Ain't Velcro the best!

There was an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise where T'Pol's grandmother traveled to Earth from Vulcan and her ship crashes. She integrates herself into the local community while awaiting rescue from Vulcan. As an act of thanks, she raises money for a local kid to go to college by showing some Vulcan Velcro-like item to an entrepreneur who buys the technology. So Velcro is an alien invention! Who knew? I think the episode is called "Carbon Creek."

There was a "Making Of" documentary about Stanley Kubrick and 2001 where they describe how they filmed this scene as well as the one where astronaut Frank Poole is jogging around the perimeter of the rotating portion of the spaceship, Discovery. I couldn't find it quickly but it was enlightening.

There's an interesting tale behind the famous score from 2001. When editing a new film, the director will often create a "temp track" of music to give some presence to the film during post-production. This track is also helpful for the composer to understand the director's thinking about the underscoring. In this case, Kubrick used the Richard Strauss theme for the opening as well as the other Strauss's, that's Johann, waltzes for the trip to the Moon sequence. Additionally, Kubrick used music by Krystof Penderecki and Aram Khachaturian for the sequences aboard Discovery.

During the film's production, Kubrick commissioned Alex North (Spartacus) to compose an original score for the movie. This was recorded but in the end, Kubrick discarded it and stuck with his temp track. All of those recordings had to be licensed for the film and the commercially-released soundtrack was something of a hit release. Interestingly. Kubrick never told North that he didn't use the commissioned score and North only discovered it at the premiere! Ouch.

Apparently, North was so pissed off that he walked away from the music and the scores and recordings disappeared. Decades later, the music scores were re-discovered, edited and recorded for a CD release. One day, I was kind of bored so I cued up the recording and tried to sync it with the film based on the titles of the tracks. Mr. North wrote an excellent score but, frankly, Kubrick was right!