It seems there is a reason for the visual reboot and the producers aren't being honest about it.

Yep. Can't argue with any of that.

 

This. I think most casual watchers would think we're stupid for trying to make this fit flawlessly with what came before.

Alec Peters got the rights to the classic Enterprise from CBS!

 

Dark episodes in a bright and optimistic series are popular. Bright and optimistic episodes in a dark series are popular. That's just par for the course.

But overall, Star Trek especially, and even many other franchises in general (Marvel vs. DC, Brosnan Bond vs. Dalton Bond, ...), the one that's usually the more optimistic one is most of the times the more popular one. Grimdark is very rarely popular. Not a lot of people like "The Punisher" over "Spider-Man". Hell, it's retrospectively fuckin' amazing how positive Nolan's Dark Knight movies are: They're serious. Tense. Yes. But they are also about unadultered heroism, doing the right thing just because, and pretty much always end with a positive picture of humanity under pressure on a grand scale.

People like to dwell on the dark and serious stuff. They just don't want to do it all the time.

 

My impression is that it is and has been. It's certainly one of my ten favorite TNG shows.

I hate all this "grimdark" and "noblebright" stuff. It sounds like kindergarten primer talk.

 

I dunno, seems to me that the Trek novels set in the 24th century era over the past 15 years or so have done a perfectly nice job following up on those shows and finding sources of drama without going all "edgy and grimdark." As I've thought on more than one occasion over the years, the people producing the canon Trek material could do a lot worse than to take some creative cues from the people producing the licensed Trek fiction.

Of course, they wouldn't actually have done that... which would've led to a whole other problem, namely that any show set post-VOY would almost certainly have invalidated a great deal of what's been established in the "litverse." And doing that would've upset a whole distinct (smaller but very dedicated) cohort of fans... just as Disney's sequels pissed off fans of the Star Wars EU.

Hmm, that's interesting. The court said that Paramount owns the copyrights to the Star Trek films, not merely that it holds the film rights to Star Trek? (Those are two different statements. Michael Uslan holds the film rights to Batman, for instance, but that doesn't mean he owns Batman in any meaningful sense.) That seems potentially at odds with the legal statements of ownership actually promulgated by CBS (as I mentioned upthread), and also (particularly it comes to the novels) at odds with everything I've heard about licensors having to deal only with CBS, not Paramount.

I think it's probably safer to stick to the "sole ownership" understanding of the underlying IP, just as CBS has consistently represented it for years, and assume that Paramount was involved in the Axanar lawsuit primarily because Peters was seeking to make a film (hence also interfering with Paramount's rights), and that the judge who authored the decision slightly mis-stated things.

I agree with that last sentence. I've never understood this notion in some quarters that "new fans" of any given property are somehow turned off by a deep continuity. Speaking as a fan (of many things) myself, I've always loved the opportunity to dig into the backstory of a fictional world that goes beyond any particular story. It's an enticement, not a deterrent!

 

Too much of any one thing makes something unwatchable in a movie or film. This is why, for example, the action scenes in generic action movies get boring if they are stretched out too long. Or if you have too many extras die, there stops being any reaction to further deaths.

One of the great advantages of Star Trek as TV is you can use it to tell any type of story. Action-adventure, character drama, and allegorical message pieces have of course been the most popular. But you can use it for murder mystery, military fiction, romance, political drama, western, spy fiction, courtroom procedural, alternate history, horror, etc.

One of the great disadvantages of movie Trek is this is usually completely forgotten, with an attempt to continually turn Trek into a blockbuster franchise.

 

The rights of Licensees to an IP they do not own (i.e. Mattel having the rights to produce star wars toys does not give them a right to make up "new" star wars characters to make toys out of; nor does it give them the rights to new star wars derivatives not covered by the current licensing agreement, etc) can play a factor.
For one, I would have been just as happy with an updated, more modern TOS look as I was with the whole new look in the DSC pilot (haven't gotten to seeing the rest yet).
And there is something to be said for establishing a brand-new visual continuity for a brand-new show.

 

How casual are we talking about here? Because I don't think most really casual viewers would even know that any significant changes were made or that a reboot is even a thing that anyone cares about. They'd probably just go, "So is this before or after the one with Dr. Spock?"

Also, are even most non-casual viewers trying to make it fit flawlessly with what's come before, or are they just willing to accept that there are inevitably going to have to be some changes in a fifty year old franchise and roll with it?

 

Marvel got desperate and did the same thing once a few decades ago and they are STILL trying to put everything back under the same roof.

 

I honestly think that - in general - a reboot makes more sense for a film franchise than a TV franchise.

I mean, let's consider for a second if you were writing a novel which took place during an era of high feudalism. Making it historically accurate would require doing quite a lot of "homework" checking in with fact-checkers, etc. It would be much, much easier to just set the story in some sort of low-fantasy parallel world where you could ignore history as much as you wanted. Then you could just focus on telling the story you set out to tell.

However, what if you aren't just telling one story? What if you need to tell dozens of stories, and you don't even have a very good idea what the third story you're going to be working on will be about? In that case, suddenly the equation changes. Doing historical fiction rather than low fantasy might make sense, because you could continue to mine history for ideas related to the next plot element. If you earlier chose the fictional world, you might have to do almost as much research as before, just trying to mine history for stories you then use in allegory rather than directly.

Taking the analogy to Trek, the "reboot" option becomes even worse. Because using aspects of new Trek as allegories to old Trek stories will just come across as a shallow copy of what came before. Either you have to come up with totally original ideas (something which VOY and ENT writers banged their heads against the wall trying to do) or you have to build on what came before.

 

Voy and ENT had premises that were custom made for new ideas but the very people that ok'd that premise were too timid to really let Star trek go out there and do something new. If you're writers cant cut it, I hate to say it, but there is an almost inexhausible supply of new ones ready to take their spot in the bull pen. Institutional loyality in that case just gives you a mediocre show. Many Coto seemed to be getting his feel for what to do with what he'd been given when it came to ENT but it was already over, really.

Discovery has the ability to go anywhere and do anything. it doesnt have to come back and affect the time line to do that, so i hope they can divest themselves quickly enough from nostaglia (Pike, Enterprise, Baby Spock) and do something different.

 

5billion

 

Fully agree with both of you gents.

Star Trek's greatest strength has always been its diversity...and in this case I don't just mean cast/character diversity, but the diversity in the type and tone of stories you can tell.

It's one of the reasons the whole "THIZ IZ NOT TEH REEL STAR TRACKS!!1!!1!" arguments always confuse me for any of the series or movies.

 

On further reflection (apropos the court order quoted above on the Axanar case, and its bearing on Trek rights)...

...it's worth noting (although it may seem to some like hairsplitting) that owning the copyright on a movie (or set of movies) is not the same as owning the copyright on the characters and concepts in those movies. It's plausible that Paramount's film rights (post-Viacom split) were framed in terms of actual ownership of the film copyrights (as opposed to, say, merely holding the rights to distribute the old ones and a license to make new ones), yet this still remains compatible with CBS retaining ownership of all the underlying IP.

For example (to stick with the Batman analogy I've been using), if you pick up a copy of the Dark Knight Rises DVD and read the small print, you'll see the following: "Batman, the Dark Knight, and all related characters and elements are TM and (c) DC Comics. The Dark Knight Rises (c) 2012 Warner Brothers Entertainment Inc." And meanwhile, in the credits box you'll see Michael Uslan listed as an Executive Producer, because he holds the film rights to the character (although not the copyrights to either the character or the film), so he gets a credit and a generous check from Warner Bros.

Just to reiterate: intellectual property law is complicated, and things can be carved up in lots of different ways. However, there's still nothing going on here to suggest anything other than that CBS retains both copyright and trademarks on all the actual underlying IP for Star Trek. As such, even if Paramount has the film copyrights, the only thing that would prevent CBS from using on TV (at least, without paying for the privilege) is actual content from the films (e.g., clips).

 

Yes, I believe it is.

That was the entire point of my post, so yes!

I

Lots of Star Trek does the same thing though...at times people applaud it, and at times people spit on it. It all seems to depend on the mood of people doing the evaluation. Usually I find it's small things that piss people off, and then they start pointing to all kinds of inconsistent other reasons to justify their opinion rather than just saying "hey man, I don't like the aesthetics / guy who plays the Captain / theme music / etc."

Trek II is one of the most well-crafted science fiction movies of the last 40 years...so using it as a comparison point is, admittedly, difficult!

 

Unless they're watching nuBSG.

 

They've said there are a couple people in the writers room that look at the lore.

 

Just no. I want everyone in the writer's room focused on telling the best story possible. Not wasting time and effort being continuity cops.

 

The Star Wars story group doesn't do that exactly.

Yes they keep an eye on the continuity, but they're not cops, if a writer thinks something is better for the story they let them do it.

They just make sure it fits.

 

Agreed. I know there's a lot of Trek lore to manage these days, but think of how difficult it must have been for the writers on the first season of TOS, when everything was poorly defined and there was only the writers' guide to go by. Yet somehow the production folks made it work.