Deleted Scenes and Canon

[ThePlumsofWrath]

Hi all, hope you are well?

I'm new to the forum so I wanted to jump in and get my feet wet with a question that I'm sure will have been asked and discussed before, please be gentle with me.

Are deleted scenes, from the movies, considered canon?

Cheers.

 

[Bones2]

No.

I don't think so anyway. Only the final cut.

 

[Shazam!]

Yeah, final cut is what counts, I think.

 

[Kegg]

Deleted scenes can only be considered or argued to be canon if there's an official cut of the movie which includes them (the three different cuts of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, for example).

But something that's on the cutting room floor regardless of edition, that's not canon.

 

[Shazam!]

Deleted scenes can only be considered or argued to be canon if there's an official cut

Coud you define official cut, please?

 

[Christopher]

Deleted scenes are not part of the movie any more than leftover marble on the sculptor's floor is part of a statue. If they were meant to be part of the story, and therefore part of the canon, they would've been left in the movie.

And "considered canon" is something of a contradiction. Too many people abuse the word "canon" as if it meant a matter of the fans' opinions and beliefs. That's the exact opposite of what it means. A canon, by definition, is determined by the official organization in charge of an institution. The term originally comes from religion and refers to the official body of ecclesiastical law. Anything that exists outside of the officially defined, core body of the entity, anything that its people in charge choose to exclude from that core body, is therefore not part of the canon. If a scene is cut out of the final product by the filmmakers, then it is excluded from the core body of work by its official creators, and thus is not canonical.

There's nothing stopping the individual fan from believing that a deleted scene "happened" in their version of the Trek universe, any more than there's anything stopping the individual believer of a religion from accepting apocryphal or heretical texts and practices. But those remain outside the canon regardless of the individual's belief or preference. And there's always the possibility that a deleted scene will be contradicted in a later production, because it's not part of the actual film and therefore isn't binding on the makers of followups. (Heck, sometimes even stuff that does get into the final, canonical film isn't binding on the makers of sequels. There's stuff in TWOK that blatantly contradicts what came before, like Khan's followers being less ethnically diverse and younger than they were in "Space Seed.")

 

[JustKate]

Aside from the various problems pointed out by other posters, the other problem with cut scenes is...why were they cut? If they were cut because of time, then yes, it would be tempting to consider them canon. I don't, but I can understand why others might find this tempting, particularly if it explains something about a character or Trek history or whatever.

But what if they were cut because of a change in concept - of a character, for example? Or, as Christopher points out, what if maybe the character didn't change in that particular movie, but because the scene didn't make it on the screen, it's contradicted in a subsequent movie?

So, no matter how tempting, it just doesn't work. As a couple of other people have pointed out, the only way a deleted scene might count is if it is added back in for a subsequent edition.

 

[Kegg]

Coud you define official cut, please?

Sure. A cut released and/or authorised by the license holder.

So, any fan made edits of, say, Star Trek: Nemesis that include the new first officer would not be deemed an official cut.

And "considered canon" is something of a contradiction.

Hardly. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan is considered canon, but Saavik being half-Romulan is not considered canon. It's a rather applicable phrase.

This objection would make sense if the OP had said 'what do you consider canon', but it's not posed so subjectively.

(Heck, sometimes even stuff that does get into the final, canonical film isn't binding on the makers of sequels. There's stuff in TWOK that blatantly contradicts what came before, like Khan's followers being less ethnically diverse and younger than they were in "Space Seed.")

The issue isn't whether it's binding but whether it's canon. In practice writers can (and have) ignored or forgotten about existing canon when writing a new story that is also canon. Which is where we get all the wonderful canon conflicts of Star Trek lore. And then that pesky word continuity comes into play, which is sometimes - unfortunately - used as interchangeable with canon.

 

[Shazam!]

Coud you define official cut, please?

Sure. A cut released and/or authorised by the license holder.

Hmm, okay. What about Superman II?

 

[Kegg]

Coud you define official cut, please?

Sure. A cut released and/or authorised by the license holder.

Hmm, okay. What about Superman II?

The Donner version? It'd qualify as an official cut in the manner I described, yeah.

However I have no idea how the Superman canon works, though my general impression is it's far more flexible then the Star Trek canon (with lots of essentially self-contained and unique takes on the same story). My comment was restrained to just the Star Trek canon.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

Canon is largely meaningless unless one is writing an installment of Trek and needs to know what is official and what is not. So I don't see why it even matters.

 

[ThePlumsofWrath]

I'm don't think I'm suggesting it matters at all but the fact of the matter is that these offcuts are out there and suggest a backstory to the main event. The new offcuts for ST09 are interesting in that they would appear to add some depth to Nero for example.

 

[JustKate]

^ Yes, that's what makes them so tempting - they can seem to tell us stuff that we'd really like to know, stuff that the movie probably should have told us (or, in the case of Nero, should definitely have told us, IMO).

But unfortunately, it just doesn't work that way. The plain fact is, it wasn't in the movie. Therefore, unless the director adds some of this material in as part of a subsequent edition (which would indicate that he believes it to be canon), it basically just didn't happen.

 

[Hambone]

How about footage that was originally cut, then edited back in for "director's cuts", "special editions", and so forth?

I'm thinking of the scene in STII when Scotty introduces Peter Preston as his nephew. Most fans consider this relationship "canon" but I can see it both ways.

 

[JustKate]

How about footage that was originally cut, then edited back in for "director's cuts", "special editions", and so forth?

I'm thinking of the scene in STII when Scotty introduces Peter Preston as his nephew. Most fans consider this relationship "canon" but I can see it both ways.

My opinion is:

Therefore, unless the director adds some of this material in as part of a subsequent edition (which would indicate that he believes it to be canon), it basically just didn't happen.

That's how I see it anyway. If the director makes it canon by including it in a subsequent edition (which means that presumably Paramount is OK with this as well), then I'd call it canon. But maybe that's just me.

Edit: Oh, and I meant to add that I personally think it's only canon if it's actually edited back into the movie. Being included in the "Deleted scenes" thing doesn't cut it, and the reason is that nobody, surely, considers those when he goes to make a sequel. But then again, maybe that's just me.

 

[Ziz]

I kind of split the difference. I look at deleted scenes as "canon, but with an escape clause" - the escape clause being that they can't contradict some established fact in the film or episode.

Was it ever established on screen that Saavik is full Vulcan? If not, Kirk & Spock talking about her being half-Romulan can still be considered canon, it just hasn't been addressed on screen yet.

Age & ethnicities of Khan's followers in TWOK - Was it specifically established that these are literally the same people from Space Seed? There is a 15-odd year time difference between the ep and the film. Could these kids be exactly that - children of Khan's original crew that just look a little older than they technically are due to genetic engineering speeding up and enhancing their metabolism, and thereby their growth?

Bottom line is that it comes down to, if you choose, having two levels of canon; "official" and "personal".

 

[Therin of Andor]

When Richard Arnold and Gene Roddenberry were starting to promote their use of the term "canon" to quell fan questions about which bits of Star Trek could be considered as "actually happened", there hadn't been any "director's cuts" of any of the movies. I recall Richard saying that the 1989 memo (to the licensees) included in "not canon": ST novels, novelizations (including GR's own), comics, RPG and other manuals, TAS, and live-action footage made for video board games, CD-ROM games and theme park presentations.

GR later "allowed" aspects of Vulcan geography and Spock's early life ("Yesteryear", TAS) and Captain April to be included in the official timelines and encyclopedia. He then described parts of ST V as "apocryphal", meaning that he didn't personally approve of two elements of ST V: the existence of Sybok, and the scene of McCoy mercy killing his own father.

I think I recall RA saying that the TV "longer versions" of TMP and ST II, which had already aired on ABC were not definitive or "canon". So that would include other unused scenes.

But... Since RA is long gone from Paramount, and GR has passed away, no one has ever addressed, officially, whether a director's edition of a ST movie displaces a previous theatrical release. Or the canonical status of CGI additions to TOS, some of which corrected production errors. Hence the ongoing ambiguity.

So... was the Vejur cloud in TMP actually 82 (theatrical and TV premiere), or just 2 (director's edition DVD), AUs in diameter? Who knows, but 2 AUs is still mighty big.

 

[Falcor5]

Its a good question to be sure. One really interesting deleted scene that would have had a big impact on the crew of the Ent-E had they made another TNG movie was Dr. Crusher leaving the enterprise in Nemesis for a new job at Starfleet Medical. All mentions of her leaving were deleted so I guess they must have changed their mind at the last minute? If they ever made another movie it would have been interesting to see if she was still part of the crew or not.

 

[Therin of Andor]

All mentions of her leaving were deleted so I guess they must have changed their mind at the last minute? If they ever made another movie it would have been interesting to see if she was still part of the crew or not.

There was only the single throwaway line, and it was probably deleted to speed up the pace.

The post-"Nemesis" novels have had her reconsider that post at the last minute, a sensible move for the books, since the Enterprise-E had just lost Data, Riker and Troi. The new Head of Starfleet Medical is the chirurgeon Ghee P'Trell of Andoria (once mentioned in DS9), but now revealed to be a Caitian resident of Andor.