Wednesday 2 April 2014

Frisbee USS Enterprise should be real!

As if ThinkGeek aren't already creative enough with their weird and wonderful products, on April Fools' Day (yesterday) they like to go a little further, and come up with some extra implausible goodies to tempt us with. This year they had two Star Trek creations!

My favourite, and one I hope ThinkGeek can bend the laws of physics to make a reality, is the incredible USS Enterprise frisbee! Here's how ThinkGeek imagine it might work:
Each Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise Flying Disc is pretty much just what it looks like. There's the saucer section (made of space-age plastic) which is the part you throw (just like a regular flying disc). But the Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise Flying Disc also has the rest of the ship attached (made of foam). The saucer section spins freely, and the secondary hull actually stabilizes and flies behind it. The result? A U.S.S. Enterprise you can easily throw and catch. The Star Trek U.S.S. Enterprise Flying Disc - it's the most fun you can have without anti-gravity, a bottle of Saurian brandy, and four Tribbles!

There is of course a video of it in action too:



The second Trek product is a Rosetta Stone language course to Learn to Speak Klingon. They promise the package will include:
• Language software that will take you from simple greeting to arguing about sports over a bottle of Bloodwine
• Live conversation sessions with native speakers (guaranteed to be from Beta Quadrant)
• Language-enhancing games
• Free, downloadable mobile companion app
They got Michael Dorn (Mr Worf himself) to present the video explaining this one:



The potentially exciting thing about ThinkGeek April Fool's products is that they don't always remain jokes. As well as being a bit of fun, ThinkGeek carefully monitor the interest in the ideas, and sometimes bring the more plausible ones to life. You can even vote for the ones you like most (there are seven other besides these Star Trek ones this year).

These two are so plausible there are indeed already similar products out there. There have of course been numerous Klingon language books and learning guides over the years, including a CD-ROM language course from EuroTalk.

There's been nothing quite as elegant as the idea of turning a frisbee into the Enteprise, but flying models aren't unheard of. A few years ago Mattel released a propeller driven remote control model, and perhaps even more out there than what ThinkGeek propose, many years ago Estes released a model you could build around a rocket! I think the ultimate flying Enterprise would be a frisbee one though, so lets hope ThinkGeek can make it real!


2 comments:

Destructor1701 said...

The Enterprise Frisbee isn't a new idea:

http://trekcore.com/blog/2013/10/galoob-25-the-first-generation-of-tng-toys-part-ii/

Let's hope ThinkGeek have more success in bringing this to market than Galoob did!

8of5 said...

Awesome! Well, if the Galoob one actually flew, there's hope for ThinkGeek to pull it off!

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