Dick Smith Update – 01- We Visit Bob and Cathy Burns

(Above) Dick standing in front of the original George Pal’s Time Machine from the 1960 classic. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Time_Machine_%281960_film%29

Last weekend, Dick and I dropped in to visit Bob and Cathy Burns at their home\museum in the San Fernando Valley.  I was aghast that Dick had never visited the science fiction\horror and fantasy Mecca, and delighted to be the one to introduce him to it.  It goes without saying that Bob and Cathy were thrilled to have the makeup master visit them. We had a wonderful afternoon hob knobbing and reminiscing.

By the way, you may remember an early entry where I recount Mike Okuda’s 40th birthday bash held at Bob and Cathy’s house. If not, check it out – http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/03/13/mikes-40th-b-day-spectacular/

Story behind The Time Machine – In the early 1970’s, MGM had an auction of their props. Bob attended with $1000 he’s scraped together, with every intention of going home with the Holy Grail, the Time Machine. The price shot up to $4000, way out of his league. Bob was heartsick, and left before the final bid. He later heard it was sold to a traveling show for between 8-10 thousand dollars. In 1975, a friend of Bob’s was in an Orange County thrift shop looking for interesting items when he caught sight of the familiar big dish in the back of the store. The machine was in rough condition, and was missing the chair. Bob made an offer, and finally had the Time Machine. George Pal had given Bob a set of plans of the machine years earlier, and with the help of Dennis Muren, Tom Scherman, Mike Minor, Dorothy Fontana, TV producer Mark Richards, and Lynn Barker, the machine was restored.

(Below) Kindred spirits,  Dick and Bob,  smile for Doug’s drex files roving eye.

DS9 Tech Manual – 02 – Runabout

(Above) TNG borrowed the runabout, establishing the layout of the aft compartment of the vessel, seen in this cutaway. Note the warp core situated in the spine of the ship, and the deuterium and anti-matter pods in the aft part of the assembly.

Wow! The DS9 Tech Manual Illustrations were a real hit with everyone, so we’ll keep them coming!

Until the Defiant came along, the Danube class runabout was the only real piece of starfleet hardware we had on Deep Space Nine. It was designed by Rick Sternbach before he turned his attention back to TNG. Jim Martin’s main contribution to this design was suggesting the idea that the runabout carry detachable cargo pods under wing, like the Space: 1999 Eagle Transporter.

(Below) I put my own spin on the idea by suggesting that these containers could also be special duty modules coming in a variety of flavors… science, medical, cargo, or even crew cabins.

(Below) “Visible V-8″ style, the Runabout’s total warp propulsion system pared down to it’s basic components.

Bill Mauldin

(Above) Dorth clipped this “Peanuts” strip out of the paper for me on Veteran’s Day. I’m a big Bill Mauldin fan, and wondered how many people reading “Peanuts” today would even know who Mauldin was. I realized it was my duty to present this tribute to Bill in today’s drex files.

When I was just a kid, I came across a book in my father’s collection called “Upfront”, one of the most famous books to emerge from the Second World War, a classic in every sense of the word. In Bill Mauldin’s drawings of the infantry dogfaces Willie and Joe, done while he himself fought in campaigns in Sicily and Italy, Mauldin created the immortal archetypes of the American fighting man. He knew, as one who had been there himself on the front line and in the slit trenches, drenched with mud and rain, that Willie and Joe – with their unshaven faces, their gallows humor, their fortitude, and their dislike of privilege and cant – exemplify something enduring and noble about Americans at war during WWII. He knew their gripes, their fears, their jokes, and their opinions, and he recorded their talk with the most pungent accuracy.

(Above)) Cartoonist Bill Mauldin in Italy during WWII.

Bill Mauldin served his country in WWII with the 45th Infantry Division and other outfits. He received the Purple Heart for wound received in Italy. After the war he became one of the most distinguished editorial cartoonists in America, first for the St Louis Post-Dispatch and later the Chicago Sun-Times. he received the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1944 and 1959, as well as numerous other awards.

The great war correspondent Ernie Pyle described Bill this way:

” Sergeant Bill Mauldin seemed to us over there to be the finest cartoonist the war had produced. And that’s not merely because his cartoons are funny, but because they are so terribly grim and real. Mauldin’s cartoons aren’t about training camp life, which is most familiar to people at home. They are about the men in the line – the tiny percentage of our vast Army who are actually doing the dying. His cartoons are about the war.”

I’m more than honored to run a cross section of some of my favorite Bill Mauldin Willie and Joe cartoons today in the drex files.  If you are interested in learning more about this American original, find “Up Front” here – http://www.amazon.com/Up-Front-Bill-Mauldin/dp/0393050319/ref=pd_sim_b_1

Time Names Ares Rocket “Best Invention of 2009″!

(Above) The dramatic roll out of the Ares at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.

The Best Invention of the Year: NASA’s Ares Rockets

“Metal has no DNA; machines have no genes. But that doesn’t mean they don’t have pedigrees — ancestral lines every bit as elaborate as our own. That’s surely the case with the Ares 1 rocket. The best and smartest and coolest thing built in 2009 — a machine that can launch human beings to cosmic destinations we’d never considered before — is the fruit of a very old family tree, one with branches grand, historic and even wicked.”

Read more at Time Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1934027_1934003,00.html

Here’s a Time Magazine video feature on the selection of Ares I as “Invention of the Year.”
http://www.time.com/time/video/player/0,32068,49642414001_1937778,00.html

And here’s a Time Magazine gallery of cool Ares I-X photos:
http://www.time.com/time/photogallery/0,29307,1932999,00.html

Mike – Thanks for sharing!

(Below) NASA workers make pre-launch preparations on launch pad 39-B at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The rocket is part of a family of rockets in NASA’s Constellation program, started in 2005 to go to Mars or the moon. It will also be equipped to fill in for the current aging Space Shuttle.

Bajoran Interceptor\Transport

(Above) The gull-like Bajoran interceptor. This CG model was only seen in one episode, “Shadows and symbols”. As far as I know, the CG model was never seen again or modified to appear as a different vessel.

One of the more graceful designs for a Star Trek spaceship, came from my old buddy Jim Martin during his tenure on DS9. I think I had mentioned that Jimmy was our first art department production assistant, and he was determined to become an illustrator. He couldn’t have been in a better place. Being a number of years younger than the rest of us, Jim was highly influenced by Star Wars, and often that would show in his work. Nothing gave me more excess stomach acid than that, so I would carry an eleven foot G-95 cattle prod and used it in case the “Force” clouded his vision. This is one of my favorite Jim Martin spaceships. It captures the spiritual essence of the Bajoran people.

(Below) The far superior physical model of the interceptor at Image G. Read more about it here -  http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/02/15/bajoran-transport/

Eyecandy – 28

“Defiant Found”

A companion image for last weeks “Mirror” set pictorial.

Click for a better look.

A study in how things evolve once they leave the art department. Above is the original dock concept that we sent to Eden Effects. This weeks “Eyecandy” uses final dock as seen in the episode. It was built by Mike Stetson.

Steve Canyon – 31

http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/07/11/the-return-of-steve-canyon/

http://stevecanyondvd.blogspot.com/

Calling Dick Tracy! 91

MMMM….MMMM…Toasty!

BSG BBQ – Gary in action.

A few months back, Gary and I appropriated Dorth’s patio to shoot elements for the BSG direct to DVD movie “The Plan”. Since Gary had made the decision to more graphically drive home the destruction of the colonies this time around, we called our good pals at KNB Makeup Effects for a hand. Greg Nicotero, head honcho at KNB joyfully allowed us all the crispy critters we could carry from his football field sized makeup lab in the Valley. Note the sweet little  family unit we set up. Heart warming!

Honey? I’d like to have a few friends over for a cook out. Dorth looks on, as Gary tip-toes through the terror.

DS9 Tech Manual

The Defiant bridge is one of my favorite starship bridges: it’s lean, mean, and to the point. I was in my glory on this one, as Mike let me lay out all of the ship’s interfaces. I sweated every single panel, and every button on every station pertains to that station’s function. It was no fooling around.

I flip through the pages of the DS9 Technical manual shaking my head, “When the hell did I do all of this?”

Digging through my files the other day, I came across all of the original Illustrator documents which I had prepared for Margaret Clark at Pocket Books. Originally the book was meant to be strictly about the gothic Cardassian space station, but I’m a Starfleet kind of guy, and there was no way we were going to do this book without a section dedicated to the USS Defiant and her various gear. Going through this stuff reminds me one thing in particular:  just how much freaking fun I had in the Star Trek art department. To the best of my knowledge, none of these illustration have appeared anywhere in their original digital form. Click on ‘em and see them as never before, in a nice and big oversized format. If you guys enjoy this, I’ll make it a point to post more.

(Below) I originally prepared this illustration for good Sir Gary Hutzel, and the DS9 episode “The Sound of her Voice”. I was in my glory yet again! Design a Starfleet shuttle and pocket hangar bay? Let me at it! For more on this design –

http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/chaffee-shuttle/

http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/2009/01/04/defiant-shuttle-bay/

(Below) The never seen internal arrangement of the artillery sized pulse phaser sported by the Defiant. Note the two white spheres at the back which tip their hat at the the laser cannon seen in “The Cage”, and another hat tip on the back wall to the TOS G-95 systems.

Lego J

The Enterprise J from “Azati Prime”.

When Chris Gay sent me these images of his Enterprise J, I just about fell off my chair. I have to admit an oddball feeling of having “arrived”, after all, this honor is usually reserved for the Capitol Building, Statue of Liberty and the Loch Ness Monster. Chris admits to being obsessed by the design, “You did a wonderful job with the Enterprise J. It’s beautiful to look at. It’s like a Starfleet take on Noah’s ark.” Chris! Not only is your Leggo sculpture of the J amazingly cool, I bet it hurts like hell to step on in your bare feet!

For more of the Lego J – http://www.brickshelf.com/cgi-bin/gallery.cgi?f=377756

For more on the Enterprise J – http://drexfiles.wordpress.com/category/ent/enterprise-j/

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I guess I can pretty much retire now, ’cause I’ve seen it all: an Enterprise J made of Lego blocks!

Okuda Log – The Launch Of The Ares 1-X

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Mike and Denise have posted an in-depth report on their trip to the Cape to view the launch of the Ares 1-X on their blog. Check it out!

http://web.me.com/michaelokuda/michael_okuda/Blog/Blog.html

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