Sorry if this has already been mentioned but I thought the canon stuff came up because GR wanted to throw his weight around in favour of his new show (TNG)
To some extent, maybe. I've come to suspect that his desire to declare TAS allegedly "non-canon" may have been connected to his efforts to deny Dorothy Fontana co-creator credit for TNG; it's possible that he was trying to downplay the value of her contributions to the franchise, and since TAS was essentially her baby, he didn't want to count it (even though he was the one officially in charge of it and had fuller creative control over TAS than over any other Trek production he ever worked on, so it was pretty hypocritical to dismiss it as not being "his" Trek). But that's just my own speculation.
If GR himself had not bought up the subject would we be talking about it now?'
As we discussed above, fans have always debated continuity, and the idea of a fictional "canon" goes back to Sherlock Holmes. But the '89 Roddenberry memo did probably create the myth of canon as some kind of officially declared doctrine or a seal of approval that can be granted or revoked by executive fiat, and that elevated the arguments to a whole new level.
Without GRs apparent decanonisation of TAS, parts of TOS, TWOK/stuff in the TMP novelisation I would have just said that TNG was set in the Star Trek universe a century later and they had got the Klingon/Romulan stuff wrong. Not that it wasn't canon.
People didn't need to be preoccupied with the word "canon" to have opinions about what stories "counted" in a fictional universe. The concept existed with or without the label. A few years back, someone around here posted a scan of a letter from a 1982 magazine like
Starlog or
Cinefantastique, from a fan who insisted that ST:TMP and TWOK couldn't possibly be in the same universe as the original ST because everything looked too different, Chekov hadn't been there in "Space Seed," etc. In their opinion, the movies were what we'd now call a reboot.
And there was longstanding disagreement among fans over whether the animated series counted, long before the '89 memo. There's a letters page in, I think, a 1984 issue of DC's first Trek comic where editor Bob Greenberger mentioned that he considered TAS to "count" but the book's writer Mike Barr didn't.
Well, I don't think canon is something just confined to Star Trek. Star Wars has their own variety of course. Though I do think the idea of canon became more prevalent as more shows and movies were added. But as others have noted, it's something used more for tie ins, that they had to be aware of canon and not contradict it. I think it was important to show runners too, esp. as the shows became more serialized. If you're going to build on more directly on episodes that came before, you'd want to be aware of what came before.
But then I guess that's more continuity.
Exactly. Creators don't have to think of that as "canon," because that's a word that's only relevant when comparing it to outside works. To them, it's just internal consistency, the common-sense considerations of creating the illusion of a cohesive reality. Canon schmanon, it's just about using the toys that are already in the box.
And it's not a matter of compulsion for them. The creators of a canon are perfectly free to change or ignore its past continuity if they want, though generally they try to do it subtly or concoct a rationalization for the change. It's only tie-in authors who are
required to stay true to the canon, because we're just guests in someone else's home and they make the rules. If you own your own home, you can remodel it however you want, but if you're just a tenant, the most you can do is hang a few posters or plants.
Because one of the best ways to explore and understand something is by contrast with something different. Because the value of science fiction is that it lets you put humans in situations and contexts they can't experience in real life so that you can find new and different ways of testing and challenging human nature. And because storytellers as far back as Aesop have known that it's often easier to make a point about human nature to audiences if you sneak it past their prejudices by disguising it as a story about inhuman creatures like animals or aliens or robots.
