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Regarding canon: isn't it ironic?

Kirk's talked plenty of computers to death, but isn't Vaal the only computer god that qualifies under that? Maybe Landru if you stretched it, but he was more like a computer dictator.

I think Landru is more computer Muhammed or Jesus than Computer God but that's close enough to qualify I think.
 
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"Uh, guys...he's asking us if we have any Grey Poupon..."
 
A month and a half ago, I said, half-jokingly,
Last night, something about canon and about TFA (which I still haven't actually seen) torpedoing the existing SW novel continuity, occurred to me.

It would seem that the Abramsverse has expanded to encompass A Long Time Ago, in a Galaxy Far Far Away.
Well, now that I have finally seen SW:TFA, I would say that the ST Abramsverse and the SW Abramsverse are (as a certain old friend with yellow eyes would say) "more alike than unlike."
The ST Prime Universe and Abramsverse forked from a common continuity when Nero arrived in Geordie Kirk's era. Clearly the SW Novelverse and the SW Abramsverse forked from some so-far unknown event that had to have happened sometime after the deaths of Palpatine and Vader, some focal point in time that, one way, led to Han and Leia having three children (Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin, from the Novelverse), and the other way led to their having only one child (Ben, who became Kylo Ren). I will note that in both continuities, Han and Leia had one child who went bad.
 
I don't think it's entirely accurate to say "SW Abramsverse." Abrams is only responsible for TFA, not any of the other movies currently in development. Also, the decision to abandon the EU and start up a new continuity and canon was made by higher ups at Disney, not Abrams. I would be very surprised if Abrams even had input on the matter.
 
I don't think it's entirely accurate to say "SW Abramsverse." Abrams is only responsible for TFA, not any of the other movies currently in development.

Well, Abrams is producing the next two chapters in the trilogy, though he has no involvement in the Star Wars Stories anthology movies. But yes, it's totally misinformed to call it an "Abramsverse." Kathleen Kennedy, the new head of Lucasfilm, is the person in charge of the new wave of Star Wars movies; Abrams is simply one of the filmmakers she hired to make them, along with others including Lawrence Kasdan, Rian Johnson, Colin Trevorrow, Derek Connolly, Gareth Edwards, Gary Whitta & Chris Weitz, and Phil Lord & Chris Miller.

Also, it's not a continuity reboot like the Abramsverse, except where the tie-ins are concerned. It's a direct continuation of the original six films. It's not a reinvention of the universe and a recasting of its leads, it's an attempt to continue it as faithfully as possible with as many of the original players as feasible. There's just no legitimate comparison.

Also, the decision to abandon the EU and start up a new continuity and canon was made by higher ups at Disney, not Abrams. I would be very surprised if Abrams even had input on the matter.

Well, the decision to reboot Star Trek was probably made by CBS and Paramount to begin with. Once they hired Abrams and Bad Robot as the production company, they gave them carte blanche to reinvent it, but the decision to reinvent it in the first place was probably the studio's. The reason it doesn't work as an analogy is that changing tie-in novel continuity is a totally, hugely, completely different matter from rebooting the screen continuity. Tie-ins are a tiny sidebar to the screen works. They're read by 1-2% of the screen audience. No matter how much Lucasfilm may have made noises about them being "canonical," they were never more than an optional and expendable adjunct to the canon. Star Wars comics and novels were contradicted and overwritten many, many times over the years; it was just done case-by-case instead of wholesale. Most franchises that have tie-ins coming out while new screen works are being produced will have tie-ins contradicted and overwritten by new screen continuity; there's nothing unusual about that.

And when tie-ins are contradicted, it's because the canonical continuity is being added to, and what happens in screen canon automatically overrides anything else. It's in service to the original continuity, because tie-ins always follow the lead of the canonical continuity even when it means ignoring earlier tie-ins. So it's not at all the same thing as rebooting the canonical continuity -- in fact, it's pretty much the opposite of that. So there is just no legitimate comparison between the Star Wars tie-ins' reset and the Abramsverse reboot. What happened with the SW novels is more like what happened with Pocket's Star Trek novels and DC's ST comics when The Next Generation came along. The creation of a new, official continuation of the canonical universe meant establishing facts that conflicted with the conjectures of earlier tie-ins, and so the previous tie-in continuities had to be disregarded and new tie-ins written to be consistent with the newly expanded canon instead. The only difference is that Lucasfilm announced the change and carried it out more systematically, and that it attempted to bring the new tie-ins into the tent and keep them mutually consistent, rather than what happened with ST tie-ins in the '90s, when each book was completely standalone and unacknowledged by everything else.
 
Technically, the Joanna-character goes all the way back to the early script drafts of the third-season TOS episode "The Way to Eden," where Joanna was one of the space-hippies traveling with whom became Dr. Severin. This later got changed during rewrites to the Irina Galliulin character (former Chekov-paramour and Academy classmate), but the notion of McCoy having a daughter by that name persisted even into spinoff sources during later years.

Also, only onscreen elements are considered canon by CBS/Paramount; a comic book released back in 1980 or thereabouts wouldn't be.
 
The ST Prime Universe and Abramsverse forked from a common continuity when Nero arrived in Geordie Kirk's era. Clearly the SW Novelverse and the SW Abramsverse forked from some so-far unknown event that had to have happened sometime after the deaths of Palpatine and Vader, some focal point in time that, one way, led to Han and Leia having three children (Jaina, Jacen, and Anakin, from the Novelverse), and the other way led to their having only one child (Ben, who became Kylo Ren). I will note that in both continuities, Han and Leia had one child who went bad.

I'm pretty sure the alternate timeline gamble doesn't work here, because the differences include the backstory that would predate any hypothetical split (same issue with STO versus the novelverse). For instance, I'm sure that there's some Wookiepeidan who's secretly relieved that they won't have to shoehorn in yet another version of "how the Death Star plans were stolen" into their article because they all really happened. I'd say there's, at best, a 50/50 chance that Rogue One will reference an Operation: Skyhook as a nod to the fans, same as how Rebels had a place called Shantipole involved in building starfighters, but everything but the name was totally different.
 
IN this comic we are introduced to doctor mcoys daughter joanna this should be cannon!

Technically, the Joanna-character goes all the way back to the early script drafts of the third-season TOS episode "The Way to Eden," where Joanna was one of the space-hippies traveling with whom became Dr. Severin. This later got changed during rewrites to the Irina Galliulin character (former Chekov-paramour and Academy classmate), but the notion of McCoy having a daughter by that name persisted even into spinoff sources during later years.

Also, only onscreen elements are considered canon by CBS/Paramount; a comic book released back in 1980 or thereabouts wouldn't be.

Wasn't Joanna mentioned in one of the TAS episodes? So if we assume TAS is canon, then so is McCoy's daughter. Although I know that not everyone agrees with that particular assumption.
 
McCoy mentioned his daughter in "The Survivor", yeah, but not by name. So it's canon that he has a daughter, and Fontana and Kelley intended that daughter to be Joanna; she actually goes back even further than what Leto said, the two of them had talked about it after season one and her existence was added to the writer's bible between seasons. But her name was never actually stated on screen, so technically the name "Joanna" isn't itself canon, just the fact that McCoy had a daughter.
 
These last Posts are Great example of why this Franchise rules! Even after 30-40-50 years, there are still things for us to discuss, point out, like, dislike and Cannonate. The characters we know and love continue to intrigue and surprise and bring out new traits and angles!

All of our Worthy Posts contribute to the "...voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise."

5 Year Mission? Almost 50 Years and counting...

:techman:
 
These last Posts are Great example of why this Franchise rules! Even after 30-40-50 years, there are still things for us to discuss, point out, like, dislike and Cannonate. The characters we know and love continue to intrigue and surprise and bring out new traits and angles!

All of our Worthy Posts contribute to the "...voyages of the Star Ship Enterprise."

5 Year Mission? Almost 50 Years and counting...

:techman:

Well, I mean, I love Star Trek, and I agree that it's great, but wouldn't this be true for literally anything that's continued producing material for decades that meets a minimal standard of acceptability? It doesn't seem something specific to Star Trek, if something wasn't broad enough to support questioning and consideration it wouldn't last for decades. Like, it seems less necessarily an indication of quality above a certain level and more just a natural consequence of longevity. And I'm not sure I'd go so far as to say that every single franchise that survives for decades is automatically great by virtue of that fact. There's probably a certain minimum quality you'd need to maintain that level of interest, but probably something like a 7 out of 10-ish average would be enough to sustain a fandom interest in the long term.

I'm also not sure what intrigue and/or surprise you're referring to in the last few posts? Joanna isn't someone new; she's literally been part of the franchise almost since year one, just offscreen.
 
Thank you for your kind words regarding my Post.
Also, thank you for your words addressing my Personal Opinion.

If you would kindly read my Post again, you will read that I use the "Joanna" subject as example of the wealth of information we can all discuss and be interested in.

Even after almost 50 Years.

Here are some examples of shows that have run between 30 and 49 seasons.

As I look down the list, I do not see many shows that are still quoted, beloved, argued about, expanded upon, become part of the Social Lexicon, or continued with other iterations, and with their own Fora, as Star Trek has.


48 60 Minutes CBS September 24, 1968 present
46 Sesame Street HBO November 10, 1969 present 4,378
46 Monday Night Football ABC September 21, 1970 December 26, 2005 667
ESPN August 14, 2006 present
44 Masterpiece PBS January 10, 1971 present
41 Nova PBS March 3, 1974 present 698
40 Saturday Night Live NBC October 11, 1975 present 766
39 The Victory Garden PBS April 16, 1975 present
37 Austin City Limits PBS 1976 present
37 Live from Lincoln Center PBS January 30, 1976 present[3]
37 Live from the Met[4] PBS 1977 present[3]
37 Inside the NFL HBO September 1977 February 6, 2008
Showtime September 10, 2008 present
36 20/20 ABC June 6, 1978 present
35 Wall Street Week[5] PBS November 20, 1970 June 24, 2005
34 This Old House PBS February 20, 1979 present 786+
33 Firing Line Syndication 1966[6] 1971 240
PBS 1971 December 26, 1999
33 Mystery! PBS February 5, 1980 present
32 Survivor CBS May 31, 2000 Present 459 (at end of S30)
31 Nature PBS October 10, 1982 present
30 Frontline PBS January 17, 1983 present 520+

Source: Wikipedia and 5 other sources.
 
Almost all of those are news or educational programs, though; the only exceptions are Masterpiece and Mystery!, which are anthologies and so don't really qualify in this discussion, and SNL and Survivor, which absolutely have been influential in the common culture with people still discussing them and tons of commentary still devoted to them today. Not devoted message boards, sure, but that's because message boards honestly are kind of out of date on the Internet at this point in favor of more general interest forums like Reddit or more article/comment-type systems like AV Club. That's not really a sign of popularity so much as it is a sign of the shifting focus of the Internet over the years.

But anyway, I wasn't talking about single shows, of which Star Trek doesn't qualify anyway by the definition you give above, but multi-decade media franchises like Doctor Who, Star Wars, DC, Marvel, Final Fantasy, D&D, Zelda, and so on. Overarching sets of fictional narrative works all linked by a shared universe or thematic connections of one sort or another. (Which honestly neither SNL nor Survivor would fit alongside either, so nothing in that list is really relevant to what I was trying to say.) I do think they need to be good to survive the decades (I consider 7 out of 10 to be good, if that didn't come across properly), but I think that anything that lasts that long will naturally generate a ton of stuff to talk about purely by virtue of lasting so long.

And again, I agree that Star Trek is great. I'm just saying that any media franchise that's been relatively continuous for 50 years will have a ton of discussion topics generated as a result, even if it isn't great, but merely good enough to survive so long. :p
 
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And let's not forget soap operas like THE DAYS OF OUR LIVES or GENERAL HOSPITAL, which still have their own digests at the check-out aisle at you local supermarket.

As for SURVIVOR, um, surviving in pop culture, it was just the other day that Jeb Bush bitterly quipped about being voted off the island . . . :)
 
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