• Welcome! The TrekBBS is the number one place to chat about Star Trek with like-minded fans.
    If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Question from New Guy

Hi everyone. I'm new to this whole Star Wars/sci-fi world. First off, how do I tell the difference between Star Wars and Star Treck? (One has the lazer swords, one has Dark Vader and such.) To be perfectly honest, they seem the same.
Oh, and when did they start actually using the lazer swords? I was watching the old series with Shattner and never saw them on the show, yet in the movies (which I've never seen, lol) they have them. Is there a reason for this? Was it something the creators added into the story AFTER the original show ended, perhaps? (Those lazer swords are the coolest scifi thing ever, in my opinion.)
 
I'm amazed at the lengths people go to to try a joke that's been done a billion times. I really wish just once one of these would at least have some level of wit or humor to it.
 
I'm not joking. I really have been living under a rock with regards to scifi stuff. From my perspective, it seems like one big blur of soundbytes and discconnected images and concepts randomly slushed together in popular culture.

Can't a guy ask an honest question without being belittled?

Or would you rather me not know about scifi?
 
If you are serious, Google is your friend.

The "lazer swords" are in Star Wars.

The TV show is Star Trek.
 
Giving you the benefit of the doubt here. Don't make me regret it. On that basis, welcome. Do you mind if I ask why you're checking it out if you never had an interest before? Just seems odd for someone to come out of the blue with no real knowledge and sign up for a Star Trek bulletin board. It's not the first thing I would do. As mentioned, I'd check Google, do some on line reading, watch a few movies and episodes, and then jump into a discussion site. However, since you asked:

Star Wars: the lazer swords (light sabers), robots, the Force, Darth Vader, Yoda, Harrison Ford. Six movies with "Episodes" in the titles. Mostly based on action and science fantasy, concerned with "good vs. evil" and myth building. And marketing toys.

Star Trek: TV based, but had after-series movies. Kirk, Spock (guy with the pointed ears), and stories about exploration and commenting on the "human condition" and the like. Mostly character based stories, more concerned with plausible science over science fantasy. Aims higher in age and smarts for the most part. No music by John Williams. Has had many sequels, but no equals. Far as I'm concerned, anyway.

Really, the best way to find out the differences and if you like them is to watch them. Netflix has all you need.
 
Important to remember: Star Trek came first, by over a decade. Star Wars was named that because George Lucas wanted a title that sounded like Star Trek.

Star Trek is based on the concepts and tropes of prose science fiction of the 1930s-60s, with a number of noted prose SF authors writing for the original series. It's noteworthy for distilling those tropes and popularizing them for a mass audience. It's also somewhat influenced by the 1956 film Forbidden Planet, one of the classiest SF films of the era, with a story inspired by Shakespeare and featuring top-notch production values for its day. Its creator, Gene Roddenberry, tried to do something new for series television by making an SF show that was just as adult and naturalistic as any Western or cop show or medical drama of the era, striving for character realism in the scripts and consulting with scientists and engineers to help him build a plausible world. Although it's arguable how successful he was at achieving the desired level of believability, and his successors have not always cared as much about realism. The original TV series spawned an animated continuation, four live-action sequel TV series that all ran longer than the original, and eleven movies to date, the most recent of which is an alternate-universe reboot of the original series. There have been numerous novel, comic, and computer-game tie-ins which are not considered to have canonical status and are often not consistent with one another, although the longest-running line of tie-ins, the original novels which Pocket Books has published for the past three decades, have had an ongoing continuity for over a decade.

Star Wars is a pastiche of the fanciful space-adventure film serials of the '30s-'40s such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs's sword-and-sorcery John Carter of Mars adventures -- material that was more fantasy than science fiction and aimed at least as much at children as adults. Its creator, George Lucas, considers it "space fantasy" rather than science fiction. The original three films were meant to be simply light adventure romps, but the prequel trilogy made a couple of decades later was more serious and allegorical in tone, but less artistically successful. Those six live-action films are the core of the universe's canon, along with the current CG-animated series. There are numerous other tie-ins, including a few older traditionally-animated series, a long-running comics franchise, and books that were initially intermittent but have become far more frequent and interconnected in the past couple of decades as an emulation of the Star Trek novel line; these are treated as "canonical" in the sense that all tie-in authors are expected to treat every other tie-in as "real" even when they contradict each other, but the movies and TV series are free to contradict them, so they're not really canonical.

At its heart, Star Trek is a narrative about exploration, idealism, the embrace of reason over brute force, the idea that enemies are more often misunderstood than evil, and the humanistic principle that intelligence and dedication can surmount any challenge and build a better future. Star Wars is a narrative about epic warfare between absolute good and evil, mystical forces of destiny, and the moral superiority of nature over technology, with the exception of the occasional funny droid sidekick. They couldn't be more dissimilar at the core. Although later Star Trek films and shows have been influenced by Star Wars' flashy, action-driven style in a lot of ways.
 
5489009611_027812ae84.jpg
 
In Star Wars, Luke and Han both have a thing for Leia..
In Star Trek, Kirk and Bones have a thing for Spock.
 
No, you're thinking of the Whoniverse. That's the one with the space station and the religious overtones too..
 
If you are not already a member then please register an account and join in the discussion!

Sign up / Register


Back
Top