Why didn't Berman and Braga think that Ent-D looked good on the big screen?

[The Rock]

Edit: Meant to say "Why didn't Berman and Braga think that the Ent-D looked good on the big screen?" in the title. Whoops!

Anyway.....

I heard the reason they wanted to "kill" the Enterprise-D in Generations was because they thought it looked bad on the big screen and wanted to make a ship that would look better on the big screen.

Now while I love the Enterprise-E, I thought the Enterprise-D looked absolutely gorgeous in the theater when I saw Generations! It was cool seeing her on a TV screen but wow, seeing her on a giant movie screen displayed her majestic beauty the way it was always meant to be seen!

How exactly does that look bad?! Looks fantastic, to me!

IMO I think using the Enterprise-D in FC, Insurrection, and Nemesis would've been fine, especially since her bridge got a cool looking renovation for Generations. Can you imagine the Enterprise-D hallways and Engineering that we were all so familiar with completely assimilated by the Borg in FC?!

 

[Tosk]

If anything, I think the D design was more suited to 2:35 than a 4x3 screen. I really wish the D had survived until Nemesis, but thems the breaks.

 

[USS Firefly]

I also think that it was a big mistake to destroy the D, she was absolutely gourgious in Generations.
And if needed they could upgrade the ship with extra phaser strips like the USS Venture.

 

[suarezguy]

I like the D but both its interiors and exteriors do feel a little too pleasure cruise-y, it'd be hard to take it seriously in combat like with FC.
Introducing new uniforms and the new starship design was a good way of making the films more distinct from the series and signifying that there was and would be a different tone for Starfleet.

 

[The Rock]

I like the D but both its interiors and exteriors do feel a little too pleasure cruise-y, it'd be hard to take it seriously in combat like with FC.
Introducing new uniforms and the new starship design was a good way of making the films more distinct from the series and signifying that there was and would be a different tone for Starfleet.

I see what you mean, but for FC they could've done an interior overhaul for the D. Change the inside color scheme to grayish with the carpeting and whatnot, and they wouldn't have had to do anything for the lighting because in Generations they already darkened the lights. Also, they would have decided to remove children and families from the ship. And they could've used the FC uniforms to match the new interior colors.

 

[Galileo7]

Kirk had his 1701-Refit/1701-A Constitution class in the films and it would have been great to have kept the 1701-D Galaxy class for all of Picard's films. The 1701-E could have been another Galaxy class too.

 

[Sibyl]

I don't mind the Sovereign as a starship design, itself, but I don't like it as the Enterprise. The Enterprise shouldn't be a warship.

I also don't like change for the sake of change or the production designer needing to put their own "mark" on established and well-received components in a franchise (think: new Batman suit for Every. Single. Movie.).

The change in uniform from TMP to TWOK was--in large part--because of the actors complaining that if they kept those jumpsuits that "there would be no Star Trek II", so I don't mind that at all, not to mention that those uniforms were NOT well-received in general.

The Galaxy class Enterprise was synonymous with The Next Generation. I don't think they should have changed it, nor the uniforms.

And yes, the Enterprise on the Big Screen was about the only thing I liked about Generations.

 

[Galileo7]

As the interior sets of the Constitution class 1701-A [TVH, TFF, TUC ] revised what we saw in the 1701-Refit [TMP, WOK, SFS] , the same could have been done for another Galaxy class 1701-E. Although I loved the 1701-D Bridge changes done for Generations.

 

[Sibyl]

I seriously don't get why Roddenberry thought that the TMP corridors looked like a hotel when he later presented us with the Galaxy Class.

I don't know. The Ent-A was a brand-new ship, not a refit of an older one, so I can see (though I don't like it) why it might have a different interior than the Refit. The Refit was an extensive overhaul of the TOS Ent that took many years to complete. I don't see that an extensive overhaul of the interior ship for the sake of changing it would be worth the amount of time that a ship would be out of commission to do so, especially in a time of war. That would've seemed frivolous to me.

I don't mind the bridge changes between TNG and Generations visually, just like I actually prefer the TWOK bridge over the TMP bridge, but I don't know how practical such changes are in-universe.

 

[Christopher]

"Berman and Braga?" No, not in this case. People have gotten this idea that Berman and Braga were perpetually joined at the hip (perhaps because of the alliteration?), but the only time they were actually writing and producing partners was on Enterprise. On TNG's final two seasons, Braga was the most junior member of the writing staff, at the opposite end of the hierarchy from Berman. He and Ronald D. Moore were writing partners on TNG. On Voyager, Braga started out as a low-ranking producer, generally writing in partnership with Joe Menosky, and rose gradually through the ranks until he became showrunner in seasons 5-6, reporting to Berman in the same way as VGR's other showrunners Michael Piller in seasons 1-2, Jeri Taylor in seasons 3-4, and Kenneth Biller in season 7. There never was a "Berman and Braga" outside of ENT, and certainly not on the movies.

As far as the TNG movies were concerned, Braga worked on Generations and First Contact exclusively as a writer, in partnership with Ron Moore. He was not a producer on any of the Trek movies. The TNG films were produced by Rick Berman and co-produced by Peter Lauritson, who was a non-writing producer on all four Berman Trek shows. Michael Piller was also a co-producer and the sole writer on Insurrection, with Patrick Stewart as associate producer. Paramount executive Bernie Williams was executive producer on GEN (more a managerial role than a creative one), and Marty Hornstein filled that role on the other three films.

 

[Smellmet]

How exactly does that look bad?! Looks fantastic, to me!

I think this shot is stunning, and is the very best shot we ever got of the D. The visuals still hold up really, really well. It's a shame we didn't get any more like this in the film or the shot wasn't longer.

 

[Sibyl]

That's interesting. I'd always heard (and despised) "Berman and Braga" when it came to later series (basically everything after Roddenberry died). Thank you for the clarification.

That said, whoever was responsible made a poor decision, in my opinion.

 

[The Wormhole]

Can you imagine the Enterprise-D hallways and Engineering that we were all so familiar with completely assimilated by the Borg in FC?!

Indeed, that was my problem with First Contact back in the period of 1996-1998. It's the first time we see this new ship, but for the majority of the movie, the interiors are either darkened with red alert lighting, or we see it all "Borgified." As a result, I didn't really have all that well an idea of how the interior of the Enterprise E was supposed to look.

To be fair, though, even if the Enterprise D were still around, we'd probably have different looking sets anyway. The main reason little was changed for Generations was because they were just going to trash everything afterwards anyway. But if there were plans to keep the Enterprise D for a continuing film series, they most certainly would not have kept sets from the TV show in storage for use in future films. I wouldn't be surprised if we got a new engineering set that resembled the Enterprise E's anyway.

 

[Christopher]

That's interesting. I'd always heard (and despised) "Berman and Braga" when it came to later series (basically everything after Roddenberry died). Thank you for the clarification.

I've always found it paradoxical that the people who disliked Braga's work the most were also the ones who insisted on giving him more credit than he actually deserved. There's this idea I've seen from many of his critics that he's this dictatorial auteur who imposes his exclusive vision on his creations, but if you look at his overall body of work, it reveals basically the opposite: He's a journeyman showrunner who mostly gets hired to execute other creators' vision, on shows like Threshold, 24, Terra Nova, Cosmos, etc. There are only three series on which he has a co-creator credit (Enterprise, FlashForward, and Salem), all in partnership with another creator (and FlashForward was loosely based on a novel). He doesn't really have a strong defining style of his own. I've come to believe that the weaknesses of the VGR and ENT seasons that he ran arose mainly from the fact that he wasn't a strong-willed enough showrunner to stand up to Berman in the way that the other Trek showrunners did.

 

[Sibyl]

Although I was parroting a lot of what I'd heard at the time, I placed most of the blame firmly in Berman's hands. I thought there was a partnership there that wasn't, but I was not under any illusion that Berman didn't want to take Trek in a completely different direction from Roddenberry.

 

[Kor]

Always lumping Berman and Braga together isn't as bad as that time somebody kept complaining about "Brannon and Braga."

Kor

 

[Sibyl]

At the time I may have been guilty of repeating that.

 

[Christopher]

I was not under any illusion that Berman didn't want to take Trek in a completely different direction from Roddenberry.

Funny, I always had the sense that Berman was trying too hard to be true to "Roddenberry's vision" as he understood it, and thus wasn't as willing to take chances as some of the other producers involved.

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that Berman wasn't primarily a writing producer. There are two types of producer, the ones on the writing/creative side and the ones on the logistics side (i.e. all the stuff involved in turning the written word into a finished film or TV episode). Berman was primarily on the logistics and management side of the production -- and he was actually pretty amazing at that, making sure ST had top-notch production values even when there were two shows and a movie in the works at the same time. As a rule, he was only moderately involved in the writing side; he only wrote two scripts for TNG ("Brothers" and "A Matter of Time," IIRC), and otherwise just co-wrote the story outlines of important episodes like 2-parters and season premieres and finales. But that changed on Enterprise, when he became Braga's writing partner full-time.

 

[David cgc]

To be fair, though, even if the Enterprise D were still around, we'd probably have different looking sets anyway. The main reason little was changed for Generations was because they were just going to trash everything afterwards anyway.

Not so much "trashed" as "remodeled." The Enterprise-D sets became the Voyager sets. "Generations" was also filmed right on the heels of "All Good Things." They may not have had time to do more extensive changes than minor facelift they got.

 

[Sibyl]

Funny, I always had the sense that Berman was trying too hard to be true to "Roddenberry's vision" as he understood it, and thus wasn't as willing to take chances as some of the other producers involved.

Of course, the thing to keep in mind is that Berman wasn't primarily a writing producer. There are two types of producer, the ones on the writing/creative side and the ones on the logistics side (i.e. all the stuff involved in turning the written word into a finished film or TV episode). Berman was primarily on the logistics and management side of the production -- and he was actually pretty amazing at that, making sure ST had top-notch production values even when there were two shows and a movie in the works at the same time. As a rule, he was only moderately involved in the writing side; he only wrote two scripts for TNG ("Brothers" and "A Matter of Time," IIRC), and otherwise just co-wrote the story outlines of important episodes like 2-parters and season premieres and finales. But that changed on Enterprise, when he became Braga's writing partner full-time.

I had always read that the producers, and I'd assumed this meant Berman, were frustrated with the tone of TNG and wanted to up the tension and make it more action-centric and when Roddenberry died, they seized their chance.

I haven't watched TNG beginning to end in a long time, so I don't remember the actual change in tone, but certainly, the subsequent shows went in wildly different ways (introducing wars and ongoing conflicts).

It sounds like you have more knowledge about this, so I defer to what you say.