No, true creativity comes only when the fetters are so tight that only the truly creative can escape them. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, for that matter, created the most popular comic book superhero universe during the most stringent era of censorship by the Comics Code Authority. And they did it by pushing, but not pushing past, the boundaries of the Comics Code. Remember, the stories that they told that broke the boundaries were not only not approved by the CCA, but they were never repeated. You can't test the limits of your creativity, and what's permitted, if there are no limits set, and that breeds laziness like you wouldn't believe.
Lazy writers?
- Thread starter JesterFace
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No, true creativity comes only when the fetters are so tight that only the truly creative can escape them. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, for that matter, created the most popular comic book superhero universe during the most stringent era of censorship by the Comics Code Authority. And they did it by pushing, but not pushing past, the boundaries of the Comics Code. Remember, the stories that they told that broke the boundaries were not only not approved by the CCA, but they were never repeated. You can't test the limits of your creativity, and what's permitted, if there are no limits set, and that breeds laziness like you wouldn't believe.
Depends on the story. Some are about disagreements. Without them there is no story.
Quite frankly: When I see how viciously the producers and the writers (see the book "The next 25 Years"), the fans (see this forum, Reddit) shit on TNG with a passion, I am extremely surprised, that this show got made after all. And how it was this phenomenon with around 10 million viewers every week. Because the published opinion about this show is pretty much: "TNG is a boring shit show, and no one wanted to produce it and write for it, because its premise was bad drama, and view it on TV, because its characters were boring, arrogant and not relatable".
I find this pretty hilarious.
The true punchline is the seven series, two direct spin offs...there are more hours of Trek that follow directly on from the seeds at Farpoint than do from Gary Mitchell’s eyes.
It is not as certain people say.
Then again it was Stan Lee who first defied the CCA by publishing a drug story in SPIDER-MAN over the express objections of the CCA. He dared to publish a Marvel Comic without the CCA's blessing and seal, the world did not come to an end, and you know what? Marvel is still here . . .and the CCA has gone the way of the dodo.
Because Stan broke the rules and didn't accept the limits.
CCA died when modern marvel dumped it...but frankly, I can’t say the medium overall improved as a result. Which takes us back to the advantages of having some rules in place when we play the game.
That's a judgement call. Personally I think we're well rid of the CCA, and the Hays Office, and any other self-appointed guardians of public morality.
I am fifty fifty on it overall. But in specific cases...years of good stuff came out and flourished well under the CCA, even when comics in general started to fall in popularity. In the immediate aftermath...well...that’s when I stopped reading X-Men. And some of the grimdark shit that turns up in what was once generational comics? Yeah....could have done without those.
Sometimes, a little restraint is a good thing.
Otherwise you get wolverine leg steaks in a series that was at the height of its powers when it had a Saturday morning kids show.
Still. I am probably mutating into a grumpy old man myself...I think even the art got worse in the last ten to twenty years too.
Some censorship isn’t a prison. Sometimes it’s a guardian, that lets thing flourish that would otherwise be choked or lost.
The nineties was th last golden age for some stuff...see I really am an old man. You could read X-Men, Strangers in Paradise, Witchblade, Kabuki....and the CCA was still a thing.
But you didn’t get Wolverine Leg Steaks, and there was far less scandal or drama around the industry. *shrug*
It’s like Hitchcock’s Psycho vs Saw. One of these films had much stricter controls than the other.
And for some reason...removal of these things always always ends in more violence and grimdark. Never the other possibilities.
To be fair, it's not like anyone ever listened to his suggestions anyway, as evidenced by that video on YouTube showing all the times Worf was overruled.
But if you go back in time, you''ll find the equivalents of the CCA complaining that Psycho is depraved and bad for society and should not have been allowed. Ditto for comic books in general, or rock-and-roll, or jazz music, or even the waltz . .. which at one time was considered indecent and inappropriate and a sign of society's sad decline.
Have you read The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju? It's an excellent study of how waves of censorious anti-comics hysteria eventually led to the CCA, destroying dozens if not hundreds of careers. Sure, Lee and Kirby still managed to create great stuff despite the limits imposed on them, but we'll never know what we lost. Or what we were not allowed to see.
And, honestly, I think the jury is out on whether, say, Lee & Kirby succeeded because of the limits or despite them.
Have you read The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju? It's an excellent study of how waves of censorious anti-comics hysteria eventually led to the CCA, destroying dozens if not hundreds of careers. Sure, Lee and Kirby still managed to create great stuff despite the limits imposed on them, but we'll never know what we lost. Or what we were not allowed to see.
And, honestly, I think the jury is out on whether, say, Lee & Kirby succeeded because of the limits or despite them.
But if you go back in time, you''ll find the equivalents of the CCA complaining that Psycho is depraved and bad for society and should not have been allowed. Ditto for comic books in general, or rock-and-roll, or jazz music, or even the waltz . .. which at one time was considered indecent and inappropriate and a sign of society's sad decline.
Have you read The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hadju? It's an excellent study of how waves of censorious anti-comics hysteria eventually led to the CCA, destroying dozens if not hundreds of careers. Sure, Lee and Kirby still managed to create great stuff despite the limits imposed on them, but we'll never know what we lost. Or what we were not allowed to see.
And, honestly, I think the jury is out on whether, say, Lee & Kirby succeeded because of the limits or despite them.
No...I read around the subject, but never delved seriously into it.
I am in the UK, so we never had outright bodies like the CCA for comics, just one set obscenity law I think covering the whole sector. We do have the BBFC for film, but they seem to deliberately try to evolve in touch with societal trends. Original Star Wars Trilogy are all U, TFA and Rogue One were 12, despite them being pretty similar violence wise.
I think it’s like a filter...it stops what it’s designed to stop, but sometimes maybe it catches stuff it shouldn’t do. Question is...what’s the risk of having no filter?
It’s a real tough call.
I like the filter that was on Trek till recently, it had its advantages. DSC goes filter free, and now Trek is not something you watch as a family anymore. And double-dumb ass jokes no longer work.
I hate word counts on writing, but I accept why they exist in the places they do. Comics in the West were very much a kids medium (European Bandes excepted.) for a long time, and that comes with some responsibility (cos of the great power natch.) and unless the publishers stepped up and dealt with that, an external body was always going to.
We see the same thing happen with video games in the nineties, but Sega and eventually Nintendo got ahead of that curve for a while at least, or tried to.
I guess there’s censorship and censorship basically.
Mind you, I'm coming out at this from the publishing and writing end, so I tend to regard would-be censors as my natural adversaries. Too many years of dealing with the Angry Mothers from Heck and other irksome guardians of "decency."
Believe it or not, I once had to remove the word "paranormal" from a book cover because of concerns that it would read as "Satanic" south of the Mason-Dixon Line. . . .
(Thankfully, that was a long time ago and now "paranormal romance" is a bestselling genre.)
Meanwhile, I don't know much about the British film censors, but I do know they gave Hammer Films a fair amount of grief back in the day, leading to various canceled and/or compromised horror film projects. If not for the British censors, we would have gotten a Hammer Films version of I AM LEGEND back in the sixties, scripted by Richard Matheson himself.
Still grumpy about that one!
Believe it or not, I once had to remove the word "paranormal" from a book cover because of concerns that it would read as "Satanic" south of the Mason-Dixon Line. . . .
(Thankfully, that was a long time ago and now "paranormal romance" is a bestselling genre.)
Meanwhile, I don't know much about the British film censors, but I do know they gave Hammer Films a fair amount of grief back in the day, leading to various canceled and/or compromised horror film projects. If not for the British censors, we would have gotten a Hammer Films version of I AM LEGEND back in the sixties, scripted by Richard Matheson himself.
Still grumpy about that one!
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To be honest, I'm surprised anyone working in American television (Network stuff in particular) can get anything done with how many limits there are under them. In Canada things are much loser, we even have liberal profanity at a much earlier time of night than in the US. Even daytime TV can get away with profanity aside from Fuck or Cock.
Although one of the greatest examples is the CG animated series Reboot from the 90s. Though a Canadian production, the first two seasons had to meet American censorship standards, but the third season only had to meet Canadian ones, which were much loser than the American ones. And whoa, what a difference that made. The first two seasons were typical Saturday morning cartoon fare, mostly standalone episodes with feel good messages and happy endings. The third season turned dark and grim with long-term story arcs and some really serious stuff. Characters captured and tortured, the main character turning into an antihero, and this was children's programming!
True creativity is unfettered.
Although one of the greatest examples is the CG animated series Reboot from the 90s. Though a Canadian production, the first two seasons had to meet American censorship standards, but the third season only had to meet Canadian ones, which were much loser than the American ones. And whoa, what a difference that made. The first two seasons were typical Saturday morning cartoon fare, mostly standalone episodes with feel good messages and happy endings. The third season turned dark and grim with long-term story arcs and some really serious stuff. Characters captured and tortured, the main character turning into an antihero, and this was children's programming!
True creativity is unfettered.
Ah the Moral Guardians trying to impose their standards of deceny on the rest of us. I've got a crazy idea about that, now hear me out it's somewhat radical.
If something offends you don't watch/read it.
Besides it can be counter productive as some people will read/watch it just to find out what all the fuss is about.
I don't know how true it is but the UK censors seem to take issue with excessive voilence in films whilst US censors target nudity.
If something offends you don't watch/read it.
Besides it can be counter productive as some people will read/watch it just to find out what all the fuss is about.
I don't know how true it is but the UK censors seem to take issue with excessive voilence in films whilst US censors target nudity.
"Ya know, I've been saying this for years... If you're not a creative person, you just can't understand what it's like to create something creative."
It’s more or less true. The biggest no-no for a long time was and still is putting sexualised violence in. They have also got pretty good at working with filmmakers (TV is different, the BBFC only worry about that at the home media stage.) and taking into account audience. It’s a rare thing for films to get outright banned here...but if you want a fifteen certificate say, rather than an eighteen, you have to play the game.
An at best partial truth. What had happened is that Stan felt the story was more important than the stamp, and was ultimately proven correct. The drug story ran without the CCA stamp, and there was a fuss about it, but when it died down, the CCA still ran things until Marvel disowned them almost thirty years later.
This. Stan and Jack had to bend over backward on occasion to be able to tell the stories they wanted and still get them past the CCA, but Marvel and the CCA both flourished for decades as such stories continued to be published by Marvel, DC, and other publishers. Some were good, some weren't, but the Ol' Debbil the CCA was never the villain in their failure.
And when you realize that the genre was considered by the public to be the sole province of a child audience, and all content had to conform to that (silly, I know) idea, having an arbiter of what was acceptable was a good idea. It only became a problem after the rules were broken, and some at the CCA felt they could enforce their own standards, rather than what their job description demanded. That was when the era of biting the creators over marginalia got out of hand.
Even so, there are comics creators that wish the CCA or something like it were in place today. John Byrne, who got slapped by the CCA for drawing a bikini bottom on Storm that was following the leg lines like they would in reality, and had to redraw it so it looked like a boyshort with the outer leg cut off (it looked stupid, really), defends the concept of a body that will either rate content, or enforce limited censorship like the CCA did. As someone who has been in comics for 45 years, he is one that will tell you that Stan and Jack did their best work under the CCA, and that when they worked without it, save for Stan allowing that one story (Gerry Conway wrote it), the end product was the lesser for it.
I don't like censorship, absolute prohibitions, but think rating systems make a lot of sense; if the work has more controversial, offensive or potentially disturbing content, admit that it does and that it may not be appropriate for all audiences, including those you would assume it would be for, rather than try to have it both ways or be sneaky.
Shitty-assed writers have been the bane of STAR TREK for over half a century, now. And they always have these convenient excuses for their lazy, uninspired writing ... they learn less from making entertainment than we learn from watching it. Even STAR TREK: The Next Generation - the best series in the franchise - had its share of unfortunate episodes, like:
"Where Silence Has Lease" and "The Outcast."
"Where Silence Has Lease" and "The Outcast."
I don’t know if it’s the writers fault as much as the producers/studio.The sheer unwillingness to break with what has (safely..and profitably)gone before.
Rarely have we seen any of the main characters really and truly affected or changed by their experiences(perhaps the exception being Picard and his de-borgification).
The bane of Trek seems to be the dreaded reset button and nowadays that simply will not do anymore.
I was watching the TNG episode “Second chances”yesterday,a dramatic turn of events in Will Riker’s life.I was amazed at just how perfunctorily the episode dealt with both Rikers feelings and spent an inordinate amount of time on a completely forgettable tech-fix problem of the week.Very unrealistic and dismissive treatment of a main character can lead to a distancing of fans from that character.
Rarely have we seen any of the main characters really and truly affected or changed by their experiences(perhaps the exception being Picard and his de-borgification).
The bane of Trek seems to be the dreaded reset button and nowadays that simply will not do anymore.
I was watching the TNG episode “Second chances”yesterday,a dramatic turn of events in Will Riker’s life.I was amazed at just how perfunctorily the episode dealt with both Rikers feelings and spent an inordinate amount of time on a completely forgettable tech-fix problem of the week.Very unrealistic and dismissive treatment of a main character can lead to a distancing of fans from that character.
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Ah the Trope
Status Quo is God
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/StatusQuoIsGod
The question is how much of it is down to the writers or the studio/network?
A less seralised shows requires no real investment from the viewer as they can miss episodes without losing anything, the more seralised the show the more investment is needed by the viewer.
But even that is only a partial excuse, as you just have the reap "Last time on ........" and show the clips that are relveant to today's episode. As a viewer I understand that I may have missed an episode or two or forgotten some detail.
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