
  Speaker 9: you could project lines up from the blueprint up to
• 59:37
  Speaker 9: a 2D image and everything would be in perfect alignment,
• 59:42
  Speaker 9: perfect perspective. And directors, you know, kind of used that
• 59:46
  Speaker 9: to say, well, okay, well, I want, you know, I
• 59:48
  Speaker 9: want a window over there in that drawing. And then
• 59:52
  Speaker 9: you can draw the lines back to the blueprint and
• 59:55
  Speaker 9: tell the construction guys, okay, well, that's where this window
• 59:58
  Speaker 9: is going. So Harold taught me things about geometry in
• 1:00:04
  Speaker 9: film production that I had never even considered.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 7: Yeah. Now they'll just plug it into a program and
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 7: do that. But the fact that you were still physically like,
• 1:00:14
  Speaker 7: you know, just mapping it all out on blueprints. Right.
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 9: I mean, we didn't have computers in 1978, you know? Um,
• 1:00:21
  Speaker 9: so I mean, Harold, uh, you know, Harold taught us
• 1:00:23
  Speaker 9: a lot of things, um, Um, uh, I worked, uh, uh,
• 1:00:27
  Speaker 9: pretty closely with, uh, Mike Minor, who was, uh, you know,
• 1:00:31
  Speaker 9: a terrific illustrator. Uh, he was, he was a good
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 9: friend of Bob Burns and, uh, you know, he passed
• 1:00:39
  Speaker 9: much too soon. Um, uh, but I learned a lot
• 1:00:43
  Speaker 9: from Mike about production. He was a real science fiction fan.
• 1:00:48
  Speaker 9: You know, he painted, um, uh, science fiction things. Uh,
• 1:00:51
  Speaker 9: you know, he worked on some independent production, uh, uh, things. And,
• 1:00:56
  Speaker 9: and I, you know, I just had a great time
• 1:00:58
  Speaker 9: talking with Mike and, and, uh, you know, learning from him, uh,
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 9: about things like, uh, storyboards, which I'm terrible at, but, uh,
• 1:01:08
  Speaker 9: you know, I, I, I, I really loved the, the
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 9: production experience. Uh, uh, John Cartwright was our, uh, lead
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 9: set designer. And I learned a lot from John about, uh,
• 1:01:21
  Speaker 9: about the set design and, uh, uh, You know, a
• 1:01:26
  Speaker 9: lot of these guys were, you know, and I hate
• 1:01:29
  Speaker 9: to say it, old school, but, you know, for me,
• 1:01:33
  Speaker 9: old school is the best school.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 1:01:35
  Speaker 9: You know, they understood production techniques and, you know, construction
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 9: and so on.
• 1:01:44
  Speaker 5: Do you ever get the itch to do something beyond
• 1:01:47
  Speaker 5: science fiction, like something else?
• 1:01:52
  Speaker 9: I think my alter ego wanted to be Jackson Pollock.
• 1:01:56
  Speaker 4: Nice.
• 1:01:57
  Speaker 7: That's very different, I mean.
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 9: But not for the reasons that I think people might
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 9: think that it's just paint splatters.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 1: No.
• 1:02:07
  Speaker 9: Because if you look at Pollock's work, you know, if
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 9: you look deeply into Pollock's work, there is a lot
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 9: of structure in there, okay? And people see, you know,
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 9: they see just paint whacking onto a canvas, but there
• 1:02:26
  Speaker 9: was so much more than that. And I, I could
• 1:02:29
  Speaker 9: really appreciate, you know, seeing, you know, okay, yes, this
• 1:02:34
  Speaker 9: paint is being, you know, dabbed, you know, that's the technique.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 7: Yeah.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 9: Yeah. Yeah. Uh, with the, um, uh, I think he
• 1:02:43
  Speaker 9: did a piece called seven blue poles, which if you
• 1:02:47
  Speaker 9: look at it, there are, there is very definite, uh, uh,
• 1:02:52
  Speaker 9: linear patterns and interesting bits of, I mean, some of
• 1:02:57
  Speaker 9: the stuff that he embedded in the paint was just astounding.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 9: Like little bits of plastic or little bits of razor
• 1:03:04
  Speaker 9: blades or little bits of glass and things like that.
• 1:03:08
  Speaker 7: Probably some blood.
• 1:03:09
  Speaker 3: Yeah, but you know, you.
• 1:03:10
  Speaker 9: Stand back and you see the overall, but then you
• 1:03:13
  Speaker 9: move a little closer and you start to see, you know,
• 1:03:16
  Speaker 9: little shapes in the paint. And it's just, you know,
• 1:03:20
  Speaker 9: I just find that fascinating.
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 7: So have you worked any abstract over the years? Have
• 1:03:25
  Speaker 7: you tried to go down that road?
• 1:03:27
  Speaker 9: I've taken out my acrylic paints and I've dabbed and
• 1:03:32
  Speaker 9: I've slung paint off the tips of a brush and
• 1:03:38
  Speaker 9: just to see what the process was like.
• 1:03:43
  Speaker 5: It's very easy at this age or me too when
• 1:03:47
  Speaker 5: I'm advancing my career. It's very difficult to to free
• 1:03:51
  Speaker 5: yourself up again like you were as a kid.
• 1:03:52
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:03:53
  Speaker 5: You know, I tighten up and I tighten up and I,
• 1:03:55
  Speaker 5: you know, sometimes I'm just, I would be afraid to
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 5: just spatter paint onto a canvas at this point. But,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 5: you know, I think that's something that maybe I need
• 1:04:07
  Speaker 5: to free myself, give myself permission to make mistakes again.
• 1:04:13
  Speaker 9: Right. I actually find building models to be a different
• 1:04:18
  Speaker 9: hand-eye skill set that, you know, I am not constantly,
• 1:04:23
  Speaker 9: you know, hunched over the drafting table making very precise lines,
• 1:04:30
  Speaker 9: you know, with the T-square and the triangle and the
• 1:04:32
  Speaker 9: mechanical pencil because that really, you know, yeah, you can
• 1:04:36
  Speaker 9: kind of get tense with that. But with the models,
• 1:04:40
  Speaker 9: all right, Yes, I can cut some plastic with a saw.
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 9: I can sit there and sand while I listen to
• 1:04:47
  Speaker 9: Miles Davis in the headset. It's a bit more therapeutic
• 1:04:53
  Speaker 9: for me.
• 1:04:54
  Speaker 5: I do sculpture. It's the same thing. You do sculpture.
• 1:04:57
  Speaker 7: Very good.
• 1:04:59
  Speaker 5: It's another form of expression, but it's enough of a
• 1:05:05
  Speaker 5: break from 2D that you are– I think I can
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 5: be more experimental when I'm doing it. I'm not so,
• 1:05:12
  Speaker 5: you know, this is a precious piece of art that
• 1:05:14
  Speaker 5: I'm doing now.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 9: Right.
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 5: But it's like, okay, let's just try it and see
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 5: if it works.
• 1:05:19
  Speaker 9: But you get to see things from different angles, too.
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 5: Yeah, and that's refreshing.
• 1:05:24
  Speaker 9: I mean, I use a lot of, you know, when
• 1:05:26
  Speaker 9: I'm talking with people, I use a lot of hand gestures,
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 9: you know, as if I'm holding a physical object and saying,
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 9: you know, I can see it from this angle, I
• 1:05:36
  Speaker 9: can see it from this angle. maybe I should add
• 1:05:40
  Speaker 9: a little texture to that side. It's different. It's much
• 1:05:45
  Speaker 9: different than staring at a single piece of paper and
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 9: making marks on it that will eventually mean something. I
• 1:05:56
  Speaker 9: like working with Sculpey to make things. Even if I
• 1:06:03
  Speaker 9: take a Sculpey later and just mash it back into
• 1:06:06
  Speaker 9: its box... It's still the process. I kind of got
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 9: that from Robert Silverberg. He had a story where there
• 1:06:15
  Speaker 9: were little shops you could go to, like little woodworking shops,
• 1:06:20
  Speaker 9: and you could build things, and then you're done, and
• 1:06:25
  Speaker 9: you take a hammer to them and break them back
• 1:06:28
  Speaker 9: into their pieces. But it was the act of Of
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 9: working with the wood and, you know, creating something, even
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 9: if it was temporary, you know. And then, you know,
• 1:06:43
  Speaker 9: you'd pay your money and you'd leave the shop. I
• 1:06:47
  Speaker 9: think I'm remembering that right, but I just found it
• 1:06:50
  Speaker 9: to be an interesting concept where, you know, you create
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 9: something and then it goes back into raw form.
• 1:06:56
  Speaker 4: Yeah.
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 7: That's the people that create the giant, like, sculptures in
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 7: sand on the side of the beach, and it looks amazing,
• 1:07:03
  Speaker 7: and then a few hours later, it's gone.
• 1:07:05
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:07:07
  Speaker 7: So that's, yeah, I have issues with that. Like, again,
• 1:07:10
  Speaker 7: maybe just a weird hoarder in me that I'm like, no,
• 1:07:12
  Speaker 7: I created this, I want to have it forever.
• 1:07:14
  Speaker 9: That's right.
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 7: So it's, yeah, I think it's part of just letting
• 1:07:17
  Speaker 7: go and just creating for the sake of creating.
• 1:07:20
  Speaker 9: It's like making a cake. You can't get the cake forever.
• 1:07:24
  Speaker 5: Well, even a lot of, you know, My early scribbles,
• 1:07:27
  Speaker 5: I don't keep them. I throw them away. But it's
• 1:07:30
  Speaker 5: sort of an education. I remember I mentioned this once
• 1:07:36
  Speaker 5: on your show, but Chuck Jones, he used to say
• 1:07:42
  Speaker 5: every artist has a thousand bad drawings in them, and
• 1:07:45
  Speaker 5: as soon as you get them out, the better.
• 1:07:46
  Speaker 9: Okay.
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 5: Just get them out of the way just get them
• 1:07:49
  Speaker 5: out of the way but it's it's you know it's
• 1:07:51
  Speaker 5: it's a next step in in your education or you
• 1:07:55
  Speaker 5: know improving your skill you just got to keep doing
• 1:07:57
  Speaker 5: it keep doing keep doing it.
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 7: Well then i mean yeah just kind of going through
• 1:08:01
  Speaker 7: the timeline they're coming off of the motion picture star
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 7: trek and then not too far off uh one of
• 1:08:06
  Speaker 7: my favorites was the last starfighter so how did you
• 1:08:10
  Speaker 7: get in again that the machine was downstairs this weekend
• 1:08:13
  Speaker 7: it was I walked past it. I was waiting for
• 1:08:15
  Speaker 7: it to start talking to me, and I might get recruited.
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 7: It's not too late. So, yeah, how did you get involved,
• 1:08:21
  Speaker 7: and then what did you end up doing on the
• 1:08:22
  Speaker 7: last Starfight?
• 1:08:25
  Speaker 9: Okay, this also involves a small jump backwards. One of
• 1:08:29
  Speaker 9: the first jobs that I had was over at Disney
• 1:08:32
  Speaker 9: on the Black Hole. And that was a very short
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 9: job because they wanted to go back and work on
• 1:08:37
  Speaker 9: the script some more. And I met up with a
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 9: fellow named Carl Aldana, who was– a terrific storyboard artist
• 1:08:43
  Speaker 9: in the IATSE, the union back in L.A. And Carl
• 1:08:52
  Speaker 9: was working, I think, over at Digital Productions when Starfighter
• 1:08:58
  Speaker 9: was going on. And I think he called me and
• 1:09:05
  Speaker 9: wanted to know if I'd want to work over at
• 1:09:08
  Speaker 9: Digital on Starfighter. And, yeah, sure.
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 10: Sure.
• 1:09:15
  Speaker 9: So I got to do hardware storyboards, which is okay.
• 1:09:20
  Speaker 9: I'm not real good with action scenes with people, but
• 1:09:27
  Speaker 9: for Starfighter, I got to do storyboards of the star
• 1:09:32
  Speaker 9: car and the gun star. I got to do texture maps.
• 1:09:39
  Speaker 9: for the planets, for Rylos and the green moon and
• 1:09:43
  Speaker 9: our moon and Pluto, that digital productions would scan at
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 9: high res. Okay, this is 1983.
• 1:09:51
  Speaker 7: It's the early days of digital.
• 1:09:54
  Speaker 9: Well, yeah, it's early days of digital, but, I mean,
• 1:09:58
  Speaker 9: digital productions had a Cray computer, which was like the
• 1:10:01
  Speaker 9: biggest monster thing, you know, going.
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 5: Um, and then all that fits into a laptop.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 1:10:07
  Speaker 9: Yeah. So I, you know, I got to, um, I
• 1:10:10
  Speaker 9: got to do those sorts of things, but the coolest
• 1:10:13
  Speaker 9: part of it was I got to work with Ron
• 1:10:15
  Speaker 9: Cobb for, you know, a few months. Um, and just
• 1:10:21
  Speaker 9: to be able to talk to Ron about science fiction things, um, was,
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 9: was astounding. And, and like Monday mornings, we would both
• 1:10:30
  Speaker 9: come in and, and, uh, We had both subscribed to
• 1:10:33
  Speaker 9: Aviation Week magazine. And it's like, hey, did you see
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 9: that thing about that airplane in AvWeek? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 9: So we had a real common ground. I learned a
• 1:10:43
  Speaker 9: lot from Ron in terms of his painting and sketching
• 1:10:48
  Speaker 9: and his hardware design. His pencil drawings of the Gunstar
• 1:10:56
  Speaker 9: that Digital used to create the 3D model You know,
• 1:11:01
  Speaker 9: his line art was just astounding. You know, I got
• 1:11:06
  Speaker 9: to do some low-res drawings of things like the Kodan
• 1:11:14
  Speaker 9: mothership and the fighters. And, you know, again, got to
• 1:11:20
  Speaker 9: storyboard a lot of the action that was going on
• 1:11:25
  Speaker 9: and work with the technical directors who were putting all
• 1:11:29
  Speaker 9: of these scenes together as wireframe animations prior to full
• 1:11:35
  Speaker 9: color res renders. The time at Digital was a big
• 1:11:46
  Speaker 9: help for me in understanding how the computer could be
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 9: used in all of this. you know, we didn't have
• 1:11:55
  Speaker 9: computers back on next gen or back on, uh, uh,
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 9: the Star Trek, the motion picture. Although for cosmos, I
• 1:12:02
  Speaker 9: did get to work, uh, on a, a tablet hooked
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 9: to a PDP 11. I think it was at the
• 1:12:10
  Speaker 9: jet propulsion laboratory, you know? So I got to paint
• 1:12:15
  Speaker 9: with a tablet, uh, some of the moons of Jupiter.
• 1:12:18
  Speaker 7: Okay.
• 1:12:19
  Speaker 9: And that, it was a lot of fun. It was,
• 1:12:21
  Speaker 9: it was in support of, uh, The Voyager mission, you know,
• 1:12:26
  Speaker 9: were the press releases to show, you know, how Voyager
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 9: was going to head out there. So, you know, JPL
• 1:12:34
  Speaker 9: was the first little experience with computers. Digital Productions was,
• 1:12:41
  Speaker 9: you know, was a much more overall look at how
• 1:12:47
  Speaker 9: these things were being digitized. They had like a 30
• 1:12:50
  Speaker 9: by 40 inch tablet for with a digitizing puck, which
• 1:12:56
  Speaker 9: was essentially like a mouse with crosshairs. And you would
• 1:13:01
  Speaker 9: click on each point to make a polygon. Okay, save
• 1:13:05
  Speaker 9: the polygon. Do the next polygon. Do the next polygon.
• 1:13:10
  Speaker 9: And today... Boy, are things so much easier. But I
• 1:13:16
  Speaker 9: got to see the evolution of that whole process.
• 1:13:20
  Speaker 7: I think that even about just that movie. Like, you
• 1:13:22
  Speaker 7: can look back at specific projects over the years, just
• 1:13:26
  Speaker 7: even as a viewer. And, like, to me, that is
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 7: one of those. You can look back and the effects
• 1:13:30
  Speaker 7: certainly look of their time. But I'm like, there are
• 1:13:33
  Speaker 7: leaps and bounds before that. And, like, it's like that's,
• 1:13:36
  Speaker 7: to me, one of those big steps before you get
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 7: to Jurassic Park. You know, it's like one of the
• 1:13:40
  Speaker 7: first times where you see it. And it's completely, like,
• 1:13:43
  Speaker 7: you can see them working on the screen. You can
• 1:13:45
  Speaker 7: see them, like, this is what we're going to do.
• 1:13:48
  Speaker 7: And they actually make it happen before you get to
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 7: the next phase and the next phase.
• 1:13:52
  Speaker 5: Was there anything in between Tron and Last Star Party
• 1:13:55
  Speaker 5: that used that much CG?
• 1:13:56
  Speaker 7: Probably not. Not that I can think of. Those were
• 1:14:00
  Speaker 7: both pretty immersed in, yeah, just taking the computers to
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 7: a new level. But, yeah, it seems like there's almost
• 1:14:06
  Speaker 7: like a drop-off for a little while after that of, like,
• 1:14:09
  Speaker 7: I don't remember anything for quite a while that was
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 7: near as, as overwhelmingly like computer oriented as, as those
• 1:14:16
  Speaker 7: first couple in the beginning of the eighties. But yeah,
• 1:14:19
  Speaker 7: I don't know. It's, it's, it's a whole different, whole
• 1:14:21
  Speaker 7: different world once you get into that and you brought
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 7: it up. So what, what did you end up doing
• 1:14:25
  Speaker 7: on black hole?
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 11: Cause I'm a, I've, I, I did a number of,
• 1:14:31
  Speaker 11: you know, very early sketches of, you know, bits, a
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 11: little bits of hardware, probably a little, little prop things.
• 1:14:37
  Speaker 9: Uh, Never really got to get into the production a
• 1:14:43
  Speaker 9: lot because, like I said, they kind of shut it
• 1:14:45
  Speaker 9: down after a few months and went back to work
• 1:14:51
  Speaker 9: on the script and so forth. So while they were
• 1:14:55
  Speaker 9: doing that, you know, I ended up doing other projects.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 5: Yeah.
• 1:15:01
  Speaker 7: But not doing like the layout because that one had
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 7: a very distinctive look to the ship and, and.
• 1:15:06
  Speaker 9: The ship was already underway. The ship was already underway.
• 1:15:09
  Speaker 9: I mean, they, they built a couple of them out of, uh, uh,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 9: brass and, and, uh, uh, plexiglass. Uh, and the things
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 9: were enormous. They were, they were huge. They were already underway, but, uh,
• 1:15:22
  Speaker 9: you know, I came in to do some illustration work, but, uh, um,
• 1:15:27
  Speaker 9: you know, I got, I got onto other projects.
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 7: Uh, um, That is what I was thinking because you
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 7: end up doing a lot of like later on doing
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 7: a lot of displays and like stuff physically that, you know,
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 7: you are on the set more or less and you're
• 1:15:40
  Speaker 7: setting up the look of the entire like what would
• 1:15:43
  Speaker 7: be the Enterprise or for many other things after that.
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 7: And how is it that what approach do you take
• 1:15:50
  Speaker 7: on like trying to do something? Because it's very it
• 1:15:52
  Speaker 7: has to be sort of grounded in the sense that
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 7: you're creating this world that these characters are going to
• 1:15:57
  Speaker 7: live in. But it has to be distinctly different than
• 1:15:59
  Speaker 7: what we're in. So I don't know, what approach do
• 1:16:02
  Speaker 7: you kind of use as you go into something that's
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 7: that kind of a lived-in project?
• 1:16:06
  Speaker 9: Yeah, well, I mean, starting with Star Trek The Motion Picture,
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 9: there was already a Star Trek, Starfleet style to work from.
• 1:16:21
  Speaker 9: You know, I mean, going all the way back to
• 1:16:22
  Speaker 9: the original series with the sets and the spaceship and
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 9: the props and so forth. And the work on the
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 9: movie just furthered that look. Okay, very clean look. The
• 1:16:42
  Speaker 9: instrumentation and the props and things were all evolving. And
• 1:16:47
  Speaker 9: when we got into The Next Generation in 1987, things
• 1:16:54
  Speaker 9: evolved even more.
• 1:16:56
  Speaker 7: It's kind of a huge leap by that point.
• 1:16:58
  Speaker 9: Well, yeah, huge leap, but still, you know, enough of
• 1:17:01
  Speaker 9: the stylistic cues, you know, so that, you know, you
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 9: could tell a Starfleet ship from a Klingon ship, from
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 9: a Romulan ship, etc. So, you know, we all, you know,
• 1:17:16
  Speaker 9: whichever Trek art department I was in, we were all
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 9: basically in sync about the looks of things, okay? And
• 1:17:26
  Speaker 9: especially on Next Generation, episodic TV, every 10th working day,
• 1:17:31
  Speaker 9: we were into a new episode. So it was fast. So,
• 1:17:37
  Speaker 9: you know, I learned to work fast. I learned to
• 1:17:40
  Speaker 9: sketch quickly. You know, maybe couldn't add a lot of
• 1:17:44
  Speaker 9: color if there wasn't a whole lot of time. But
• 1:17:49
  Speaker 9: a lot of my stuff, I drew... to be buildable. Okay.
• 1:17:54
  Speaker 9: You know, enough information so that, uh, you know, the
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 9: guys in the, in the, uh, construction mill could build something.
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 9: Our prop vendors could, could build the stuff. Uh, and,
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 9: and we stayed in constant contact with, with all of
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 9: the different crafts, uh, you know, to, to, just to
• 1:18:12
  Speaker 9: make sure that, uh, Okay, you know, we're going to
• 1:18:15
  Speaker 9: be using this font on this thing or, you know,
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 9: this style of cooling fin on this prop. And generally,
• 1:18:25
  Speaker 9: you know, it was clockwork. It worked. Yeah, there were
• 1:18:29
  Speaker 9: little hiccups here and there. You know, producers wanted like
• 1:18:32
  Speaker 9: six or seven variations of a design. And it's like, okay.
• 1:18:37
  Speaker 9: Is this what you want? And that really didn't occur
• 1:18:43
  Speaker 9: that often. But we would occasionally have to draw and
• 1:18:48
  Speaker 9: draw and draw some more. and, you know, get approvals.
• 1:18:53
  Speaker 5: The problem with saying, is this what you want, usually
• 1:18:56
  Speaker 5: is that we don't ask. They don't know. And then
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 5: they ask for more and you just have to kind
• 1:19:01
  Speaker 5: of second guess them.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 9: But, I mean, they were very good listeners. They were.
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 9: They were very good about approving the designs. They trusted us.
• 1:19:15
  Speaker 9: I say that a lot to people. They trusted us
• 1:19:18
  Speaker 9: to know the subject matter, to know the style stuff.
• 1:19:28
  Speaker 9: I was with the franchise for 15 years, so that
• 1:19:31
  Speaker 9: kind of says something. They liked what we were doing,
• 1:19:36
  Speaker 9: and we were supporting them.
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 7: The show that's something i was wondering too going back
• 1:19:41
  Speaker 7: and forth from those different levels of projects how different
• 1:19:44
  Speaker 7: is it and you may have mentioned the biggest difference
• 1:19:47
  Speaker 7: doing like a weekly series and an ongoing universe that
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 7: you're dealing with there with different versions of track versus
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 7: jumping way ahead to something like solaris it's like then
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 7: you're doing i'm assuming time is a massive change in
• 1:20:01
  Speaker 7: like when you've got to come up with the stuff
• 1:20:03
  Speaker 7: and then the financing is probably very different. So I
• 1:20:06
  Speaker 7: don't know how, how different is it when they throw,
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 7: you know, working on a series week to week versus
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 7: doing a major motion picture kind of a thing.
• 1:20:12
  Speaker 9: Well, I, I, I didn't get to work on that
• 1:20:15
  Speaker 9: many major films where we had a lot of lead time. Uh,
• 1:20:19
  Speaker 9: I mean, even Solaris, uh, uh, where I was doing mostly, um, um,
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 9: you know, things, uh, dealing with the computer displays, um, um,
• 1:20:31
  Speaker 9: A lot of that was happening at a pretty quick pace.
• 1:20:38
  Speaker 9: There were maybe four or five of us over at
• 1:20:42
  Speaker 9: Warner Brothers working on just the general style of the display,
• 1:20:51
  Speaker 9: how complex should it be. You look at computer displays
• 1:20:55
  Speaker 9: in science fiction these days, and there's crazy stuff happening
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 9: in every corner of the And Solaris, when I was
• 1:21:05
  Speaker 9: on the production, this was 2002.
• 1:21:07
  Speaker 11: Yeah, this is the Soderbergh version for anyone confused.
• 1:21:12
  Speaker 9: We had computer displays. We finally had flat screens. And
• 1:21:19
  Speaker 9: I would create a number of static elements that some
• 1:21:25
  Speaker 9: others would animate. Uh, but I would give them a
• 1:21:29
  Speaker 9: little notes. Okay. This, this little series of boxes here
• 1:21:32
  Speaker 9: should move this way. Uh, or, uh, this particular little
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 9: tree diagram would grow and then disappear. And so we
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 9: sent up, you know, it was very much like, like
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 9: writing animation count sheets, uh, for doing cell animation, except
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 9: it was all in computer layers. Um, And, you know,
• 1:21:52
  Speaker 9: and that was fun. I got to do, you know,
• 1:21:54
  Speaker 9: a few little sketch bits for some of the spacecraft stuff.
• 1:21:59
  Speaker 10: Yeah.
• 1:22:00
  Speaker 9: But mostly it was 2D graphics for me. You know, again,
• 1:22:07
  Speaker 9: part of the same big creation thing, you know, it's
• 1:22:10
  Speaker 9: just one element.
• 1:22:11
  Speaker 8: Yeah.
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 7: Well, then I was going to kind of let you, like,
• 1:22:14
  Speaker 7: wrap up with what you are doing. So I didn't
• 1:22:17
  Speaker 7: know if you wanted to do, like, projects that you're
• 1:22:19
  Speaker 7: working on or even like the fact that you kind
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 7: of created a company to help other people recreate this
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 7: type of stuff that you do so like i don't
• 1:22:27
  Speaker 7: know do you do you like with model kits and
• 1:22:29
  Speaker 7: stuff like that like you've got different different avenues that
• 1:22:32
  Speaker 7: you're kind of working on as time going.
• 1:22:34
  Speaker 9: On most of the most of the the hobby stuff
• 1:22:37
  Speaker 9: uh that that i've been doing involved for um you
• 1:22:41
  Speaker 9: know water slide decals yeah And those I find fun.
• 1:22:45
  Speaker 9: You know, yes, they're 2D graphics. There's a lot of
• 1:22:47
  Speaker 9: research involved doing historical things like, you know, the Saturn
• 1:22:52
  Speaker 9: V booster and the Apollo spacecraft and Gemini and all this.
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 9: I mean, that's stuff that, you know, going back to
• 1:23:00
  Speaker 9: the beginnings.
• 1:23:01
  Speaker 5: Real stuff, yeah.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 9: Yeah, you know, it was real stuff. I've done some
• 1:23:06
  Speaker 9: 3D models of– things like Terrains of Mars and some
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 9: of the Jupiter satellites. I'm not currently producing any of
• 1:23:16
  Speaker 9: that stuff right now, but more, you know, downsizing the
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 9: home studio. You know, taking a couple of years to just,
• 1:23:27
  Speaker 9: you know, focus on certain other projects. I've done a few,
• 1:23:33
  Speaker 9: you know, freelance things for some science fiction projects, production pitches,
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 9: a couple of book things like the Klingon Bird of
• 1:23:46
  Speaker 9: Prey Owner's Manual for Haynes Publishing, which was a ton
• 1:23:50
  Speaker 9: of fun, which was a ton of fun.
• 1:23:51
  Speaker 7: And you're ever working on yours out in the garage.
• 1:23:53
  Speaker 9: Yeah, so I'm not working on anything massive, but I'm
• 1:23:57
  Speaker 9: kind of prepping for maybe doing some more stuff over
• 1:24:06
  Speaker 9: the next six months or so.
• 1:24:09
  Speaker 7: Do you want to have people find you online, or
• 1:24:12
  Speaker 7: is there something to keep up with social media-wise?
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 9: I'm on Facebook. Look me up on Facebook. My website
• 1:24:19
  Speaker 9: is horribly out of date, so that's going to change.
• 1:24:22
  Speaker 9: I'll update that at some point. There's no real purpose
• 1:24:26
  Speaker 9: in sending people to ricksternbach.com because it's It's, you know,
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 9: the stuff is just so old.
• 1:24:34
  Speaker 7: Just keep your eye on it.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 3: It'll be updated.
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 7: Don't you worry about it.
• 1:24:37
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah. But, yeah, I mean, Facebook is where I
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 9: hang out. All of my artist friends are there. Modeling friends,
• 1:24:45
  Speaker 9: you know, anime fanatic friends.
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 5: A lot of people loitering around on Facebook.
• 1:24:52
  Speaker 9: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:24:54
  Speaker 7: And Eric, you told me you're not doing anything. So
• 1:24:56
  Speaker 7: I'd let you plug your stuff, but you told me
• 1:24:59
  Speaker 7: I don't do anything. I don't know. So you're scribbling
• 1:25:03
  Speaker 7: at home with the kid now, right?
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 5: Yeah, I'm spending a lot of time raising my four-year-old.
• 1:25:08
  Speaker 5: He's a lot of fun. And yeah, that's pretty much
• 1:25:12
  Speaker 5: taking up all my time these days.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 1:25:16
  Speaker 7: Well, thank you for both being here. You're very welcome.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 9: Thanks a lot.
• 1:25:19
  Speaker 6: Thank you.
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 7: Alright, we're ready to round out our Wonderfest weekend festivities, Misty.
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 7: You've survived it all. Yes. I think we're out of here,
• 1:25:50
  Speaker 7: so You, in the meantime, should go to wonderfest.com and
• 1:25:54
  Speaker 7: see how you can join in on all these festivities
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 7: today and be part of this next time around.
• 1:26:00
  Speaker 4: All right.
• 1:26:01
  Speaker 7: Otherwise, that about does it. We will return next time,
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 7: same geek feed.
• 1:26:04
  Speaker 3: Thanks for listening.
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 2: Bye. Waves around the world Sooner or later we will
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 2: melt together Land of waves around the world With all
• 1:26:31
  Speaker 2: those meteoric storms And all those ships they never call
• 1:26:37
  Speaker 2: again I am going radioactive With the beams around the
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: world We wish you could see us when we're at
• 1:26:50
  Speaker 2: our best. Now we draw waves around the world. The
• 1:26:53
  Speaker 2: kinds of folks brought to it all. We're gonna vaporize
• 1:26:58
  Speaker 2: your soul. Earth will become Saturn too. We're drawing waves
• 1:27:06
  Speaker 2: around the world. We have a.
• 1:27:18
  Speaker 3: Pose to draw.
• 1:27:50
  Speaker 2: Major L. Good luck.
• 1:28:23
  Speaker 8: Bye-bye, Mom. Hello?
• 1:28:24
  Speaker 2: You've been to all the things.
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 5: Around the world?
• 1:28:29
  Speaker 7: Oh, man. Um, have you.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 10: Been to the whole Bizarro? That's true.
• 1:28:41
  Speaker 8: It worked.
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 7: Midway earlier into our reaper discussion which i'm way behind
• 1:29:03
  Speaker 7: because i started just a few episodes i've.
• 1:29:06
  Speaker 8: Only got two episodes left of season one i love
• 1:29:10
  Speaker 8: ray wise is awesome so he's so fucking delightful he.
• 1:29:14
  Speaker 7: Is pretty amazing and has a pretty impressive list of
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 7: accomplishments projects over the years it's amazing the stuff he
• 1:29:24
  Speaker 7: was in and then who he became and who he
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 7: continued to become. He's done a lot of crazy stuff.
• 1:29:30
  Speaker 7: So to me, that was like, yeah, when I first
• 1:29:32
  Speaker 7: saw the ad for Reaper, I was like, well, of course,
• 1:29:34
  Speaker 7: like that's the perfect guest, obviously perfect casting. That's what
• 1:29:38
  Speaker 7: you need. Very wise. So we'll see how that works out.
• 1:29:42
  Speaker 10: This episode is a production of movie meltdown produced and
• 1:29:44
  Speaker 10: edited by the out of two studios with opening music
• 1:29:47
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• 1:29:50
  Speaker 10: or support the show. Email producer at moviemeltdown.com.
• 1:29:53
  Speaker 1: Talk hard!
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 7: This program is a proud member of the Battleship Pretension Fleet.