Settle back with a few beers and join me and The Longman himself as we continue our journey through the world of Star Trek movies, this time by watching Star Trek IV: The One With The Whales.
"Portraying humpbacked whales as worldwide saviors could lead to humpbacked people having unfair expectations placed on them." - Russell T. Davies, probably
As a kid I adored the Bird of Prey as a "cool looking" spaceship that I asked my mom to rent Star Trek 4 like 50 times till she forced me to pick something else...thus I picked The Wrath of Khan so I could eyeball the Miranda Class
I always loved the semi meta line Chekov said about “ and Admiral, it’s the Enterprise”. Growing up in a navy town I remember being excited at the connection made between the 2 ships. The Brits missed it. ;)
Melvar, you have to respect your actors. I got a magnificent performance out of Bill because I respected him so much. And in Star Trek V, I got a magnificent performance out of me because I respected me so much.
@@dragonknightleader1 Melllvar: Make it out to Melllvar. That's with three Ls. George Takei: I think I've done enough conventions to know how to spell "Melllvar".
This is one of those rare films where I get this feeling of joy when I watch it. And it's an equally joyous experience listening to Drinker and Mauler review it as well!
I agree with Anna That Star Wars Girl, the idiots on Picard, when asked what future thing they wished existed in the present, without hesitation said "acceptance." I want that Kidney Pill. I could USE that Kidney Pill.
Ah, finally. The ONE Star Trek movie I've seen enough to remember (it was the only one we had growing up). I... I can be part of the conversation now 🥲
Classic Star Trek had a great deal of humor in it; even in serious episodes, there were moments of levity, jokes, and so on, all a reflection of the intelligence of the writing and the chemistry among the cast members. (And of course there were whole episodes that were meant to be comedies, A Piece of the Action, for example.)
This is the film that made me a Trek fan. I had seen some TOS prior to this but never got into it. I was 14 when The Voyage Home came out in cinemas and was late getting to the theater. I arrived while Spock was talking to Amanda and in the very next scene had to ask someone nearby what the hell the big screaming space cigar was. By the end of the film, I wanted more Trek, and not long after that I found a VHS rental shop nearby. I’ve been hooked ever since.
This movie turned a casual Star Trek fan into a fully fledged Trekkie. Fun facts. The movie was titled in the UK when originally released as The Voyage Home: Star Trek IV to appeal to none Star Trek fans and the promotion worked making it a hit with the casual audience. And when the movie was released on VHS, it had a little recap of Star Trek III at the beginning with William Shatner narration just before the opening titles.
Yeah, I remember the intro well & seeing the Enterprise explode on the big screen was impactful. It really served well to bring the audience up to speed who'd not seen the previous two outings.
It's funny to think that at one point, these writers had San Francisco pegged as the centre of galactic government and spacefaring for humanity several centuries in the future.
I don't find that connection too difficult to make. Star Trek embodied the ideal progressive liberal future global government and San Francisco represents that ideal in reality.
1:52:54 The underwater shots of the whales actually WERE animatronics. They were so realistic that the save the whales crowd thought they had actually gone underwater and filmed whales. The production staff had to demonstrate the animatronics to convince them.
Regarding leaving Chekov's phaser behind, I think they covered their bases well enough. They show that it's broken, and I believe an internal examination would show parts so advanced that they just look like plastic, as often is with Star Trek tech. That phaser probably was considered a toy by the authorities and got stored in some evidence locker until lost or destroyed in one of the wars to come.
I love how Mauler makes the whales/Wales joke right at the beginning, then again right at the end of the commentary, and both times it goes totally over Drinker's head. XD
MauLer proposes fixing a complaint about this movie with The Holdo Maneuver! If that’s not just pure gold!! In all fairness, Admiral Cartwright tells the President “We’re launching everything we have...” so it was addressed.
I like how this movie transitions from highbrow sci-fi to American excess in .05 seconds. Then, it has some fun pointing out that though the future is more "enlightened," it's really just as impractical and emotion-driven as the present, only with transparent aluminum.
We know that Cryogenic Stasis is invented within 5 years after Scotty gave that guy Transparent Aluminum, because the Eugenics war starts in 1992, and a ship with that technology launches at the end of the war in 1996. (And in TNG we meet people from 1991-2 who were in a space module with cryogenics.) Its my headcanon that Transparent Aluminum introduced in 1987 made that possible.
In terms of seer joy and contentment this is my favorite Star Trek. I've never watched the original series not do I care about the later spinoffs. My Star Trek mania started and finished with the movies featuring the Original crew and Galaxy Quest. Wrath of Khan is great but for pure fun nothing beats The Voyage Home!
@@seans9134"Wrath of Khan" is certainly the best Star Trek film, but I would argue "Voyage Home" is better than Search for Spock. There are great moments in "Search for Spock" but I think it's a little more unfocused overall. "Voyage Home" is very economically written and the quality is more even.
DS9 is the best Tv show ever made. I've watched the OG as well, its great, minus season 3. TNG obviously outstanding. Voyager Mid, Enterprise very good @@73rmin8r
@arefinahmed4682 I agree with @73rmin8r, if you like the movies you will certainly enjoy certain episodes of the original TV show. For someone who just wants to dip their toes in and see if they like the water, I'd highly recommend trying the episodes "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Balance of Terror", "City on the Edge of Forever", "Space Seed", "Operation: Annihilate", "The Doomsday Machine", "The Trouble With Tribbles", "The Immunity Syndrome" and "The Ultimate Computer". If you enjoy the movies, and you enjoy those episodes, then you'll love the rest of the show too.
The thing with the glasses though is you have to remember Star Trek II, III, and IV all happen within days of each other. So, it’s entirely possible Kirk had the glasses with him from the time McCoy gifted them to the events of IV
IV has always been my secret favorite movie. It's the only one that felt like a fun episode of Star Trek. Wrath of Khan is amazing, but this one is the one that I would love to watch again.
The Leonard Nimoy movies did not have Spock and Bones bicker, did not have the crew in the military uniforms the cast hated, and since Nimoy considered Star Trek an ensemble, he gave the not-big-three side quests.
Can’t wait until Mauler gets to The undiscovered country, he’s gonna have a ball with that one… hopefully the final frontier doesn’t take him out with cringe before it happens.
I'm from the USA and a huge fan of British science fiction (Wells, Clarke, Quatermass, Hitchhiker's, Who, etc) and it's really fun to hear a British take on one of our old American science fiction warhorses. I do remember seeing this at age 15 or so, it was a small town theater but there were fans in uniform from the slightly bigger town 20 miles away. The Challenger dedication at the beginning received general and respectful applause. That's John Shuck as the Klingon ambassador, he was the dentist "Painless" in Robert Altman's MASH (1970). His scene does indeed set up Undiscovered Country in a bit of blatant foreshadowing that I need from a Star Trek film in the same way I need Sylvester McCoy's Doctor to get bit by an alien he's trying to pet.
By this point, Star Trek novels were well established, so they took on many of the loose ends in the movies, so the movies didn’t feel as much pressure to tie everything up. “Probe” is the direct result of this movie, and is a banger of a romp.
Gillian pointing out that she has a photographic memory is important to the story because it shows how at the end of the movie when she finds herself living in the 23rd century that it won't take her years and years to re-learn everything. She'll be shown something once and retain the memory.
I dunno, I always thought she was going to be put on some kind of Starfleet ocean-going vessel to monitor the whales and study them, rather than be shipped off into space. Maybe I misunderstood, but that was the only thing that made sense to me.
The scene where Sulu sees the Yellow Pages ad on the side of the building, he was supposed to meet his great, however many great, grandfather. But there was a problem with the child actor, and the scene was scrapped. Much like, the original scripts, Sulu was helming Enterprise as a favor to Kirk, because he had six weeks free before his next assignment. And when they get back to Earth, because he had been there for Genesis, that assignment was taken away from him. He WAS captain of the Excelsior.
If you're wondering how or why they put in accurate engineering about the amount of "transparent aluminum" they would need to make a tank like that, remember that they filmed this partially at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, which hand opened only two years before. The Aquarium has enormous two- and three-story tanks of water with transparent sides. If James Doohan (or any of the rest) had politely asked any of the engineers who had worked on those tanks to draw up engineering plans for refitting a Klingon Bird of Prey with transparent aluminum bulkheads, I'd imagine they would have been thrilled to help.
Notice how the Enterprise crew struggles with the 20th century's "colourful metaphors" - with a running theme that 1986 is a primitive place compared to the more elevated 23rd Century that Kirk and his chums are from? And then along comes Kurtzman with his "sheer (expletive) hubris" line - from a 25th Century Starfleet Admiral, no less - to detonate an f-bomb under all that.
Remember that time Geordi was confused when Zephram Cochrane said he needed to take a leak because people in the 24th Century speak differently to people in the 21st? *sigh*
Though it’s a toss up between Wrath of Khan and The Undiscovered Country as my favorite Trek film because they’re both so solid, I can’t dispute The Voyage Home’s contribution to Trek as a whole. I have the fond memory of my folks taking me to see it in theaters when it originally released. Seeing the dedication to the crew of the Challenger while still fresh in the American consciousness was a sobering reminder. And smart to put it at the beginning versus the end dampening the joyous tone. I can’t wait until you guys get The Final Frontier. It had such a problematic production but it had such great moments with the three leads. The bickering was very on point for the franchise. They carry the film.
1:16:18 The strange part is that the original series clearly and repeatedly established these characters use money in their era, there are lots of references to the crew of the Enterprise are paid, there is a galactic economy in episodes like "The Trouble With Tribbles" etc. This is literally the first mention of them not using money, a notion that carries through all Star Treks from here on out, but it's just a funny throwaway line. Heck, even in the previous movie, McCoy tries to buy passage to Genesis in the bar scene. Now, physical money, that's really all Star Trek IV needs to imply. Kirk understands how money works, he just isn't used to handing it around in paper notes and coins.
I think TNG was first series that wholeheartedly explored the no money no poverty socialist utopia idea and it seemed like only the Federation had abolished it. The Ferengi are portrayed as greedy by comparison. Perhaps, by this point, Kirk had spent so much time flying around the galaxy that he had almost forgotten how to use money.
This has always been my favorite Star Trek movie. I like the lighter tone and the larger roles for the ensemble cast outside of the main trio. Also, as an animal lover, the whales storyline always appealed to me on a gut level. I requested "the one with the whales" so often as a kid that my parents stopped bothering to ask which movie I wanted to watch when it was my turn to pick, and just put this on automatically.
YES YES! I can't wait. I love your streams and especially your Star Trek movie reviews. But Star Trek 4 has got to be my favorite of ALL of the Star Trek films.
I always understood the whole "we don't use money" line referred to them not using physical currency in the Federation, but there's still some form of electronic or digital payment.
Really, any currency they had in the 23rd century would be completely different. Your Federation Credits are no good here on 20th century Earth. That's why every time traveler in the real world ends up stranded here, homeless and crazy ranting about stuff in the future but completely dismissed and ignored by everyone from our present day. They have no means to recharge their technology. They have no tools to repair anything. Whatever crazy alloys they have no value to anyone in the present because nobody can identify them as valuable or have any way to make them useful. So what happens to a person with no money, no valid ID? On the streets, maybe committed forcefully into an institution if they say the wrong things. The absolute best case scenario is they keep their mouth shut, manage to find some under-the-table unskilled manual labor since none of their advanced degrees in whatever future skills or knowledge are useful in the present and can't be proven anyway, and make enough cash to barely survive a very quiet, uninteresting life while trying to go unnoticed by any authorities.
My uncle worked on this film. When we heard the plot, we thought it was the dumbest thing ever. Saw it and it became my favorite hands down. Even went on location and set to meet the crew.
"Kirk and Spock have such good timing, you could just have the two of them walking around a town and that would be fun" Huh. THAT would be an interesting thing to put into a random SciFi show.
You got to watch Star Trek 5..... As bad as it is, parts of the dialog are great fun. It's elements of friendship and lore make the arc of these characters more complete.
I loved this one. Mostly i think because it was so different, at the time, than the normal sci-fi fare. Of course, it's basic plot was repeated a lot in movies and tv shows for years afterwards.
I was little when I saw this movie for the first time. I always watched Star Trek with my parents since it was in syndication in my area almost every night. Because of that, I didn't understand the modern cultural references, so I also felt like a fish out of water along with the crew. I knew Star Trek more than the real outside world. It wasn't until I got older that I understood the humor and culturally significant elements more. On a note on Challenger. Reagan's speech about it when the disaster happened it quite heartfelt and definitely worth a watch.
The humour you get from the original cast and especially in IV, is something that i’ll always find lacking in subsequent generations of series and films.
This one was light enough that a lot of trekkies could bring their children. ( I was one of the thousands of kids who watched the challenger launch in school--elementary in my case.)
This is one of those times in a franchise where going in a different direction was a great Idea. This movie is far more light-hearted, innocent fun and I think the franchise needed it after 3 movies that were at times very dark, serious and heavy. Is 4 a masterpiece or the best movie in the franchise? No but it's a lot of fun and honestly it's actually aged really well, my ex girlfriend who wasn't into star trek watched this movie with me over Christmas about a decade ago. Even though she knew nothing about star trek even she had a blast.
This isn't the best Star Trek movie, but it is the one I enjoy the most. It's just a lot of fun. I'd watch this any time and be in a better mood after than I was before I put it on, every time. I've found it flipping through channels late at night (back when I still even owned a TV) and would always stop flipping and just watch this. I'm sure it's the Star Trek movie I've watched the most times, and I'm sure it's not even close.
It's good to see you guys to continue with this series and it's funny to see MauLer trying to be diplomatic so he he won't offend Trek fans.😂That being said 19:19 - silly Longman, people of Federation don't have missiles, they have photon torpedoes ! And all though we've seen them being fired at considerable distances - episode TNG Wounded shown torpedoes being effective at the distance of 300 thousand kilometers - I doubt that firing at the probe would work. Yes, inertia should carry projectiles at intend target but there are at least few way to deal with objects without it's own propulsion in ST; 1. tractor beam - it can not only capture & immobilize objects but it also can push it away. 2. phasers - it was shown being capable of shooting down large amount of small & relatively fast moving objects. 3. transporters - it was shown on occasions that you can beam up objects moving trough space. And that's only few ways in which probe could defend itself because being alien ancient technology it can have other defensive measures unknown to Federation. And assuming that he wouldn't simply changed course and flew around incoming projectiles. Should Starfleet try to do something to stop the probe? Probably but I don't see what realistically they could do without writers using some kind of deus ex machina? So, maybe line of dialog about countermeasures failing would be desirable but still I think that UFP was helpless against this probe. That being said I enjoy those conversation you guys have and I wonder how MauLer will react to Star Trek V ? 😂 Live long and prosper! 🖖
My all time favourite Star Trek movie…I have watched this movie over 100 times and I literally watch it for a pick me upper on bad days…lol…it’s down right perfect in my mind…..I love the movie!❤😂😊
This is the Star Trek movie I've seen the most. My mom had it on VHS. It was the only one we owned, so I watched it a bunch growing up. However, I think Undiscovered Country is probably my favorite.
Fish out of water stories were very popular in the 1980s . Like Balky from Perfect Strangers or Paul hogan of crocodile Dundee fame . It was a genius idea after the heaviness and grief of the previous films to do one of the finest Star Trek comedies ever . Star Trek is one of my favorite science fiction . Being a former 1980s kid was amazing to grow up with so Many great films .
+ Coming to America, Flight of the Navigator, Beverly Hills Cop, Police Academy/ies, Splash, Big, Labyrinth, to an extent even D.A.R.Y.L and Harry and the Hendersons. Yeah, definitely a thing at the time!
They hadn't officially announced TNG yet. I went to a con shortly after the movie, and Majel was talking about there being a plan for it. But the full pitch was not there yet. (But it wouldn't have been long after.)
