The 90's Golden Age.

[Amaris]

^Thanks for the ad hominem.

See my response to Hober Mallow below.

They're fundamentalists, but instead of a classic religion, they've chosen their favorite Trek as their idol, and the heretics be damned.

I've no doubt that describes some fans. Then there are others, like me, who simply think the Abram's films are dull.

Of course. I'm not blanketing every detractor with that statement, only those who fit the bill of a fundamentalist. There are a number of reasons some people aren't going to like the film, and that's perfectly okay. Tastes vary, people vary. I'm talking about the people who aren't just people who dislike elements of the film, and may be disappointed overall, I'm talking about people who have an avid fan hate for Abrams, the writers, the movies themselves, the best boys, and the caterers. There are people who refute every point with "only an idiot likes this movie," or "of course since it's big dumb action, brainless illiterates will love it."

See, that's not disliking a movie, that's disliking people for liking a movie; it's hatred for something that people love, and everything associated with what those people love. There are those fundamentalist fans who treat Star Trek like it's a religion; where anything made after their coveted favorite series is an abomination, and yes, I've seen the word "abomination" thrown at a movie.

I think when it gets to that point, one needs to step back, take a deep breath, and stay off the internet for a year.

So if one isn't a fundamentalist, if one doesn't fit that bill of goods, then one has nothing to concern oneself about my statement.

 

[Nerys Myk]

1. Super powered being threatens the ship. [Charlie X, Trelane, Abe Lincoln, Mitchell]

Yeah, that never happened on TNG...Q, "Ardra" Edo god,Douwd

 

[Commishsleer]

Im aware, from my years of lurking here, how many fanboys of TOS are here. As much as I love it, I view TOS as more of a nostalgia-trip than anything even close to TNG, DS9, VOY. It simply isn't as deep, as clever, as moving, as sharp....

Yes TOS fanboys are just lame whereas TNG, DS9 and VOY fanboys are deeper, cleverer, more moving and sharper.

People who take shots at other people for liking differing things are so classy. It's really great and in tune with the message of Star Trek that all differences are to be scorned and ridiculed.

So its OK to take potshots at 'TOS fanboys' who are here. I thought that was meant as an insult. I can call myself a fanboy but I don't like others calling me it. Just because I prefer TOS over other Star Trek things I don't think I need to be scorned or ridiculed either.

I actually like lots in the other Treks and probably agree that Star Trek in the 90s was at its peak in volume on screen at least. I remember somewhere Wil Wheaton saying how his parked his flash car near Stewart's flash car at the parking lot and thinking that sort of think wasn't happening for the TOS cast in the 60s.
I just don't agree all the writing and stories and ideas in DS9, TNG and VOY were superior to that of TOS. Technobabble is not superior writing even though the words are longer IMHO

 

[R. Star]

Yes TOS fanboys are just lame whereas TNG, DS9 and VOY fanboys are deeper, cleverer, more moving and sharper.

People who take shots at other people for liking differing things are so classy. It's really great and in tune with the message of Star Trek that all differences are to be scorned and ridiculed.

So its OK to take potshots at 'TOS fanboys' who are here. I thought that was meant as an insult. I can call myself a fanboy but I don't like others calling me it. Just because I prefer TOS over other Star Trek things I don't think I need to be scorned or ridiculed either.

I actually like lots in the other Treks and probably agree that Star Trek in the 90s was at its peak in volume on screen at least. I remember somewhere Wil Wheaton saying how his parked his flash car near Stewart's flash car at the parking lot and thinking that sort of think wasn't happening for the TOS cast in the 60s.
I just don't agree all the writing and stories and ideas in DS9, TNG and VOY were superior to that of TOS. Technobabble is not superior writing even though the words are longer IMHO

Oh my comment was aimed at both of you taking potshots at each other's likes and dislikes, worry not.

Even if like GoodStuff apparently I think that TOS was the foundation of the franchise that bigger and better things were built upon, that doesn't justify talking down to a person who enjoys something different than you.

I will agree that especially by Voyager and Enterprise the technobabble had spun out of control that we had entire scenes of people sputtering gibberish.

 

[TheGoodStuff]

Im aware, from my years of lurking here, how many fanboys of TOS are here. As much as I love it, I view TOS as more of a nostalgia-trip than anything even close to TNG, DS9, VOY. It simply isn't as deep, as clever, as moving, as sharp....

Yes TOS fanboys are just lame whereas TNG, DS9 and VOY fanboys are deeper, cleverer, more moving and sharper.

Now that is pure inferal. I never said that. I said the shows are better written, acted etc. There was no attack on the intellect of fans. I simply meant that many here seem to have a 'TOS uber alles' mentality.

Yeah, that never happened on TNG...Q, "Ardra" Edo god,Douwd

Which is a handful of of examples out of hundreds of episodes. TOS recycled that same plot repeatedly.

So its OK to take potshots at 'TOS fanboys' who are here. I thought that was meant as an insult. I can call myself a fanboy but I don't like others calling me it. Just because I prefer TOS over other Star Trek things I don't think I need to be scorned or ridiculed either.

I actually like lots in the other Treks and probably agree that Star Trek in the 90s was at its peak in volume on screen at least. I remember somewhere Wil Wheaton saying how his parked his flash car near Stewart's flash car at the parking lot and thinking that sort of think wasn't happening for the TOS cast in the 60s.
I just don't agree all the writing and stories and ideas in DS9, TNG and VOY were superior to that of TOS. Technobabble is not superior writing even though the words are longer IMHO

Now I will correct you right away: I am taking potshots at nobody. I love TOS [have the entire 3 seasons & movies on DVD and Blu-Ray] and am a fan myself. However some seem blinded to its weaknesses. I wish some would stop being so...hyper sensitive.

I said, cumulatively, TNG, VOY & DS9 have far better scripts, plots and acting. I fail to see how that can be argued. They have a vast amount of memorable episodes that were great. Im not saying TOS had none [though I think of the 3 seasons there are about 4 truly great episodes] simply that those 3 combined had far more.

I dont know why you are mentioning technobabble. If you count 'The Inner Light', 'Best of Both Worlds', 'Far beyond The Stars', 'Year of Hell' etc etc to be just technobabble then fair enough.

Its intriguing to see how many have taken my level-headed critique of TOS so personally. I apparently hate TOS and look down on others opinions because I dared to say the show is somewhat repetitive and not as good as the '90's shows.

Definitely not so.

 

[Lord Garth]

I don't have a dog in the '90s Trek vs. New Trek debate.

What I will say is that there's more of '90s Trek to revisit. If there was an episode or film I didn't care for, it wasn't a three or four-year wait until the next one. There was also the chance to tell stories that didn't have to be the types that would bring in multi-hundred-million dollars in order to keep going.

Also, there's added pressure to be as profitable as possible with the new films being as expensive as they are, you need huge box-office results to off-set the monstrous budgets. ST and STID have done that by expanding the mainstream appeal and pursuing the foreign market more aggressively. That means TPTB have to push what they know will make money and they know a lot more about the familiar than they do the unfamiliar so you get the original crew and the Romulans, Khan, and the Klingons as villains. The drawback is that you get less new races because Paramount has to rely on what's already familiar out of necessity because cost of failure if they take a risk on something unknown is too high.

It's great that Star Trek is up and running again but, as of yet, it's costed variety and there's simply (much) less of it in general.

 

[Zod]

I would say this golden age started in 1993 with the launch of DS9 all the way till the end of Enterprise in 2005.

For most of that period you had 2 shows in production along with the movies and conventions all over the nation.

I can't even remember the last time a Trek convention was in the NY area. I remember a convention in 1995 or 1996 at Hofstra University. It was packed!

2005-2009 were the dark ages for Trek. (non fan made stuff)

 

[Nerys Myk]

Yeah, that never happened on TNG...Q, "Ardra" Edo god,Douwd

Which is a handful of of examples out of hundreds of episodes. TOS recycled that same plot repeatedly.

There is a difference between recycling plots and using similar themes or characters. Mitchell, Trelane, the Metrons and the Organians were not used in the same plot.

 

[RandyS]

I would say this golden age started in 1993 with the launch of DS9 all the way till the end of Enterprise in 2005.

For most of that period you had 2 shows in production along with the movies and conventions all over the nation.

I can't even remember the last time a Trek convention was in the NY area. I remember a convention in 1995 or 1996 at Hofstra University. It was packed!

2005-2009 were the dark ages for Trek. (non fan made stuff)

I'm guessing you weren't alive in the 70's? Yes, 2005-2009 WERE dark ages, but for reasons that have nothing to do with Star Trek. In those years, we had Pocket novels every month, every episode and movie available on DVD, Numerous toys and video games, and yes, fan productions.

Now, compare THAT to the period of 1969-1979. We had TAS as the ONLY new show, TOS reruns that were available depending on what market you happened to live in, Bantam novels ONCE IN A BLUE MOON, NO home video to speak of in ANY format.

I take it you weren't around for any of that?

 

[Captain Kathryn]

The era of TNG/DS9/VOY is my favorite as well. I was also an '80s baby, so I am biased for '90s TV regardless.

 

[BigJake]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I saw TOS Trek first as a little kid, thought the Wrath of Khan was the most awesome thing ever when I first saw it (still my favourite Trek movie), grew up with TNG Trek in my teens. TNG Trek was a curious thing; it had bigger budgets and eventually more dramatic ambition, it took the SF action format to new places and I think it has to be said that it eventually owned the televised medium in a way no Trek show has done before or since. Yet it also still felt a bit... second-hand. I can't help agreeing with Justin Rye that in retrospect it feels like this:

ST:TOS was a respectable effort (for the sixties) to produce intelligent SF. It at least tried to make sense, and featured US TV's first interracial kiss. ST:TNG has bigger budgets but less integrity: it reuses the setting not because it was good, but to guarantee an audience for minimal risk and creative investment. So it can't imperil its ratings by depicting a world where most humans aren't WASPs, women are as important as men, and moral codes can be irreconcilable... The diversity-stifling corporate control of the media has formularised [sic] Star Trek into a soap-opera using sci-fi special effects; a genre in its own right, supplanting SF in the minds of the viewers and in the ecosystem of big-budget TV productions. Resistance is futile…

This feeling is what prevents me, in retrospect, from being whole-heartedly able to pronounce the Nineties as any kind of Golden Age. More content wasn't necessarily better, and while TNG had some great content, still: on average it wasn't actually all that much better than the Original Series, and more importantly it wasn't really the boundary-pushing exercise for its time that original Trek had been. It was ultimately... safer.

DS9 had its moments and took some genuine dramatic risks, but the funny thing was that the more spin-off series came out, the more Trek as a whole seemed to sag under the weight of its own legacy. TOS had already pushed the limits of nonsensical continuity, and gotten away with it because the other elements of the show felt fresh. By the time DS9 was trying to extract some freshness from the premise -- and to their credit, they did manage it to an extent -- it was like the Trek premise was wading through quicksand. Then after DS9 the last attempts at real dramatic risk-taking ended, and despite potentially daring attempts at reinvention, ultimately the safeness of the setting and unwillingness to risk departure from formula ensured that VOY and then ENT sank.

It all feels like a lesson in why many SF authors are so wary about shared universes; without a strong, decisive and (frankly) ruthless creative vision to guide them, they can turn into messes, overstuffed with mediocrity that detracts even from whatever good things they otherwise achieve. Ultimately that's why TNG and what's come after it has rather palled for me; in a funny way, the four and a half decade-old Original Series and its setting still feel fresher and more promising than the overcrowded, overdetermined kludge of a Trek universe that resulted from the Nineties.

I think the instinct to "reboot" the Original Series, or at least to revisit that era, was actually a sound one: although I fear that Abrams' cavalier approach to it may have sunk it out of the gate as anything other than a Fast and Furious clone with Trek trappings.

 

[Bad Thoughts]

Considering the dearth of scifi on tv during the seventies and eighties, TOS reruns were a godsend.

 

[Praetor]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

"Message, Spock?"

I'm sad I didn't think of referencing that sooner. That actually sums up the so-called "Golden Age" perfectly.

 

[garaks the best]

I think the 90's were a golden age for a lot of sci fi not just star trek, i mean along with TNG,DS9 and VOY you also had SG1,B5,x files and farscape.

 

[Nightdiamond]

I think the 90's were a golden age for a lot of sci fi not just star trek, i mean along with TNG,DS9 and VOY you also had SG1,B5,x files and farscape.

Very true. The mid 90's were so much fun for sci fi and fantasy. It was a big treasure chest of shows and ideas.

A lot of them were simply stupid, but that's what made it so much fun.

Trek got bloated. Ironically, I noticed that each show kind of moved further away from the Utopia-we solved our problems at last format.

Levar Burton just mentioned something like this recently.

 

[Grendelsbayne]

Trek got bloated. Ironically, I noticed that each show kind of moved further away from the Utopia-we solved our problems at last format.

Levar Burton just mentioned something like this recently.

I wouldn't call it moving away from Utopia so much as acknowledging and engaging with the facts that were fairly obvious all along - that the Federation Utopia was never all that Utopian to begin with.

Earth is a paradise, a few other planets as well, but the Federation is still surrounded by hostile forces (Klingons, Romulans, Tholians, Gorn, etc); the supposedly non-existant capitalist society still clearly does exist, at least on the edge of the Federation (Mudd, Jones); and humans still toil and die in dusty, relatively primitive colonies and mining outposts.

 

[The Old Mixer]

And they were too timid to move far enough away from that with Enterprise....They squandered the opportunity to show us a humanity that was still learning to become that perfect futuristic society.

 

[Zod]

I take it you weren't around for any of that?

Yeah I was just a baby in the 1970s so I don't remember. One of my first childhood memories is watching the animated series. Its what got me started with Trek. Then came the 11pm Trek episodes on channel 11 WPIX in NY which is what made me a fan of Trek.

 

[Nightdiamond]

Nu trek doesn't have the advantage of having episodes to establish the characters the way TOS and TNG did.

Kirk and Spock are pretty well-established characters.

My impression is that NuTrek characters are not as well established with viewers because they altered their history and added things. Being a movie that comes out every few years doesnt make it any easier.

For example Spock and Uhura were just suddenly shown in a relationship, when regular fans know they were never together in the TOS, and never shown that type of interest in each other.

Primarily because Spock was generally was shown as the non emotional, logical, 'I won't take a wife until it is necessary type'.

And with ITD, things like having Spock being the one to yell "Khaaannn!" instead of Kirk, when you know his character is supposed to be logical and emotionless most of the time, I'm not surprised that scene threw a lot of people off.

Then again, it's a reboot--that's what's supposed to happen, but some fans won't go for it, because they think it's typical blockbuster movie drama gimmick.

I wouldn't call it moving away from Utopia so much as acknowledging and engaging with the facts that were fairly obvious all along - that the Federation Utopia was never all that Utopian to begin with.

That's probably the case, but you can also notice that in the NuTrek movies the focus is more on how advanced technology is in the 23rd century, and how everything and everybody looks, but the Utopian element doesn't seem to be there.

We do get humans with problems, though. Mccoy is complaining about how his wife took everything in the divorce when around this time, no one uses money and supposedly evolved out of greed and such. People getting into fist fights, arguing. etc.

That may be some of what Levar was talking about- Actually I always have fun criticizing super Utopian ideas from Trek, especially when those ideas were considered cool at the time they were made.

 

[Forbin]

I take it you weren't around for any of that?

Yeah I was just a baby in the 1970s so I don't remember. One of my first childhood memories is watching the animated series. Its what got me started with Trek. Then came the 11pm Trek episodes on channel 11 WPIX in NY which is what made me a fan of Trek.

The 6PM shows on WPIX saved me. My mother's father had moved in with us after her mother died, and he was just an awful person. I insisted on eating dinner on a tray table in the living room so I could watch Star Trek (and not have to listen to his nightly Archie Bunker crap at the dinner table).