Star Trek Bootcamp: How to Introduce Your Kids to the 24th Century

The only two things in this world I take seriously: (1) movies and (2) my kids. With this Star Trek Into Darkness thing coming out, I'm planning to take Zev, but needed to get him up to speed on the Federation and the whole history of the 24th century.

Introducing Star Wars, on the other hand, was easy. I've had that one worked out for decades (feel free to disagree, but know that you're wrong):

1. Watch Episode IV first.
2. Watch it again.
3. Then Empire and Jedi.
4. Take a long break.
5. Introduce the prequels.
6. Pretend The Clones Wars never happened.
7. Rewatch only Empire and Jedi.

Easy.

Star Trek is trickier. There's the original series, 7 seasons each of Next Generation and Deep Space Nine and Voyager, and however much Enterprise, the original movie series, and on and on. There's no clear or easy way in.

Advice I got from two nerd-dad friends: Watch some episodes with Shatner, then maybe some TNG and perhaps Wrath of Khan. A greatest hits approach.

I ignored them and went this way, given that we're dealing with a 21st century kid with things to do and places to be:

1. We talked about why I love Star Trek, the vision for a spacefaring peaceful Earth where exploration, goodwill and curiosity drive galactic progress.  
2. Watched the first JJ Abrams' reboot. It's a good entry and set-up, to both the new stuff and the old.
3. Watched some of the best episodes of Next Generation, starting with "Q Who" and a few of the other Borg episodes. Going to move on to some Data-centric ones. The pacing of the shows is dated and slow, to be honest, but the sci-fi and characters are solid. I could watch it all day and all night.
4. Whatever's next. 

How did you do it? 

Minecraft Is a Virus and It's in My House

Like any amazing father, I'm super involved in my kids' gaming life. I play along. I join the Lego adventures and play the coop companion. I encourage and support, I look up cheats and hints. That's good parenting, right? Yes it is.

Usually, we're playing something we got into together (my all-time favorite coop: Portal 2), but Zev has started bringing this own tastes into our gaming. Skylanders Giants was all the rage with the second graders for a while, but that's worn off (plus, we beat it in like 2 weeks, and only fully upgraded one giant).

So now he's brought Minecraft into the house, and it's taken over everything. The thing is a virus. A truly awesome and social and brain-bending virus, but still.

We both have worlds going on the Xbox. It's on the iPhone, all the time. He's watching YouTube clips of advanced gameplay and elaborate (and very well done) music videos recasting pop songs into the Minecraft universe (loving "Some Items That I Used to Own"). He makes up his own songs now, too, and shares everything he learns about the world, constantly, with all the other boys in the second grade.

And that's the best part of the whole game for me: All the good stuff to know about Minecraft, you hear from friends. (Well, in my case, the wiki or the book.) And what could be more social than that?

This is how I even know anything about Minecraft, from all the second-grade gossip. It's not like the game tells you that you need to build a portal to hell, and collect some eyes, and find a hidden fortress, and defeat a dragon. The casual player would have no idea. At all. Not a clue. But the kids all know this, and they obsess about it and talk all about it, so now I do, too.

My wife calls it the game where I break rocks and kill cows, and that's true. There is a lot of breaking of rocks and killing of cows. But there's also fighting zombies with pig faces, and building flying castles, and…breaking rocks.   

But I finally made a diamond sword, and I'm collecting obsidian (it's hard!) for my Nether portal. Zev's keen on making an iron golem and building an underground city and only occasionally loses track of his house and gets so upset he can't play for a few days.

We have goals, agendas and we know how to get there. Hard work and patience. Again, good parenting, right?

Insta-review: HORTON HEARS A WHO

Real quick, like: Easily the year's best movie about sweet dumb talking elephants and tiny worlds in existential crisis. Plus, the first adaptation to stay True to the Seuss since, like, the Chuck Jones cartoons a lifetime ago. The animation, the flavor, the expansion of the story (already one of Dr. Seuss' "long" books) all just works.

Bonus personal details: Saw this on the Fox lot with Zev, his first critics' screening and, let's see, third-ever movie in a theater. He ate it up. Turned around an buried his head a few times, when the Wickersham Brothers or Vladikov the vulture (Will Arnett! Love Will Arnett) were on-screen. By the end he was chanting and clapping with the Whos, and pretending to play a trumpet, and what else do you want?

Good news for tiny people developing ever-more-complex worldviews: The key for him, and anybody at a fragile age where they're trying to reconcile how Good and Bad can co-exist, it's important that all the bad guys in the story not only get schooled but, as Zev says, "turn good."

Full review: Here.

Bonus bong-related detail: Oh, and here's one of those trippy "sync" videos, with the old Chuck Jones cartoon version of HORTON and The Who's "Teenage Wasteland." Compare and contrast.

World's Littlest Jazz Critic

As Zev falls asleep in the backseat, we're listening to the jazz station, Sarah Vaughan is singing "Lullaby of Birdland." She's scatting and bebopping and otherwise jamming on some nonsense lyrics. Zev cracks a smile, his eyes closed. "This is a crazy song," he says,and then he's out.