How can these episodes (from TNG, DS9, and ENT) be canon any longer?

They always have been; Paramount/CBS are balancing the need for legal action with PR, but aspiring filmmakers can remain safe and create films that risk failure in not being able to rely on a ready-made platform and community. The key is to make it work anyway and eventually make some legal money in the process.

 

That's cool, but when you use language like "excuse," that implies the producers had some sort of obligation to do it another way. They didn't.

As noted above, fan films were always illegal -- in fact, fan fic itself is illegal: it uses someone else's intellectual property in published works without a license from the I.P. owner.

As it stands, CBS has issued guidelines by which they will choose not to exercise their legal right to shut down a fan film. But that's their prerogative to refrain from enforcing a copyright claim, not a legalization of fan films. It's a "we'll look the other way," not a "this is totes legal now."

 

Defend the changes Disco made to the 23rd century visual aesthetic all you want, but at this point I'd say that even people on the production side of things felt the changes went too far in the first season, given all the "corrections" we ended up with in the second season. The Klingons were made more in line with "traditional" Klingon appearance, we got a proper D-7, and the Enterprise is very accurate to a TOS visual aesthetic. Indeed, I'd say the Enterprise is probably more in line with what many expected a modernized 23rd century to look like than season 1 of Disco was.

 

It's fine that they made changes . I expect them in a production process.

Still part of TOS continuity for me.

 

"This just in: artist experiments with multiple aesthetic decisions in creating a work of art. Film at 11."

Anyway, it's their right to change whatever they wanted -- and their right to change it back. I didn't really like the new Klingon design, but I'd rather have producers that feel comfortable trying new things than ones that just give us the same old, same old.

And they don't owe an explanation to any of us for it.

 

But do you mentally TOSsify DSC or discofy the entire franchise to match? Or do you dismiss visuals from a medium designed to approach reality and pretend it’s a novel, theater or a radio play?

 

Why do you have to do either? I don't have to do any grueling mental contortions to watch TOS and watch DISCO and accept that they're different chapters of the same story even if (for real-world reasons) they don't literally look the same. I just go along with what the story is telling me.

If I'm understanding you correctly, you seem to be suggesting that movies and TV need to be held to a higher level of "reality" than other forms of fiction, but I don't see it that way. Fiction is fiction, reality is reality, and enjoying the former requires a certain degree of imagination and participation on the part of the audience, whether you're talking movies, TV, theater, novels, comics, video games, whatever.

To put it another way, visual discrepancies in Trek don't necessarily have to induce the kind of cognitive dissonance you seem to be worried about. Personally, I don't have to force my brain to impose one set of visuals on another. When I watch TOS, Trek looks like TOS. When I watch DISCO, Trek looks like DISCO. But it's still the same characters and continuity, just different cinematic productions made by different people in different eras, with the same characters sometimes played by two or three different actors as well. The artificiality is what makes it art, not reality, as it were.

That's just how this stuff has worked since the silent era at least, and on stage before that.

 

It’s just the nature of the medium, which has progressed since the early days towards ever higher levels of reality, right down to making entirely sci-fi concepts feel real. With that in mind, how can we say to the viewer “Sorry, it’s not that there is a TOS reality and a DSC reality, but only one, visually undefined reality in which all this effort at “approximation” doesn’t count: even Okuda’s timeline is holier than one or the other production design, and you just have to allow for multiple visual expressions of an otherwise fixed continuity.”

Physical artificiality is OK for theater, which has had to move into abstract directions to compete, but that’s just not how live-action designers approach things. Production compromises aside, why else would some of them imagine a ton of engineering detail on their ships unless that is supposed to be something that would be built as envisioned in 2245? VFX are not supposed to be abstract art, and if we say it looks one way, then it can’t also look another way unless there is a reboot or an alternate universe or whatever you want to call it.

(Recasting is different because it’s often unavoidable and highly localized, so you kind of have to treat it as a production compromise, not an entirely different expression that someone would nevertheless insist is the same continuity, not a reboot, not even an alternate universe on the same timeline.)

 

i don't have a problem with changes being made due to improved production values, budgets, etc. But what probably "irks" me a little is folks trying to make the visual inconsistencies fit completely in-universe when it's really just a case of them being different productions. It's probably more important that the stories and the characters fit their respective narratives than whether the Pike-era Enterprise uniforms in DIS are exactly the same as the ones seen in TOS, IMO.

 

Everyone's like "it's just visuals" when it's not. Attitudes are incompatible. Characterisations have changed. Technology has been altered, and retconned into earlier periods of Trek which makes various older episodes nonsensical.

But again, it's still just our standards of what constitutes continuity being totally different from CBS'. I like the idea of Disco being a post-temporal war timeline where everything's a mess, but I know that'll never be anything official.

 

But what if someone insisted on writing an anthology story on Starfleet’s uniform design department between 2254 and 2266, right down to references in dialogue about the exact shapes and color values? Why should that be an invalid story?

 

While I defend CBS' creative right to 'visually reboot' the franchise to updated sensibilities (which I noted up thread were started by Gene himself no earlier than The Motion Picture), it is possible to read the S1->S2 changes as an acknowledgement that some of the S1 changes didn't 'work' and weren't really needed, so they were reworked to be more minimalist. Certainly, for me personally, the Discoprise uniforms and bridge set - while not necessarily exactly what I would have preferred - were definately more in line with the "TOS era after Enterprise" than either DSC s1 or the Abramsverse).

 

They're not? They'd better get rid of all those visible stars when the ships are at warp, then. And the sounds with explosions have to go, too.

Well, for starters, it sounds boring as hell.

 

No, they are not.
Jumping on the extreme end of the bandwagon does not make it so.

They CAN be violations of an author's copyright under certain conditions, but their simple existence doesn't make it so. Fair Use is extremely important in such discussions.

To put it another way, do you think that large forums like this, or, say Reddit, who have owners that have to think seriously about that kind of thing, a lot more than you, I suspect, would have fan fiction sections if yours and that other poster's opinion were anything close to fact? What would be the point of the taking all that risk?

There are other factors, but it primarily comes down to fair use. As someone who has written some fan fiction, ran a fan 3d rp production for star trek, etc, I take it pretty seriously when someone decides to call me a criminal.

 

Fair Use is parody or reproducing excerpts as needed to support a scholarly analysis. Fan films, fanfic, fan manuals practically never fall into those categories, so they have merely been tolerated on a case-by-case basis.

 

Yeah, fair use doesn't apply in fan creations.

 

Well, I know what I'm doing the next time a restaurant I eat at changes their menu. Hint: I'm not going to stop eating there.

 

Poor analogy, since most restaurants don’t have BBSs where one can also discuss the latest attempt at finding a chef or the pros and cons of the revamped lunch menu. You can’t post here, then suddenly step back and pretend to be a casual viewer who watches ST when it’s good (I assume most fans are aware that DSC is only average TV as of 2019).

 

Yes. Average TV that I happen to enjoy, and think adds a lot to Star Trek lore . Partly because a central conceit of Star Trek is that it is based upon contemporary knowledge. TOS was not designed to be one world divorced from human development it was designed to be forward looking.

Thats why DSC and their aesthetic work for me and I don't try to reconcile it. It's just Star Trek telling stories about people, not technology.