George Takei was so excited to do this shirtless episode. He spent all his free time doing push-ups for a week before they shot this.
they were going to give him a katana and have him be a samurai, but he didn’t want to be stereotypical, so he told the execs that he could fence and they wrote in references to the three musketeers instead
he could not, in fact, fence
he spent the weekend before shooting learning how
Not only that, but he found he liked fencing, kept it up, and became a master fencer.
When I had the privilege to hear him talk at AwesomeCon 2015, he informed us he is a master fencer. It was a very clear implication that he is still fencing at his advanced age. No wonder he’s so healthy.
He had far too much fun with this episode and it shows.
Hikaru Sulu, our first Space Pirate.
Reblogging for all this cool trivia
And also for George Takei running through the Starship Enterprise with a sword and cackling sinisterly
Reblogging for ALL of this, and for the coolness of George Takei still kicking butt with a sword to this day!
Reblog if you trust George Takei with a sword to protect you
“In the end, [Takei] loved his sword-fighting scene so much he held onto the rapier for several hours, poking stage hands with it and engaging in mock duels off the set.” – IMDB’s trivia
i really, really hope that whenever we actually get to space for real, like past mars, the universe turns out to be exactly as goddamn weird as we have all been expecting all this time. like, space whales past jupiter. palaces of methane ice on pluto. old gods lurking around in the asteroid belt. the ghost of ancient vengeful alien sailors crewing their ghost ships in eternal loops through the oort cloud and sirens off alpha centauri. in a hundred years i want one of my great grandkids to unfurl a holographic map, and look at the little notation hovering a hundred light years past vega that says here there be dragons (no really) and smile, and set sail.
look i am already in the car with the keys in the ignition i am so here for this
could you imagine The Enterprise having like a yearly inspection and Kirk bugs out every time because the best running ship in the fleet certainly doesn’t become so because they follow therules. He has to remind the crew a week in advance to actually call him Captain and use formal titles. Bones and Scotty’s shared bathroom which is one hundred percent a liquor cabinet/distillery cannot be a thing.
Sulu has to collect all of his plants out of everywhere that’s not the Botany Labs and hide the illegal ones he picked up during their journey in his quarters. Scotty has to remove all of his Scotty-Approved-Modifications from Engineering. Spock can’t work four shifts in a row and break the ensigns that challenge him in the gym to sparring matches. Bones can’t medically offer alcohol to anybody. Uhura needs to not curse every ten minutes, in any language. Chekov needs to focus more on his console and less on every pair of legs walking by his station.
And then when he was Admiral Kirk, he wasn’t especially interested in actually giving the inspection he was supposed to give at the beginning of The Wrath of Khan.
Remember how he was all, “you know what, let’s just take these cadets on a training cruise!” and Bones was like, “what about the inspection?” and Kirk was all, “nah, man, fuck the inspection”? Yeah, he already knew the kind of shit he was going to find, and he was like, “you know what, I’ll just let y’all off the hook.”
Also the Enterprise vs. Millennium Falcon debate has never ceased to confuse me, like, you’re basically wondering who’d win in a fight between a fully staffed US Navy research vessel armed with harpoons and torpedos and all sorts of other boat vessels OR your weedman and his sweet vintage van, his buddy riding shotgun with a crossbow
George Takei was so excited to do this shirtless episode. He spent all his free time doing push-ups for a week before they shot this.
they were going to give him a katana and have him be a samurai, but he didn’t want to be stereotypical, so he told the execs that he could fence and they wrote in references to the three musketeers instead
he could not, in fact, fence
he spent the weekend before shooting learning how
Not only that, but he found he liked fencing, kept it up, and became a master fencer.
When I had the privilege to hear him talk at AwesomeCon 2015, he informed us he is a master fencer. It was a very clear implication that he is still fencing at his advanced age. No wonder he’s so healthy.
He had far too much fun with this episode and it shows.
Hikaru Sulu, our first Space Pirate.
Reblogging for all this cool trivia
And also for George Takei running through the Starship Enterprise with a sword and cackling sinisterly
Reblogging for ALL of this, and for the coolness of George Takei still kicking butt with a sword to this day!
Reblog if you trust George Takei with a sword to protect you
“In the end, [Takei] loved his sword-fighting scene so much he held onto the rapier for several hours, poking stage hands with it and engaging in mock duels off the set.” – IMDB’s trivia
Starfleet Admirals get worried when Captain Kirk bursts into their offices.
Starfleet Admirals get a little scared when Captain Kirk bursts into their offices followed by Commander Spock.
Starfleet Admirals get fucking terrified when Captain Kirk bursts into their offices with both Commander Spock and Doctor McCoy by his sides.
I love this because I get why the admiral is scared. Kirk bursts in by himself, that’s troubling but not full red alert yet. He’s followed by Spock and oh shit it’s yellow alert because whatever Kirk’s cooking up, Spock is on board with it and if Spock is on board then it means it’s Logical and they’ll probably get their way. But then sometimes they both have insane schemes that somehow Kirk talks Spock into but if McCoy is with them then RED ALERT, RED ALERT, THE VOICE OF REASON IS NOW ANOTHER AGENT OF CHAOS AND WHATEVER THEY WANT THEY’LL GET EVEN IF THEY HAVE TO STRAP FOUR WARP CORES TOGETHER AND RIDE THAT SHIT BACK TO THE MESOZOIC ERA TO DO IT
And if Spock and McCoy arrive without Kirk? oooooohhhH SHIT!!!
I’ve heard the theory that Kirk’s logs just get circulated round headquarters for lulz before being dumped in the circular file as obvious fabrications by someone bored with a frontier posting.
“Hey, have you seen this one? He says he fought Apollo.”
“What, the old earth probe?”
“Try the old earth GOD!”
“Hilarious! Classic Kirk! That’s better than the time when he was transported to an evil dimenison.”
The reason why in The Naked Now it was Riker who remembered that the previous polywater infection had happened is that he’s the sort of person who would read The Hilarious Adventures of Captain Kirk for fun.
I especially like this idea because of the implication that all the other captains in Starfleet are reporting perfectly ordinary experiences like visiting a space station, dropping off supplies at a colony, bit of a stand-off with some Klingons in disputed space but got out of it unscathed - and then there’s Kirk all, “sorry guys we’ve been off course this week because my first officer seriously needed to get laid (LIKE YOU HAVE NO IDEA MY NECK STILL HURTS)” and “let me tell you about the Chicago Gangster planet” and “WHIPPED AND THROWN IN JAIL BY SPACE NAZIS.”
I actually really like the above explanation
“So wait, they stole his first officer’s brain?”
I always preferred the idea that every single Constitution-class starship of the Kirk era was running into all kinds of insane shit and so the Enterprise’s adventures mostly just got lost in the shuffle.
“Sir, Starbase 12 reports a flock of space sharks cruising through the system. They’re worried about them chewing on the antennae.”
“Can we get the Hood over there to monitor their path and shoo them off if need be?”
“No can do sir, Hood called in two days ago, says the Captain took his security detail down to the local surface to fight an army of evil komodo dragons.”
“Damn. What about the Valiant?”
“Captain says she’s currently engaged in a duel of wits with a clone of Bismarck.”
“Like the battleship?”
“No sir, a clone of Otto von Bismarck, the German chancellor from the 1900s.”
“I’m scared to ask, but where’s the Potemkin?”
“Last reported in pursuit of a super-intelligent shade of blue.”
“God’s sake. What about the Enterprise, are they available?”
Okay so this is one of the WEIRDEST FUCKING THINGS humanity has stumbled upon in science and it gives me a nerd boner that can be seen from Alpha Centauri.
As far as we can tell, this fucking thing generates reactionless thrust. Let that shit sink in: The EM Drive does not require fuel. Only electrical power.
Okay I know I said it already but AS FAR AS WE CAN TELL THIS IS A !!REACTIONLESS!! !!THRUST!! !!DEVICE!! you have no idea just how goddamn amazing that is
mark my words this fucking thing is going to REVOLUTIONIZEthe design of satellites and scientific probes
and just think of the potential it might have if its thrust increases proportionately to the power fed into it
THIS IS FUKCIN HUGE MY DUDES
Reblogging this just to restate how fucking huge this is.
Imagine you blow air into a balloon and tie it off. Then when you untie it, you let the balloon go and it flies all over the place. This is how propulsion works. This is what Newton’s Third Law is based on. That the air is coming out and pushing the balloon forward.
The EM drive is moving forward when the balloon is still tied off at the end.
I heard about this theorized not some time ago and thought it was amazing!
The fact that it’s been thoroughly peer-reviewed and still stands up is nothing short of absolutely astounding.
This device works, and no one is quite sure how or WHY it does. It defies our current understanding of why physics work the way the way they do. Which mean basically means that we need to re-evaluate and refine our laws of physics because we have discovered empirical evidence that we’ve got something wrong. And trying to fix our math to accurately describe the universe is going lead to new discoveries about the fundamental nature of reality. IT’S MIND BLOWING.
Not to mention this device itself, if we can elaborate and expand on it, will change how we do propulsion. This might the next stage of propulsion technology. To the people a few decades in the future, combustion engine propulsion technology will seem as silly, outdated, and quaint as steam propulsion or horse-drawn carriages seem to us.
THE FUTURE APPROACHES.
god I’m such a nerd
This is hugely important stuff.
A lot of reports on this thing talk about how it “breaks the laws of physics,” but this is an inaccurate oversimplification. The reality of it is much more profound. If this thing indeed works, and the results we’ve gotten thus far can’t be explained by some sort of experimental error, it will redefine our understanding of physics. In other words, the laws of physics aren’t being “broken,” we’ve just been wrong about physics the entire time.
so what you’re saying is maybe we get long distance space travel before we go extinct of our own stupidity
Yes.
So we built a machine and we don’t know how or why it works?
Random Headcanon: That Federation vessels in Star Trek seem to experience bizarre malfunctions with such overwhelming frequency isn’t just an artefact of the television serial format. Rather, it’s because the Federation as a culture are a bunch of deranged hyper-neophiles,
tooling around in ships packed full of beyond-cutting-edge tech they
don’t really understand. Endlessly frustrating if you have to fight
them, because they can pull an effectively unlimited number of bullshit
space-magic countermeasures out of their arses - but they’re as likely
as not to give themselves a lethal five-dimensional wedgie in the
process. All those rampant holograms and warp core malfunctions and
accidentally-traveling-back-in-time incidents? That doesn’t actually
happen to anyone else; it’s literally just Federation vessels that go off the rails like that. And they do so on a fairly regular basis.
So to everyone else in the galaxy, all humans are basically Doc Brown.
Aliens who have seen the Back to the Future movies literally don’t realise that Doc Brown is meant to be funny. They’re just like “yes, that is exactly what all human scientists are like in my experience”.
THE ONLY REASON SCOTTY IS CHIEF ENGINEER INSTEAD OF SOMEONE FROM A SPECIES WITH A HIGHER TECHNOLOGICAL APTITUDE IS BECAUSE EVERYONE FROM THOSE SPECIES TOOK ONE LOOK AT THE ENTERPRISE’S ENGINE ROOM AND RAN AWAY SCREAMING
vulcan science academy: why do you need another warp core
humans: we’re going to plug two of them together and see if we go twice as fast
vsa: last time we gave you a warp core you threw it into a sun to see if the sun would go twice as fast
humans: hahaha yeah
humans: it did tho
vsa: IT EXPLODED
humans: it exploded twice as fast
I love this. Especially because of how well it plays with my headcanon that the Federation does so much better against the Borg than anyone else because beating the Borg with military tactics is nigh-impossible, but beating them with wacky superscience shenanigans works as long as they’re unique wacky superscience shenanigans.
Yeah, I love this.
Reminds me of the thing I wrote a while back about Humans in high fantasy realms - they’re basically Team Fuck It Hold My Beer I Got This.
Impulsive, passionate to a fault, the social structures they build to try and regulate this hotheadedness ironically creates even greater levels of sheer bull-headedness. Even their “cooler” heads take action in months or weeks.
All their great heroes of the past were impossibly rash by galactic standards. Humans Just Go With It, which is their great flaw but also their greatest strength.
klingons: okay we don’t get it
vulcan science academy: get what
klingons: you vulcans are a bunch of stuffy prisses but you’re also tougher, stronger, and smarter than humans in every single way
klingons: why do you let them run your federation
vulcan science academy: look
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores they don’t do experiments on one and save the other for if the first one blows up
vulcan science academy: this is a species where if you give them two warp cores, they will ask for a third one, immediately plug all three into each other, punch a hole into an alternate universe where humans subscribe to an even more destructive ideological system, fight everyone in it because they’re offended by that, steal their warp cores, plug those together, punch their way back here, then try to turn a nearby sun into a torus because that was what their initial scientific experiment was for and they didn’t want to waste a trip.
vulcan science academy: they did that last week. we have the write-up right here. it’s getting published in about six hundred scientific journals across two hundred different disciplines because of how many established theories their ridiculous little expedition has just called into question. also, they did turn that sun into a torus, and no one actually knows how.
vulcan science academy: this is why we let them do whatever the hell they want.
klingons: …. can we be a part of your federation
Come to think of it, I mean. Look at the “first human warp drive” thing in the movie. That was… Not how Vulcans would have done it.
you know what the best evidence for this is? Deep Space 9 almost never broke down. minor malfunctions that irritated O’Brien to hell and back, sure, but almost none of the truly weird shit that befell Voyager and all the starships Enterprise. what was the weirdest malfunction DS9 ever had? the senior staff getting trapped as holosuite characters in Our Man Bashir, and that was because a human decided to just dump the transporter buffer into the station’s core memory and hope everything would work out somehow, which is a bit like swapping your computer’s hard drive out for a memory card from a PlayStation 2 and expecting to be able to play a game of Spyro the Dragon with your keyboard and mouse.
you know what, I’m not done with this post. let’s talk about the Pegasus. the USS Fucking Pegasus,
testbed for the first Starfleet cloaking device. here we have a handful
of humans working in secret to develop a cloaking device in violation
of a treaty with the Romulans. they’re playing catchup trying to develop
a technology other species have had for a century. and what do they do?
do they decide to duplicate a Romulan cloaking device precisely, just
see if they can match what other species have? nope. they decide, hey,
while we’re at it, while we’re building our very first one of these things, just to find out if this is possible, let’s see if we can make this thing phase us out of normal space so we can fly through planets while we’re invisible.
“but why” said the one Vulcan in the room.
“because that would fucking rule” said the humans, high-fiving each other and slamming cans of 24th-century Red Bull.
there
must be like twenty different counselling groups for non-human
engineering students at Starfleet Academy, and every week in every
single one of them someone walks in and starts up with a story like “our
assignment was to repair a phaser emitter and my one human classmate
built a chronometric-flux toaster that toasts bread after you’ve eaten
it.”
Humans get mildly offended by the way they are presented in non-human media.
Like: “Guys, we totally wouldn’t do that!” But this always fails to get much traction, because the authors can always say: “You totally did.”
“That was ONE TIME.”
There’s that movie where humans invented vaccines by just testing them on people. Or the one about those two humans who invented powered flight by crashing a bunch of prototypes. Or the one about electricity.
And human historians go, “Oh, uh, this is historically accurate, but also kind of boring.” To which the producers respond: “How is doing THIS CRAZY THING boring????????”
There are entire serieses of horror movies where the premise is “We stopped paying attention to the human and ey found the technology.”
reblog for new meta.
RE that last line: McGuyver.
“MacGuyver” is the equivalent of Vulcan vintage human horror television.
during orientation at a human college, vulcans are presented with a list of swear words.
“what is the word ‘fuck’ for,” the innocent young vulcans want to know. “surely there are more logical intensity modifiers.”
“yeah, you’d think so,” say the weary, jaded vulcan professors. “you’d really fucking think so.”
there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.
This is why the Federation is the only organisation to ever stand a chance against the Borg
The Borg can adapt to the brilliant millitary strategies of the Romulan Star Empire, the Klingons and even the cold logical intellectual prowess of the vulcans
The Borg weren’t prepared for a starship captain to lure them into his 50′s noir detective holo-novel and then machine gun them to death with a weapon made out of hard light
This thread is amazing. Even as a baby star trek nerd that only really knows the new movies.
“there is a phrase in vulcan for ‘the particular moment you understand what the word ‘fuck’ is for’.”
I just died
I lost my shit at “toasts your bread after you’ve eaten it”
