TMP: A Reboot?

[locutus101]

I think the one thing we've learned about Gene over the years, is that he wasn't exactly a class act.

Oh well.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

I think the one thing we've learned about Gene over the years, is that he wasn't exactly a class act.

Yeah, I'm just surprised that I keep discovering new scummy things he did.

 

[drt]

For me, most of my problems with TMP spring from the fact that they were trying to emulate 2001 rather than TOS.

Having watched them within a day of each other recently, I was struck by how much TMP is almost more "The Cage: The Motion Picture" from the color palette, other aspects of the production design and the overall more serious tone.

The idea of the Enterprise being refit goes back farther than Phase II. It was a core concept of every effort to launch a new Trek movie/show in 1970s, going all the way back to Planet of the Titans.

I've asked this previously, but was the Titans Enterprise intended to be a refit, or was it just going to be "this is how the ship looks in the movies" like the TMP Klingons?

 

[Kor]

Somebody is working on an indie bio-pic of Roddenberry. I hope it will be an honest and critical portrayal, and not yet more unwarranted hero worship.

Anyway... yes, I always felt that TMP was more along the lines of The Cage than the rest of the series, as if Gene was trying to realign Trek with his initial concept, more cerebral in tone and more visually subdued.

I do find it interesting that the test footage for Phase II looked about as colorful as TOS in the costuming and sets. It was a lot easier to see it as part of the same universe.

Kor

 

[Christopher]

Anyway... yes, I always felt that TMP was more along the lines of The Cage than the rest of the series, as if Gene was trying to realign Trek with his initial concept, more cerebral in tone and more visually subdued.

I do find it interesting that the test footage for Phase II looked about as colorful as TOS in the costuming and sets. It was a lot easier to see it as part of the same universe.

I think a lot of the subdued, sterile quality of TMP came more from Robert Wise than from Roddenberry, because Wise's The Andromeda Strain has a very similiar look and tone. Although on the other hand, there is a bit of a TMP-like feel to the PAX jumpsuits in Roddenberry's Planet Earth -- although the PAX uniforms' colors are a lot uglier.

 

[Galileo7]

...
I do find it interesting that the test footage for Phase II looked about as colorful as TOS in the costuming and sets. It was a lot easier to see it as part of the same universe.

Kor

Agree, if only TMP had carried over these elements.

 

[Warped9]

People often like to say TMP was trying to emulate 2001, as if saying, "See this? This is what we're aiming."

I don't believe that for a second and never have.

2001 was a different breed of SF in that it wasn't about good vs. evil. It was a first contact story of humanity coming into contact with an alien intelligence beyond what they could grasp. And that intelligence might well have influenced human evolution. Mankind was facing something cosmic unlike anything he was familiar with.

2001 also dealt with its ideas in a disappasionate manner as Kubrick rendered the characters practically without any real personality. It's a film of ideas and practically no emotion. It's gorgeous to look at yet sterile.

TMP is also a film of ideas yet it doesn't deal with them dispassionately. It looks at life amassing so much knowledge and yet still questioning its existence and pondering what else there could be. This is a cosmic idea beyond good guy/bad guy that a lot of sci-fi panders to including a lot of later Trek films.

And the characters, unlike 2001, do have personality. There is also a measure of energy and dynamic that 2001 lacks--unfortunately there isn't quite enough of it.

TMP did what had been done before in TOS: ask questions and not automatically assume a good vs. evil approach. The alien intelligence of Vger was not evil in of itself. It just lacked a greater understanding of life beyond itself.

TMP's similarity to 2001 is only in that both films deal with ideas beyond the commonplace and conventional. They were dealing with something that is much more common in SF literature than SF in the visual mediums. Indeed that is also what often set TOS apart from the much of the sci-fi of its day.

2001 can be plodding and a chore to get through primarily because Kubrick was so focused on the ideas and deliberately left out character and interesting character interplay. TMP can drag because of forgetting to inject more character interplay and drama.

Whatever similarities between the films are coincidental rather than deliberate as so many like to claim or allude to.

 

[Christopher]

^I think you're taking the 2001 comparison a bit too literally. It's more that it was the prime example of what SF cinema was before Star Wars came along and changed the conversation. It was the synecdochic example of the more cerebral, rarefied, adult SF fare of the late '60s and '70s, the idiom that TMP belonged to, as opposed to the more visceral, action-driven idiom that TWOK embraced and most later Trek movies have tried to emulate.

 

[Warped9]

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

 

[Anduril]

I hate reboots.

But if they are going to reboot it, please provide excellent soundtrack and also the Beautiful TOS Film Warp Drive Effects, especially from the 1979 TMP.

I think you need to read the thread.

 

[In_Correct]

I never understood the point of the thread because the title makes it sound very misleading.

If somebody is going to question that The 1979 film is a reboot, then so is TOS from its pilots. This is not like today's reboots. Reboots appear to erase everything from already existing stories.

Star Trek does not do that. It never did. Because of Star Fleet includes many starships, people, and it is set in the future, then if they want to "reboot" something, then they don't have to. All they are doing is slightly changing the location and the year. Star Trek 2009 got away with it because it called the original stories "Prime Universe".

03:10 "Maybe keep the red striping". Didn't I just mention this in another forum post?! but No. Do not keep the red striping or the purple walls. Especially no purple walls. The reason why TMP looks so shockingly different from TOS is because they got rid of the chrome from the 1964 pilot and switched to stupid tie dye rainbow purple walls which certainly does not help TMP look similar to TOS.

I still find reboots alarming.

 

[Christopher]

If somebody is going to question that The 1979 film is a reboot, then so is TOS from its pilots. This is not like today's reboots. Reboots appear to erase everything from already existing stories.

Star Trek does not do that. It never did.

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.

 

[nascenticity]

In the novelization, what we saw of the five-year mission was supposedly a dramatization. According to Roddenberry. So, yeah, I could see TMP as a reboot of sorts. He definitely seemed to spend the latter part of his life trying to distance Trek from TOS.

This is actually one of my favorite bits of trivia. Because it opens the door to a much more organic form of storytelling.

In the novelization, what we saw of the five-year mission was supposedly a dramatization. According to Roddenberry. So, yeah, I could see TMP as a reboot of sorts. He definitely seemed to spend the latter part of his life trying to distance Trek from TOS.

People today are overly focused on continuity, on whether one story "fits" with another. They assume there are only two options, perfect continuity or a wholesale reboot. But that hasn't historically been the case. The creators of ongoing series, or of revivals of older works, have frequently tweaked or altered the continuity as they went along. This was especially common in the past, when we didn't have the Internet and Wikia and home video and it wasn't as easy for fans to stay current on every tiny little detail, which meant there was more flexibility to rewrite continuity as needed. So a lot of things fall in between what modern fans would call a continuation and what they would call a reboot.

For example: In the pilot movie of The Six Million Dollar Man, Steve Austin was a civilian astronaut and the head of the bionics program was a hardnosed, manipulative government man named Oliver Spencer (Darren McGavin) who essentially forced Steve to work for the government because the government owned nearly half his body. But in the subsequent series, Austin was retconned into an Air Force colonel and Spencer was replaced with (the original novel's) Oscar Goldman, who started out as a government meanie like Spencer but evolved into a much nicer character, and Steve became a more willing (if often rebellious) agent. And when a later episode revisited the events of the pilot, they replaced Steve's original love interest from the movie with a different woman altogether -- different character name, different actress, but described in retrospect as having played the equivalent role to Barbara Anderson's character in the initial movie. It wasn't a complete reboot, the broad strokes of the pilot were still assumed to have happened, but the details of how they happened were subject to change as needed.

Then there's something like M*A*S*H, an 11-year series about a 3-year war. They played quite fast and loose with their own continuity and chronology. In the early seasons, it was often claimed to be 1952 and even 1953 eventually, but then later, after several cast changes, they did an episode that spanned "a year in the life" from the start of 1951 to the start of 1952, featuring the current cast only.

Then there's the way Marvel Comics has always approached continuity -- all the past events are assumed to have happened, but when and how they happened is subject to change. Tony Stark now created Iron Man in a cave in Afghanistan instead of Vietnam. Peter Parker's spider bite happened the same way, but now he had a cell phone at the time. The big-picture continuity is kept, the specifics are negotiable.

And this is the way Roddenberry approached TMP and TNG. They were continuations of TOS, but they were continuations of the general universe, not necessarily of every exacting detail. There was a lot about TOS that he was dissatisfied with, compromises he'd been forced to make due to budget or time restraints or network censorship, mistakes that had been made, things that had turned out badly. And so he wanted to keep the ideas that worked without being hamstrung by the stuff that didn't work so well. In his foreword to the novelization of TMP, he presented himself as a 23rd-century writer who'd produced an "inaccurately larger-than-life" dramatization of the Enterprise's real adventures, and who was now undertaking to do a better, more authentic dramatization with Admiral Kirk riding herd on him to make sure he got it right this time. So what we see as Star Trek, in this view, was just an artistic interpretation of the "real" Trek universe, and so any changes or discrepancies between different works were the result of poetic license or adaptational error.

So, in sum: Yes, both TMP and TNG were intended as what we'd now call "soft reboots," continuing the universe in broad strokes but reinterpreting the details and ignoring the bits he didn't like.

Indeed the idea that our fiction has to be perfectly internally consistent is a very new idea. Heck, in terms of human history the idea that there is only one "real" "canon" version of a story and anyone else is violating property rights by reinterpreting or retelling it is not only new but bordering on bizzare. Used to be in centuries and millenia past that most stories were just retellings of older stories, and new elements would be added in or changed according to what the storyteller thought was a good idea. I enjoy seeing this reflected in Star Trek; it seems like a much more natural and Human way of storytelling rather than prioritizing the adherence to "continuity."

 

[Mytran]

I watched that video last week with a little confusion, since I thought it was generally acknowledged by everyone that TMP was a side reboot of Star Trek.

That'll teach me to make assumptions! :-)

 

[Rad]

Being a Trek fan boy from the days of TOS and then watching TOS in syndication, when the movie was announced, I was over the moon. On Startrek,com, they are providing a segment called "Roddenberry's Vault" where they bring out old news clips and photos from way back. This month, they featured the TMP Enterprise model under construction.

I sat through "The Motion Picture"... 100+ times. BIG screen. For me, seeing that Enterprise (refit), up close, in detail... was as much a star of that movie as Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Even today; in my 50's... when I see TMP, and see Kirk's first fly-by of the Enterprise... I get all weak in the knees. I find myself still screaming at the (now TV), "It's the ENTERPRISE!!!!!"

TMP was a very week movie when it first came out. I loved Robert Wise's "Directors Cut" that was released as an anniversary edition several years ago; his remastering of the movie added a lot more context and much needed depth to an otherwise, visually stunning but lacking motion picture.

 

[soornge]

my issues with the first seasons of TNG:
i thinknone of the issues was they wanted thier cake and eat it to, they wanted tonuse old fan base to support gaining a new fan base. i think thats why the later producrion tend to play better. i think the mistake was in cozing up to the nostalgia . i think they could have captured the old fan base while at the same time distancing itself in the first season by instead of idolizong the TOS have throw away spurs at it.I think if they had raken tongue and cheek jabs at parts of theTOS in the beginning they could have captured the continuity aspect and fan base while being able to distance themselves. even when they did take poles of fin at it, it was done with sense of nostalgia and a kind of arrogant sense of arent we clever . first aspect of saling something is always what I am selling you now is the best. understandably this metaphor is going to ruffle feathers when taken k. the surface , but there is a very real awareness of a huge deficit in time difference which is magnified and mirror. I think that other spin offs have been able to bind themselves with other shows much better. I would have more respect for it had it not held TOS as some kind of holy positon.
TMP was as sheldon said a failure on multiple fronts: but the biggest issue is over all it took itself to seriously: I do not think the latest reboot really needed to take such drastic measure : I think whats gets lost a lot and has been recaptured in the latest movies : is all of star trek is character driven not plot driven: its like indiana jones you dont go to indiana jones for a clever plot or deep meaning : you go to see what kind of mess is indy going to get into :

 

[gottacook]

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.

I agree with this, but I want to add that one factor in the imposition (inadvertent or otherwise) of this retrospective continuity is something that began with TMP and frequently continued throughout the movies and the various later TV series: visiting (rather than avoiding, as the original series did) Earth of the "present day." Once scenes on Earth began to appear on screen - particularly those at Star Fleet headquarters - a certain increase in continuity naturally followed. By the end of 1991, all six feature films had scenes on contemporary Earth; likewise [although 80(?) years later] a number of episodes of TNG.

 

[F. King Daniel]

The Original Series exists in broad strokes in The Motion Picture's universe. I do wonder if, at any point during production, anyone wondered if the characters would be thinking how similar these events are to those of "The Changeling"

I can picture McCoy encouraging Kirk and Spock to try talking V'ger to death, just like they did Nomad

 

[Rad]

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

 

[soornge]

i agree there is some strange new definition of canonization going on in recent years verse the classical critical definitin where canonization is built of recapturing ir replying to a thematic message , plot or literary conclusion ie tender is the night is canonized because both hemingway and faulkner reaponded directly ir inderectly
to arguments it makes intellectually but also in cooying its theme and structure

This is actually one of my favorite bits of trivia. Because it opens the door to a much more organic form of storytelling.




Indeed the idea that our fiction has to be perfectly internally consistent is a very new idea. Heck, in terms of human history the idea that there is only one "real" "canon" version of a story and anyone else is violating property rights by reinterpreting or retelling it is not only new but bordering on bizzare. Used to be in centuries and millenia past that most stories were just retellings of older stories, and new elements would be added in or changed according to what the storyteller thought was a good idea. I enjoy seeing this reflected in Star Trek; it seems like a much more natural and Human way of storytelling rather than prioritizing the adherence to "continuity."