Kirk never having sex with an Orion woman is thankfully something we can say that JJ Abrams fixed.
Question on Richard Arnold and his role
- Thread starter RonG
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This claim has been repeated multiple times before, so I'm going to reiterate (again) that Richard Arnold didn't do anything in particular to "popularise the term 'canon'" in Star Trek fandom (or anywhere else).
There are numerous debates/rants/references to "canon" in fanzines, The Best of Trek, and Usenet throughout the Seventies and Eighties before Arnold rose to any prominence--and, of course, the use of the term itself in relation to fiction comes from Sherlock Holmes fandom, already in widespread use decades before Star Trek existed.
Conversely, my searching through Usenet archives during a previous discussion about him on here showed no reference to Richard Arnold at all on any Star Trek newsgroup before 1989, when someone quoted from a print column by Peter David complaining about his editorial practices. The "canon" discourse had been underway for a very long time by then.
Well, he did for me. He started using the term in his column in the "Star Trek Communicator". Until he used it, I had only ever heard it used in the biblical sense, and (in articles I read much later) by Sherlock Holmes fans. And I ran a Trek club of over 1000 fans. No one used that term re Trek, at least in my experience, until Richard started using it. So, as far as I'm concerned, he did popularise the term for Trek fans.
So he further popularised a popular term.
I first met him in January 1984, when he was volunteering at Paramount and working as a bellhop at a hotel. He certainly never said the "c" word that visit. RA began scrutinising the tie-ins for the Star Trek Office in 1986 (novelization of ST IV), so I wouldn't expect to see references to RA on UseNet or GEnie until then, unless it was in regard to him running the Grace Lee Whitney Fan Club, or taking Trek fans on set tours.
His first appearance at an Australian convention was 1988, although I missed that one, and caught up with him again in 1989. He was certainly using "canon" in arguments about the licensed tie-ins at that convention.
Sorry, that post went screwy. I already tried to fix it once.
Not sure he was "underpaid". Well, when he was volunteering (up till 1986), I suppose. After GR's passing, RA became a consultant for companies preparing licensed Trek proposals. He also travelled the world presenting promotional slideshows at conventions for many years. He had to start charging committees an appearance fee because some of the actors complained that he was unfair competition to them by appearing at cons for free.
According to RA, these gigs ended up paying better than his official Paramount Archivist position (1986-91) and included much overseas travel.
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Yes. "Popularized" doesn't mean "invented," it means "made more widely known." Yes, Trek fans have always argued over continuity, and some probably used the word "canon" in the course of those discussions, but the actual word didn't become the obsession it is today until after the '89 Roddenberry-Arnold memo. Past fans may have used the label as a means to the end of discussing content, but now the label has become the fixation in itself, held up like a magic talisman that exclusively defines the worth of a creation rather than merely describing one aspect of it. And I do blame that on Arnold and his "my way or the highway" attitude toward continuity. It created the perception that canon is an authoritarian stricture defined by what it rejects, rather than simply a convenient shorthand for an original body of works as distinct from imitative and derivative works from outside creators.
Exactly. Which is why I originally said "(RA had not yet popularised the term 'canon'.)"
Exactly. Thanks.
TBF, there is an Americentric bias in the sources available to me, but Usenet (and the letter column in Starlog, another contemporaneous source I didn't mention earlier) also had international contributors. I can't speak to the history of Australian Star Trek fandom, but I'm trying to stick to that which can be documented rather than relying on our own faulty memories.
Nevertheless, what you described about Australian fans rejecting novels in the wake of TMP is still a complaint about what we presently call canonicity, even if that wasn't the term they were using at the time.
The question of when and how "canon" has been used in the history of this fandom (and others) is honestly really interesting to me, albeit beyond the scope of this thread...if I had more free time (or someone were paying me
), I'd make more of a research project out of it and pin down the chronological specifics more precisely. Maybe Fanlore will do something like that someday.As I said, I couldn't find a Usenet reference to him in any context at all before someone posted excerpts from PAD's published complaints about him in (late) 1989.
...by which time (as I've pointed out) that term was already being used for those arguments in many fandom contexts that we can look back on now, without any evident connection to Arnold and whether he was or wasn't using them. Similarly, his use of them in a magazine column started in the Nineties really doesn't give him any credit/blame for its popularisation when it was already very widespread by then.
IOW, I think you're putting the cart before the horse--Richard Arnold used the term "canon" because it was well-known and widespread, not the other way around.
I still maintain, though, that modern fandom has become obsessed with the label to a far greater extent, and that Arnold's methods and the '89 memo played a role in creating the myth that canon is some kind of official designation that has to be assigned to a work by some nebulously defined studio department (I've actually talked to people who were surprised to learn it isn't), and that dictates in some authoritarian manner whether fans are allowed to enjoy it, rather than simply a convenient shorthand when discussing continuity questions. I.e. it used to be treated as a descriptive term, but after Arnold it came to be perceived as proscriptive.
The only problem with writing/English courses is when the teacher gets more obsessed with their rules than with the actual quality of the students writing. Obviously you need to understand the mechanics of the writing process, but some teachers get so carried away with all of the rules that you can't really get creative. Sometimes the best stories are the ones that break the rules.
When Gene Roddenberry died, Arnold lost his job, and the news spread rapidly online. Compuserve's Trek forum was one of my online hangouts at the time, and I remember the rejoicing among the novelists and the novel fans.
As has been mentioned, his Star Trek Communicator column allowed him to rant and rave at fans for incorrect thought. I don't remember ever reading one of his columns that didn't take some kind of shot at tie-ins and their fans, or some other general jackassery. It's one thing not to suffer fools gladly, it's another to gladly call people fools, and Arnold was more of the latter.
His roots in Trek fandom do go a fair way back, though, A few years ago I flipped through my one copy of the Star Trek Welcommittee's Directory of Star Trek Organizations (the "Yellow Pages of Star Trek Fandom") from 1976, and in the section listing people looking for fannish pen pals, there's Richard Arnold of Burbank, California. Seems reasonable to assume it's the same guy.
As has been mentioned, his Star Trek Communicator column allowed him to rant and rave at fans for incorrect thought. I don't remember ever reading one of his columns that didn't take some kind of shot at tie-ins and their fans, or some other general jackassery. It's one thing not to suffer fools gladly, it's another to gladly call people fools, and Arnold was more of the latter.
His roots in Trek fandom do go a fair way back, though, A few years ago I flipped through my one copy of the Star Trek Welcommittee's Directory of Star Trek Organizations (the "Yellow Pages of Star Trek Fandom") from 1976, and in the section listing people looking for fannish pen pals, there's Richard Arnold of Burbank, California. Seems reasonable to assume it's the same guy.
I don't believe much of what Richard Arnold says, but I do believe that his behavior toward the licensed properties mirrored Gene's attitude, even if Gene didn't sign off on every little thing he did. Gene's decree that only filmed Star Trek counted as "canon" was something that the guys making the movies had been informally operating by anyway. It's not like Harve Bennett's assistant ever came running into his office with the latest Pocket novel like "Oh my god, Harve, the entire second act of our movie is undone by Pawns and Symbols! We've gotta rewrite!"
The somewhat-interconnected novels, comics, and roleplaying sourcebooks of the 80s had created kind of an alternate Star Trek universe, one that Gene didn't have control over. And I believe that irked him, especially after having creative control over the movies ripped away from him after TMP . He didn’t just impose an Official Star Trek Canon Policy to serve as a guideline for writers on TNG. He did it to expunge from the Star Trek universe those elements that other people had created without his input. It was his way of hiking his leg and marking his territory. So while it's true that Richard Arnold was a jumped-up gofer who acted like someone promoted him to God, I really do believe that he thought he was doing what Gene wanted. He was kind of the Mike Pence of Star Trek.
The somewhat-interconnected novels, comics, and roleplaying sourcebooks of the 80s had created kind of an alternate Star Trek universe, one that Gene didn't have control over. And I believe that irked him, especially after having creative control over the movies ripped away from him after TMP . He didn’t just impose an Official Star Trek Canon Policy to serve as a guideline for writers on TNG. He did it to expunge from the Star Trek universe those elements that other people had created without his input. It was his way of hiking his leg and marking his territory. So while it's true that Richard Arnold was a jumped-up gofer who acted like someone promoted him to God, I really do believe that he thought he was doing what Gene wanted. He was kind of the Mike Pence of Star Trek.
More than that, it's simply the definition of canon. Canon just means the original body of works as distinct from derivative works, licensed or otherwise, by outside creators. And creators of original works have never been bound to follow what derivative works have done (although they have occasionally borrowed elements of them by choice, e.g. when Superman comics adopted Jimmy Olsen and Perry White from the radio series). That wasn't a "decree," just a clarification for people who mistakenly assumed that the novels were authoritative.
Although the fact that he and Arnold were insecure enough about the competition that they felt the need to bother issuing a formal clarification helped create the misconception that "canon" was some kind of official decree or doctrine rather than just a descriptive label.
He's mentioned in several early issues of Starlog as one of the LA fandom contacts helping to gather fans for the rec deck scene in The Motion Picture. His mother, Denny Arnold, also gets a shout-out in Harlan Ellison's (scathing) review of TMP.
One of the ironies in how Richard Arnold served up jackasserole to tie-ins and the people who like them is that the definition of Star Trek canon which he considered his solemn duty to protect would itself be considered strange by much of fandom today. Here's how he defined it in a 1991 interview with Tim Lynch:
That standard is Richard Arnold (and Gene Roddenberry, implicitly) clinging to the singular-creator ("Word of God") model, whereas Star Trek was (arguably always) operating on the collaborative ("Supreme Court") model.
Nevertheless, I think these aspects of fandom discourse were always going to become more prominent as the Internet itself became more widely adopted and the general public became aware of them, even if Arnold had never gotten a paycheque from Paramount. It would be like trying to trace the rise of cosplay back to a specific costumer.
His mother, Denny Arnold, was very active in early fandom. When I became aware of fandom in 1980, Richard was running the Grace Lee Whitney Official Fan Club.
It sounds like the issues came in when Arnold (and presumably Roddenberry) started interfering with tie-ins, such as telling them not to link to other books or create continuing stories. It sounds like they really curtailed the freedom of the tie-ins. As you noted, the on screen stuff was always the official source. But as long as the novels (and other tie ins) didn't contradict the canon or do something like kill off a main character I never understood why Arnold and co. felt the need to go any deeper into it.
I do find that interesting. Basically anything Roddenberry wasn't directly involved with on a day to day basis wasn't considered 'canon' in their eyes. Which is a bunch of BS. Paramount owned Star Trek so the 'canon' is whatever they said it was, not what Arnold thought it was. It's one thing I didn't care for in Roddenberry's character. He had some great ideas, and I loved his creation, but it always seemed he needed others around him to make it a reality. He struck me as the 'ideas' guy, and he even wrote some good stories too. But he just needed others to take care of the details. And later in life he seemed to get more obsessive about it all.
And it didn't have to be that way. Every show, movie, Hell, even every novel these days based on Star Trek has his name on it. That's something to be proud of. He will always be remembered as the 'creator'. That's something he should have been proud of.
Hmm. More than that, knowing how he felt about tie in continuity I wonder how he'd feel about the continuing litverse for the last 20 some years. Probably made his eyes bleed
I’ve always heard about the ‘89 memo, but never seen or read it. Does it exist for perusal?
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