Saturday, June 4th marks the 40th anniversary release of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Paramount is celebrating the event with a “Summer of Sweet Revenge” with screenings, some new partnerships, and pop-up events in select US cities. They have also launched a website at wrathofpkhan.com to keep up with 40th anniversary activities.
Vote for the Khan Funko
Funko is releasing a brand new Khan figure and fans can actually pick the design. Visit the Official Star Trek Shop to choose between “Battle Ready Khan” or “Post-Battle Khan.” Votes have to be in by midnight Friday with the winner announced on Saturday. The Khan Funko will then be available for pre-order on June 6th at shop.StarTrek.com. And you can sign up and save 15% off your next order at Shop.StarTrek.com!
Screenings from Fathom Events
Wrath of Khan is headed back to the big screen at the end of the summer with a series of screenings with Fathom Events across the country on September 4th, 5th, and 8th. There will be over 2,500 screenings of the film across the three-day event. The screenings are part of a TCM Big Screen Classics series and will include exclusive insight from Turner Classic Movies. Visit FathomEvents.com for more details and tickets.
Paramount+ revenge collection
Starting on June 4 the Paramount+ streaming service will feature special carousels with a specially curated selection of Khan-centric and “revenge” themed Star Trek episodes and movies. The curated list will also be shared on Star Trek’s official social channels (@StarTrek and @StarTrekOnPPlus).
Wrath of Ice Cream
Paramount has also partnered with the ice cream brand Coolhaus to bring limited-edition Wrath of P’Khan ice cream sandwiches to New York City via a specially branded truck that will visit fans in SoHo at Prince & Green Streets on June 4th.
The Coolhaus Khan ice cream truck will celebrate National Ice Cream Day on July 17th in Los Angeles, visiting 2nd Street and Santa Monica Boulevard. And the truck will also be headed to San Diego Comic-Con, which runs July 21-24.
Here is a map of where you can find the truck in NYC (via StarTrek.com).
Visit wrathofpkhan.com to keep up with 40th anniversary activities.
Such happy memories of seeing Trek II that summer of 82 as a kid. I got a fold out poster magazine in the cinema and we took it home and just looked at it, mesmerised by the images wed just seen on the big screen ..
I’ve still got my fold-out poster somewhere!
Mine went to tatters and eventually lost it, but bought it again on ebay a few years ago. Mint condition :)
Movie memorabilia on sale in the cinema in the 80s was a fun thing, I remember with Superman III they had the foldout poster magazine, DC comic, and lots of badges (still have a badge from then, but like Trek II the comic and poster magazine were either lost or fell apart and got replaced via ebay years later. im pretty thorough with this stuff lol I guess its just important to me)
Same! In fact TWOK is one of the first movies I remember watching. We watched it at a drive thru with a double screening with Raiders of the Lost Ark!
I went and watched TVH in theaters last summer (one of the few Trek films I didn’t originally see in the theater when it came out). I really loved watching it in the theater and will probably watch this too now.
i saw II again as part of an all day I-IV ‘Trekathon’ at a cinema summer 87. that was a fun day as in those days no regular viewings of the films just catch them on tv once in a blue moon. so seeing II and III again after so long, and seeing TMP at the cinema (previously just seen it once on tv) was thrilling. IV id already seen a couple of times by then but it was still great to see it again. oh man those were the days!!
Its a really odd thing to say, but sometimes I do kind of miss the days when not every piece of content was so accessible because it felt special when you did catch something on TV you haven’t seen in years. There was real excitement and build up to watch something you haven’t seen 100 times just because you can now.
But I’m not saying I want a return to that or anything lol; but it did make watching movies feel more special when you did watch them again. But it’s nice you still get these kinds of events for old movies. It does tell you despite the fact everyone has thousands of movies on their phones in their pocket these days and can watch TWOK while they are waiting for their order at a restaurant, there is still a big enough audience to warrant these types of screenings.
Agreed. I really enjoyed seeing TMP new edition on the big screen in LA two weeks back, and the producers even stuck around for a panel with the audience afterwards.
Those dolls are so stupid-freaky looking that I absolutely have to get the set.
Most overrated Trek movie, if you ask me. It’s good. Very good. Might be the fourth best Trek movie though. Overhyped because it was the first really good one though.
“Most overrated Trek movie, if you ask me.”
And yet… nobody did. But thanks for trying to rain on the parade!
He’s right though. It’s a classic and a great Trek movie. But the fanboy, online media types nearly always assume that fans see it as the best Trek film. And to this fan that incorrect and rather arrogant viewpoint makes it “overated,” as I also rank it at #4 on my list, behind TSFS (1), ST-2009 (2) and TMP-2022 Remaster (3).
And why the need to be rude here? Hey AlphaPredator, I, for one, would be happy to ask you!
Well, everyone has opinions, as always. Even if KHAN were perfect, I’d have very mixed feelings about it, because as a measure of its perceived success it became the template of many a lesser Trek film down through the decades. That’s not the fault of the film per se, but it is unfortunate.
(And of course, for all its pleasures TWOK is far from perfect. It’s colorful, cheesy, heartfelt, silly, literary, and in some ways fairly juvenile. As David Gerrold opined at the time, there’s a lot to like, and a lot to dislike.)
TWOK is still my favorite movie, but its more out of nostalgia than it is for science or story accuracy. ;)
And yes sadly it left its legacy on the franchise both a positive and negative way. It’s because of TWOK we had four straight movies of supervillains with big ships trying to take down the Federation for VENGEANCE!!! And it’s gotten old. Really really old.
I’m praying to Kahless the next one just goes in a different direction for once.
count ‘generations’, ‘insurrection’ and ‘nemesis’ with similar plots
The quote I remember from him is that the film is about as scientifically accurate as the 1803 Farmer’s Almanac — which might be putting too positive a spin on it (even so, it doesn’t hold a candle to the scientific awfulness of the next one.) But hey, it delivers the goods that the first film didn’t.
My wife is not a fan of Trek in general (except for THE X-FILES and CARNIVALE, I can’t think of any genre show she might consider herself a fan of, and with X-, it comes with the caveat to disregard latter seasons along with the reboot), but her take is that TWOK is considered beloved because it engaged fans and non-fans in a very movie way without steamrollering over too much of what had been established.
And we both marvel that this happened given that it doesn’t often really look like a movie — there’s a lot of undramatic lighting choices, especially in the early going, though the choice of camera angles is often good. Wish they had gone more richNcontrasty, so we could have had a BoT moment like when all the lights go out except for the red alert and helm blinker, which has got to be one of the coolest looking things I remember from all of TOS. Supposedly this is due to the choice of film stock, and it was the only shotonfilm Trek not to employ Kodak stock.
For myself: I only really like three movies in the whole batch to date: 1, 2 & 5. And it took me years to really get squared away on 1. With this one, I started to feel pretty sure it was going to work during the scene in Kirk’s apartment, and that feeling solidified during the KSM scene in Kirk’s quarters, which to some felt like pastiche but to me just plain WORKED.
And the point when I realized this was a good movie-movie — something TMP couldn’t even ever aspire to being IMO, though I have decided in recent years to consider it the spacegoing equivalent of a police procedural — was when Kirk is on the station calling the ship with the code ploy, because right off, there was something odd about his “Captain Spock, damage report” line reading that wasn’t just Shatner missing the target. The ‘this thing has got some smarts’ feeling really revved things up for me, and it even made me feel smart for having noticed. (there’s a moment in FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, the Bond film that came out the year before, with a similar tiny bit, much more subtle: Bond and a guy he presumes is an ally sit down for dinner, but when the other guy suggests a particular wine, Bond graciously declines, saying it is a trifle too scented for his pallet or words to that effect. I told the guys with me that this was the bad guy, and got the ‘you’re fulla ____’ reply that you might expect, but it turned out to be the case, though even afterward they were both telling me that bit of dialog had nothing to do with whether the guy was a villain or not.)
So when a movie gets so many important things right, large and small, it somehow does make it easier to overlook the misses. I didn’t ever give a hoot about whether Koenig was on the show when SPACE SEED was made, but Kirk trying to say he had never faced death like this before was a bad and incorrect call, and the whole not raising the shields thing is about on par with the wrongheadedness of Nolte giving up his gun to James Remar that same year in 48HRS, something with the latter that was so infuriating it left me fuming till the Redneck bar scene many minutes later.
So much for limiting myself to two-sentence replies! I’m starting to realize that these HEAVEN’S GATE sized posts are taking up my whole morning coffee time!
Good post. Did you mean to say Trek 6 though instead of 5?
No.
I know you explained it to me Kmart, but it’s still nuts to me you love TFF lol. Dude you are so critical of basically every Star Trek show that isn’t TOS or DS9 and think everything Abrams and Kurtzman has touched belongs in the trash heap never to be seen again; but somehow you manage to appreciate one of the most reviled movies in the franchise. I’m not getting your case for it, you know I don’t care, just find it funny as hell though.
Tiger2, I agree with you. I have a ton of respect for kmart’s knowledge of cinema, but this one is a hard one to make sense of.
I think the non-VFX shots are very well-composed, and there is a lot of fairly subtle choreography of actors and camera in the movie too, so there is something good going on with DP and Shatner in this regard. I love Goldsmith’s music (even the stuff recycled from RAMBO 3) too, but mainly I dig TFF because I like the KSM stuff so much, even the parts where they push too hard.
I can find as much fault with this as I can with any of the others (more, if you want to get into effects), but for me this is like Indy hanging on the Nazi sub for 3000 miles … if you like the movie, you will just roll with it.
I think there is a better movie to be made with this story, one with Kirk more pro-active. I think Sybok should have tried and failed to convert him down on Nimbus III, then marooned him there. That way Kirk would have to go with Klingons in pursuit of Ent. You could do it with him and his buds or him alone, only to reunite with his buds later on, but you could have played existing KLing tenssions and then had something develop.
My problems with it are why is the Enterprise a training vessel and why is the Enterprise only 20 years old. The literary elements and stage play elements work well as does the submarine movie stuff. They don’t do a lot of scientific things though or explore anything. Its much more militaristic than TMP. I can see the problems Gene outlined in his memos.
They don’t (mis)claim the ship is 20 years old till TSFS. I can see the ship as a training vessel, just barely, as the refiting must have taken place several years prior to TWOK to get them to the ’15 years ago’ bit.
The subtext I’ve always taken, and it has been observed by many others, is that Spock is serving as Captain basically to keep the ship ready for whenever Kirk comes back to his senses and resumes command. A training command would also probably keep them around 001, to use TNG parlance.
You’re right. I misremembered that line, its from Star Trek III.
It really is.
Both Khan and Kirk are so painfully stupid from “Space Seed” to TWOK that they are hard to watch without groaning.
Let me take a wild guess: you prefer the snoozefest of TMP? More ”cerebral” for you?
I prefer it (the 2022 version) over WOK as well, your petty-childish insults to those of us who like it notwithstanding.
The only thing it did poorly was it made all the feature films or at least 70% of them after being about villains on revenge. It had such a huge impact that all 3 Kelvin features in some way were trying to out Khan, Khan.Only the TMP and the Whales movie, and Shatner’s bizarre search for god movie. seemed to be about something other than Revenge.
I was able to go to a screening for the 30th anniversary in NC with Nick Meyer. Half way though I turned around and he was sitting right behind me lol. Highlight of my Trekdom.
Awesome! Cool as well that they had a screening in the south.
I really do get spoiled living in NYC. First the SNW premiere, now ice cream sandwiches!! What will they think of next?