Pointless in space
Sinnlos im Weltraum ( SiW for short ) is a fandub and a non-commercial parody of Starship Enterprise - The Next Century (with the exception of the episode Segelohr, which is based on the fragment of an old Starship Enterprise episode). UPON served original footage that of seven friends in Siegerländer slang and dialect Siegerländer ( Sejerlänner Platt ) re-synchronized was so the consequences were new acts and characters were sometimes transformed into its total opposite. This discrepancy is particularly evident compared to the original in the choice of words and expression used. Those involved in SiW "may [...] perhaps call themselves the forefathers of the film genre" Fansynchro "- at least on German soil" .
history
The idea arose in December 1994 when the two Siegener Peter M. and Roland K. watched a Star Trek episode without sound. They noticed that there were certain traits of character that were not present in the original: Picard was interpreted as "always in a bad mood", Geordi as technically adept, but rather punted, Data as stupid and Riker as mentally retarded.
Instead of the very chosen and respectful tone of the original, the characters were now put into the mouths of their parodied role - sometimes vulgar - colloquial language (see below: #Charaktere ). The main focus of the conversations are violence ("Always in the face - until there are no teeth left"), brazen insults of all kinds and sexual acts, which in the context of the images shown results in a crude and absurd comedy. In contrast to the original, the program is therefore unsuitable for children. Sometimes drug use is also discussed in connection with multiple characters.
The episodes were initially passed on from hand to hand on VHS in Siegerland , then on CD-ROM and later spread quickly over the Internet. On August 22, 2002, two episodes were broadcast on the big screen in the Siegen Open Air Cinema - with the permission of Paramount Pictures - as part of the Siegen is ready for film event .
The makers used a video recorder ( Blaupunkt RTV-820 HIFI) with a microphone input for the new dubbing . Acoustic special effects (phaser shots, warning signals, etc.) were created with a Star Trek key chain and a Yamaha RY10 drum computer . Other noises were improvised with everyday objects, such as the sound of a campfire with the crackling of plastic or the removal of Borg implants with bottle corks. Drum computers, guitar and bass served as background music.
The makers
This overview lists the creators and their involvement in the project in chronological order.
| Surname | Characters | Number of episodes |
|---|---|---|
| Peter M. | Picard, Riker, Geordi, Rubi Flannel, Data, Spock, Pill | 12 |
| Roland K. | Worf, Data, Kaubärbel, Wesley, Dr. Pulaski, Councelor Troi | 6th |
| Daniel P. | Daniel (Q), Karl Squell, super idiot, simply great, Darmok,
Race director, Adelheid, Dr. Crusher, Guinan, Dr. Pulaski, Chancellor Troi, Worf |
8th |
| Guido R. | Remulaner, Bad Randolf | 1 |
| Andreas W. | Vaddr, Jim Beam, Klingon, Worf, Data, O'Brien | 3 |
| AH | Kirk, Uhura, (fragment) | 1 |
| Manfred T. | Worf, Data, Troi, Keiko (rocking horse) | 1 |
Episode overviews
Episode list
An overview of all synchronizations. The length varies depending on the version.
| Serial No. | Episode title | length | episode | German original title | Original English title | Time of origin |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | That started the madness ... | 02:05 | S04 E13 | The pact with the devil | Devil's Due | 1994 |
| 2 | Time jump with Q alternatively: time jump with Daniel |
42:44 | S02 E16 | Time jump with Q | Q Who | 1994-1995 |
| 3 | Illusion or reality | 34:35 | S02 E02 | Illusion or reality | Where Silence Has Lease | 1995 |
| 4th | Guinea pigs | 42:52 | S03 E18 | Guinea pigs | Allegiance | 1995 |
| 5 | Daniel again | 09:08 | S03 E13 | Q again | Déjà Q | 1995 |
| 6th | The Defector (Remulan) | 20:33 | S03 E10 | The defector | The Defector | 1995 |
| 7th | Darmok | 43:01 | S05 E02 | Darmok | Darmok | 1995 |
| 8th | Sailing ear | 03:13 | S02 E19 | The hole in space | Immunity Syndrome | 1997 |
| 9 | On a fine line | 05:48 | S03 E07 | Walking a fine line | The enemy | 1996 or 1997 |
| 10 | Rocking horse | 01:56 | S04 E12 | The campaign of revenge | The wounded | 1996 |
| 11 | Planet of the Clones | 44:15 | S02 E18 | The planet of the clones | Up the long ladder | 1996 |
| 12 | The missing fragment | 42:38 | S06 E20 | The missing fragment | The Chase | 1996-1997 |
Contents
- And that's where the madness began
"I recently bought a pound of butter at the Aldi for 2.95 marks, and I was thrilled, it tasted so good!"
These are the first "pointless" words in the series. The first episode consists only of a dialogue in the corridor and a short meeting in the conference room.
Another absurd dialogue emerges when Cpt. Picard is called via his communication device: "Pizza man please report to the bridge!" And replies: "Pizza man understood!".
- Time jump with Q (Daniel)
On the way to the toilet, Picard and the elevator are kidnapped onto the shuttle of the "stupid fagot" Daniel, who wants to have sex with him there. But because Picard is very hungry, he wants to go back to his ship immediately. After a while Daniel gives in and promotes himself and Picard back to the Enterprise, where the crew is already impatiently waiting for dinner. There, however, Daniel has nothing better to do than annoy everyone. First he wants to scratch out Guinan's eyes and next to the captain he wants to have sexual intercourse with Worf and Riker. After Picard has finally made it clear that Daniel is not allowed to have sexual intercourse with anyone, he gets serious. He kidnaps the Enterprise into the middle of the quadrant of the so-called "fagot species". There Daniel's friends are already waiting to have sexual contact with the entire crew of the Enterprise. The situation seems hopeless ...
- Illusion or reality
In flight through space, the Enterprise encounters a mysterious cloud. The captain sends a probe to investigate more closely. However, since this does not deliver any results, Wesley flies closer - and the Enterprise is caught. A Remulan ship appears out of nowhere, but Worf can easily destroy it. A short time later, a second ship appears on the screen; it's the Enterprise ...
- Guinea pigs
When Picard relaxes in an armchair with music, alcohol and a book after a long day at work, he is beamed from his quarters into a locked cell in which there are three other inmates: the stuttering Adelheid, the highly intelligent and eloquent Einfach Toll and the ( later coming) nothing rascal super idiot.
The four people can't stand each other from the start and accuse each other of being kidnappers. And because there are only giant raspberry lumps (Sejerlänner Platt for raspberry candy) to eat all day, the nerves are particularly cold; Conflicts are therefore predetermined.
On the Enterprise, a doppelganger has now taken Picard's place, who immediately sets course for the next pub. In the eyes of his crew, the captain is acting strangely. He just wants to drink all day, tears up Worf's teddy and fills the doctor with cheap booze ...
- Daniel again
The Enterprise is in orbit around the planet Bre'el, whose people fear the moon (the size of an inflated pea, if not smaller) would fall on their heads. The crew half-heartedly tries to solve the problem with the tractor beam, but fails miserably.
To make matters worse, Daniel shows up a little later. He explains to the crew that he has lost his strength, but nobody believes him. Picard even blames him for the moon problem and lets Worf take him to jail (because of annoying attempts to fool him) ...
- The Defector (Remulan)
The Enterprise takes a Remulan drug dealer on board to rid him of his addiction.
But that turns out to be more difficult than expected. He tries to sell his wares to the crew and refuses to follow the budget and is suspected of being a spy.
In the meantime, Bad Randolph annoys the captain with terrible rap songs . Picard hires Data to beat up Randolph ...
On April 1, 2006, the beginning sequence, believed to be lost, appeared and the total playing time of “Der Remulaner” was extended by 2 minutes.
- Darmok
Picard has gathered his crew to proudly announce the purchase of a new ship. "He only wants 20,000 bags for that thing."
But the anticipation doesn't last long, because the seller - a Tamarian captain - suddenly demands 90,000 marks as payment (in words: Nooinzischtaaauusend!) And the Enterprise as well.
Since there is no agreement on the price, the Tamarian beam their captain together with Picard to a planet where an evil monster is up to mischief ...
- Sailing ear
This time we are on the old Enterprise, which is due to return to Earth for an inspection. Everyone is tired and does not want to continue working. Because Spock can hardly stand on his feet, Captain Kirk orders the doctor to accompany the Segelohr to bed. Once there, he announces to the exhausted Vulcan that, according to the devices, he has long been dead ...
- On a fine line
Worf, Riker and Geordie beam themselves with flashlights onto a dark, rocky planet and sing Saint Martin's songs. Since nobody wants to throw a Frisbee with Geordi, Geordi goes alone into a cave because he suspects dark coffee there. Once there, he falls into a hole and is trapped ...
- Rocking horse
Dawn on the Enterprise.
Early in the morning, Picard is forced to have pointless conversation with his crew. Meanwhile, O'Brien torments himself with the dubious culinary skills of his wife Keiko.
- Planet of the Clones
The Enterprise is on its way to the Ficus sector to meet with the cargo ship "Alk-Trans", with whose crew the crew once had a real drink in the "Biertunnel" (this location actually exists in a district of Siegen). Because Picard has a "damned fire", he has the crew of the Alk-Trans - the "peasant idiots" - beamed together with a schnapps distillery into a cargo hold, because a party is supposed to take place where "people really drink and f ...".
A little later a few people call who want to drink with you. The leader is the famous Karl Squell from Krombach , whose liquor store is inexhaustible. But in secret, Karl Squell plays a double game ...
- The missing fragment
Picard's father visits the Enterprise to inform his son about a mofa race . And because Picard is an excellent driver, he signed up for him straight away and also put his entire pension on him.
But Picard has to fulfill his duties as a spaceship captain and blocks all attempts to persuade his father, who then leaves disappointed.
Back on course, the Enterprise receives a distress call from the "Vadderrr" who is under attack. Picard can fend off the attackers, but his father is in bad shape. Lying on his death bed, he breathes the last words into his son: "You have to win the race!"
Versions
The different versions of the episodes differ mainly in sound and picture quality, they are identical in terms of content. It happens that the last few seconds of the original editions were cut off because they were difficult to design for resynchronization. In some versions, an extended intro has been added. It is known that the original video cassettes still exist. There are also the following common versions of most SiW episodes:
- First digital version: converted from VHS to MPEG format, Sat.1 recording, very poor quality
- TMZ, Roadrunner: AVI format (DivX), Sat.1 recording, good quality
- Ricardo: AVI format (DivX), from DVD, very good quality
- DVD: completely digitally restored version in DVD quality with de-noisy soundtrack and in stereo (SiWonDVD / 2004)
Timeline
This graphical timeline shows the history of Pointless in Space between 1994 and 2006.
The glowing bars in the creative period make it clear when work was carried out on SiW, and the black markings show who was involved in which episode. (Click to enlarge the image.)
Characters
The various Star Trek characters were mostly synchronized by the same speakers for Sinnlos in Space and developed into completely new characters. This created partly completely new relationships between the crew members.
- Picard
Captain Jean Luc Picard's most distinctive traits are above all his bad mood, occasional alcoholism and constant aggression and threats of violence against his team, especially against his first officer, Riker. Therefore, he is already introduced in the intro as the “hobby alcoholic who is always ready to use violence, Jean Luc Picard”. Picard may have supernatural powers, at least he says in the episode "The Defector" that he could use his power of thought to detonate ships, whereupon a Romulan ship detonates immediately. Whether this is a coincidence or whether the captain really has such powers remains unclear.
For him, all female characters only have the function of making coffee or serving as a sexual object. He usually ends the sentences with: “Really now” or “Boy!”, Regardless of whether the person addressed is a man, a woman, an alien or even his own father. However, if he himself is called a boy, he doesn't like it at all, as becomes clear in the episode "Planet of the Clones". There he admonishes Data, Jim Beam and Maria Chron, "Sach again boy, boy" when they called him boy. Typical saying: "Let’s clap, boy!"
- Riker
Commander William T. Riker (the mastermind) is by far the most retarded member of the crew. He is always inferior to Picard and obsessed with the idea of finally becoming "Captain" himself. Picard and other characters are repeatedly drawn to gross insults by his extreme ignorance, but Riker is immune to these insults because he doesn't understand them anyway. Nevertheless, he constantly asks where they are, what they are doing and what is actually going on. Typical saying: "Uh, I don't know."
- Worf
The Klingon Worf is as naive as he is impetuous, has a preference for gummy bears and other sweets and tends to divide his entire environment into “sweet” and “bad”. In many ways he mostly behaves like a small, whining child, which is also shown by the often belittled vocabulary. The rest of the team is usually quite annoyed by Worf's nagging and constant emotional fluctuations (which he loudly announces) and actually only tries to calm him down or to get him to shut up. Typical saying: "You are bad (e)!"
- Geordi
Geordi LaForge (sometimes also "Bums-Geordi") is the chief engineer of the Enterprise, although he is probably the least aware of his surroundings of all people. At least his tendency speaks for this, after almost every sentence “How? What? What did you say? ”Or a similar series of W-questions. From time to time, however, he indulges in detailed and incomprehensible explanations of technical facts about the spaceship. The main part of the speech is clearly in the sometimes excruciatingly long “How? What? Who? Why? … ”Capers. Typical saying: "... or how or what or who?"
- Data
Commander Data is an android that is characterized by the fact that, with its 1-bit storage capacity, it is guaranteed to be able to solve every single-digit addition incorrectly within three hours. He also often changes his accent, sometimes sounds like a Bavarian, then like Rudi Carrell and then completely normal again. These language changes are due to his temporarily defective language chip. Every now and then he has to solve a complicated arithmetic problem in the course of an episode, but the crew doesn't really believe in his abilities. In addition, it is not too bad for himself to say a little song: "3 × 14 is 38, and 12, that gives 110"
- Daniel (Q)
Daniel is an alien with supernatural powers that he usually manifests by snapping his fingers. He is strictly homosexual ("I'm not so perverted that I do it with a woman!") And as such is after the captain's affection, who does not reciprocate his advances. In order to change his mind, Daniel teleports himself naked to the bridge of the Enterprise or confronts the crew of the ship with a "fagot species", but without success. Typical saying: "Ah ... Jean-Luc!"
reception
Since the episodes were distributed on the Internet, the series has received enormous cultural reception. Numerous followers created and distributed their own contributions to SiW in various ways: self-composed songs, pictures, computer games, flash animations , photo montages or self-written texts that tell stories from the SiW universe. This fan art is mainly published in SiW forums.
Other Star Trek episodes were re-dubbed by fans in typical SiW fashion, but without the original speakers. Their dissemination and publication also takes place in the relevant SiW fan forums.
In a reminiscence in July 2011, Ole Reissmann regrets on Spiegel Online that “ not everyone knows this Dadaistic fun by a long way ”. The plot is summarized as outrageous . As early as November 2005, Frank Patalong paid tribute to the series' “ brutal humor ” on Spiegel online . In a retrospective of well-known Star Trek parodies, he already pays tribute to SiW with the title of the article: "You Assis are militated!" He sums it up critically, be it "here and there anyway [funny], because it is precisely this one that is so extremely 'politically correct' ' Series full of virtuous, completely unselfish heroes is dragged through the gutter. "
For the Saarbrücker Zeitung , Thorsten Mohr comments on this "joke" that the Star Trek episodes "pull through the cocoa" as of "technically dubious quality" .
The Austrian daily Der Standard recalls the work of the Siegerländer, which took place in the “pre-Internet era” , and presents the history of the fan-club scene, which is now being imitated by many fan clubs. "With very archaic means" the episodes were synchronized on video recorders and later distributed on CD-ROM.
Florian Hartling sees SiW in the area of new dubbing as an important contribution to the media appropriation culture of the Star Trek universe. The quality standard that SiW has in common with some others, given the tight budgets, is astonishing. “Nevertheless, these films are not likely to be suitable for use in traditional media; they remain largely limited to the Internet or DVD video. "
SiW inspired numerous fan synchronizations . A well-known example of this is Lord of the Weed , a Lord of the Rings -andub, which also achieved a high level of awareness. SiW was one of the decisive factors in creating a German synchro scene .
Response from Paramount
Since mid-2014, Paramount has been invoking the copyright law in force in Germany and suing various providers of the SiW episodes, who are no longer forced to provide the material. This has recently also affected the YouTube platform.
Secondary literature
- Jonas Etten: Jean-Luc Picard's nasty face. Pointless in space as a paradigm of parodistic fundub. In: Vera Cuntz-Leng (ed.): Creative Crowds. Perspectives on fan research in German-speaking countries, Darmstadt: Büchner 2014, ISBN 978-3-941310-42-1 .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Giga: A classic on the web: Pointless in space
- ↑ It all began with the Death Star, in: Reutlinger General-Anzeiger of June 27, 2008
- ^ A b Siegener Zeitung: "Star Trek" in Eckmannshausen - First member of the Siegerland Enterprise crew found on August 22, 2002
- ↑ a b st-enterprise.de: Pointless in space
- ↑ a b c Spiegel Online: Surfing tip - “Your Assis will be militated!” From November 1, 2005
- ↑ Westfälische Rundschau of August 20, 2002: Culture department wants to honor Scherzbolde: Search for "Sdarrr-Dräk" voices
- ↑ SiW-Talk: A look behind the scenes
- ↑ a b c d face party: "Senseless in space" Startrek with dialect
- ↑ History of Sinnlos im Raum ( Memento of the original from October 25, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ a b Ole Reissmann: Blog tips: Kraftworf and beautiful black coffee, on: Spiegel Online, July 31, 2011
- ↑ Westfälische Rundschau of August 22, 2002: Scherzbold found - "Sdarr-Dräk" puzzle solved
- ↑ Turn of the word: Pointless in space
- ↑ Thorsten Mohr: Surf long and successfully, in: Saarbrücker Zeitung of May 7, 2008
- ↑ Schwabenschmäh, in: Der Standard from February 27, 2009
- ↑ Florian Hartling: "Klingons allow us to express a certain aspect of our personality that we're not allowed to do in public." An analysis of identity dispositions and constructions, pp. 127–158, in: Maren Hartmann and Jeffrey Wimmer: Digital media technologies - past - present - future, Wiesbaden 2011, pp. 145f
