"They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon Bird

[trevanian]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

It would've been nice to see it go out all guns blazing, instead of getting off one phaser shot and firing a "full spread" of ONE photon torpedo!

Yeah, do we know what was up with that? Did ILM make a mistake with the opticals? Did they not read the script? I would assume the line "Full Spread" implies something more spectacular.

See, this is the thing. The Enterprise being taken down isn't really the issue. It's that she goes down in such a lame way. We'd already seen better battles on the TNG tv series!

I'm guessing the fullspread line was already there when it was decided to reuse TUC's BOP blast. So where would all the other torpedoes in the spread go, they'd have to animate those going through the stock shot?

 

[trevanian]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

And seriously, I'd argue that the big D is more suited for movies than television. For one thing, the ship is very wide so that would fit perfectly with the theatrical widescreen ratio.

The E is the one built for a widescreen look, the D is practically so squat it is 4:3 like TV was for so long.

Honestly, if GR hadn't castrated the nacelles on Probert's original concept, it would have probably been fine instead of something I have always hated.

 

[Grant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

You can also blame Rick Berman and Ronald D Moore for Kirk and Picard making eggs and riding horses. Braga wanted Kirk and Picard doing action hero shit on their respective ships against Soran. Listening to the GEN commentary you get the impression that Braga, Moore and Berman did not want to do what people expected, and instead strove to do things unexpected and off beat. It's outside of the box thinking yes, but sometimes the box is their for a reason.

In a way it was Jeri Taylor's fault because she was the one that actually encouraged them to do something off beat. Originally the introduction of the Enterprise was supposed to be heroic. We see the station get attacked by Romulans, suddenly the Enterprise sweeps in to save the day. Jeri Taylor then said "that's boring, you should do something more off beat and quirky, make it fun". Thus, our introduction to the TNG crew on the big screen is a holodeck program of the old sailing ship with everyone in costume. From then on, Moore and Braga kept up with Taylor's advice of going for the unexpected, off beat kind of thing. It's ironic, cause Beverly tells Data "live in the moment, do something unexpected" and when Data tries (pushing her into the water) it's a failure.

That's bugged me for years--ever since I heard the story!

Wait, so the script starts the movie off with a bang Ent-D vs. a Warbird (which was never done in the series) and then Taylor convinces them to ditch that and they come up with a F-ing BS holodeck scenario----a BORING holodeck scenario!????

Oh well, the movie's final ship vs. ship battle will make up for it!!

Uh no--no it didn't.

Why oh why couldn't they have at least used the new Klingon ship it took them 5 years to build??

Oh wait, they needed to reuse the Trek 6 explosion---that makes sense.

Double fail.

 

[Grant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

And seriously, I'd argue that the big D is more suited for movies than television. For one thing, the ship is very wide so that would fit perfectly with the theatrical widescreen ratio.

The E is the one built for a widescreen look, the D is practically so squat it is 4:3 like TV was for so long.

Honestly, if GR hadn't castrated the nacelles on Probert's original concept, it would have probably been fine instead of something I have always hated.

Yeah the super short nacelles and the super wide main section!! LOL. A ship nearly wider than it is long!

Attractive profile but ugly from so many other angles.

 

[SpHeRe31459]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

To be fair, most of Voyager's "needless" action came along after she was gone.

And was almost certainly due to increasing pressure from the UPN management to add more of it.

When you hear how clueless UPN's suits were by the time ENT rolled around it's pretty amazing anything of value was made in the Trek shows under UPN.

 

[Cyke101]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

You can also blame Rick Berman and Ronald D Moore for Kirk and Picard making eggs and riding horses. Braga wanted Kirk and Picard doing action hero shit on their respective ships against Soran. Listening to the GEN commentary you get the impression that Braga, Moore and Berman did not want to do what people expected, and instead strove to do things unexpected and off beat. It's outside of the box thinking yes, but sometimes the box is their for a reason.

In a way it was Jeri Taylor's fault because she was the one that actually encouraged them to do something off beat. Originally the introduction of the Enterprise was supposed to be heroic. We see the station get attacked by Romulans, suddenly the Enterprise sweeps in to save the day. Jeri Taylor then said "that's boring, you should do something more off beat and quirky, make it fun". Thus, our introduction to the TNG crew on the big screen is a holodeck program of the old sailing ship with everyone in costume. From then on, Moore and Braga kept up with Taylor's advice of going for the unexpected, off beat kind of thing. It's ironic, cause Beverly tells Data "live in the moment, do something unexpected" and when Data tries (pushing her into the water) it's a failure.

That's bugged me for years--ever since I heard the story!

Wait, so the script starts the movie off with a bang Ent-D vs. a Warbird (which was never done in the series) and then Taylor convinces them to ditch that and they come up with a F-ing BSD holodeck scenario----a BORING holodeck scenario!????

Oh well, the movie's final ship vs. ship battle will make up for it!!

Uh no--no it didn't.

Why oh why couldn't they have at least used the new Klingon ship it took them 5 years to build??

Oh wait, they needed to reuse the Trek 6 explosion---that makes sense.

Double fail.

Your post and your avatar go together *so* perfectly. Hat's off to you!

 

[Lance]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

I think the biggest mistake they made was leaving the TNG movies in the hands of the people behind the TV shows.

I've often thought this too. 1994 was the point where Star Trek was united under one banner. No longer were there seperate teams working on the movies independently of the TV show. In one way it made sense because it unifed the brand, but in another way it meant decisions were being made about the movies by "TV people" who were all so used to working on TV scripts, and they brought that kind of limited syndicated TV thinking along with them. It also meant that Berman and his teams were being stretched pretty thin, which had an impact on the TV material as well.

Say what some might about some of the TOS movies, they all had genuine ambition. The people who made them were thinking "bigger than TV", they were thinking the audience wanted something they couldn't just get on TV. I never felt that Berman's teams were working that way. They seemed to be just churning these movies out like they were all individual episodes of a TV show, trying to meet a predetermined quota for the season. The 'sausage factory' approach that is suited to television production... but these are movies, they've gotta be better than that.

I'd have rathered the movies were still put together by their own team, independent of the TV shows, who could be autonomous enough to make decisions for a movie audience.

 

[Maurice]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

And seriously, I'd argue that the big D is more suited for movies than television. For one thing, the ship is very wide so that would fit perfectly with the theatrical widescreen ratio.

The E is the one built for a widescreen look, the D is practically so squat it is 4:3 like TV was for so long.

Honestly, if GR hadn't castrated the nacelles on Probert's original concept, it would have probably been fine instead of something I have always hated.

What? Andy told me that the books have the caption backwards re the final design. He originally had the nacelles shorter, so that the pylon and nacelle would mimic the silhouette of the saucer and the neck, and Gene's two comments on the design were "make the engines longer and put the bridge on top".

 

[trevanian]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

The concept painting Probert did around the time of TMP (which is what I'm thinking of, the one I thought Gerrold took to GR) seemed to have really long nacelles, or that was the impression (it was a mostly front view.)

I remember talking to Probert briefly back in 97 and 98 and I do recall him saying that except for the STARLOG SPECIAL EFFECTS mag (#3 or #4), pretty much everybody had always screwed up the captions and order of illustrations on his stuff (we were mainly grousing about THE ART OF STAR TREK, no surprise there!), but I didn't think this was part of that mess-up. Was pretty sure the GR rationale for shorter nacelles was to indicate the ship didn't need big nacelles because it was already so powerful (more of a conceptual notion than an aesthetic one IMO.)

EDIT ADDON: doesn't look like the links are working for the TNG stuff yet on his site. On the home page, there is one batch of e-d concepts that all have shortish nacelles though, so maybe you're right.

When i bought the model kit, I tried putting the nacelles on backwards just to make the ship longer and I thought it was tons better. Then again, I thought it looked better upside down and minus the dish entirely, too.

Maybe I better check Probert's site ... I remember it had lots of TNG stuff on it at some point ...

 

[Maurice]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

Oh I see which image you are talking about.

As to the more refined plans, if the bridge superstructure is missing, it's older. That's the giveaway.

 

[Jeyl]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

Wait, so the script starts the movie off with a bang Ent-D vs. a Warbird (which was never done in the series) and then Taylor convinces them to ditch that and they come up with a F-ing BS holodeck scenario----a BORING holodeck scenario!????

Not to mention the fact that a good chunk of the budget was blown on the holodeck scene. They literally made richly detailed costumes for every TNG actor for this one 10 minute scene, but when it came to the actual uniforms that the cast would be wearing throughout the rest of the movie? Nope. Just make a new uniform for Picard and Data and have everyone else "borrow" uniforms from the DS9 cast. LeVar is pretty short so he should fit perfectly in Colm Meaney's uniform!

 

[Shat Happens]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

It's funny how everybody hates that stinking movie, but for different reasons.

It's been a while since I watched it, but one interesting part that came to my mind now is how extensively Kirk OWNS Picard -- in The Movie Where The Two Captains Meet At Last.

Picard comes to him with one of his trademarked speeches and he does not give a f*ck. Kirk doesnt stop for a second to listen to him, he makes Picard go after him all around the house, he makes Picard hold his kitchen utensils, he lets Picard talking while he enjoys the eggs, the thoughts about Antonia, the horse riding, he makes Picard ride a horse after him, and when he eventually he decides to go back (bad decision btw), it's not because of all the speech about duty and shit, but because it "sounds like fun". The only part when he bothers to acknowledge Picard is when the latter talks about heroics, and Kirk tells him to shut up because he wrote the book about Star Trek heroics when Grandpa Picard was still in diapers.

 

[Jeyl]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

It's been a while since I watched it, but one interesting part that came to my mind now is how extensively Kirk OWNS Picard -- in The Movie Where The Two Captains Meet At Last.

SFDebris talks about this in his review and brings up many great points. In the opening, Kirk manages to mount a rescue mission in an unequipped and understaffed ship, rescue 47 people from the doomed ship and sacrifice his life to safe everyone on the Enterprise B.

When we meet Picard, he is late in rescuing all but one survivor on the observatory station who just happens to be the villain, considers allowing said villain back onto the station, manages to lose his Chief Engineer and let Soran escape with the Klingons and grows over confident that his "Federation Flagship" will be able to handle a century's old design Bird of Prey. The ONLY THING that Picard manages to succeed in doing is figuring out where Soran's next target is, which was a mistake because in doing so he basically sent his ship, his crew and all their families to their deaths.

When the trailers showcased this film as a literal "passing on the torch", Picard not only drops it multiple times, he winds up holding the thing upside down in the end.

 

[Lance]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

Yeah, I thought the same thing when I first saw it back in '94. It's like Picard doesn't even matter in his own movie.

 

[SpHeRe31459]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

Yeah, I thought the same thing when I first saw it back in '94. It's like Picard doesn't even matter in his own movie.

I have a feeling that they felt such a need to make Kirk a hero (likely a Shatner ego thing and/or thinking that it would appease TOS fans thing) that Picard took the brunt of it.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

I have a feeling that they felt such a need to make Kirk a hero (likely a Shatner ego thing and/or thinking that it would appease TOS fans thing) that Picard took the brunt of it.

After the way they treated Scotty in "Relics", they damned well better have! Completely ridiculous that the crew would *not* have been in utter awe.

 

[USS Triumphant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

<--- but then, maybe I'm biased toward temporally displaced original series era characters.

 

[Grant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

It's funny how everybody hates that stinking movie, but for different reasons.

It's been a while since I watched it, but one interesting part that came to my mind now is how extensively Kirk OWNS Picard -- in The Movie Where The Two Captains Meet At Last.

Picard comes to him with one of his trademarked speeches and he does not give a f*ck. Kirk doesnt stop for a second to listen to him, he makes Picard go after him all around the house, he makes Picard hold his kitchen utensils, he lets Picard talking while he enjoys the eggs, the thoughts about Antonia, the horse riding, he makes Picard ride a horse after him, and when he eventually he decides to go back (bad decision btw), it's not because of all the speech about duty and shit, but because it "sounds like fun". The only part when he bothers to acknowledge Picard is when the latter talks about heroics, and Kirk tells him to shut up because he wrote the book about Star Trek heroics when Grandpa Picard was still in diapers.

Not only that----Kirk/Shatner BURNS Picard/Stewarts hand on the fry pan---by "accident"

Check out when kirk hands the fry pan to Picard------100% certain he burns Picards hand.

Watch Stewart go, "Ahhhh!!" when he touches it.
But congrats to him for not blowing the take!

 

[Shat Happens]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

I had to watch it on youtube. You're right! and what a good thing he managed not to cry again.

 

[Grant]

Re: "They're just trying to decide whether a twenty year-old Klingon B

I had to watch it on youtube. You're right! and what a good thing he managed not to cry again.

"My hand, it was so gentle, so trusting, it's whole life ahead of it and now...scarred, scarred because of this imbecile's odd fantasy, uh huh, huh, huh.......! Oh sh*t did another star just blow up outside my window?"