It very much does.
Strange New Worlds' showrunners advise fans to write to Skydance and Paramount if they're interested in a "Year One" Kirk sequel series
- Thread starter Quinton
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Gawd, I hope not. The first go round was bad enough.
Yeah. There were people who said Trek got rebooted in 1979, 1987, and 2001, or would have if the word had been used that way back then.
Technically even Kelvin is arguably not a reboot, since it's canonically an alternate timeline within the existing Trek continuity, with Spock Prime providing continuity between the two.
Sometimes it takes awhile for a pilot to get picked up.
That's correct. It depends upon one's definition of 'reboot.' With both TMP and TNG, Roddenberry's idea was very much to start from scratch and ignore what came before them, or at the very least to have them connected by the thinnest of threads. Which, of course, was invalidated by future producers, who decided that it was all one and the same.
Yes, exactly. Roddenberry, like most TV producers back then, took a flexible approach to continuity and saw those both as what we'd call soft reboots, keeping the parts he liked but making changes in hopes of improving on the original's shortcomings, or getting rid of dated elements. I think if he'd stayed in control of TNG longer, it would have diverged more overtly from TOS and they'd be seen as different continuities today. But then the show gained producers who were also TOS fans, and they started tying back more to the original continuity.
Sometimes it takes awhile for a pilot to get picked up.
It took Strange New Worlds 55 years.
Regime change at the studio.It took Strange New Worlds 55 years.
There is also the possibility, however unlikely, that future showrunners or Trek IP holders will invalidate past works (i.e. 'decanonize' them), or at best relegate them to a separate continuity. As far as Star Trek is concerned, the only example so far of this type of thing is TAS, where it originally was meant to be a continuation of TOS albeit as a kid's show. Then its 'canonical' status wavered in and out over the next 50-odd years, and to be quite honest I'm not even sure how it is officially viewed. Is some of it canon? Is all of it canon?
It all happened but details can be overwritten at any time. Robert April's appearance being the most famous.
It was never officially out of canon. Roddenberry had no real authority over the shows when he issued the memo "decanonizing" TAS, and it was only ever binding on tie-ins and reference books, whereas the shows did occasionally slip in the odd reference to the Klothos or Edosians during the era of the fictitious "ban." At most, there was a period when Paramount's ownership of it was uncertain and they preferred to stay agnostic about it, but that was resolved decades ago and now it's treated as part of the whole along with everything else, as proven by the TAS elements we've seen showing up in Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds.
And there's no "some" or "all" with canon. Canon doesn't refer to individual parts, just the collective whole. A canon is a set of stories that pretend to represent a shared reality, even when the occasional episode or scene is contradicted or ignored by later ones. There are parts of TAS that have been contradicted, but there are parts of other shows that have been as well.
As I said, it's up to whoever owns the Star Trek IP as to what is 'canon' or not. In the Macross continuity, Macross II was 'canon' and officially the sequel to Super Dimension Fortress Macross until the people in charge of making the new sequel Macross Plus decided that II was no longer part of the continuity they were creating. Yes, it's still a 'work,' but it was relegated to a parallel timeline (i.e. it's invalidated and no further works will be made in its continuity.)
And again, there is the possibility, however unlikely, that Skydance may say that a previous Trek series is no longer canon. I seriously doubt that will happen, unless they want to go the Kirk/Spock/NCC-1701 reboot route yet again and want a clean slate.
The appearance of what seems to be the city of ShiKahr in the new VFX for TOS-R "Amok Time" seems pretty indisputably to have been a live-action rendition using CGI of its TAS appearance.
Yes, but that’s not necessarily proof that all of TAS is canon. Just like how PIC used some STO ships doesn’t mean that STO is now canon.
I only write to Paramount skydance for remasters.
I suggest anyone who wants those do that as well.
If it worked for Kimmel, think it can work for DS9 and Voyager?LMAO.www.paramount.com/contact-us
I suggest anyone who wants those do that as well.
If it worked for Kimmel, think it can work for DS9 and Voyager?LMAO.www.paramount.com/contact-us
That's a common misconception. "Canon" is not an official seal of approval, it's just a term of criticism to refer to a complete body of works. The output of the original creators or owners is the canon, automatically, by definition. In most cases, creators and studios never even think about the word "canon," because it's a word used mostly by fans and critics. It describes what something already is, rather than making it what it is. Canon is not synonymous with continuity, because there are plenty of canons that play fast and loose with their internal continuity, like Marvel Comics with its perpetually sliding timescale.
And yes, some canons' creators choose to alter their continuity or disregard parts of their past. But they don't do that by removing some official seal or sticker that says "This is Canon," because there ain't no such animal. (Also because "canon" is a noun, not an adjective. It's "canonical.") They just do it by deciding they're not going to count that part of the story.
Which means it is still part of the canon, the comprehensive body of works. It's just not part of the main continuity.
Also, things like that are the exception, not the rule. They do not mean that every work of canon needs to be somehow officially designated as "Canon" by some hypothetical authority. As a rule, creators just create things, and the complete set of their creations in a given series or continuity is described by outside observers as that series's canon. Usually the definition of a canon is far more straightforward than fans want to make it, except in those rare cases where a series's continuity is retroactively altered, or where tie-in works that would normally be apocryphal by default are alleged to be part of the canon. Those are exceptions that fandom mistakes for the rule.
Why would that be the studio's decision? Studios are run by businesspeople. Skydance is basically a financial company that makes money by buying up media companies. I doubt in-story continuity matters to them one way or the other, as long as they make money.
The only time a business consideration ever had any influence on how canon/continuity was approached was when Paramount was agnostic about TAS for a while because they didn't own it. But now they own everything. The movie and TV studios were merged back together, so presumably they have full access to Kelvin, which is why they were able to reference it starting in Discovery season 3.
That's just semantics, and it's not like you aren't understanding the point I'm making. It doesn't matter what the word is. "Canon," "Official," "Continuity"...whatever you want to call it. I'm referring to the idea that at any time, whoever is controlling the IP can declare that a past work is no longer valid.
I explained that with my Macross example. If a past work isn't in line with whatever they are making presently, then they can declare that past work invalid and not part of the present continuity.
Now as far as Star Trek is concerned, the trend I'm seeing with CBS/Paramount is that they have no interest in making a blanket statement that, say, TOS is no longer valid and the DSC/SNW 'universe' is now the 'correct' one, and instead are going under the proclamation that it's all the same universe (it just looks different on the surface despite other fundamental differences), and that it all fits together seamlessly even though it really doesn't. JJ Abrams also made sure to point out that his films didn't 'erase' TOS, albeit for different reasons than CBS.
The original reason why CBSAA wanted DSC advertised as taking place in the 'prime' universe was to distinguish it from the Kelvin Timeline films running at the same time, so as not to confuse the audience into thinking the show also took place in that timeline. Now this is just my opinion, but I think the real reason why CBS/Paramount wanted their audience to know that it's all the 'prime' universe now, is because they don't like the term 'reboot' and felt the need to link their shows to TOS because the audience wouldn't care enough about the show if they thought it took place in yet another timeline (i.e. they didn't have enough faith that their own show would be able to stand on its own without making sure the audience knew it was part of the 'prime' timeline, which to me is now just a meaningless buzz word.) And I'm sure CBS/Paramount also didn't want to invalidate past works because they still want people to buy that media. Big West doesn't care if people no longer buy Macross II DVDs/Blurays.
As to what Skydance will do? Who knows. By next year SNW will be concluding and we'll get at least one season of SFA before we'll see anything SkydanceTrek-wise. Maybe they'll just have the producers continue on with SFA and focus more on the theatrical aspect of Trek, which they've pretty much all but stated already. Maybe we'll only get that first season of SFA and then the regime change will kick in and we'll get zero Trek on TV for the foreseeable future. Or maybe they will come up with some new idea for a TV show that has nothing to do with CBSTrek.
I will say this: I sincerely doubt we're going to get Year One, Legacy, President Archer or any other schlock we've been hearing these guys wishful-thinking about.
"Controlling the IP?" You keep talking as if this is some official doctrine handed down from the corporate office. No. They don't care about in-story continuity, they care about making money. They only care if people buy tickets or turn on a show, and despite the preoccupations of hardcore fans, most people in the general audience don't care what version of a continuity a story is in as long as it has the characters they enjoy and tells an interesting story.
Decisions about in-story continuity are the purview of the writers, producers, and directors, not the executives they report to. Canon is not some official doctrine handed down from an Office of Canon. That's a complete delusion invented by fans who take a descriptive shorthand term way too seriously. Canon is simply the result of the creative choices made by writers and filmmakers. The storytellers decide what form the story takes and what continuity elements it includes. That therefore becomes the canon, because "canon" is just a vernacular term for the complete body of work or the fictional reality it currently purports to represent.
And I explained that that's an exception. The normal rule is that creators just create stuff and we call that the canon as a convenient nickname. Fans insist on overcomplicating a very simple question by insisting that the unusual, exceptional cases where canonical status is ambiguous are required to be treated as the template for everything else.
Again this bizarre assumption that that's the executives' decision rather than the storytellers' choice. Look: It's normal in the history of series fiction for storytellers to treat a continuity as mutable and just pretend it's consistent. Look at the Universal Frankenstein movies, where the location of Dr. Frankenstein's lab changed in every sequel. Or the Planet of the Apes movies, where none of the first four movies was made to allow a sequel and thus they had to rewrite the continuity every time to justify making another movie. Or the Alien Nation TV series, which reworked its continuity as it went so that the pilot movie ended up being contradicted by most of its first and only season, even before the later revival TV movies tweaked the series timeline to compensate for the 4-year gap. Or the aforementioned example of Marvel Comics, where events originally depicted as taking place in the 1960s are traditionally assumed to be perpetually 10-15 years behind the present no matter how much time passes. Star Trek itself has plenty of examples, like The Wrath of Khan retconning Chekov into "Space Seed" and making Khan's followers inexplicably younger, or The Search for Spock claiming the Enterprise was only 20 years old at a point when it couldn't have been less than 38 (13 from "The Cage" to season 1 and 15 from season 1 to TWOK), or "Encounter at Farpoint" ignoring "Space Seed"'s third and last world war in the 1990s and bumping it forward to the mid-21st century.
The nature of stories is that they're just pretend, so it's always possible to change the details and pretend they were like that all along. Historically, this has always been far more the rule than the exception. And audiences used to understand that and go along with it. It's only since the advent of TV-show reference books and home video and show wikis that audiences have gotten fixated on exact details and become inflexible about continuity. But creators aren't just cataloguing someone else's story, they're creating their own, and that requires prioritizing the story's own needs over strict continuity with what came before. It isn't some executive doctrine imposed on storytellers, it's just the way that stories are naturally told. Continuity is a choice, not a mandate, and some storytellers choose to use it more rigorously than others.
This is not correct. They didn't put it in Kelvin for two reasons: One, the film and TV studios were separate businesses at the time, so CBS Television would've had to pay Paramount Pictures for the license to use Kelvin. Since it was CBS's show, naturally they were going to use their usual Trek continuity like they had with every previous series back when they were still called Paramount Television. (Of course, CBS was and is the ultimate owner of all Trek including Kelvin, and technically Paramount & Bad Robot were only licensing it from them, but it's like the situation where Marvel owns Spider-Man but still needs Sony's cooperation to make a Spider-Man movie because Sony licensed the exclusive film rights.)
And two, Bryan Fuller didn't want his show to be in Kelvin. He wanted it to be in Prime, the continuity he was a fan of and had previously written for on Voyager. His original desire was to do an anthology series where each season explored a different part of the Prime Timeline's history with different characters. The only thing the studio did was to nix that in favor of a continuing series and cast.
