Once upon a time, there was a Star Trek fan club in Atlanta that did not have enough members, and it did not have enough rules. So they had an idea: they were going to organize every other fan club in Atlanta with their rules and give them each a planet. So there would be a Doctor Who planet and a LARP planet and an RPG planet and an anime planet and so on.
And each of these planets would appoint ambassadors to visit the other planets and report back to their own planet, and to the Star Trek planet, which was the most important planet, what every other planet was doing. Because that’s exactly what you want to do before you spend your afternoon in the game shop playing BattleMech: stop for half an hour to listen to your planet’s ambassadors report what episodes of Forever Knight they watched at the vampire planet’s last meeting.
But in the interest of goodwill, some friends of some friends put an anime music video together for the Star Trek fan club to show at their table at some con. This was the early ’90s, when Akira was hot and people were saying things like “that Japanimation is totally bitchin’.” I don’t remember what song the editors originally chose, but the Star Trek fan club decided that it needed to be a much more totally bitchin’ song and so they overdubbed it with MC Hammer’s “U Can’t Touch This.”
I’m not making any of this up, I swear.
Word got back, and we were aggrieved and offended and amused, and so I decided to retaliate. I phoned a friend who had some Star Trek on video and a couple of us got together and edited, deliberately, the worst fan video ever made. You thought that songtape of Kirk and Spock exchanging meaningful glances to the tune of REO Speedwagon’s “Can’t Fight This Feeling” was bad?
Okay, that one I made up.
Well, this was worse. It didn’t have a storyline, I dumped video effects into it just because one of my decks could do that, and once I finished the master, I recopied it back and forth twice more with the tracking screwed up to make it look like the work of an enthusiastic idiot.
The scenes were picked almost entirely at random from six episodes of the original show and Next Generation, plus the movie where Spock gives a nerve pinch to the guy on the bus with the boom box. It was four minutes of shots of people in hallways, except I made sure to include Denise Crosby in a sexy costume, and when all the Tribbles got dumped on Kirk’s head, I fast forwarded and rewound and fast forwarded and rewound. And then the finishing touch, delivered with a chef’s kiss: the soundtrack to this eyeball-punching monstrosity was a song by the then-popular boy band New Kids on the Block.
The people who were in on the joke chuckled for maybe thirty seconds before it lost any charm. People who were not in on the joke were annoyed just being in the same room. The video was made to aggravate anybody who saw it, like going to a comedy club to see Andy Kaufman, that funny man from TV, and all he does is read a book at you until his voice gives out. Some joke, huh?
But the joke was on me, because when you spend half an hour making your Tribbles dump and jump, up and down, back and forth, as terribly as two VHS players can make them hop, you have, forever, associated the Tribbles with “You Got The Right Stuff” by New Kids on the Block. And David Gerrold, who wrote this episode, is such a nice man and such a good writer that even though I don’t care for Star Trek, I feel terrible that I did this to his script. And the original episode has those fine actors William Schallert and Stanley Adams in it. The guest stars and series regulars all deserved better than the New Kids on the Block. David, if you’re out there, I’m really sorry. We should have used Harlan’s episode.
Of course the kid loved it to pieces. “The Trouble With Tribbles,” I mean, not that terrible video. And that bit where Scotty asks Kirk whether his answer is on the record really is funny. But he howled throughout as the situation escalated, especially because it wrong-footed him completely. I successfully kept this one a complete secret, and when Cyrano Jones is selling Uhura on the wonder of Tribbles, one goes and munches on Chekov’s grain. Our kid said “It’s going to grow into a giant!” And boy, was he wrong. We’ve seen this kid lose it completely laughing, and I’ve reported to you good readers that he was in stitches, but this was next-level. Every subsequent revelation that the Tribbles are getting everywhere had him on the floor choking with laughter. Watch old shows with kids, friends. You might just have a really good time.
And then I seriously wrong-footed him by sending him out of the room and setting up the 1996 sequel episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, telling him that what happened next on Sherman’s Planet was resolved in this show. What actually happened was they made a thirtieth anniversary special and had a Klingon villain jump back in time a century to the events of “The Trouble With Tribbles,” planning to change history somehow. So Avery Brooks and Terry Farrell and their gang dig deep in the closet for some old Star Fleet uniforms and tech.
Honestly, the “gee-gosh-wow that’s really the Mister Spock!” business gets a little tired, but the production is remarkable and the visual effects to insert the 1990s actors into 1960s footage makes for some great little jokes. Say, that guy wasn’t there when we watched this scene half an hour ago! The time travel stuff is the really amusing part. Avery Brooks’ character is being grilled by two bureaucrats from the Federation’s time travel division, who really don’t want to have to clean up another mess involving that blasted Captain Kirk again, and one poor fellow thinks he may be caught in a Grandfather Paradox and is obliged to meet up with a lady on the Enterprise to ensure his own existence. And of course there are Tribbles. Tribbles everywhere.
That’s all the Star Trek I’m going to watch, but the kid enjoyed the heck out of it and he’ll probably want to start getting spaceship ornaments for our Christmas tree just like his uncle. He can get his own Blu-rays though. We’ll watch one more thing on the CBS streaming service before they bill me, so stick around for Saturday to see what that might be.