Star Trek: The Art of Juan Ortiz
Titan Books, 2013As the original TV series of Star Trek slowly inches toward its 50th birthday, interpretations, homages, pastiches, and adaptations continue to proliferate. The cottage industry of Star Trek fiction continues unabated; Star Trek fan tributes multiply online like tribbles; there've been two hysterically wretched new movies; there's even occasional mad rumors of a new TV series. It's almost fair to characterize it as infinite diversity in infinite combinations.Even so, Trek fans won't have seen anything quite like the new oversized volume from Titan Books, Star Trek: The Art of Juan Ortiz. Ortiz is a designer for Disney and Warner Bros. and a sometime-illustrator for DC Comics, which means the casual browsers at bookstore new release tables won't have heard of him. This is just as well: the weird idea of the book is at least as much of an attraction as the artist.That idea is simple: what if each of the original televised Star Trek episodes (the book consistently numbers those episodes at 80, leading to the inescapable conclusion that no die-hard Trek fan participated in the book's production) had instead been a theatrical movie release that required its own poster?As a conversation-starter among fans of the old show, it can't easily be beat: here are all the iconic adventures that fired the imagination of a generation and created one of the most successful science fiction franchises in TV and cinema history, and Ortiz has tried to come at each one afresh while maintaining a vaguely late-60s/70s visual style. These 'posters' tend to list the main cast, any notable guest stars, and each episode's writer and director, and sometimes Ortiz also includes a movie-style tag-line ("Why was this episode banned in the UK?" for the first season's "Miri," for instance, or "The Kiss That Traveled Throughout the Galaxy" for the third season's "Plato's Stepchildren," which featured the first interracial kiss in television history).An inevitable side-effect of all this good clean fun will be the kind of hypothetical nostalgia that's become an occupational speciality for long-time Trek fans. Shown the posters for all these movies that were never made, those long-time fans will start to long to see those movies, and to imagine what they might have been like. Star Trek's creator, Gene Roddenberry, wanted each weekly episode of the show to pack the dramatic punch of a good movie, but all too often he was constrained to produce that punch using the equivalent of stone knives and bearskins: he had a little over 50 minutes per episode, he had hovering network censors, and he had about $150 in his special effects budget. Counterbalancing these he had some enviable constants - namely, his central cast of actors, all of them veterans who could be relied upon to make the absolute most of whatever material lay to hand.Given the show's technical limitations, it's amazing how many cinema-quality episodes it managed to produce. Trek fans will wince affectionately at the well-known clunkers (demonic children, space hippies, and the so-bad-it's-awful spectacle of William Shatner trying to get in touch with his inner woman), but gazing at Ortiz's thought-provoking visual summaries underscores just how many of those original episodes would have made damn fine movies. "The Corbomite Maneuver," with its tense climax, "Balance of Terror," with its taut, three-dimensional character work, and of course the series' three finest episodes, "Mirror Mirror" (introducing the alternate-universe concept that would much later underpin the aforementioned atrocious 21st century movies), "Amok Time" (written by science fiction legend Theodore Sturgeon), and most of all "The City of the Edge of Forever," written by Harlan Ellison and directed by Joseph Pevney. It's impossible to look at Ortiz's poster for, say, "The Ultimate Computer" (in which the U.S.S. Enterprise's new computer-control system takes over the ship and uses it to attack other starships) and not conjure the movie it would have made - a better movie, perhaps, than some of the multi-million-dollar big screen outings fans actually ended up getting.Star Trek: The Art of Juan Ortiz arrives well in advance of the gift-giving season at year's end, but anyone with a Trek fan on their list should keep it in mind. And fans who can't wait will find an attractively wistful experience awaiting them in these pages; it's a game of 'what if' drawn on a large scale.
