According to The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Roddenberry approved of the ideas the series was based on. But you're right, he passed before the series filmed.
TAS: why not canon?
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According to The Making of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Roddenberry approved of the ideas the series was based on. But you're right, he passed before the series filmed.
Absolutely.This was exactly the point I made earlier about why TAS compares favourably in context of other cartoon adaptations.
TAS was a jewel in that crown--including adaptations from other animation houses. Somehow, Filmation's producers wanted to work with Roddenberry, et al, in respecting the source, while The New Adventures of Gilligan, My Favorite Martians, M.U.S.H. and other efforts were cheap attempts to cash in on popular concepts. It is no wonder of the Filmation TV adaptations, only Star Trek was treated as something deserving more than its Saturday morning slot.
Yes,...unlike TAS, to this day, no one even gives a thought about My Favorite Martians being a part of the the original series' canon. The same applies to Fantastic Voyage, Lassie's Rescue Rangers or The Brady Kids as they were so far removed from the source, you would be too kind to label them "in name only" productions.
It is clear the other adaptations were not trying to honor the feel, characterizations or general creative directions of the source material.
That is an essential point: before the series debut, Fontana promised convention audiences that TAS would respect TOS, as she (and Roddenberry) understood they were dealing with innumerable adult fans who wanted TAS to be a serious continuation of TOS--not just cloning the name and trappings of the live action version.
Considering the changes that got made to the majority of animated adapations of live-action material, we definitely "dodged a bullet" with TAS being so relatively accurate to TOS.
True. Aside from the list of series mentioned yesterday, it would be easy to add more failed adaptations to the junk pile of deservedly forgotten spin-offs. On the other hand, the "TAS: why not canon?" debate has been active for decades, which is a testament to its standing as a serious chapter in the ST in-universe chronology.
This thread should prove just how nonsensical this obsession with canon is. It's accepted as canon, it's not accepted as canon, then it's accepted as canon again. At no time during all that did any of the content of the series change.
No one. It's a mistake to think canon is something decreed by authority.
We need a "d'oH!" icon for me.
Christoper said:
Michael Bell was one of the voices that seemed so iconic to me in heroic cartoons. He had this voice that sounded like the "square jawed hero" of sorts. He voiced Cyclops (I think) in the one-off Xmen cartoon that never got off the ground, Bruce Banner in the NBC Hulk cartoon, and I think one of the Joes in the 80's GI Joe cartoon.
I really liked the animation in Batman TAS, and the other series that followed (Superman TAS, Justice League and Justice League Unlimited).Christopher said:
I really thought Filmation had some great moments of animation throughout their late 70's/early 80's cartoons.
Tarzan and Batman had some really nice, fluid animations at times. I loved the space fights in Flash Gordon (when Ming's ships would fly with such fluidity...and the glow effects on their thrusters and ray beams...that was cool.) He-Man and the Masters of the Universe also had some very good animations, even if the stories were wince-worthy.
Christopher said:
I think, for me, I liked the pacing of the story. Also, how Rambo seemed to have finally found peace for himself, only to have it turned upside down when the missionaries failed to heed his advice. I'll admit, it seemed rather kitzschy (if that's the right word...let alone spelling...lol) that the chick was the one who managed to convince him to take them into Burma...but at least they didn't resort to her using her "feminine wiles" to do so. She pleaded a good case, certainly much more eloquently than her often self-righteous hubby who led the mission. And then, The White Shadow shows up and informs him that his people lost contact with the mission, and they need Rambo to take a mercenary team in to search for them. I also liked how the leader of the mercenary team tried to be all "typical tough bloke", but at least he didn't shirk when he was captured and tortured by the Burmese army.
But again, the big sell for me about this was that this time, Rambo was not the "one man army/unstoppable killing machine" he was in 2 and 3. I thought it was fitting in the first movie that he said to the sheriff: "Don't push it! Don't push it or I'll give you a war you won't believe!" and Trautman's line of "If you're sending that many people against John Rambo, don't forget one thing: ....a good supply of body bags." That was fine to establish that Rambo was one not to be trifled with....but Rambo 2 and 3 seemed to push that a bit over the top. The fourth film seemed to hearken back to the original's take, but this time, he didn't work alone as a matter of circumstance. You could see that Rambo was obviously way older, and that, whilst certainly capable, was not quite as spry as he used to be.
The ending of the movie really brought it home for me....it seemed to end as the series started: John Rambo, coming home after long years away in a living hell, just wanting to make peace with himself and become a human being again. And hearing Goldsmith's theme underscore the moment was beautiful.
If I were to rate the four films from best to worst, it'd have to be:
First Blood (simply because it wasn't too over the top, and it establishes Rambo)
Rambo ( especially the extended cut known as John Rambo)
Rambo First Blood Part II
Rambo 3
Nobody determines it. It's not a seal of approval, it's simply a description. Canon means the stories told by the creator or owners of a franchise, as distinct from the subsidiary stories and pastiches told by other creators. Saying that what the creators themselves make is canon is simply a matter of defining a synonym. It's a statement of identity, not a declaration of worth.
The problem is that when Roddenberry and Arnold issued that memo clarifying what was and wasn't canon, they created the false perception in fandom that canon was something that had to be formally defined by an authority, rather than something that just happens. That memo was the exception to the norm, but it was also the first time that the concept of "canon" had really become an issue that SF fandom was aware of, so it shaped fandom's perception of the term in a very misleading way. And it didn't help when Lucasfilm started misusing the word "canon" to describe their Expanded Universe tie-ins that we now know were never anything of the sort.
But canon is not something that only exists if someone formally defines it. The definition is a given: It's what the originators of the property create. Sometimes those originators may make a more active attempt to define the boundaries of their canon, but the canon still exists without that effort, because it just means their own stories. What you create is your canon. If you later choose to disregard or overwrite parts of it, then your canon evolves in response and those parts fall out of it. Their canon status is thus defined by the stories themselves, not by some formal ukase.
If there had been some actual episode saying that Kirk took the Enterprise back home and got promoted immediately after "Turnabout Intruder," then TAS would be out of canon. But since that didn't happen, and since elements of a number of TAS episodes have been referenced in later stories, that tells us that TAS is still part of canon. The stories define the canon, because the stories are the canon.
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True--the content did not change, and more importantly, the questionable reasons GR tried to remove it from canon no longer matter, despite his status as series creator. For example, Bob Kane and Bill Finger created Batman, but whatever they thought did not fit in later interpretations of the character did not matter--to DC, it was/is all canon until the publisher and/or editor decides to jettison certain stories, characters, etc.
The same applies to TAS; GR created ST, and wanted to erase TAS from ST continuity, but it was since incorporated in Berman-period series, so his flip flopping is just that: a flip flop having little bearing on the official recognition of TAS in other ST productions.
It may have been said before but I can see--standing in 1986 (or so) and contemplating a new ST series--a need to filter out some of the contradictory material that been published or aired since TOS was canceled in 1969. I mean you had FASA, Star Fleet Battles, FJ's stuff, TAS, the movies, assorted references and novels galore. Do you pick and choose? Or do you just ignore it all? Probably easier to do that latter.
^Well, that might make sense, except that Roddenberry was ignoring a lot of TOS too. Naturally they would've had no reason to be bound by tie-ins like the books and games, but excluding actual TV shows and movies was another matter.
Rodenberry worked on TOS and TAS (was executive producer) and in retrospect wanted to decanonise part of TOS and all of TAS.
So does every episode of DS9 get his royal blessing and is automatically canon even though he didn't see one episode of it. And every episode of ENT is canon even though GR never heard of it. Yet GR gets to pick and choose movies and episodes of TOS to decanonise and we're supposed to take it as gospel.
How do we know GR would have approved of episode of DS9 and I think we all know the episode(s) I'm alluding to.
I'm unhappy giving GR the whole say over star Trek when he didn't see half of it and sometimes his motives weren't altogether altruistic depending on his mood and money and who he was having a fight with at the time(he was human after all just like the rest of us).
Frankly I find TAS no less credible than the rest of Trek.
Of course not. Series fiction is an evolving thing. Canon is something that changes shape over time as its creators refine their ideas -- whether it's a single creator changing one's mind or a succession of creators bringing different interpretations. So the most current view of what's canon trumps earlier views. Roddenberry's view of canon ceased to apply in 1991. That was nearly half the lifetime of the franchise ago. Why are we still talking about it as if it's current events?
Actually I used to find it a huge continuity error that "Joker" had a holodeck-ish rec room a century before TNG treated holodecks as a novelty. But recently I thought of a way to rationalize it: Maybe the technology was still in prototype as of "Joker" (since we didn't see it during TOS), and after the near-disaster in that episode, Starfleet decided the technology was still too unreliable and dangerous, and it wasn't for another century that the stigma faded or the technology was deemed reliable enough.
Although, the Rec Room in "Joker" could only do environments, and not animate people/characters. So in that respect it could be considered an earlier, less complex version.
Yeah, but first-season TNG treated character-based simulations like Dixon Hill and Minuet as a recent breakthrough (although later Trek ignored that, with Janeway having been brought up on Flotter and Treevis holostories). And 90-some years between environments and characters is kind of a big gap.
Besides, it makes sense -- when a technology is new and untested, the first accident will make people wary and question the technology's value, possibly slowing its adoption. But once it eventually becomes more common and reliable, then the occasional accident won't have the same effect. Note how the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger caused the shuttle program to be suspended for years, but jet plane crashes around the same time didn't cause air travel to be suspended.
That's hardly an apt comparison, as the Challenger grounded a tiny fleet of vehicles all of the same type and airlines use many different kinds of aircraft which typically have long established operational records. Whole fleets of planes of a given model are routinely grounded when a major accident happens with one of them while investigators try to figure out of the problem was a one-off accident or a design issue.
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