I saw the comic of jem recently. I was horrified.
Bryan Fuller showrunner for new trek...consequences?
- Thread starter Jarvisimo
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I saw the comic of jem recently. I was horrified.
Good point, but note that we had a 50% success rate there. The X-FILES revival is doing gangbusters, but the HEROES revival sank like a stone. Maybe because there was more residual good will attached to X-FILES?
(And this is where I mention that, as it happens, I have a story in a new X-FILES anthology that came out this very month. And, yes, it's set back in the original continuity. Season Four, to be exact.)
I don't think there's a one-size-fits-all approach. Sometimes reboots work (yay, PLANET OF THE APES), sometimes they don't (er, DARK SHADOWS). Ditto for revivals.
Probably depends on execution more than anything else.
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Doesn't having residual good will require having had good will remaining at the end of the original?
For real, I am completely certain that this is exactly what happened there. People were excited about the X-Files revival before it started because there were still a ton of people out there that wanted to see more in that world, but the main reaction I saw when NBC announced the Heroes revival a year or two ago was "why" (from both a creative perspective and a business perspective).
The fly films are remakes of 4 hours of films including sequels. The ghostbusters reboot is essentially a remake, and I am hoping better than its stills are suggesting.
Remakes are different to reboots. Films are different to television. Adaptations are a different percolator of fish altogether.
Several hundred hours of established television continuity, which is it's original form to start off with, is what makes Trek pretty damn unique.
The diversity spoken of here is clearly the borg kind. An end to development and adapt to service.
They don't want your history star trek, they want your concept.
The ultimate consumer.
If the continuity is stopped, there is no more development, yes those dvds are on my shelf, but that story, that world, is essentially dead. What continues, the reboot, takes what it wanted then carries on.
It's an attitude of 'i like this thing so much I want to take it apart and use bits of it to make it in my image to serve my purpose' as opposed to ' like this thing so much, I want to learn about it and add to its tapestry'
To really push it to its most over the top ridiculous, so exaggerated in importance silliness....it's colonialist. And not in a friendly way.
Anyway.
Genesis torpedo or not, I think I am done and had my say, and all without veiled insults. Or not so veiled. On the internet. Go me.
Remakes are different to reboots. Films are different to television. Adaptations are a different percolator of fish altogether.
Several hundred hours of established television continuity, which is it's original form to start off with, is what makes Trek pretty damn unique.
The diversity spoken of here is clearly the borg kind. An end to development and adapt to service.
They don't want your history star trek, they want your concept.
The ultimate consumer.
If the continuity is stopped, there is no more development, yes those dvds are on my shelf, but that story, that world, is essentially dead. What continues, the reboot, takes what it wanted then carries on.
It's an attitude of 'i like this thing so much I want to take it apart and use bits of it to make it in my image to serve my purpose' as opposed to ' like this thing so much, I want to learn about it and add to its tapestry'
To really push it to its most over the top ridiculous, so exaggerated in importance silliness....it's colonialist. And not in a friendly way.
Anyway.
Genesis torpedo or not, I think I am done and had my say, and all without veiled insults. Or not so veiled. On the internet. Go me.
Doesn't having residual good will require having had good will remaining at the end of the original?
Probably.
People seem to be excited about the GILMORE GIRLS revival, which bodes well for its chances, I guess.
As for the proposed new XENA series . . . personally, I would prefer a revival with Lawless and O'Connor reprising their original roles, but if they go the reboot route instead . . . so be it. I'll try to give the new XENA (and the new Xena) the benefit of the doubt.
Has heroes happened then? Blimey. Kept that quiet if it's been on here in the UK.
Nothing personal. I was mostly talking about fannish conservatism in general, and not just regarding STAR TREK.
And HEROES REBORN has already come and gone here in the States, without making much of a splash. It's already been canceled.
I thought a new Xena series was a brief rumor that was quickly debunked by the people supposedly involved? Or am I thinking of something else?
Edit: Oh, I am mixed up, I was thinking of that rumored Labyrinth reboot that got understandably debunked within like 24 hours.
I have no idea how I mixed those two up.
For me this is just about Star trek. And my dislike of reboots is part of that, but if I was that kind of Conservative over everything, I wouldn't be giving the new ghostbusters time of day and probably have a rant about that too.
I'll still read your books. Except non movie era Tos ones, because I never really liked any of those anyway, from anyone.
jaime said:
I was referring to the film, not the comic. The comic is also a reboot, but it's coming from a place where its creators understood the appeal of the original cartoon and have made more tonally appropriate updates to the material.
(Personally, I would've set a Jem film in the Eighties and embraced all which that entailed...)
I may have been aware of the overlap between Star Trek writers and the writers of tie-ins to those franchises when I used those examples.
I'm not really talking about what works on a creative level, though, but rather about which way the makers of films and television series are leaning in response (IMO) to the way audiences are leaning. Audiences seem to prefer continuations lately--including continuations of previous reboots.
On that level, it is a competition in the sense that business decisions have to be made about what form the creative output will take based on past successes and failures, and I'm observing how those decisions are tilting in favour of continuations with reboots being increasingly rare. (They won't disappear completely, especially when a continuation isn't feasible, but they'll become all the rarer if reboots that flop keep piling up.) It's not limited to genre franchises, either, as examples like Fuller House and Girl Meets World (and Gilmore Girls, which you mentioned) demonstrate.
In some cases, but not universally. Supergirl is a hit, and it's a brand-new reality. (Granted, there's only ever been one previous screen production titled Supergirl, but it's still an offshoot of the Superman franchise and uses a lot of its elements and characters.) Sherlock and Elementary are both successful reboots/reimaginings of Sherlock Holmes. Netflix's Daredevil is essentially a reboot -- it may be technically an extension of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, but it's a whole new version of the Daredevil character and his world, unrelated to the previous movie. There's also the similar case of Deadpool, which totally repudiates the previous movie version of Deadpool even though it's technically in the same continuity (thank you, time-travel reboot) and has the same actor playing the role. Audiences are perfectly fine with reinventions in cases where they weren't that fond of the earlier version. So you can't generalize.
And it's hard to say what's really a trend and what's just a random fluctuation. Just because there are some prominent continuations in the mix lately, that doesn't prove that the industry as a whole is moving toward preferring continuations; it could just be happenstance that a few happened to hit recently. And even if it is a trend, no trend lasts forever. The pendulum always swings back eventually.
Not in all cases. Nobody seems to mind that SUPERGIRL is not set in the same continuity as MAN OF STEEL, SMALLVILLE, or even the old Helen Slater movie. Ditto for THE FLASH, which, despite some cameos and easter eggs, is not a reboot of the nineties show or a spin-off from the Flash character on SMALLVILLE. And then there's GOTHAM . . ..
And the new PLANET OF THE APES movies seem to be thriving even though they're not continuations.
EDIT: Just saw Christopher's post where he makes the same point. And, yeah, nobody seems to mind that the new DAREDEVIL is not picking up where the Ben Affleck movie left off. (Which breaks my heart a little, since that was the very first movie I ever novelized. You know you're getting old when they start remaking movies you wrote the novelizations for!
)
As always, I'll point out that comic book franchises are a terrible example to use because they already have an in-built explanation for how different continuities can co-exist rather than being truly incompatible--a point that The Flash is increasingly making explicit.
Having that option allows comic book reboots to also be continuations...much like the Abramsverse, which is what originally got us talking here.
That's just the "best-case scenario" I was describing earlier--the reboot was so successful that it now has its own continuation.
I'll still read your books. Except non movie era Tos ones, because I never really liked any of those anyway, from anyone.
Fair enough. I hope you like the February book, if not the June one.
Miasma isn't it? Pre ordered it already. And I rarely get the novellas because the price is usually 4 or 5 times the amount of time I will spend reading it. But movie era books, especially ones that feature just the movie era, are rare beasts. Not as rare as TMP movie era granted, but rare.Fair enough. I hope you like the February book, if not the June one.
And 80s/90s trek is my Trek so am gonna reprazent.
Hope it's good. It's got the right ship on the cover, and doesn't appear to be hiding a Tos TV era story in there (I didn't go for the novels that use Movie era framing devices, I was put off that idea by DC comics long ago.)
Persuade your bosses to do more of them...Movie era books were once the bastion of Trek lit, and people like me enjoy the familiarity all the more as the other lines wander away from their roots. It's basically this and the Voyager novels if you want nostalgia as well as story these days.
That "explanation" is an incidental story point, a stylistic choice. There have been countless prior reinventions that haven't had any such "explanation," and audiences haven't had a problem understanding it. Because most people are smart enough to know the difference between fiction and reality and thus don't need an "explanation" for how there can be two or more different versions of an imaginary concept.
Put another way, a fictional multiverse is an effect of the existence of multiple reinventions, not a cause of it. The reinventions came first, and the multiverses were invented to reconcile them. National/DC Comics reinvented the Flash and other characters in the Silver Age without any concern for continuity; then, after that, they did "Flash of Two Worlds" and introduced the multiverse idea. Which wasn't because the change needed to be justified, of course, but just because Gardner Fox thought it'd make for a fun story.
A bunch of bitter angry rants about Disney "betraying fandom" after they invested over 20 years into the EU, even though there was never a real possibility Disney was going to follow the EU's continuity anyway.
Those books got pretty naff towards the end of the run.
I still feel bad for the very active retcon they got hit with, and it does pretty much guarantee I will never buy another star wars book for myself ever again, as a relatively casual reader of them. What's the point. They become the same level as fan fiction over night.
I also can't be bothered with the new film because of the things it then borrowed from those books, and the way it goes for the shock and awe (I was one of those who inferred a couple of things from the trailers and promo guff, and was sad to find out I was right. I might watch it on telly in a few years.)
They could have handled it better. I hope when it comes to Treks approach they just quietly avoid overt contradiction wherever possible, and only the odd easter egg of a mention now and then. The doctor who approach essentially. (assuming series goes Prime)
Rather than Order 66ING the poor buggers who kept the dream alive in the first place.
It's definitely a movie-era story, since Saavik plays a major part in it. Hope you like it.
I'm not sure what you are saying about Nikita here, the show ran for 4 seasons with 73 episodes and the majority of reactions I saw to it over those 4 years was pretty positive. I honestly have no idea how the hardcore La Femme Nikita fans felt about it, but there don't seem to be the same number of people complaining about it compared to the original as there are for things like BSG.
But there is no reason you can't do that kind of stuff with a reboot, the conversations might not play out in exactly the same manner, but there would still be conversations about how the versions relate.
Really? Almost all of the reactions I've seen to the comic have been positive. Did you actually read it, or did you just not like the art style?
Execution is all I care about, I don't care if it's reboot or continuation as long as it's done well.
I don't mind reboots at all. I think it can often be really fun to take a different look at a concept. Sometimes reboots just don't work, but sometimes the changing times can cause people to bring an interesting new perspective to the concept. I think BSG and Planet of the Apes are perfect examples of that. I don't think either of those destroyed or hurt the originals in any way, but they still managed to take things in different direction that works at least as well as the original.
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