TMP an attempt to revise Star Trek back to 'The Cage' style?

I thought this was pretty obvious. TMP/Phase II and TNG started out as identical projects. Even the majority of the characters are the same (some with almost the same name):

Desk jockey Admiral Kirk = Cautious and Prudent Picard
Chompin' at the bit Cmdr. William Riker = Bitter for losing command Cmdr. William Decker
Mysterious celibate-from-Riker Deanna Troi = Mysterious celibate-from-Decker Lt. Ilia
etc... etc...

TNG was Roddenberry's way to take Trek back from those who stole it from him... But luckily (just like with the movies), people quickly figured out that Roddenberry's Trek sucks, and is much better in someone else's hands.

 

Well, Willard Decker, but yeah. Also, Gary Lockwood's character in Roddenberry's first series The Lieutenant was named William Tiberius Rice. Roddenberry liked reusing character names.

And Data was half Xon from Phase II, half Questor from The Questor Tapes. Also there's a bit of a classicist pun in Ilia/Troi (Ilium being the Latin name for the city of Troy).

 

They're more restrictive on that now, actually. After Disney purchased Lucasfilm and its properties, the official policy of the studio was to decanonize the extended universe works. The current policy is now much like what Paramount/CBS has treated Star Trek - it's only canon if they make it.

 

No, that's not right. Before, no matter how much the Star Wars novels and comics were claimed to be canonical by Lucasfilm Licensing, the films freely ignored or contradicted them, and Lucas himself is on record as saying that he never considered them canonical after all. They were required to be consistent with each other, but the onscreen material was under no obligation to acknowledge or stay consistent with them. But now, under Disney, the policy pursued by the Lucasfilm Story Group led by Pablo Hidalgo is that literally everything is the same level of canon. Movies are incorporating characters and storylines from the animated TV shows, and elements introduced in novels and comics are showing up in both, because they're all working from a common blueprint.

Whereas in the case of Star Trek, tie-ins have never been canonical. That's the default definition of canon -- it's a nickname for the stuff from the original creators or owners as opposed to the tie-ins and fanfic done by other people. As a rule, the only times that tie-ins can really be canonical is if they're from the same creators as the original work, because that's the only way to really keep them consistent with the original work (short of a dedicated operation like the Story Group, which is pretty much unique). The only Trek novels that were ever considered canonical were the two Voyager novels written by Voyager's showrunner Jeri Taylor. But as soon as Taylor left, her successors ignored her novels and contradicted them.

 

The Talosians raid the ship’s computer and Spock lays down a snarky “I told you so”:

V’ger raids the ship’s computer and Spock lays out a console:

 

He's one to talk. He should've given the computer a stronger password.

 

Not sure if serious or joking, but the Talosians could have just read it from his mind whatever it was, right?

 

Or made them look under the keyboard to see the Post-It where it's written down.

 

If that's not just coincidental you just made my day! #nerdgasm

 

Given that they were both sexy alien empaths with romantic histories with first officers named Will ___ker, I'm disinclined to believe it's coincidence.

 

Never have I noticed that!

 

I noticed V'ger being similar to vejee and N'sa - no strings attached. But that's just me.

 

In one respect the story for TMP would have essentially been the aired pilot for Phase II. The pilot-nature of TMP is the simularity to the Cage, for me. It's also, in a way, an unaired pilot that also found its way to an audience by different means. You can't keep a good pilot down.

If Phase II were to have been the flagship show for the Paramount network that ultimately failed to happen (that decade), that would have had to have been a compelling opener. In that regard I think TMP/In Thy Image would have worked a little better than Encounter at Farpoint.

I don't know if the earlier Paramount network would have worked, but considering how well TNG did less than a decade later, I suspect it would have had a fine flagship of a show in in Phase II and it might have helped keep the network afloat. There were a lot of bubblegum action adventure shows in the early 80s, fun but pabulum. Phase II could have offered something different. By the time TNG came out, instead, to first run syndication, people were hungry for that.

There's a parallel universe where Phase II fever swept the nation. Spin-off series kept being made into the 80's.. then the movies..

 

The Reeves-Stevens discuss this at the end of their book on Phase II. They aren't as optimistic about the potential success of the show. For my part, I believe that TNG came out a decade later when syndicated first run programming was in a stronger position to succeed than in the 70s. Also, a Spock-less Trek in 1977 might have seemed off-putting to both fans and casual viewers alike. TNG came after everyone got a chance to sate themselves on the old crew for four movies and were now ready to try something new.

 

The general argument of the Reeves Stevens is that Phase Two *could* have been a failure in 1977, spearheading a fourth network that might have crashed and burned, consigning the franchise to the trashbin of history as a twice failed show, whereas the course of events we got led to a bunch of successful movie sequels and a bunch of successful TV revivals. They give little credence to the idea that Phase II could equally have been successful (either with or without the Paramount network; let's say the network burns but Star Trek is picked up by NBC), and led either to spinoffs of its own or, ultimately, films based on it.

Yes, Judith and Garfield arw correct in that without Phase II becoming The Motion Picture, we could likely never seen The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager or Enterprise. But even as late as 1982 Harve Bennett was initially tapped to head a TV movie not a theatrical film, so on some level (I believe) the idea of Phase II, and all the completed scripts for it, were still being kept as options. It was the late choice to film and release TWOK in the theatrical format, and it's success as a low budget release which seen Paramount begin to claw back their losses on the Phase II/TMP mess, that as much as anything led to the course of events we've seen unfold before our eyes.

 

Wow, Star Trek on NBC, where it belongs. That would be a dream. Especially if it was successful by then with classic episodes like the Cattlemen which could have been developed into a great classic episode. It might have had a false start but it would have found it's space legs especially with the new 70's designs which included the very ship you see in discovery by Ralph McQuarrie. Go figure that. It only took them 40 years to figure out that it is a great design or was before it became a pizza cutter. That's the thing about being a visionary - you're original designs hold up over time.

 

That's weird for me to hear. It used to be, when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, that Star Trek fandom (myself included) routinely cursed NBC for "killing" Star Trek with the same level of vituperation you hear from Firefly fans regarding FOX. I guess time and nostalgia, and perhaps Solow & Justman's mythbusting book Inside Star Trek, helped change perceptions of NBC's role.

Not the same ship; Discovery's designers only used the Ken Adam-Ralph McQuarrie concept as their initial inspiration.

 

It used to be, when I was growing up in the '70s and '80s, that Star Trek fandom (myself included) routinely cursed NBC for "killing" Star Trek

Well, NBC did run the animated series.

I'm no expert on the economics of television in the 1970s (or any other time, for that matter) but unless the ratings for Phase II were phenomenal (and there is no sure way to be sure of that, especially after the novelty wore off) wouldn't the costs of producing the show have been more than the returns? Isn't that what happened to the original Battlestar Galactica just a year later? Or would the Paramount "fourth network" been different than ABC?

It seems to me that Fox was in the right place at the right time (and with the right amount of money that Rupert Murdoch was willing to spend) in it's successful creation of a fourth network a decade later. This was also a much friendlier environment that led to TNG's success.

 

Which a lot of fans overlooked or dismissed. Plus it only ran a season and a half, so people who were fans of it probably blamed NBC for killing it early too, even though that was a fairly typical run for a Filmation cartoon.

As a rule, no TV series makes up its costs in first-run; it's not until later syndication or home video sales that it turns a profit. That's why making enough episodes to get a decent syndication package is a priority for TV producers, and it's the only reason Galactica 1980 exists at all, so that ABC could get a larger syndication package out of the franchise.

But a large part of the reason for Galactica's budget woes, from what I've read, is that Glen Larson spent his budget very wastefully. G80 was intended to be a low-budget show thanks to being set on present-day Earth and relying heavily on stock FX footage, but even so, it ended up costing about as much to make as the original BSG because of Larson's lack of spending discipline -- hence its cancellation after an extremely short run.

 

I wasn't thinking about Galactica 1980 (which is loved by few ) as much as the original 1978-79 show which had a high budget and ratings decline despite it's initial popularity. I could see Phase II taking a similar trajectory, not to mention potential conflict between Roddenberry and his co-producers (as did occur during the production of TMP) which might lead to a premature cancellation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(1978_TV_series)#Ratings