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Star Traders: A Review free porn video
Star Traders: a review
by Trismegistus Shandy
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The short-lived television show _Star Traders_ (1972-73) has long been
legendary among fans of science-fictional TV with good stories and bad
special effects. Canceled after less than two seasons, it was never
widely syndicated partly because of the small number of episodes and
mainly because of rights disputes in the wake of the bankruptcy of Silver
Silo Studios. These rights disputes prevented any official video release
until 1989, when a LaserDisc collection of six of the the best episodes
had a limited distribution before being suppressed due to renewed
lawsuits. There have been a few bootleg editions over the years; my first
exposure to the show was via one of these, a set of VHS tapes with grainy
video, echoey audio and Korean subtitles I watched in a friend's basement
some years ago. I recently became aware of a slightly higher quality set
of AVI files in a torrent (obligatory note: I do not officially endorse
torrenting of pirated content).
The show featured the crew of an interstellar trading vessel which
typically visited a different planet or space station in each episode,
looking to buy and sell various cargoes advantageously; variations in
local laws and customs provide much of the plot conflict, as they find
for instance that merchandise they had hoped to sell legally has been
outlawed in the time since their last visit to a given planet. (The show
wasn't very consistent in its physics, but it took relativistic time
dilation more seriously than _Star Trek_ ever did. Decades of social and
political upheaval passed on the planet Ereshkigal between the crew's
first visit there in episode three and their second in episode eighteen,
while mere months passed for the crew.)
The crew of the _Caravan_ included the jovial patriarch Captain Frederic
Tunstall (Tim Siler); his wife Dr. Emily Tunstall (Ursula Kingman), the
ship's medical officer; dapper ladies' man First Mate Roger Enderby
(Jeremy Walters), Dr. Tunstall's younger brother; Chief Engineer Sven
Larssen-Tunstall (Lars Svensen); his wife, Chief Steward Amy Larssen-
Tunstall (Julie Siler); and a passel of other Tunstall cousins and in-
laws in subordinate positions, and Tunstall children and grandchildren
underfoot. It makes sense that if centuries pass on your home planet
while you spend your career on a starship, you would bring your family
along. First Mate Roger Enderby, the only unmarried character among the
main cast, played something like the "Kirk" role in many episodes, being
the focus of romantic subplots with a variety of women in various ports.
The other main cast tended to be involved in intramarital drama B-plots
more typical of a sitcom than a space adventure show, e.g. Dr. Tunstall's
constant efforts to get Captain Tunstall to cut back on the exotic alien
pastries.
Those with an encyclopedic knowledge of 1970s character actors will
notice that _Star Traders_ did somewhat better than _Star Trek_ in
portraying women in positions of authority, but less well on racial
diversity; all the main cast were white. In his defense, executive
producer Quinn Siler pointed out that they were nearly all related.
Critics further noted that much of the cast were hired from among Siler's
own extensive set of Hollywood hopeful cousins and in-laws, which
undoubtedly helped with making the Tunstall family *look* like they were
related.
The transgender element, my reason for reviewing the show here, appeared
in the finale to season one and the scant six episodes of season two. In
the final episode of the first season, the crew are on shore leave at the
giant space station Raven-4 when a local terrorist group sets off a mind-
shuffling device which affects everyone within a half-kilometer radius.
Most people swap with someone fairly nearby, which means most of the crew
end up in the bodies of relatives and shipmates (for instance, the
Captain and the Doctor swap, as do the Chief Engineer and the Chief
Steward), but some shuffle into the bodies of station natives or visiting
crew from other ships, some of them nonhuman or even non-humanoid. (Non-
humanoid aliens were generally represented by puppets, not very
convincingly.) Nearly all were restored to their original bodies by the
end of the episode, but the original body of First Mate Roger Enderby was
killed in a riot, and he was stuck in the body of the lovely teal-skinned
alien Siruanna (Raquel Lundquist, credited as a guest star in this
episode). Walters left the cast as of the end of season one, while
Lundquist joined the main cast and was added to the opening credits
beginning with season two; several episodes of season two involve a B-
plot focusing on Enderby's discomfort with and gradual adjustment to his
new body -- not just his altered gender, but the new senses his alien
body has (he's empathic, and sees five primary colors including
ultraviolet and infrared).
Various zines have published interviews over the years containing
contradictory statements from Walters, Lundquist, and Siler about the
reasons for the switch. Reading between the lines, it appears that Siler
found Walters personally hard to work with, but decided, on the basis of
fan mail, that his character was too popular to kill off. This unique
solution allowed him to fire the actor and keep the character. Whether it
was a good solution may never be known; I freely admit my bias, the cause
of which will be obvious to my readers here, toward thinking the six
episodes of the second season more interesting than most of the first
season. Raquel Lundquist was a fine actress, too little remembered
(chiefly for guest roles on _M*A*S*H_ and _Columbo_), and could, I think,
have done great things with the role of Enderby if the show had continued
for another season or two. Alas, she was still growing into the role
when the show ended, and most of the zine articles I've run across
vociferously disagree with the producer's decision. I note merely that
these critics did not have to work with Walters; his tenure on two other
shows was similarly brief and in 1975 he left acting for a career in
sales.
-----
This fictitious review of an imaginary TV show is released under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States
License. You may repost it on other sites, for instance, or write new
stories based on it, as long as you give me credit and release your own
stories under the same license.
-----
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