Things Someone Should Have Mentioned At The Time, Part 1.

Welcome to a new series on this blog where I take the time out of my busy day to mention things that really, someone else should have mentioned earlier and saved us all a lot of trouble (and in my case, sleepless nights).

1. Star Trek. Now, let's get one thing straight: when I talk about Star Trek i'm talking about the REAL Star Trek. Shatner, Nimoy, Deforrest. You know a show is good when one of it's stars is named after a military tactic the yanks are using to kill the Viet Cong. You can keep all of your Next-gen, DS9 poofery, I once saw Captain Kirk build a primitive blunderbuss from dirt. Here endeth any competition and you haven't even had your turn yet. Awesome.
However, there was one part of the show that wasn't all that awesome. Correct me if i'm wrong, but the Enterprise was on a five-year mission of exploration and discovery, right? So how come every time the ship wasn't in orbit around a planet it was speeding past stars like nobody's business? Surely if you're supposed to be exploring you should stop at a few. Captain Cook didn't go tear-arsing past Australia, he got out and had a look around. Have you told Starfleet you're just phoning the trip in, Jim?

2. Tom Bombadil. I like Lord Of The Rings for a number of reasons, mainly because i'm pretty much convinced it's all true. You couldn't make that shit up, and one day Oxford scholars are going to find all of the ancient runic scrolls that JRR copied it from. Probably in CS Lewis' wardrobe. What does annoy me is that Tom Bombadil isn't in the movie. Yes yes, it's a non-linear part of the narrative. No-one likes it. He's weird and has singing sheep. But did you know that Tolkien's publishers put all of these reasons to him and told him to take Tom out of the book? His refusal delayed publication by about five years. FIVE YEARS. That's how much he wanted it in there, Peter Jackson. He was willing to put off earning cubic buttloads of cash and more elven groupies than his tongue could cope with (admittedly, 1950s British elven groupies) just to get a crazy dwarf and his choral bovines some page space. Given that, you'd think the matter would have come up while his estate (yeah, i'm lookin' at YOU, Christopher Tolkien) was negotiating the film rights. Twice, 'cause the shitty 70's movie left him out too.

3. Star Wars. In The Empire Strikes Back, Darth Vader had to take the Executor out of the asteroid field just to take a call on the hologram phone thingie. He had to sit on a huge metal plate just so's he could see a massive hologram of the Emperor. This technology was so limited, expensive and rare that in order to talk to his Admirals ON THE SAME SHIP (admittedly, a pretty big ship) Vader just used a TV screen. So can someone with the last name Lucas please explain how, 25 years earlier, this shit was handheld? And able to beam across the galaxy, from Tatooine to Coruscant? And while we're on the subject, it Tatooine is the place which is farthest from the bright spot in the galaxy, as Luke Skywalker puts it, absolutely everything that was ever important in the history of the galaxy happens there? Bloody hell.