It's been a while since IDW did an intercompany crossover

[Extrocomp]

In the 2010s it seemed like we had one almost every year, but then they suddenly stopped. The last one was Star Trek vs Transformers, which finished in 2019. There have been Galaxy Quest missions added to the Star Trek Fleet Command game and a Doctor Who limited-time event happened in The Badgey Directive, but video game crossovers are a lot less accessible because you have to invest a lot of time in learning the game.

Does anyone else want more crossovers or am I the only one?

 

[Danlav05]

IDW publishes Galaxy Quest abd Paramount owns it so that would be a cool crossover

 

[Christopher]

I generally don't care for crossovers between science fiction franchises, since by their very nature, their universes have incompatible physics, histories, alien planets and species, etc., so it makes no sense for them to share a reality, even as parallel timelines (since different timelines in the same universe must have branched off from the same original and thus must share the same physics and the same history up to the point of divergence).

A crossover can occasionally be entertaining as a purely speculative, out-of-continuity exercise, though. I liked Marvel's TOS/X-Men crossover, since it did good work with the thematic parallels, the Federation being the realization of the dream of equality and acceptance that the X-Men fought for. And there was some cleverness to the way the TOS/Planet of the Apes crossover "explained" how things got from the end of the first movie to the start of the second, though I felt they missed an opportunity to use the Enterprise's presence to explain how Cornelius, Zira, and their friend managed to launch Taylor's capsule back into space to escape the cataclysm, a physical and logistical impossibility that the third movie just glossed over.

Still, I feel IDW overdid crossovers to the point that they felt routine, obligatory, and forced rather than special. I don't want to see any more crossovers done just for the sake of doing crossovers. It's only worth doing if there's a genuinely good story reason.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

In the 2010s it seemed like we had one almost every year, but then they suddenly stopped. The last one was Star Trek vs Transformers, which finished in 2019.

A lot has happened in the industry since 2019, from the collapse of the Diamond monopoly to people leaving and moving around to publishers, like IDW, not being in the same shape as they were then. (IDW has some well-publicized financial issues, is what I mean by that.)

Does anyone else want more crossovers or am I the only one?

I'd like a third Kelvinverse/Green Lantnern crossover series, because the second ended in a really interesting place that I would like to see developed more.

I didn't think it would go anywhere, which is why I never pursued it, but from time to time I thought about hitting up Dynamite and saying, "Have you thought about doing a John Carter/Dejah Thoris crossover with IDW and Star Trek? If you're interested, I have a couple of pitches for you...."

Sure, I'd like to see more, but I don't know what I'd like to see, except for Star Trek/Godzilla. I have no idea what it would be like, but IDW recently did a Great Gatsby/Godzilla crossover that was a riot, so I know IDW would be able to find a way for Kirk to deliver a disabling flying leg kick to Godzilla.

 

[Christopher]

Sure, I'd like to see more, but I don't know what I'd like to see, except for Star Trek/Godzilla. I have no idea what it would be like, but IDW recently did a Great Gatsby/Godzilla crossover that was a riot, so I know IDW would be able to find a way for Kirk to deliver a disabling flying leg kick to Godzilla.

There's already been a Trek/Godzilla crossover of a sort, since the le-matya in TAS: "Yesteryear" had Godzilla's roar. My Star Trek Adventures RPG campaign Hard Rock Catastrophe is kaiju-themed, bringing back the giant rock monsters from TAS: "Mudd's Passion." Many of its segment titles are references to kaiju movies.

Back in 1989-90 when Alien Nation was on, I think I occasionally entertained the possibility of finding a way it could be crossed over with Trek. The two franchises shared similar themes and social commentary, and the AN tie-in novels were from the same editor and a lot of the same writers as the contemporary Trek novels. And AN was set just a few years in the future, so it didn't clash with Trek's cosmology and history as much as most SF franchises would. Since humanity's first contact hadn't been canonically established yet, it might have been possible to retcon in the Newcomers' arrival on Earth in the early '90s (although you'd run up against the issue of the Eugenics Wars). Or more likely I was thinking of an alternate timeline, the Newcomers existing in the Trek universe but just not having crashed on Earth in the Trek timeline.

I do believe that Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes happened in the Trek universe, and I'm one of two or three novelists who have hinted as much in our books (Jeffrey Lang was the first in Immortal Coil), though we can't do so explicitly for legal reasons, since it wasn't from Paramount. I consider Roddenberry's Genesis II and Planet Earth pilot movies to represent the timeline where Gary Seven failed to prevent the buildup of orbital nukes in the 1960s, so that the Eugenics Wars were a bigger nuclear cataclysm (and the mutants seen in G2/PE make more sense as advanced Augments than as the results of radiation-induced mutation). Though I strongly suspect that the "Post-Atomic Horror" from "Encounter at Farpoint" was Roddenberry cribbing his own G2/PE backstory and implying that it had happened in the Trek universe, though bumped forward a few decades to update the timeline for a late-'80s show.

 

[Avro Arrow]

Does anyone else want more crossovers or am I the only one?

Just speaking for myself, I don’t usually care for crossovers that much. They just seem too gimmicky to me, and usually I’m not that interested in whatever franchise it is they’ve crossed over with, especially if it’s a superhero franchise.

The one franchise I thought I wouldn’t mind a crossover with is Babylon 5, since at least they’re somewhat similar. (And based on the comparisons people have done a DS9/B5 crossover would be chef’s kiss ) But then you run into the things @Christopher mentioned about completely different aliens and such. And no one’s going to publish a B5 story in 2025 anyway.

I guess that generally I prefer Star Trek to be… Star Trek. Sorry to be a wet blanket. But I don’t really have a background in non-Star Trek comics, where I’m guessing these types of crossovers would be more common?

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I do believe that Roddenberry's The Questor Tapes happened in the Trek universe, and I'm one of two or three novelists who have hinted as much in our books (Jeffrey Lang was the first in Immortal Coil), though we can't do so explicitly for legal reasons, since it wasn't from Paramount. I consider Roddenberry's Genesis II and Planet Earth pilot movies to represent the timeline where Gary Seven failed to prevent the buildup of orbital nukes in the 1960s, so that the Eugenics Wars were a bigger nuclear cataclysm (and the mutants seen in G2/PE make more sense as advanced Augments than as the results of radiation-induced mutation). Though I strongly suspect that the "Post-Atomic Horror" from "Encounter at Farpoint" was Roddenberry cribbing his own G2/PE backstory and implying that it had happened in the Trek universe, though bumped forward a few decades to update the timeline for a late-'80s show.

You're kinda describing how, for myself, I fit the 80s War of the Worlds television series into Star Trek. Even the post-apocalyptic second season; that all gets lost in the memory of the Eugenics Wars.

At the time -- 1988-9 -- I really wanted Paramount to cross over their two syndicated shows. I imagined that John Colicos' Quinn was effectively immortal, and maybe he turns up on the Enterprise-D one day, or maybe the D finds the alien homeworld. And the basic concept that was used later in "Time's Arrow" would have worked as a way of bringing the two casts together in one story. Second season TNG was primed for this. Teenage me would have be so excited.

 

[Christopher]

You're kinda describing how, for myself, I fit the 80s War of the Worlds television series into Star Trek. Even the post-apocalyptic second season; that all gets lost in the memory of the Eugenics Wars.

Except the two seasons don't even fit with each other, since season 1 posited that most people had forgotten the invasion already due to denial and a nebulously defined amnesia effect of alien contact (which was tied into the "alien abduction" mythos, and is obviously incompatible with the Trek universe), while season 2 retconned things to show, as you say, a post-apocalyptic world still in ruins from the 1953 attack. (Season 1 never explained how people justified the global devastation to themselves if they didn't remember why it happened, or how they managed to erase every trace of it in just 35 years.)

The last season 1 episode established that a second wave of invaders would be coming in four years, and I was inclined to assume that season 2 was four years later and the change was due to all the damage the aliens had done in the meantime. But that was, of course, impossible to reconcile with the female lead's teenage daughter still being only a year older in season 2.

Of course, Alien Nation had its own internal continuity issues, retconning itself as it went. The alien slaves' Overseers were treated in the pilot as a deep dark secret that the Newcomers didn't remember because they'd been drugged on the slave ship, and the secret of the Overseers' existence was the catalyst for the pilot's entire plot; but the rest of the season ignored that and established that the slaves on the ship had been very aware of the Overseers, and that their existence was known to the Earth authorities right after the crash but they couldn't be prosecuted for crimes committed in space. But then the revival movies changed it so that many Overseers had been tried and convicted and shunted into an Operation Paperclip-type program to create advanced tech for the government. And that's on top of the revival movies decanonizing the season finale so they could redo its cliffhanger from scratch four years later, and altering the timeline of the Newcomers' arrival. And the business where you had Newcomer prostitutes servicing human clients in an early episode, but the second movie established that the two species needed a 6-week intensive training course to learn how to have sex without injury.

But at least Alien Nation was a good series, as good as Star Trek and with the same spirit of social commentary. WotW had an entertaining cast in its first season (before the season 2 producers dropped both the nonwhite regulars and replaced them with the walking mannequin known as Adrian Paul, and stripped the remaining regulars of any interesting personality traits), but it was pretty badly written (largely by scabs during the '88 writers' strike) and it had startlingly cheap production values compared to its syndication partner ST:TNG. When I revisited season 1 some years back, I was startled by how bad it was, since I remembered liking it for its cast chemistry. But even the actors were weaker than I remembered.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

Why must you harsh on my melon?

No, you're absolutely right. War of the Worlds was not high-quality television. It filled the time in an entertaining way at the time.

 

[Christopher]

No, you're absolutely right. War of the Worlds was not high-quality television. It filled the time in an entertaining way at the time.

Season 1 entertained me at the time, up to a point (or at least the characters did), but I found most of season 2 quite unpleasant and borderline unwatchable, to the point that I wonder in retrospect why I didn't quit watching (although it did get moderately better in the second half, until its very, very stupid finale). I was deeply angry and offended at the ignominious way they killed off Ironhorse, and at the blatant hypocrisy of their excuse for killing Norton, the only black cast member (that the team would be on the run and a guy in a wheelchair couldn't keep up, when in actuality they moved into a new permanent base in episode 2x2 and stayed there all season). And I never understood why they thought that the way to make a struggling show more attractive to audiences was to turn its setting into a relentlessly grim, hopeless, nasty, and literally dark world where the sun never shone.

 

[Markonian]

In my head, I assume most fiction is already parallel universes of each other. Explanation could be we‘re on a branch of the multiverse where Earth and Humans usually exist. Physics differ due to the absence/presence of subspace and hyperspace in each universe and their properties.

Co(s)mic crossovers I would like to see are Galaxy Quest and Perry Rhodan.

 

[Christopher]

In my head, I assume most fiction is already parallel universes of each other. Explanation could be we‘re on a branch of the multiverse where Earth and Humans usually exist. Physics differ due to the absence/presence of subspace and hyperspace in each universe and their properties.

As I said, parallel timelines of the same universe would have to have the same physics, because they'd branched off the same origin. Obviously any two universes that had humans in them, that have a common human history and culture, would have to have diverged after humanity and those common historic and cultural antecedents arose.

After all, if the laws of physics were even a tiny bit different, if the values of the fundamental constants were changed by even a fraction of a percent, stars, planets, and matter as we know them couldn't exist, so life certainly couldn't. Different fictional universes can independently posit different hypothetical physical laws beyond the known ones that allow matter and life to exist, but they just can't plausibly go together as parts of the same multiverse. They're just independent works of imagination that set different ground rules.

And yes, somebody always drags out the old saw, "Well, if there's an infinite number of random universes, then it's probabilistically inevitable that every possible reality will exist somewhere, so universes that are exactly like ours down to individual people but with different physics are bound to exist." But that's an abuse of the concept of infinity. If there's an infinite number of universes, the odds of ever finding one of the X universes that had duplicate people in it would be X divided by infinity, which is zero. In other words, it would take an infinite amount of searching to find any of them. So even if they did exist, the probabilty that any two of them would ever interact is zero.

Of course, you can always just throw out logic and intelligence and mash up any two universes you want as a fantasy premise. But different universes have different degrees of plausibility, and I don't like lowering the standards of a more plausible universe (as Star Trek was originally intended to be, though that keeps eroding) to the level of a more fanciful one. I can buy, say, the Arrowverse crossing over with Smallville or Lucifer because it's a fantasy universe to begin with (although even there, there are details that bug me, like the totally different rules for angels between Lucifer and Constantine, or the fact that Kryptonians can fly and breathe in space in Superman & Lois when they can't in Supergirl). But I don't want Trek crossing over with a less plausible universe.