My first radio story will be broadcast today. You can listen to it here right now. The process of assembling and editing it was not all that much different from making these. Although in this case I had expert help -- WAMU managing producer Tara Boyle -- to make the piece sound better. The piece is about the starship Enterprise. That is, the impressively large, now-49-year-old model that appeared in every episode of Star Trek, 30 years before computer graphics became Hollywood's defacto visual effects methodology.
I initially imagined this segment as a Daily Show-style news package wherein I would feign indignation that an artifact as significant as the civilization-seeking, boldly-going Enterprise rates a spot only in the basement of the National Air & Space Museum. (Apparently they also have some spacecraft there that have actually flown in space.) That approach proved to a be little ambitious for my first time out of the gate.
I haven't spent enough time with the various spinoff series to get much of a read on them, but original-flavor Kirk-Spock-McCoy Star Trek is a thing I love. My favorite formal thing about the story is that I managed to use, chronologically, music from three eras of Trek: Alexander Courage's 1966 theme for TV series, two snippets of James Horner's score for The Wrath of Khan from 1982, and finally, Michael Giacchino's theme from the 2009 Trek reboot directed by J.J. Abrams.
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Naturally I thought of a theory about why one of the songs I mentioned affects me so profoundly as soon as producer Nick Fountain turned off the mics in NPR's Studio 46 and episode #161 of Pop Culture Happy Hour -- on which I was honored to be a guest -- wrapped. But fortunately for you, dear listener, the three full-time panelists on this weeks's show -- Linda Holmes, Stephen Thompson, and Trey Graham -- were all on top of their games. Their usual fourth man, my pal-for-life Glen Weldon, was on top of a raft or something, vacationing in Grand Cayman.
You can hear the episode in web browser here or download it from iTunes here.
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1. Pop Culture Happy Hour
I was delighted to sit in on this week’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast,
a Very Special Episode we -- okay, I -- have decided to call "The Cavil
Over Henry Cavill." The A-topic this week was the arrival of Man of Steel,
the muscled-up, darkened-down reboot of Superman film franchise that
is, we all agree, short on humor. Also short on height. Zing!
Any regular listener to the show will know that Glen Weldon, my pal-for-life and 25 percent of the show’s regular lineup (along with host Linda Holmes and Stephen Thompson and Trey Graham), just spent the better part of two years researching and writing the marvelous Superman: The Unauthorized Biography. I recently ran a freezing cold 12-mile death race wearing a Superman T-shirt, so our credentials are roughly equivalent.
But
they didn’t exactly need a second longtime Supes fan. I snuck in by mocking Henry Cavill’s average-ish height. He is, for the record,
exactly as tall as I am if you believe IMDB, an authority on which actor
heights seem to be self-reported.
“I think he makes you feel short,” Linda teased me during the show.
Ouch. But I am not alone. My film-critic crush Dana Stevens said on the Slate Culture Gabfest this week -- an episode featuring the Gabfest debut of one Glen (Superman:The Unauthorized Biography) Weldon -- that she kept picturing Cavill “standing on a milk crate. Amy Adams seems strapping compared to him.”
Cavill’s performance in the movie is the one
element we all agreed worked splendidly. Otherwise we differed in our
assessments, although it’s clear I liked it more than Linda, who liked
slightly more than half of it, and more than Steven, who hated it....
which means he still may have appreciated it more than G-Weld, who in
various podcast appearances this week has called the film “small” and
“evil” and likened it to a Transformers film. I understand why he said that, but that’s still way harsh, guy.
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