Romancing the Precious Cargo

 The brief for July's Star Trek Fan Art Challenge was, well, brief:

  

Not Good Enough: Art inspired by unpopular episodes

  One particular episode came to mind as soon as this theme was suggested: "Precious Cargo" (a kind of screwball comedy).  Although it's not my absolute favourite, it is one of my most watched episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise (and not just because the lovely Connor Trinneer is running around in his undercrackers again).  However, almost everyone else considers it "a piece of crap" - even the episode writer, David Goodman!

 I quickly gathered up some screencaps from TrekCore and put together the rough draft below.  The inspiration for this came from the Romancing the Stone movie - specifically the odd couple romance and the crashing around in a jungle (I love that movie!). 

 

 Initially, I'd intended the backdrop to be a screencap of the watery jungle that Trip and Kaitaama find themselves in (similar to the RtS poster background), but the characters didn't stand out very well against it so I used a shot of their escape pod descending towards the planet instead.  Happily, the top of the escape pod lent itself as a marvellous background for the episode title.

 I made the "Precious" part of the title by chopping up & amending a screenshot of the "Romancing" typeface (from Art of the Title) because I couldn't find a suitable substitute typeface online, and the "CARGO" is Trek's (and sci-fi's in general) ubiquitous Microgramma Bold Extended superimposed over Princess Kaitaama's sparkly dress.  That took some doing in Paint, I can tell you! 

 (The rough draft "CARGO" isn't Microgramma, by the way - it's Lovecraftimus.)

 

 While we're here, let's give everyone a break from the Star Trek stuff and have a look at the Romancing the Stone trailer, shall we?

 Hey!  I'm sure at least one reader is here for Trek!  And this is my post, so stop busybodying.

 Too late!  I've already inserted the video.

 

 

 Right, now that Witchface is out of the way, back to Precious Cargo.  After some repositioning of the characters and swapping Plinn for Captain Archer (he is the star of the show, after all), I added the stasis pod's control panel lights to the top of the escape pod then overlaid the refined title.  At the bottom I added the poster credits - the layout is based on the Romancing the Stone movie poster and contains references to the episode as well as other Enterprise refs and a personal ref, too:

 

 And that, you may be relieved to hear, is that.  And now I've got this latest Trek art out of my system, the next post will be some garden stuff, I think.  Possibly a reminder for the Infomaniac Garden Photos Event as time is getting on?