Charles Apple

What better way to end your week than with a festival of ultra-geekazoid Star Trek items?

We’ll run through these pretty quickly, so hold on to your pointed ears…

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1. ANALYZING THOSE RED-SHIRT DEATHS

Seems like damn near every episode of Star Trek, some poor security guard — wearing a red shirt, naturally — would get bitten by a space vampire or knocked into a bottomless pit by a surly android.

Left: Before. Right: After. ‘Nuff said.
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Matt Bailey — a web marketing guru who apparently has waaay too much time on his hands — conducted extensive research into his DVD collection to quantify the actual peril Hollywood extras put themselves in when they put on a red shirt and stood behind the hammy William Shatner.

The Enterprise has a crew of 430 in its five-year mission. (Now, I know that the show was only on the air for 3 years, but bear with me. 80 episodes were produced, which gives us the data to build from.) 59 crewmembers were killed during the mission, which comes out to 13.7% of the crew. So, that will be our overall conversion rate, 13.7%.

Data Segmentation:
However, we need to segment the overall mortality (conversion) rate in order to gain the specific information that we need:

• Yellow-shirt crewperson deaths: 6 (10%)
• Blue-Shirt crewperson deaths: 5 (8 %)
• Engineering smock crewperson deaths: 4
• Red-Shirt crewperson deaths: 43 (73%)

He then goes into just how each crewman dies and considers other factors, such as: Is a red-shirted crewman more likely to live or die if Kirk gets laid in the episode?

Here are the statistics:
Red Shirt Death episodes = 18
Episodes with fights = 55
Probability of a fight breaking out = 70%
Kirk “conquest” episodes = 24
Kirk “conquest” + fights = 16
Kirk “conquest” + red shirt casualty= 4
Red shirt death + fight + Kirk “conquest” = 3

…As the data shows, Captain Kirk “making contact” with alien women has an impact on the crew’s survival. The red-shirt death rate is higher when a fight breaks out than when Kirk meets a woman and a fight breaks out. Yet the analysis shows that meeting Kirk meeting women only happens in 30% of the missions.

Conclusion:
We can reliably improve the survivability of the red-shirted crewmen by only exploring peaceful, female-only planets (android and alien females included).

Oh, but Mr. Bailey is just getting started. It’s about then that he pulls out the PowerPoint. And then starts graphing. He even invokes the name of the one, true Great Bird of the Galaxy: Edward Tufte.

It’s a scream. Read it all here.

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2. IT’S THE NEW ‘INTERSTATE’!

Here’s a hot new font for all your redesign needs:

This is not the Star Trek typeface. That would be this one:

(Please excuse the awful kerning. That’s not mine.)

Instead, Trek Disruptor Blast is the typeface used for the nameplate in the old Star Trek comic book, published in the early 1970s by Gold Key comics. Like these:

This really brings back memories. Sigh.

Download it free (for personal use only) here.

If you’re interested in more Star Trek fonts, check out this site here. Or at this site here.We’ve not tried any of these, so we won’t vouch for them. We’re just pointing them out.

I’ll look forward to spotting Trek Disruptor Blast soon on redesigned pages at the Newseum.

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STAR TREK MOTIVATIONAL POSTERS
While we’re at it, we thought we’d share this little gem (or is that “Jim”?) with you. It’s a site where you can download faux inspirational posters featuring Trek characters and themes.

This one is our favorite. Click for a larger view:

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DOWNLOAD THAT NEW EPISODE

The latest web episode of Star Trek: The New Voyages was to be posted last night.

We’re not sure it’s there; last we heard, the traffic was a bit much for the fan-produced series and its servers. We’ll cruise by this weekend and check it out.

What are The New Voyages? Glad you asked.

A well-connected group of L.A.-based Trek fans are writing and producing episodes that would, in theory, be placed in the fourth season of the classic 1960s Star Trek — had the show actually lasted four seasons, that is.

Jeff Quinn as Spock, James Cawley as Kirk and John Kelly as McCoy. Kelly, I’m told, is a urologist. Playing McCoy, I’m sure, has gained him the respect of his peers.
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Apparently, Paramount Pictures allows them to do this — as long as it remains a non-profit venture. Their first few episodes created so much buzz that a number of Trek professionals — writers, actors, special-effects folks and so on — have climbed aboard. Among the stars that have made guest appearances in The New Voyages:

* Walter Koenig - He played the Beatlesque Russian Ensign Chekov.

* Grace Lee Whitney - Captain Kirk’s blonde girl Friday, Janice Rand

* Majel Roddenberry - Wife of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, Majel played a number of characters, including Nurse Chapel. In New Voyages, she reprises her role as the voice of the ship’s computer.

* William Windom, who played the doomed Commodore Decker in the popular episode in which the Enterprise goes head-to-head with an alien Doomsday killing machine that looks like a giant Bugle-brand snack chip.

The latest episode — “World Enough and Time” — stars George Takei in his old role of Sulu.

The production values of the episodes is downright stunning. The acting… um, well, it’s stunning at times, too. But for other reasons. *Cough.*

If you’re interested in reading more — or in downloading episodes — find them here.

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VINTAGE TREK COMIC REPRINTS

If you want to know more about the vintage Trek comics I mentioned above, check out Curt Danhauser’s guide to the Gold Key Trek comics.

All these comics were collected last year and reprinted in nice, neat paperback format. You can get them all from Amazon. Most are around $15.

Volume one:

Volume two:

Volume three:

Volume four:

and volume five:

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As Mr. Spock told the glow-in-the dark man: Live long and phospher this weekend.

QaPla’!

This entry was posted on Friday, August 24th, 2007 at 7:05 am and is filed under Amusing stuff, Charles Apple, Comic books, For your bookshelf, News design, VizEds Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.