Could we as fan send a open letter to CBS executive to make Star Trek better

[Lord Garth]

It was also not 1966 anymore in 1996 or 2005, but they still kept TOS consistent.

I was here in 2005. There were people arguing about whether or not the TOS Enterprise should've been updated and if it looked out-of-place or not. But, then again, they argued about everything in the ENT Forum, so I don't know if that's really anything to go by.

I was on ICQ (it was like another version AIM) talking to a co-mod who brought up the Enterprise in "In the Mirror Darkly". Knowing how much of a TOS Fan I am, he tried to sugarcoat it when he told me he thought the TOS Enterprise looked like the odd-ship out. He was really trying hard -- a little too hard -- not to offend me. I shrugged it off by saying there were 100 years for the look of ENT to become the look of TOS. The ship looked it was from another time, so I thought it worked.

But, nevertheless, it wasn't universal acceptance.

There was no TrekBBS in 1996, but I did post on bulletin boards and everyone just took "Trials and Tribble-ations" as tounge-in-cheek. So things changed between 1996 and 2005.

 

[NCC-73515]

There never was and never will be universal acceptance of anything XD

But if they keep it consistent through several appearances over decades, and then suddenly change it, it becomes questionable.

 

[Lord Garth]

There never was and never will be universal acceptance of anything XD

But if they keep it consistent through several appearances over decades, and then suddenly change it, it becomes questionable.

I don't disagree but my point of view changed when they set DSC 10 years before TOS.

This is why: With ENT, I could rationalize it. With TMP, I could still rationalize it. I figured the TOS and TMP look overlapped for a while and we just didn't see it. With DSC, I couldn't do that anymore. So I finally thought, "The Hell with it. This is what it looks like now."

For the Disco Enterprise, they already had a season of DSC looking like DSC. If the Enterprise is supposed to be from the same time as Discovery, then I thought the Enterprise from DSC should look like it belongs in DSC. Continuity within the same show should come first IMO.

With DS9 and ENT, the Enterprise (and the Defiant in ENT) wasn't supposed to be from the same time. So that was the difference. At least for me.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Wow, this thread went kind of nuts since the last time I checked on it. I can't imagine how much more insane it would read if it still included the people I put on "Ignore."

I've observed that a lot of people tend to get spun-up about stuff that really doesn't mater.

Hear, hear!

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It's not a matter of love. It's a matter of what is available for me to consume. Even if I hated Discovery that doesn't eliminate my love of TOS.

Also, GR was the first to discard TOS for visuals so with his rationale around Klingons, so it is neither new nor offensive to me. If I ignore DISCO then I still enjoy TOS and vice versa.

My observation is that too much emphasis is being put on canon and not enough on enjoyment.

A great approach, IMO. Someone making a television show you dislike is not a personal affront. It means that someone made a show that you dislike.

I realized back in 1996 that I didn't like VOY very much and that it was pretty silly for me to keep watching a show I didn't particularly enjoy just because it had the words "Star Trek" in the title. So I stopped watching VOY altogether. To this day I still haven't seen most of the last four seasons of the show.

And you know what else I don't do? I don't go into the VOY forum on the BBS and tell everyone there that I think their show sucks and why they shouldn't like it and talk about how it's all obviously an alternate universe or something. I just don't think about it and instead concentrate on the versions of Trek that I do enjoy. I'm a lot happier that way.

 

[Go-Captain]

They missed a trick to use

Spoiler

Discovery being sent into the future

as an excuse to do that actually. Or they could have used it to erase Discovery from the timeline entirely and to explain why no one remembers the spore drive.

Discovery would have worked better as a post Nemesis series. The square ship aesthetic works better post Nemesis. The spore drive fits the Caretaker species extremely well, as well as a few other things I can’t recall. It wouldn’t trample on the feet of TOS. No need for secret engines and events. Even the first season Klingon story line would work better because post DS9 the Klingons should be pretty chummy with the Federation and the idea of a cultural recoil would have an actual basis.

I don't disagree but my point of view changed when they set DSC 10 years before TOS.

This is why: With ENT, I could rationalize it. With TMP, I could still rationalize it. I figured the TOS and TMP look overlapped for a while and we just didn't see it. With DSC, I couldn't do that anymore. So I finally thought, "The Hell with it. This is what it looks like now."

For the Disco Enterprise, they already had a season of DSC looking like DSC. If the Enterprise is supposed to be from the same time as Discovery, then I thought the Enterprise from DSC should look like it belongs in DSC. Continuity within the same show should come first IMO.

With DS9 and ENT, the Enterprise (and the Defiant in ENT) wasn't supposed to be from the same time. So that was the difference. At least for me.

I can’t rationalize DIS, it just doesn’t work for me in terms of canon, even it’s internal consistency is flawed, so I watch it in a vacuum. That’s not actually a bad thing in itself, just disappointing. I consider The Orville, Seaquest DSV, and Mass Effect to be Trek shows and they have zero canon continuity to Trek.

 

[Lord Garth]

The square ship aesthetic works better post Nemesis.

Movie Era actually. 24th Century ships look like aquatic sea-life.

Look at it like this: Cars nowadays are aerodynamic. Hard lines even disappeared for a little while altogether. It all started with the 1986 Ford Taurus. The Enterprise-D is like the 1986 Ford Taurus of starships. What did cars look like before that? They all looked like boxes. They all looked like squares. That's a late-'70s, early-'80s design.

Do you know what else was designed in the late-'70s and early-'80s? You guessed it. Most of the ships we see in the TOS Movies. That's where the Discovery looks like it fits in. The Discovery's design is even based off the Ralph McQuarrie design for Planet of the Titans, one of the abandoned ideas for a Star Trek movie in the 1970s.

As odd as it looks, I love the Discovery design. It's funky. It has some character to it. But I'm not a fan of the way 24th Century ships look. Same with cars too, actually. I'm not really a fan of the way cars look nowadays.

When people have said DSC should've taken place after TUC, I never argue with them. That's what I would've liked too.

 

[Tenacity]

What did cars look like before that? They all looked like boxes.

The entire line of Chevy Corvettes would like to have a word with you.

Art is a reflection of the culture in which it is done.

But Trek (aside from time travel to our era) is depicting cultures from centuries in the future. Shouldn't the expectation be that they would be different? One of the reasons that TOS is my favorite series is it was made decades before I was born and the culture on display is obviously dissimilar to the culture i live in. This gives TOS more of a scifi futuristic feel.

did Captain Picard also once not make a comment about being judged by their culture's entertainment?

Which culture? Certainly the federation would have many millions of cultures.

It would be scary as hell if the show revealed that a trillion people had a single culture.

 

[Lord Garth]

The entire line of Chevy Corvettes would like to have a word with you.

Touche.

 

[Lord Garth]

I'm going to go for a different angle. Even though I'm not bothered by the change in look to the TOS Era that DSC brought and soon SNW will bring, TOS still looks like TOS. These new shows don't change how the original show looked.

If some asshole decided to insert the Disco Enterprise into TOS and released it as TOS Remastered 2.0, I'd have an issue with that. Now that's changing a pre-existing show in a way other than how it was intended to look.

I could take or leave TOS-R. I prefer untouched TOS over it. I like the way old film stock looks. But not only that, but I also prefer to see the original craftsmanship and the aged film (which isn't even first-generation in effects shots) shows the test of time these episodes have stood.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I could take or leave TOS-R. I prefer untouched TOS over it. I like the way old film stock looks. But not only that, but I also prefer to see the original craftsmanship and the aged film (which isn't even first-generation in effects shots) shows the test of time these episodes have stood.

Yeah, TOS-R is a very mixed bag for me. Some of the new effects I absolutely loved (like the shot of the Botany Bay drifting away from the Enterprise underneath Kirk's log entry of "They have my ship."). And some of the new matte paintings (like the Tantalus V facility and Flint's home) were terrific.

But sometimes it drove me nuts. Typically whenever they did shots they never would've done on TOS (like the extreme closeups of the Enterprise nacelles that always looked like crap) or when they took it upon themselves to rewrite the original intent (like in the beginning of "Wink of an Eye", when the folks working on TOS-R decided that the creators of TOS didn't really mean to have the background be blue or to have a statue in the middle ground, thus totally wrecking the original composition). That sort of thing was overstepping the bounds of the project, IMO, and gave it a "rewriting history" vibe that frankly I'm still uncomfortable with.

 

[Vger23]

It doesn't matter but people can discuss their opinions even if some people don't like what's written. Can a thread be aloud to have such a spun-up turn of differences? If a person don't like what's mentioned then don't surf the thread, no point in being upset because someone has an opposite view, and having arguments about the topic is not going to change another's views. Just go to the threads that praises its brilliance. Its out there.

I guess all I'm saying is that the expenditure of emotional energy sometimes just doesn't seem to match the value of the items being argued about.

Look at the way this thread progressed, and change my mind.

Wow, this thread went kind of nuts since the last time I checked on it. I can't imagine how much more insane it would read if it still included the people I put on "Ignore."

Hear, hear!

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A great approach, IMO. Someone making a television show you dislike is not a personal affront. It means that someone made a show that you dislike.

I realized back in 1996 that I didn't like VOY very much and that it was pretty silly for me to keep watching a show I didn't particularly enjoy just because it had the words "Star Trek" in the title. So I stopped watching VOY altogether. To this day I still haven't seen most of the last four seasons of the show.

And you know what else I don't do? I don't go into the VOY forum on the BBS and tell everyone there that I think their show sucks and why they shouldn't like it and talk about how it's all obviously an alternate universe or something. I just don't think about it and instead concentrate on the versions of Trek that I do enjoy. I'm a lot happier that way.

Stop. This is waaaaaaay too rational and simple for most to comprehend.

 

[Forbin]

purely stupid to unexpectedly okay.

Oh, that's so perfect.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

Stop. This is waaaaaaay too rational and simple for most to comprehend.

 

[Lord Garth]

Yeah, TOS-R is a very mixed bag for me. Some of the new effects I absolutely loved (like the shot of the Botany Bay drifting away from the Enterprise underneath Kirk's log entry of "They have my ship."). And some of the new matte paintings (like the Tantalus V facility and Flint's home) were terrific.

But sometimes it drove me nuts. Typically whenever they did shots they never would've done on TOS (like the extreme closeups of the Enterprise nacelles that always looked like crap) or when they took it upon themselves to rewrite the original intent (like in the beginning of "Wink of an Eye", when the folks working on TOS-R decided that the creators of TOS didn't really mean to have the background be blue or to have a statue in the middle ground, thus totally wrecking the original composition). That sort of thing was overstepping the bounds of the project, IMO, and gave it a "rewriting history" vibe that frankly I'm still uncomfortable with.

I wonder how hard it would've been to digitally clean up the ship shots? I think it could've worked. Not perfectly, but good enough. Especially since there were so few of those shots and they were reused often. Once you clean up those shots, you can get a lot of mileage out of them. As it is, looking at '60s footage next to so-so '00s CGI takes me out of it sometimes. And I agree with you: I think they made a bad call with that "Wink of an Eye" shot.

I thought the re-mastering of TNG was handled a lot better.

 

[mswood]

I wonder how hard it would've been to digitally clean up the ship shots? I think it could've worked. Not perfectly, but good enough. Especially since there were so few of those shots and they were reused often. Once you clean up those shots, you can get a lot of mileage out of them. As it is, looking at '60s footage next to so-so '00s CGI takes me out of it sometimes. And I agree with you: I think they made a bad call with that "Wink of an Eye" shot.

I thought the re-mastering of TNG was handled a lot better.

I really liked the live action clean up of the print for TOS, I liked most of the Matte replacement, I liked most of the CGI space backgrounds, what in general I didn’t like was the renders of the ships. And a couple of the actual movement of the ships (but 98% of the staging and movement of the ships was solid). Even as a kid when I was old enough to notice (so not it’s original run but it’s start in syndication), I hated simply hated the heavy use of stock shots for almost every episode).

 

[mswood]

TNG remaster was both more riddled with errors and also far superior. The errors in season one were pretty significant and the over crap job for season two was shocking, though somewhat reflective of Dan Curry’s work.

By that when Curry and Legato were alternating episodes of TNG and comparing when Legato did DS9 first season versus Curry doing TNG 6th, Legatos shots were always lit darker and had sharper focus, while Curry shots were lit more and far more flat. He did very solid design work, nothing against that just commenting on the different visual look he used.

And season 2 is remastered with far less crisp, and much more overlit.

it really felt out of place even the company that did season 4 was in my opinion far superior. And much closer to the work done by CBS on seasons 1,3, 5-7.

 

[fireproof78]

It would be scary as hell if the show revealed that a trillion people had a single culture.

Please keep that in mind with Klingons and new designs

But Trek (aside from time travel to our era) is depicting cultures from centuries in the future. Shouldn't the expectation be that they would be different? One of the reasons that TOS is my favorite series is it was made decades before I was born and the culture on display is obviously dissimilar to the culture i live in. This gives TOS more of a scifi futuristic feel.

That's great, but that doesn't change that it is a 60s interpretation of the future. I don't have to look far to find similar aesthetics within 60s and 70s scifi.

Regardless, I take the approach that I want Trek to reflect our humanity, and not just an alternate version of humanity. That was part of the original idea of TOS was that humanity survived and was willing to work together. But, now, it feels very much separated from our humanity and that is not a good thing, in my view. It feels like it has to be contained in its own little "Star Trek" box and we better keep that nasty real world stuff out of there.

Mileage will vary.

 

[Nyotarules]

Dear CBS Executive,

Make Star Trek the way you want, its your money and your TV show, if folks like it, they will watch and if folks don't like it, they will hate watch instead.
Regards

NR

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I thought the re-mastering of TNG was handled a lot better.

I think that was likely because that many of the folks working on the TNG remastering had worked on TNG itself, so they weren't likely to be second-guessing their own work the way they tended to with TOS. If it was a completely different team of people working on it 40 years later, we likely would've seen something similar to the "We know better than these guys" results we got with TOS-R.

 

[Lord Garth]

It looks like Star Trek might be turning into a multi-verse. I remember in the first season of DSC how the existence of the multi-verse was at stake. The tie-in novel Dead Endless seems to be taking that concept and running with it. If this multi-verse rationalization is taken further in DSC itself, then it would solve any continuity issues people have.

DSC/SNW, TOS, and TOS-R would each take place in different multi-verses. Each have similar stories and things unfolded in a similar way, but the different looks would be explained away.

I think the multi-verse will become more of a factor if they have deeper exploration of the Mycellial Network. I'm not spoiling anything since all I'm doing is speculating.