Japanese robot scientist-- I know, I know-- Masahiro Mori came up with a chart of human emotional response to robots or really any kind of non-human thing. The more human-like a thing appears, the more empathetic we'll be to it-- up to a point. This is the titular Uncanny Valley: a gap in-between the upward path from machine-like to human-like where the emotional response goes into the extreme negative. "Almost-human" is more disturbing than 'Not-even-remotely-human.'

People talked a lot about last November's THE POLAR EXPRESS horror by referring to the Uncanny Valley-- the CGI characters were referred to as "disturbing" an awful lot.

Uh, right. So, anyway.

Is there maybe some kind of Uncanny Valley of Crap?

I got the first season of STAR TREK-- the Kirk/Spock/Dayglo Pop Psychosis STAR TREK, I mean, not the NEXT GENERATION or any of that-- for Xmas and have had them on in the background for the last couple weeks.

So, I was never a hardcore trekkie-- I liked NEXT GENERATION an awful lot the longer it was on, and gradually drifted out of following the shows after that one was put out to pasture. And from there I kinda travelled backward into my earliest experiences with the original show from when I was a little little kid-- four, five, somewhere in there.

I remember images, flashes, sensations. Bright, insane colors. Women with long legs and short skirts, short enough that I knew it was some sort of adult thing, and strange special effects.

I say strange because I knew they weren't, like, good. They weren't STAR WARS good, anyway-- but I knew it was this thing, this STAR TREK thing that people spoke of and talked about and watched and enjoyed. And it just creeped my shit right out. I found classic TREK eerie and surreal.

I had fever dreams a lot as a kid- weird and inescapable nightmare sorts of things. They felt like massive loads of data being forced through my tiny head, like the entire bandwidth of the world was trying to jam itself into my brain. So many weird juxtapositions and superimpositions, contexts recontextualizing, recursive waking dreams and little sick old me, sweating it out, trying to parse this very grown up world into some kind of sense.

For whatever reasons, the visual grammars of classic TREK got folded into all that. Re-watching them now for what's really the first time since I was a kid brings all those weird-ass feelings churning up to the surface. I remain four, terrified and fascinated, repulsed and awed. Shatner's chest glistens; that lady's skirt is so short you can see her underpants when the ship gets shot; the background of that planet is just the color red; they call him "Bones" because he has bones in his throat and it makes him feel like he's choking down tears all the time. I am as hypnotized now as I was then.

I want to grab frame after frame after frame and stare. Hours, days even. I could lose serious time in my Shatner-Zen meditation, my Rodenberry Namaste. Land of the Lost in the Valley of the Crap-Gwangi. Fuck off, earthman. I'm busy.

•

EDIT:
This is GREAT. I'm happy to see I'm not the only thoroughly creeped out by STAR TREK.

I've been thinking about it more and more and have remembered a couple other things:

• The first experience with McDonalds that I recall was getting a Happy Meal that was promoting STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. The toy was, if I recall correctly, a Spock sticker-sort of thing. Like a vinyl static cling sticker, you know? And my Mom saying, Oh, you got Spock! And I didn't know what that meant.

Later I stared at the box and tried to make sense of the characters, the mythology.

• The Sex Thing. It's crazy-- CRAZY-- how many of these shows are about man's right to seek out a destiny wherein he gets laid freely and without consequence by as many beautiful and leggy B actresses from the Sixties as possible. The routine objectification of women-- and mind you I've only watched the first season, or most of it, thus far-- is hysterically antiquated and ironically pig-headed and, uh, a little hot because of the aforementioned many beautiful and leggy B actresses from the Sixties. I remember this not entirely escaping me as a kid, but I didn't really know what it meant, either. Needless to say, that single-entendre Playboy revolution style of getting one's wick wet in the twenty-fourth (?) century was Yet Another Thing that creeped me right the fuck out ("Why is she just waiting on Captain Kirk's bed? Did she just let herself in? Why didn't he lock his door? Is it because he's the Captain and nobody would steal from-- WAIT, why is he hitting her?").

• Tom has offered up that he was afraid of the one where they turn into cubes. I have offered the one with Captain Pike and his face herpe. What about you?