Is the animated toon canon?
- Thread starter WiredPlanet
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Did you accept the TNG transporter turning crew members into insects? If anyone accepted that, a giant Spock should be easy to handle.
Canon can be whatever you want it to be in your own mind. Unless, you suffer from hallucinations or are possessed in someway, there's noone sharing that brain of yours to tell you what is canon or what isn't. Don't like a giant Spock? Give him the elbow! Don't like transporters reversing Kate Pulaski's aging with only a hair brush? Erase it from your mind. Don't like the idea that the Enterprise can visit the "centre of the galaxy" in as much time it takes to visit your granny? It never happened.
Don't like JJ's stuff? What JJ's stuff?
Don't like JJ's stuff? What JJ's stuff?
I want TAS to be canon because I like it, and because of nostalgia. I remember watching it as a kid on Saturday mornings when it came out.
It's all personal preference of course. I'm willing to just enjoy comics or novels on their own terms and not expect or want them to be canon. But I maintain there has to be SOME body of work that has been declared canon by the powers that be. It really adds to my enjoyment to see that the producers and writers of a franchise take the time to craft a universe that fits together as a whole. It's like seeing attention to detail in a great work of art. I want to see that kind of care and attention to detail go into the crafting of the work of art that is creating a universe.
I basically like ENT, but it annoyed me any time it broke continuity with TOS. It just felt sloppy and uncaring to me. I didn't like Star Wars episodes 1-3 much, AND they annoyed me with how they broke continuity with episodes 4-6.
I'm not going to be in a place where I just accept everything on its own terms and not worry about continuity. If you're going to do it, take the time to do it right.
It's all personal preference of course. I'm willing to just enjoy comics or novels on their own terms and not expect or want them to be canon. But I maintain there has to be SOME body of work that has been declared canon by the powers that be. It really adds to my enjoyment to see that the producers and writers of a franchise take the time to craft a universe that fits together as a whole. It's like seeing attention to detail in a great work of art. I want to see that kind of care and attention to detail go into the crafting of the work of art that is creating a universe.
I basically like ENT, but it annoyed me any time it broke continuity with TOS. It just felt sloppy and uncaring to me. I didn't like Star Wars episodes 1-3 much, AND they annoyed me with how they broke continuity with episodes 4-6.
I'm not going to be in a place where I just accept everything on its own terms and not worry about continuity. If you're going to do it, take the time to do it right.
The thing is, canon isn't really something that needs to be "declared." What the creators or owners of a series put out is the canon by definition, and it's a term that only needs to be used at all in order to distinguish that original creation from its tie-in works and fanfiction. "Canon" was originally a term used within Sherlock Holmes fandom to refer to Conan Doyle's stories. It's a given that Conan Doyle himself never once used the word to describe his own work.
The myth that something needs to be officially labeled as canon before it qualifies is the result of the infamous Roddenberry canon memo of 1989 and the Lucasfilm policy defining the "canonical" status of the Star Wars Expanded Universe. Those public uses of the idea of canon in the context of a formal statement of policy from the creators gave fandom the impression that canon is something that has to be formally declared. But even those two things were really about defining how the tie-in work related to the screen canon. The canon itself is defined by the simple fact of its existence. It's only in occasional cases that something's status as part of the canon is ambiguous enough to need clarification. TAS falls into that ambiguous category because it was produced by a different company than Paramount and there were differences of opinion on whether it counted as a tie-in or a direct continuation -- and in '89, with Filmation bankrupt and the ownership of TAS unclear, it suited Paramount more from a business perspective to treat it more like a tie-in. And there are instances of filmmakers "decanonizing" parts of the screen franchise, like Star Wars has done with things like the Ewok TV movies and the Clone Wars microseries. But those are the exceptions. As a rule, it's a given that the creators' own work is the canon, unless they say otherwise or contradict it in a later production.
It didn't do that remotely as often as people think. A lot of its "contradictions" were actually just inconsistent with widely believed extracanonical fan assumptions, like the myth about Spock being the first Vulcan in Starfleet. And of course TOS contradicted its own continuity dozens of times, since it was making up its whole universe as it went along. TOS contradicted TOS more often than Enterprise contradicted TOS.
It doesn't have to be all-or-nothing. There's a healthy balance between judging a work exclusively on its continuity on the one hand and being totally unconcerned with continuity on the other. Most decisions in life are not about choosing between black-and-white extremes, but about finding the optimal balance in the middle.
For the record, I care a great deal about continuity. Anyone who's read my Star Trek tie-in fiction knows that I have an encyclopedic knowledge of Trek continuity and use it extensively in my work, and also that I take care to keep all my different books and stories consistent and interrelated with each other, reusing species and characters and concepts and background details from one of my works to another to another. And in my original fiction, I've always defaulted to keeping my stories in the same consistent universe as one another even when they have little to do with each other, unless I have a specific reason to set them in a different universe.
But what I don't do is mistake continuity for quality. It's something that's always mattered to me, but I recognize that it's not the only thing that matters, and that works that are out of continuity with one another can still be very good. Just because something is worth having, that doesn't mean you can never go without it. After all, there's no reason there can't be more than one continuity. And every rule needs to have exceptions made from time to time. That doesn't mean you throw out the rule altogether. It just means you understand the value of adaptability.
Take a look at Star Wars. The movie called Star Wars. Lucas could shoehorn in as much nonsense as he wanted after the fact, but it's very clear from the writing that Darth Vader's name is actually Darth Vader ("Darth" to his friends), he's not Luke's father, and Luke and Leia are not siblings. If he gave a damn at all, Lucas took advantage of the fact that no one explicitly states these things to rewrite his universe in the sequels, despite the obvious implications of the original's script.
Do these continuity issues mean that any one movie is not "official"? And who cares? The question is whether you can enjoy the movies.
I really enjoy Never Say Never Again. People who don't usually start and end with it not being a Broccoli production, and fill in the rest with biased BS.
Do these continuity issues mean that any one movie is not "official"? And who cares? The question is whether you can enjoy the movies.
I really enjoy Never Say Never Again. People who don't usually start and end with it not being a Broccoli production, and fill in the rest with biased BS.
Canon or not, that incarnation inspires me to stage and render stuff like this.
http://redfern42.deviantart.com/art/M-Ress-The-klystron-modulators-need-replacing-565595735
(Rats, I thought DeviantArt's embedding code would have displayed a moderate sized "thumbnail" of the image in-line. I changed it to a conventional link.)
Sincerely,
Bill
http://redfern42.deviantart.com/art/M-Ress-The-klystron-modulators-need-replacing-565595735
(Rats, I thought DeviantArt's embedding code would have displayed a moderate sized "thumbnail" of the image in-line. I changed it to a conventional link.)
Sincerely,
Bill
Of course TAS is canon. Whether particular elements of it are in continuity depends, but just like a lot elements of Trek, really.
Yep, I think the difference between "canon" and "continuity" confuses a lot of folks.
No doubt. That is the ideal -- that a canon is continuous within itself -- but in practice, a long-running canon will inevitably ignore or overwrite parts of itself. There are definitely elements of "The Alternative Factor" and The Final Frontier and "Threshold" that aren't in continuity anymore, if they ever were. ("Alternative"'s take on antimatter contradicted at least one episode that had already aired, "The Naked Time." And while its coinage of "dilithium" has stuck around ever since, its interpretation of dilithium as the ship's power source, as opposed to a means of channeling matter/antimatter power, has not.)
I think the key is not to look for absolute, all-or-nothing answers. Canon and continuity are best understood if you recognize that there are exceptions and case-by-case variations, and that sticking a one-word label on something is not a substitute for applying individual judgment and analysis to it.
I think that this is a concept that many Trek fans would find helpful:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BroadStrokes
If there's something in Trek that you like but it doesn't 100% jibe with what came before, just assume that something sort of but not completely like it happened. You save yourself a lot of headaches that way.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/BroadStrokes
If there's something in Trek that you like but it doesn't 100% jibe with what came before, just assume that something sort of but not completely like it happened. You save yourself a lot of headaches that way.
If we use the word "canon" in its original sense, then there are councils and lots of debate involved in deciding which works belong in a "canon."
Which is part of why it's such a misleading term when used in fiction.
Or maybe not, because the Holmes fans and/or scholars who first used it were probably engaged in a debate among themselves and attempting to decide how it should be defined. But they weren't any kind of formal council. That's the irony, I guess -- it's always been treated among fans as a subject for debate, but the people with actual official authority have rarely paid any attention to the question at all, except in cases like the '89 Roddenberry memo and the Lucasfilm EU policy.
I'll claim ignorance of how, if, or when Lucas conceived the progression of the plot outline in the first set of films. But if, as you seem to be saying, there was no master schematic from the outset, I still don't understand the contention that it was obvious that the points you cite couldn't have turned out to be logically developed as they were ultimately shown. Is the rationale here about the clarity of these characters' identities drawn from the idea that Vader would have had to have sensed the existence and truth about Luke and Leia long before the first episode, given his extreme control of the dark side and that it was just too implausible that he wouldn't? If so, it seems premature to me to reach that conclusion since we don't really know much at all definitive about Vader's backstory by the end of the film. If the reality that you're claiming is based on something else, whether more basic or not, I'd appreciate to be clued in, even if the connection I seem not to be making is blindingly apparent.
It's in the writing - for instance, the way Kenobi calls Vader "Darth".
In this instance, isn't it plausible that Kenobi simply didn't see anything left of his previous incarnation, regardless how close they were subsequently shown to be, that he felt that using the Vader appellation, was in fact accurate? How would the latter even have responded to the use of his real name at this, the earliest stage of the proceedings, when that life was likely nothing more than a distant memory?
In 1989, due to ST IV and TNG, Gene Roddenberry had some influence on Paramount when the tie-in licenses were being renegotiated. All proposals and manuscripts had to pass by then-Viacom Consumer Products (and now replaced by CBS Consumer Products) and his own Star Trek Office. Richard Arnold, a longtime volunteer tour guide and convention volunteer, began a fulltime position, as Archivist, and was soon vetting tie-ins on GR's behalf, and the Office began distinguishing what was "canon".
At first, it was defined as "live action, as screened", and that which was produced by Desilu/Paramount/Viacom. That cleverly shunted out TAS (which had been produced by Filmation and Norway Corp. for NBC Children's TV, and wasn't live-action), and licensed tie-in books, comics and RPG materials, but the definition also omitted new live action material, even when filmed on the actual sets (i.e. for video board games, computer games and Universal's "A Star Trek Adventure"). By extension, it also covered later products, such as the two live-footage interactive rides at the "Star Trek Experience" in Las Vegas - and perhaps(?) restored/new footage in revised videos of the movies and episodes.
Roddenberry passed away in September 1991, Richard was suddenly no longer Star Trek Archivist, so by default the "keeper of canon" passed to Rick Berman. Paula Block and her team at Viacom, (later CBS) Consumer Products, continued vetting the tie-ins. Essentially, nothing changed, although TAS started being referenced in the tie-ins again, and was retro-added to the official online encyclopedia entries.
After Berman left, nothing ls has really changed. Bad Robot would designate any change to accepted "canon", and Orci and Kurtzman were supervising how IDW would approach any TNG- and TOS-related tie-ins to the 2009 and 2013 movies (eg. "Countdown", "Nero", "Spock Reflections", "Countdown to Darkness", "Star Trek Ongoing", etc).
But not much has changed. "Canon" would still be "as screened", and that which is produced by Desilu/Paramount/Filmation/Viacom/CBS/Bad Robot. It has never been the novels, comics or RPGs. No one ever clarified that changes for DVD releases altered canon. (e.g. Was the Vejur cloud 82 or two AUs in diameter?)
For the last few years of her tenure at "Voyager", Jeri Taylor treated her novel, "Mosaic", as canon, but only because she was showrunner, and was using Janeway background material she had conceived of for the episodes if ever needed. She invited the other writers to use that book, and "Pathways", but they started ignoring the VOY hardcovers as soon as Taylor left the series.
"Canon" really only affects the licencees anyway.
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True-- Kenobi says "Darth" like it was the villain's first name, not a title or rank.
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