(no subject)

[unbibium]

Trekkies 2 showed this fan video being produced in Germany, where they built a replica of the TNG bridge, and played their favorite characters from the original series, movies, and TNG too.

I noticed two things.

First, their movie-era Spock was a dead ringer. They could not have found a more perfect look-alike.

Second, their original-series Kirk totally didn't look American. He looked really really Eastern European. I didn't think that was possible, especially in comparison to some white Canadian actor's portrayal of a starship captain from Iowa. But, yet, he had a face that just made me think "Finnish C64 demoscener?"

It reminded me of how, when they made "Hunt for Red October", they staffed the Red October with a bunch of Russian immigrants they found in Los Angeles, and the director kept trying to keep the ones with the least-American faces in the shot. It makes me wonder whether it's really possible to tell someone's ancestry by their facial features. Then, next time I'm in France, I can spot the German guy right away and ask for directions in German right off and he'll think I'm psychic. Then I can tell him he's in terrible danger, and if he gives me $1000 I'll remove the curse.

No, then he'll just ask me if I'm psychic then how come I couldn't find the Rue des Peches station on my own?

Comments

[nandan.livejournal.com]

They say that French people have more developed jaw/mouth muscles, not because of their ancestry,but because of the demands of the language.

[ronebofh.livejournal.com]

Along those lines, i've heard that Chinese people have better pitch thanks to their tonal language.

[vyus.livejournal.com]

because psychic is about reading people's minds. if know one around is thinking about where the Rue des Peches is, being psychic would be no help whatsoever.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I'd say you can often identify broad ethnic types among Europeans, but it's fuzzy and imprecise. (There are probably comparable differences among groups in other parts of the world, but my eyes haven't been trained to identify them.) Anglos and Slavs and Mediterraneans do not look quite the same. But it's hard to get a handle on in America because we're so heterogeneous and interbred. I look kind of Scandinavian, like my maternal grandfather, but that's only a quarter of my ancestry.

The story about French jaw muscles sounds kind of suspicious to me; French phonemes only seem hard to pronounce if you're not French. They talk a thousand miles an hour in Paris, but that's the way of big-city people all over the world.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...There's also the question of what constitutes a Russian-looking person. A lot of the immigrants from Russia that I know are Jews, ethnically somewhat separate from Russian Slavs (and they'll sometimes remark that in Russia they weren't considered Russian, but they're Russian when they get here).