You say it's "only" been nine years since ENT went off the air, but I was two years old when TNG started. It felt to me like Trek had always been on the air.
The break is probably better for any future show, creatively, but that doesn't make it feel like any less of an eternity!
I was thinking of "too long" not in terms of an individual's wishes, but in terms of its impact on the franchise's long-term prospects for survival.
Star Trek has gone far longer without a TV series on the air, but a new TV series did eventually come along. So there's no reason to fear for the franchise's future just because it's been off TV for a while.
Maybe we could see a master plan to reboot TNG, DS9, and VGR all together.
2.1) The Prime timeline still exists. There's no reason it should cease to exists. We just got an additional timeline. The existence of the Prime timeline doesn't negate any of the parallel timelines in TNG "Parallels" either.
I never said anything about anything "ceasing to exist."
None of it actually exists, of course. Or rather, all of it will exist -- as stories -- as long as the recorded media endure. I'm speaking of
Star Trek as an entertainment franchise in the real world, and how Paramount might hypothetically approach it as the basis for a multi-series film franchise of the sort that Hollywood is crazy about right now. The preference might be to continue the Abramsverse and spin other series off from that, but there are no onscreen TOS-era spinoffs, and the odds that Hollywood would adapt a book series like
Vanguard or
Seekers are pretty slim. It's more likely that they'd look to the part of the Trek franchise that's already sustained a multi-series shared universe, the 24th-century trio.
And if they did bring those to movies, it's likely they'd reinvent them and recast them, because starting from the ground up would give them more freedom and younger leads would be better anchors for a multi-year film franchise. After all, it worked for the Abramsverse; the past two films did better box office than nearly all their predecessors with the aging original cast. That would be Hollywood's consideration -- not any fannish concerns about the "reality" of fictional constructs. Of course fans could still treat the Prime universe as ongoing, because a reboot doesn't preclude that -- especially if they decided to start over with a wholesale reinvention.
I mean, if I were a Paramount exec looking to turn ST into a Marvel-style multi-series franchise, I'd conclude that it would be better to just reinvent the whole thing from scratch so that it could be rearranged to fit the needs of the crossover series -- namely, put Kirk and company, the most perennially popular part of the franchise, in the same time frame as Picard's crew, DS9,
Voyager, and whatever else I chose to adapt. Sure, the purists would freak out, but they're a tiny fraction of the audience, and it's no worse than the way the X-Men films have messed around with the timeline (e.g. having Storm be an older member of the team than Iceman, or having Havok be a generation older than Cyclops), or the way the Marvel films have removed Nick Fury's WWII-era origins and made the Howling Commandos Captain America's team instead. Heck, the Abramsverse has already flirted with that despite the alternate-timeline conceit, making Chekov older and the
Enterprise newer and having the crew come together aboard the ship years earlier than they did in TOS.
Or, I suppose, they could try something closer to the established chronology but have periodic time-travel crossovers serving as the
Avengers/Justice League-style epics unifying the individual series. That's not as appealing to me, since time travel has already been done to death in Trek movies. But that might be just why a creative team in charge of such a reboot would deem it appropriate to include as an integral part of the series.
A new series would have to be original to compete with all the other series on TV, but still recognizable and preferably not a carbon copy of BSG's concept.
Of course a reboot of Trek wouldn't be a "carbon copy" of another reboot, but I still say that if Trek is going to remain relevant and interesting to the next generation of viewers, it will need to reinvent its continuity altogether and slough off the residue of its antiquated 1960s ideas. To modern viewers, communicators and tricorders look technologically backward. The core casts of both TOS and TNG are too dominated by white males. The history is already problematical to reconcile, because we didn't have Eugenics Wars in the '90s or a manned flight to Saturn in the 2000s. And you know what I just realized? Starting just six months from now, in mid-January 2015, we will be closer to the date of Cochrane's first warp flight (April 2063) than to the premiere of
Star Trek (September 1966). And the closer we -- and our children -- get to that date, the more obvious it will become that we won't have warp drive by then.
Nostalgia for the original ST is fine. People still read the 1960s Marvel comics, the 1940s DC comics. We still read the original Sherlock Holmes stories even as we watch the modernized versions in
Sherlock and
Elementary. The new does not erase the old. But if we want
Star Trek to continue to feel relevant and engaging to new generations -- to people who will actually be alive and in their prime in 2063, people to whom genetic augmentation will probably become a part of everyday life, people who will know for a fact whether there are habitable planets around Alpha Centauri or 40 Eridani -- it's going to have to be reinvented completely, rebuilt from a more modern starting point.
Yes, but Star Trek is not as 'cool' and appealing as, say, Star Wars. Superhero movies are popular at the moment and there's probably a large following of such comics. When you walk into shops, how often do you see Trek memorabilia? Without the internet, nothing besides novels would be available here in Germany, for example. Because Trek isn't cool enough to appeal to the masses. Star Wars is.
Currently, sure. But nothing lasts forever. A quarter-century ago,
Star Wars was all but defunct and
Star Trek was the entertainment juggernaut. Fortunes shift.
