That's an excellent point. The presentation has to advance with the audience.
Spoilers Discovery and the Novelverse - TV show discussion thread
- Thread starter F. King Daniel
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That's an excellent point. The presentation has to advance with the audience.
Which is not to discount the importance of the visuals. Just to discount the importance of consistency over effect.
Most artists probably understand why such things need to be updated more than fans do,
Some might even say, "I wish I thought of that!"
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I disagree completely. This framing ignores how productions (and, in turn, franchises) set up certain expectations for consistency (or not), how a given audience member can adjust expectations based on what a production is communicating, and how some audience members will self-select out of consuming something if they only want one version of it.
The makers of the later version of Cabaret referenced upthread were not marketing Alan Cumming's character as a younger version of Joel Grey's character--and in general, people approach explicitly separate adaptations of a single story differently than they will something where a shared continuity has been communicated to them. This isn't "having your reaction dictated by some higher authority," but it is taking a production's creators at their word and (justifiably) questioning it when the final product feels at odds with their statements.
Whether Star Trek made a big change in 1979 or 1984 is irrelevant to our current media landscape, which has trended much further towards visual congruence within shared-continuity franchises and where consumers can compare and contrast what different franchises are doing--so when a franchise claims it "can't" do something, they have counterexamples where that thing was done and thus see it as a choice with which they might disagree.
The day Scotty opened the holodeck doors to the TOS bridge, Star Trek started heading in that direction, so TPTB can't be too surprised when audiences who've had twenty-five years setting up one expectation--where even departures like the Kelvin Timeline are carefully contextualised, and there are simultaneous productions in the same franchise making other choices--start to question why a series which marketed itself as tying into their nostalgia didn't provide the thing they were nostalgic for.
No franchise revival can succeed by appealing exclusively to people nostalgic for the old version. They're too small an audience for that, and their tendency these days to assume they're the only target audience is not only naive but narcissistic. Attracting new audiences is the way a franchise survives in the long term.
It's also specious to argue that just because a franchise did things a certain way two or three decades ago under one set of creators, that somehow prohibits a new set of creators a generation later from taking a new approach. It's the prerogative of new creators to try new things. They don't always succeed as well as one might like, no, but it's nonsensical to claim that makes it wrong even to try.
When they revived Doctor Who in 2005, they didn't make it look like it did in 1963 or even 1989. They totally modernized its look and style, while still managing to work in enough nostalgia to satisfy the old guard.
I don't know. I like to think the "current media landscape"'s obsession with "canon" and 100% consistency is just a temporary aberration and is not necessarily applicable to every property and franchise. It could be that pendulum will swing back the other way towards a more laissez-faire approach to continuity, visual or otherwise. We may well remember that it's entirely possible to enjoy a new SPACE IGUANA movie or TV series or comic-book series without fretting endlessly about how it fits with the last seventeen SPACE IGUANA stories.
I also question whether the general public really obsesses about this sort of nitpicking as much as portions of "fandom" do.
(Says the guy who just rewatched ABBOTT & COSTELLO MEET THE MUMMY for the umpteenth time, so I clearly have my finger on the pulse of "the current media landscape."
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Also, just because something is in fashion does not make it mandatory. This is about personal enjoyment, after all, and not everybody enjoys the same things. The hell with the gatekeepers -- there's no one "right" way to create art or entertainment. Trends are not laws.
Aww, did Space Vixens finally get cancelled?
I very much doubt it. As long as they see a saucer and nacelles, they know it's the Enterprise. They don't care about the exact proportions of the nacelle struts or the number of buttons on Spock's console.
Aww, did Space Vixens finally get cancelled?
The reboot is not true to the creator's original vision!
(Seriously, I think I combined CAPTAIN IGUANA with SPACE VIXENS in my head. Along with SAMURAI MERMAID VAMPIRES, they're among my go-tos when citing imaginary franchises for illustrative purposes.)
So they're kinda like the Pakleds in Lower Decks, episode 10: they think every ship is the Enterprise.
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No, just that every interpretation of the Enterprise is the Enterprise. As long as the overall shape is recognizable, the exact proportions and details aren't required.
I was joking. I just forgot to add the winking emoji at the end.
Yes, obviously you were joking. I am not ignorant of that. I am objecting to the premise of the joke, which implied that people who understand artistic license are blind and stupid. I find that rude and condescending. "I was joking" is not an absolute defense, because some jokes are hurtful to their targets.
That framing ignores no such thing. It merely asserts that the very expectations you describe are not meaningfully different from the desire some people have to proclaim one version or another of a story to be the "true" or "definitive" version.
Reacting to minor continuity differences and aesthetic differences by "questioning the creators words" is a really weird and inappropriate thing to do. Different versions of something set in the same continuity are really common and most audience members know to just suspend disbelief instead of acting as though creators are being somehow "dishonest" by asserting that two shows are set in the same shared universe despite minor discontinuities.
You mean like the Marvel Cinematic Universe, where the much-touted "it's all connected" tagline and continuity crossovers of Agents of SHIELD with the films were eventually tossed out the window when the Snappening didn't happen on that show? Or the Netflix Marvel shows, supposedly set in the MCU but depicting events that should have been referenced on other shows but weren't, and which actively depicted Avengers Tower as absent from establishing shots of New York?
I mean, hell, even the Hulk/Bruce Banner look totally different and have totally different personalities between The Incredible Hulk and The Avengers.
I don't think anyone has questioned that the discontinuities in DIS are the result of artistic choice rather than ability.
Except I don't think DIS was marketing itself as tying into TOS nostalgia. I think it was marketing itself as tying into public affection for the Kelvin Timeline films. The aesthetic similarity between the Kelvin films and DIS are pretty blatant; yeah, they played the "10 Years Before Kirk and Spock" card, but I think they were assuming (rightfully) that most people are not going to necessarily take that as meaning TOS nostalgia per se. I doubt most members of the public care much about the distinctions between TOS and the Kelvin film, and probably don't care much about the seeming discontinuities between DIS and TOS. "10 Years Before Kirk" and "She's Spock's Sister" to most people just mean, "Oh, they, those characters I like!" not, "The specific incarnation played by William Shatner that died in 2371 on Veridian III..."
While I doubt anyone was truly expecting Disco to exactly replicate the TOS look, I doubt anyone was expecting such a radical new look as we got in the first season either. I suspect something like how the Enterprise was depicted in the second season was probably more in line with everyone's general expectations when they first heard a new 23rd century show was in development.
And, if anything, I almost wish the Discoprise had been more different in visuals and, especially, the sound profile. I don't agree with the choice of turning the Enterprise into some kind of pseudo-sixties throwback freak-ship. It's the worst parts of evoking and altering the past put together.
Do you really think most audiences care that much? It's the really extreme Trekkies like you and me who spend mental energy on stuff like that. I think most audiences are perfectly happy to go, "Oh, this looks like the new movies now!" and leave it at that.
I've documented in other threads that a focus on canon, and how/whether pieces of fiction "count" and fit together in a shared continuity, is a practice that stretches back decades. It's more common and well-known now, but (as I've argued) that is an inevitable consequence of the Information Age in which everything is less niche and easier to know about than it used to be.
If anything, I think it will continue to trend more in the direction it's already going, as visual and other references become ever easier to access...
...but the entire point of my previous post is that there is a spectrum of "laissez-faire" to "100% consistency," that franchises establish where they fall on that spectrum, and that audiences will adjust their expectations accordingly.
People get it. They do. The same person will not have the same continuity expectations, even within the same medium, between a James Bond movie and a Star Wars movie or between a sequel and a remake. I know because I'm one of those people.
Are they making really granular observations? Probably not, but they're making some of their decisions about what to consume in a franchise based on their desire to follow a particular ongoing narrative and whether the question of what forms part of that narrative is easy to determine.
I'll give you a personal example: I've stopped trying to follow any releases in the Transformers franchise because there are too many separate continuities to track, it's too much work to figure out what fits with what, and I'm interested in having a single narrative (or at least a couple of easy-to-distinguish ones) as opposed to multiple extremely-similar fits and spurts of storytelling.
Am I going onto a Transformers forum to make that known? No, I'm just quietly removing myself from that audience, and I think there are plenty of people in the general public who make these sorts of decisions for themselves without feeling any need to explicitly communicate them--and I think it often takes less of a hurdle to constitute a dealbreaker when someone isn't as emotionally invested.
I simply don't see that desire expressed in the same way when it comes to the theatre world...where, you know, people understand that it isn't the same fixed visual medium as film and television and more readily expect one script to have a wide variety of possible interpretations. Maybe I'm just not up on my Cabaret fandom--do people complain because Alan Cumming's performance doesn't fit into the continuity of Joel Grey's performance, as opposed to just liking one performance over the other?
I don't think "they conveyed that this would be the same and it's too different to come across as the same" is that weird a reaction--and you spoke quite eloquently upthread about how you had that reaction to how Pike and Spock are portrayed on Discovery. For many people, visual congruence is part of that calculation, and their tolerance for what constitutes a "minor" or "major" discontinuity will depend on what the creators of a work communicate to them.
I feel this is even more true in the streaming era, where watching new Star Trek is a much more deliberate act--in most countries, you can't just stumble on Discovery whilst flipping channels--but the vast majority of people are having these reactions in their own heads or amongst friends as opposed to talking about them in any sort of public setting.
Are you under the impression there was no negative reaction to that perceived bait-and-switch, precisely because Marvel had set up an expectation not reflected in the finished products when they could've had the same products with a different expectation?
Again, people understand the difference between recasting and redesign, and how different factors lead to one versus the other. If Marvel could've had a perfect digital Edward Norton for the same amount of effort as recasting him, some people would've argued for doing so--and indeed, digital solutions are becoming more common for these issues as technology makes such options possible.
A number of people in this very thread have essentially argued that Discovery couldn't possibly stick to the same visual aesthetic because makeup/set design/technology have advanced over time--as if we haven't seen other franchises (and Star Trek itself) do just that.
Again, you've already done a fantastic job articulating why it was artistically arbitrary to set this story in the TOS era, so marketing the nostalgia seems to have been a primary motivation--and if they wanted to market specifically to the audience for the Kelvin Timeline films, then (from that narrow perspective, at least) it was a mistake not to set this in that continuity instead of marketing one and producing the other.