No there is nothing special about it unless you're a fan which is a small portion of the audience. What are you going to do, rejuvenate Shatner or Stewart? Or do you really want a bunch of kids playing them? Good actors can be found for a new show, just like Stewart and Brooks were. The appeal of Star Trek was strange new worlds and technologies in adition to writing and acting. New generations of kids want to see wonders just like I did when I was a kid, not same old rehashed technologies. Everybody has a laptop now, everybody has a powerful database, everybody can buy a video game and play with phasers, starship combat etc... there's a million "gritty" shows on TV like the nuTrek, that type of stuff is just not interesting. A Trek series like that would flop in 1 season. What needs to happen is that new, revolutionary technologies need to be invented, new strange stories need to be told, with a new compelling characters that we don't know, but want to know more about, etc etc. That's why I'd set it in the 25th century, have Picard and Sisko come in a cameo aboard new ship as 145 year old admirals or captains. That said, I'd like movies to feature them, but a new series needs to be totally independent.
I've always liked the idea of going back to the Lost Era and picking up a series there, plenty of scope for stories, bridging the gap between TUC and TNG and all the massive changes that went on there. There are also a few ships that could be the focus: Excelsior (the rumoured Sulu series from the 90s), Enterprise-B (repairing the damage that GEN did to Harriman, by making him a competent CO rather than the baffoon he had to be to make Kirk look better), or the Enterprise-C (from the time the ship was launched, she is on a countdown to an honourable death, but before that she would have done the name proud).
Because no one can act like Stewart or Shatner no matter how many manerisms they try to replicate. I'd never buy it, just like I didn't nuKirk. It was just alien to me. PS. Those were all movies, and no continuity movies at that. When you see Picard in almost 200 episodes, it's a bit different from replacing shambolic Cloney with serious actor like Bale. Comic books vs Star Trek is too much like apples and oranges
Okay, what about Bond? Suppose somebody had decided decades ago that "no one can act like Connery no matter how many mannerisms they try to replicate." Should they have ditched the character back in the seventies? Heck, Bela Lugosi was the definitive Dracula for generations, but then Christopher Lee came along, and Frank Langella, and Jack Palance, and Gary Oldman . . . No actor is irreplaceable. And audiences have proven that they'll accept new actors in classic roles, sometimes over and over and over. There have been six different SUPERMAN's in my lifetime. Another Kirk or Picard doesn't faze me!
This is how I feel. If I make it another thirty or forty years, I imagine I'll see multiple actors play both characters. We've already had two actors play Kirk and three play Picard or a clone.
You know, instead of recasting, they could do something original and create new Trek characters to launch a new show or movie!
That could work, too. It certainly did for TNG. But, on the other hand, you don't have to put the old characters out to pasture as long as you can recast and reinvent them . . . . .
Don't forget James McAvoy's xcellent Xavier in X-Men: First Class. That's pretty much Wheelchair Picard.
I think the biggest one that strikes me would be Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. They ignored the third movie completely. But the fourth movie continued from the third despite the TV show. Yeah, Terminator is definitely not as big of a continuity as Trek, but it's at least a decent example. There are other examples in movies where a new direction was forgotten. Wouldn't that be the case for recasting too? Personally, I'd want a new set of characters for TV.
Hmm. Interesting example. Although I think that's more a case of a franchise spliting off into two separate continuities rather than backtracking, since the TV show and Salvation were developed more or less around the same time. (I remember being told, when I wrote my Terminator: Salvation novel, to ignore the TV show since that was a separate continuity.) I'll be curious to see where the Terminator series goes next, especially since rewriting timelines and continuity is pretty much built into the concept's DNA . . . .
I'm not sure if this really holds up, but I thought Sarah Connor Chronicles was the same kind of time travel thing as STXI. Terminators from post-T3 (or T4?) travel back to sometime after T2 and make changes sending history down an alternate path. Just like Nero and Spock went back to Jim Kirk's birth and started meddling.
Indeed. "Continuity" in the Terminator series is kinda slippery by design, since the whole series is about the future trying to change the past in order to change the future . . .
Yeah, because Star Trek '09 was a dismal failure that nobody went to see. BTW, I think the word you were looking for was "abomination," not "abortion." An abortion is the termination of pregnancy by the removal or expulsion from the uterus of a fetus. Using that word as a metaphor for a movie would not make you very popular with the female sex. The next time you bash Abrams's film, you might want to be a bit more careful with your choice of derogatory statements. I believe Ron Moore said it best when he said that people's attitude should be "Yay, another Star Trek series!," not "Oh God, not another Star Trek series..." My fear is that making a new series with a new cast in the prime universe, but just farther into the future, would just give people reaction #2. Changing the time period is not good enough (but don't take my word for that, just see how good that worked with Enterprise). C.E. Evans is right: the characters are the most important thing, not the setting.
As long as the name "Star Trek" is attached to a project it will be judged by what came before. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are iconic and part of our culture. The characters that followed have never reached that level of renown. I don't know if they ever will.
To be fair, I'm sure people said similar things back in the eighties before TNG debuted, and yet people accepted a STAR TREK series without Kirk and the usual gang--for seven successful seasons. On TV at least, TNG was an unqualified success, even if the TOS crew has a better track record on the big screen.
I bet if you asked random people on the street to make a word-association with "Star Trek," most people would automatically say Kirk or Spock (or Enterprise, Klingon, "beam me up, Scotty," etc. of course, but that's not important to this point). Maybe a small few would say Picard, Data, or Worf. I'd bet nobody would say Sisko, Janeway, or Archer.
Which could maybe still be the case with Star Trek. Maybe the movies will continue with the alternate universe, and maybe a series would be in the prime universe. It probably wouldn't happen that way if the Bad Robot team controls the TV series though. I think it's too hard to say since a TV series doesn't even seem likely for the next few years. There's a lot of variables. As for Terminator, well, I think Cameron said it best when he said that the soup had been pissed in.