jetpack_monkey | VID: Starships! (Monochromatic Remix)

Title: Starships! (Monochromatic Remix)
Based on: Starships! by

bironic
Source: Space-based black & white TV and movies released before July 1969)
Song: Nicki Minaj - Starships

Summary: A celebration of astronauts, space rangers, scientists, faithful sidekicks, and the spacecraft they love to fly.

Update: Now available in both Youtube and Vimeo varieties:

"" (Watch on YouTube)

Vimeo Password: rockyjones

Watch on Vimeo

Download 31.7MB MP4 file (right/ctrl-click and "Save link as...")

Notes: This vid premiered in the Brand New Classic Hits vidshow at Vividcon 2013.

This is a near shot-by-shot remake of bironic's Starships! vid using exclusively black and white sources that were released prior to July 1969.

How did this come to be? Well, to start, I love the original vid. Love it. Just... bironic captures the joy and the wonder of space travel so perfectly, it makes my heart go "ping!" The vid is pretty damn expansive, especially given the limited amount of time that went into making it.

With that said, I very much felt the absence of certain fandoms, but they were fandoms that would not have fit in bironic's original vid and I don't blame her for not including them. I am talking about the early days of sci-fi, when brave astronauts soldiered to the stars long before we'd actually managed to make it to the moon, all in glorious black and white.

I made a half-joking comment to bironic (screened now) in her original Starships! post that "I kind of want to do a remake with nothing but black and white space adventure."

And then I got really obsessed with that idea really quickly and started collecting source. Once I realized the idea was a good one and that it wasn't going away, I asked for bironic's formal permission to proceed, which I received. She's been amazing in this whole process and I cannot emphasize enough that this vid would not exist without hers. I made a comparison side-by-side video for both vids and ~~I'll be putting that online in a separate post in the next couple of days~~ you can find that here.

The vid contains roughly 77 different sources. The numbers varies depending on how you count source. I've made a separate post listing all of the sources and later I'll be making some recommendations.

Source quality was a problem throughout the making of this vid. I had to make a call very early on where I wanted to lend the most weight -- prettiness or history. I chose history, because I'm me. Source quality varied and it was always such a delight to find an unexpectedly good-looking version of something like Phantom Planet or the Czechoslovak slow-burn sci-fi epic Ikarie XB-1. Other times, I had to do some fancy dancing when available source only came with watermarking, like Space Probe Taurus or various episodes of Rocky Jones: Space Ranger.

The most important factor in the history vs. hotness debate was early space adventure TV. I could not, in good conscience, make a vid like this without including footage from shows like Tom Corbett: Space Cadet, Space Patrol, and the granddaddy of them all, Captain Video and His Video Rangers. These were important milestones in the history of television and science fiction. The problem is, you can't see them the way they were originally broadcast. They were shot live before the invention of videotape. The image was broadcast directly to the various affiliates as it was being shot. The only reason any episodes survive at all is a process called kinescope. The short version is that somebody set-up a special 35mm or 16mm camera and pointed it at a studio monitor. This (generally) wasn't done for archival purposes, but for the benefit of time-delayed broadcasts to West Coast affiliates (since television was generally New York based at the time).

From a technical standpoint, kinescope recordings are very poor -- the brightness range is very small, you lose a lot of detail, and the sound quality is complete crap. It gets worse, though. Most shows from this era survive only because a handful of kinescope recordings weren't destroyed. That rarity means that you generally can't get direct access to the recordings themselves. No, the process you're usually dealing with is that somebody in the 1980s or 90s dubbed off the kinescope recording to VHS, usually to sell in the gray market to sci-fi fans. Then, when DVD came around, the VHS tapes were digitized and burned to DVD-Rs. If you're lucky, that's the exact chain the show goes through before it arrives in your hands. If you're unlucky, well... the original kinescope could have deteriorated. The VHS dub you're working with is actually a dub of a dub of a dub. The episode you have is the result of someone ripping the DVD-from-VHS-from-VHS-from-deteriorated-kinescope and then converting it into a highly-compressed video codec (and hope to hell somebody didn't take the compressed file and then burn it to a DVD and that's what you ended up with).

I have lots of feelings about kinescope. LOTS OF THEM.

The short, vid-related version of this rant is that some of the footage here looks like crap. I did my very best to clean it up, but even when you polish crap, you still have crap.

Some random, scattered notes:

There are a couple clip choices that are little in-jokes that I made with myself based on the matching clip in the original. I'd be interested to see if anyone picks up on them.

At first I thought there might be too much Jamie McCrimmon in this vid. Then I realized there's no such thing.

All source is very specifically and deliberately cultivated from sources released prior to the moon landing in July 1969. There is one exception to this. My Fire Maidens of Outer Space clip is actually a clip from Mystery Science Theatre 3000 featuring Fire Maidens of Outer Space. This was done for two reasons. First, it was the only usable footage I could find of that film (and barely that). Second, the placement of it amused me.

I worked hard to make sure this vid wasn't a parade of white dudes, but this proved difficult given the filmmaking eras I was pulling from. As an example, in all of the vid, there is only one character that is both non-white and female.

Thanks to

thirdblindmouse for her beta notes and cheerleading. Also (especially) thanks to bironic for the original vid. It is so good that I never tired of watching it while I was putting this vid together.