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Meh, I think it's perfectly possible to be a fan of TOS and appreciate Berman-Trek's achievements* -- at minimum as they pertain to TNG and DS9 -- simultaneously without any cognitive dissonance whatever. And I'm not aware of "that particular rendition of Trek" being thought of as "prime," since they're both technically part of the same continuity.
Seems you're falling into the same trap you accuse others of: claiming of things as fact when you have absolutely nothing to back it up. At least I can point to TOS having been wildly popular in strip syndication and still more easily available to the masses in that form than TNG (or any other Berman-era spin-off).
I'll buy that when you can explain to me why, as OpenMaw correctly pointed out, general media or audiences would still care or talk about TNG if your belief that "everyone moved on from it rather quickly" was correct. The behaviour of the world I'm seeing doesn't match the claims you make about it, is all. Which suggests to me that your claims are not making contact with reality.
I'll buy that when you can explain to me why, as OpenMaw correctly pointed out, general media or audiences would still care or talk about TNG if your belief that "everyone moved on from it rather quickly" was correct. The behaviour of the world I'm seeing doesn't match the claims you make about it, is all.
Nice try at misdirection. You tried to claim something as fact with nothing to back it up.
Can someone point me to all these media articles that were wondering when more TNG was going to be made prior to the Abrams films? Can someone point me to all these articles that were wondering about more TNG after the Abrams films were made?
I believe that the number of media sites clamoring for more TNG may be being exaggerated here.
Mmm-hmm. I can see that it's time to take a break.
(Oh, and trying to send other people off to do your homework for you is never convincing as a debate tactic, BTW. You're as capable of doing a simple Google search as any of us. I found this example in eighty seconds flat, from that obscure Trekkie publication Rolling Stone. What obscure, forgotten show could they possibly be talking about there? Surely only us hardcore Trekkies even remember that sort of thing, everyone else moved on, right? )
Mmm-hmm. I can see that it's time to take a break.
(Oh, and trying to send other people off to do your homework for you is never convincing as a debate tactic, BTW. You're as capable of doing a simple Google search as any of us. I found this example in eighty seconds flat, from that obscure Trekkie publication Rolling Stone. What obscure, forgotten show could they possibly be talking about there? Surely only us hardcore Trekkies even remember that sort of thing, everyone else moved on, right? )
^ Okay. Is that your final answer? And you're taking the proverbial Fifth on responding to why RS is publishing articles about a supposedly forgotten show?
I'm actually interested. Do you have anything from Forbes or Variety? Something that has some actual weight beyond, "we should bring Data back with an aging chip"?
Do we know that the piece actually made it into the magazine? I'm pretty sure that Rolling Stone also has web-only content.
^ Okay. Is that your final answer? And you're taking the proverbial Fifth on responding to why RS is publishing articles about a supposedly forgotten show?
^ All I'm going to do is, when I have more time later this evening (or tomorrow morning), do a more detailed search. What I'll find with more than a few seconds' effort I'm not sure (although I have suspicions). Are you sure? I'm going AFK shortly, so I'm just trying to verify if that's where you want to leave it.
And this:
BillJ said:
I'm pretty sure that Rolling Stone also has web-only content.
All I'm going to do is, when I have more time later this evening (or tomorrow morning), do a more detailed search. What I'll find with more than a few seconds' effort I'm not sure (although I have suspicions). Are you sure? I'm going AFK shortly, so I'm just trying to verify if that's where you want to leave it.
I don't know if you're trying to change the subject or if you've just lost track of it, but I'm talking about general audience awareness of and mentions of TNG as part of pop culture. OpenMaw cited articles about a reboot as an example of this, not the totality of it, and I'm not arguing that there's any "supposed groundswell from general audiences for new TNG," I'm arguing that your attempts to pretend TNG has been forgotten by general audiences are poppycock. Those are different things. Keep that in mind for later.
All I can say is that both Frakes and Dorn have tried to pitch post-TNG series and no one at CBS seems the slightest bit interested. If there are all these people waiting for new TNG, it seems like now would be the time for CBS to pounce on one of the pitches and give general audiences what they are demanding.
Jesus. Does everyone that reads Rolling Stone read every single article? I don't think so. In order to capture as many readers as possible they offer a wide range of articles.
No, I don't remember saying that. I would expect that Rolling Stone would put up content that some numerically significant portion of its audience would recognize, relate to and be interested in. Just as any media outlet does. That doesn't change the fact that such material has to have some extent of appeal within the general audience.
Interestingly, Roddenberry's original idea for TNG is that it would actually be a reboot, aside from some extremely vague pitch about taking place 80 years or so after Kirk and Spock, whatever that was supposed to mean. He wanted no reference whatsoever to any original series character, no Vulcans, no Klingons, Romulans, or anything else. Just the Enterprise, Starfleet, and his new perfect humans. Roddenberry was against the very idea of Worf, didn't want him as a regular, and even as late as the third or fourth season didn't think he should be the main focus of any episode. There was talk of simply calling the new show "Star Trek." It was the co-creators of TNG (the ones Roddenberry ended up screwing out of a "created by" credit) who pushed for at least some continuity with the original series.
I see TNG as a sequel to the original Star Trek (as was the animated series). DS9, VOY, and ENT, however, are spinoffs not of STAR TREK, but of TNG.
I have three models of the Enterprise on a shelf behind me.
The TOS-E, The TMP-E, and the Church-E.
I have one set of figures. They are the original series characters.
Why do I bring this up? I just want it clear that my bias is strictly in the field of The Original Star Trek.My first Star Trek hero was James T. Kirk, at the age of four. Four years old, witnessing the Enterprise in drydock. The original series holds my whole heart. Now, I enjoy TNG in parts. I'm not a fan of many of it's later elements. (I would say I think Warped9's views are fairly close to my own with regards to TNG.)
So when I say that TNG has a sizeable audience out there (Considering it was 20 million strong at the show's height), please know it's not coming from someone who is a blindfolded fanboy of TNG. The first five seasons are mostly good, DS9 has it's moments of greatness, Voyager and Enterprise I regard as missed opportunities. However, I know there are many out there who think DS9 is brilliant, and who love Voyager. ... So, to say there would be no demand to revisit the Next Generation in any capacity is silly. It has a strong following. TNG's remastered wouldn't be doing so well if not for the fact that there is an audience out there for it.
There have been articles(And i'm not going to get into an ego-measuring contest over who is a "real journalist" and who isn't. I distinctly remember an article talking about recasting TNG for a modern audience, and the "Honest Trailers" guys made a reference to rebooting TNG as being "awesome." It's about getting a pulse for the audience that exists for it, not about what hot-shot journalists think of the idea.
Do I want to see a TNG reboot? Not really. Would there b an audience for it, though? Absolutely.
No. At the same time, I don't think that the inclusion of Kirk, Spock, et al. is a sine qua non for a viable television future just because they're so recognized by the Nu Trek legions. Do we really need to drag back any established characters from previous iterations of Trek? I suppose those that might be held up as exemplars of some attribute or who achieved lasting renown could be mentioned in passing, off-the-cuff remarks once in a great while.
But I feel that a totally original complement is quite viable as long as basic aspects of good showcraft are hewn to. Draw up the major roles with a solid conception of their back stories and personal hooks that make them if not compelling, at least compellingly interesting for viewers to find out more about, without being gimmicky (this is not a code word for different sexual orientation) and with room for growth.
The architecture of the show's presentation should be consonant with what has worked best as the genre has developed, or at least during those periods that it hasn't been AWOL over the last decade plus. That is to say, no orientation on epsiodic fare except perhaps as really noteworthy outliers. The constitution of arcs should make intuitive sense in the context of the world being protrayed. One doesn't want to see any length of time invested on storylines, that when all things are considered, are too small and/or inconsequential to have merited the effort. On the other hand, a long multifaceted one should be warranted by the status of the organic development of the program's main themes, not to be brought into play too soon as it might overwhelm the audience's nascent identification, grasp, and acceptance of what they are watching.
Needless to say, discernment and utilization of quality writing talent by the show runners from the get go is vital. Even with a concept that is divorced from directly drawing upon the known and delineated associations of the past, I suppose there would still be a danger of seeing well worn tropes redolent of fifty years of baggage, being injected more often than would be palatable. It is probably unrealistic to think that some of this wouldn't appear, but a creeping growth of such elements must be avidly avoided.
I think that if a fortuitous synthesis of talent, vision, and determination could be realized, a thoughtful, engaging, and entertaining project set in the post-Voyager timeline would be very appealing and be my optimal choice going forward.
Is such a scenario at all likely to happen? Almost certainly not. There is probably no incentive for the property holders to formulate this kind of future. Not the least of which I guess is the patina of perceived failure still attached to the administration associated with Trek vehicles' evolution into this timeframe.
Okay, first of all for BillJ. Sorry to keep you in suspense, there were real lifey things that needed seeing to.
Now, you may not have seen this edit on the previous page, so I'm going to reiterate it:
I said:
I don't know if you're trying to change the subject or if you've just lost track of it, but I'm talking about general audience awareness of and mentions of TNG as part of pop culture. OpenMaw cited articles about a reboot as an example of this, not the totality of it, and I'm not arguing that there's any "supposed groundswell from general audiences for new TNG," I'm arguing that your attempts to pretend TNG has been forgotten by general audiences are poppycock. Those are different things. Keep that in mind for later.
On Reboots:
I decided to start with this since you seemed to think it was the main point I was making. It isn't, as you're hopefully now aware, but nevertheless it was a useful exercise and is a decent starting point.
And the general outcome is that yes, OpenMaw was correct to say that there have been periodic bursts of speculation around TNG reboots whenever one of Abrams' reboot films comes out, and no they don't just appear on Trek sites (although obviously the list of sites interested in such speculation leans heavily General Geek & Tech).
(I found the following nine items, incidentally, by the simple expedient of looking past the first page of Google search results. One of the reasons I kept asking you “is that your final answer?” earlier is because I was incredulous that this possibility seemed not to have occurred to you. For future reference, when someone tells you that they're going to do a more detailed search, this sort of thing is probably what they mean.)
None of the above, incidentally, indicates a "groundswell of support for a TNG reboot" right now; you read that in because you seem to have a paranoid tendency to assume that anyone who mentions TNG in anything like a positive or nostalgic light is scheming to replace Abrams with Berman in a palace coup or something*. But OpenMaw is IMO correct to adduce that the awareness and potential audience remains out there.
* Not meant literally, of course. You just seem awfully oversensitive about it, is all.
Now some bonus categories, which speak to what I was talking about, which is that your various attempts to claim that TNG is largely forgotten outside the fanbase are ridiculous on their face.
On the 25th Anniversary of TNG and the events surrounding it:
... for a series everybody is supposed to have forgotten and moved on from rather quickly :
Random Items in the Google news feed:
Just a sampling of what turns up randomly for TNG in today's Google News Feed.
I confined myself here to items that were centrally about TNG Trek or something specifically connected to it. The only exception is the last item, which is simply of interest for the way it introduces Patrick Stewart as a Star Trek star... because that's the way the audience of this random Australian news outlet is likeliest to know him.
I have not included any articles that casually reference TNG's holodecks or Geordi's VISOR or some other aspect of TNG Trek as either having inspired some technology or other or having some metaphorical relevance to an otherwise unrelated story. That list of links runs to seventeen pages.
I've tried to keep the number of links restrained because I'm not trying to dump a massive link-bomb here, I'm just making the point that there is vastly more mainstream coverage of and ongoing news about TNG as a franchise than one would expect to see if your claims were correct. As it is, it's understandable why TNG was returned to syndication in 2009 in an apparent effort to bolster awareness of the franchise for the coming Abrams reboot. (And the stats for viewership, be they of TNG's syndicated run after it ceased producing new content or after its recent reinstatement, would be interesting. But they're not needed to make this basic point.)
The Google newsfeed of a genuinely forgotten series runs to one page and about a half dozen items period, most of them mentions of the show in the bio notes of actors now either doing other shows or having recently died. That's what I got with a search for Spenser for Hire. And that's what tells me your "everybody's moved on from TNG" myth is pretty much busted.
Now, I went to this much effort this time for a simple reason. I meant what I said earlier about it being bad manners to demand someone else go do your homework for you. And you seem like a good guy to me and I like you, really I do, but you have this habit of blurting out questionable claims and then, when challenged, angrily demanding cites for very commonly-known, easily-checkable facts from your opponent as if you think you're executing some kind of "gotcha." That's a bad habit, and the only reason I humoured it this time is to show you that this kind of very simple fact-checking -- it took about twenty minutes to a half-hour to put together the above -- is the sort of thing you should be doing before you make grand, sweeping claims like you did in this thread. "Citation please" is something you do when a person is claiming something unlikely or counter-intuitive, not when they're claiming something that is common public knowledge.
I ain't mad at you. Exercises like this can be perfectly enjoyable and I certainly ran across some interesting tidbits while doing it. But fair warning, you can't routinely expect other people to have the time and inclination to exert this kind of effort in your behalf... and the next time you angrily demand cites from me to "prove" that the Sun rises in the east or that Elvis was a popular musician or [some other such thing of comparable ridiculousness to this outing], I may simply refer you to this post and remind you of this.
That's all I've got to say about that, and you're certainly welcome to have the last word in-thread if you'd like.
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