The thing I dislike about the maroons most is the inconsistencies with the uniforms and collars .
If TMP had kept going
- Thread starter seigezunt
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Yeah, that got bad after Robert Fletcher was no longer in charge of the costumes. The mismatched collar and trim on Valeris' uniform in STVI drives me NUTS. All the moreso because supposedly they noticed the mistake a day or two into shooting and they didn't have the budget to go back and reshoot those scenes.
I'd take Christopher Lee's Count Dooku over Darth Maul any day of the week. I liked Maul and especially liked his Clone Wars storylines but Dooku has much more depth than Maul ever did, despite how little he's in the actual movies and it's a much better and more interesting character.
There's stuff I like about TMP. The special effects and sense of scale...no other Star Trek movie ever looked like that. The wonderful music and it is epic in its own way. But it's completely let down by a boring story which just has the characters staring at the special effects. TMP with an actual exciting story would have been something to see. I prefer Wrath of Khan and Nicholas Meyers did much better with Kirk, Spock and McCoy's interaction than anyone involved in TMP, including Roddenberry.
Agreed that TMP-inspired movies would have looked a lot like the first and second season of TNG. Though I acknowledge that Phase II had some interesting stories they developed.
There's stuff I like about TMP. The special effects and sense of scale...no other Star Trek movie ever looked like that. The wonderful music and it is epic in its own way. But it's completely let down by a boring story which just has the characters staring at the special effects. TMP with an actual exciting story would have been something to see. I prefer Wrath of Khan and Nicholas Meyers did much better with Kirk, Spock and McCoy's interaction than anyone involved in TMP, including Roddenberry.
Agreed that TMP-inspired movies would have looked a lot like the first and second season of TNG. Though I acknowledge that Phase II had some interesting stories they developed.
First a reminder: Star Trek: TMP was successful. Very successful.
Secondly, as with TWoK, they still would have had to inject more humor and fraternity into it. I love TMP warts and all, but Robert Wise really put the brakes on the chemistry.
Thirdly, what made the TOS movies superior, as a whole, to all that's followed was the fact they chose to tell different type of stories from film to film. Even ST V gets credit for good intentions.
So I guess my ultimate 2¢ on this is that I don't see the shift as being a negative statement on TMP per se but rather a serendipitous bit of good fortune.
Especially if you make Leonard Nimoy's "Mr. Spock" the focus of of interpretation then there is a brilliant arc and unifying thread.
Sorry, I ended up sidestepping your premise, but I think aside from cosmetic differences (uniforms, etc.) things unfolded they way they needed to.
Ilia's pheromones essentially give Chekov an orgasm to divert his attention from the burns on his arm. (And in the SLV, Sulu is hiding an erection when asked to "take Lieutenant Ilia in hand", and accidentally punches all the wrong buttons.)
Both scenes are clarified by the novelization.
Ummm...maybe not what Livingston had in mind lol.
Man, there were a lot of erections on that bridge in the novelization.
And not all of them had to do with Ilia. Kirk and Spock, it was rumored, were crossing swords regularly (Note: Not that there's anything wrong with that).
As I recall in the novel, Kirk said basically that he and Spock were friends, not boyfriends.
No. In the hardback edition I read it was mentioned as a definite rumor within Starfleet. I chalked it up to Roddenberry wanting to piss off Shatner to whatever degree he could.
Or Roddenberry's own admitted homophobia seeping in and attempting to invalidate the Slash movement?
Maybe, but to be fair Kirk doesn't condemn or even judge it in the novel, he just says he finds his best gratification with that creature known as "woman". I suspect a lot of this is just GR reasserting his primacy over that we would now call "canon" and saying to certain fans "Nope."
The slash movement is invalid. Kirk and Spock are both heterosexual in canon, however much certain fans may wish otherwise.
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Yeah, Jim ain't gay. Spock ain't gay. They're good friends who love each other like brothers.
That's what bugs me about so much of the slash fiction stuff. It ignores that close heterosexual friendship is something that exists. "Well, these two are so close emotionally, it must be physical, too!" Well, no. You can be close with somebody and love them without it being a romantic or physical love.
Sorry for the thread drift. I'll drop it now.
As a gay man I actually cringe at this reductio ad absurdum that intensely close same-sex relationships equates to homosexual or homoerotic. It's just as idiotic as the idea that heterosexual men and women can't be close friends without some sexual component. Apply that same idea to the close friendship between a gay man and a lesbian and it demonstrates how this whole fallacy falls apart. I have gay male friends I'm intensely close with where there's zero sexual component.
