What really kills these uniforms is the impression they give of pants pulled up way too high, like a cliche pensioner. The same thing plus bagginess made the "All Good Things" future uniforms look terrible too. I have a Beverly figure in this uniform, which I picked up in a comic book and collectables store on Long Island last month for $8. I'm surprised that these unis, if made for the entire cast, never cropped up again in one of Trek's alternate timeline episodes. Bad as they look, it could have lent credibility in such a circumstance.
Really a TNG-era uniform transition should be pretty rapid, with little overlap of new and old. Starfleet could just transmit the updated specs and the replicators spit out new uniforms as the crew turns in their laundry.
the problem with the transition theory is that in season 4 of DS9 the TNG uniforms were still being used on Earth, so seeing as thats where Starfleet Command is wouldn't they have been the first people to switch to the new uniroms not the last. Plus I can't really buy a 4 year transition period when as pointed out above they can just put the new pattern in the replicator and call it a day.
It's funny, I used to think the TNG Season 3-7 were much better looking than the Season 1-2 ones, but now I think they have that frumpy, fake shoulderpadded, late 80s/early 90s look, and the Season 1-2 ones seem kind of sleek and futuristic. I'm glad Frakes and Dorn were glad for the change, the old ones would have forced them to stay in better shape.
I really didn't feel any of that at all (it didn't seem like a radical or awkward change to me). If anything, it seemed more gradual and natural of a change as there still were crewmembers wearing the TNG uniforms too. As such, the DS9 uniforms came across just like newly-issued fatigues to me.
I always wondered how the uniforms would have changed if these ones had stuck around and/or been considered popular. It probably would have continued in the subsequent TNG movies, and been used on Voyager, while DS9 maintained their earlier jumpsuits. They would have thus been used in the "Homefront / Paradise Lost" two parter that saw Sisko transfered to Earth for a while, and we'd have had Avery Brooks in one of them... But then the more rough & tumble look of the older uniforms would have looked somewhat out of place when the Dominion War started up IMO... Mark
Personally, I like the concept of different unis for different types of assignment. It feels good because one would expect the crew on more "front line" assignments to wear something more formal, like the TNG uniform or even these abandoned ones, while the jumpsuit works for DS9 because it's an out-of-the-way assignment so a casual uniform variant makes sense (at least that's how it was conceived in the first few seasons). I was never keen on how First Contact "unified" the Starfleet look across everything, into that dull gray dirge. Nor did I honestly feel the Voyager crew should've been in DS9 unis from the beginning (I might understand Janeway relaxing the regulations and allowing the casual variant once they realize they're not getting home anytime soon, but I'd have expected more of them to be wearing a TNG style in the pilot episode at least -- unless the fact that the Badlands/Maquis assignment is as far from the center of action of DS9 is, hence Voyager being docked there in "Caretaker", in which case it makes sense?).
My guess is that they simply thought the new uniforms didn't look good. See next. You hit the nail on the head. It was as if these uniforms (and the AGT future uniforms as well) were designed by an 80 year old man who thought the "pants hiked up to your armpits" look was actually stylish. Honestly, the crew of Voyager should have ditched wearing the uniforms completely. They should have gotten as far away from "Starfleet" as they could have, and made the living situation on the ship much more casual and civilian, seeing as how they may have had to be a generation ship.
It was Janeway's call from the start of their trek home that the Voyager's crew would be a Starfleet crew and would uphold themselves to that standard. The use of different rank insignia for some former Maquis members was probably done more to denote provisional authority granted by Janeway more than anything else.
Oh, I know that. My point was that it shouldn't have been that way. That choice made the show no different than TNG.
But that was really the point. VOY was trying to get people who may have been turned off by DS9 ("I can't relate to it--it's too different from TNG").
I have a hard time believing that was the case. But even if it was, the whole point of Voyager being stuck in an unknown region of space was so that they could tell whatever type of stories they wanted without the usual Trek cliches of the Federation, Klingons, Romulans, etc. That didn't happen, of course. There was little about VOY that was any different than TNG. But that wasn't the intention.
Believe it. Never underestimate the ability of Trek fans to complain about something. The intention was merely to create a Star Trek show for the then fledgling UPN network (a no-brainer given how popular TNG was at the time). As DS9 was set on an alien space station, VOY was developed around the more familiar idea of a Federation starship exploring the unknown.
Piller even before the show premiered talked about how the ship might be a generational ship, and Taylor talked about how the crew was going to be more of a family than a crew. I think the creators definitely had more ambitious ideas than UPN ever agreed to. The big failure of VOY was entirely the fault of the creators, and it's such a basic mistake it's hard to believe no one caught it. They spend part of TNG and DS9 the previous season introducing a group of characters called the Maquis who would, it was believed, inject some character conflict into VOY. So in the VOY premiere episode, they reintroduce the Maquis and the situation causing the conflict with the Federation, and then... completely remove the source of the conflict(!!!) by sending both groups far away from the source of conflict, almost totally negating anything they were trying to do.
I think the whole Maquis thing was just backstory or the set-up for how this particular crew got together, but wasn't the main premise for the show.
The producers intent was to use the Maquis to inject some sense to interpersonal tension into the show, since it had been established that a fully-functioning Starfleet crew would never behave that way. Of course, this idea was abandoned about three episodes into the run. I think realistically, the show could have started with a 100% Starfleet crew and the tension and disfunction building up as the years passed and life became more difficult as systems started to fail, similar to nuBSG. That Voyager remained so functional, made it seem silly that Starfleet stayed so close to home and wasn't already sending crews on deep, multi-year probe missions to other regions of the galaxy where interesting things may have been detected (which I guess was sort of the idea when TNG started, hence the families on board, but then they chose to also never venture too far from Earth).
Or any crew really. And for good reason (although it was touched upon here and there throughout the series). The original mission of the Maquis was to fight off the Cardassians in the Demateralized Zone. Since that was no longer possible on a ship stuck on the other side of the Galaxy, well... That was pretty much what happened to the Equinox. But I think it was established that they had it much harder in the Delta Quadrant than the Voyager to begin with. To be fair, though, the Voyager's initial mission in "Caretaker" was to hunt down the Maquis, not to spend seven years in an unfamiliar part of the Galaxy with no Starfleet support. The fact that the ship survived her ordeals pretty much intact says as much about her crew as it does the ship herself. As far as the Enterprise-D, a case could be made that her missions were atypical of a Galaxy-class ship due to her status as the Federation flagship. It's also possible that as still a fairly young vessel at the time of Generations, her turn at a long-term deep-space exploration mission just never came.
It's very, very telling that it's a matter of written record that the Maquis were specifically created for Voyager, for this very purpose... yet it was Deep Space Nine which introduced them, and Deep Space Nine which got all the best mileage out of the concept. Because, surprise surprise, Deep Space Nine is the show set in the middle of Cardassian politics! It seems like a no-brainer now that the Maquis would be used more strongly in DS9 than in VOY, but it's very obvious that the intentions during VOY's conception were sadly beyond what the network (UPN) was willing to let them do. Now, if Voyager had been syndicated like TNG and DS9 were, that'd be a different story...
It wasn't nerdrage in general I was questioning. It was that VOY was a direct response to what fans (who had no real way of bitching to the producers) were apparently upset about with DS9. I doubt UPN cared what the fans wanted. There was more to it than that. Between the idea of the ship being lost in unknown space and the tension between the Starfleeters and the Maquis, there was supposed to be quite a difference from what we saw in TNG.
The uniforms do look a bit rubbish to my eyes, a somewhat unsuccessful attempt to do something a bit Wrath of Khan-ey, but not as good. I suspect, as others have said, that the "Not wanting to introduce too many new elements" was just the producers being coy/polite to the designer rather than going "And then we came to our senses and realised they sucked". As for what we do get, in theory it should work as there is indeed no reason for multiple styles of uniform to be in use as in real uniformed organisations (not even just military ones, I work for Tesco and we have about three variants). But because Trek is otherwise fairly ridged about how the cast of one show will wear the one uniform at all times with only minor variations (the odd jacket or stealth outfit), presumably for budget/ease of continuity reasons (TMP and the new films are the only ones to go to town with the idea and likely had more money for costumes than any other film/show) it can't help but look strange. [You could argue, as I think Worf does in DS9 at one point, that because the uniforms are made of SPACE fabric they can cope with the full range of temperatures and environments meaning you don't need more than one version. But even then, for times like when they go Borg hunting in Descent you'd think they'd have less stand out brightly coloured versions with some body armour] Especially the way its presented, it never comes over as people wearing the appropriate uniform for the right situation, they just gradually shift over to the new ones over the course of the film as if it is a formal uniform change rather than there being two types (I think Picard is the only one to change back to the TNG type after putting the DS9 one on). Which makes the lack of coordination on having the crew just all start doing it on the same day seem the odder (especially as the women seem to be stuck with the tighter TNG types, I wonder what motivated Picard to keep them in those?). Having to stick most of them in reused DS9 uniforms rather than specially made ones doesn't help either, Riker's is especially ill fitting.