The Enterprise...then and now?

[T'Bonz]

ST-One said:

IT. IS. NOT.

Despite meeting the criterions for being considered canon.

I must disagree. It aired, it's canon.

There are plenty of Trek things that aired and are canon that I'd prefer would not be, and plenty that should be canon (book stuff) that isn't.

The only real way to call something in Trek canon is if it aired.

No disrespect to Gene, but it aired and was therefore canon.
Even if it was a cartoon!

 

[Professor Moriarty]

I'm in the "little tweaking" camp, but the redesign won't stop me from enjoying Star Trek: The Reboot this Christmas--er, next May.

 

[Ryan Thomas Riddle]

Starship Polaris said:

EliyahuQeoni said: Forgive me for not giving a rat's ass what he said.

You're forgiven - I feel the same way about TOS-Onlies and most of GR's detractors on the Internet.

Leave the poor rat's ass alone! All we need is PETA to come in here and string us all up. Geez, as if we need anymore extremist on this board.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Smiley said:
I freely admit that I haven't analyzed the teaser for the design of the XI Enterprise. In fact, I've only seen the thing once.

Does it still have a saucer, two nacelles, and connectors in the familiar places? Does it look like it could be made in the 23rd century? How does it look traveling through space? Is it beautiful and inspiring? Is it treated with respect in the movie itself?

When I know the answers to these questions, then I will have a real opinion about the matter. For now, it's just so much useless rumbling.

Nothing in the trailer contradicts any of that, and much supports it.

 

[Warped9]

Starship Polaris said:

Smiley said:
I freely admit that I haven't analyzed the teaser for the design of the XI Enterprise. In fact, I've only seen the thing once.

Does it still have a saucer, two nacelles, and connectors in the familiar places? Does it look like it could be made in the 23rd century? How does it look traveling through space? Is it beautiful and inspiring? Is it treated with respect in the movie itself?

When I know the answers to these questions, then I will have a real opinion about the matter. For now, it's just so much useless rumbling.

Nothing in the trailer contradicts any of that, and much supports it.

Then we didn't watch the same trailer.

But this sidesteps what we're talking about. What I'm hearing here is that you don't care what the ship looks like as long as you're entertained. That's fine, but it doesn't address the issue at hand.

But I'm at the point of bailing now on this topic because few here seem to have a grasp of what's being discussed.

Frankly I don't give a shit what they do with the ship in Trek XI because it has sweet damn all to do with TOS beyond some familiar sounding references. They couldn't make contemporary Trek work and so now they're likely to piss on Star Trek's roots and pat themselves on the back the whole time.

 

[M'Sharak]

Warped9 said:

ST-One said:

Warped9 said:
If TPTB are changing the ship and if in conjunction they are indeed trying to establish Pike is the ship's first Captain then thats concrete that this has nothing to do with TOS. It's a restart and thats fine.

If I'm not mistaken, for all we know, Pike was the first captain of the Enterprise; Robert April is not part of the canon... yet...

TAS affirms GR's original idea that Robert April was the first Captain. And TAS is far more canon in my book then any Trek from the '80s onward. Also TPTB "official" chronology and encyclopedia--much of it compiled by the Okudas--affirms it also. And so if JJA is asserting otherwise then he's going against something thats been accepted for the longest time.

Even so that hasn't anything to do with the thread's initial issue: why can't the E's original look (with minor and very selective tweaking) work today? I argue it can, but then I can easily envision something done that so many can't seem to envision without actually seeing it themselves first.

Now, who's going through contortions?

 

[ST-One]

aridas sofia said:

ST-One said:

EliyahuQeoni said:

ST-One said:
Excuse me, but it was The Great Bird himself whe declared that only what is shown on TV or in a cinema is to be considered canon. Nothing else.

And TAS was shown on TV and therefore is "canon"

IT. IS. NOT.

Despite meeting the criterions for being considered canon.

In fairness, we keep hearing that "Roddenberry" said TAS was not canon. I have never seen anything with his signature upon it that confirms this, or a video of him saying it. I have read that his attorney Maizlish and his appointed übermensch Arnold were involved, and that Roddenberry himself was quite infirm by the time this supposed statement was made. I frankly don't know whether it was ever made by him, or was made in his name, or was made by him at the heights of his disagreements with the people responsible for helping him make TAS, or at the depths of his decrepitude.

In any event, the lack of clear provenance renders citing him as authority for the claim that the televised TAS, produced by some of the original people involved in TOS including Roddenberry himself, involving the original actors, and most of all, using many of the scripts intended for the unfilmed fourth season, is as worthy of the contempt leveled by any of the many fans that bandy about that term canon as if they'd found diamonds in a dung pile, to be similarly dung filled.

Then, would you take the Okuda's words for it?

TAS-elements can only become part of the canon when they are mentioned in the live-action parts of Star Trek (as it happpend with the city of ShirKahr)

 

[ST-One]

EliyahuQeoni said:
feh.. TAS was an officially produced and broadcast Star Trek television program. It is listed and treated the same as any other "canon" series on the official Star Trek website. Sounds pretty canonical to me.

Oh right, "Gene said.." Gene said a lot of things: Star Fleet isn't a military organization... TAS isn't "canon"... Star Trek V and VI are apocryphal.. Harlan Ellison had Scotty dealing drugs... and he apparently thought that the first two seasons of TNG represented good television. Forgive me for not giving a rat's ass what he said.

Yes, what does Gene Roddenberry have had to say anyway?
He just thought the whole thing up...

 

[ST-One]

Warped9 said:

ST-One said:

EliyahuQeoni said:

ST-One said:
Excuse me, but it was The Great Bird himself whe declared that only what is shown on TV or in a cinema is to be considered canon. Nothing else.

And TAS was shown on TV and therefore is "canon"

IT. IS. NOT.

YES. IT. IS!

...And you are irrelevant.

Why, thank you.

 

[Captain Robert April]

A couple of items.

1) Captain April is in the official chronology at Roddenberry's insistence, so any ruling about TAS is irrelevant in this regard.

2) This was covered more extensively over in the TAS thread in this very forum, but it would appear that the primary reason for GR distancing the rest of Star Trek away from TAS was primarily legal. Filmation was in the process of shutting down, and there was the matter of all those licensed characters and properties they'd been playing with since '66, including Star Trek, so for all concerned, until that lawyer infested mess was cleaned up, it was safer to just avoid any TAS references altogether. Nothing against TAS, it just wasn't legally prudent to fully embrace it at the time. It's not unreasonable to believe that Maizlish the bloodsucker and Richard Arnold mistook this approach as GR disowning TAS, but that doesn't make either of them right. After Roddenberry's passing, Berman's antipathy towards anything pre-TNG didn't help things, so we had to wait until he and his pet monkey Brannon had been shown the door before TAS could get the respect it deserves.

Now, however, everyone's been paid who needed to be paid, all the i's are dotted, the t's are crossed, and Paramount now has control over its animated progeny, and the writers had been sneaking in TAS references for years, especially on DS9 and Enterprise, so in every sense of the word, TAS is now canon.

God bless us, every one.

 

[TigerOfDarkness]

ST-One said:

Warped9 said:
If TPTB are changing the ship and if in conjunction they are indeed trying to establish Pike is the ship's first Captain then thats concrete that this has nothing to do with TOS. It's a restart and thats fine.

If I'm not mistaken, for all we know, Pike was the first captain of the Enterprise; Robert April is not part of the canon... yet...

Is there actually any evidence to suggest that they will say Pike is the first captain?

 

[ST-One]

Captain Robert April said:
A couple of items.

1) Captain April is in the official chronology at Roddenberry's insistence, so any ruling about TAS is irrelevant in this regard.

2) This was covered more extensively over in the TAS thread in this very forum, but it would appear that the primary reason for GR distancing the rest of Star Trek away from TAS was primarily legal. Filmation was in the process of shutting down, and there was the matter of all those licensed characters and properties they'd been playing with since '66, including Star Trek, so for all concerned, until that lawyer infested mess was cleaned up, it was safer to just avoid any TAS references altogether. Nothing against TAS, it just wasn't legally prudent to fully embrace it at the time. It's not unreasonable to believe that Maizlish the bloodsucker and Richard Arnold mistook this approach as GR disowning TAS, but that doesn't make either of them right. After Roddenberry's passing, Berman's antipathy towards anything pre-TNG didn't help things, so we had to wait until he and his pet monkey Brannon had been shown the door before TAS could get the respect it deserves.

Now, however, everyone's been paid who needed to be paid, all the i's are dotted, the t's are crossed, and Paramount now has control over its animated progeny, and the writers had been sneaking in TAS references for years, especially on DS9 and Enterprise, so in every sense of the word, TAS is now canon.

God bless us, every one.

No, it is not.
Using that 'logic' every book ever published about Star Trek (novels, stories and secondary literature) would have to be considered canon.
Which is NOT the case.

Paramount reserves the right to use any element from any of the Trek books and TAS, but that still doesn't make all the book and the entirety of TAS canon.

 

[ST-One]

TigerOfDarkness said:

ST-One said:

Warped9 said:
If TPTB are changing the ship and if in conjunction they are indeed trying to establish Pike is the ship's first Captain then thats concrete that this has nothing to do with TOS. It's a restart and thats fine.

If I'm not mistaken, for all we know, Pike was the first captain of the Enterprise; Robert April is not part of the canon... yet...

Is there actually any evidence to suggest that they will say Pike is the first captain?

No. What gave you that idea?
The point was, that in the official canon there is only one man captain of the Enterprise befor Kirk. And that is Christopher Pike.
There may have been others (I would really love it if April would finally be canonized [in the Trek-canon sens ]) but, as far as we KNOW, there were none.

 

[EliyahuQeoni]

Take a gander at StarTrek.com. They seem to treat TAS just like the rest of the Trek series. No indication at all that it has any sort of different status. It would seem that Paramount does consider it "canon."

 

[TigerOfDarkness]

ST-One said:

TigerOfDarkness said:
Is there actually any evidence to suggest that they will say Pike is the first captain?

No. What gave you that idea?

There seemed to be a feeling that XI would contradict the generally held view that April was Pike's predecessor and hence be in a separate continuity to TOS.

The point was, that in the official canon there is only one man captain of the Enterprise befor Kirk. And that is Christopher Pike.
There may have been others (I would really love it if April would finally be canonized [in the Trek-canon sens ]) but, as far as we KNOW, there were none.

I was hoping TAS would be canonised too.

Warped9 said:
In regards to the variations in the ship we saw throughout TOS, well we know what was going on and most fans have no problem getting their head around it.

Indeed, it is a bit disapointing though.

Stock footage of the pilot versions of the ship were used throughout the series to save money. Otherwise we would have seen the series producttion version only during the series after WNMHGB.

The interesting thing is that TAS does the same thing. Some of the animations in TAS are derived from the Cage configuration and some of the production version. That could have been fixed.

Then we get the TMP refit where you pretty much have to squint (because of the change in production standards) and think, "Okay, it's a refit of the same ship if you say so. I'll accept it."

I found that a bit of a sretch too, especially the interiors.

Now we get this thing that supposed to be set in the same Pike-Kirk era of TOS and it looks more TMP than TOS and it's sopposed to be the same thing? No fucking way.

If you can accept that the shots of the earlier versions of the Enterprise are really the production version, why not accept the XI version as another variation?

Oh, and for those who aren't interested in this subject and are supposedly just concerned about getting a "good" movie, good luck to you and look for the subject somewhere else. Because HERE we are concerned with talking about the Enterprise which happens to be a very significant element of Star Trek. That might not be significant to some folks who've come to accept Trek ships as just more disposable sci-fi hardware.

I consider the TOS Enterprise to be one of the most iconic SF space-ship designs. Personally I think it looked great in Airplane II and the same design could be used today, but yet another minor variation in the design doesn't seem that bad.
If a significantly different design was used, I think I would be disappointed, but the trailer appears to show something not too far away.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

Captain Robert April said:
1) Captain April is in the official chronology at Roddenberry's insistence

Nope. His suggestion, and the relevant explanatory text is this:

April is, of course, totally conjectural, but is being included at Gene Roddenberry's suggestion. Gene had used the character name for the ship's commander in his first proposal for Star Trek, written in 1964.

There's quite a gulf between "totally conjectural" and "canon."

On the subject of what's canon and not, the authors state:

In a related vein, this book adheres to Paramount studio policy (italics mine) that regards the animated Star Trek series as not being part of the "official" Star Trek universe...

The producers of the new "Star Trek" are at liberty to ignore April without violating official continuity ("canon").

 

[aridas sofia]

ST-One said:

Then, would you take the Okuda's words for it?

I'd like to read his recollections on the subject, and then decide.

 

[ancient]

canonical:

-canonic, basic, accepted, sanctioned, conforming.

In this case by whoever is making it, i.e. Abrams with Paramount's approval required. Not us, certainly not Roddenberry (He's dead now, it's out of his hands). They chose to decanonize TAS, period, end of discussion. Paramount tells us what is canonical and what isn't.

Now, if you want to say it's part of continuity you can argue it is, since nothing really contradicts it (yet). Or more correctly, it doesn't violate canonical materials yet.

 

[aridas sofia]

^ Whoa... the rationale quoted, IIRC was that Roddenberry stated it wasn't canon. That was what was being questioned, at least by me. Paramount can decide anything they damn well please with their franchise. But to support it with Roddenberry's supposed condemnation begs the question of just when he condemned it, and what were the circumstances. With that information one can either discount the story, or at the very least put the story in its proper context.

Whether or not Paramount considers it canon is beyond question. Whether their justification is valid is questionable.

 

[USS Mariner]

Here's some of my parallel commentary from the HobbyTalk topic:

Episode 1
Episode 2
Episode 3: (Guest starring Forbin as John P)
Episode 4: (Guest starring JeffG as Himself)
Episode 5: (Guest starring Captain Robert April as Captain April)