yeah Spocks Brain and Way To Eden tend to wind up on those lists. I have to say I enjoyed them. Gave the world some great catch phrases. ATCSL???? drawing a blank there.
Fun and Adventure gone?
- Thread starter RobertScorpio
- Start date
number6
Vice Admiral
And The Children Shall Lead.. You know the one where the Rolling Stones' Lawyer plays a bad blue/green sparkly pedophile?
TNG was a pretentious preach fest for its first season, and remained that even after GR's departure from the scene if only in a lesser degree.
Sure, TOS very often had a message. In my experience it was very often tagged on or least delivered in an amusing way and never came across as condescending.
Though I think simply having a message doesn't automatically prove its worth. If a tv show isn't entertaining (its first and only job) it should and will fail. No message or social commentary can redeem a boring show. To a certain extent the later series took the wagon train out of the stars, reined in those cowboys out on the frontier to behave as space going desk jockeys. By the 24th Century things had become procedural.
The attempt at Enterprise and the notion it was meant to recapture the original shows spirit tells me at least the producers were aware of these things.
Sharr
Sure, TOS very often had a message. In my experience it was very often tagged on or least delivered in an amusing way and never came across as condescending.
Though I think simply having a message doesn't automatically prove its worth. If a tv show isn't entertaining (its first and only job) it should and will fail. No message or social commentary can redeem a boring show. To a certain extent the later series took the wagon train out of the stars, reined in those cowboys out on the frontier to behave as space going desk jockeys. By the 24th Century things had become procedural.
The attempt at Enterprise and the notion it was meant to recapture the original shows spirit tells me at least the producers were aware of these things.
Sharr
The OP mis-states the case. There is no reason a show can't have fun & adventure and be character-driven. DS9 proves this. TOS is the same way, albeit the character development on TOS was severely-handicapped due to it's episodic format.
No, the problem is never character-driven format. The problem is that other than TOS and DS9 there has been no fun & adventure, nor has there been any character development. A great show will have both.
Note: by "character-driven", I am not referring to "who's-screwing-who this week" soap opera orgy fests with no plot, as some SciFi fans have misappropriated the term to mean in recent years.
No, the problem is never character-driven format. The problem is that other than TOS and DS9 there has been no fun & adventure, nor has there been any character development. A great show will have both.
Note: by "character-driven", I am not referring to "who's-screwing-who this week" soap opera orgy fests with no plot, as some SciFi fans have misappropriated the term to mean in recent years.
number6
Vice Admiral
Hail Hail Fire and snow.....
For some reason the acronym threw me off. Yeah that one gets on the list too. I never thought it was that bad. It has Pam Ferdin in it and I always liked her. Some of the other kid actors, not so much.
L
Lord Garth
Guest
If I took snapshots of my psyche every five years for the past 20, what I consider "fun and adventure" would change each time. If I apply that knowledge universally, then I can say what everyone finds fun and adventurous shifts over time whether they're aware of it or not.
What I've also come to realize is that people in general are culturally programmed. When you're very young, and you haven't been exposed to much of anything else, you'll embrace what you're experiencing because your brain wants to absorb all the stimuli it's recieving. Mentally, you're learning what things "should be" or maybe you're learning what they "shouldn't be". Either way you're developing a compass.
By the time your compass is fully developed, times have probably changed, things have shifted, and if they've shifted along a path that's within your adaptive range then you'll be fine with it. If not, then you stop, pause, and say, "Wait a minute..." and start comparing what's new to what you remember.
Once you start looking back to what you were exposed to before, then it's become comfort instead of excitement. So, the question shouldn't be "Is the fun and adventure gone?", it should be "Is the comfort gone?"
Tying it back into the beginning about shifting sense of fun and adventure, experiencing something too many times makes the novelty of something turn stale and stale isn't something that's usually equated with fun and adventure. That's why sequels to movies try to up the ante in each successive installation and when the ante can no longer be topped then they go in a completely different direction. This is one area that benefits TOS since it had a shorter run than any of the others. I'd even say if the other series were like TOS then it would've lost its uniqueness.
If and when there's something wrong with a later series, it's not because of how much it's not like TOS, it's because it either isn't being as faithful to its own premise as it could be or the writing has become stale because epsiodes are being written for the then-current series that could've been done just as easily on one of its predecessors where the only difference is the names are changed.
... and that went a lot longer than I meant.
What I've also come to realize is that people in general are culturally programmed. When you're very young, and you haven't been exposed to much of anything else, you'll embrace what you're experiencing because your brain wants to absorb all the stimuli it's recieving. Mentally, you're learning what things "should be" or maybe you're learning what they "shouldn't be". Either way you're developing a compass.
By the time your compass is fully developed, times have probably changed, things have shifted, and if they've shifted along a path that's within your adaptive range then you'll be fine with it. If not, then you stop, pause, and say, "Wait a minute..." and start comparing what's new to what you remember.
Once you start looking back to what you were exposed to before, then it's become comfort instead of excitement. So, the question shouldn't be "Is the fun and adventure gone?", it should be "Is the comfort gone?"
Tying it back into the beginning about shifting sense of fun and adventure, experiencing something too many times makes the novelty of something turn stale and stale isn't something that's usually equated with fun and adventure. That's why sequels to movies try to up the ante in each successive installation and when the ante can no longer be topped then they go in a completely different direction. This is one area that benefits TOS since it had a shorter run than any of the others. I'd even say if the other series were like TOS then it would've lost its uniqueness.
If and when there's something wrong with a later series, it's not because of how much it's not like TOS, it's because it either isn't being as faithful to its own premise as it could be or the writing has become stale because epsiodes are being written for the then-current series that could've been done just as easily on one of its predecessors where the only difference is the names are changed.
... and that went a lot longer than I meant.
Last edited by a moderator:
TOS had a mix of message, humor, adventure and above all... the unknown.
TNG onward do not hold that sense of wonder of the unknown, IMHO. Captain James T. 'Hornblower', the adventurer, morphed into 'Herbert'-Luc Picard, the preachy bureaucrat. At the time, it was Trek ('nuff said), but now that I've had a few years (decades?!) retrospective... I can see the OP's point of view.
I think one reason STXI will do well is it's attempt to bring back that sense of awe and wonder of space travel. At least that is the hope I have for the re-start (re: jump-start) of this movie.
If we can believe the writer Ron Moore I'd say some of them were aware of it :
http://trekmovie.com/2008/06/12/exclusive-interview-ron-moore-on-breaking-out-of-the-box/
I think he nails it when he says that it was hard writing anything that had any teeth to it with the setting they had to work within.
RobertScorpio
Pariah
3D Master
Rear Admiral
Trek didn't substitute substance for adventure, they LOST substance. Just look at how many TOS episodes were risk-takers and showed something inconvenient about the world then. Now go to later eras, and go see if you can find anything similar in Trek. Hell, just check out the crews alone! Go see if you can find any crew after TOS that was as ethnically, culturally and as nationally diverse as that crew! You will find none. See if you can find a genuine gay character, while every other show at its spinoffs has a good chance of having one.
TOS has substance! Later Trek had platitudes masquerading as substance.
Me. (but, I'm okay with one of the other series, and very happy with the remainder).
