by Vijith

I suppose this post would have been more timely a couple weeks back, before the new Star Trek movie had decided to set its phasers to "perform moderately well and still basically bend over for Pixar," but I hadn't seen it until just now. Late or not, I was surprised to learn that it features, among other things:

• Captain Kirk portrayed by James Van Der Beek
• Spock as a sex machine
• Uhura doing a striptease
• Lost producer J.J. Abrams driving the boat on a plot about (what else?) time travel
• An alternate reality premise that allows the storyline to ignore some fairly fundamental aspects of the series
• A Vulcan genocide (see above)
• An appearance by Leonard Nimoy, looking so wrinkled and decrepit these days that he could probably take over portraying Emperor Palpatine in that other franchise.

In all, however, it's merely ridiculous, not actually as god-awful as it might have been -- remember Superman Returns? Still, there are those few hardened Trekkies who are currently hard at work writing huge blog posts about how the use of non-canonical stardates besmirches Gene Roddenberry's legacy.

This, as you have probably guessed by now, is not one of those blog posts.

Those guys need to set their, um, phasers to "get a girlfriend already," and in the interest of furthering that process, let's all revel for a moment in the warm YouTube glow of a couple of the franchise's most absurd musical moments.

First, we have William Shatner's cover of the spectacular 1995 Pulp bourgeoisie seduction anthem "Common People." The only thing more amusing than hearing Jarvis Cocker's crown jewel rendered with the iconic Priceline-shilling stutter that ol' Johnny Blue Eyes Chris Pine so incomprehensibly failed to tip his hat to would be picturing Shatner's slumming socialite object-of-affections not as a high-class bird from Notting Hill, but rather as a sentient cloud of glowing dust from Beta Centauri.

OK, I lied. There is at least one thing that's more amusing, and that's Leonard Nimoy singing about Hobbits.

The most distressing part of the latter, I think, is that Spock comes to us from science fiction and Bilbo is from the related but indisputably distinct world of dungeon/dragon fantasy. Stardates were purposely designed to be wishy-washy and hard to place, so it's possible that the two worlds did exist in parallel and the Shire was just, like, developmentally retarded by a few hundred thousand years. Still, it makes for a striking contrast when you ask a Starfleet commander for commentary on happenings in a world where one has to poop in the bushes whilst adventuring. (Strangely, Tolkien never really expands on the specifics there.) But hey, I guess that's what time travel is for.