Some fans have it all backwards. The idea that Kirk and Spock on the Enterprise is "new" but a new crew on a new ship with continuity shout outs to other spinoffs somehow isn't completely baffles me.
Total Reboot?
- Thread starter Bry_Sinclair
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I could create a whole new universe that has similar elements to Star Trek and yet it would allow me the creative freedom to do all sorts of things. The advantage Trek has is a built in audience initially.
I think there is also a perception that Star Trek is the only space adventure that's really worked on television. It isn't true, but it is a perception. No other property on television has had Trek's reach and sheer quantity of materiel. That can work against you in a number of ways. People can have the idea that nothing but Trek works on TV and the idea that Trek has done everything it could do. Neither of those are true, but they're persistent preconceptions.
It's a false argument because look how many cops and lawyers and medical shows have been done through the decades that are really retelling the same types of stories over and over and over again. Superheroes are no different. How many times has the Batman faced off against the Joker in comics and books and television and films? Over and over again yet people keep going back to see something familiar told in a new way.
Yes, you can do Star Trek without calling it Star Trek or you can do Star Trek in a revised way that allows you the creative freedom that a non Trek creation would allow. But to do so you have to cut the umbilical cord. The Nolan Batman trilogy couldn't have been told if they had adhered to what was established in the Adam West TV series or the Tim Burton films. To tell the story of the Nolan trilogy he had to start from scratch. It's still rcognizably Batman, but told through a new perspective.
Yes, we get that many are wedded to the previous continuity, but studios and general audiences aren't going to care about getting caught up in all that again. Best to start with a clean sheet. Keep some familiar and important elements, but tell the story in a new way. An added advantage of this approach is it doesn't wipe away what was established before. It's simply an alternate take as if set in a sort of parallel universe. Note this is different than what Abrams did who insisted it was the same continuity yet used a time travel gimmick to erase the original timeline. He was saying the original TOS timeline no longer existed. I think it's easy to see how that might piss off some people.
But a clean sheet and updated approach sidesteps that problem. It's no different than being able to enjoy Tim Burton's Batman as well as Chris Nolan's version. They're two seperate things even if there is some familiarity between them.
You know I like revisiting TOS every so often and at the end of it I can pretend those heroes are still out there adventuring and none of the rest has happened. But outside of a fan production no one is going to put TOS back on the screen as it was. So if I want to enjoy truly new adventures in a Star Trek universe that interests me then it has to be remade from scratch again.
Abrams is a branching timeline. The Abramsverse and TOS universe are both there running side-by-side.
That's not how it's put across. He is rewriting TOS era continuity while saying it branches from the original.
Anyway it's not a whoile cloth reboot because he's just redressed a lot of what's there before. He is still showing a '60s based view of the future as opposed to a contemporary one. The only truly contemporary aspects are shaky cam, dysfunctional characters and a lot of flash-and-bang.
He hasn't rewritten anything. TOS is still on my shelf on both Blu-ray and DVD. It's likely still on your shelf as well.
It was never meant as a full-on reboot. It was designed to be more of a soft-reboot to keep people from going crazy thinking J.J. Abrams was going to break into their homes and steal their Star Trek stuff in the middle of the night.
Whatever. He doesn't have to steal into their homes. But his approach basically says the original continuity is no langer part of the whole because he erased it. That's what he did with his approach.
He hasn't rewritten anything. TOS is still on my shelf on both Blu-ray and DVD. It's likely still on your shelf as well.
It was never meant as a full-on reboot. It was designed to be more of a soft-reboot to keep people from going crazy thinking J.J. Abrams was going to break into their homes and steal their Star Trek stuff in the middle of the night.
Anyway, I don't want to get into this argument. It is what it is no matter how you choose to look at it. If I can ignore a lot of other stuff I don't care for I can certainly ignore JJ.
It isn't an argument, it's a discussion. Anyway, they've said many times they went the way that they did so they wouldn't erase prior continuity.
Personally, I would have rather had a full-on reboot.
You're right, it's not an argument. I guess I'm just sensitive to the fact that arguments have indeed started from small disagreements in opinion.
It isn't an argument, it's a discussion. Anyway, they've said many times they went the way that they did so they wouldn't erase prior continuity.
Personally, I would have rather had a full-on reboot.
And what is this Star Trek "concept" exactly?
A bunch of people going off in space exploring stuff?
There is no complicated or essential premise to Star Trek that somehow prevents any fresh take to be set in the same universe. It's sci-fi, anything goes.
There isn't a story that you could do in a reboot that you somehow couldn't do in a series set 100 years from the last one for example. You want the Klingons to be peace loving vegetarian hippies because that's essential to the story you wish to tell? Fine. Anything can be explained away by time (and possibly some tie in media
).And some people treat the word "reboot" as a magical spell incantation that will make Star Trek suddenly relevant again... it won't.
If anything Star Trek was already "rebooted" twice on TV, it's just that reboot wasn't a buzzword at the time so marketing people didn't think to use it...
A lot will depend on who you ask because different individuals will interpret it differently.
- Science fiction and space adventure periodically mixed with allegory.
- Generally adult level approach.
- Basic anthology format to allow for broad range of stories.
- Generally idealistic/optimistic, but not Utopian.
- Contemporary humanity projected into a future setting.
And even more basically: these are the voyages...
Exactly my point.
There's nothing there that prevents another show of any conceivable premise to be set in the same universe.
It's not like BSG where the original series was about a group of people who find out that a massive genocide of the human race had just taken place and they are the only few survivors so they go to a space disco.
There was no way that you could possibly tack on nuBSG onto that narrative so a reboot was necessary.But in Trek you can still do anything, nothing in the previous continuity is that limiting.
Well the words these are the voyages set the stage for space travel.
That said you have to be cognizant of what large segments of the audience will expect.
Space war can be a component or a story or two in Star Trek, but if you make it a series primarily about space war (as DS9 became) then I'd say you're straying from broader expectations. DS9 was popular with a core group of fans, but it wasn't something most were drawn to. A group of temporal investigators or a salvage crew in space are not something most are going to envision when they think of Star Trek.
Like it or not Star Trek has a recognizable face: a group of individuals encounter adventures while exploring deep space. The "strange new worlds" idea is code for having different kinds of stories in different places rather than staying in one place.
It really isn't that hard to get what Star Trek basically is. The disagreements are going to come in terms of the form it will take. It's happened every time it's been reinterpreted.
I freely admit I'm not immune from that. They could launch a new reboot of Trek and I might like it or be totally turned off by it.
I have an answer to all of that, but I'm saving it for my fanfic, so I'd rather not get into it here. But seriously, for a good writer - or even a halfway mediocre one with some imagination, like myself - none of that is a problem. In fact, it's a PLUS.
Remember, in our last canonical looks at the 24th century, Starfleet had self-contained transporters the size of a comm badge, a formula to remove transporter range limitations, Borg-busting future torpedoes and armour (which would give them a pretty overwhelming advantage over local powers), black hole WMD's.... even things like the ability to detect things like androids over several light-years. Fast forward a century and they've either had to pretend none of that ever happened () or spend the whole series writing convoluted Voyager-style technobabble workarounds for all of it.
EDIT: Or they could run with it, but would the result resemble Star Trek at all?
Generally I think it's a mistake remaking existing episodes. Leave them alone. You could take a basic idea and do something new with it, but just reshooting what's already been done is a migraine in the making.
Compare: TOS' "The Naked Time" with TNG's "The Naked Now." No contest. The TNG episode is a a waste of film in comparison.
Compare: TWOK vs. STID. Again the remake is a waste of film in comparison.
Hello, Hollywood? Do something else other than remakes.
And, yes, you can't miss the irony when considering a reboot.
My thoughts basically go along the lines of -- what can one take from TNG and expand upon and delve into a bit more? If I rebooted TNG, I'd maybe take one or two existing episodes and maybe expand one of those stories over a season or maybe make them grander in scale. But generally, yeah, I'd want new stories for these characters.
I disagree because the argument, to my mind, boils down to Berman-Era Trek being rejected because of it's setting (i.e. the universe it's in) and I've yet to find an instance where a Berman-Era story either sucked or didn't get written because a piece of canon specific to that universe/setting prevented it.
What made me lose interest and what dampens rewatchability of Berman-Era Trek, especially VOY and ENT, is the incessant resets, the throw-away and recycled plots, the non-existent character development and cookie cutter portrayals, the eye-rolling banter between characters as if it's clever, and the stupid, stupid call backs (Arik Soong, "Cybernetics ...." or Archer's .. "say 200 years?" at the end of "Regeneration" BLARRGH BARF GAG ME with a Varon-T disruptor for the love of Kahless).
Star Trek didn't need a new universe by the time it was over, it needed better writers, better actors, and better characters.
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A big reason why I've no interest to revisit the Berman era is I feel it's tainted. Someone somewhere said something interesting that I think caught part of what I feel: TOS was like naval drama while TNG became like office drama. It's not meant as a literal definition, but rather a sense of perception.
L.A. Law is Space!
I think DS9 did recover from the feel of an office drama to a degree. But that momentum was lost with Voyager and Enterprise.
Please, don't get me wrong, but it seems to me, that somebody (not an particular person, but group of fans) has an unhealthy attachment to Kirk and Spock.
IMO, Kirk&Co not equal to "Star Trek" concept. TOS-crew is only a part of it.
OK, Star Trek is not a "real" universe, it's a context for plenty of good stories. That's why we can talk about continuity and Star Trek concept.
Kirk and Spock are my favorite characters.
But that doesn't change two things:
1. There is less live-action material featuring those characters outside of Enterprise. There is six-hundred plus hours of "Other Trek" compared to less than a hundred featuring Kirk and Spock.
2. Kirk and Spock are still "Star Trek" to general audiences and those audiences continue to show an interest in those characters.
There is a recognition factor with popular franchises. Although comics have delved into other possibilities (temporarily before being reset to status quo) who can imagine someone else as Batman, Superman or Spider-Man in a film, animated or television project. Bruce Wayne is Batman if you're going to do a major film or television project. You can toy with alternatives in comics for a brief time, but eventually you have to bring it back to the status quo that the broader audience recognizes and expects.
Same with James Bond. You can reference someone else perhaps being 007 before Bond came along (as was hinted in the original Fleming books), but when it comes to the main adventures 007 is James Bond.
Yes, there is a wide untapped universe in Trek with many characters, but that being said there are still some faces people are familiar with, are fond of and expect to see. Primarily those faces are Kirk, Spock, McCoy as well as Picard and Data along with their respective supporting characters.
TNG established you could do Star Trek without the original crew. But then a generation of audiences became familiar with this new group. Yes, there were other crews introduced with the subsequent spin-offs, but since those shows didn't gel in quite the same way and to the same extent as TOS and TNG the recognition factor isn't there nearly to the same extent.
Like it or not JJtrek set the precedent for recasting familiar characters in a Trek universe. Yeah, technically fan productions already did that, but they're not widely recognized as is a major feature film franchise. Also continuity has already become divergent in published books and one no future Trek production will ever recognize.
The precedents are already there. Whether you like JJtrek or not it basically set a point that the original continuity is highly unlikely to ever be revisited. That isn't to say the Abramsverse will be adhered to after the next film, but that one can reset the continuity with familiar characters and elements.
We can't turn back time, but we can go forward incorporating the things we like while jettisoning the things that don't work anymore (if they ever worked at all).
For those who want to continue where the previous continuity left off there are the fan productions and the published Pocket Books novels.
Same with James Bond. You can reference someone else perhaps being 007 before Bond came along (as was hinted in the original Fleming books), but when it comes to the main adventures 007 is James Bond.
Yes, there is a wide untapped universe in Trek with many characters, but that being said there are still some faces people are familiar with, are fond of and expect to see. Primarily those faces are Kirk, Spock, McCoy as well as Picard and Data along with their respective supporting characters.
TNG established you could do Star Trek without the original crew. But then a generation of audiences became familiar with this new group. Yes, there were other crews introduced with the subsequent spin-offs, but since those shows didn't gel in quite the same way and to the same extent as TOS and TNG the recognition factor isn't there nearly to the same extent.
Like it or not JJtrek set the precedent for recasting familiar characters in a Trek universe. Yeah, technically fan productions already did that, but they're not widely recognized as is a major feature film franchise. Also continuity has already become divergent in published books and one no future Trek production will ever recognize.
The precedents are already there. Whether you like JJtrek or not it basically set a point that the original continuity is highly unlikely to ever be revisited. That isn't to say the Abramsverse will be adhered to after the next film, but that one can reset the continuity with familiar characters and elements.
We can't turn back time, but we can go forward incorporating the things we like while jettisoning the things that don't work anymore (if they ever worked at all).
For those who want to continue where the previous continuity left off there are the fan productions and the published Pocket Books novels.
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