TVSquad

This might sound more overdue than According to Jim's cancellation, but one of TV's greatest creators is getting the Hall of Fame treatment.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry will join the ranks of the Television Academy's Hall of Fame next year at a special induction ceremony at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

Other inductees include Candice Bergen, production and art director Charles Lisanby, announcer Don Pardo, Tom and Dick Smothers and game show producer Bob Stewart. Is there anyone that they left off the list?

You have to admire the tenacity of writer Harlan Ellison. He filed a lawsuit against CBS Paramount accusing the company of not paying him for all the ancillary income the company earned from the episode of Star Trek he wrote in 1967, "City on the Edge of Forever." Yesterday, Ellison announced on his web site that he had settled with CBS Paramount and he was very, very pleased. He didn't reveal how much money he made, but he probably did quite well.

After all, CBS Paramount has done very, very well with that original Star Trek episode. It's regarded as -- and is -- the all-time best show in the entire original ST canon. Ironically, Ellison never liked what Roddenberry and company had done with his script.

Over at ComicMix, Alan Kistler has written annotations for the new Star Trek movie and how well it fits into the overall continuity of the show. It's a pretty impressive list and does prove that despite the blatant contradiction of the show's history as a result of time travel, they were actually pretty good with getting the details of the characters correct.

Spoilers follow this paragraph. You have been warned.

In what may be the most frightening piece of nostalgia ever produced, someone has posted their video from Paramount's Star Trek Adventure online, which was at Universal Studios way back when. Judging by the ages of the original actors, it was probably produced sometime around Star Trek IV or Star Trek V (or possibly VI) and serves as a wonderful example of how quickly everybody involved with this American icon was willing to sell out.

Of course, Roddenberry himself was selling IDIC medallions by season three of the original series, so this blatant commercialism should come as no surprise. Does anybody out there actually have a video of themselves participating in this? If so, did you have to wait on line for it? If I did something like this ever, I would likely bury the videotape somewhere and hope it was never discovered again.

Someone's embarrassing video is after the jump.

Star Trek will be in movie theaters on May 8, 2009, and with it the hopes and fears of Trekkers worldwide. I'm one of those longtime fans who is both excited and apprehensive about J.J. Abrams' take on Gene Roddenberry's vision of Wagon Train to the stars. Yes, that was once all it aspired to be. It was just going to be a TV show. Roddenberry optimistically referred to a five year mission in the intro hoping it might last that long.

Of course, that's a long, long time ago -- in a galaxy far, far away, if you mix sci-fi metaphors. Now, we're poised to see a new incarnation of Star Trek, and the new trailer is online. Take a look at it after the jump.

Star Trek fans everywhere are mourning the loss of Majel Barrett Roddenberry, who died yesterday at her home in Bel Air, Calif., after a battle with leukemia. Barrett Roddenberry was the widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who boldly cast her as second-in-command of the USS Enterprise in the original 1964 Star Trek pilot.

She didn't stay in command for long, thanks to the NBC execs of the time, but Roddenberry remained aboard the Enterprise in the role of Nurse Chapel and as the voice of the ship's computer. She went on to voice the computer for six Trek series and many of the films, including J.J. Abrams' upcoming reboot. She also guest-starred as Lwaxana Troi, the Captain Picard-chasing empath, on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine.

It's almost as if J.J. Abrams is patting nervous Star Trek fans on the back and cooing, "It's OK. Everything's gonna be alright."

Variety reported this week that Majel Barrett-Roddenberry will reprise her role as the voice of the Enterprise computer for Abrams' upcoming Star Trek flick. Barret-Roddenberry, the widow of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, voiced the computer for all six Trek series and many of the movies. She also played Christine Chapel in the original series and two of the films as well as "Number One" in Star Trek's original pilot. And who could forget her as Lwaxana Troi, the randy Betazoid from The Next Genertation?

The bar mitzvah is a Jewish rite of passage, the time in a boy's life when he becomes a man -- symbolically -- by reading from the Torah. When a girl does the ritual, it's called a bat mitzvah. I mention all this because in TV, the bar/bat mitzvah has been the catalyst for some wonderful episodes, mostly on sitcoms.

The Simpsons celebrated Krusty the Klown's bar mitzvah in the episode "Today I Am A Klown," which was a variation on one of the all-time great sitcom bar mitzvahs of all time: the episode "Buddy Sorrell, Man and Boy," on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Square Pegs shared "Muffy's Bat Mitzvah" with viewers, and this past season, Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David used his friend Jeff Greene's daughter Sammi's bat mitzvah to announce that he never put a gerbil up his butt.

Don't you just love the web? News traveling so fast, ideas extrapolated and speculated upon based on the simplest of facts. That said, here's a sweet little tidbit that I found amusing. Tom Cruise was spotted on the Los Angeles set of the new Star Trek feature film. He reportedly was visiting writer/director JJ Abrams. The two men, you'll recall, collaborated on Mission Impossible 3.

This exclusive, courtesy of JFXOnline, revealed that Tom stuck around the set for a couple of hours. Prior to this sighting, there had also been talk last fall that Abrams had wanted to enlist the superstar to make a brief cameo appearance in the revamped Star Trek opus, telling the story of how creator Gene Roddenberry's original characters came to be. How Captain Kirk made it out of the Star Fleet Academy (in The Wrath of Khan he said he cheated on his Kobyashi Maru simulation test), as well as the first time Kirk met the half-Vulcan, half-human Mr. Spock.

It's becoming clear that if you plan on buying every season of a TV show, at least the more popular ones, you might want to wait a couple of years (if you can wait, that is). They're coming out with more and more "complete sets" and if you buy the sets individually you're probably paying more (and missing out on some extras, though that's not always the case).

Here's another one. CBS/Paramount will release a complete set for Star Trek: The Next Generation on October 2, to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary.

Are you a Captain Kirk fan or a Captain Picard fan? On one hand you have toupees and overacting and awesome songs, and on the other hand you have a calm, tea-drinking guy who pulls at his shirt all the time. I lean more toward Picard, but I often find that punching an alien instead of talking to him and sleeping with various female life forms gets the job done too.

In honor of Star Trek: The Next Generation's 20th anniversary,* Marty Beckerman makes a case for Jean-Luc Picard as President of the U.S. in this Huffington Post piece. More specifically, he compares the leadership qualities of the Enterprise captain with the leadership qualities of our current President.

It's a great piece, even if you're not a Trekkie geek virgin Star Trek aficionado.

* God I'm old.

Hey, Trekkies! Did you spend all your money on the complete set of Star Trek DVDs? Time to get a bank loan because there's more stuff to buy. A lot more.

CBS Paramount Studios is unloading its vault of Star Trek memorabilia for an auction at Christie's this fall. There will be something from every series and all 10 movies. More than 4,000 items will be up for bid, including big ticket numbers like a replica of Capt. Kirk's chair that was recreated for a Deep Space Nine episode called "Trials and Tribble-ations". It's expected to go for $10,000 to $15,000. And the actual miniature USS Enterprise used as a visual effect in the movie, Star Trek: The Undiscovered Country, could fetch upwards of $25,000.

The collection goes on tour this week in Germany. It goes up for auction on October 5-7 at Christie's in New York.