I remember "The Next Doctor", that is as close as I need to get to a Doctor Who / Transformers crossover.
I get the feeling a lot of people hate Ian Levine. It's another one of those "I guess you have to be in the UK for you to care" things. As far as I'm concerned the guy is credited with stopping the BBC from destroying its copies of the first Daleks story and, indirectly, stopping the whole junking fiasco. He's got my respect for that alone. Couldn't care less if he calls people names. As far as the "canon-keeper" business. It doesn't hurt to have someone keep tabs, but fortunately given the nature of Doctor Who and its tendency to create different timelines and even realities, frankly as long as the BBC doesn't pull a Roddenberry and issue an edict like Paramount did with Star Trek, then as far as I'm concerned everything is canon - from John & Gillian travelling with "Dr. Who" to Faction Paradox and that Miranda comic book they came out with (featuring the Doctor's adopted daughter). The nature of the beast makes everything fair game - even a crossover with TNG after the TV series acknowledged Star Trek as a fictional franchise. All it means is the IDW story might take place in a different reality, or maybe Big Bang II created a universe in which the Star Trek continuity now exists within the Doctor Who continuity. For all we know IDW could be planning a "knock on the head" storyline where Rory or Amy or even the Doctor get conked and hallucinate the whole thing. Also, the ongoing Script & Screen competition has revived The Land of Fiction. This whole thing could end up being a sequel to The Mind Robber. Alex
the Tiptons interview had one of them saying that as far as he's concerned, it's canon and his definition of canon is: "if i like it, it's canon."
Hmm. They're engaging in a bit of retconning there, using First Contact/VOY-style Borg instead of the TNG designs even though it's set during TNG. And I'm pretty sure the Borg drone to the left in that first image is based on a picture of Seven of Nine when she was fully Borgified.
Also, whenever Voyager showed flashbacks featuring the Borg set either before TNG or during it, they always used the First Contact design. I always assumed that was one change that wasn't meant to be acknowledged. As far as anyone is concerned, they always looked like that.
Yeah... that's a little misleading.... here's the WHOLE quote: I think the important bit is: "every reader has their own "canon" of stories that matter, and ones that don't."
The changed look of the borg doesn't really bug me. I just assume its a case of 'thats how they would have looked in TNG if they'd had a bit more money'. Kinda like Roddenberry's explaination way back when of why the TMP Klingons had ridges. I was going to make the same point. Don't each of us have our own personal canon? If we hate a story, we ignore it. If we like it, we tend to fit it into our own personal view of the universe.
Try telling that to those guys on Sons of Guns. Sorry - canon/cannon jokes never get old with me. Anyway, anyone wanting a bit of a chuckle might want to check out the back pages of IDW's Doctor Who Ongoing #15 that came out this week. There's a little Fred Hembeck comic strip (remember HIM? Haven't seen his name in ages) commenting on Doctor Who crossovers. I mention it because as anyone who reads IDW knows they always run about 10 pages of house ads at the back. The strip is on the promo page for upcoming issues right after the "Next issue" promo for #16. Considering comics are put together months in advance, therefore this issue would have been put together and Hembeck's comic strip commissioned well before the TNG crossover announcement, someone at IDW (or at least Hembeck) must have known the announcement was going to get mixed reaction from some quarters! Alex
But that's unworkable, because then fans and writers lose frame of reference. For example, let's say (just for fun) that the new companion they introduce tomorrow ends up being the daughter of The Master. But uh oh - you hated the Master stories, from Terror of the Autons through to Last of the Time Lords. They didn't happen (which also means the Fourth and Tenth Doctors never regenerated, or at least not in the way depicted). So how can you reconcile the Master's daughter? I've seen people try to pick and choose "personal canon" in Star Trek and it doesn't work. Lots of people selectively ignore Enterprise or Voyager or even DS9 and TNG, or the Abrams movie. Just as there are Who fans who refuse to consider the 1996 movie as canon or - worse - reject the entire 2005 revival because the 2001 webcast Death Comes to Time apparently killed off the Doctor in his Seventh incarnation. So therefore you have fans who have a schism between them because how can someone extoll the virtues of "Blink" or Amy Pond with someone who, thanks to their personal canon, feels the Doctor died way back when he was travelling with Ace? You can choose to forget stories. Make "Fear Her" or "The Twin Dilemma" an unpleasant and fading memory. But they still need to have happened. Dragging things back on point, it's easier to ignore something like the TNG crossover, because it's not televised. It's easy to ignore the existence of the Doctor's daughter Miranda from the Eighth Doctor novels, or the fact Romana II regenerated into a somewhat evil Romana III. Or the suggestion that Gallifreyans are born on looms and Susan was some princess or something and not the Doctor's granddaughter at all. Because none of this is on TV. So I'm willing to give the crossover the benefit of the doubt until I see how they handle it and -primarily - if it's a good story. And if it isn't, then pfft! - I'll file it with those stories involving talking robot dinosaurs and shape-shifting penguins and move on. Alex
I highly recommend people read "Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes" first to see how Chris Roberson treated both franchises, I've said this before in the other thread, it has been sublime and better than I expected, and both franchises were treated equally and with the respect they both deserve. There are even continuity references for both as well. I was both excited and hesitant about it when it was first announced but fell in love with the thing after the first issue. I understand that this will be a different story, with different writers, but if they treat it with the same passion and effort that Roberson treated Star Trek/Legion of Superheroes, it should be awesome.