Star Trek at Fifty Years, and the First Week of a New Semester

Source: Copyright Paramount Pictures https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:STIn_Beauty.jpg

I spent part of my evening watching some Smithsonian Channel shows regarding the 50th anniversary of the initial voyage of the Starship Enterprise on Star Trek (TOS; that's "The Original Series" for those of you who aren't Trekkies). The show was a part of my youth; I am one of those lucky people who saw at least some of the episodes during their original airings on network television. It was in black and white (in my home, anyway), but I found it fascinating. This minor television hit from the 1960s had such an optimistic view of the future of humankind, as well as being filled with really neat devices and technology.

I talk about Star Trek during the first week of every class I teach. I ask my students about their attitude towards "science", and two words invariable come up: boring and hard. As we continue a discussion about how science works we talk about how science is a body of knowledge, a codified organization of facts and principles that we agree are "real" despite the cultural background of anyone studying science. In other words, we can believe whatever we wish. We can even decide, for instance, to deny the existence of gravity. But no matter how hard one believes that gravity isn't real, one will still drop like a rock if one steps off a cliff. So we start to collectively begin to understand how science works. But still, there are challenges in learning and mastering science. It can indeed be hard (and maybe boring, but I can't imagine how...). On the other hand, what a privilege to be living in the times that we do, with the knowledge that we have access to!

This was the Solar System of my youth

That's where Star Trek comes in. Episode after episode imagined "strange new worlds", and most of them included bizarre planets far removed from our own. To me, back in those primitive years before the Hubble Space Telescope and the Voyager satellites, the science of astronomy was an exercise in frustration. I would head to the library week after week, checking out every astronomy book in the stacks, hungering to understand our own Solar System. And we knew so little! Venus was shrouded in clouds. Mars had visible features, but they were unidentifiable from earthbound telescopes. Jupiter and Saturn had spectacular clouds, but their moons were simple points of light. Nothing could be discerned on their surfaces. Neptune and Uranus were small disks, and diminutive Pluto was a dot of light. I wanted to know more!

Mars, up close. The various orbiters we've sent have mapped the surface of Mars with more detail than much of the Earth, since oceans obscure much of our own planet.

The advances came so slowly (at least to this young growing child). The first satellite missions to Mars in the 1960s revealed surface features (and a lack of alien civilizations). And in the late 1970s, the two Voyager spacecraft began the grand tour of the outer gaseous planets. It was an excruciating wait as the small satellites passed first Jupiter, then Saturn, followed by Uranus and Neptune (years passed between each visit). Then, knowing the satellites had arrived, there was the excruciating wait for the pictures to be downloaded and processed. It was worth the wait. The pictures and data were astounding, revealing worlds never imagined by humans, even on Star Trek! Volcanic moons, ice moons, cratered moons, moons with atmospheres, rivers, lakes and seas. It was a menagerie of strange new worlds, and they were in our own back yard.

Jupiter from the Galileo mission

The Voyager missions were one of humankind's greatest adventures, and they continue as the satellites actually leave the Solar System and enter interstellar space. They continue to send data, even after 39 years. And other incredible missions followed, the Galileo to Jupiter, Cassini to Saturn, the New Horizons to Pluto. And most recently, the arrival of Juno at Jupiter. We are only now seeing the first pictures.The quality of the photographs and scientific data are astounding.

From the Juno mission THIS WEEK! Our first ever view of the north pole of Jupiter.

And what about all that cool Star Trek technology? Who could have believed that some of the craziest bits of technology from the original show would be commonplace less than fifty years later. Communicators and tricorders became the flip-phones and smart phones and tablets of today. Essentially the entire library of human knowledge can be carried in anyone's pocket (and what do we do with it? Send each other pictures of kitties...priorities!).

Saturn

And this is what keeps me going every day as I approach my thirty-fifth year in the front of a classroom. The adventure in space continues, as it does in all areas of science, including my own in geology. Just in the last year we saw Pluto up close for the first time, as well as the largest of the asteroids, Ceres. More planets and planetoids remain to be discovered. The launch of the Webb Space Telescope in a few years promises to extend our vision to the edge of the known Universe. It is an incredible time to be alive! I feel privileged to have seen a vision of adventure in outer space through the many permutations of Star Trek, as well as seeing a vision of humankind at its potential best. But I'm glad I'm still around to see the real human adventure of science exploration continuing.. And that's what I hope my students will come to understand as well.

From Paramount Pictures

Thanks Gene Roddenberry, and all the cast members, living and gone, who've been part of the Star Trek universe. Happy 50th anniversary!

TV Theme Songs that Evoke a Sense of Place: A Top 10 List...(Part 1)

A song lingered in my head for a few hours the other day, and I found myself wandering like an ethereal spirit someplace different, specifically on a beach in Hawaii. It was quite literally like an out-of-body experience. I could feel the warm air, the bright sun, the light sea breeze...I could even hear the waves crashing, and after a moment I realized that Steve McGarrett just might walk through the door into the computer lab where I was struggling to finish a long program review document.
That's what music can do for you, especially when it is tied to powerful visual images, and to a great extent, youthful memories. It got me thinking about TV theme songs and how they sometimes evoke a sense of place as much as they evoke characters, dramas, and comedies. It didn't take me too long to come up with my personal top 10 themes. It took quite a bit longer to find them all, but here they are:

These are not in any particular order, but the first two probably represent the top of my list. Hawaii Five O has the most unforgettable opening theme of any television show in history. Composed by Morton Stevens and performed by the Ventures, it is one of the few songs that can stick in my head all day and not drive me up the wall. You may or may not know that there is a new Hawaii Five O on CBS right now. It's ok, and I tune in to see the scenery backdrop, but I was upset that they took the opening theme and cut it half! The first night the show was on, I actually went online just to bring up the old theme and play it all the way through.

The show itself hasn't aged so well though. The plots were more sophisticated in my memories than in fact, and the actor's behaviour at a crime scene was appalling. Acting was stiff and wooden; watch an old episode some time and notice that whenever there is an office discussion of the case, everyone but McGarrett stands with their hands firmly at their sides, never moving. Any plot that required hippies or protesters was, um, clumsy and stereotypical. Still it was one of my favorite shows of all time.

I read somewhere that when Hawaii Five-O went off the air in 1979, after twelve seasons, there was an entire institution of studios and film crews left in Hawaii who had nothing to do anymore, so they more or less invented a new series. It was about some happy-go-lucky private investigator who lived in Hawaii who was named, um, something like Remington, or Colt, or Magnum, or something like that.

Oh, it was Magnum, and the opening theme is second on my list! The show, half comedy and half drama is one of my enduring favorites, and now that the DVDs are out, I realize the show has weathered the years quite well. They made great use of the landscape in most episodes, especially since a helicopter flight with the character T.C. was often an important plot point. One got a real sense of the geography of the islands, especially Oahu.

If you are only marginally familiar with the series, you may not know that the whole first season of episodes had a totally different theme song. It wasn't very good at all (check it out below).

Third on the list is one of those songs that will, in fact, drive you nuts in a few minutes if it gets stuck in your head, but it evokes a sense of place as sure as any other song on this list: The Gilligan's Island theme. Although the specific locality of the "island" is never mentioned, it existed on a studio lot in Hollywood. But the pilot for the series was shot on the Hawaiian island of Kaua'i, and I've been there. I've been to the real Gilligan's Island!

So my question is, instead of trying to get off their island, why didn't they just go up the beach to the housing development?

For your listening pleasure, I found three links, the first of which is the version everyone remembers:

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/2315010/gilligans_island_opening_theme_in_color/

And then there is a second, earlier version, in which the Professor and Maryanne get no billing. Really! I, like many others, liked Maryanne better than Ginger, and the Professor was one of my life role models. According to Wikipedia, Russell Johnson, the actor who played the professor, insisted that any science statements he made on the show had to be accurate:

http://youtu.be/cfR7qxtgCgY

Trivia question of the day: What was the Professor's name (the character, not the actor)?

I always assumed the castaways were traveling from a Hawaiian port, but listening to the original theme music, one would have to assume they were in the Caribbean:

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIvslFMAaew

Theme number four evokes a sense of place, but it evokes a place nowhere near Earth...Star Trek.

I appreciate the original theme well enough, but I thought that the theme for "Star Trek: The Next Generation" caught the majesty of space a bit better than the original series. None of the other spinoff series ever came close, but I can listen to the movie soundtracks for hours. For the purists, I found a Youtube of the original series, shown below:

Number five on my list is a theme song that takes me to two places. The first is Lake Tahoe, one of my favorite local destinations, and the other is my youth. My grandparents NEVER missed "Bonanza", and so that music has the ability to turn me into a six-year-old child spending a night at the grandparent's ranch (the two acre ranch was in south Ontario, California; how many southern Californians can remember when Ontario had ranch properties?).

The map that burns up at the start of the theme song is actually oriented with North pointing to the left. Carson City and Virginia City are actually east of Lake Tahoe. Wow, if the family still owned that ranch, they would be billionaires....

That's it for Part one of this exploration of television theme songs that evoke a sense of place. We do have an extra bonus theme song for a place that you all thought didn't really exist at all: Bedrock!

Well, it does exist. I saw it this summer. It's in the extreme western end of Colorado, in the Paradox Valley. I did not see any dinosaurs, or Fred or Wilma. It is conceivable that some dinosaurs would be found nearby, entombed in the Mesozoic rocks that form the local cliffs.

Part 2 will be posted shortly. In the meantime, what shows would you add to this list?