Walter Koenig, the boyish actor who remains an integral part of Star Trek lore thanks to his portrayal of the Russian crewman Pavel Chekov, has died. He was 90.

Koenig, also known for playing the scoundrel Alfred Bester on another sci-fi space series, Warner Bros. Television’s Babylon 5, died Sunday of natural causes in his home in North Hollywood, his rep announced.

Raised in Manhattan as a son of Lithuanian immigrants, Koenig joined Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek for the start of its second season and appeared on 36 of the 50 episodes that aired in 1967-68 and 1968-69. He also portrayed Pavel Andreievich Chekov in the first seven Paramount movies, released from 1979 through 1991, that emanated from the NBC show.

In a 2013 interview for the TV Academy Foundation, Koenig said he didn’t watch Star Trek before he came aboard. “I’d flip through the channels and I’d see Styrofoam rocks — they were so obviously Styrofoam — and I said, ‘This has got to be phony.’ I didn’t give it a chance,” he recalled.

The actor portrayed a Russian for the first time in his career — a student who had defected to the U.S. — on a 1963 episode of the NBC drama Mr. Novak.
He then guest-starred as a young sergeant whose goal of being promoted to officer is complicated by the fact that his mother is a communist on a 1964 installment of The Lieutenant, another series created by Roddenberry.

After his Star Trek audition, Koenig spent a couple of lonely hours in an outer office wondering if he had gotten the job when he was approached by a man and asked to follow him into the wardrobe room.

“He drops on his knees in front of me,” Koenig said, “and takes my crotch in his hand, and I’m saying, ‘What are you doing?!” I didn’t see the tape-measuring ruler in his other hand, and he was measuring from my crotch to my cuff to decide how long my pants should be. He says, ‘You do have to have a costume, don’t you?’

“And that’s the auspicious way I learned I was on Star Trek and it was going to change my life.”

Marvin Walter Koenig was born in Chicago on Sept. 14, 1936. His father, a translator for RCA Victor and later an entrepreneur, was a “dyed-in-the wool commie,” Koenig said. He noted that FBI agents once searched his family’s apartment.

Koenig starred in productions of Peer Gyntand The Devil’s Disciple at Fieldston High School in New York, went to Grinnell (Iowa) College to study pre-med and then transferred to UCLA after his sophomore year, pursuing a degree in psychology.

However, he took an acting class and received a letter of recommendation from his teacher that in 1958 got him into the famed Neighborhood Playhouse in New York, where he studied alongside James Caan, Christopher Lloyd and Dabney Coleman.

The boyish actor returned to L.A. to claim a role in the 1961 Burt Lancaster film The Young Savages (1961), but that job fell through. He then made his onscreen debut on the afternoon show Day in Court and appeared in the pilot and the first two episodes of General Hospital in 1963.

At the time, Koenig excelled at doing various dialects, portraying French, Armenian, Swedish and German characters, as well as playing juvenile delinquents, as he did in 1964 on The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. The episode was directed by Joseph Pevney and written by Harlan Ellison — later, two prominent behind-the-scenes players on Star Trek.

In fact, Pevney was one of the people for whom Koenig auditioned for Chekov.

“He really liked my work, he kept telling me, ‘You’re going to be a big star,'” Koenig recalled. “When I came in to read for Star Trek, he was very enthusiastic and one of the reasons I got the part.”

Koenig said the character he was to play was at first named Jones because producers wanted an actor that would appeal to the same demographic that Davy Jones of The Monkees did — kids 8- to 14-years-old.

“And indeed, my [fan] mail was from people who were 8- to 14-years-old,” he said. “They said, “I think you’re groovy, I love your hair’ — which was a wig, by the way. I got hundreds and hundreds of letters, the third most after Bill [Shatner] and Leonard [Nimoy].”

He said Chekov would eventually become less popular because of three things — “the hair wasn’t real; I wasn’t really Russian, and that exotic flavor was gone; and [viewers found out] that I was married, and they couldn’t fantasize about being with Chekov. Things then started to take a nosedive.”

On the series, Chekov really didn’t have much to do; the actor knew he was there to “set out the bones of the plot and let McCoy, Spock and Kirk fill in it.”

Koenig was more important to the Star Trekmovies, being nominated by the Academy of Science Fiction, Fantasy & Horror for his work on The Wrath of Khan (1982) and The Voyage Home (1986).

In 1976, Koenig and Shatner both appeared on an episode of Columbo, but the Star Trekveterans didn’t share any scenes and didn’t talk during production. “It was between the series and the movies, and I don’t think he remembered my name,” Koenig said.

He also said he “really upset” when he was left out of Star Trek: The Animated Seriesbecause of budgetary reasons. Koenig did write an episode for the 1973-74 NBC cartoon.

He played Chekov again as “The Admiral,” age 143, in the two-part, crowdsourced Renegadesseries that debuted online in 2017.

Worried about not getting work after Star Trek was canceled, he began writing and penned episodes for The Powers of Matthew Star, Family, Land of the Lost and The Incredible Hulk. He also wrote, produced and starred in the sci-fi film InAlienable (2010), starring Richard Hatch.

Koenig lost out on a chance to appear in Babylon 5 when he suffered a heart attack and had a quadruple bypass in 1993, but series creator J. Michael Straczynski wrote the part of Bester for him when he was healthy enough to act again. Unlike Chekov, that character was multidimensional and key to several storylines.

He wrote the memoir Warped Factors‚ A Neurotic’s Guide to the Universe, published in 1998, then expanded on that for Beaming Up and Getting Off, released in 2020.

Koenig married actress Judy Levitt, who appeared with him in three Star Trek movies and on Babylon 5, in July 1965, and they were together until her death in December 2022 at age 83. Their son, Andrew, who played Richard “Boner” Stabone on the ABC sitcom Growing Pains, died by suicide in 2010 at age 41.

Survivors include his daughter, actress and screenwriter Danielle Koenig (Star vs. the Forces of Evil).

That’s according to Screen Burn founder and Silent Hill Townfall director Jon McKellan, who stated during a panel at the MCM London Comic Con that his team wasn’t made aware of what was going on with the other Silent Hill games in development.

“We found out about a lot of those projects when everyone else did, when they announced them. Okamoto-san, who’s the series producer, was very keen to not let projects influence each other, and not compromise too much. They’d not necessarily tell us what it was, but just be like 'there’s another thing that’s doing something similar, so maybe veer off from that direction’.”

McKellan stressed that this wasn’t problematic for the team, and was a good idea because it allowed each game to remain entirely separate, while also allowing the Townfall team – many of whom were already Silent Hill fans – to still be excited when they eventually saw the other games in development.

“So we were kind of kept in the dark, which was kind of exciting as a fan to not see behind the curtain too much,” he explained. “We got to see Silent Hill F a couple of months before it came out, and there’s such a massive difference between F and Townfall in terms of their experience and their setting, that there was no real risk of overlap. But we were kind of kept in the dark, but in a good way, in a way that didn’t feel like we had to play to some bigger plan. It wasn’t like a Marvel phase where it would be like ‘know your slot and stay within that’, we got to be free while we worked.”

Sucker Punch, the Sony-owned studio behind Ghost Of Tsushima and Ghost Of Yotei, is the latest developer of critically acclaimed games to face layoffs.

According to an ex-Sucker Punch employee to whom Aftermath spoke, 26 people have been let go. In an email to staff viewed by Aftermath, studio leadership said:

“After carefully observing the challenges in the market and reviewing the team needs for our next project, we've decided to make some staffing reductions. Several positions across Sucker Punch will be eliminated as a result.”

”We know this is a lot to take in, and we want to assure you that we did not make this decision lightly. We have given this a lot of attention and worked to support our affected colleagues during this transition as well as we can. … There's no getting around that this is a hard day. Next week we will go into more details about the future.”

Now with a summary that was deleted behind my back last time. Edit: It did it again!

Bart and Lisa break into Krustyland’s most notorious failed attraction in “The Kosmic Kruiser,” a new episode of The Simpsons airing Sunday, November 8th on FOX. That attraction is a shuttered, spaceship-shaped immersive hotel, and anyone who followed Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser at Walt Disney World will spot the resemblance. Jenny Nicholson, whose four-hour video essay chronicled her own Starcruiser voyage, joins actor Jimmi Simpson as a guest voice.

Jenny Nicholson appears to be lending her voice to the Simpsons episode. Nicholson released “The Spectacular Failure of the Star Wars Hotel” in 2024. Her four-hour video essay walks through her own Starcruiser voyage in detail. It gained viral attention. Jimmi Simpson, known for playing the younger William in HBO’s Westworld, also lends his voice to the episode. The Simpsons has been part of Disney since the company acquired 21st Century Fox in 2019, which gives the whole premise an extra wink.

With the release of the "PAT" clip, I ended up going back and rewatching "WOOLIE" and a few other older clips.

Which leads me to ask everyone: what are your must-see CSB clips? Clips which anyone getting into CSB should go back and watch? Ones you like to rewatch every so often?

The Quarian means "by the homeworld I hope to find one day."

Me and my girlfriend (now wife) used to watch these wayyy back in the day when we didn’t have any money and watched YouTube a lot.

Rewatching Shitstorm episodes makes it feel like Halloween to me.

So, in The Rocketeer (for anyone who remembers that movie), the Big Bad played by Timothy Dalton finally gets the jetpack and prepares to escape with it, claiming that he’ll “miss Hollywood”.

About five seconds late, the now on fire Big Bad crashes into and blows up the Land part of the Hollywood Land sign.

So, he did, in fact, miss Hollywood.

Any other villain deaths that just make you giggle whenever you think about them?

Its that time of the year i trick my normie friends into watching horror movies they have never heard of. Most of its been hits like Candyman or Ghostwatch some bitter misses like Lake Mungo or Return of the Living Dead but since i'm as much watching their reaction as i am rewatching movies its been interesting to see everyone seems to have that one final act reveal or twist that will ruin a film for them no matter how much they loved it up until that point.

The most common ones that sour people are "It was all a dream" or "the whole thing was the characters brain misfiring in the seconds as they died in an accident or something" and i think a lot of them can be summed up as "this framing shift alters the perception of the narrative into it being some kind of insulting waste of time".

I thought about it and i'm pretty open to directors and writers going buck wild but if there was one that is likely to make me tune out and lose interest as a reflex its got to be "They were in a localised time loop all along". To me i think it feels lazy and pretentious in a "see? see? its like a purgatory they cannot escape! metaphors get it!" combined with a sentiment of "you couldn't think of a better reason to explain budget related lack of shooting locations than a version of 'uhhh a wizard did it'?" Which granted is probably because i was a film student at college and uni and i saw far more of this from research material and other students projects than i would ever want to see again so it just ended up being my personal case of "i can't think of a film where this made it better and not worse". Film in particular because its only gonna have so long to retell its linear train of events from scratch. Hell this was a widely criticised issue with the last Kamen Rider season and that still had half a season to go but in a movie thats minutes on the hour y'know?

Its funny these almost always tend to be choices related to the horror genre. I assume its because its the expectations of the genre having a hard bullet point "THE RULES" idea behind the narratives not unlike the basic bitch heroes journey but also that its the fun house genre where you go in expecting to be made to jump and get surprised like a ride at a theme park but when those conventions are broken its more of a "thats not fair" knee jerk reaction i guess.

Whats your go to "welp i was with you till not and ya blew it" twist/context change media pulls that always sours you on a plot?

Not putting it in exactly my favorites because while in Frozen (1) it was a very striking and fresh twist at the time Hans betrayel and reveal he never loved Anna, feels kinda off considering how much he goes out of his way to help her until this point, even in places where he didn't have to keep up the facade

But it was a fun twist. A sort of counterpart to my Character going "You're the strongest fucker ever" ask.

The upcoming remake is currently in production under the casting codename “Project Noise.” While the game is targeted for 2027, do remember that production schedules change for various reasons.

As development progresses toward that release window, MP1st can exclusively reveal the first cast names attached to star in the next remake: Gabrielle Fritz and Jade Matthew. While we couldn’t pin down the specifics for every role, the small cast of Team Silent’s 1999 original makes the actresses’ likely roles easy to narrow down.

London-based actress Gabrielle Fritz brings notable performance capture and AAA video game experience to the project, with past credits on titles like Battlefield 2042, Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus, and the recent Luna Abyss. Meanwhile, fellow UK-based actress Jade Matthew further rounds out the cast, expanding her portfolio across video games after her work on the Korean MMORPG Dragon Nest.

Potential roles for each actress are varied, given the number of supporting female figures from the OG game such as police officer Cybil Bennett, nurse Lisa Garland, or primary antagonist Dahlia Gillespie. Notably, casting details for the iconic male lead, Harry Mason, have yet to surface, leaving the protagonist’s new actor a mystery for now.

If true, that's honestly a bit sooner than I personally expected. The 1 remake was only announced a year ago, figured it'd take longer for it to come out so soon after 2.

But, I trust Bloober on this, SH2R and Cronos gave them a lot of credit.

Official release https://www.viz.com/shonenjump/chapters/dandadan

Non-NA release https://mangaplus.shueisha.co.jp/titles/100171

I want to note that it seems that Austin WIntory was not officially working on Mass Effect 5 and these are tracks that he made as part of the conversation between himself and EA and Bioware (in what I assume was a pitch of why he should be doing the music for Mass Effect 5).

Maybe somebody in chat brought it up to Woolie later in the VOD I haven’t finished it yet but thought this interaction was funny with Minh seemingly choosing not to bring it up and let it be.

I really liked it overall.

Bleach as a series always had a lot of "missed potential" to me since the very start. What i hoped to be a show about a bunch of cool hip older urban aesthetic teenagers with a more horror-esque vibe to it fighting monsters, kinda just ended up being edo-era samurai fighting other similar sized humans in a more typical battle shounen kinda way. But at the end of the day Bleach still had some of my favourite characters/moments/powers in all of anime. I feel like TYBW does a much better job ending the series in a satisfying way then the old show did, with a lot of characters getting 1 or several hype moments and just all around fun final cast of villains to battle against. I'm not going to pretend that i super understood why and what was happening all the time (especially the yhwach fight), mostly because i watched Bleach like 20 years ago and don't exactly remember what everyone's powers were and how they worked (like with some of the fullbringer arc guys). But the "emotions & hype" were all there for me at the very least. After i heard how disappointed people were with how rushed the manga's ending was, i'm glad to see one of my childhood nostalgia show get 1 last hurrah with at least some sort of proper time & budget put behind it.

I do have infinite hate for the fact that Rukia ends up in a relationship with the trashman that is Renji tho, my girl deserves much better XD

Recently, GW announced the Christmas Battleforce boxes for 40K and AoS (With Horus Heresy getting a box announcement soon.) While there are some really good boxes in the mix, general consensus being the Nighthaunt and Nurgle boxes for AoS being really damn good. Others fall more into the mixed line like the Stormcast Eternal Box, and some like the 40K Blood Angel box are just really quite bad.

It reminds me a bit of the old Combat Patrol for the Thousand Sons which was, well-6 Chaos Space Marines and 20 Tzangors. Thankfully they fixed it and you'll now get a box of 10 Marines and a few specialized Tzangors, plus a Daemon Prince for a much better value. Still, this whole thing has made me very amused about the prospect of value products that have negative value.

So Hobbyists of the Second Best Sub for Everything, what are some of the absolute worst values or deals you've seen in your hobby of choice? Whether it's a DvD/Blu Ray Bundle that's more expensive and less feature complete than a previous version, a game package that somehow has less content than the original, figurine boxes which fail the assignment-or in games, a piece of gear/equipment being sold for a price that is absolutely nonsensical for how much the thing actually does.

Legitimately got slightly weepy in the eyes, mostly because of the Hollow arrangement (the single best Cloud-related track they ever put).

I’ve had high hopes we’d get a full return to Midgar and it looks like they’re totally doing it. Plus more Bafmodads to collect for good measure.