Again I was there, watching the show and it's contemporaries. Campy was Batman and Lost In Space not Star Trek. Because it's cringe now doesn't make it camp back then.
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- Thread starter johnjm22
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That's most shows for me. Even Star Trek. I like it but if it ceased to be, oh well.
No.
Why would I laugh?
No it wouldn't be LOTR, because it wouldn't have those fantasy elements. But is can be the same story with all the same beats. Same for Sopranos 1600s. We have seen Shakespeare's plots adapted into 1950s New York, Medieval Japan and an alien world. This is no different.
Does something like "tasteful camp" exist?
Because the big lizard was some serious shit. But something like the Halloween castle, or the rabbit from Alice in Wonderland had one or two winks to the audience in there - however not really too overt, they were still acting serious about it.
This is interesting because while I wasn't around at the time, my parents and grandparents were, and they loved the show but found it always quite funny in a heightened reality way. My dad actually first met his best friend by pretending to mind meld with his school backpack, replicating Nimoy's "PAAAIIIN".
Maybe it feeds back into what we were saying earlier about cultural gaps - Star Trek's always come across as fun, dreamlike, and amusingly melodramatic to me (which doesn't preclude it from also working as compelling drama). Kirk yelling "WE'VE GOT TO RISK IMPLOSION!" and beating the shit out of Spock while Spock cries about his mother is very funny, even as it simultaneously works as a genuinely tense thriller plot.
I assumed that was baked into its design - I mean, they made epsiodes like "A Piece of the Action" and "Triskelion" which seem to be clearly made to get a laugh, and Shatner's performance, while unironically good, is a universal source of parody - but maybe that reaction is more common in non-Americans somehow, in the same way DSC's odd corporate-therapy-speak tone jars with international viewers, I don't know.
Again, I have to ask where else you've seen Gothos or City done outside sci-fi/fantasy. I genuinely can't think of any other "godlike boy toys with people, turns out to be something else" plot. I mean, "The Most Dangerous Game", but not really, and the twist where the captor turned out to be a kid playing with his pets is the crux of the entire story and is incredibly difficult to replicate without magic or aliens.
Context matters. "Shore Leave" was a mostly light hearted episode. The rabbit was played for laughs, but not camp laughs. The castle was supposed to look it was from a Halloween haunted house because the aliens wanted it to "scare" our heroes. (Spoiler: it failed)
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Again you're looking for a one to one duplication of elements by insisting the rich boy be a godlike alien. All he be has to be is a kid with too much time, money and power who's parents are away.
Yeah, a similar example would be Q on TNG putting the cast in Robin Hood costumes & Worf exclaiming he's "NOT a merry man!".
It is a hightened reality. The situation is meant to be funny. But it still also takes the situation serious, there's no meta-jokes, in-jokes, parody or low brow comedy in there.
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It was a laugh line. So comedy achieved. The laugh comes from who Worf is as a character
But that's why I'm calling it reductive! If you say "these two stories look similar if you strip most of the content out and reduce them to macro-descriptors", then you can compare any story with any other story, but doing so doesn't seem to offer anything meaningful.
Again the closest comparison I can think of for Gothos is "The Most Dangerous Game" - the protagonist is trapped in a remote location with an extravagant madman who looks civil and charming at first glance, but soon becomes sinister. The plot culminates with the protagonist fleeing into the jungle, pursued by the captor who intends on hunting them for sport.
Despite those striking similarities, the stories are completely distinct, and the sci-fi element of Gothos is surely absolutely central to the entire plot, not incidental or a veneer.
I would disagree. It's just a veneer over a plot of powerful guy plays games with our heroes.
Getting back the ratings and a possible third season, I've a couple friends on the Star Trek cruise and Gina Yashere said at a talk today that while they haven't heard anything official yet,
they just finished filming season 2 and she strongly implied it's a cliffhanger, and the sets are still standing.
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That is kind of scary due to the very unstable ground we're on right now with new management incoming. Playing chicken with a renewal at this stage resulted in Legends of Tomorrow ending on an unresolvef cliffhanger.
There's a very real chance the new regime will just cut everything off as soon as the contracts expire. I can only assume the gamble is they will maybe let a show keep going until they actually have reboot content to release.
There's a very real chance the new regime will just cut everything off as soon as the contracts expire. I can only assume the gamble is they will maybe let a show keep going until they actually have reboot content to release.
that's hilarious.
Remember, when TNG premiered in 1987, TOS had been off the NBC network for 18 years; and people watching TNG at the time considered TOS 'ancient', 'out of date' and 'behind the times'..
It's now been 21 years since the last Berman era Trek series went off the air in 2005.
I'd be very surprised if there's a season 3.
Calling TOS camp shows a misunderstanding of the term, and is a kind of tone deafness to style.
It was melodramatic in the way that TV westerns and cop shows often were.
What set Trek apart from most TV fantasy was that it was so earnestly similar in tone and overall style to contemporary-set network hour dramas at the time. Whereas series like Batman and Lost in Space played with a broad wink to whatever adults happened to watch them.
The Official Site appears ro disagree -
Pitch a Space Tent: Why Every Star Trek Needs Camp
Star Trek would not be the Star Trek we know and love without embracing the camp.
www.startrek.com
