Did Abrams really save the franchise?

I could swear I remember reading somewhere that Roddenberry wanted TOS pulled from syndication around the release of The Motion Picture. I also remember Shatner blaming the failure of The Final Frontier on TNG saying you don't get excited about Thanksgiving when you have turkey sandwiches everyday.

Those rose-tinted nostalgia glasses at work...

 

TOS - 1966-1969
TAS - 1973-1974
TNG - 1987-1994
DS9 - 1993-1999
VOY- 1995-2001
ENT - 2001-2005

Films: 1979-2002

Meanwhile CBD remastered TOS and now currently TNG with enhanced resolution and with likely plans for the rest of the series.

ST09 came out only four years after the last series. Yep, we're really deep into nostalgia for something ancient.

 

It was eighteen years between the last TOS film (The Undiscovered Country) and Star Trek 2009.

 

I guess you'd need to define "save," too. Per the definition above, "the franchise" is still a commercial property. Fan support is integral to that property only as far as they consume enough to sustain profitability for the property owner. If the property's profits or growth trends do not meet the owner's expectations and justify further investment, it will be withdrawn from the market to cut losses. This, I think, would qualify to most people as a property in need of "saving."

Was Trek in that situation? I don't know about the specific finances, but I feel pretty safe in saying that without a new mass-audience presence, the franchise would have slowly wound down to the point it would be relevant only to a small nostalgia market.

I didn't like the '09 move personally, but there is no point in denying its success and benefit for the Trek brand. Flip the question around: If the movie had been a huge flop, would Abrams have been called the man who killed Trek? I think so.

 

Sources?

Genre materiel has become very mainstream.

 

This is actually a fairly common concern. Back when I was editing tie-ins, I ran into similar issues with Zorro, The Avengers, The Shadow, and Lost in Space.

Merchandising multiple iterations of the same property can be tricky sometimes . . . although I would argue that Star Trek is a special case in that the old versions were still selling books and comics before the new movies arrived on the scene. (As opposed to dragging the old versions out of mothballs to cash in on a reboot.)

 

Books and magazines over the years.

I'll see if I can dig some out later if time permits.

EDIT: Seems like I'm not the only one who remembers Shatner...

http://trekmovie.com/2013/01/02/wil...s-some-star-trek-advise-more-tng-doc-details/

 

I'm not challenging you on it. I just don't recall ever hearing of GR stating he wanted TOS pulled from syndication or WS blaming TFF stumbling on TNG.

 

Yes.

In fact, I was thinking about displaying a giant Abrams in Birkenstocks and tattered robes statue on my roof.

 

fiction is written by humans to talk about things that would otherwise not be allowed. You may share in/enjoy .001% of what the world has to offer if you only use your own experience. That way breeds ignorance, prejudice, and tyranny

as far as Obi-Wan, like I said, it is more about metaphysics, and a really slapdash metaphysics (which Lucas destroyed with his subsequent introduction of mitocondria or whatever is supposed to give you the "force". he ruined his own metaphysics and tried to make it be anatomy-based.)

 

No. That's not why fiction is written.

Forty years ago you could make that argument.

Now? Absolutely wrong.

 

Depends on your age. I've spoken at enough libraries and elementary schools to know that, only a few years ago, today's kids were more familiar with Batman than Star Trek. And I'm not sure how many young people were watching Enterprise.

Catering to us old-school fans is fine, but we definitely needed to do some outreach to the next generation . . . which seems to be working.

 

What an interesting conversation – I like it.
First, I understand the references to the ‘dark early days’ of the ‘70s. I doubt they were meant to be condescending. Yes if you study history (history of Star Trek in this case), then you can learn what happened, but if you lived through it, you understand what happened.
Now, with the new movies Star Trek is ‘popular cool’. True enough – but in today’s world, that’s momentary. That’s just a natural progression I guess – not meant to offend.
Remember, Harve Bennett, and then Nicholas Meyer “saved” Star Trek previously. Of course, Bjo Trimble also saved Star Trek too. You could make a case that Gene L. Coon saved Star Trek . . . I guess this could go on indefinitely.
I don’t think JJ Abrams saved Star Trek, not as I would define the term, but I would say that JJ Abrams revived Star Trek. Star Trek was not dead – it is just livelier now. The core fans will sustain it though, at whatever level that may be. From what I hear and read, more fans have been brought into the core by way of JJ Abrams - and that’s a good thing.

 

I do not think is saved anything. I think it refreshed it. Some other person would eventually have made a new Trek movie, and it could just as easily been as successful.

I think what the new movies did is give new fans the feeling that they are IN on the ground floor of something fresh. The Trek films always benefited by the mass of stored data in our collective brains regarding the Trek world. This made it hard for non-fans to appreciate.

Now, did JJ make new fans of Trek? or did he just make fans of this new action/adventure movie franchise? we shall see.

I personally HATE re-boots, because it is the easy way to go. It does not take any true caring for the subject matter of let's say, Green Lantern, to re-boot the story. the same goes for Trek. JJ did not like Trek. he admits it. he grew to love it though, as he has stated.

If the new movies give new fans a way to poke theirb heads into our Trekker world of fandom then that is a great thing.
If the movies create a whole new group of fans with antagonistic attitudes toward any old TREK, then he may have actually done more harm than good to the Trek Universe. we will see in a few years.

I think it will be good.

 

It certainly wasn't meant to be condescending. I lived through those early days. I missed TOS in its original run, but started to watch it in 1970.

By dark days I meant to convey a sense of how many of us felt. Unlike today without the Internet many fans could feel isolated with little idea other fans could be just down the block or around the corner. Many of us could feel other fans were scattered wide across the country (or continent) with little idea how many there really were. Our only tie to Star Trek were books and merchandise and conventions if you were able to go (or even knew they existed). David Gerrold's book The World of Star Trek really opened my eyes to the fandom that was out there. Those publications and finally attending a convention in 1976 finally brought home the realization of how real and widespread the fandom was.

For years we wished Star Trek could be granted the respect and recognition many us felt it deserved. Like them or not TMP and then TWOK were the signs that Star Trek need no longer be merely our little secret passion.

For me thats how it felt.

 

No. He simply produced 2 movies that have so far been successful. But if it's anything like Batman or Spiderman, It will reboot again after 3 or 4 films. Do we really want to keep starting over and over?

 

Exactly. I didn't discover organized fandom until the late seventies. Before then, I had, like, one friend who was also into Star Trek and Doc Savage and Marvel Comics and such. And, yes, I devoured David Gerrold's books as well!

As I like to joke, Logan's Run costumes were still fashionable when I discovered fandom!

 

It's long since reached the point where hard core fandom holds Star Trek back from the kinds of changes necessary to appeal to current tastes - and therefore drags down its chances of survival, much less success.

It wouldn't hurt to reboot Kirk and Spock every so often. It might well be the best way to go with a new TV series, given that the current cast and the kind of production involved in the movies would not be practical for TV.

 

This like saying the guy who pulls someone drowning out of a pool didn't save that person because someone else could have easily done it.

And, yes, Star Trek was drowning.

Canon has always been Star Treks Achilles. It never benefited anyone besides those who worship it.

All Trek series have been extremely popular (some of the most watched) on the various streaming sites as of late.

Nonsense. The history of human storytelling boils down to reboots.

 

and it boils down to a lot of boring crap tooo