I thought they said the JJ-comics were canon?

[Christopher]

What did the fans make of the fact that two of the TV movie scripts were novelized over a year before the movies were produced? Both Dark Horizon (by K.W. Jeter) and Body and Soul (by Peter David) were novelized in 1993; the films were not aired until 1994 & 1995, respectively.

It didn't bother me much, because I understood the sequence of events behind it. They'd been hoping to film those revival scripts for years, but eventually it looked like it wouldn't happen, so Pocket novelized them; but then FOX finally decided to go ahead and make them, and naturally they had to be rewritten, so they superseded the books.

Besides, by then I'd gotten used to seeing Trek novels overwritten by new canon, so this was just more of the same, particularly since the AN books were from Pocket and done by the same authors and editor (I think it was John Ordover). I was just glad that the stories finally got made, that we got to see Matt and George and the rest on the screen again.

 

[Hober Mallow]

Actually, even before the novelizations came out, full synopses of both movies, along with scripts written for season two, were published in the book "Newcomers Among Us," an Alien Nation companion; and a comic book version of "Soul Train," which would have been the second season premiere, was released. So for me it gave the actual aired "Dark Horizon" movie a richer history; it was interesting to see how the story morphed from "Soul Train" to the original "Dark Horizon" script to the novel to the final movie.

The original "Body and Soul" was a lot different, actually a lot bigger story, and elements of the original eventually fed three different Alien Nation movies. The story of the boy taking advantage of Emily in "Millennium" came from the original "Body and Soul" script, as did the story of Albert and May asking George to help the two have a baby which, I think, ended up in "The Enemy Within." Because the X-Files was a big hit at the time, Fox asked Kenneth Johnson to add lots of government conspiracy stuff to the script.