Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggling.

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

Here's another possibility: Klaatu may have been piling on the bullshit for the Earth people's benefit.

Meaning: Their society is not really like Klaatu says it is, he was just saying those things to scare the stupid humans. Ah, so what is Gort, then? Probably Klaatu's personal bodyguard. If Klaatu implies that there are Gorts everywhere, that makes his society look more powerful than it is, and thus we'd better be nice to them or else, blah blah blah.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

The point of the film is not to "sell" us on the idea of a robot autocracy as a utopia. The film's goal is to tell a story. A story needs conflict. By having Klaatu represent a race under the yoke of robotic overlords, it allows the film to play with tropes, giving Gort the ability to do some "pew pew" and skull-crushing and damsel-in-distress carrying without turning Klaatu into an unsympathetic figure.

Klaatu is kind of in the same league of characters that are promoted as the villain but turn out to be more of a victim-protagonist, vaguely like Elsa in Frozen.

People remember the film because it deliberately (and masterfully) baits and switches the audience expectations of the red-scare era.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

Also, for an alien-orientated 'security agent' who was supposed to stop Earth from destroying itself, Gary Seven, Isis and Roberta sure did a piss-poor job, since Earth had a World War III anyway. Also, where was Seven when people like Phillip Green were on the rise causing the shit that they were in the early to mid 21st century that led to World War III?

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

It's worth a try. I did like your optimistic points. Let me know when it's done and I'll give it a read. The key for me is just don't make Klaatu a liar, fool, misconceived, or a rogue.

Kind of like Matt Frewer in TNG's "A Matter of Time?"

Nope.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

That's a real problem that I had to dance around in my Gary Seven novels. "Wait? Gary Seven ultimately failed?"

Another good reason for divorcing any hypothetical remake from the STAR TREK universe, unless some future version of Trek ditches World War III from its timeline, too.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

I think he succeeded, though. His job was to ensure humanity survived. He delayed WWIII long enough that when it did happen, it was a limited nuclear exchange that humanity was able to recover from, rather than an all-out conflagration that would've rendered the species extinct. Not to mention that, in Roddenberry's view, going through a near-extinction like that was a key step in getting humanity to go, "Whew, let's not ever do that again, guys!" and rise above nationalism and intolerance and greed and the like. So maybe the whole idea was to allow a war that was bad enough to really drive home the point while still limited enough that it was survivable.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

I don't like to encourage this sort of thinking, but suppose we are no longer in the "Prime" universe because Gary Seven succeeded here whereas he did not in the Prime universe. Mind you, we don't need to live in the Abramsverse either. The Many Worlds Interpretation is a great thing, eh?

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

I know we'll probably never see a definitive "end" to Gary Seven's storyline, just like we'll never see an end to the storyline of most of the main characters, but I like to think that the commencement of World War III represents that end. He didn't fail in his mission to prevent World War III, he just can't live forever and perhaps the Aegis had to move their resources elsewhere.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

Clearly the explicit story isn't meant to be the whole story, as you mention above and which I suppose is discussed as frequently as the plot itself. What I wonder, perhaps a bit too facilely, is in-universe why should this confederation of highly advanced civilizations be concerned about Earth being a threat at all? Klaatu acquires information and perspective about its culture, history, and norms while here, but clearly the outline of the mission was in place and known before being dispatched. As primitive as Earth's technology for waging war beyond the home world was, it would seem that such seemingly perceptive and thoughtful creatures that Klaatu would appear to represent would be much more likely to dismiss the need to clue Earth in on the reigning order. I think a consensus probably would easily be reached that the planet almost certainly would destroy itself long before being in any plausible position to require being given any consideration at all, let alone as a potential threat.

Maybe, if any such rationale would be seen as having to be supplied at all by the filmmakers, it could be explained perhaps as a reasonable, if unstated concern by the alien cultures of the possibility of an accelerated rate of progress in Earth's ability to begin to travel widely in space. Additionally, at a time that a viewing audience wouldn't necessarily yet be widely dismissive of life being at least plausible on some planets in our own solar system, especially when reports of UFO's had quickly become ubiquitous, there simply wasn't much consideration given to any substantive questioning by the audience that such travelers as depicted would have to have been, of necessity, located unimaginably immense distances from Earth.

I haven't looked at a profusion of critical responses to the film, but I don't think I've seen this matter broached in those I have read. Given the widespread acclaim it garnered at the time and the different levels of subtext and metaphor that the film conveyed, was there even any contemporaneous thought given to what I've questioned or was it simply seen as consonant with other SF films of the era insofar as the acceptability of the general conceit of aliens visiting our world, albeit in this particular instance, with a much more important and compelling message?

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

It's worth noting that there are a lot of similarities between The Day the Earth Stood Still and another seminal science fiction tale that came out just two years later (and has recently gained new attention from a miniseries adaptation), Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke. In that book,

Spoiler: spoilers for 62-year-old novel and sort of for recent miniseries

the alien Overlords came to Earth to halt our independent technological progress because they recognized that we were on the verge of experimentation with psionic powers that could unleash great destruction across the cosmos. Like Klaatu, they were working for a pervasive higher power whose will could not be denied, though it too was painted as essentially benevolent in a paternalistic way. It's recently occurred to me that the Overlords, like Klaatu, can be seen as a parallel for the worldview of the cultural imperialists of the British Empire and the United States.

The 1950s were a time of considerable optimism about our pace of technological innovation. After all, we'd just split the atom and unleashed unprecedented new forces. Could conquering the stars be far behind? Lots of SF assumed we'd be colonizing the Solar System by the 1970s or even reaching the stars by the 1990s. (The following decade, Lost in Space had a colony expedition to Alpha Centauri in 1997.)

Klaatu said in the movie that he'd traveled 250 million miles to reach Earth, which is consistent with the distance to Mars as of July 1951. At the time, it was still considered credible that there could be people living on Mars, Venus, or other planets in the system, and lots of sci-fi from the era depicted such things. It wouldn't be until the '60s that probe data would reveal how alien and uninhabitable those planets' environments really were. So the working assumption of the filmmakers was probably that Klaatu's alliance of planets was within our solar system (something I didn't consider when contemplating my sequel idea back in the day).

There were plenty of movies and stories about aliens visiting Earth. TDTESS stands apart from the pack of '50s alien-visitor movies by showing Klaatu as benevolent (ish) rather than an invader to be fought. It shares that distinction with Jack Arnold's It Came from Outer Space from two years later, and maybe a handful of others.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

No. The reverse. Klaatu's people feared that humanity would expand out and become interplanetary imperialists, disturbing the peace that had already existed.

Klaatu even goes so far as to qualify his way of life, and by extension, you can say the filmmakers were speaking through him, for fear of being accused of glorifying the idea of robot overlords:

"Now, we do not pretend to have achieved perfection, but we do have a system, and it works."

The film only makes an appeal for peace but isn't telling us exactly how to get there.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

Lots of cultural imperialists saw the cultures they imposed their will on as potential threats that needed to be tamed. Indeed, that was a large part of the rhetoric that was used to justify colonialism in the first place. For instance, the British Raj really exaggerated the danger from Thuggee bandits, painted it as an endemic threat of Hindu culture, in order to justify imposing British rule and civilization on the indigenous people "for their own good." The British genuinely believed they were doing good, helping the Indians to better themselves, because they took it for granted that their own way of living and believing was superior. This is why Gandhi was able to win using nonviolence -- because it exposed the truth that the Indians were not the dangerous savages, that they were peaceful and it was their rulers who were inflicting violence and coercion on them for no reason. That shamed the British people into seeing that they were doing more harm than good.

So just because Klaatu and his people believed they were acting against imperialism, that doesn't mean they weren't being imperialists themselves. If all imperialists were obviously evil, then imperialism wouldn't have caught on so pervasively. It's easy to buy into the assumption that you're doing good and thereby be blind to the harm that comes from the power imbalance. (Which is supposed to be why Starfleet has the Prime Directive, to discourage the urge to impose your will benevolently. Although TNG misunderstood and twisted it into something even more condescending than the colonialism it was meant to counteract.)

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

It seems that Amritsar was the catalyst for Gandhi to abandon any hope that having supported the Empire during the War, could have achieved a partial autonomy for India, and brought him to first actively pursue using civil disobedience to secure full independence. No doubt, that same event opened the eyes of many of the British public to the truth of what was actually happening on the ground there, as you assert.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

As I recall, Wild, Wild West characters were almost futuristic spies themselves. There were gadgets which seemed a bit advanced for the time.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

Yup. It was steampunk (sort of) before steampunk was a thing.

Well, really, it's just that high-tech gadgetry and sci-fi was part of the spy genre of the time, thanks to Bond movies and The Man from UNCLE and the like. So if they were going to do a spy show in the Old West, it still needed high-tech gadgets and doomsday weapons and all the other spy-fi tropes.

 

Re: Gary Seven - Why try create new series when current one is struggl

I found it interesting on Wild Wild West that many of Jim West's gadgets were based on the equipment developed by and for the ninja of Japan. Makes one wonder where exactly Jim West got his spy training.

 

I assume someone has pointed out that AE is basically Dr. Who, also popular across the pond at this time.

 

But not well known in the States at that time.

 

I debunked that in posts #66 and #71. (I tried linking to them, but it doesn't seem to be working.) In short, it's unlikely that Roddenberry had ever heard of Doctor Who when he concieved of A:E in 1966, and Who would not take on qualities similar to "Assignment: Earth" until well after A:E had already been made. They were both just building on pre-existing spy-fi tropes popular at the time.

 

Perhaps more relevant is 'pigeon fancier' whos typically presented stereotype matches fan much better than fanatic. This is the first time I have heard of its root not being from fanatic..and it makes more sense.