In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Ferengi were intended to be the new villains when they were introduced. But it became clear pretty fast that they weren’t all that scary, so they were repurposed as mostly comic relief while the show brought back the Romulans.
Yeah the ferengi were surprisingly camp (do you have that slang in American English?) when they were supposed to be taking the role of terrifying primary antagonists going forward. It’s funny to note that even the contemporary reviews (scroll to “Reception”) all thought they were “hilarious” or “ridiculous”.
It didn’t help that this was season 1. So anything vaguely mean the Ferengi said had to be followed by 10 seconds of the crew looking at each other with shocked expressions while the orchestra collectively had a stroke.
Flash Gordon (the 1980 version) is so full of deliberate camp that it’s hard to accuse it of seriousness, but the line “Flash, I love you, but we only have 14 hours to save Earth!” always struck me as sounding a lot cheesier than it was supposed to.
That whole movie was played for camp and ran on the power of a Queen Song.
It was awesome in a cheesy way. Kind of like the 60s Batman Show.
I mean they told Max von Sydow & Brian Blessed to ham it up and chew the scenery and boy did they.
What, as opposed to Blessed’s usual restrained performance?
Exactly.
No seriously, even by his standards, he went to max BRIAN BLESSED HAMMING.
In their first appearance they (in retrospect) came across as slightly-less inept Paklads. The soon-forgotten “energy whips” didn’t help.
God, I love that movie. It came out when I was 11 and I saw it several times at the matinee at my local theater. 41 years later and if I come across it on t.v. I will watch it end-to-end and feel that same sense of campy “GO FLASH GO!” joy from that movie.
“GORDONS ALIVE!?!?”
"NO WIRE HANGERS, EVER!
Granted, the movie Mommie Dearest was unintentionally pretty goofy from start to finish but this line was delivered so hammily it became a joke.
In ST:TNG when Guinan first met Q, she pulls back in this fingers-out “witchcraft activate!” pose like “I’m gonna give you the lightning.” Instead of a tense scene where they are supposed to be more or less equals, and menacing, it looks like some cheap grade school production of the Wizard of Oz. At least they never did that again.
Especially as, in all the years since, they never gave any indication that Guinan was capable of giving a beat down to Q. Her people couldn’t even handle the Borg, fer cripessake.
Good example, but it might be easier that we just say “all of TNG season 1” at this point.
I just randomly tried to find a TNG S01 episode and this episode (warning: mildly NSFW) was the first thing that came up.
What episode is that? “Prime Directive” doesn’t show up in List of Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes - Wikipedia.
I believe that’s from “Justice” (in other words “We could have gotten rid of Wesley, then, easy” or “Planet of the Diapered People”) - the video is a supercut of discussions of the Prime Directive, hence the video title.
Episode 8, “Justice”.
@Mijin cued up a snippet from that episode that’s part of a longer video uploaded which has snippets from a number of TNG episodes about the Prime Directive.
ETA: ninja’d.
Thanks. I’m not supposed to be watching YouTube at work.
Yeah sorry, I saw that the video was a supercut but didn’t realize it was a supercut of multiple episodes.
The bit I linked is indeed E08 (of season one), “Justice”
Spoiler for an old art flick, The Field:
It’s an Irish movie about a poor Irish cattle farmer and his son who doesn’t want to be a farmer. Everything’s going wrong in the old man’s life as he desperately tries to keep his farm intact or something. And then his son, whom he depends on, decides to run off with a girl, and the farmer fucking loses it, and drives his cattle over a cliff to their deaths, in the process killing his son. It’s all very grim and tragic.
But when you’re filming the climactic tragedy of a movie, slo-mo cows falling through the air saying MOOOOOOOOO! as they fall to their deaths except you can’t hear them over the soaring orchestral music so you just see them silently MOOOOing, doesn’t have the emotional impact you’re looking for.
In Hitchcock’s Frenzy, there’s a quick shot of one of the victims, punctuated by a blare of music. The look on the victim’s face may even have been accurate for a strangulation victim, but it looks so bizarre – like a character out of a cartoon – that it comes across as being goofy.
The supposed hit musical from the movie “Stayin’ Alive” is to die for…die laughing, that is.
The Original Series had lot of goofy things that were meant to be taken serious—Kirk’s fight with the Gorn in “Arena” for example.