How Come Stargate goes on but Star Trek died?
- Thread starter Infern0
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Once you take the labels off there's really no difference at all.Ah, from the beancounter perspective, that's not at all insane.Remember, to them Star Trek is ketchup. But it's like really high-end premium ketchup and Stargate is the generic brand. They put out a brand of premium ketchup that didn't taste so good and when you want people to pay a ridiculous price for tomato paste, it better taste good. But the generic crap doesn't have to taste good at all.
That Proctor&Gamble world view that it doesn't matter what's in the box, only the brand that's on the box matters has nearly killed General Motors and made a good run at killing Star Trek. You'd think that by now it should be beyond obvious to the densest corporate executive that the only thing that matters is what's IN the box.
No what almost killed GM was their failure to keep up with the market place in that respect they're closer to Star Trek than Stargate. People have been turning off Star Trek since the '90s the ratings prove that, people have been getting what they used to get out of Star Trek from other shows, that's what killed Star Trek.
Your argument is irrelevant. Any single individual's opinion (beyond those of professional critics) is meaningless. Its the collective opinion of the viewing audience that matters (especially in the eyes of the entertainment conglomerates that produce and air this stuff).
And why did they fail to keep up with the marketplace? The belief that what the cars were like didn't matter as they were all interchangeable, only how they were marketed mattered. This may work for selling soap, but the car business, and entertainment, is different. You may be able to get away with cheapening the product for a little while, but it will be found out and the backlash is disastrous, ruining companies and entertainment franchises alike.
Three letters U...P....N.
Wouldn't that make both sides of the argument irrelevant?
21 seasons of Star Trek shoved into a short period combined combined with the movie "Trekkies" making it uncool to like Trek almost killed the franchise. I'm not sure any ST series could have survived when ENT came out.
I think the "my view must be everyone's view" attitude is feeble. It is ok not to like something. To assume something is awful because you don't like it is a bit self centered. I, like a lot of people, don't like coffee. Doesn't mean they should stop making coffee. Lot's of people enjoy coffee. Further, if a restaurant serves coffee I don't assume everything else is bad.
No, but as they say, "One bad apple spoils the whole bunch." ENT was certainly bad enough that it deserved to die (including - maybe especially - the fanboi fourth season), but it didn't actually 'kill' Star Trek. What it did was leave a bad enough taste in the mouths of many to make them extremely wary of further attempts to create a prequel or to rewrite Trek's history just to fit a pet storyline ...
... oh, crap ...
I think the "my view must be everyone's view" attitude is feeble. It is ok not to like something. To assume something is awful because you don't like it is a bit self centered. I, like a lot of people, don't like coffee. Doesn't mean they should stop making coffee. Lot's of people enjoy coffee. Further, if a restaurant serves coffee I don't assume everything else is bad.
Yeah but if a series loses money for it's parent company it gets cancelled and Stargate is a worldwide hit for MGM. And yes there was a Stargate movie that made more money than the Star Trek movie also released at the time, Generations in fact the Stargate movie has made more money worldwide than any Star Trek ever has. Maybe the new movie might change that but then MGM doesn't have $150 million to throw around.
Huh?
How many young "Star Wars" fans needed to be forced to watch "Trekkies" to make them convince the world that "Star Trek" was "uncool"?
You're confusing cause and effect here.
Do you think someone could make a movie called "Survivor Fans", depicting them all as drooling idiots and kill Survivor? Would be nice, but no. It works the other way around.
It was already uncool to like Star Trek, which is what made it safe to make fun of it's fans.
Uuuuummmmmm........ST DID "go on" and on and on........actually for close to forty years. It had six series and a movie series into the double digits. There are hundreds of comics and books(and some of them are even reaable!
)and it spawned a strange convention craze that is still going after mor than thirty years.I'd say it actually outstayed its welcome, if INS, NEM, VOY and ENT are anything to go by.
By comparison, SG is still a child. A retarded mongoloid child, to be fair, but a child nonetheless.
That was my thought as well when I read the OP.
I couldn't give a shit what anyone else thinks, if I find something to
be good... it's good. No matter how many people think otherwise.
There is no ultimate truth. There are far too many examples of great
movies that did squat at the box office for the majority opinion to matter.
And "professional" critics are the opinions that mean the least.
They're a bunch of overpaid hacks that people put too much stock in.
So, Stargate was an excellent show with great writing and fun character.
People can put all the arguments against that they want, but it won't make
them right, just differing in view. Each persons perspective is different and
no amount of numbers can take someones away from them.
Have you seen "The Phandom Menace"?
If not, I'd highly recommend it. It's a laugh riot - especially when the tragic guy comes out of the midnight 1999 screening and tries in vain to defend TPM and we see him a month later saying he sold his toys and now hates SW.
Actually, I think THAT is the ultimate truth!
Funny!
They probably had to carry me out of the midnight screening. The opening scroll mentioned tensions in the galactic political arena and I promptly went to sleep.
A few months later, they had an outdoor screening in our botanical gardens. I have only two memories of that night: sitting behind some tiny actors who were playing actual Jawas and droids at nearby Fox Studios (for Episode II), knowing they wouldn't block our view of the screen, and flying foxes flying past the screen, seemingly in battle with imperial spaceships.
As for the topic: Star Trek never died, it's just had a few periods where it was "resting".
A lot of stuff we debate around here is just opinion, but this is a rare instance where there's actually something objective underlying the debate, namely dollars.
Stargate is a viable business. It satisfies the needs of its audience at a cost that turns a profit, which is all any business need to do in order to survive. So why it survives isn't a mystery.
Why doesn't Star Trek survive on TV? The business model that would work for it is as yet unknown. Paramount will want it to be more of a premium production than Stargate, for perfectly understandable reasons of brand strategy, and probably put it on a higher-profile station than the Sci Fi Channel. But the broadcast networks are losing viewers to cable, and cable stations have viewerships too small to support a pricey space-based series.
There's probably a creative solution to this. Maybe doing deals for international licensing of Star Trek on TV that will subsidize the costs. For that to work, the movie needs to be a large international hit. And I'm sure that's the plan anyway.
As much of them as I could stomach.
Insurrection is better than Continuum or Ark of Truth, because I could actually get all the way thru Insurrection. (You should have used Nemesis as your example: that was a much tougher one for me to sit through all the way.)
Here's another test: watch DS9 and TOS and compare it to SG-1 and SG:A. I've watched all four, and there's no contest. Star Trek at its best is far better than Stargate at its best.
The reason why Stargate is still around has nothing to do with quality and everything to do with budgetary discipline. Not paying top dollar for the best writers and actors, for instance. Do you need the best to be as good as Trek (at its best)? Yes. But if that expense doesn't pay off in ratings, then high quality will work against you.
And that's the underlying faulty assumption in this thread, that the "better" product should be the more successful one. The reverse is often the case. If the market for your product isn't willing to pay more for better quality, then you are foolish to waste money in producing better quality that you cannot reap in profitability. The better/more expensive product will fail while the worse/cheaper one survives.
Wow, that's really tilting at windmills there, but I applaud your bold defiance of reality.
For better or worse, the absolute primacy of brand in the corporate world continues unabated and shows no signs of being replaced by anything else, ever. Just look at a grocery store shelves for proof. If brand didn't matter, how come all those branded products are being sold for higher prices than identical generic products sitting right next to them? Shouldn't the generics have pushed everything else off the shelves long before now? The day that happens is the day brand doesn't matter anymore.
Nice try.
Of course we mean REAL awards. Directing, writing, acting. I don't care if the show looks pretty (and I did acknowledge the decent production values lately) or the music is nice. I want good writing and acting before I have any respect for a series.Plenty of mediocre products survive for long periods of time. Like I said, there's often a market for cheaper/worse products and a market for expensive/better products within the same product category.
So one sucky show outlasted another sucky show? What exactly does that prove?
Stargate's continued existence proves the GM approach correct! It doesn't matter if you churn out crap year after year. There will be a market for it, as long as you keep an eye on the budget and don't price yourself out of the market.
This thread is delightfully circular...
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Maybe I should say the publicity of extreem fans who wear uniforms to court, speak Klingon, and spend life savings on a bridge in the bedroom created a lot of fear by association among Star Trek fans.
Sure it could have. ENT itself would have survived if it was a good show. Jolene Blalock put it best when she said:
As for the answer to the OP:
1. Because ENT was a really bad show, so nobody watched other than ~1.5 million hardcore Trek fans who will watch anything with a Trek label on it.
2. Stargate has much lower standards in terms of FX quality and rating requirements. And Stargate is a much better show than ENT was, story-wise & character-wise.
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