I’m sure they had thousands of actual planets in their territory. He probably meant 150 member worlds/civilizations. That would make more sense.
What are your controversial Star Trek opinions?
- Thread starter Amasov
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Yep. 150 separate and distinct member governments, not the number of planets.
I'm not sure what kind of ESP allows anyone to materialize trees out of thin air.
Yeah, well, prior to that I assumed Zephram Cochrane was famous for being THE discoverer of the Space Warp. Not "the discoverer of the space warp*".
* on Earth.
Star Trek: First Contract
LILY: How many planets are in this Federation?
PICARD: Over one hundred and fifty ...spread across eight thousand light years.
TOS Metamorphosis
KIRK: We're on a thousand planets and spreading out. We cross fantastic distances and everything's alive, Cochrane. Life everywhere. We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven't begun to map them. Interesting?
LILY: How many planets are in this Federation?
PICARD: Over one hundred and fifty ...spread across eight thousand light years.
TOS Metamorphosis
KIRK: We're on a thousand planets and spreading out. We cross fantastic distances and everything's alive, Cochrane. Life everywhere. We estimate there are millions of planets with intelligent life. We haven't begun to map them. Interesting?
In, meaning member planets.
On, meaning embassies, colonies, individual dwellers.
On, meaning embassies, colonies, individual dwellers.
I always took "on" to mean that's how many worlds they've set foot on and explored, etc.
We know of lots of worlds which humans had spread out onto that aren't part of the Federation. Freecloud, Turkana IV, Tau Cygna V, Moab IV, Mariposa etc. Plus Federation planets can be a homeworld with six billion inhabitants like Vulcan, or a tiny colony with a few farms like the one in This Side of Paradise, so it could be that 150 of these planets are like countries or states and a thousand are like towns.
The Star Trek Maps, held that in the time of TOS, there were only 29 full members. Over seven hundred semi full members. So, not out of the ballpark.
Prometheus class is the Poochie of Star Trek.
Oh God, he's even got a gigantic codpiece, fitting in with Roddenberry's concept that all the Ferengi were extraordinarily well-endowed.Could have been worse
Picard? I thought that reference came from Sisko in a DS9 episode?
Roddenberry created a magnificent fictional universe, but man, were some the little details he came up with (especially by the '80s) so awful they'd make even a satirist cringe.
Controversial Star Trek opinion hmm, the dude at the center of the galaxy actually was god. Him being a jerk or asking for a starship doesn't disprove that because god does a lot of jerk things and asks for things that seemingly wouldn't be needed by a god in religious texts. Presumably after ST5 the Fed realized this and sent Section 31 (ok maybe not the guys in the movie) or some other undercover group to make things right with god, not unlike how current ufo theories claim that Earth governments have secret agreements with aliens who are the basis for religious deities in history.
In fact, going by Gnostic theories about how aliens/gods feed off of suffering, the request for a starship wouldn't be for material gain but for the distress such a loss of a starship would cause to people, which the god would then feed off of (Gnosticism posits that god and demons are the same being, play acting at fighting and feed off the resulting human distress that results from the play-acted conflict).
In fact, going by Gnostic theories about how aliens/gods feed off of suffering, the request for a starship wouldn't be for material gain but for the distress such a loss of a starship would cause to people, which the god would then feed off of (Gnosticism posits that god and demons are the same being, play acting at fighting and feed off the resulting human distress that results from the play-acted conflict).
TOS was genius, but somewhere along the way between then and TNG, old Gene seemed to start turning a little funny in the head, far more than he ever was during TOS's short run. Not sure what it was all about, but you could start seeing aspects of it in TMP, especially in the novelization based off an earlier draft of the script ("Love Instructors", anyone? Oy vey!)
He was always an odd duck, but I definitely think that the studio execs made the right choices giving the feature films to Bennett and the shows to Berman. They paid the appropriate (and non-reciprocated) respect to Gene by giving him "Created by"/"Executive Producer" cred until and beyond his passing, and I think that was good enough.
Universal did the same thing with Glen Larson and Battlestar Galactica.
Apple did the same thing with Steve Jobs, although they amusingly realized their profound mistake with that one and brought him back a few years later, along with core aspects of his (amazing) NeXT and OpenStep platform. That one critical decision wound up propelling a near-dead Apple to be one of the world's most valuable companies for decades. His software that he championed back in the late 80's still exists to this day in the kernel of every piece of hardware that bears the Apple logo. That's the one success story, to my recollection. There may be others, but it rarely pans out this way under normal circumstances.
I get it's hard for a creator to let other folks take his/her baby in new directions never thought possible by said-creator, but life moves on.
What does that mean to you? And where do you think this was in an earlier draft? The novel has lots of extra insights into GR's TMP but it's certainly not an early draft. It follows the revisions that made it to the film pretty rigorously. I mean, it HAS an ending, for one thing.
I often see people throw that out as a condemnation of GR's TMP but it's never given any context. It's certainly illustrative of a 70's post-sexual revolution kind of mindset, but it's far from the craziest thing that's in TMP. Heck, it's not the craziest thing about TMP that made it to the screen.
It means Gene was a little (check that - a lot) wrapped around the axle with injecting small bits of unnecessary world-building when he should have been more focused on crafting a tight story. He was still writing for a TV show, where something like that could have been more appropriately (in some folks' opinion anyway) included in the script, and some of the more bizarro things that made it into the early drafts of TMP (even up to final cut) doubtless found their roots from Phase II.
Another weird thing I remember quite clearly from when I first saw the movie at age 9 in the theater for the first time, was this odd reaction everyone had over Ilia. The first thing was Uhura's announcement when she came on board. "She's... Deltan... Captain". Everyone on the bridge looked shocked and/or concerned. Why? WTF is wrong with Lt Ilia and Deltans? Are they like some kind of Leper colony or something? Is she diseased? Is she going to fry everyone's brain with a single thought? Then she comes on to the bridge. Okay, she's bald. A little shocking to a 9 year old, but not a really big deal. She's clearly not human. Then she says something about her "oath of celibacy is on record". Again, WTF??? It wasn't until I read the novelization many years later that I saw that whole thing about the Deltan pheromones and how they need to take the oath or human heads will explode if they turn on the mojo and whatnot.
Jiminy Crickets, Gene, does everything boil down to sex with you? God (or no-God in his case) and sex. That's Gene's thing. A one-trick pony with that guy. Eeesh! Amusing that it was first Rated-G upon initial launch with all that innuendo! Ah, the 70's...
Does it matter? It was in there at some point, and thankfully removed before the final cut was released, because it was fucking dumb and unnecessary to any of the many hundreds of versions of plot revisions they went through.
Barely. They were making changes to the filming script multiple times daily while they were filming all the way up to the final day. There were 11th hour edits to the supposed "final cut" hours before the prints were scheduled to be released to theaters. Some cinema houses complained that the cellulose acetate film was still wet from the development process when they pulled the reels out of the cans to install in the projectors, FFS!
You often see it because it's 100% true, in the context of Gene's peculiar obsessions with certain socio-political leanings he's had all his life. They just made a lot more sense back in the TOS era, the way those scripts were constructed. It should also be noted at this time, that a LOT of credit should be given to Gene Coon and D.C. Fontana for taking a lot of GR's TOS draft scripts and making them more TV series-friendly. To my recollection, he was a big idea man, but he had a hard time conveying his concepts into the written word. Lots of creators have that problem, BTW. Harrison Ford, after reading some random block of dialogue in (I think it was) ANH, famously told George Lucas, "George, you can write this shit, but you can't say it". Much of Glen Larson's dialogue in TOS BSG was epically cringe-worthy. Not a shot against George or Gene or Glen (what is it with these "G" people?). Just is what it is.
Look, TMP was a pretty-much-universally-accepted dumpster fire, plain and simple. Yes, it kicked off a new chapter of the property and it had its its good moments (technologically speaking, anyway). It was largely a think-piece about finding one's creator and whatnot (something Gene always seemed to have a big hardon for, for some reason), but it also damn near killed the franchise before it ever got a chance to get off the ground. If not for Nick Meyer, Harve Bennett and TWOK, it would likely have been DOA, and this BBS and a billion dollar I.P. would never have existed if there weren't others who were conscripted to step in, wrest what was left of the franchise from GR, pick up the pieces and start over. That's just history.
And I think I can live with that.
Nope. As I pointed out recently in another thread, when adjusted for inflation, TMP was the most financially successful of the original 10 Trek films. By quite a bit. There was no doubt after TMP that there was going to be a second film. The problem was that it was a nightmare of a production, which Paramount blamed on Roddenberry, but the film itself was a major success. Getting Roddenberry out of direct control of the films was a good decision, but TMP did not almost kill the franchise. Quite the contrary.
Okay, fair enough re. return on investment. I suspect that was more in spite of the finished product than because of it, however. Audiences were hungry for more Trek and it could be argued that they would have taken... well... anything.
IIRC, the future of the franchise was still something of a question mark. TMP still earned the snarky moniker of "Star Trek: The Motionless Picture"; or "Everyone fell asleep in the theater, including the cast, who were all wearing pajamas", "McCoy in a disco outfit?", "Spock with long hair??", "Bumpy-headed Klingons, WTF???", and so on. Yes, admittedly, it was the most profitable Trek film in adjusted dollars from a pure profit/loss perspective, but there was clearly a lot of a stigma about the project that they didn't want that repeat. Room for improvement at all that. Perhaps a second movie was guaranteed simply from the revenue generated by the first, and that's fine, but there was definitely not a third film guaranteed if the second one didn't get better reviews. It could have all ended right there. The intention of a franchise means to produce many films, not just a limited duology and call it a day. Thankfully, of course, the former happened and not the latter.
When Nick Meyer was approached to work on TWOK, I believe they even pitched it to him as needing to "save Trek", not just from a budgetary POV (hence the prolific use of TMP stock footage), but also from a story-telling POV - going to a more nautical "Horatio Hornblower" look and feel and making the characters a lot more human to relate with (Kirk's birthday & glasses, more humor injected into the dialogue treatment in general) instead of the somewhat drab, antiseptic atmosphere and wooden delivery from everyone in TMP. He laid out a pretty detailed history of what went down back then in his biography. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think that was the general gist of the early days of the project. Say what you want about its lesser financial success compared to TMP, and despite it having a few narrative problems of its own (what Hollywood project doesn't?), TWOK has been almost universally revered by the fandom as the "film that saved Trek", warts and all. Never have I ever heard those words in association with TMP, even if it has been (deservedly) credited with kick-starting everything back up. Its future was still very much uncertain. Just sayin'...
IIRC, the future of the franchise was still something of a question mark. TMP still earned the snarky moniker of "Star Trek: The Motionless Picture"; or "Everyone fell asleep in the theater, including the cast, who were all wearing pajamas", "McCoy in a disco outfit?", "Spock with long hair??", "Bumpy-headed Klingons, WTF???", and so on. Yes, admittedly, it was the most profitable Trek film in adjusted dollars from a pure profit/loss perspective, but there was clearly a lot of a stigma about the project that they didn't want that repeat. Room for improvement at all that. Perhaps a second movie was guaranteed simply from the revenue generated by the first, and that's fine, but there was definitely not a third film guaranteed if the second one didn't get better reviews. It could have all ended right there. The intention of a franchise means to produce many films, not just a limited duology and call it a day. Thankfully, of course, the former happened and not the latter.
When Nick Meyer was approached to work on TWOK, I believe they even pitched it to him as needing to "save Trek", not just from a budgetary POV (hence the prolific use of TMP stock footage), but also from a story-telling POV - going to a more nautical "Horatio Hornblower" look and feel and making the characters a lot more human to relate with (Kirk's birthday & glasses, more humor injected into the dialogue treatment in general) instead of the somewhat drab, antiseptic atmosphere and wooden delivery from everyone in TMP. He laid out a pretty detailed history of what went down back then in his biography. It's been a while since I've read it, but I think that was the general gist of the early days of the project. Say what you want about its lesser financial success compared to TMP, and despite it having a few narrative problems of its own (what Hollywood project doesn't?), TWOK has been almost universally revered by the fandom as the "film that saved Trek", warts and all. Never have I ever heard those words in association with TMP, even if it has been (deservedly) credited with kick-starting everything back up. Its future was still very much uncertain. Just sayin'...
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Picard was speaking only of the worlds of the Federation.
Kirk talking to another Human, was speaking of all the worlds Humans were on. The majority of Human worlds are not a part of the Federation
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