Not a big fan of those either. I prefer the TMP uniforms.
Alex Kurtzman: 'Star Trek: Discovery' Will Spark Debate And Adhere To Canon
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Not a big fan of those either. I prefer the TMP uniforms.
Made no sense for them to transition from the TOS unis
There is no continuity to deal with. There are years between Discovery and TOS. Starfleet could easily decide to issue new uniforms.
Just like Germany's police force went from wearing green and yellow to wearing blue. New uniforms happen.
Airlines also regularly hire designers to come up with new uniforms for pilots and flight attendants, often completely changing the look.
You can even see different uniforms in use at the same time (like in the TNG/DS9 era) when the rollout of a new style isn't affecting everybody at once.
Also, "as much as possible" is the key there. Continuity is nice, but it's just one of many factors that have to be weighed. It doesn't automatically override all other creative and practical considerations.
There is in this case. We had the Cage. Yes, uniforms can change, though usually there is also a lot of continuity as well. But since we saw the Cage look, It should be preserved as much as possible if you say it's the same period in the same timeline. Which this is. They have shown in other areas, how they are trying to do that. It may be that they will show a transition to modernized Cage soon. That could be, and in the case of these uniforms, the sooner the better.
No.
The makers of the 1960s show wanted something that looks futuristic based on what they thought the future would look like. And the makers of the 2017 show are doing the same. It would be weird to expect them to create a future based on what people in the 1960s thought the future would be like.
TOS shows us what 1960s people thought a world like Star Trek's would look like.
Discovery gives us the 2017 interpretation of what such a world would look like.
Just a thought on the uniforms: If the Uniforms used in both pilots had been the same as the ones introduced in 'The Corbomite Maneuver' (and refined over the following few episodes), given that they were deemed good enough to serve as the basis for the uniforms in the Kelvinverse films, do you think we might have seen DIS use them? That is to say that the reason that DIS (and for that matter JJ Abrams) didn't use the pilot uniforms despite their both being set in the 2250s is that they only appeared twice and outside of the fanbase, no one really thinks of them. Whilst the gold (green?), blue & red outfits have become iconic and even casual observers of TOS know that men wore black flaired trousers that stopped just above the ankle, swashbuckler boots, and coloured v-necked pullovers with the 'v' filled in with black, whilst women wore coloured low-cut mini-dresses with matching underpants, black tights and black boots?
I think Discovery steered clear of any TOS uniforms to not be confused with the Abrams films.
Yes.
And these don't look any more "modern" or futuristic. They do look bigger budget/better materials. So modernizing Cage would certainly be in order. But there is no reason to think that it's more "futuristic" to use shimmery metallic highlights of different colors to represent different departments, than different colored shirts. If anything, it's worse, less modern and more retro futuristic.
They didn't do it because it was more or less "futuristic." They did it because the costume designers on the new show are different people from the costume designers on the old shows, and so they had different ideas and tastes. They thought this looked good and the producers agreed. That's all there is to it.
And hold up well on the cameras used today. It's a specific look that the production team wanted and they are happy with it.
I couldn't agree more. Modernizing or futurizing had nothing to do with it. Same with the Kelvin uniforms. Because the Kelvin was set decades before TOS, they thought looking at classic sci fi from decades before 60s TOS might be an inspiration for the uniforms. That's an interesting thought process. And not surprising at all. And when you seen the Kelvin uniforms, you can see that influence. But one thing it is not is "modernizing" or making it "futuristic" and certainly the end result was neither.
But I recall an architect talking about how the structure of a flower he saw influenced his thinking about the structure of a building he later designed. Inspiration can come from anywhere. And as you say, people on the craft end in TV and movies receive direction from directors/EPs/showrunners who have a veto power over designs. If they are ok with looking to 30s-50s sci fi for uniform design, or the shape of a flower for a starship, then that's what we'll see. But we can agree that modernizing is only something some fans are saying here, but nothing to do with what was done, and it certainly shows, as retrofuturism appears to once again be an influence.
I thought I was with you until you mentioned Mad Men. That show was a VERY faithful, dead-on recreation of 1960's America, both culturally and aesthetically, with current day production values. If DSC is like Mad Men, then we'll see a faithful recreation of TOS era sets with 60's attitudes, cultural references, etc, with current day production values. Is this what you want? Perhaps Mad Men wasn't the example that best illustrates your point.
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No, you're completely and absolutely missing my point. We do NOT agree that the designs are "retro." I disagree with you utterly on that point. My point is that the difference in design between TOS uniforms and DSC uniforms is not about whether they're forward or backward along some sort of imagined temporal axis of design. It's just about the fact that they're from different designers with different tastes. They're both trying to design what they think are plausible and good-looking 23rd-century uniforms, but they have different ideas about what constitutes that, simply because they are not the same people. My point is that even if you take away any such considerations as "futuristic vs. retro," even if you just have two different creators designing to the same basic parameters, their designs will still be different simply because that's how human creativity works. You and other people here keep trying to "explain" the differences as an attempt to meet some kind of functional goal or objective standard, but they're simply due to a difference in the designers' imagination and the producers' preferences.
Why should it be preserved?
Are you really suggesting that no matter how well acted and scripted the show is, no matter how well it engages the viewer, how intelligently it makes one think, what issues it raises the real question is whether they used the same uniforms as The Cage?
Will you ignore the characterisation, the drama, the subtle layers of meaning and moral questions because the buttons on the consoles are wrong?
There's an old saying about woods and trees
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