Re: Which are you more curious about? New Kirk or Enterprise
Temis the Vorta said:
My closet is filled with items every bit as colorful as the uniforms seen on Trek... and I'll bet yours is too.
But I'm not in the military! And people aren't shooting at me!
Neither am I, anymore. Haven't been for quite a few years.
And last time I checked, nobody stationed on the Enterprise was trying to be stealthy and camoflaged.
It's never really made a lot of sense for people in a quasi-military role to be wearing bright colors.
Nonsense. It makes perfect sense, depending on the situation. When we did our battalion runs, we'd all have our bright red t-shirts with our batallion crest across the front. I still have both my dress whites and my dress blues. Of course, I also have a bunch of BDU uniforms, but those were camoflaged for a REASON.
Look at the flight deck crew on an aircraft carrier. Bright colors are NECESSARY there.
Your argument ONLY makes sense if you're talking about people in a tactical environment. And on that point, I'd agree... it makes no sense to beam someone down to a hostile situation on an alien planet and to put them in a bright red shirt (unless their job is to distract the hostile aliens from shooting at the captain!)
So sure, let's have a separate and distinct "landing party uniform" which doesn't use bright colors. This was done in "The Cage," and in all the Trek movies... and it probably WOULD have been done in TOS had there been the budget for it.
That was just part of the explosion of color on TV in the 60s, because color TV was still a new thing then and people hadn't gotten sick of it yet. Plus the TV manufacturers wanted to give people a reason to throw out their old black-and-whites and the TV production companies helped out by making gaudy shows. It wasn't just costuming, the lighting was often extremely gaudy, too.
No argument there... the excessive use of colored light is one thing I'd really, REALLY like to see... um... "ignored"... in any revisitation to that era. Though, it might be fun to put a similarly-colored display screen or indicator lamp in that general area, just to hint at a more reasonable explanation (ie, if you have a purple light on a wall... it's coming off of a purple display on an indicator panel... not off of some gels over a stagelamp.)
Still, I think that the argument against color is being overstated DRAMATICALLY. Today, I'm wearing a green polo shirt and a pair of tan shorts. I suppose I COULD have tan on tan... and live in a home that was entirely grey... and then I could just SHOOT MYSELF because psychological studies have shown that having a certain amount of color in the environment is crucial to our mental health!
The tendency to go for grey uniforms on grey sets... and for that matter to have grey characterizations
... made some of the latter-day Trek almost unwatchable.
If the crew are beaming down to "Planet Hell," sure, leave the bright colors behind and go "all bland," so they won't get shot at!
The subsequent Trek series kept reducing the amount of the color on the uniforms till we ended up with the mostly-black and purplish-grey DS9 uniforms (my favorite) and the navy blue of ENT.
So are you one of those people who wears nothing but black? I dunno... I'm not really into "Goth Trek."
It's worth pointing out that the Trek that was most popular with audiences never had the dark, bland feel you're inclined towards. Whether there's a relationship between colors and viewership is debatable... but the fact that the two go together, and the fact that the brighter-colored shows tended to be the more successful shows... can't just be discounted out-of-hand.
Really, Starfleet should be wearing hi-tech camoflage suits - by the 23rd C, they'd be able to literally vanish into the background - and the fabrics could be lightweight body armor, as wearable as silk but strong enough to deflect disruptor blasts.
Why?
Seriously... I get that you might want to have that stuff when on a tactical mission, a landing party or whatever. But why would you need ANY of that if you're stationed at StarBase 12, or on the Enterprise, or any other "base" situation?
I'm all for having tactical field gear as a uniform OPTION. But seriously... why would the helmsman of a starship, at his duty station, require the ability to cloak himself???
But none of that would fit well into canon. Instead, Starfleet is sadistic enough to send their people into battle wearing red pajamas!
That point is reasonable. Give 'em field gear. Fine. Make the on-ship security guys wear brown rather than red (leave red for the engineering guys). Give them body armor... do something that's a combination between the TMP security armor and the ST-V tactical jumpsuits. I'd be 100% behind that.
The clothing is the same sort of problem as the communicators - there has to be some compromise between what is reasonable to expect in the 23rd C and what we've seen on TOS.
But the communicators ARE TOTALLY REASONABLE. You're talking about a device that puts out enough power to send a signal from the surface of the planet to the moon, for God's sake! Not a tiny little cell phone that has trouble sending an encoded signal over a mile! I AM SO SICK of people arguing that the TOS communicators are "too big" based upon the relative sizes of TOTALLY UNRELATED devices today. AAAAGGGGHHH!!!
The idea that Starfleet can figure out faster-than-light travel and teleportation (!!!) but not how to reduce communicators to smaller than our modern cell phones is absurd. There has to be some equivalency in the level of technological advancement that makes gut-level sense.
What is absurd is that people today literally don't have ANY GRASP OF BASIC PHYSICS. Sure, you could put all the digital bits of a cellphone from today into the head of a pin by the time of TOS. But you are still limited by the LAWS OF PHYSICS. It takes a certain amount of energy to create a signal with enough power to overcome "background signals" over any particular distance. The power to run a communicator with enough power to reach a high-orbit starship would be greater than the power required to fire a phaser. The power required to run a cell phone is barely more than that required to run a digital watch!
Please try to get this... when you, or Rick Berman, say that sort of nonsense, all you're doing is illustrating that you don't get what these devices do.
A TOS communicator is more equivalent to THIS
than it is to THIS
The point is, it's gonna LOOK WRONG TO THE AUDIENCE if Kirk is lugging around something bigger than the devices people in the audience are forgetting to turn off in the movie theater as per usual. That ulimately is the only thing to consider. All the Trek tech is "magic," trying to rationalize how communicators "really" work is ridiculous and pointless.
So it's not "comic" at all... it only seems that way to people who've become comfortable with the "magic" behind their toys but who have no idea of how those toys work.
I know as well as you do how cell phones work, Mr. Expert on Every Conceivable Subject.
You have a remarkable capacity for entirely missing the point.This has nothing whatever to do with how cell phones work and everything to do with making the magic technology of Trek look right to a modern audience.
So you think it's more important to tell people what you think they would rather hear than to tell them the truth... gotcha. So, is the Earth flat?
And it's the Moe haircuts and beehive hairdos that are "comic." Ask anyone on the street, you'll see. Maybe you haven't heard, but fashions have changed and the aesthetic of Trek needs to change, too. Trek's reptutation for being laugahble and nerdy isn't just a mirage - and the last thing we need is for the new Trek movie to reinforce that stereotype.
Sure... yeah, I've been arguing sooo strongly in favor of beehives...
I would be very disappointed to see the washed out look of "The Cage." It will be a canonical liberty, but they'll stretch the traditional TOS look backward to their story's time.
Well I'm not a big fan of beige (or whatever that nebulous color in WNMHGB was), but it
would be canonical if they wanted to shove Kirk and Spock into uniforms of that type - and if they're more colorful before WNMHGB, how do you explain the color-beige-color transition? Starfleet's uniform designers can't make up their minds?
Actually, based upon what we saw from TOS to TMP, from TMP to TWOK, from within TNG, and from within DS9/Voy... yeah, that's actually a pretty legitimate argument. And if you assume that it's actually normal, petty human beings making those decisions (or petty "humanoids" or whatever)... it makes sense that the stylistic preference of whomever is elected or appointed to a particular position is whatever the "starfleet fashion" for that timeframe turns out to be.
So, from that standpoint, I could live with it... but I'd prefer Cage/WNMHGB uniforms.
Anyway I'm not gonna worry excessively about the aesthetics. I'm more worried they don't blow the Kirk casting and that hit a nice compromise between TOS tradition and modern audience expectations in all the set dressing, gizmos and hair. And that they don't feel excessively bound to use gaudy colors in deference to a tradition that was begun simply to sell color TV sets.
The key term there being "excessively bound" which I think we can all agree with.
Not change one iota? Well, don't expect a SFX oscar.
Good point. It won't just be what the fans want, will it? I don't begrudge the SFX team their shot at a little gold man. I'm sure whatever alterations they plan won't reach the level of detail that would ever bother me, tho I know darned well there are plenty of people who will declare the movie an utter disaster because of it.
Well, I know that people here have all pretty much concluded that this is going to be a film set primarily on the 1701. But suppose that it's not (and nobody has ANY reason to believe that it is other than personal preferences... all they've said is that we'll see the Enterprise, not that its going to be seen in anything other than a background shot!)
There are a lot of good reasons to put the show in other settings... and this is one of the best of them. Set it on the Enterprise, recast all the parts exactly as they were supposed to be in the original show (but with new actors who will all play the parts differently)... and you'll inevitably alienate some portion of the audience, for any of a million different reasons.
Put it on another ship, or any other setting... give us characters who are in many cases new, or at least the same people at different points in their lives... and the creative teams, the actors, everyone, can have a lot more creativity in what they do without knocking the knees out from underneath any significant portion of their audience.
Yeah, we'll see the Enterprise, but unlike most of the people here, I don't expect to see much of her. And as such, I expect her to look pretty much as we expect (as in Daren's work, or Prof. M's version, for example).
