He loves recreating historical battles and physical sports.
Opinion circa 1987: TNG is NOT Star Trek
- Thread starter Thomas Elliot
- Start date
Never 'splain Canadian humor to a Canadian.
I'll admit that the humor isn't for everyone; I'm one of the few women I know who gets it and finds most of it funny. So don't knock it until you've tried it (full episodes are available on YouTube).
I'm extrapolating, since O'Brien and Julian like playing sports on the holodeck. Or maybe Riker already knows - I don't recall if he ever mentioned playing hockey when he lived in Alaska.
I meant that as a good thing. I love Up The Long Ladder
Yeah keep believing that fantasy. As a TOS fan in 1987; I can stay unequivocally that the article accurately represented the majority of how TOS fans felt about the impending series.
Hell after the Pilot, and and first 'regular' TNG episode (The awful piss poor remake of the classic season 1 TOS episode "The Naked Now") a huge swath of TOS fans started to write this series off.
I was one of the few who continued to stick with it, in the hopes that it would get better; but as far as the first season goes, I saw nothing that peaked my interest until the first half of TNG's season 1 episode "Conspiracy". Up to the point where they encountered the destroyed ambassador class starship wreckage, I thought it was one of the best episodes done for Star Trek. Unfortunately the last half of the episode devolved into utter trope tripe; and was just crap by the end of it.
And that was all because of Gene Roddenberry. The writers actually did want to do a storyline with a group of Admirals, who did believe the federation was expanding too quickly, and wanted to make a change; but of course in steps or Gene Roddenberry stating such people would never make it past Starfleets psychological screening process; so if they wanted to do the storyline, it had to be invading aliens taking control. Of course they could have written something good along those lines as well; but I think they were upset, and that's why the aliens became mustache twirling villains by the end of it.
O'Brien would learn about ice hockey so he could explain curling...
Gene was a stickler in some ways, especially for his vision of humanity of the somewhat distant future - given the foibles TOS puts out and having more carte blanche for TNG, it does feel as if he's going all out for what he wanted. I also wonder if he was in the ASD spectrum...?
Then again, in TOS the only oddball commander that broke the rules was... well, James T Kirk.
And I'll say this about the trope at the opposite end, that of "evil admiral o' the week" - while it got overused in the TNG era (and by INS it was a sleepytime joke), the fact is some people can go nutters over time... Thankfully in TNG none of them are shown to be correct, with Picard always being correct... and in TOS Kirk was almost always correct. Except for TWOK.
What about Tracey?Then again, in TOS the only oddball commander that broke the rules was... well, James T Kirk.
That's a myth. He interpreted the rules, but that was part of his responsibility as a field commander who was often the sole Federation authority available. It was doing his duty, not ignoring or violating it. And when given direct, explicit orders, he followed them even when he opposed them, as when Commissioner Ferris ordered abandoning the search for the Galileo or when Ambassador Fox ordered him to make contact with Eminiar VII. The only times he defied a direct order were to save Spock's life, first in "Amok Time" and then in The Search for Spock. It was the movies that created the perception of Kirk as a rule-breaking renegade, between that and the Kobayashi Maru thing.
People often assume he broke the Prime Directive, but that's mistakenly applying the stricter TNG-era approach of no interference for any reason, while TOS's version allowed intervening to cancel out other sources of interference or disruption to a society's healthy, natural development. And TOS repeatedly contrived situations where Kirk had to overthrow the status quo in order to save the Enterprise from destruction, as in "The Return of the Archons," "A Taste of Armageddon," "The Apple," or "The Gamesters of Triskelion." The first edition of the TNG writers' bible even retroactively codified that it was allowed to suspend the Prime Directive to save one's ship and crew, although later TNG defined it more rigidly.
And Merik, and John Gill. Kirk was often the one fixing the harm done by other humans' rulebreaking.
Curling is one of those Canadian sports that you are either passionate about or it bores you to death.
I'm in the latter category (which is a very un-Canadian thing to admit; the socially correct thing to do is pretend you like it even if you don't). I respect that the players that make it to regional, national and Olympic levels are experts at judging the condition of the ice and the physics involved in placing the rocks exactly where they need to go and affect the opponents' rocks as necessary... but unless you really understand how it is to play, it's as exciting as watching paint dry.
So it would actually be the perfect sport for any TNG-era person who lives a boring, beige life on an overly-manicured Earth.
Though I am not Canadian I did want to try and be respectful. But, knowing a Canadian feels the same helps.
I appreciate your wish to be respectful. There are Canadians who aren't respectful of our various sports and athletes.
Last year I had eye surgery - the kind where the patient is drugged to relaxation but not unconsciousness, and I heard the surgeon complaining that the mayor had only attended the opening ceremonies of the Winter Games our city was hosting (I forget if it was the provincial or Canada version; I just remember what an expense it was while the politicians prattled and babbled about how much "benefit" it would be to everyone - I certainly didn't see a penny of "benefit" from it).
He was complaining that we have no sports here, no athletes... and I was just awake enough to mumble up at him that we had rodeo, curling, hockey, figure skating (some of our local and regional athletes have been World and Olympic champions in figure skating, speedskating, and biathlon), and more.
Err, how can you be sure what opinion of the "majority" of TOS fans was? Internet wasn't a thing and there were just few fanzines. I suppose there were the conventions, but I didn't read any article where the majority of fans present at some convention were against the new show.
I mean, we can't be sure today what is the opinion of the "majority" of the fans. There are youtubers out there who are saying they absolutely "know" that all the trekkers hate DSC and this is the reason why they are producing new spin-offs.
Really? you're going to pull the DDOfreequests"Hey, the internet didn't exist so how could any consensus be known..." cart? Hahahahaha. Trek fandom was widespeard and vocal long before the internet my friend, and we old fans did communicate among ourselves and other and made our reactions known. (BTW - I was on the rec,arts.startrek Usenet at that time and also to communicate with a number of Trek fans that way - being a computer science major helped in that regard.
Yes, I( know...for you kids, before the Internet fandom didn't exist or could communicate amongst itself effectively...oh. wait...
Even if that's true, "the majority of commenters" is not remotely the same as "the majority of fans." The group that chooses to participate in and comment on communications networks -- whether lettercols and fanzines in the old days or social media today -- is always a fraction of the total fanbase, too small to be statistically representative, and biased in favor of those with strong opinions. Such things also tend to disproportionately represent those with negative opinions, because dissatisfied people are more motivated to speak out than satisfied people.
I remember thinking that a blind man on the new Enterprise was a cool idea and it intrigued me. Other than that I was just plain excited.
Patrick Stewart was on Wogan, eagerly stressing the idea of the blind pilot, while Wogan ignored him to make pointy ear jokes.
I cant imagine Wogan knowing anything worthwhile about Star Trek or being anything except condescending towards sci-fi
You have a skewed and uninformed view of pre-internet fandom.
The first Star Trek fanzine I know about was Spockanalia, and it was first published while Star Trek was still in its first run (around 1967 or so). By the time the first Trek conventions started in the early '70s, there would have been at least dozens of fanzine titles (even more if Paramount's lawyers hadn't literally raided the dealer's room at one convention and confiscated every fanzine they could find; some titles were undoubtedly lost forever due to that raid).
By the time I started collecting fanzines in the mid-'80s, there were far too many for me to even know what they were, let alone acquire them. All I had to go by were the ones mentioned in Star Trek Lives! and The Making of the Trek Conventions. Fast-forward to the internet age and about 12 years ago when I discovered a treasure trove available on eBay and how many stories had been uploaded to various fanfic sites, there were thousands. At least.
I'm talking about print 'zines and material uploaded from print 'zines, published in the U.S., Canada, UK, Australia, Germany, and so on. That doesn't begin to count the individual stories that were never part of any fanzines but rather were uploaded directly.
Fanzines and letterzines were how fans communicated back in pre-internet times if they lived far apart and couldn't get together at conventions. I remember a nice reply from the editor of Interstat, thanking me for asking about their guidelines prior to submitting letters to them; they said most people don't bother asking.
I recommend a browse through Fanlore.org. It's like the Wikipedia of fanzines, and is amazingly informative.
Civilization itself didn't start until the internet age, right? Before that, we'd barely come down from the trees and discovered fire and indoor plumbing.
In the TNG soap opera parody I mentioned earlier, some of our characters included Bill Biker, Hellana of Troi, Kilometres O'Brien (Canada uses metric
), and the family of Beverly, Jack, and Eastley Smasher.TNG is a parody writer's dream. It practically writes itself (not that TOS doesn't have great scope for parodies).
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