Arriving early at the IMAX for opening Thursday’s second show gave me half an hour in the theater to watch the patrons; everywhere was life imitating art. In the nearly 43 years since the franchise premiered on NBC at the start of the 1966 television season, the audience is almost an embodiment of the predictions in Gene Roddenberry’s mind when he first proposed the series nearly 50 years ago.

As we waited, we talked about our expectations with our communicators flipped open. We all had them. and they’re more full featured that the first predictive models. Some of us twittered and texted, others checked news. Still others watched video that had more inherent resolution in the palms of their hands than the original transmission of the first Star Trek episodes.

Video, which offered so little quality that 60s television was produced on film and converted to television at the last minute, has changed places with film. Today, if film is even used for acquisition, it is converted to video for special effects work, and then converted back to support the legacy projection systems that still use it.

More important (POTENTIAL SPOILER AHEAD) the plot requires of the audience an understanding of time-space concepts that Star Trek helped many of us to understand.

The intervening years have expanded our knowledge of these concepts and popularized them to a public beyond sci-fi fans.

The cell phone is boon to nearly everyone except scriptwriters. Its dealt a lethal blow to any script with an O. Henry twist that one party doesn’t know a fact that another party would instantly communicate, if only they had the means to.

You either need a bit of business to disable the cell phone, or recast it as a period piece. This is a problem Star Trek has always had to deal with.

By including characters that exist multiply because of space-time manipulation, today’s Star Trek writers have a rich new vein to mine for a franchise that started when I was a teenager but with this brilliant rebirth will almost certainly outlive me.

We’re not traveling space, but if we’d had the right administrations for the last three decades we well might be. I know that audience was ready. They’d already adopted everything they could get their hands on, and that’s driven life to imitate art in a most wonderful way.

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Many, many years ago back when the FCC mandated news and public service commitments for radio stations, one of my duties as a local radio newsman was reviewing movies, TV shows and local live music venues. I came to have great respect for the Eberts and the Maltins (even when I didn’t agree with their opinions); knowing too much as a critic can cause you to lose objectivity.

Unless you’re writing for an industry mag, you’re speaking to an audience who may see a movie a month, while you’re seeing a movie a day, and it wasn’t long before I was an insufferable boring movie elitist for whom the grittiest little twisted indie was gold and everything coming out of the major studios was shit.

Javier's Jesus

How I got there was seeing the ground-breaking material that was the one good scene in some cheap indie being ripped off two years later by a major motion picture. It never failed to piss me off, and it just happened to me again–this time in new media–when I viewed the highly lauded first runner up (The Power of the Crunch) in the Doritos Crash The Super Bowl filmmaking contest.

I sure hope the producers of Power of the Crunch had Javier Prato on their team (I can’t find any credits listing him). He’s a talented DP and obviously a pretty creative guy, considering his Jesus Christ: The Musical went viral three years ago. You’d think it deserves at least a hat tip from the Power of the Crunch producers, considering they shamelessly ripped off his payoff right down to the framing.

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