I find thinking fun, but that's beside the point.
I also like the final 2 seasons of ENT, despite the fucking jizz covered shit that was the finale.
Do you think Star Trek needed a reboot?
- Thread starter The Overlord
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I find thinking fun, but that's beside the point.
I also like the final 2 seasons of ENT, despite the fucking jizz covered shit that was the finale.
Just thought I'd chip in on the idea TNG is somehow more popular in the UK as postulated in this thread. Having lived here all my life, I couldn't disagree more. IMHO, TOS occupies exactly the same awareness/penetration in UK popular culture as US posters have alluded to in their country.
I've got twenty plus seasons of Trek on DVD and all the movies...
But you have to have diversity in storytelling or else people will simply leave and move on to other things. Which is exactly what happened to Star Trek, they got into a happy little rut and refused to experiment within the format. The Powers That Be bought into the hype that Trek was suppose to be making social statements first and be entertainment second and by the time they it figured out people were no longer interested, it was simply too late.
For me, Star Trek became a chore near the end. I bought movie tickets and watched on TV simply because it was what I had done for twenty years straight. I wasn't there because it was compelling TV, I was there because I had always been there. I was going through the motions.
I think there are a world of flaws in Star Trek 2009 (as anyone here can tell you
) but it's also the most fun I had had with Trek since midway through TNG's run...
I think you'll find those tech-heads who could give you the E-D's specs are a fringe element of a fringe fandom. That's why they stopped doing technical manuals in the mid-90's.
New ship/crew has been done again and again, no doubt Rick Berman told the studio he could capture TNG's lightning in a bottle again - but you've already seen the ratings charts, the generic setting of Trek with a new ship/crew is no longer profitable. The Next Gen characters were no longer profitable when Nemesis came along. The plans for the animated series Star Trek: Final Frontier (another new ship/new crew a few hundred years after TNG) quietly died.
And suggesting nuTrek is just "cosy nostalgia for misty-eyed 40-year-olds" is facepalm-worthy. Especially since I believe it was you complaining about the NOT YOUR FATHER'S STAR TREK advertising slogan earlier in this thread?
You mean the generation that helped made Abrams' film a hit and never once thought "where's Picard?"
When you say stuff like this it hard to take you seriously. You come across as a petulant child who can't get his way.
Star Trek is moving forward. Using the TOS characters does not equal a step backwards.
Now you come across as a petulant child with a potty mouth. I don't think Abrams has ever said anything about "Star Trek only connecting with audiences when it had Kirk and Spock". I think it was the studio who decided to use Kirk and Spock, so those were the cards Abrams was dealt.DalekJim said:
The movie was a big hit, so a large portion of the "whole generation of Trek fans who don't give a fuck about Kirk and Spock, yet could give you all the specs of the Enterprise-D" must have bought tickets. Probably more than the number of "misty-eyed 40+ year olds who saw it". The generational divide you're trying to promote just doesn't fly. The movie success it due to it appealing to a wide. That means people who grew up with TNG, 40+ TOS fans and people with only a vague idea of what Star Trek is.
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My childhood leads me to agree with this point as any time a cartoon addressed Star Trek for the most part it was TOS based. TNG may have gotten a few but that was it and one time they actually felt the need to explain TNG to the audience whereas with TOS they never felt the need to do that.
Of course that's true.
TOS is the core of Star Trek, and the Franchise will always return to those characters and that setting.
That's just the truth. It's the way that it is. There is no more "forward evolution" going on than with Sherlock Holmes, just variation for the sake of attracting the attention of each new generation through novelty.
There have been an awful lot of Frankenstein and Dracula movies made over the last century. A lot of sequels, reworkings, shifts in characters and setting and formula have been done, and depending on the intent and skills and resources of the film makers those movies have ranged from brilliant to unwatchable to just silly and fun.
Somehow, at the end of the day they always come back around to Doctor Frankenstein stitching together corpses in his laboratory and the Count setting out for England from his family home in Transylvania, both in some earlier time than ours.
Don't be a hater.Nemesis and fun should never be associated with each other.
I see zero difference between "rebooting the franchise", "changing history" and re-writing continuity but as this is possibly the most tired debate topic ever I think we should agree to disagree.
Greg Cox said:
Nemesis. The Remans.
Nemesis was eighty minutes of foreplay with a space battle at the end of it. Which is a respectable thing to do in a sci-fi movie, except in this case the leadup phase was strange and uninteresting. The space battle WAS good, but nothing else before it was.
But that of course sets up the question of whether or not the spinoffs are worthy of a reboot in the future as well, or if the new continuity will spawn a whole new series of 23rd century spinoffs.
After all, if Star Trek has become a piece of cinematic folklore on par with Dracula and Frankenstein -- and I am hardly arguing that it hasn't -- then those derivative works (Bride of Frankenstein or Nosferatu) might be worth revisiting too, either in the context of the rebooted paradigm or as independent reboots with their own continuity. Either way, it's interesting that for a fictional universe as well-developed as Star Trek, the actual TOS universe is the least sophisticated and the most poorly understood aspect of it. There's ALOT of room for expansion there, reboot or not.
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And none of them would have existed without TOS.
There's a reason all of them were called "Star Trek", not "Random Space Station 9" or "Lost In Delta Quadrant".
Yes.
Everything that's been part of Star Trek is grist for the mill, and future producers and writers will combine, recombine, slice, dice and use it in every which way if they think they can get a successful production out of it.
You can pretty much bank on Kirk one day confronting the Borg, one way or 'tother.
You can call TOS the "least sophisticated" or "worst understood" part of Trek, but that's a backward way of looking at its strength as compared to the later versions: it's more open, simpler, less self-consciously over-delineated than the 24th century elaborations. I've always found the modern Trek shows to be far less plausible in terms of story, faux history and technobabble technology precisely because they tried to answer too much and did it in pretty narrow and under-imagined ways. They created a fake future by the simplest kinds of analogies with the present, based on representations of present and historical events in overly broad, simplistic strokes in order to make their invented details quickly identifiable and accessible to a large audience.
TOS was brilliant in telling us very little about the culture which spawned Kirk and McCoy and the other folks. We had to assume it was similar to our own - we didn't even know, back in the day, how far from now the show took place - because the people talked and thought like us and seemed to have had similar experiences to ours. But the only part of that culture we really got even a passing look at was the Star Fleet, portrayed mainly as a contemporary navy. That was very clever, given that due to a quarter century of general conscription most Americans at that time had a reasonable familiarity with military life and could intuit that our people lived more regulated, tradition-bound and less luxurious lives than the great unseen mass of folks they served in the name of.
It's not necessary to know a thing about the Federation government or economy to understand the lines of authority and social structure aboard a vessel when the characters wear the rank of American naval officers.
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You can pretty much bank on Kirk one day confronting the Borg, one way or 'tother.
I'm pretty sure it'll happen before Abrams and Company move on.
You can pretty much bank on Kirk one day confronting the Borg, one way or 'tother.
I'm pretty sure it'll happen before Abrams and Company move on.
If Abrams does the Borg, and he gives them a proper horror movie feel to them, actually makes them a menace again and somewhat scary, I will kiss his feet. From First Contact forward, I was never able to take the Borg seriously as a threat in a story. Hells, even a little blood and guts wouldn't be off putting to me.
Star Trek: BorgRaiser
Imagine a Barker or Giger style Locutus saying something along the lines of "The box. You opened it. We came. Now you must come with us, taste our pleasures."
I thought the Borg were more menacing in First Contact than in their final 2 TNG stories personally. They were excellent in Q Who and BoBW, then the decay set in.
Would LOVE more Borg though.
I Borg was okay, Descent was the start of the fall. First Contact turned into aliens of the week. Nothing against the actresses that played the Queen over the years, but gods I loath that character. The all the crap with Data (the only TNG character I don't like) just drove FC into bottom of my list of fav ST movies.
I need to rewatch First Contact. There's a lot I like about it, it's just that the script is so dumb and full of holes. Definitely one of the best directed Trek films though, along with the first 2 movies.
I Borg is awesome, it's just a shame it kinda pussified the Borg.
I Borg is awesome, it's just a shame it kinda pussified the Borg.
TNG was a TOS spin-off, even if there was about 17 years between the end of the one and the beginning of the other.
It's also likely that if the TOS movies to that point had not been popular, there would've been no TNG. Those movies showed there was still a market for Trek on TV.
Also, I personally can't think of a time any form of Trek really made me think. A lot of its moralizing was ham-fisted or preachy ("The Omega Glory", "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield", "A Taste of Armageddon", and any number of Picard's speeches come to mind).
Despite what some still think, no Trek series was really cutting edge or controversial in commenting on the moral or social issues of the day, and it wasn't particularly philosophically deep. At least not more (or less) than any other TV series that did at least try to be intelligent. Believing otherwise buys into the Trek propaganda, of which there's plenty.
REBOOT THE FRAK OUT OF IT.
That's what I say. I expect to be 80 years old and lusting over re-re-re-rebooted Kirk and Spock with actors that have yet to be born.
That's what I say. I expect to be 80 years old and lusting over re-re-re-rebooted Kirk and Spock with actors that have yet to be born.
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