If New Frontier was adapted into a movie or Tv series

[Greg Cox]

In general, "canon" tends to be more of a fannish preoccupation than an actual thing. As I've mentioned before, the word "canon" appears nowhere in any publishing contract I've ever seen, and in all the years I've been writing and editing tie-in books I've never discussed "canonicity" with any licensor.

It's more of a practical consideration than a philosophical one. Star Trek novels aren't canon because nobody in their right mind would expect the tv shows and movies to be constrained by a paperback novel that a miniscule fraction of their audience has read, so one understands that the books can be contradicted at any time if the tv shows decide to do something else . . ..

 

[Christopher]

^Yes, exactly. Fandom thinks canon is some sort of strictly defined rule, but it's just a description of a broad principle, the distinction between a core work and its derivatives. Naturally that varies from work to work. But it doesn't matter because it's not a binding law or dictate or something.

 

[Greg Cox]

Exactly. It's not like there's some guy in an office somewhere with a rubber stamp, determining which items are "Canon" with a capital C.

It all depends on the practical realities of the situation, and how flexible you want to be about continuity issues.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Whedon isn't the sole owner of BTVS, so even in that case the "canon" argument is complicated.

When David Morrell, the author of First Blood, novelized the second Rambo movie he included an introductory note acknowledging that Yeah John Rambo died at the end of the first novel but what are ya gonna do?

 

[Greg Cox]

Johnston McCulley ended his original Zorro novel with Zorro retiring and revealing his true identity to the world. When the Douglas Fairbanks movie turned Zorro into a household name (and a potenial cash cow), McCully just ignored his original ending and wrote umpteen sequels in which Zorro's true identity was still a secret.

It's really not that unusual or confusing to have several different continuities for a popular character. Even as a kid, I understood that the comic book Batman, the cartoon Batman, and the Adam West Batman were not necessarily consistent with each other, but I never worried about which stories were "canon."

Ditto for Tarzan, the Mummy, etc.

 

[TheAlmanac]

True Blood also has a similar relationship to its literary source material--the books and the television series are each happily continuing in their own continuities, with the latter just borrowing whatever element(s) it feels like from the former and changing the rest...

As for "taking it too seriously," blame Sherlock Holmes fandom for first using terms like the canon, with all of the Biblical weight such terminology implies.

 

[PsychoPere]

Exactly. It's not like there's some guy in an office somewhere with a rubber stamp, determining which items are "Canon" with a capital C.

...unless you happen to be Leland Chee at Lucas Licensing!

 

[Christopher]

It all depends on the practical realities of the situation, and how flexible you want to be about continuity issues.

And canon and continuity aren't even the same thing. Every long-running canon has internal discontinuities, whether accidental or deliberate. Earlier parts of a canon can be glossed over, reinterpreted, or ignored outright.

Exactly. It's not like there's some guy in an office somewhere with a rubber stamp, determining which items are "Canon" with a capital C.

...unless you happen to be Leland Chee at Lucas Licensing!

Except that "canon" designation is hardly strict, since new screen productions are as free to ignore the so-called "Expanded Universe canon" as new Trek productions are to ignore the novels. The difference is that Lucasfilm is more apt to borrow concepts, characters, and terminology from the EU, because they have a much more finite amount of screen content to draw on and it's a useful resource.

One of the big myths fans have about canon -- which was largely created by Roddenberry and Arnold's approach to it from '89 onward -- is that it's meant to be exclusionistic, that it's something defined by what is or isn't accepted and that there's a clear barrier between the two. Most of the time, it's a lot more flexible than that. One version of continuity will often draw on elements from another, but that doesn't necessarily make them part of the same "reality"; they can still be very distinct, but simply draw inspiration from one another.

 

[Charles Phipps]

I would watch the [insert expletive] out of a New Frontier show. Oddly, I'd prefer they just READ the books and write something SIMILAR however.

"Romulus is destroyed and the Romulan Empire has fallen. The Captain of the U.S.S. Enterprise-F and his crew of misfits heads in to save the former Romulan Empire."