It is time to journey where Film Seizure has not gone before – the world of Star Trek! This year marks the 40th anniversary of the oft-maligned Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Geoff and Jason spend the next 100+ minutes in a big ol’ lovefest for this high sci-fi take on Kirk and crew aboard the Starship Enterprise.
Film Seizure 
Of 𝙘𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙨𝙚 I was listening!
Joel Goldsmith did do some sound effects for The Motion Picture, but 𝙩𝙝𝙚 instrument, which also featured in the soundtracks for The Black Hole and Meteor, was named by its creator “The Blaster Beam”. It involves various metals, magnets, strings stretched horizontally at a great length, and it’s played with a hammer and a mortar shell.
Seriously.
Oh, look! It’s in 10 Cloverfield Lane, too!
It’s as cool to see played as it is to hear.
Inventor Craig Huxley’s relationship with Star Trek preceded this film, too:
https://vignette.wikia.nocookie.net/memoryalpha/images/a/a9/Tommy_Starnes.jpg/revision/latest/scale-to-width-down/350?cb=20090306212632&path-prefix=en
Goldsmith was finishing his score, still with placeholder shots where effects were needed, as late as December 2nd of 1979. The film hit screens on the 7th. The theme is a second draft. His early version, which is lovely, deliberately avoided a theme, which Wise told him was the only thing wrong with it. This music was restored from its original session tapes, and released in its entirety a few years ago sounding, frankly, amazing, and that early music was included. It’s amazing too.
https://lalalandrecords.com/star-trek-the-motion-picture-limited-edition-3-cd-set/
Yeah, Oscar-wise, the 1979 nominees were a good set of composers: Mancini, Dave Grusin and Lalo Schifrin, but none (save Jerry) doing their most notable work. Winner Georges Delerue (pronounced perfectly, Jason), is known for Platoon, Contempt and Hiroshima Mon Amour, not for his …A Little Romance (though it is sweet stuff!).
Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaster_beam (nice, big picture there)
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Dave, this is just amazing! Blaster Beam. Wow. Thanks for all the info. I knew we could count on you!
Jason
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Finally! Like navigating a three-dimensional, wall-shifting maze has been the search for this commentary track, which I considered fully removed from the web due to my inability to find it at all. Turns out it was just very well buried, beyond the reach of most crawl spiders. I feel like I was unable to share this with you before, so, if so, here:
http://movies.trekcore.com/motionpicture/audio/commentary_tmp_de.mp3
Paraphraseth me the site what hid it so well: “Visual effects supervisor Daren R. Dochterman, restoration supervisor Michael Matessino, and producer David C. Fein discuss the theme of ‘human connection’ which they worked to bring out in the updated cut of the film; with Robert Wise’s approval, the removal of many subtle tech-heavy elements, extraneous computer voices, clunky stating-the-obvious lines of technobabble dialogue, exchanging repetitive sensor monitor shots with previously-unused character close-ups, restoring the warm color tone of the film, and the visual effects work needed to compete the film. They also cover a wide variety of topics from the revised opening credits to the Jerry Goldsmith score.”
Here’s the latest (pretty clunky) discussion on getting the finished version of the film up to at least 4K, if not film quality. This is what prompted the re-look.
https://www.missionlogpodcast.com/the-one-with-david-c-fein/
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