Star Trek The Next Generation — Rare Parody from 1993 (updated)

Some background before you watch this NSFW Quicktime clip:

This was found on a public temp directory on a UNIX server waaaay back before the world wide web in 1993 (was it the Hyperarchive? I can’t remember…). I was an undergraduate at the time and spent all night downloading what was then a really huge 18 megabyte Quicktime movie using telnet over my 28.8 modem – just to see what it was. The clip wasn’t really as good as myself and my friends had hoped, we had a few laughs and WTFs and that was that.

Now years later my being a digital pack-rat has caught up with me – I still had this clip on a dusty CD-R backup. I’m not sure how I was able to hang on to an 18 meg file at the time – before burnable CD-Rs and other cheap storage was available, but I did.

I figured by now a nicer quality version would have turned up somewhere on the internet – I found a ton of parodies and satires of STNG on services like YouTube, but not this one.

It could still be out there somewhere but it’s not easy to locate, so this appears to be something rare. So now, regardless of the content, I have to share. I even emailed this to Wil Wheaton (definitely the most wired veteran of the show). I thought he’d get something out of it, but I’m not sure if he ever saw my email.

Turns out the author of this little parody, an “Artemus Barnoz” (also known as Richard Brandow according to Google) was apparently behind one of the few old-skool Mac OS computer viruses as well as an actual writer for Star Trek the Next Generation (eyebrows rise). It’s hard to be sure what the true story is, but his name is all over the clip and the read-me that came with it.

This is provided as-is, the quality is low and the size of the clip is miniscule by today’s standards. It is provided in Quicktime format (even for the iPhone) via some conversion that doesn’t seem to have degraded the image quality any more than it already was.

Dumb as it is, hopefully some Star Trek fans will get a kick out of this. And having been made in the early nineties it’s probably going to hold up less today as well.

And again, due to the use of foul language and cheesy composited nudity this is not-safe-for-work.

Click the link to view Quicktime movie:
Treky.mov

Click the link to view an MPEG version (if you just can’t deal with Quicktime or H.264):
Treky.mpg

Here’s the read-me that was found with this movie clip:

This QuickTime Movie was entirely produced over a period of 3 days on the following equipment:

Computer: Mac IIci
Software: Adobe Premiere
Hardware: RasterOps 24STV
Adobe Photoshop
MacRecorder
SoundEdit

The film was compressed using the CINEPAK codec and looks best when the monitor is set to “Millions”.

Note
This little film showcases what’s possible with a Mac and QuickTime: You can make your own film without shooting a frame of video, you can edit footage so it no longer resembles the original source material and you can edit the sound track to make your actors say anything you want. The possibilities are endless.

enjoy.

Artemus Barnoz
A member of The Computer Graphic Conspiracy

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Update, more info on the author

As you’ll see in the comments on this post, the original creator got in touch. I asked some questions via email and with his permission I am reposting the full back story here:

Subject: Re: [Semi-Blog] Comment: "Star Trek The Next Generation - Rare Parody from 1993"
Date: Mon, 5 Jan 2009 13:47:16 -0800

Eric Peacock: Thanks for dropping a line. It has seriously made my day.

😀

Learning about your site made mine as well, I didn’t think anyone had seen my little parody after the 90’s. Imagine my surprised to know it was referenced on a blog in 2008!

EP: Even though my post gets critical about the clip, I’d love it if you could provide any more background info or history.

Sure.

Originally I made a 2 page color comic strip for a British magazine called “Black Ice” (sort of a british version of Mondo 2000). The story involved me and a friend watching star trek TNG. It starts with the enterprise orbiting a planet and as the camera pulls back it turns out to be Picard’s bald head. Picard announces that Spock seems to have defected.

Troy is completely naked. My friend and I comment that TNG is such an intellectual show (har har) and with babes like Troy on the ship, why would anyone want to defect.

We then get absorbed into the television set and end up in the episode where we have fun with the different characters. Data goes nuts (Worf suggest fixing him with Radio Shack parts) and Picard has found a trace of Spock’s beacon on a planet.

We join the landing party and end up in a series of caves. We eventually find Spock and ask him why he defected… Turns out he didn’t defect and was there to join James T. Kirk (who appears with the same naked sexy female body as Troy on page 1). and then Spock exclaims: “with babes like him in the federation, I’d be crazy to defect!”

Anyway… so all of this was made in Photoshop in 2D in what looked like a sort of Photo-Novel. The response was great (the publisher even sent me a take from a morning chat show where they talked about the magazine and they only talked about my parody).

For me it was just a gag that I did with a friend and I did it quickly as a sort of throwaway joke. But because of the response it got in the UK, I thought that I should remake it and pay more attention to color correction, make better frames etc…

I started thinking about it and then realized, it would be great if I made it into a moving video instead of a flat 2-page comic. Thinking more about it, I came to the conclusion that I should make a -different- story altogether and make something new.

That’s how it started.

At that time, most people weren’t on the net most people had 300 baud modems etc… so I compressed the final film into 15 fps and made the picture small enough to play at a reasonable rate for computers at that time. By today’s standards it’s choppy and low res, but back then that was the top of what technology could deliver video wise.

At the time, I received a lot of feedback from people who literally cracked up at the jokes etc… Today it’s pretty juvenile and might bring a smile, but back then a lot of people told me there were on the floor with laughter. (not to mention that TNG was more in the pop culture, today it’s old and boring).

After doing that, I embarked on a new parody project: I was going to make a live action version of Pinky & The Brain with footage of Orson Welles & Joseph Cotton. I began making hand drawn storyboards, watching episodes of pinky on vhs tape and going through my collection of Welles films.

Unfortunately my “real life” TV career took off at that time and so that project was never completed and remains unfinished (ironically, like many Welles films).

EP: Were you ever actually a writer for STNG?

Not a staff writer, no never. But I wrote a script which my agent sold to Paramount. Our contact there was a guy named Eric Stillwell. I guess my stuff tends to be jam packed with concepts and so my stuff ended up being scattered in 4-5 episodes.

My basic story was this: The Klingons have found that the Romulans have invented a sort of Doomsday weapon. Fearing an invasion, the Klingons want to strike first against the Romulans to ensure their survival. Since the federation is between the two factions, they will be caught in the crossfire.

So the federation convinces the Klingons to go on a secret mission to Romulus, using Klingon cloaking technology. The best of the Empire and the federation (aka Picard & the crew of the Enterprise) will go to Romulus to destroy the device (the Klingons go along because they secretly wish to steal it and use it to expand their territory).

Long story short (Long story short, isn’t wish to bore you), when they arrive they are captured and tortured. Turns out the Romulans -never- had such a device and it was all a ruse to capture the best of the Klingon Empire & The Federation! 🙂

Our heroes eventually escape with the help of Riker who was altered to look like a Romulan and who infiltrated Romulus days earlier.

Anyway, I saw bits of my story in the 2 parter where Spock goes to Romulus and the 2 parter where Picard is captured by the Cardassian and eventually tortured, looking for a device that didn’t exist.

They of course added extra stuff in those episodes (like the new enterprise captain etc…) which I never had in my original script. But imagine those 4 shows into 1 episode 🙂

EP: Sure, the clip is dated now, but as the original read me stated this was a great example of how video production was no longer limited to the big leagues. I think I held on to it partially for that reason.

Thank you very much. I was always a believer that technology allowed individual to produce materials that could compete with things made by companies or large teams of people. And in video in particular, if I had tools back then like Final Cut, Maya, Boujou, Money or Pixel Dust (stuff we use in our production pipeline today), can you imagine the impact.

But Premiere & Photoshop was pretty much all we had and even in compression from Cinepak to H264 the mind boggles at the progress/leaps & bounds we’ve made in short years.

EP: I still hope Wil Wheaton caught it even though my email to him probably went straight to his junk filter.

Personally I don’t know if any of the actors saw it back then. I certainly make a lot of efforts to never reveal it or send it to anyone at paramount (nor even show it to my agent at the time). I didn’t want to ‘jinx’ my chances of selling a script and never told my agent of my neoist/artist name.

After my TNG script submission (which they obviously liked), I received from them a package (it was a bible for their new show) to see if I would submit another script. It turned out to be Deep Space Nine (deep spaz nine) and after reading that stuff, nothing appealed to me. And I wasn’t interested in writing anything for that show.

I was however going to send a second script for which I had begun working on a treatment called “The Words of Mercury” which was a pretty cool idea (which I may eventually use somewhere else) but by then TNG was winding down and they were moving away from TV and into films and an outsider like me wasn’t going to be the one writing the movie when they had plenty of regular producers & staff writers to do that.

And so instead, I continued to work in TV but in my country (I live in Canada) and since then I’ve been a radio commentator for 10 years on technology at the CBC and a TV hot on Radio-Canada (french arm of the CBC, I am in Quebec and a francophone). and for the last 12 years I’ve also worked as a television director in the news department, doing commercials and television shows (mostly in french).

THANK YOU VERY MUCH!!!

And take care!

Barnoz