But also, their aims are different. If both are striving for similar levels of realism, and one looks like smeared jello while the other looks like the Eiffel Tower, it's still fair to compare the two as not being the same not just superficially, but also substantially.
I'm regretting that choice of metaphor, though, because it's getting away from my real point. I'd rather go back to the point that these are actors on a stage putting on a play. Different productions may use completely different set and costume designs, but it's still the same play. Because fiction is not about what things look like -- it's about what
happens. Story is events and characters, words and actions and emotions. Sets and props and visual designs are just the surface trappings of how the story is told. They are not the story itself.
Continuity in narrative fiction is about how stories relate to each other in their shared history and events and characterizations, the way they reference and build on each other. That supersedes their differences in detail, because it's all make-believe anyway and you can just pretend two things are consistent even when they aren't (e.g. pretending that Julie Newmar and Eartha Kitt are both Catwoman, or that Henry Frankenstein's lab way out in the mountains in the 1931
Frankenstein is the same continuous lab as the one in the outbuilding on the Castle Frankenstein grounds in
Bride of Frankenstein and the one inside the castle itself in
Son of Frankenstein).
Speaking from what I've seen of people being steamed, it has nothing to do with Enterprise being the oddball. It has to do with a perception of disrespecting the legacy from which the current producers are milking their livelihoods. The TOS Enterprise is simultaneously TOO iconic to abandon, yet they also want nothing to do with it because it embarrasses them (because their imaginations for what makes "futuristic" is either lacking or they don't trust their audience).
Well, that's a very sad misunderstanding of how artists think. Wanting to take a classic design and put a new spin on it is
not about "disrespecting" it or being "embarrassed" by it -- just the opposite. The original design was itself a work of creativity, of artistic expression, and it drew on past references that meant something to Matt Jefferies and Pato Guzman and Gene Roddenberry, inspirations that they carried forward in their creation. Later artists putting their own spin on the iconic design are doing it out of love, because they want to do the same thing -- to use the original as an inspiration and engage in the same kind of creative, innovative process that produced it in the first place.
Look at, say, Bruce Timm's DC Comics-based artwork from
Batman: The Animated Series onward. Timm's art style is very influenced by both Jack Kirby and John Romita, Sr., but it's not a mere copy of either one (and the two are very different from one another). He homages what he loves about their work, but synthesizes it into a style of his own, and that's true tribute, not embarrassment or disrespect.
Heck, there are fan artists here on this very forum and elsewhere who reinvent canonical ship designs as a creative exercise. Gabriel Koerner's
Enterprise redesign is perhaps the most famous example. They don't do that because they're embarrassed by the original designs, but because they're inspired by them and want to play with the possibilities.
If anything, mere imitation is more disrespectful, because it's co-opting a style that belongs to someone else. I think most artists would consider it a greater tribute to see someone reinvent their work in a fresh way than they would to see someone merely copy it.
Sure, it's fun when a local theater wants to stage Hamlet with every character as a different era of soldier fighting an alien invasion of greek myths, but those won't end up as Shakespeare's legacy.
Shakespeare's legacy is the words, not the set design. They didn't even
have set design when he wrote. They performed on a bare stage and trusted the audience to be able to imagine Elsinore and Agincourt and Prospero's isle. Your example is a straw man, because modernized productions of
Hamlet like the 2009 David Tennant/Sir Patrick Stewart production do not change the
story, only the set and costume design. They use the same words, the same sacrosanct dialogue, the same characters and events, with only the superficial trappings being changed. So it's still the same play, because story is about what happens, not what things look like.
