Legal situation concerning the new TV series

[Quimby]

So it would seem the interesting question would be: if it were a complete reboot of Star Trek, what would it have to keep and still be Star Trek?

For me it would need:
An optimistic take on Earth and Humanity's future (this is probably most important) centered around a Star Ship that serves something called the United Federation of Planets. That's the absolute minimum. If I got more wishes, it would contain updated ideas for Klingons, Vulcans, and Romulans. Everything else is probably on the table for negotiation.

 

[Christopher]

So it would seem the interesting question would be: if it were a complete reboot of Star Trek, what would it have to keep and still be Star Trek?

For me it would need:
An optimistic take on Earth and Humanity's future (this is probably most important) centered around a Star Ship that serves something called the United Federation of Planets. That's the absolute minimum. If I got more wishes, it would contain updated ideas for Klingons, Vulcans, and Romulans. Everything else is probably on the table for negotiation.

Sure... Any reboot is likely to draw on variations of the familiar ideas, recast into new forms. So a lot of the iconic species, planets, institutions, technologies, and possibly characters would be included, but reimagined. For instance, in my idea for a wholesale reboot, it'd be set thousands of years in the future and all humanoid aliens would be descended from human colonies settled at sublight millennia before warp drive was invented, giving them time to evolve physically and culturally into distinct forms. And maybe some of the aliens that are humanoid in Prime would be more nonhumanoid in my version. For instance, I've always wondered what Cardassians would've looked like if they hadn't had to be built around human features and could just be purely reptilian. Maybe more fully insectoid Andorians, say.

I think keeping some of the iconic visuals would be important too -- the arrowhead insignia, the saucer-and-nacelles starships, that sort of thing.

 

[Shon T'Hara]

Except that two cycles of films provide completely different origins for Caesar and explanations for how the Apes took over. In the first series, Caesar is the child of talking, time-traveling chimps from the future; in the new movies, he's the product of James Franco's experiments on an ordinary chimp.

You misunderstand. The original films already provide two completely different origins for the Apes. What happens in Conquest and Battle is different from what Cornelius and Zaius say about Ape history in the first three movies. The implication is that Cornelius and Zira changed history, and the future Taylor saw isn't the same one that will evolve out of Conquest and Battle. That's why Battle ends with the ambiguous image of the Lawgiver's statue weeping -- is he crying for joy that there will be a new future where humans and apes coexist, or does he see the two kids fighting and realize that conflict is inevitable no matter how much history changes?

The new series can be fitted as prequels, showing the original timeline where Cornelius and Zira didn't come back in time. It takes some twisting to fit, but no worse than what's necessary for any of the original five films.

In the old movies, civilization is wiped out by a nuclear war; in the new movies, civilization is wiped out by a super-bug that evolves apes and but kills humans by the millions.

There's a thousand years until Taylor arrives. That's plenty of time for someone to nuke New York and bomb worshiping mutants to evolve in the subway. (That's another inconsistency in the original films -- in Battle, it's shown that the proto-mutants are in Los Angeles with a doomsday bomb.)

 

[Greg Cox]

There's a thousand years until Taylor arrives. That's plenty of time for someone to nuke New York and bomb worshiping mutants to evolve in the subway. (That's another inconsistency in the original films -- in Battle, it's shown that the proto-mutants are in Los Angeles with a doomsday bomb.)

There's a scene in the BATTLE novelization in which the defeated proto-mutants migrate east, taking the Bomb with them. I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the original script, but got cut from the finished movie.

 

[Christopher]

The new series can be fitted as prequels, showing the original timeline where Cornelius and Zira didn't come back in time. It takes some twisting to fit, but no worse than what's necessary for any of the original five films.

I don't buy it. Why would there even be a Caesar in the original timeline? Why would events play out so similarly?

And as I've said, there's no logic to the idea that the more plausibly portrayed intelligent apes of the new continuity would evolve into the far more fanciful, behaviorally misrepresented "apes" of the original continuity. The virtue of a reboot is that it can cast off the less successful parts of the original version and do them better. The original's unrealistic portrayal of apes was one of its biggest weaknesses. John Chambers's makeup design was extraordinary for its day, but ultimately these were still just human beings in rubber masks; and the portrayal of the different ape species' behaviors was based in completely false cultural myths and stereotypes. Now we have the means to portray evolved apes in a realistic way and a better understanding of ape psychology, and that gives the new continuity an advantage in realism. It should stand apart from the old continuity for that very reason. If the end goal of this series is to produce a world where the apes have a full civilization and humans are their servants and pets, then let's see a new, updated, improved take on that idea.

 

[Quimby]

There's a scene in the BATTLE novelization in which the defeated proto-mutants migrate east, taking the Bomb with them. I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the original script, but got cut from the finished movie.

When I saw Battle for the Planet of the Apes on TV as a kid, the only two scenes I ever remembered from it were a speech about how you should never say "No" to an Ape since that was a word they used when torturing Apes and a scene at the end where we saw the Origin of the Mutants in the second movie. Apparently those two scenes were only in the TV version and not in the original theatrical version. I always thought it was funny those were the only scenes I remembered.

 

[Leto_II]

^ Yeah, for years those I thought those same extended scenes had always been part of the original theatrical prints, as I'd mainly watched the fifth movie via TV broadcast when I was younger, but when AMC ran all five movies as part of their 30th anniversary marathon back in 1998, they ran the theatrical cut, leading me to immediately think that they'd edited the film for some bizarre reason.

It was only a short while later that I finally learned the truth (after years of thinking otherwise), and the 2000 DVD boxed set likewise only contained the theatrical cut, which was very disappointing. Luckily, Fox finally released the extended version in 2006, and the unrated cut of Conquest (which I'd never seen before) on Blu-Ray in 2008.

 

[Christopher]

There's a scene in the BATTLE novelization in which the defeated proto-mutants migrate east, taking the Bomb with them. I wouldn't be surprised if that was in the original script, but got cut from the finished movie.

That novelization was by David Gerrold, wasn't it?

 

[Greg Cox]

That novelization was by David Gerrold, wasn't it?

Yep. And, trust me, it's much better than the movie.

I read the novelization before I saw the movie, and was disappointed that the movie left out so much of the book. I suspect that much of the additional material were deleted scenes, but some of it may have been Gerrold's invention as well. Always hard to say with novelizations.

 

[Christopher]

I do recall Gerrold adding a fair amount of not-in-the-script background to his "Encounter at Farpoint" novelization, much of which is totally incompatible with what the show later established, like Picard's history with a woman named Celeste. (Although since Gerrold was one of the co-developers of the show, it's possible that he was fleshing out things that had been planned by the original creative team.)

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I do recall Gerrold adding a fair amount of not-in-the-script background to his "Encounter at Farpoint" novelization, much of which is totally incompatible with what the show later established, like Picard's history with a woman named Celeste. (Although since Gerrold was one of the co-developers of the show, it's possible that he was fleshing out things that had been planned by the original creative team.)

I liked his idea that a Captain approaching his new ship via shuttlecraft had become a Starfleet tradition since Kirk had first done it during the V'Ger incident.

 

[Jinn]

I liked his idea that a Captain approaching his new ship via shuttlecraft had become a Starfleet tradition since Kirk had first done it during the V'Ger incident.

Or since Archer had done it, because everybody was afraid of transporters.

 

[Leto_II]

^ And funnily, although we never actually saw Picard's shuttlecraft-episode in "Farpoint" itself, "All Good Things..." would (years later) depict this event onscreen, pretty much straight out of Gerrold's novelization (though probably unintentionally coincidental).

 

[Leto_II]

Well...I guess for all this discussion on storytelling-canon, reboots versus continuing franchises, etc., even Star Wars EU fans don't have to deal with the potential de-canonization of at least two of the actual movies:

...Weaver is working with District 9 filmmaker Neill Blomkamp to create a new Aliens sequel, one that picks up where Cameron’s film left off, and somewhat de-canonizes David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection (1997).

“It’s just as if, you know, the path forks and one direction goes off to three and four and another direction goes off to Neill’s movie,” Weaver says.

http://www.ew.com/article/2016/07/06/aliens-30th-anniversary-comic-con-event

Yeesh. Can we also de-canonize the post-District 9 career of Neill Blomkamp?

People usually don't want sequels to be different or interesting, though -- they want them to be the same thing all over again. In this case, Aliens Again. The fact Aliens was a different and interesting sequel to Alien doesn't seem to matter, and sadly didn't in a different way back in 1992 with Alien³ , either.

The opening of Alien³ is one of the greatest statements of filmmaker-intent ever. It really doesn't get more bitterly-Fincher than that huge, "Fuck you, fanboys."

 

[Christopher]

Well...I guess for all this discussion on storytelling-canon, reboots versus continuing franchises, etc., even Star Wars EU fans don't have to deal with the potential decanonization of at least two of the actual movies:

Already happened with the Ewok TV movies and the first Clone Wars cartoon.

And it'd hardly be the first time a movie series has retconned away earlier movies or branched off on an alternate continuity. Sometimes they do it with a time-travel excuse, like X-Men and Terminator have done, but sometimes they just pretend previous sequels never happened. Den of Geek posted a list of them when this news about Blomkamp's version was first announced early last year. It includes examples like Superman Returns, Rocky Balboa, and various films in the Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street, and Universal Soldier franchises. Not to mention Prometheus, which disregarded the Alien vs. Predator films, so it's not even a first for this franchise. There are other cases like Psycho IV: The Beginning, which was by the original film's screenwriter and ignored the previous two exploitative sequels to tell a more thoughtful story. And apparently Jurassic World ignores the second and third Jurassic Park films. It's actually surprising how common it is for unpopular sequels to be ignored by later sequels.

And then of course there's the Godzilla franchise, which has seven different, mutually incompatible continuities that are all direct sequels to the original film. (Although the new movie coming out in Japan in three weeks is a complete reboot ignoring even the first film, for a change.)

 

[Leto_II]

Already happened with the Ewok TV movies and the first Clone Wars cartoon.

Well...two of the major theatrical SW films, is more what I meant, there, but yeah.

(That said, Alien³ and Alien: Resurrection both still have their pretty passionate fans, and some decent cases to be made for auteurist cinematic vision and legitimacy, love them or hate them...the Alien vs. Predator movies, probably not so much. Nobody was really weeping when Prometheus ran roughshod over them, continuity-wise.)

 

[Idran]

Highlander 2 is another example, isn't it? Did any of the later movies acknowledge the whole "Immortals are actually aliens from Zeist" thing?

 

[Christopher]

Highlander 2 is another example, isn't it? Did any of the later movies acknowledge the whole "Immortals are actually aliens from Zeist" thing?

That's on the list I linked to yesterday. Basically, every Highlander sequel except the most recent one ignored all the previous sequels, and that one was only consistent with the immediately previous sequel -- which was a continuation of the TV series, which started out being a prequel to the first movie but then struck out in its own alternate direction.

I gather there's also a director's cut of Highlander 2 that eliminates the entire Zeist backstory.

 

[Leto_II]

^ Correct, it changes the backstory of the Immortals from being from another planet, to being from an undocumented, lost era in Earth's ancient past (which actually works better in some respects with what's established lore-wise in the TV series). The Director's Cut of Highlander 2 is now also just about the only readily-available version of the film still commercially out there, unless one orders from Europe or something.

Also, the past two feature film sequels (Highlander: Endgame and Highlander: The Source) were in continuity with each other (as well as the first movie and TV series), and although at first glance the third movie (Highlander: The Final Dimension) appears to be strictly a sequel to the original film, the recent canonical Dynamite Comics series brought it into continuity with the TV universe.

And really, even the very first movie itself is at pretty heavy odds with the TV show, with Connor and The Kurgan being the last two Immortals remaining, so by that precedent, it was very easy to bring The Final Dimension into the fold as well.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

Sorry, but the "dream" element is purely an invention of the Judy Garland movie; there was nothing about it in any of the books.

That was the gist of what I said: Baum never explicitly said ANYTHING about whether it was a dream or reality until The Emerald City of Oz, at which point he did come down decisively on the "reality" side. We can speculate all we want to on what was in his head for the first four books (and Dorothy's complete absence from The Land of Oz is certainly suggestive that he was not thinking "dream"), but until Aunt Em and Uncle Henry lost the farm (at the beginning of The Emerald City of Oz), and Dorothy arranged for Ozma to transport them to Oz (via the Nome King's Magic Belt), and Dorothy and her family all became permanent residents, the books all made perfect sense as either fairy tale or dream fantasy. Indeed, in Chapter 2, Baum even acknowledges the ambiguity:

Aunt Em once said she thought the fairies must have marked Dorothy at her birth, because she had wandered into strange places and had always been protected by some unseen power. As for Uncle Henry, he thought his little niece merely a dreamer, as her dead mother had been, for he could not quite believe all the curious stories Dorothy told them of the Land of Oz, which she had several times visited. He did not think that she tried to deceive her uncle and aunt, but he imagined that she had dreamed all of those astonishing adventures, and that the dreams had been so real to her that she had come to believe them true.

(Baum, The Emerald City of Oz, Chapter 2, Paragraph 5)

Then, in Chapter 5, Aunt Em and Uncle Henry arrive. And the whole issue of dream vs. reality is settled, once and for all.

Then, just over 28 years later, a whole committee of screenwriters tossed Baum's canon out the window with a script that came down decisively on the "dream" side, and released the movie the following year. And the worst part of it was that it created a "tail wagging the dog" situation, ultimately leading to Disney's Return to Oz being essentially a conflation of The Land of Oz and Ozma of Oz, with the characters of Mombi and Languidere themselves conflated, the Land of Ev (where most of Ozma of Oz takes place) squeezed completely out, the Magic Belt conflated with the Ruby Slippers of the MGM movie, and an added "Kansas" scene of a quack psychiatrist hooking Dorothy up to a primitive electroconvulsive therapy machine that was specifically designed to look like Tik-Tok, the latter two purely for the sake of making nods to the MGM movie.