You mean that franchise which the general viewing audience steadily became less and less interested and engaged in until it was ultimately cancelled, and was only revived by wiping the continuity slate clean and starting over again?
Agents of SHIELD: Season 3 - Discussion (SPOILERS LIKELY)
- Thread starter Trekker4747
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Well, to be fair, the Star Trek spin offs ran for 18 years producing 25 seasons of work. That's over 600 hours of television.
Absolutely, insofar as the particular circumstances shown on AoS are concerned, but I'm fairly certain Whedon (who is of course also involved with the show, and on literally familiar terms with its showrunners) wrote that line specifically as a tip of the hat to the show's existence.
Enterprise took place before the timeline split. It took place in both timelines.
There was very little direct continuity between any of the spin-offs and the films at the franchise's height. And this is not to even mention tie-in books and other media, which were never acknowledged at all by either.
And actually, in Trek's case, it's the films that were spun off from the TV shows, not the other way around.
The Maquis?
When did anything remotely involving the Maquis ever come into play in any of the Trek films?
Oh! I thought you were talking about the franchise as a whole. Well, how about Worf's assignment to Deep Space Nine. They had to find a way around that three times. Also, the Spock appearance on Star Trek the Next Generation. Also, the Dominion War was given as the reason why Picard and crew were no longer explorers in Insurrection, as well as the reason Admiral Whatsisname was dealing with the Son'a. Also (almost) in Insurrection was a sadly deleted cameo from Armin Shimerman as Quark. Admiral Janeway.
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Huh? TNG starts off with Data giving Bones a tour of the Enterprise D. We'll later see the crew interact with Scotty, Spock, and Kirk. DS9 directly ties into TNG and Voyager pretty much starts off as a DS9 episode. As for the movies, Generations continues directly after the TOS movies with Kirk, Scotty, and Chekov starting things off, First Contact featured a character originally created on TOS, Insurrection starts with the Enterprise being sent to that species in the cloud because of their involvement with DS9's Dominion, and Admiral Janeway is joking it up with Picard in Nemesis.
What do you mean very little direct continuity?
Except Whedon has said in interviews that he basically ignored the show in making Age of Ultron. I think the "old friends" he referred to were meant to be specifically the people who were crewing the Helicarrier with him. IIRC, he delivered that line just before we cut to a shot showing the full crew on the bridge with him, so the reference was probably to them. They were former SHIELD agents who had come together to help him out unofficially. Sure, you can easily plug the show's version of SHIELD into that, but I don't believe it was meant to be specifically a reference to the show.
I generally agree, but the movie people could do a bit more. Perfect example: did Civil War really need that post-credits scene of Spidey back home in Brooklyn? Sure, it was cute, but couldn't they have given those fifty seconds (for the minority of fans that stick around past the credits) to Coulson and Co.? The famous Schwarma scene was filmed literally days before The Avengers opened, so the TV people could absolutely have scripted a small bonus scene, maybe with one of the movie cast doing reshoots or otherwise in town (say, William Hurt) for them to put in. Not on every single movie, necessarily, but maybe just on one? Heck, Age of Ultron didn't have a post-credits scene at all, just a mid-credits one!
There were a couple of things that could have been considered nods to AoS in CW. Vision, while not saying the word "Inhuman", did comment on the explosion of powered people in recent years. Also, the brainwashing techniques invented by Johann Fenhoff (Known as "Dr. Faustus" in the comics"), seen in AoS, Agent Carter and the last two Cap movies, had similar phraseology attached-- "Happy to comply" and "Compliance will be rewarded" in AoS, "Ready to comply" in CW. That might be my head connecting completely unconnected stuff, but both things made me think of AoS during the movie.
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Going to try to disentangle a few aspects of what I was saying earlier, which partly due to my own lack of elaboration may have been conflated.
I understand we're probably mostly all Trek fans here, given where here is, but regardless of whatever any of us thinks about the quality of the spin-off shows beyond TNG, I'm not sure a good argument can be made that the mainstream non-fan audience would consider DS9-VGR-ENT and the later films "the height" of the franchise. By that phrase I didn't mean the period when there was the most Trek being produced by volume, I meant in terms of its mass appeal to the widest audience, as shown by averaged ratings. I think a better argument can be made that the franchise was on the whole in decline once you get to the last couple seasons of TNG and beyond, and while the overall-increasing level of interconnectedness and self-reference surely doesn't remotely represent the totality of what went into that, it seems logical and likely to me that it was a significant factor.
Regarding TOS/movie characters guesting on TNG, remember it was that show which was initially the spin-off! That Bones cameo in "Farpoint" was the equivalent of Fury showing up on AoS to give it a boost, and stories like "The Naked Now" and "Sarek" were the equivalents of Coulson's team finding a HYDRA artifact from The First Avenger or crossing paths with Lady Sif! The other examples cited by @bbjeg and @Turtletrekker above date to the period when, as I said, the general viewing public's interest in the franchise was in steady decline, and even if they weren't solely or directly responsible for that trend in the first place, then at the very least they certainly didn't help to arrest or abate it! (And some might say the "why is Worf here this time?" ones are good examples of just how clumsy and silly and handwavey such token references can come off.)
Conversely to pre-Abrams Trek, the Marvel CINEMATIC Universe is a major motion picture franchise that has spun-off into some TV series, which are allowed to play around in the films' sandbox insofar as they abstain from stepping on the toes of the movies, which are the real "cash cow" keeping it all going. They lead, and the TV shows follow, and that dynamic isn't going to fundamentally change for a variety of reasons including the logistic ones explained earlier by @Christopher, and also because that's just part and parcel of way the whole arrangement is designed to work. And that's as it should be, because thus far it's working fine.
Now, would the popularity of the Marvel films suddenly and precipitously collapse and go all to hell immediately if they started dropping occasional references to AoS here and there? No, probably not, and that isn't really what I'm arguing. My point is more that from the perspective of those who make the films there is no advantage to things moving in that direction, and thus no motivation to take such a risk. They have quite enough balls in the air to concern themselves with already. And the only audience to whom adding more TV references would plausibly make the movies more appealing are the ones who are already watching the TV shows! (And who, by the way, are also already watching the movies.)
And to return to Guy's point:
I understand we're probably mostly all Trek fans here, given where here is, but regardless of whatever any of us thinks about the quality of the spin-off shows beyond TNG, I'm not sure a good argument can be made that the mainstream non-fan audience would consider DS9-VGR-ENT and the later films "the height" of the franchise. By that phrase I didn't mean the period when there was the most Trek being produced by volume, I meant in terms of its mass appeal to the widest audience, as shown by averaged ratings. I think a better argument can be made that the franchise was on the whole in decline once you get to the last couple seasons of TNG and beyond, and while the overall-increasing level of interconnectedness and self-reference surely doesn't remotely represent the totality of what went into that, it seems logical and likely to me that it was a significant factor.
Regarding TOS/movie characters guesting on TNG, remember it was that show which was initially the spin-off! That Bones cameo in "Farpoint" was the equivalent of Fury showing up on AoS to give it a boost, and stories like "The Naked Now" and "Sarek" were the equivalents of Coulson's team finding a HYDRA artifact from The First Avenger or crossing paths with Lady Sif! The other examples cited by @bbjeg and @Turtletrekker above date to the period when, as I said, the general viewing public's interest in the franchise was in steady decline, and even if they weren't solely or directly responsible for that trend in the first place, then at the very least they certainly didn't help to arrest or abate it! (And some might say the "why is Worf here this time?" ones are good examples of just how clumsy and silly and handwavey such token references can come off.)
Conversely to pre-Abrams Trek, the Marvel CINEMATIC Universe is a major motion picture franchise that has spun-off into some TV series, which are allowed to play around in the films' sandbox insofar as they abstain from stepping on the toes of the movies, which are the real "cash cow" keeping it all going. They lead, and the TV shows follow, and that dynamic isn't going to fundamentally change for a variety of reasons including the logistic ones explained earlier by @Christopher, and also because that's just part and parcel of way the whole arrangement is designed to work. And that's as it should be, because thus far it's working fine.
Now, would the popularity of the Marvel films suddenly and precipitously collapse and go all to hell immediately if they started dropping occasional references to AoS here and there? No, probably not, and that isn't really what I'm arguing. My point is more that from the perspective of those who make the films there is no advantage to things moving in that direction, and thus no motivation to take such a risk. They have quite enough balls in the air to concern themselves with already. And the only audience to whom adding more TV references would plausibly make the movies more appealing are the ones who are already watching the TV shows! (And who, by the way, are also already watching the movies.)
And to return to Guy's point:
I imagine that if "cool and important things" were hinted at in a movie I paid $10 or more to see, but then weren't followed up on at all in it, instead requiring me to buy 3 seasons' worth of DVDs, I would find it offputting and annoying.
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But the noobz who fall for that, are the noobz who are not already watching Agent's of S.H.I.E.L.D..
Are you a noob?
From a fanboy or fangirls perspective, who have already given all their money to Marvel in one way or another, it's like reward points similar to air-miles, but instead of free global transit, you get a smug self-satisfied sense of unwarranted accomplishment and community with the rest of us virgin basement dwellers, still living at home with mum.
Are you a noob?
From a fanboy or fangirls perspective, who have already given all their money to Marvel in one way or another, it's like reward points similar to air-miles, but instead of free global transit, you get a smug self-satisfied sense of unwarranted accomplishment and community with the rest of us virgin basement dwellers, still living at home with mum.
Well, at least you didn't respond with "TLDR"! 
(BTW, you are one of my favorite posters, even if I can only discern your meaning in maybe half of your posts.)
(BTW, you are one of my favorite posters, even if I can only discern your meaning in maybe half of your posts.)
The post-credits scene wasn't there for Civil War's benefit, it was there for Spider-Man: Homecoming's benefit. Those tag scenes are usually previews of future movies, meant to promote them and generate buzz for them. So yes, of course they're going to devote that real estate to promoting the next multi-billion-dollar movie in their franchise, rather than devoting it to a TV series that makes them less money and is thus less important to them. The movies are the big business, and the TV shows are a side operation. The TV shows exist to promote the movies, just as the post-credit scenes exist to promote the next movies.
Yes, the TV shows have a lot more screen time, and to those of us who do watch them regularly, they seem like a larger part of the whole. But that's not the case for the majority of the moviegoing audience. People go to movies for all sorts of reasons other than being fans of the material. They go casually because they want something to do on a weekend, or they want a place to take a date, or they read a good review and are curious, or they want to ogle Chris Hemsworth/Evans/Pratt/whoever because he's dreamy, or they got dragged there by their kids, or whatever. So only a limited percentage of the profit Marvel Studios gets from the movies is going to be from people who are interested in the shows. So the shows are always going to be a secondary consideration. The movies are the dog, the shows are the tail.
That could be because CW was written by the same pair of authors who created and executive-produced Agent Carter, Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely. It's easier to get that kind of continuity within a single author's or author team's work.
Or maybe it's just happenstance. "Comply" is a pretty common word, after all.
There are probably people out there whose only experience with the MCU is the movies. If they never watched, or have never heard of the series Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., all they know is Coulson is dead and S.H.I.E.L.D. is gone. Adding a post credits scene for it would just be confusing.
Yes, exactly. That's another reason why the movies have to be designed to function as their own self-contained reality, independent of the shows. It wouldn't be impossible to insert cameos by characters from the shows, but it would have to be done in a way that would require no familiarity with the shows and fit smoothly into the movie continuity. For instance, a future movie could theoretically introduce Adrienne Palicki's Bobbi Morse as a former SHIELD agent in a supporting role, but without making any explicit references to her association with Coulson or Gonzales or any of the rest. Or J. Jonah Jameson could mention the New York Bulletin from Daredevil as a rival paper.
