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Litverse & Star Trek '09

I never believed he had a quantum discriminator in his desk in high school. I think he was just exagerating
 
Ironically, he'd been given full creative control over TAS, something he never had with any other incarnation; but he'd chosen to step back and entrust D.C. Fontana with the show instead. Which made it totally hypocritical for him to devalue it just because Fontana (and Filmation's Lou Scheimer) had been in charge of it instead of him. It occurred to me just the other day that this was only a couple of years after he'd gone out of his way to cheat Fontana and David Gerrold out of their right to co-creator credit for TNG, so maybe devaluing Fontana's other contributions was an extension of that.
That... makes a LOT of sense.
There is a story that Orci and Lindelof actually did try to inject some actual science into Trek XI but were overruled by Abrams who was more concerned with being cool than with scientific accuracy.
Abrams being more concerned with being cool than scientific accuracy? Hell, I've known that since he wrote the movie Regarding Henry and admitted (hell, practically bragged) in an interview that he never did any research into gunshot wounds or head trauma victims. He just wrote what he thought would be the most dramatic. He's always struck me as a rather lazy writer.
 
Makes me think of the ENT episode "Cold War". When I saw it the first time, I heard this dialog happening between Tucker and "Daniels" in engineering, but never found it on a rewatch:

T: <tinkers and poses question>
D: I'm from Illinois. Not the one you know. <significant look>
T: Good to know good ol' Earth still exists in the future.
D: That depends on how you define 'Earth'.
T: <flabbergasted>

The Illionois comment here reminds me of the story about Star Trek 2009 where the Kelvin was going to be called the Iowa, so that Kirk's line in Star Trek IV - "I'm from Iowa, I only work in outer space ..." - still made sense. Crewman Daniels, born on a future USS Illionois, perhaps?
 
Huh? You do know that the size of the moviegoing audience is maybe 100 times the size of the book-reading audience, right?

If the Romulan disaster isn't allowed to be mentioned, then what happens when Romulans are used? Also, (IMHO) that makes the NuTrek movies not part of anything and how Spock died doesn't count. Nothing in those movies would count. I can understand not allowing books to play in that universe, the the disaster took place in the prime universe so either it should be allowed to be written about or all of the NuTrek movies are BS.
 
If the Romulan disaster isn't allowed to be mentioned, then what happens when Romulans are used?
Nothing unless you don't contradict or mention the new movies.
Also, (IMHO) that makes the NuTrek movies not part of anything and how Spock died doesn't count. Nothing in those movies would count. I can understand not allowing books to play in that universe, the the disaster took place in the prime universe so either it should be allowed to be written about or all of the NuTrek movies are BS.
It's not about in-universe content but rather about legal stuff and as the prime universe parts of ST09 were in that movie it can't be referenced.
 
If the Romulan disaster isn't allowed to be mentioned, then what happens when Romulans are used?

First off, as I've been saying, the vast majority of Trek stories have not been about the Romulans. Even if we had to avoid them entirely, there would still be plenty of other stories to tell.

Second, as I've also said, the majority of stories about the Romulans have not mentioned the planet Romulus itself, and the majority of those that have mentioned it have used it only as a synecdoche for the empire/civilization as a whole. The movie implied that the fall of Romulus meant the fall of the empire, but that's silly. Losing the capital would certainly hurt an empire, but not necessarily destroy it. Western-biased history teaches that the Roman Empire fell when Rome did, but that's a lie; its Eastern half endured for another thousand years with Byzantium as its capital. Romulan civilization could also endure the fall of Romulus.

Of course, it might be best to avoid stories about the Romulans in the short term after 2387, but if the chronology got sufficiently far ahead, it would certainly be possible to involve Romulans in some capacity. At the very least, they could be included as individuals without the need to address their nation's political situation. There were plenty of episodes involving Worf that didn't involve Klingon politics, even though a significant number of them did.


Also, (IMHO) that makes the NuTrek movies not part of anything and how Spock died doesn't count. Nothing in those movies would count. I can understand not allowing books to play in that universe, the the disaster took place in the prime universe so either it should be allowed to be written about or all of the NuTrek movies are BS.

It's not a matter of individual opinion, it's a matter of objectively defined legal rights and business practices. The "universes" of Star Trek do not exist. They are merely imaginary concepts in works of fiction that are the legal property of real-world businesses. All Prime Star Trek is wholly owned and created by CBS Studios. But Kelvin Trek is created by Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures under license from CBS. CBS owns the franchise as a whole, but BR and Paramount have a copyright on the contents of the films it produced. So ideas original to those films cannot be used without BR and Paramount's consent. This would be true even if the Bad Robot movies had been set entirely in the Prime universe.
 
It's not a matter of individual opinion, it's a matter of objectively defined legal rights and business practices. The "universes" of Star Trek do not exist. They are merely imaginary concepts in works of fiction that are the legal property of real-world businesses. All Prime Star Trek is wholly owned and created by CBS Studios. But Kelvin Trek is created by Bad Robot and Paramount Pictures under license from CBS. CBS owns the franchise as a whole, but BR and Paramount have a copyright on the contents of the films it produced. So ideas original to those films cannot be used without BR and Paramount's consent. This would be true even if the Bad Robot movies had been set entirely in the Prime universe.

But, since CBS owns the main Trek Universe and Paramount has a license to play in that universe, wpuld that not mean then that the Romulus disaster in 2387 be fair game for authors?
 
But, since CBS owns the main Trek Universe and Paramount has a license to play in that universe, wpuld that not mean then that the Romulus disaster in 2387 be fair game for authors?

Once more: It's not about "universes," which are merely imaginary constructs within stories. The imaginary distinction between timelines or universes within the fiction is less important than the real-world distinction between CBS and Bad Robot. As far as the law and business are concerned, Star Trek is Star Trek. Period. It doesn't matter one damn bit whether a concept or story within the franchise takes place in Prime, Kelvin, Mirror, Myriad, "Yesterday's Enterprise," or any other "universe" within the fiction, because those are all equally part of the intellectual property known as Star Trek. The only distinction that matters is who has the copyright to a specific work of fiction in real life. As I said, even if the Bad Robot movies had taken place entirely in the Prime Universe, any original concepts and events they contained would still be copyrighted by Bad Robot and Paramount, and thus CBS would not have exclusive control over them as it does with the rest of the franchise.

Even aside from that, your question doesn't make sense. What's licensed to one party is not automatically licensed to any other party, because these things are worked out in specific contracts. Yes, CBS licenses Paramount and Bad Robot the right to tell stories that use the Star Trek universe and characters, i.e. existing concepts like the Enterprise, the Federation, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Vulcans, Klingons, etc. But they use that license to tell their own stories using those characters, and they have a copyright on the specific contents of those stories, so they have a say in who gets to use the concepts original to those stories -- e.g. Nero, the Kelvin, Robau, the fate of Romulus, Red Matter, Gaila, Alexander Marcus, the Franklin, Captain Edison, etc.

It's the same reason DC took so long to start merchandising Batman '66 or adapting original villains from the show like King Tut or Bookworm. Since the show was made by 20th Century Fox and Greenway Productions rather than Warner Bros/DC, that means WB/DC didn't have the rights to the specific characters and elements it introduced, even though it had the rights to the larger Batman franchise as a whole. There's a functional distinction between the existing concepts they borrowed and the original concepts they created.
 
But, since CBS owns the main Trek Universe and Paramount has a license to play in that universe, wpuld that not mean then that the Romulus disaster in 2387 be fair game for authors?

Did you even read the post you quoted? He explained it in there. That event was created for the KT Movies, so it doesn't matter if it happened in the Prime Universe.
 
You know, I just realized, we went how many years without actually talking about how the Ascendants thing turned out, beyond the fact that it had, in fact, turned out? There is a precedent for just working around it, potentially indefinitely.
 
Once more: It's not about "universes," which are merely imaginary constructs within stories. The imaginary distinction between timelines or universes within the fiction is less important than the real-world distinction between CBS and Bad Robot. As far as the law and business are concerned, Star Trek is Star Trek. Period. It doesn't matter one damn bit whether a concept or story within the franchise takes place in Prime, Kelvin, Mirror, Myriad, "Yesterday's Enterprise," or any other "universe" within the fiction, because those are all equally part of the intellectual property known as Star Trek. The only distinction that matters is who has the copyright to a specific work of fiction in real life...Even aside from that, your question doesn't make sense.

You know what really doesn't make sense? Going all the way back to the definition of fictional universes to prove your point. If he doesn't get it, he doesn't get it. No need to post a block of text denoting the distinction between fictional universes and the copyright limitations thereof.

TC
 
You know, I just realized, we went how many years without actually talking about how the Ascendants thing turned out, beyond the fact that it had, in fact, turned out? There is a precedent for just working around it, potentially indefinitely.
You mean we need another Destiny to distract everybody??
 
[redacted] Problem solved!

The bonus is afterwards books can literally say, 'After the incident that crippled the Romulan Empire,' and still be ambiguous about what incident it was.

EDIT: Sorry!
 
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