This Side Of Paradise message
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Some of these folk would gladly erase the past so as to prevent inconvenient comparisons which might lead to criticisms of contemporary entertainment.
Nah, The "past" is there on streaming, disc, tape and film for all to see. Comparisons and critiques will and have been made, but no one is sweating over it
Yeah, I was thinking how amazing the model work on TOS was when I was watching it on Paramount+... Oh. Wait...
Well, none of the current "folks" are responsible for TOS-R. That was done by "old school" fans. But TOS is still there. Or was there a different point being made?
It is available on blu ray and they are not that hard to find or that expensive. But what Paramount is keeping "in print" (Paramount+) is TOS-R.
There is no need for any comparison game.
You can "define enslavement" to mean pink cotton candy, and you'd be just as wrong.
Or you could say, something that seems good comes at a cost not all are willing to pay.
I thought this episode was saying it's not human frailty or original sin that causes of to live in "self-made purgatories" instead of paradise.
It's another episode where Kirk endorses eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
ELIAS: In return, they give you complete health and peace of mind.
KIRK: That's paradise?
ELIAS: We have no need or want, Captain.
SPOCK: It's a true Eden, Jim. There's belonging and love.
KIRK: No wants. No needs. We weren't meant for that. None of us. Man stagnates if he has no ambition, no desire to be more than he is.
ELIAS: We have what we need.
KIRK: Except a challenge.
It's another episode where Kirk endorses eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil.
MCCOY: Well, that's the second time man's been thrown out of paradise.
KIRK: No, no, Bones. This time we walked out on our own.
I think the message is rejecting a view that humankind flawed by original sin and our goal should be to be absolved our sin and get to paradise in the next life.
everyone, no matter who you are, needs a sense of purpose, a goal to strive to, to make some sort of a contribution.
That's why when I hear people fantasize about being rich and how they would simply lounge around their mansions all day and get daily massages, I tell them that that would get boring very fast...Whereas working and saving for 6 months to pay for that Hawaiian vacation, makes the experience that much more rewarding and enjoyable, because it is a tangible result of labor and sacrifice
If you have nothing to look forward to, because everything you want is at your disposal..that's when people get nutty, and we start to see bizarre behavior..because they need SOMETHING for stimuli...
ideally people that are in those positions will do something positive, philanthropic, beneficial. But too often we see the opposite type of behavior, negative, decadent, and aberrant...
A planet where everything is "perfect" would be a microcosm of this idea...
That's why when I hear people fantasize about being rich and how they would simply lounge around their mansions all day and get daily massages, I tell them that that would get boring very fast...Whereas working and saving for 6 months to pay for that Hawaiian vacation, makes the experience that much more rewarding and enjoyable, because it is a tangible result of labor and sacrifice
If you have nothing to look forward to, because everything you want is at your disposal..that's when people get nutty, and we start to see bizarre behavior..because they need SOMETHING for stimuli...
ideally people that are in those positions will do something positive, philanthropic, beneficial. But too often we see the opposite type of behavior, negative, decadent, and aberrant...
A planet where everything is "perfect" would be a microcosm of this idea...
Although it's kind of weird how Roddenberry in the '60s said that paradise is an illusion and humans need to strive and struggle, but then Roddenberry in the '80s said that Earth in the 23rd-24th century is a paradise and humans thrive there. Although I guess the difference is that he saw humans as still striving, but striving to learn and grow and explore the universe rather than just striving to avoid starving or losing their homes.
There would have been plenty of satisfying things to do in the real garden of Eden, if only Adam and Eve had trusted God.
Walking away from a poor imitation isn't the same thing if staying there comes with damaging strings attached.
Walking away from a poor imitation isn't the same thing if staying there comes with damaging strings attached.
in a way the original ST is a "paradise" in that there is no disease, poverty, hunger, homelessness...but the need to better oneself still exists. One could define "paradise" as an absence of hardship
I'm not sure TOS/TAS ever established that. Unlike later productions, it avoided establishing anything about 23rd-century Earth, and we know there were hardships on the frontier, like young Jim Kirk living through Kodos's massacre, or Cerberus suffering a crop failure that nearly starved the colonists, including McCoy's daughter, until Carter Winston used his fortune to provide for them. We know that capitalism was definitely still a thing in the TOS/TAS era, what with Harry Mudd's grifting, Cyrano Jones's trading, Flint being rich enough to buy a planet, Kirk telling Scotty he'd earned his pay for the week, and so on. And where there's capitalism, there's likely to be poverty, unless it's very regulated capitalism.
The idea of Earth as a paradise didn't start to appear until ST:TMP (much more so in the early "In Thy Image" outlines than in what ended up in the film). TOS showed a human society that was relatively better than ours in overcoming war and racism between humans, though there were still other flavors of racism like Stiles's xenophobia toward Spock, and still war between species. But it never implied that it was a perfect society, just one that had improved on ours in certain ways. (In fact, if you read between the lines of "Balance of Terror," it strongly implies that Earth was the aggressor in the Earth-Romulan War, since it's unlikely that Romulans without warp drive could have been the aggressors against a warp-capable Earth. There was also that line in "The Conscience of the King" about Vulcan being conquered. It took TOS a while to define future humanity as a peaceful and benevolent society, as opposed to one of the Earth empires that were commonplace in the pulp science fiction that inspired the show.)
How do you figure based on TMP? I don't see Earth equals paradise until the TNG era.
As I said, based on the early script drafts, which had a lot more material set on Earth. That, as far as I can recall, was when Roddenberry first codified the idea of 23rd-century Earth as a paradise, even if it didn't show up overtly on screen until later.
The future ain't what it used to be.
I wonder if any of that made it into the novel. It's been decades since I read that novel...
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