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Spoilers Starfleet Academy General Discussion Thread

I am working on it! Ideas for Captain Cock and Mr. Spank takes time!
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I do get the argument that these shows ostensibly belong to a shared universe and that it'd be a courtesy to try to respect (or at least, avoid treading on) pre-existing works... but the Berman shows already fucked TOS over, and then sequentially fucked each other over.

It's best to just accept that all of them are standalone series with very thin connective tissue, and none can control or "ruin" any other. Hell, no episode can control any other, let alone series.

Well the Berman shows didnt mess with continuity near as much. They acknowledged that the tos enterprise looked like the 66 tos enterprise. They respected the source material as much as possible. Did they make mistakes? Sure. But kurtzman Trek has gone way beyond what Berman did.
 
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Well the Berman shows didnt mess with continuity near as much. They acknowledged that the tos enterprise looked like the 66 tos enterprise. They respected the source material as much as possible. Did they make mistakes? Sure. But kurtzman Trek has gone way beyond what Berman did.
Starting to get this vague feeling you just don't like Kurtzman era Trek.
 
Well the Berman shows didnt mess with continuity near as much. They acknowledged that the tos enterprise looked like the 66 tos enterprise. They respected the source material as much as possible. Did they make mistakes? Sure. But kurtzman Trek has gone way beyond what Berman did.
Berman was hated as much as Kurtzman is now, by a certain part of fandom that just seems to hate an awful lot. I was there during the VOY - ENT years, it was no different than it is now and claims that Berman was destroying continuity were rampant...

IMO, I think Trek has pretty tight continuity, and I think Kurtzman has done quite a lot to unify all the series instead of the opposite...
 
Well the Berman shows didnt mess with continuity near as much. They acknowledged that the tos enterprise looked like the 66 tos enterprise. They respected the source material as much as possible. Did they make mistakes? Sure. But kurtzman Trek has gone way beyond what Berman did.
It's subjective I suppose; the entire utopian project of TNG could be said to undermine TOS much more overtly than The Burn does - The Burn is a distant future event, but TNG is still within the lifetime of the TOS characters.

Also obviously WW3 is arguably a completely bananas thing to include which totally reframes TOS from "here's what humanity achieves if our better angels win out" to "here's what humanity achieves after nuclear war because of one lucky flight". DS9 is on another level - introducing S31 and revelling in backdating them to Kirk's era, carpet-bombing Betazed off-screen to raise the stakes in a single episode, reducing the Federation's technology down to WW1-era trench combat so they can do war film knockoffs...

Again I think the difference is that the Berman shows largely ignored TOS (and, to a great extent, each other) and didn't really care about things lining up, which ages far better than what the recent shows have done. TNG, DS9, and Voyager are all largely standalone shows trying different things and with their own identities, which ends up being far more durable than the Kurtzman era's endless callbacks, Memory Alpha bingo, and remixing of other people's ideas.
 
ell the Berman shows didnt mess with continuity near as much
Yes, they did. Awfully, and disregarded whatever they didn't like.

Klingons probably the worst. World War 3 changing completely was another one. Romulans another one.

ETA: @Starflight said it better, noting the huge different shift in tone from TOS to TNG, with TNG looking down on the past.
Starting to get this vague feeling you just don't like Kurtzman era Trek.
They do not. Kurtzman has personally burned all copies of TOS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT and ensured only his vision of Star Trek continues on. This BBS is the last bastion of preserving the only Star Trek that truly matter...The Final Frontier.
 
Did they make mistakes? Sure. But kurtzman Trek has gone way beyond what Berman did.
Giving Romulans cloaks and having Federation starships see them a century before "Balance of Terror" is a continuity snafu that goes far, far beyond anything that Kurtzman has done. By an order of magnitude. That was actually when I jumped on the "fire B&B" bandwagon. So you say that Kurtzman changed the look of the Klingons? What, again? Gave Spock a previously unknown sibling? What, again? Introduce potentially Galaxy changing technology that never gets mentioned again outside the context of its story? What, again?
 
He really wanted his own mark on star trek.
As well he should! As should any writer, artist and performer involved with a creative work. The goal is not to produce a version of Star Trek that‘s as close as possible to any previous version. Working as a creative is not like working on an assembly line where every item needs to be the same soulless product. Leaving your own mark on a creative project can be the very point why a creative person started out in that field in the first place.

But he'll never outdo tos or any of the Berman era.
I think you got it completely wrong. No-one‘s goal is it to “outdo” anything.
 
I wonder what a conservative thought when he saw this episode in the 1960s: "Wait, you are saying racism is bad? What?!?"

Incidentally, I'm asking the film makeup experts: Why does this photo look like, well, they've painted their faces, and in SFA it actually looks like their skin color?
 
Not a makeup expert, but my guess would be that in the 60s there just wasn’t any pitch black makeup available that didn’t glisten or look wet/oily under the harsh and hot 60s studio lights, whereas today they do have black makeup that looks completely matte. But there’s also more subtle things, like how the makeup looks imperfect on their lips, making the red skintones shine through. The same thing happens on the hairline, albeit more subtly. And I think it helps that for the new version of the makeup they also color the hair. What I don’t love about the way the makeup looks now is how there’s almost not definition on the dark side as it’s almost completely unreflective. Granted, we’ve only seen them as backgrounds aliens so far on Starfleet Academy, but should they feature one more prominently in the future, they hopefully make sure to light that side of the face accordingly.
 
I wonder what a conservative thought when he saw this episode in the 1960s: "Wait, you are saying racism is bad? What?!?"


Republicans understand satire. They know when they are being called out. They just dismiss the message being sent and will often subvert the message by finding something that speaks truth to them. Chances are Republicans back then would find comfort in the "both sides are equally bad" when it comes to racism in that episode.
 
Not a makeup expert, but my guess would be that in the 60s there just wasn’t any pitch black makeup available that didn’t glisten or look wet/oily under the harsh and hot 60s studio lights, whereas today they do have black makeup that looks completely matte. But there’s also more subtle things, like how the makeup looks imperfect on their lips, making the red skintones shine through. The same thing happens on the hairline, albeit more subtly. And I think it helps that for the new version of the makeup they also color the hair. What I don’t love about the way the makeup looks now is how there’s almost not definition on the dark side as it’s almost completely unreflective. Granted, we’ve only seen them as backgrounds aliens so far on Starfleet Academy, but should they feature one more prominently in the future, they hopefully make sure to light that side of the face accordingly.
Modern make-up also has the advantage of being able to be tweaked in post. I don't know if that happened here, but it's at least a possibility.
 
Modern make-up also has the advantage of being able to be tweaked in post. I don't know if that happened here, but it's at least a possibility.
True. I was surprised to learn that they desaturate the inside of Gina Yashere’s mouth digitally in post. Knowing that they went to the trouble of doing something as subtle as that makes me believe they totally would fiddle with the dark part of the Cheron(ian) makeup as well.
 
True. I was surprised to learn that they desaturate the inside of Gina Yashere’s mouth digitally in post. Knowing that they went to the trouble of doing something as subtle as that makes me believe they totally would fiddle with the dark part of the Cheron(ian) makeup as well.
It can definitely come in handy for fixing a paintjob, you can patch any bits that get scuffed or just don't cover the skin properly. IIRC, they did that to Gaila in ST09 to fix a hard-to-get-consistent green skin all over.
 
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