• A Look Back,  Inside Entertainment

    A Look Back: Star Trek IV – The Voyage Home

    If you wanted movies news in the 1980s, you had limited avenues. There was no internet. I’m sure there were magazines, but as a teenager I had no idea what they were. I – and so many others – had to rely on Entertainment Tonight (1981), a television magazine about movies and TV series. I’d watch Entertainment Tonight for three things: interviews with actors I liked stories on movies I was interested in, and any clips. Back then, there wasn’t simultaneous release of movies. Often, they would open in Australia months and months after they’d opened in the US. So Entertainment Tonight was a valuable tool for a nerd such…

  • Inside Entertainment,  Media Rants

    Discovering How to Ruin Star Trek

    I’m interrupting my overblown series on ranting at Star Wars to rant this week about another ruined franchise: Star Trek: Discovery. The second season just finished and I cannot contain myself. The first season was so bad that it almost killed any possibility of improvement. Almost. They then changed the showrunner. They changed writers. They had feedback from the fans. They had feedback from the licensees. Hmmm. Okay, all that amounted to a glimmer of hope. Maybe they could take all that on board and do something with Discovery and make it … Star Trek. Right? Right? Unfortunately, not. The second season isn’t just an indictment on the second season,…