TMP continued…
- Thread starter Warped9
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I know I read both of those, but that's where my memory is beginning to fade just a bit. And some really good pre-TOS history can be found in the My Brother's Keeper trilogy, which detailed Kirk's friendship with Gary Mitchell.
For me, much of the literary versions of early Trek history have been preferable to what we have gotten on the screen. I do hope that in the years ahead we may get more post-TMP novels, as it is still an open period of time to fill in - and be able to fit in with existing canon.
For me, much of the literary versions of early Trek history have been preferable to what we have gotten on the screen. I do hope that in the years ahead we may get more post-TMP novels, as it is still an open period of time to fill in - and be able to fit in with existing canon.
I miss Waldenbooks, KB Toys, etc.
The Voyage Home really needed to be TMP era—the shuttlebay gives the whales enough room at least.
TMP—the first season on TNG… all very heady.
A previous discussion
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The Voyage Home really needed to be TMP era—the shuttlebay gives the whales enough room at least.
TMP—the first season on TNG… all very heady.
A previous discussion
The Motion Picture era in literature
Hi there, I've just watched the 4k director's edition of The Motion Picture and was wondering if there are many novels that explore the era from around this time up until the Wrath of Khan?
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Except that things during TVH would have gone much more smoothly if they'd had a top-of-the-line starship to work with instead of a Klingon BOP.I miss Waldenbooks, KB Toys, etc.
The Voyage Home really needed to be TMP era—the shuttlebay gives the whales enough room at least.
TMP—the first season on TNG… all very heady.
A previous discussion
The Motion Picture era in literature
Hi there, I've just watched the 4k director's edition of The Motion Picture and was wondering if there are many novels that explore the era from around this time up until the Wrath of Khan?
Yep. Margaret Wander Bonanno was a penniless young writer at the time and would go to her local bookshop and memorize dates, events and characters mentioned in "The Starfleet Spaceflight Chronology" by the Goldsteins to devise her plot for "Strangers from the Sky".
I loved the Chronology, and still have my original copy of it (and in decent shape for nearly 45 year old book!)
It's sort of a shame that all that background material is no longer valid, due to everything that came along after its publication. There was a lot of well thought out ideas in there, along with a wealth of truly wonderful drawings and images of pre-TOS ships.
It's sort of a shame that all that background material is no longer valid, due to everything that came along after its publication. There was a lot of well thought out ideas in there, along with a wealth of truly wonderful drawings and images of pre-TOS ships.
It's mainly only the dates. A lot of elements would still work with existing canon.
I just finished Strangers last night. I love it as much as I did almost 40 years ago. Maybe more since I didn't really know who Lee Kelso was back then.
I'm not sure if the Strangers 21st century would fit with ENT's 21st, even if you just moved all of the dates forward. Plus there's the whole notion that the Vulcans are not the first extraterrestrial people we encounter.
I haven't watched much ENT but they have also stated that there were Vulcans on Earth earlier than 2063 as well, haven't they?
I was surprised at how many details MWB took from Roddenberry's TMP novel: The Admiralty, staff officers having chips in their heads, the mind control revolts, kaiidth, the name of the
Kolinahr master. Those are just off the top of my head.
You are correct. In the second episode of Season 2, we learned (from T'Pol's family history) that a team of Vulcans, which included her great-grandmother, crashed on Earth shortly after the launch of Sputnik 1 in 1957 - basically retconning the events of Star Trek: First Contact.
And your memory is far better than mine - I didn't remember that she had referenced GR's novelization of TMP that much. I'm definitely going to give it a re-read later on this year.
Here's the link to the Wiki entry for 'Carbon Creek':
Carbon Creek (Star Trek: Enterprise) - Wikipedia
Well, I'm fairly obsessive about GR's novel AND I just re-read it a month ago. (https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/star-trek-the-motion-picture-45th-anniversary-book-club.318164/ if you're curious.)
The thing about Strangers? It was actually a little better than I remembered it. It had a lot more Gary Mitchell than I remembered. (He was kind of written out of Enterprise: The First Adventure a year previously so I might have been more sensitive to any time he was not "on screen".) But he might be in it more than Spock! He does constantly call Kirk "kid". I wonder if MWB thought Gary was older (Kirk being the wunderkind) or if this was part of him just being SO Gary, even though Gary (both Mitchell and Lockwood) is younger.
I think it fits with Where No Man Has Gone Before better than I recalled (by some timey-wimey and a little memory loss). And not only do I know Star Trek better than I did then, but I know the real world a little better.
Of course I'm more nostalgic for this version of Star Trek "history" than I was at the time. At the time there was some competition from various sources and the Spaceflight Chronology wasn't my favorite. But now all of the 1980's versions of Star Trek have all been overwritten and to a certain extent overwritten again.
All of the characters are pretty much letter perfect. Even Dehner.
And it's set between TMP and TWOK. So I love that.
I think Mitchell calling Kirk 'kid' is just Gary being Gary - probably alternated between that and calling Kirk 'Jim'. And it may have had to do with Kirk being the youngest starship captain at that point in Starfleet history. I always just assumed the two of them were the same age, or that Kirk might've been a year older at best.
Now I'm getting the urge to go watch 'WNMHGB' again on P+ as well as TMP.
Now I'm getting the urge to go watch 'WNMHGB' again on P+ as well as TMP.
These are fantastic instincts all round. Go with it.
"Carbon Creek": T'Pol's grandmother had a mysterious link to Earth's past, in a script very reminiscent of the set-up of "Strangers from the Sky".
That history books don't always have the real story.
Indeed. And the events of 'Carbon Creek' led to Dayton Ward's excellent TOS novel, From History's Shadow.
I really like the Chronology as well. My only issue with it is that a majority of the ships don't really seem "Star Trek" enough, so there isn't really any cohesiveness to how starships developed. I sometimes wonder if Sternbach was brought in last minute to illustrate it so he had to fill things in with a bunch of generic-looking scifi rockets combined with the ring ship Enterprise and a couple of new designs with saucers and warp engines.
Yeah, it holds together a lot better than it probably should given the 850+ episodes made since it was written.
The amazing thing about that ringship is that it's a design created by Matt Jeffries in 1964, as one of his original concepts for the Enterprise, but he rejected it on the basis that he didn't feel a filming model would've been strong enough to hold up to the rigors of filming. Roddenberry later resurrected the design to include in the Enterprise rec-room in TMP and of course, it went on to become part of the pre-history of ENT. The legacy of the ringship encompasses the entirety of Trek's real-time history.
Oh, TWOK is absolutely a soft reboot of Star Trek for the movie era. There's no reference to anything that happened in TMP outside of the sets being largely the same, and even there they did things like rearrange the wedges of the bridge set to make it look closer to TOS. You can honestly just go from watching TOS straight into TWOK and not feel like you missed anything.
I agree that the 2001 Director's Cut is a much better film than what came out in 1979. But even after the subsequent revision in 2022 (which I only watched once a year or two back), it's still majorly flawed in terms of story, pacing, and character development. TWOK is much closer to the mark in terms of what I wanted to see for Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
I honestly don't think it would've made much of a difference. All of the "Star Trek: The Motionless Picture" criticisms still apply to the revised versions of the film. It still really slows down after the first hour and features endless scenes of the crew just reacting to special effects. And Stephen Collins' blandness as Decker and Persis Khambatta's extremely wooden acting don't exactly help.
Not really. They missed the mark in the first film, and they course corrected in the second. So I don't have a high degree of curiosity about seeing more of an underwhelming version of Trek.
I second this recommendation. That mini (by Glenn Greenberg and Mike Collins) was a lot of fun.
Of the first Marvel run from 1980, I like Mike W. Barr's "The Enterprise Murder Case!" from issue #6 and Marty Pasko's "All the Infinite Ways" from issue #13. Both of those stories have great hooks (An alien ambassador dies while beaming up to the Enterprise and McCoy's estranged daughter Joanna is engaged to a Vulcan!). The rest of the issues are pretty forgettable.
And Xon's intended character arc of trying to emulate human emotions was more or less moved over to Data on TNG, just as Decker & Troi's romantic backstory was recycled for Riker & Troi. Most abandoned ideas tend to find their way into writers' subsequent projects one way or another. Roddenberry's recycling is just more obvious than most.
There were already age jokes about the TOS in the early 1980s, as they were all in their 50s and 60s. Meyer and Bennett decided they should stop pretending the cast hadn't aged since 1969 and turn a potential handicap into a strength.
Yeah, I was very disappointed that Gary Mitchell was sidelined by an injury in Enterprise: The First Adventure. I enjoyed seeing Gary in Mike W. Barr and David Ross' version of Kirk's first mission aboard the Enterprise. It seems silly to write in an earlier era of Trek and not lean into what made that era different from TOS. I wasn't terribly nuts about Kirk's first mission being the 23rd Century equivalent of a USO tour, either.
Calling Kirk "kid" even though he's younger than Kirk seems like a very Gary Mitchell thing to do.
Yeah, true. Which is a shame, as I liked a lot of the Trek history established in the 1980s comics and novels.
Oh, it SO is. But the joke only works if you know Jim is older. But I do, so it does.Calling Kirk "kid" even though he's younger than Kirk seems like a very Gary Mitchell thing to do.
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