TNG changes to TOS
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One thing that I noticed as a change was that TNG established a nuclear World War III in their very first episode, whereas TOS seemed to say no such war occurred. (Spock: "It would mean they fought the war your Earth avoided". And yes, I know that in "Breads and Circuses" Spock also referred to a death toll in the third world war, but taken with "Space Seed", that seems to point to the Eugenics Wars -> Spock: "The mid-1990s was the era of your last so-called World War." McCoy: "The Eugenics Wars.")
But, yeah, ridged Romulans were dumb. (And oddly, ENT went with the ridges, but the two TOS movies to show Romulans, both which came out well after "The Neutral Zone", kept the original TOS style.)
But, yeah, ridged Romulans were dumb. (And oddly, ENT went with the ridges, but the two TOS movies to show Romulans, both which came out well after "The Neutral Zone", kept the original TOS style.)
Not to mention Star Trek VI established that the Klingon homeworld would be uninhabitable within 50 years, and that was a year and a half after TNG's Sins of the Father.
I guess the one thing I didn't like from TOS to TNG was making the Enterprise a family ship. Though Roddenberry says Starfleet isn't the military, Starfleet has always been structured like a military, from the ranking system and chain of command, to having an academy, and having enlisted men vs. officers. So continuing with the "non-military military" Starfleet in the 24th century aboard a supposed Kumbaya starship that has dozens of phaser banks and hundreds of photon torpedoes, I call bullshit on the idea that it would have a preschool.
Spock was saying Earth avoided a biological war. He wasn't speaking of a nuclear war, which Humanity did have.
It always struck me, and this predates the TNG movies, that a lot of what TNG changed in the early seasons, they actually spent a lot of time trying to unravel later on, and return to a more TOS-like keel. For example, early TNG established a universe that was pretty much without conflict, where even the great galactic powers of the past (the Klingons in particular) are no longer enemies. But later on, with the re-introduction of Romulans and the introduction of Cardassians and Borg, there seemed to be this concerted effort to re-militarize the format, as if somebody up there had realized that Star Trek needed that in order to actually "be" Star Trek. They were able to go further with it in DS9 because they were able to make it out of whole cloth, and the TNG movies pretty much canonized it. But I always suspected that the powers that be on the TNG television episodes were always quietly edging back to that more knife's-edge view of the universe as seen in TOS and the TOS movies. The TNG we were presented with at the end of it's life was a much more 'dangerous' place than the TNG we were introduced to back in "Farpoint".
I thought families on board was a stupid idea. I could see Wesley tagging along with Beverly (it was always a Vickie from the Love Boat sort of thing though), but who packs up their children and goes into space? The Borg show up and you got Borg preschool. I cheered when Q showed Picard that space is dangerous. If I had a kid, that would have been it for me. Ship Junior back to Earth ASAP.
The different makeup artists went with their own distinct variations on the designs. The productions that Michael Westmore was involved with -- TNG, DS9, VGR, ENT, and the TNG movies -- used his particular designs for Klingons and Romulans. The fourth through sixth movies had prosthetic makeup designed by Richard Snell, who used his own distinct variations on the Klingon and Romulan designs. It's like how different comic-book artists bring their own interpretations to the design of the characters or their costumes.
Well, it's the other way around, of course, since ST III came first. Fred Phillips's Klingon redesign in TMP gave all the Klingons the same type of ridge, a single vertebral ridge extending to the bridge of the nose. The prosthetic designers for ST III, The Burman Studio, created the approach of giving each Klingon an individualized bony plate. Westmore based his Klingon design largely on the Burman design, while taking the ridged nose from the Phillips TMP design. Meanwhile, in the later movies, Snell went for a Klingon design with subtler, rounder skull plates.
Rather, it established that the Klingon homeworld would be uninhabitable in 50 years if the Klingons didn't get help from the Federation. As Spock said, "Due to their enormous military budget, the Klingon economy does not have the resources to combat this catastrophe." That's the whole reason they were open to working with the Federation -- because the UFP did have the resources to combat the catastrophe. Since the alliance succeeded, it follows that the UFP was able to help mitigate the ecological disaster.
Frontier towns in the Old West had heavily armed fortifications, but they also had families and schools. The arms were to protect the civilians against the dangers of the frontier. I don't understand why this is so unbelievable. Unless it's because we're so far removed from frontier existence that we've forgotten how many generations of our ancestors chose to take their families into dangerous environments, trusting in their weapons to protect their families.
The thing is, the Enterprise-D's crew wasn't supposed to be all Starfleet. It was a mix of Starfleet officers and civilian scientists, the former being there to protect the latter as they did their work exploring the galaxy.
But this was mostly forgotten in later seasons. The problems with TNG's concept aren't with the concept itself, but with the way the show largely abandoned it and failed to explain why it was conceived that way in the first place. The E-D was meant to be a deep-space explorer spending 15 years or more away from a friendly port. A ship like that would need to be an independent community with families, essentially a colony in its own right, since you'd get few people willing to give up their lives and families for 15 or 20 years. But after the pilot, the show promptly abandoned the deep-frontier idea and had the ship on milk runs to help Federation colonies and ships. So there was a mismatch between what the ship was set up to be and what it actually ended up doing.
Roddenberry did indeed want to distance TNG from TOS. There was a lot about TOS that he'd come to regret and renounce, particularly the parts that he wasn't personally responsible for. By the time TNG came along, he was very caught up in the idea of making ST entirely his own, and he wanted to leave most of the old stuff behind. But once Roddenberry was gone and Trek fans like Ron Moore began rising through the producers' ranks, they started moving TNG back toward its TOS roots. Roddenberry saw TNG as essentially a soft reboot to the continuity, ignoring or renouncing a lot of ideas from TOS; it was his successors who chose to make it a more direct continuation.
These.
I want to add: The unisex hairstyles for the Vulcans and Romulans, and even a uniformed look (and even a soul-less physical depiction) of the Vulcans and Romulans.
Probably becuase your examples are covered by other stuff in Star Trek.
Colonies and Starbases already cover the frontier towns and forts examples.
Also wagon trains would be covered by colony ships and groups of colony ships likely with armed escorts.
So really its just the examples to explain the Enterprise-D having families are already covered and are considerably different.
Pretty much everything, actually.
lol
We actually did see the Andorians maybe once or twice in TNG.
But frankly, the biggest change was that in TOS the Federation was really a Human Polity that just inducted alien species into it as Weak Partners instead of conquering them and Starfleet was just your usual run of the mill space military. In TNG it was made more clear the Federation was an equal alliance of species and not everything was cut-and-past out of the 20th Century.
Unfortunately, they underestimated how much people loved the 20th Century and how much they DIDN'T want anything to be different.
But frankly, the biggest change was that in TOS the Federation was really a Human Polity that just inducted alien species into it as Weak Partners instead of conquering them and Starfleet was just your usual run of the mill space military. In TNG it was made more clear the Federation was an equal alliance of species and not everything was cut-and-past out of the 20th Century.
Unfortunately, they underestimated how much people loved the 20th Century and how much they DIDN'T want anything to be different.
The family ships thing only made a little sense if the Enterprise was a lone ship on a deep space exploration mission. It was originally imagined as a full self sufficient community on the frontiers of civilization. Just they kind of threw that out early when they started focusing more on conflicts with local races.
Oh yeah, one of Lal's 3 holodeck templates, and the (blink and you'll miss it) set decoration on Risa during Picard's Horgon conversation
Human beings. What the hell happened between Kirk's time and Picard's? Did some Federation or Earth president institute a propaganda program which had an entire generation grow up thinking humanity had evolved into some idealized form?
All of the early TNG smug. It wasn't in every episode and it eventually was banished.
Although I know why they did it, I don't think that their new uniforms looked as good. I think TOS just had more functional and simple uniforms. Plus now you can't have redshirts /:
New Romulan look was pretty wacky all around. Big huge shoulders, one haircut for everyone, and V shaped foreheads...I think the biggest problem is that they all look the same.
Although I know why they did it, I don't think that their new uniforms looked as good. I think TOS just had more functional and simple uniforms. Plus now you can't have redshirts /:
New Romulan look was pretty wacky all around. Big huge shoulders, one haircut for everyone, and V shaped foreheads...I think the biggest problem is that they all look the same.
Same as now, actually. Nearly everyone today sees themselves as superior to their predecessors.
With TNG, we're just seeing it happen to us.
I honestly hated that the "Prime Directive' was changed from:
"Applies only to worlds that do not have spaceflight/warpdrive technology"
to
"Applies to ANY world or entity that is not a member of the UFP."
^^^^
It got ridiculous.
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