It's gonna be Khan (pretty damn sure now with the pics)
- Thread starter Lord Garth FOI
- Start date
Which isn't saying much.
Paramount should have stopped before they strangled the goose that generated so many golden eggs.
Let's hope that JJ's team has truly cloned that original goose, and that they all promise to take better care of her this time around.
Not a clone I’m afraid, unless they gave it a heart transplant from some nondescript donor. Seems more like a cautionary tell about the dangers of genetic engineering.
In 2012 Hollywood? Any stupid frickin' thing is possible. A lot of people in Tinseltown gave up on halfway original ideas years ago. I'd never put it past some people out there to recycle even when you have talented writers who can create something truly new.
Not a clone I’m afraid, unless they gave it a heart transplant from some nondescript donor. Seems more like a cautionary tell about the dangers of genetic engineering.
Not an exact clone, no. And that's okay.
But the heart is beating again, for the first time in many years, and that's a good start.
TREK's alive and profitable. That's more than we could say in 2005, and I loved ENTERPRISE. But bless its heart, that show couldn't keep the franchise afloat much longer.
You could consider ENT a failure due to the threat of cancellation it faced during it's run. ENT had a "strong start" during the beginning of it's first season but it died off after that. I seem to recall ENT only having about 2-4 million viewers a week, and by season 4 it was in the uppper hundreds of thousands to 2 million viewers. ENT was plagued with a guillotine of cancellation after one season.
John Billingsley/Dr. Phlox stated in an article with Indystar.com "It’s a miracle we got four seasons. Any other TV show would have been yanked after one season. Our ratings were abysmal. We opened well, we had a great audience for the first episode, and they watched it and they said, “This is nothing new. It’s the same Star Trek I’ve been watching for years and years. It’s a retread. And they ran away." Read the rest of the article here http://trekweb.com/articles/2011/12/09/John-Billingsley-Blames-Enterprise-Cancellation-on-Studio-Greed-Ratings-Were-Abysmal-It-was-a-Miracle-the-Series-Lasted-Four-Years.shtml
Season 2 didn't improve things and the season 3 temporal cold war was a bigger turnoff. ENT was slated to be cancelled after that third season. Due to the write in campain from fans and Berman and Braga probably begging TPTB to let them finish things right, ENT got it's fourth and final season. But there were to be no more whether this season was a success or failure.
Alot of the fans of ENT say that season 4 was the best one and it should've continued past that. But if you think about season 4, it really is a retcon to the show's own retcon. Season four basically fixes everything the creators changed or inserted to add drama or new intrigue to the show. The mind-meld aids disease and social taboo, the dickish and out of character nature of the Vulcans this entire show, the klingon ridge issue, Romulans having cloaking devices even though in Kirk's day they were imperfect and had significant imperfections, use of the Borg in some sort of casualty loop and Ferengi 200 years before their introductions in TNG etc. The writers and producers were pressed to make the universe look recognizable in the context of not having an interjected prequel be vastly different from it's senior shows that it follows (or predates in the context of the Trek universe.)
Biggest problem is more fans ignore ENT because it didn't leave as big as an impression as the other shows and doesn't really add to the conversation of Star Trek things that could've been inferred by the fans or in comics, games and novels.
From a business point-of-view, though, is that really true?
They do make really good money from syndication and DVD sales of Enterprise and Voyager - not nearly what they make from TOS and TNG, but good. The only thing that declining to make eleven(!) additional seasons of Star Trek would have meant in the long run was having less material to resell. I don't think it's intuitively obvious that retiring the property for five or ten years would necessarily have enhanced demand for a new TV version that would have brought greater profits at a later date than continuing to pump product into channels of distribution and sales that were already fully developed and available to them did in the last decade. I'm not even sure what one would base speculative numbers on.
And as has already been pointed out, Paramount let the franchise lay fallow for all of a year after Enterprise's cancellation before handing it over to Abrams and investing a couple hundred million more in a new version which has been a great success so far. Does that mean that the studio came close to killing off the golden goose, or never truly got anywhere near it when - unlike, say, Superman Returns - their very next decisions appear to have jump-started Trek almost without a hitch?
So, whatever one thinks of the quality of the later Trek shows it's not clear - to me, at any rate - that the studio would have been better off not producing them. They might have spared a lot of aggravation on the Internet, but how many dollars lost is that worth to them?
It's the age-old art versus business equation.
If art generates money, then business squeezes money out of it for as long as it can. Some businesses nurture the art. Some don't.
I'm a fan of good Star Trek (which, like all art, is in the eye of the beholder).
So was running Star Trek into the ground to make a bunch of money for some suits worth leaving a bad taste in my (and many other fans') mouths for years on end?
Obviously, I say no.
Go ask the suits. You might get a different answer.
We have some financial data for the films, but what about the series? Is there any data available on how profitable the various Star Trek TV series have been, how much money they've made gross, how they've made it, etc.?
^
Thanks!
I really like the cover of the Gary Mitchell issue. It's weird seeing Gary Lockwood in a nuTrek uniform after forty years of the guy being in a classic, ribnecked shirt but it's still cool. Nice to see that Lockwood is still giving permission to use his likeness after all these decades.
Thanks!
I really like the cover of the Gary Mitchell issue. It's weird seeing Gary Lockwood in a nuTrek uniform after forty years of the guy being in a classic, ribnecked shirt but it's still cool. Nice to see that Lockwood is still giving permission to use his likeness after all these decades.
So was running Star Trek into the ground to make a bunch of money for some suits worth leaving a bad taste in my (and many other fans') mouths for years on end?
Obviously, I say no.
Go ask the suits. You might get a different answer.
I don't disagree, on that basis (well, I do about the overall quality of Enterprise, but that's a matter better discussed nine years ago
). The way you phrased the statement seemed to me to put the question squarely in the arena of commerce rather than art, though.
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I fear that you have taken me far too seriously, cooleddie74! Maybe you didn't watch NuBSG and aren't aware of the severe stomach upset that many had over how Starbuck was "re-imaged", but I was facetiously implying that Khan would be a woman in this Trek alternate timeline.
(Maybe even Chaka Khan....)
As far as what I really think, I would really rather not see any movies featuring Khan in this alternate timeline. While I have no doubt that an alternate version of the crew's encounter with Khan could make for a potentially very cool and interesting tale that unfolds in a graphic novel, I would prefer to see a fresh, squeaky-clean NEW story on the screen.
(Maybe in this timeline, Chekov is actually aboard the Enterprise when it finds the Botany Bay....)
And as I said before, a photo of a guy who is wearing a Starfleet shirt who seems to be momentarily getting the best of Spock just does not scream "Khan" to me!
^
If I did take you a little too seriously, my bad. Subtlety and context can be hard to convey on these boards. Common mistake.
If I did take you a little too seriously, my bad. Subtlety and context can be hard to convey on these boards. Common mistake.
At this point, I wouldn't even complain about VOY. I need new Trek on TV.
...well of course I'd complain. It's too much fun not to. But I'd watch the damn thing, that's what I mean.
As for smooth-forehead Klingons, they could use that idea in this movie without much explanation at all. McCoy: "He's a Klingon, Jim, cleverly disguised to appear human!" That takes about two seconds to say, and it's all they'd need.
TMP didn't feel the need to explain bumpy-headed Klingons. They just presented them to us as Klingons and said: "These are Klingons". The audience accepted that as being fact without further explanation.
Nobody ever felt the need to address it until 17 years later (in DS9), and that was only required because DS9 wanted to reuse TOS footage in a "gift to the fans". And even then, it was just addressed in passing in a very vague manner. Plus, I've always felt that it was addressed in DS9 in more of a "wink and a nod" to the fans rather than being addressed seriously as "an in-universe clarification".
Star Trek didn't feel the need to fully explain it until over 25 years later in ENT, and unnecessarily so, as I contend. I would be fine if Future trek decide to present smooth-headed Klingons someday without explaining the difference in head smoothness.
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Darvin was disguised as a human in Trouble with Tribbles - McCoy had to scan him to realize his true nature. So, bumpy forehead or smooth, Klingons do need to be disguised to pass as humans.
But I wasn't saying that McCoy needed to explain the lack of bumps. He could simply say that a naturally smooth headed Klingon was disguised as human, that's all. Just like the "other" McCoy did.
But I wasn't saying that McCoy needed to explain the lack of bumps. He could simply say that a naturally smooth headed Klingon was disguised as human, that's all. Just like the "other" McCoy did.
Darvin was disguised as a human in Trouble with Tribbles - McCoy had to scan him to realize his true nature. So, bumpy forehead or smooth, Klingons do need to be disguised to pass as humans.
But I wasn't saying that McCoy needed to explain the lack of bumps. He could simply say that a naturally smooth headed Klingon was disguised as human, that's all. Just like the "other" McCoy did.
Got it.
I suppose my feeling on this is a general one:
If NuTrek wants to include Klingons -- AND include those Klingons as looking like TOS Klingons (i.e., smooth-headed), I don't think they need to provide any explanation whatsoever as to why they have smooth foreheads.
All NuTrek needs to do is simply tell us "this is what our Klingons look like", and the audience should simply accept that's how NuTrek Klingons are supposed to look.
Having said that, I'm not claiming that I think Cumberbatch is playing a Klingon. I'm just talkin' in general here.