Hasslein Blog

Have you been watching the humorous webseries The Red Shirt Diaries? If you haven't been, you've been missing out.

The Red Shirt Diaries parody introduces Ensign Williams, a low-ranking security officer, and follows her through the first 10 episodes of Star Trek: The Original Series. Williams soon learns that she may well be the only sane person on board. Violent alien plants, overly friendly superior officers and the "Naked Time" plague wide-eyed Ensign Williams as she struggles to follow Starfleet protocol and make it alive to the end of the episode.


Watch Ensign Williams record her mission logs that both celebrate and illuminate the weird, wonderful details of Star Trek: The Original Series. Writer-producer-actress Ashley Victoria Robinson (Asmodeus, Hotel Secrets & Legends) stars as Ensign Williams, and she describes The Red Shirt Diaries as "my love letter to the original series."

The ensemble cast also includes Carshenah Jefferson (Boomerang Kids, Shameless), as Lieutenant Uhura, Jason Inman of the Youtube channel JAWIIN (The Walking Dead Christmas Special) as Captain Kirk, comic book writer Sterling Gates as Doctor McCoy and Geek & Sundry’s 2 Broke Geeks (Omar Najam and Mia Resella) as fellow red shirts. The Red Shirt Diaries is written and produced by Ashley Victoria Robinson and 2013 Geekie Award Winner for Best Parody Jason Inman, who also directs all the episodes. The series premiered in early September on Youtube, and has been quite popular among Trek fans ever since.

This week's episode, "The Enemy Within," is now available, and you can view it here. You'll be glad you did. And be sure to catch up on the previous episodes, some of which are laugh-out-loud funny. The team's companion web comic, A Night in the Enterprise, can be read here.

Labels: Ashley Victoria Robinson, parody, Red Shirt Diaries, Star Trek, webseries

Labels: Aladdin, Rebels, Star Wars

By Rich Handley


This past week, I was privileged to sit down with Ian M. Cullen of Scifi Pulse to discuss the grass-roots effort to get the British Star Trek newspaper strips reprinted. Give it a listen!

Labels: Ian M. Cullen, SciFi Pulse, Star Trek, Star Trek comics

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Labels: Daleks, Doctor Who, Patrick Troughton, reviews, T. Scott Edwards

By Rich Handley

For the heck of it, I decided to take a photo of my comic book shelves today. My comics collection is getting out of control, and I'm about to run out of room, as you can see in the image below. It comes down to a choice of either binding them, selling them or adding another shelf.

:::mumble grumble rassn frassn first-world problems:::


I obtained these printing-shop shelves years ago and discovered that they were the perfect height for comic books (except, oddly, for the third row from the bottom, which is why those comics are slightly tilted). Before I found them, I used to keep the comics in cardboard boxes, like most people, but I enjoy having them all handy, without having to pull out a box every time I want to re-read something (which I do often).

The shelves go floor to ceiling, so they hold a lot. But after thirty years of collecting, I'm nearing the point at which they'll soon no longer fit. (The problem is that although there's extra space on some shelves, each shelf contains a different collection, and my OCD won't allow me to mix 'em in order to tighten up the available space.)

Left shelves:
Top four rows: Star Trek 
Bottom two rows: Planet of the Apes, Battlestar Galactica, Babylon 5, Preacher

Right shelves:
Top three rows: Swamp Thing and Hellblazer (sans "New 52")
Bottom three rows: Star Wars

As you can see, I am a very picky and specific collector; although I own a lot of comics, they're really only in a small handful of categories. I do have some other comics as well, but those I don't bother keeping on display since I don't re-read them.

How has my wife not yet left me?

Labels: collecting, comic display, comics, Star Trek

John Freeman, over at DowntheTubes.net, wrote up a news story about our call to arms to get the British Star Trek strips reprinted (see John's article). This is a great piece, and it's much, much appreciated.

By Rich Handley

Star Trek comic fans: It's time for a grass-roots campaign. Over the past couple of years, IDW's Library of American Comics (LOAC) imprint reprinted the hard-to-find L.A. Times Star Trek newspaper strips as a pair of beautifully made hardcover books, making the strips available to readers for the first time since the early '80s. The results were spectacular, with the strips looking better than they ever had before.


At the time, there were tentative plans to give the same treatment to the even-harder-to-find British strips (from the pages of Joe 90: Top Secret, TV21, Valiant and Mighty TV Comic). So far, however, nothing has materialized.

Just to be clear: These are not reprints of Gold Key's Star Trek comics—they're completely original material, published only in the United Kingdom, and they've never been made available to U.S. readers. Here are some sample strips:





Read more »

Labels: comics, IDW, Star Trek

A new Planet of the Apes magazine has begun publication, and it looks like it'll be a great addition to POTA fandom. The title? Ape Planet Magazine. The first issue will be made available in February 2015.


Here's the lineup for issue #1:

MOVIES/TELEVISION
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

CHARACTERS
From the Desk of Otto Hasslein

PHILOSOPHY
The Sacred Scrolls

COLLECTIBLES
The Mego Apes
The Collectible Checklist (Part I: Action Figures)

DVD/BLUE RAY REVIEW
Conquest of the Planet of the Apes

SOCIAL MEDIA
Facebook Ape Groups

DIY MAKEUP/COSTUMES
Working With Prosthetics

COSPLAY
Cosplayer of the Quarter

APE CONSERVATION
The Great Ape Conservation Fund

For submissions information, click here. Those interested in advertising should visit here. Editor Steve Kimball also maintains a blog, though there's not much posted to it yet since the first issue isn't out yet. For more information, be sure to like the group's Facebook page: facebook.com/groups/ApePlanet.

Labels: Planet of the Apes

Given his work with the National Rifle Association, as well as the types of characters he often portrayed onscreen, Charlton Heston has often been portrayed as a hard-as-nails type of guy. But it turns out he had a softer side as well. Reader R.W. Martin sent us the following letter he received almost twenty years ago from Mr. Heston, after writing to him to seek advice about becoming an actor. It's a charming letter, and it's gratifying to see that Colonel Taylor really did care about people after all.

Labels: Charlton Heston, Planet of the Apes

Posted by Rich Handley

Recently, we showcased the work of Planet of the Apes fan Michael Kostka, who created a series of custom-made figures based on BOOM! Studios' Apes comics. Today, we present more of Michael's collection, this time based on the 1974 Planet of the Apes TV series. Michael has done a fantastic job of capturing the likenesses and outfits of the farming family from "The Good Seeds" (Polar and Zantes, and their children, Anto, Jillia and Remus) as well as Galen's mother Ann, from "The Interrogation," and Prefect Barlow, from "The Gladiators" and "The Horse Race." Well done!

Labels: action figures, custom figures, Michael Kostka, Planet of the Apes