TOS: Showing, not Telling.

[Longinus]

By the way, as an aside, I do wonder if the TOS aesthetic would carry for an entire series under modern productions. It was celebrated for one or two episodes but I wonder at the longevity.

There could be middle ground with updating the look. Keep the overall aesthetic, the shapes and colours of things, but add detail and polish. In essence keep the 60s style but do it with today's tech.

 

[uniderth]

I could see a Forbidden Planet aesthetic for an April-era series, but not for a show set 100 years before that. I would go so far as to say that Enterprise didn't look advanced enough. Though, maybe add a touch more NASA.

 

[BillJ]

Yet in DS9's "Trials and Tribble-ations" and ENT's "In a Mirror, Darkly" both extensively featured the TOS exteriors/interiors alongside the current tech/design of both series, but the TOS designs were celebrated for how beautiful they were with then-current production standards (mainly camera/lighting). If TOS' appearances in those series was not seen as archaic or laughable, it stands to reason a new series using TOS exteriors/interiors would work. The greatest challenge would be stories to match the power of that written for TOS.

As one offs? Sure. Every week for 178 episodes? I'm not so sure people would be celebrating the look.

 

[Warped9]

This is actually my biggest complaint with Continues and Phase II/New Voyages. it's possible to continue the design ethic while adapting to known advances in technology. They just aren't doing it. Instead, they're just going back to the original and copying it, warts and all. I'd be much more impressed if their set design, at least, gave us a glimpse of how TOS would look if the original had been prescient enough to know what today's technology looks like.

And yet that is a large part of why I like STC--the fact they strive for a strong sense of continuity with the original. This isn't a full-up contemporary television production. It's a labour of love to recconnect with the original series and pick up where it left off and feel (as much as possible) like a convincing extension of that original.

For me it's almost like being able to go home again.

 

[MGagen]

There were two main problems with Enterprise:

1. First Contact. This movie painted the earlier stories into a corner. By having humanity meet the Vulcans on Earth, just crawling out of the rubble of the Eugenics War; rather than "out there", in a later period of warp-driven exploration, as was always assumed from hints in TOS, they were saddled with always being the junior partner. Rather than "boldly going where no man has gone before" they were stuck "timidly going where everyone else has already been"! Plus, Earth as Junior Partner, doesn't wash with the Federation being so Earth-centric. Verdict: First Contact -> TOS... "you can't get there from here."

2. The Killer Bs. Berman and Braga were too steeped in the TNG / "politically correct" ethos to ever be on board with how un-PC a true TOS prequel would need to be. This is the wild and wooley frontier. Something that full-blooded, with a rich, romantic old-style musical score, was simply beyond their ken. Add to this that they also had NO INTEREST in TOS and it was doomed from the start.

I think it would've been fun if they embraced the whole Forbidden Planet aesthetic and made it look like 1950s science fiction. That would've been remarkably noncommercial, though.

This is what I've always thought. I would have locked the writers in a room for 8 hours with Forbidden Planet and The Cage playing in a loop and told them: "Give us something precisely between these two."

And before someone says "nothing with those old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes could possibly be a hit with today's audience, I have two words: Mad Men.

 

[PCz911]

There were two main problems with Enterprise:

1. First Contact. This movie painted the earlier stories into a corner. By having humanity meet the Vulcans on Earth, just crawling out of the rubble of the Eugenics War; rather than "out there", in a later period of warp-driven exploration, as was always assumed from hints in TOS, they were saddled with always being the junior partner. Rather than "boldly going where no man has gone before" they were stuck "timidly going where everyone else has already been"! Plus, Earth as Junior Partner, doesn't wash with the Federation being so Earth-centric. Verdict: First Contact -> TOS... "you can't get there from here."

2. The Killer Bs. Berman and Braga were too steeped in the TNG / "politically correct" ethos to ever be on board with how un-PC a true TOS prequel would need to be. This is the wild and wooley frontier. Something that full-blooded, with a rich, romantic old-style musical score, was simply beyond their ken. Add to this that they also had NO INTEREST in TOS and it was doomed from the start.



This is what I've always thought. I would have locked the writers in a room for 8 hours with Forbidden Planet and The Cage playing in a loop and told them: "Give us something precisely between these two."

And before someone says "nothing with those old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes could possibly be a hit with today's audience, I have two words: Mad Men.

This!

You wrote it better than I ever could! It reflects my sentiments exactly.

(Love the killer b label!)

 

[FormerLurker]

There could be middle ground with updating the look. Keep the overall aesthetic, the shapes and colours of things, but add detail and polish. In essence keep the 60s style but do it with today's tech.

This is what I was getting at with my earlier post. The styling aesthetic of TOS is fine. I prefer it, to be honest. But to make it believable to today's audiences, the tech has to at least appear more advanced. For instance, and any engineer worth their degree will tell you this, the more advanced something is, the more it does, the more complex the controls for it have to be. If that means more buttons, then more buttons. If that means a multi-interface touchscreen that is big enough to bring up two sets of controls at once, to be able to multi-task, then a large touchscreen that can bring up multiple controls. If it doesn't look like the user can use it, it doesn't look like it works.

 

[Anwar]

1. First Contact. This movie painted the earlier stories into a corner. By having humanity meet the Vulcans on Earth, just crawling out of the rubble of the Eugenics War; rather than "out there", in a later period of warp-driven exploration, as was always assumed from hints in TOS, they were saddled with always being the junior partner. Rather than "boldly going where no man has gone before" they were stuck "timidly going where everyone else has already been"! Plus, Earth as Junior Partner, doesn't wash with the Federation being so Earth-centric. Verdict: First Contact -> TOS... "you can't get there from here."

The problem is that TOS' unspoken rule was that the Federation was really just a benign Terran Empire that inducted other aliens in as weak partners rather than Vassals. TNG+ made it clear it really was a Multi-Species Cooperative.

So you're taking two very different ideas and trying to make a prequel than matches both.

Of course, I personally always found the Human Empire thing to be an outdated concept anyways.

Add to this that they also had NO INTEREST in TOS and it was doomed from the start.

Well, neither did Bennett or Nick Meyer. Or JJ Abrams.

This is what I've always thought. I would have locked the writers in a room for 8 hours with Forbidden Planet and The Cage playing in a loop and told them: "Give us something precisely between these two."

It wouldn't fly with modern audiences.

And before someone says "nothing with those old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes could possibly be a hit with today's audience, I have two words: Mad Men.

Mad Men worked because it was a more-or-less accurate portrayal of our own past, it wouldn't work to have people in our own future brazenly displaying attitudes we ourselves have already moved past (or at least acknowledge the flaws of).

 

[Trekkin]

Yeah, Mad Men! Which depicted those 'values' (and the entire aesthetic) as a thin layer of shiny over a rotten, and increasingly obsolete, core.

Somehow, I don't think Trekkies will really be into a show about how mundane Federation society keeps fucking up the main characters. No matter how 'classy' it looks.

 

[C57D]

For me ENT had so much promise, but just did not deliver - well not for me anyway. I expected it to be humanity making its first faltering steps out into space, meeting the Vulcans and Andorians (and Romulans!!) for the first time and building the Federation from the ground up.

Tech and attitudes didn't need to be sixties (and probably would have looked a bit silly if it was), but being so TNG-a-alike was a bit too far in the wrong direction. Why wasn't the heroes ship a Daedelus class or one of earlier ships (Marshall class??) from the Spacelight Chronology? (Oh, and before the High Priests of canon remind me that SFC is not canon, let me ask where the design of the Enterprise-Declaration class liner model in the Rec room in ST TMP came from - yes SFC! ).

Phase pistols, Photonic torpedos, Transporters etc all shifted the tech way too much, for me. But has already been mentioned the "Going where everyone has already been" and beng "baby-sat" by the Vulcans so they don't climb out of the pram was just the death knell of any hope of an exciting, exploratory series.

 

[BillJ]

TNG+ made it clear it really was a Multi-Species Cooperative.

It really didn't. Or else all values wouldn't be human values. Nor would 99% of Starfleet personnel be human. Including pretty much every Captain and Admiral we see.

 

[Trekkin]

I don't actually remember that many bona fide Federation species in TNG. There were Vulcans and Betazoids, but most aliens either enemies (Romulans, Cardassians,Ferangi, Borg), non-member allies (Klingons, Bajorans), or wannabes/newly discovered cultures (the people in 'Justice', 'Haven', First Contact, Aminus, Who Watches the Watchers, Baku etc etc etc etc.)

I suppose there was the strategy-expert species from the war games episode, and the room full of ambassadors in INS.

 

[uniderth]

What exactly are these "old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes" that we're talking about?

Besides, cultures are changing all the time. What is considered "progressive" today will be called old fashioned and conservative in 50-100 years time.

 

[Anwar]

What exactly are these "old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes" that we're talking about?

Thinking rape is funny, for one thing.

 

[Warped9]

Thinking rape is funny, for one thing.

Sadly there are people still like that today.

Societies, like all things, evolve. Not everything is inherently bad or inherently good at any given time. Not everything back in the day was rotten just like not everything today is automatically peachy.

 

[RAMA]

In TOS and early movies, they were discouraged from pinning down too many details in order to keep the complex future universe from being controversial or having to use too much exposition. There are lines in the TOS Bible that state this directly I believe.

As ST became more comfortable in it's own milieu, ie: STNG, it started showing us more of these details.

RAMA

After commenting in a couple of other threads about various TOS episodes that speculate about the ST universe, it struck me that TOS had a certain storytelling technique that the sequel series didn't practice too much: Not telling us everything.

When they were first creating Star Trek, Gene Roddenberry & co. decided against giving us explicit explanations about how certain equipment worked. After all, the cops on Dragnet didn't stop the story to give us an explanation of how their firearms worked, so why should Kirk & co. do so with their phasers or warp drive? The viewers didn't really need to know how the phasers worked. It was enough that the characters did.

This led to TOS sometime dropping tantalizing references to things that were common knowledge to the characters, but unknown to the viewers at home. What was the Tantalus Field Device and how exactly did it operate? What were the Vulcanian Expedition or the Axanar Peace Mission? How old was the UFP implied to be? What happened in the Eugenics Wars when the supermen simultaneously seized power in 40 nations?

It strikes me that dropping references like that is a great way to engage the imaginations of fandom. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle did a similar thing in his Sherlock Holmes stories, dropping intriguing references to cases that the readers never were never witness to. People have been speculating about the Giant Rat of Sumatra for over 100 years now. I think you could make a good case for Star Trek fandom being birthed in those almost-throwaway references that don't explain everything. The subsequent shows, almost unavoidably, became a bit more about filling in the gaps that already existed instead of creating new ones. I think this might be part of what keeps me coming back to TOS when I've lost interest in some of the other shows. (What's more intriguing, being outright told that the Federation was founded in 2161, or to hear how they only had subspace radio during the Earth/Romulan War?)*

*Please note that I DON'T mean this thread as a pointless exercise in bashing the subsequent shows. Heck, you can find examples of this sort of worldbuilding in the more recent Treks. A throwaway reference to the "Rules of Acquisition" in a DS9 ep became the cornerstone of developing the Ferengi culture. It's something that I hope future Treks remember to do. It's nice to have an occasional reminder that we don't know everything there is to know about the Star Trek Universe!

 

[uniderth]

Thinking rape is funny, for one thing.

*in Kirk's voice* WHERE?

Where was rape laughed at?

 

[BillJ]

Where was rape laughed at?

Not exactly laughed at, but treated in a less than serious fashion. At the end of "The Enemy Within".

 

[Anwar]

Sadly there are people still like that today.

Having main characters in a show made today who think that wouldn't really go well with audiences, I think.

Societies, like all things, evolve. Not everything is inherently bad or inherently good at any given time. Not everything back in the day was rotten just like not everything today is automatically peachy.

Of course I agree, but there are some values and cultural resonances that go back hundreds and even thousands of years. Things that have never changed or transgressions that have always been looked down on.

 

[uniderth]

Not exactly laughed at, but treated in a less than serious fashion. At the end of "The Enemy Within".

Ok. So we have one example of "old-fashioned, un-PC attitudes." I'll throw in Turnabout intruder's "no women as ship captains."

Anything else, or are two examples the best we can do?