TMP: A Reboot?

[BillJ]

...I think both TOS and TNG characters aged well as they went through the motion picture treatment.

I just don't think TNG had the right makeup for the big screen. Too big a cast, that was an ensemble plus the fact is simply never was an action-adventure show. Putting it on the big screen was like trying to cram a square peg in a round hole.

 

[Rad]

Morning, KB! I concur - even the cast felt rushed to the big screen. I remember the articles when TNG wrapped up the series, and no sooner did they yell "CUT!" then Berman started rebuilding the bridge set for "Generations". I recall Patrick Stewart saying they never got a chance to revel; to celebrate the conclusion of the series. The TNG movie franchise was uneven; the closest they came to something cohesive was, I felt, on "First Contact", but "Insurrection" was as close to a core Trek principle. As for the rest... eh? Good fodder for watching on a rainy evening.

 

[UnknownSample]

Actually, it kinda did, but it didn't stick. Both ST:TMP and TWOK, as discussed, were the kind of soft reboot that implicitly changed or ignored things without making it overt. TMP changed the look of everything and left it to us to rationalize the changes as the result of time passing, or just asked us to pretend it had always looked that way (as with the Klingons). TWOK's makers intended to quietly ignore TMP and start fresh, albeit reusing the same sets etc. because they were on a budget; and it also quietly retconned details of "Space Seed" to suit its purposes, just as Harve Bennett's earlier The Six Million Dollar Man had retconned details of the pilot movies and earlier episodes from time to time, because continuity wasn't taken too seriously back then. TNG was also a soft reboot of sorts, since Roddenberry considered a lot of prior Trek apocryphal by that point. It rarely offered any overt contradictions to TOS or the movies, but in the early seasons, TNG mostly stayed as far away from TOS characters, species, and continuity as it could.

Basically, what we had were several different versions of Star Trek with enough differences in style and detail that it was unclear whether they were really representing the same version of the universe. And had things gone on in that vein, had Roddenberry remained in charge and kept operating under that model, TNG might have ended up making a cleaner break with TOS and the movies.

But what happened later was that the franchise was joined by new producers and staffers who were big fans of the original series and who played up the ties to it that Roddenberry had tried to play down. So we got stories like "Relics" and Generations and "Blood Oath" and "Trials and Tribble-ations" and the like, firmly tying the old and new together as parts of a single whole. True, that's what most fans had always assumed it to be, but it wasn't quite what the actual creators of the movies and TNG necessarily had in mind. And if things had gone differently, if that early ambiguity had been resolved in the other direction, we'd now be talking about Trek's long history of reinventing its universe rather than its long history of having a consistent universe. A lot of that perception of consistency was only made solid after the fact, once the fans of first-generation Trek started writing and producing second-generation Trek and bringing their nostalgia to bear.

You see the same thing in other fictional franchises. For instance, Godzilla has rebooted its continuity many times, but the first reboot pretty much repudiated the lighter tone of the earlier sequels and ignored them altogether, but some of the later reboots actually reincorporated bits of the original continuity into their backstories. Then you have Batman comics and screen adaptations aggressively getting as far from the tone of the '66 sitcom as possible in the '70s through the '90s, but now embracing its tone in things like Batman: The Brave and the Bold or reviving it outright in the Batman '66 comic and the upcoming animated DVD movie Return of the Caped Crusaders. The first wave of revivals tend to react against the original and try to stand apart as something different, but then the next wave reacts against that reaction and embraces the original more fully. It's just that in the case of Star Trek, it's been in continuous enough production that those waves blended together into what appeared to be a single whole.

Trek was always notable for its world-building. Violations of continuity were kept to a minimum, though all shows require a little bit of tweaking of their internal histories, when they becomes too creatively limiting. What we really didn't have back then was the concept of blatant rebooting, where the audience is expected to notice but be fine with it. We were straightforward enough as viewers to expect that past events in a thing called "Star Trek", or "Bonanza", whatever, would go on being the fictional past, and not be swept away by some new producer's "re-imagining".
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Next Gen had an appearance by McCoy in its first episode. In its second, the events of a TOS story are talked about as history. It was all set about 75 years in TOS's future, from the start. It was in the initial publicity, I think.

 

[Christopher]

Trek was always notable for its world-building. Violations of continuity were kept to a minimum, though all shows require a little bit of tweaking of their internal histories, when they becomes too creatively limiting. What we really didn't have back then was the concept of blatant rebooting, where the audience is expected to notice but be fine with it. We were straightforward enough as viewers to expect that past events in a thing called "Star Trek", or "Bonanza", whatever, would go on being the fictional past, and not be swept away by some new producer's "re-imagining".

But that's what I'm saying -- back then, it wasn't seen as a binary choice between perfect consistency and complete reimagining. Sequels would be loosely consistent with what came before, pretending to be continuations but changing the specifics as needed for the stories they wanted to tell.

For instance, Turner Classic Movies has been showing the old Universal and Hammer Films Frankenstein movie series, and you can really see that loose, in-between approach to continuity in them. The sequels refer back to events from earlier films, but change the details of those events quite liberally. For instance, in the first two Universal Frankenstein films, Henry Frankenstein's lab was in an abandoned watchtower far from his family home, and it was burned to the ground in the second. But in the third film, supposedly a direct sequel, the lab was suddenly on the grounds of the Frankenstein estate and merely had a collapsed, dome-shaped roof; plus Bela Lugosi's Ygor was introduced as Frankenstein's assistant from back in the day, even though he hadn't been in either of the first two films. The fourth film picked up directly on the ending of the third, but it changed the geography again so that now the lab was inside the Frankenstein castle. And the castle had a completely different set design and exterior in each film. The Hammer Frankenstein films are even looser with continuity. The third film is a near-reboot that tries to emulate the Universal films more than the first two did, but it still presents itself as a sequel, the return of the monster Victor Frankenstein had created years before, even though the circumstances of that creation are portrayed in a very different way. The fourth film is in some odd side continuity where Frankenstein is able to work openly using his own name and his hands are crippled somehow, but in the fifth, he's using aliases again and his hands are fine.

After all, moviegoers and TV viewers in those days didn't have access to the reference books and home video and online sources that we've had in the past few decades. So earlier installments in a series were remembered in broad strokes rather than precise details, and thus film and TV creators could get away with fudging the continuity more than they generally can now.

Next Gen had an appearance by McCoy in its first episode. In its second, the events of a TOS story are talked about as history. It was all set about 75 years in TOS's future, from the start. It was in the initial publicity, I think.

Actually it was said to be 78 years in the future of the TOS movies. Which is pretty much what later chronological references used as their guide; TNG's first season was set in 2364, and the Okuda Chronology put The Voyage Home (the most recent film at the time TNG began) in 2286, 78 years earlier. And Generations explicitly said in an onscreen caption that its TNG portion was 78 years after the launch of the Enterprise-B.

 

[BillJ]

Trek was always notable for its world-building. Violations of continuity were kept to a minimum, though all shows require a little bit of tweaking of their internal histories, when they becomes too creatively limiting. What we really didn't have back then was the concept of blatant rebooting, where the audience is expected to notice but be fine with it. We were straightforward enough as viewers to expect that past events in a thing called "Star Trek", or "Bonanza", whatever, would go on being the fictional past, and not be swept away by some new producer's "re-imagining".

But comics were already into multiple versions of characters existing in different universes, so they could do what they wanted. What is going on now in TV and movies is just an extension of that.

I never really had an issue with rebooting properties.

 

[Tallguy]

^^ Whatever. People keep saying, "TMP was trying to be like 2001." and thats plain wrong.

It always confused me that people simultaneously claim that TMP was trying to be 2001 and then turn around and call it a Changeling retread. How can it be both? (And nobody remembers One of Our Planets is Missing).

Christopher, I like your analogy to the Frankenstein pics.

 

[Christopher]

It always confused me that people simultaneously claim that TMP was trying to be 2001 and then turn around and call it a Changeling retread. How can it be both?

Because those comparisons are about two entirely different aspects of the film. The "Changeling" comment is related to the plot -- an old Earth space probe being transformed by aliens into a world-killing super-AI and setting course for Earth with plans to rid it of all life. The 2001 comparison is about its style and tone -- the fact that it was a throwback to the more thoughtful, intellectual, subdued, adult-oriented science fiction films of the '60s and '70s, of which 2001 is an archetypal example, as opposed to being in the more lowbrow, visceral, garish, action-oriented style of genre filmmaking that Star Wars ushered in.

 

[Kor]

... the more lowbrow, visceral, garish, action-oriented style of genre filmmaking that Star Wars ushered in.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

Kor

 

[Rad]

Much like the Abrams reboot in 2008, TMP was foundational in that the movie rebooted the franchise in 1979. The large screen gave atmosphere and depth to an otherwise stalled series.

 

[FormerLurker]

...Actually it was said to be 78 years in the future of the TOS movies. Which is pretty much what later chronological references used as their guide; TNG's first season was set in 2364, and the Okuda Chronology put The Voyage Home (the most recent film at the time TNG began) in 2286, 78 years earlier. And Generations explicitly said in an onscreen caption that its TNG portion was 78 years after the launch of the Enterprise-B.

Generations was a stated 80 years later.

 

[Tallguy]

Generations was a stated 80 years later.

The card in the film says 78.

 

[Christopher]

The card in the film says 78.

Yup. Dialogue did say 80 years, but of course people tend to round things off. The caption gave the more exact interval.

 

[FormerLurker]

I need to watch it again. I remember the card saying 80.

I don't know why they'd insist on it staying at 78, anyway. Time passage shown wasn't consistent.

 

[Tallguy]

I think it was a kind of payoff. All the commercials for TNG said "SEVENTY EIGHT YEARS AFTER..." Then it was never really mentioned again (since TNG kept a comfortable distance from TOS for the early seasons).

So when they really finally bridged the two Generations, they came back with 78. Yes, fans, we remember you. It was kind of sweet, really.

 

[UnknownSample]

But comics were already into multiple versions of characters existing in different universes, so they could do what they wanted. What is going on now in TV and movies is just an extension of that.

I never really had an issue with rebooting properties.

World-building is one of the joys of programs like Trek, the built-up accumulated history that you can live in and imagine in. When something called Trek throws that away, I immediately and completely lose interest.

 

[BillJ]

World-building is one of the joys of programs like Trek, the built-up accumulated history that you can live in and imagine in. When something called Trek throws that away, I immediately and completely lose interest.

But a reboot or multi-verse doesn't throw it away. Many Trek fans seem to have very limited thinking in this regard. "Prime" serves as a baseline for comparing and contrasting multiple interpretations by new creators. I love to see the same events or time periods play out in different ways.

 

[Kor]

I think that different versions/continuities/whatever of a property actually open up a lot of interesting possibilities for new and different world-building.

I need to watch it again. I remember the card saying 80.

I don't know why they'd insist on it staying at 78, anyway. Time passage shown wasn't consistent.

Here's a screencap of that card, 78 years:
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=511&pid=55441#top_display_media

Kor

 

[Rad]

I think that different versions/continuities/whatever of a property actually open up a lot of interesting possibilities for new and different world-building.


Here's a screencap of that card, 78 years:
http://movies.trekcore.com/gallery/displayimage.php?album=511&pid=55441#top_display_media

Kor

Ah! Yes, that was from "Generations". So that would place the start of TNG at -7 years from that stardate.