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Behind the Scenes: Treknobabble
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this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2023
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Risa
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Come on'n get your jamaharon on! There are no real rules—just don't break the weather control network.
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I don't get this reaction, is technobable really that difficult to recite for actors?
Yes. Like high octane laughter fuel. It's ridiculous and everyone is just trying not to crack.
There's also a reason that the "legitimate nerds" in show business become such cult favorites. The overlap of (1) "people who look like professional actors" and (2) "people who are believable while acting" and (3) "people who legitimately get into the fake logic of technobabble" is vanishingly small. If you are on a Trek show and not in that intersection, pretending to be a 3 is going to be one of the biggest challenges in pulling off 2 to your expected standards.
To cross franchises for a moment, "you can write this shit George, but you can't say it."
I don't like sand...
There was that one scene in TNG where Riker is actually making up a bunch of technobabble to distract a ferengi who had taken over the ship... and to this day I'm not sure how they got a take where he managed to go through it with a straight face.
I can see Frakes making it through, I have a hard time seeing the rest of the cast making it.
A scene that lasts 30 seconds on screen might take an entire morning to shoot. The actors have to repeat their lines exactly the same, every time. Imagine having to say the technobabble fifty times or more, without messing it up.
It's like filling up a balloon with air, then something bad happens!
Theoretically, it is possible
I can easily imagine it. You have words that the actor has never seen before, which have literally zero emotional resonance for them so they can't draw on any personal or cultural connections to use them, and they're tasked with spitting them out in a scene that calls for both intimate familiarity and stressful high stakes.