Animated Trek series coming to Nickelodeon

[captainkirk]

Is it too much to hope that the lead character is an alien? Isn't it long past time we got one?

 

[Christopher]

That was the idea behind a previous animated attempt, where Warp drive as made difficult.

No, that was somewhat dystopian, but not post-Federation. https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Star_Trek:_Final_Frontier

 

[The Butter Phantom]

Is it just my browser, or is that article in a really bizarre font?

Your browser might not correctly preload the Star Trek font it uses.

 

[Kzinti]

here's hoping the cast is full of aliens and not boring ass humans

 

[Ravenswood]

You're seeing it through modern eyes. Broadcast standards have grown much laxer over the decades, as have sexual mores. At the time TOS was new, it was as adult as any show on the air, and actually rather racy compared to most. Back then, you couldn't even say "hell" or "damn" as a curse word on TV; you could only get away with "Hell" as a literal place name (like Matt Decker's "a demon right out of Hell") or "damn" as a verb (as in Kirk's "The evidence is damning" in "Court Martial"). Kirk's "Let's get the hell out of here" at the end of "The City on the Edge of Forever" was something the producers had to fight to keep in over the network censors' protests.

Similarly, TOS was constantly pushing the envelope in terms of how much sexual content and bare skin it could get away with. They'd often send the censors edits that were even sexier than what they intended to show, so that they could then cut it down to what they actually wanted and make the censors think they'd won. And they got away with some pretty daring sexual themes, like Spock's compulsory mating drive in "Amok Time" or the mention of contraception in "The Mark of Gideon" -- not to mention the scene of Kirk putting his boots back on after being alone in his quarters with Deela, Queen of Scalos for a while, which was pretty bold at the time.

As for violence, TOS was about on a par with anything else on the air at the time. Censors in the '60s were very strict on depictions of violence. Even on a spy show or Western with lots of gunplay, you couldn't show bullet wounds; people would just mime getting shot and fall down with no sign of blood. And if blood were shown onscreen, it'd be a small patch of unnaturally bright red paint that didn't look at all like the real thing.

I remember my mother not allowing us kids in the room during "Friday's Child" because there was—gasp!—a pregnant woman who was—gasp!—about to give birth. This was during mid-1970s syndication.

 

[RedAlert]

Yeah.
The idea sounds like fun.

I'll give it a chance.
New adventures.
New characters.
New ships.

 

[Christopher]

I remember my mother not allowing us kids in the room during "Friday's Child" because there was—gasp!—a preganat woman who was—gasp!—about to give birth. This was during mid-1970s syndication.

Your mother was stricter than the censors at the time, since by the '70s you could get away with saying "pregnant." Before then, though, things were different. When Lucille Ball got pregnant during I Love Lucy, it was a daring choice to write it into the show rather than try to hide it and pretend the stork delivered babies or whatever, but they still couldn't say the word, so they had to come up with euphemisms like "in the family way" and "expecting."

It's bizarre and sad that society was ever so repressed that even the process of child development and birth was treated as obscene. I guess it's because it resulted from sex and involved lady parts, so talking about it meant acknowledging other things that were taboo. But it's still really, really dysfunctional.

 

[Ravenswood]

Your mother was stricter than the censors at the time, since by the '70s you could get away with saying "pregnant." Before then, though, things were different. When Lucille Ball got pregnant during I Love Lucy, it was a daring choice to write it into the show rather than try to hide it and pretend the stork delivered babies or whatever, but they still couldn't say the word, so they had to come up with euphemisms like "in the family way" and "expecting."

It's bizarre and sad that society was ever so repressed that even the process of child development and birth was treated as obscene. I guess it's because it resulted from sex and involved lady parts, so talking about it meant acknowledging other things that were taboo. But it's still really, really dysfunctional.

What's really odd is that my mother grew up on a farm. She surely had witnessed many births—and doubtless a few conceptions!

But she also went to private, Catholic schools in the 1940s and 50s. So.

 

[Blue Squadron]

“...a group of lawless teens who discover a derelict Starfleet ship and use it to search for adventure, meaning and salvation...“

The Star Trek connection sounds pretty loose here...! I’m curious to see how they actually develop this but other than notionally setting it in the same universe and specifying a Starfleet ship this all seems fairly tangential so far.

I’m not attacking it, we don’t have enough information at this point to really say very much at all and I want to see how it pans out. That said, based on the premise outlined so far, I wonder if it would make any difference at all if you deleted the Starfleet reference and set it in a generic sci-fi universe? Put simply, “a bunch of kids find a derelict starship and have some adventures.”'

 

[Christopher]

The Star Trek connection sounds pretty loose here...! I’m curious to see how they actually develop this but other than notionally setting it in the same universe and specifying a Starfleet ship this all seems fairly tangential so far.

People said much the same about TNG 30-odd years ago. And DS9, and VGR, and...

That said, based on the premise outlined so far, I wonder if it would make any difference at all if you deleted the Starfleet reference and set it in a generic sci-fi universe? Put simply, “a bunch of kids find a derelict starship and have some adventures.”'

Of course it will, because of course the one sentence we've heard is not the entire outline, just the barest fragment. Naturally a show about kids finding a derelict starship in the Trek universe is going to be quite different from a show about the same thing happening in an original universe, because the former has 50-odd years' worth of worldbuilding that it can freely draw on whenever it wants. Context matters. Agents of SHIELD was far from the first TV series about a team of government agents investigating weird phenomena, and it was originally conceived to be in a fairly generic ABC-series mold to comfort skittish network executives who wanted something familiar and formulaic, but the fact that it was set in the Marvel Cinematic Universe gave it a vast amount of material to draw on that a show in a built-from-scratch universe wouldn't have had, and thus it ended up having a distinctly Marvel flavor despite its generic-seeming starting premise.

 

[Vger23]

Is it too much to hope that the lead character is an alien? Isn't it long past time we got one?

No.

Star Trek, at its very heart, is about humanity.

 

[Kzinti]

No.

Star Trek, at its very heart, is about humanity.

fuck humanity after 762 episode and movies i'm sick of boring ass humans give me some caitian or more gorn !

 

[Vger23]

fuck humanity after 762 episode and movies i'm sick of boring ass humans give me some caitian or more gorn !

Ok brah.

 

[Starflight]

There's lots of possibilities in having an alien lead character. Probably not quite the material you'd want in an animated show for kids, but an alien captain put in charge of a majority-human crew during a time when the races of the Federation were still getting used to integrating with each other would be fertile ground for all kinds of stories.

It could work with the kids concept too, but I have no idea how because I haven't really watched kids TV since I was a kid, and back then it was Ren & Stimpy and Johnny Bravo so I'm lost in today's climate. The lead derelict-ship kid is an alien and the rest are humans? I dunno, could work.

Caitians are always good. Put a Caitian in charge of a ship and you've got a solid gold show right there.

 

[captainkirk]

So many cartoons don't feature human leads. I have no idea why a franchise set in a universe where we are just a minuscule part of it and that is supposed to promote diversity can't let just one show have a non-human main character.

 

[F. King Daniel]

Is it too much to hope that the lead character is an alien? Isn't it long past time we got one?

Humans are relatable. Mobok from Omicron Beta VIII, who breathes methane, prays to the god Berafarz every 119.4 minutes and eats through a flap in his side, less so.

 

[captainkirk]

Humans are relatable. Mobok from Omicron Beta VIII, who breathes methane, prays to the god Berafarz every 119.4 minutes and eats through a flap in his side, less so.

If you asked most people who the most relatable TOS character is, most would probably answer Spock. Being human often means less interesting.

 

[Jayson1]

What this news has done is actually made me more excited for "Lower Decks." This one sounds like it's going to be for smaller children and since I don't think they would do that twice at the same time I tend to think "Lower Decks" will be aimed at more older audience and attention to quality will be more important. Not something like "Family Guy" or "South Park" but more like maybe the old "Tick" cartoon back in the day.

Jason

 

[Christopher]

No.

Star Trek, at its very heart, is about humanity.

But even the "alien" characters are allegories for humanity. It wouldn't be Trek without its central aliens that let us explore facets of our humanity through the contrast or allegory, like Spock, Data, Odo, Seven, T'Pol, and Saru. So it's misguided to think that Trek's focus on humanity equates to some kind of racist "no alien leads allowed" dogma. That's profoundly and painfully missing the point.

Humans are relatable. Mobok from Omicron Beta VIII, who breathes methane, prays to the god Berafarz every 119.4 minutes and eats through a flap in his side, less so.

Oh, yeah, him, from the Planet of the Straw Men.

What this news has done is actually made me more excited for "Lower Decks." This one sounds like it's going to be for smaller children and since I don't think they would do that twice at the same time I tend to think "Lower Decks" will be aimed at more older audience and attention to quality will be more important. Not something like "Family Guy" or "South Park" but more like maybe the old "Tick" cartoon back in the day.

Well, yes, we've been told all along that Lower Decks is an adult-oriented animated series. It's from the creator of Rick & Morty, which is a very adult and very crass comedy (which worries me, since I very much dislike that style of humor, though I expect they'll tone it down somewhat for Trek).

 

[Soong-type Android]

It's from the creator of Rick & Morty, which is a very adult and very crass comedy (which worries me, since I very much dislike that style of humor, though I expect they'll tone it down somewhat for Trek).

Never understood the appeal of Rick and Morty from the clips I've ever seen advertising it on TV. Ugly, unwatchable animation style and completely unfunny comedy. What's the big deal about it?