[IDW] Possibility for more unmade scripts to be adapted?

[Danlav05]

City on the Edge of Forever is now running, we've had a comic of George Lucas' first Star Wars draft and later on this year Ellison's lost Batman episode is being adapted.

Now some of these lost projects are fairly well known thanks to magazine articles/the internet etc, but what more Star Trek ones could be published by IDW?

- The Billion Year Voyage
- Planet of the Titans
- The First Adventure
- Spiner & Logan's Trek 11
- The Beginning

Are there any more people may like to see?

 

[Nightowl1701]

Makes sense to do The God Thing first, I suppose. That brief excerpt Rod Roddenberry presented of the script was quite intriguing.

 

[Christopher]

I'd like to see more early drafts like "City." For instance, the original version of "Mirror, Mirror," where the alternate reality wasn't an evil-twin universe but just one where history had developed subtly differently. Or the original, less stupid versions of "Spock's Brain" and "The Mark of Gideon."

 

[Nightowl1701]

Um, I've read the summarized story outlines of both "Spock's Brain" and "The Mark of Gideon." Maybe slightly less silly/campy, but less stupid might be stretching a little.

 

[EnriqueH]

The God Thing is still in limbo, isn't it?

I know there's been numerous attempts at reviving it. Is there anything new here? (I assume not because I'm sure I would've seen a thread by now.)

 

[nickyboy]

I would be happy to see more unmade scripts find their way into a comic adaptation. How about adapting:

1. The DS9 episode that would have seen the return of Ensign Sito
2. Star Trek Phase II
3. TOS Episode: Deep Mudd

 

[Nightowl1701]

Rod Roddenberry put the first 20 pages of the script up on his Mission Log podcast (link here) a couple of months ago, but nothing since. Like I said then, I don't see what point there is in keeping it, Planet of the Titans or any of the others Danlav mentioned locked up after all these years.

 

[Christopher]

Um, I've read the summarized story outlines of both "Spock's Brain" and "The Mark of Gideon." Maybe slightly less silly/campy, but less stupid might be stretching a little.

At least "Gideon" didn't have the gratuitous and inexplicable duplicate Enterprise, and "Brain" had a more interesting alien culture than the '50s B-movie Space Amazons.

 

[Avro Arrow]

2. Star Trek Phase II

This was going to be my response to the OP's question. Adapt all the Phase II scripts as an ongoing series. Keep the art true to the Phase II pre-production art, use the Phase II characters and ship, basically let us see what the whole thing would have been like if it had come to pass in the 70s.

I know there would be no way it would be in continuity, but I don't care.

Of course, I'd also like them to do an Enterprise: Season 5 comic (it apparently worked for Buffy?), but I don't know if there were enough scripts in the pipeline for this to count as "adapting unmade scripts" vs. just creating something new. And Star Trek: Phase II would probably sell better anyway.

 

[Danlav05]

2. Star Trek Phase II

This was going to be my response to the OP's question. Adapt all the Phase II scripts as an ongoing series. Keep the art true to the Phase II pre-production art, use the Phase II characters and ship, basically let us see what the whole thing would have been like if it had come to pass in the 70s.

I know there would be no way it would be in continuity, but I don't care.

Of course, I'd also like them to do an Enterprise: Season 5 comic (it apparently worked for Buffy?), but I don't know if there were enough scripts in the pipeline for this to count as "adapting unmade scripts" vs. just creating something new. And Star Trek: Phase II would probably sell better anyway.

The webseries has many elements from the original Phase II so it doesn't feel as lost - they even adapted a few scripts. Now CBS has a rule in place that no stories written for them can be adapted as a fan film (see Spinrad's recently rediscovered episode) but maybe they could licence a comic. Also Phase II although they are filming loads has a very slow output!!

There's no way 'City on the Edge of Forever' comic is canon is it? The Guardians are completely different as is the story - I've only read reviews but I plan to get the collected edition. If Phase II were to be done then yeah, use the artwork and scrpits/bible as THE source material and go from there. I love the webshow as it is but the comic would be fun.

As for other episodes, Enterprise Season 5 had several ideas from the Reeves-Stevens and the like which prequelled a lot of stuff like the origin of the Borg Queen; a Flint story; Stratos and more Mirror Universe. An idea was to have Shran become a regular.

The last big thing I can think of for now is the videogame 'Secret of Vulcan Fury' by DC Fontana - a comic would suit as it had wonderful visuals of Vulcan, aliens, the Enterprise and a space station (?) realised which were previewed in the trailer.

 

[Christopher]

There's no way 'City on the Edge of Forever' comic is canon is it?

Canon is the core work -- in this case, the TV/movie franchise. Anything supplementary to or derivative from the core work is separate from the canon, by definition. Even novelizations of canonical episodes or films are not canonical; many novelizations add material that's contradicted by later canonical works. And first-draft scripts, story outlines, series bibles, behind-the-scenes documents, etc. are not part of the canon either; they're simply materials that contribute to the creation of the canon.

 

[F. King Daniel]

City on the Edge of Forever is now running, we've had a comic of George Lucas' first Star Wars draft and later on this year Ellison's lost Batman episode is being adapted.

Now some of these lost projects are fairly well known thanks to magazine articles/the internet etc, but what more Star Trek ones could be published by IDW?

- The Billion Year Voyage
- Planet of the Titans
- The First Adventure
- Spiner & Logan's Trek 11
- The Beginning

Are there any more people may like to see?

I'd have loved to see the novelization of Star Trek: The Beginning which Eric Jendresen spoke of after the film's cancellation, as well as Walter Koenig's version of Roddenberry's The God Thing.

 

[Stevil2001]

I think of all these, Planet of the Titans and The Beginning would be the most interesting to me. Have the scripts of those ever been made available anywhere? I know that Ellison® published his original script, though I never read it.

 

[8of5]

How about Star Trek Renaissance? The early draft of First Contact, which would have seen the TNG crew team up with da Vinci to deal with the Borg invading Italy. Sounds a bit bonkers, but would probably look cool on the page!

 

[Danlav05]

How about Star Trek Renaissance? The early draft of First Contact, which would have seem the TNG crew team up with da Vinci to deal with the Borg invading Italy. Sounds a bit bonkers, but would probably look cool on the page!

Could fans handle that after HIVE and Assimilation2 (I say that with the two being quite underwhelming - and I say that as a Whovian aswell who wanted to absolutely love that book but unfortunately there was a lot of standing around talking!)?!

 

[The Wormhole]

I would be happy to see more unmade scripts find their way into a comic adaptation. How about adapting:

1. The DS9 episode that would have seen the return of Ensign Sito

But isn't that just Second Skin but with Sito instead of Kira?

 

[JD]

What about The Final Frontier? They already have two complete scripts, with storyboards.
Are there that many unoproduced episodes and movies out there that have full scripts? I thought most of the stuff you guys were talking about never moved beyond a general concept.

 

[Christopher]

Are there that many unoproduced episodes and movies out there that have full scripts? I thought most of the stuff you guys were talking about never moved beyond a general concept.

Which isn't a dealbreaker. DC's about to release a comic based on Harlan Ellison's so-called "Lost Episode" of the '66 Batman series, a Two-Face story, but in fact he never wrote a script for it; it was simply a rejected story outline which veteran comics scribe Len Wein is turning into a full comic script.

After all, even a complete television script would still need to be rewritten into a comic-book script from the ground up, due to differences in format, pacing, and the like. Sure, if there's a complete TV script then presumably most of the actual dialogue in the comic would come from it (though much would probably be trimmed down to fit the voice balloons, especially since modern comics favor art over dialogue and tend to avoid having too many words per page), but there would still need to be a new script written in any case.

 

[James Swallow]

Interesting idea, this. A universe over, the Big Finish audio drama gang have been doing something similar, adapting unmade Doctor Who scripts/outlines into full productions for their 'Lost Stories' range.

 

[Danlav05]

Interesting idea, this. A universe over, the Big Finish audio drama gang have been doing something similar, adapting unmade Doctor Who scripts/outlines into full productions for their 'Lost Stories' range.

It's a fantastic range - I follow Big Finish a lot; and all the audios are sound designed to capture the era of the show from which the stories came - even stories for the first 3 Doctors which are narrated with some dramatisation.

A lot of people know that Star Trek Generations was due to have slightly different uniforms which were canned - could they be used for Hurley's script should it be adapted? http://imagizer.imageshack.us/scaled/landing/577/medgallery17911161567.jpg