Ron Moore on STXI - Capture the Spirit of the Original Series
- Thread starter Carpe Occasio
- Start date
I stated this before in another thread, but it is on topic here as well...
By Picard's time, he was a cog in the bureaucratic machine... like someone said, when Picard left there was the Federation machine to clean up any loose ends.
In Kirk's time, he WAS the machine! He was the Federation to many races and his actions had lasting effects.
While Picard was the diplomat, Kirk and Spock were the Lewis & Clark/old West marshalls. Their seat-of-the-pants diplomacy/adventure is the stuff from which good TV & movies are made.
This hits the nail on the head. TOS was about sending ships to the unknown and expanding the frontier of knowledge of what's "out there." TNG and especially DS9 were about the day-to-day of living in that frontier. If TOS was "Wagon Train" to the stars, DS9 was "Gunsmoke" and TNG was somewhere in the middle. Doesn't make one better than the other, just gives each a different feel. And of course, neither was black-and-white about it.
While the rumors of the XI story don't sound a lot like a story of exploration and the unknown, I think we'll get a sense of that adventure and curiosity for what's "out there" in the characters as we see them develop throughout the film.
Whenever someone starts working on a Star Trek movie, we always hear they went back and watched all (or a lot of) the episodes. Maybe what they should do instead is read Hornblower. That will give them the feeling of being the representative of something bigger, out on the frontier, far from the control of, and power of, home, needing to make decisions and take actions on their own.
Newer Star Trek has been more like our current military, where decisions can be made at the Pentagon in real time.
Newer Star Trek has been more like our current military, where decisions can be made at the Pentagon in real time.
Nice avatar, Rich. You're looking okay for an old guy. 
RobertScorpio
Pariah
You know, that is a pretty good idea. I think its the one thing that Shatner/Roddenberry agreed on, Hornblower being the spirit of Star Trek..
Rob
Scorpio
Yep.
If you find out whatever pill Moore took to forget "Voyager," can you let me know?
Yep.
I'm going to take a shot in the dark and say that RDM probably watched a lot fewer episodes of "Voyager" than most of us on this board - even those of us who disliked it.
Thanks. I'm standing outside the shuttle Atlantis on the pad. The stuff in the background is the slidewire escape system. It's a couple of years ago, when I was working at the Cape.
The film will work or it won't. If it works, any expectations will go by the wayside. If it doesn't...well...the same.
I remember going to see Star Wars the first time with an attitude of "what a stupid name for an SF movie!" I was wrong, and my attitude made no difference once the movie ran.
The film will work or it won't. If it works, any expectations will go by the wayside. If it doesn't...well...the same.
I remember going to see Star Wars the first time with an attitude of "what a stupid name for an SF movie!" I was wrong, and my attitude made no difference once the movie ran.
The original series was much more science fiction oriented than any of the rest. Not technodrabble but stories written by real science fiction writers with imaginations geared toward science. Later incarnations became more fantasy world oriented, and the writers were more from the realm of fantasy novel writers.
There were still unknowns and ununderstandables out there, the galaxy was yet to be explored and the science fiction writers could take scientific ideas and theories and make a script out of them. The characters and their relationships lended themselves well to the script writing. Later Trek became a big fantasy world where alien cultures and governments were examined, emphasis was on diplomacy and disagreements. For me it resembled the fantasy world of Lord of the Rings with all these differing people, contrasting cultures and wars between different factions. Some people like a large fantasy world but I prefered the smaller, yet to be discovered, adventurous world offered by the old trek.
There were still unknowns and ununderstandables out there, the galaxy was yet to be explored and the science fiction writers could take scientific ideas and theories and make a script out of them. The characters and their relationships lended themselves well to the script writing. Later Trek became a big fantasy world where alien cultures and governments were examined, emphasis was on diplomacy and disagreements. For me it resembled the fantasy world of Lord of the Rings with all these differing people, contrasting cultures and wars between different factions. Some people like a large fantasy world but I prefered the smaller, yet to be discovered, adventurous world offered by the old trek.
I completely disagree. I think you are confusing less technobabble and more focus on character as the solutions to conflict with being more scientifically valid. With a few exceptions, the original series was a hodge-podge of scientific gibberish for the most part, no better or worse than newer series. When you think about it, besides "the power isn't flowing, the crystals are going to crack, and the shields are at 60%", they didn't say a whole hell of a lot about their technology at all, just how they used it. If anything, people like Okuda and Sternbach tried to incorporate more "real" science into Trek with their designs and technical touches, but in the 90s the writers ran away with it and by the time of Voyager, entire plots and scenes revolved around using fake words to attempt to explain complex ship-board systems and the problems they were causing. It's no wonder the average person didn't want anything to do with Trek any more, it had nothing to do with real life by that point.
People think all modern Trek is riddled with technobabble, but most of TNG's was well-tempered and quite often grounded in some real principal. In a way, it was probably necessary for an audience that was becoming increasingly familiar with technology and communications to be convinced by their universe. It's just a shame they started to focus in on it so much.
For example?
What Trek now suffers from is trying to relate to technology that we have today. Besides the obvious trekisms, most technology seems being capable of today's standards and the designs are pretty much what we design now. There is no more the 'wow' factor of Trek technology, which has made Trek bland at best. The stories being stupid didn't help modern Trek either.
I agree with this. Watching TNG, they throw in a bit of technobabble here and there, but it's nothing like watching Voyager, where it seems every word out of 3 is a treknodrabble word that makes zero sense.
They confused that as something to make the show sound "edgy and advanced" and only made it sound nerdy and idiotic.
That is because TOS inspired many in the scientific fields to make the present look like the Trek future.
The palm sized flip phones from Motorola were called Star-Tac, as close as they could come to Star-Trek... real life science inspired by science fiction. This is just one of many inventions based on sci-fi.
TOS also inspired many to enter various fields. A friend became an archeologist because she liked "Who Mourns for Adonis" and liked the idea od Greek Gods from outer space. Another liked the idea of life based upon silicon "Devil in the Dark" and became a chemist. Later series didn't inspire like this. I am open to being wrong, but I've never seen it. Perhaps TOS just had a better way of presenting scientific ideas without technodrabble which was a turn off. Even though some claim TOS looks so dated, in terms of the functionality of their technology - not much had changed since TOS.
I agree with Ron.
Then again, as long as the movie is good, I'm open to a different interpretation.
Then again, as long as the movie is good, I'm open to a different interpretation.
Semi-disagree. Regardless of what you think about Voyager, one of the primary plots of the show was about getting back to Earth, which is is quite the opposite of TOS any way you look at it.
That's a very sweeping statement. TNG probably inspired hundreds to choose various careers, just as TOS did. The doco, "Trekkies" interviews several.
A young friend of mine says, if not for TNG, he'd have been aborted as a fetus. His mother was a single career woman, and watching Beverly and Wesley Crusher on TNG every week inspired her to go through with her unexpected pregnancy.
