Captain’s Log: STAR TREK is Back (Again)!

So this past weekend, I considered seeing the new Star Trek movie based on the 1966-69 NBC television series starring William Shatner (who was not chosen to play a young James T. Kirk in this new film….make that make sense), but then I decided to take a nap instead. We arrived at home after not going to the theatre, and discovered the bedroom had been infested with flying ants…so no nap.

That being said, I thought it would be a good opportunity to talk about the 1999 CGI film, Antz, featuring the voice of Sharon Stone, but I never saw it, so that’s out.  Instead, I’m going to talk about the first episode of the 1965 Hanna-Barbera cartoon, Atom Ant, and how it strangely parallels real life (or is it perpendicular?).

While researching flying ants on the internet, I learned that ants can lift as much as 10 times their own weight, and the title card for the Atom Ant cartoon shows him lifting a bar bell over his head…so that’s real.

This particular episode starts with a villain, Big Fats Dynamo (voiced by Allen Melvin, who played Sam the Butcher on The Brady Bunch), escaping from an Alcatraz-like prison, by simply bending open the bars of his cell with his bare hands and walking out. The Warden should be hung out to dry for the lousy security in the prison (which is ironic because Fats escapes in a laundry truck…it’s not clear where Fats was going in the truck, since it was already established that the prison is built on a rock in the middle of the ocean…A ROCK IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN!).  When the Warden learns of Big Fats’ escape, he doesn’t contact the police…he sends a distress signal via radar to Atom Ant. That can’t be the appropriate protocol. Not real.

The narrator announces that the Warden’s signal has reached Atom Ant’s secret headquarters, which are clearly marked by a mailbox with the name Atom Ant printed on it in bold, black letters. Now maybe I’m not clear on the definition of secret headquarters, but this one doesn’t seem to be particularly secret.  Just the same, my wife and I spent a lot of time trying to locate where those flying ants were coming from, with no luck, so I assume ants do maintain secret headquarters. Real.

Atom Ant manages to fly (yes….FLY) to exactly where Big Fats is hiding. This is where the lines of fiction and reality become very blurred. Atom Ant doesn’t have wings, but was flying, yet out of all those ants in our bedroom that had wings, NONE of them were flying. Not real.

I didn’t mention that Big Fats brought along two accomplices. They are useless idiots. They don’t help Big Fats (who they only met two minutes before escaping, so its not like they owe him anything), but they don’t try to get away either, and Atom Ant isn’t even after them. That’s weird too, because they broke out of jail just like Big Fats. Not real.

Big Fats tries a number of tactics to stop Atom Ant, including spraying him with ant spray. It doesn’t work. I think this is real because we’ve contracted with a pest control service regularly for the last three years (we live in the forest) and yet we still have those pesky flying ants.  Real.

So Atom catches Big Fats, returns him to prison-rock, does some significant damage to a prison wall as he’s leaving, and then it’s over. The End.

I don’t think I’ll get a chance to see Star Trek this weekend either, but maybe I will manage to get a nap in.