Lieut. Arex said:
Cary L. Brown said:That's one of the most broadly lambasted elements of "Enterprise," though... and PPC knows it.
Lambasted by fans. This film isn't being made for the fans, not solely. The producers will love it if the fans flock to the thing and spread great news about it, but ultimately this is about giving Paramount a new foundation on which to build future productions for a new, hopefully broader, audience.
I don't disagree. But realize, nobody BUT "the fans" were watching "Enterprise." If you have a small audience, and that audience is overwhelmingly bitching about something you did because you thought it was what that audience demanded, it DOES strike a cord with you.
"Enterprise" had deflectors, phasers, photon torpedoes... all of the "broadly recognized" bits. Sure, they renamed some of them but it was UTTERLY UNCHANGED, and for the very reason you give, above.
And they saw a huge backlash over it. Trust me, they may not "get it" as to WHY that's the case, but they are aware that the fans didn't like that.
The backlash against ENT wasn't because they didn't change the recognizable bits, it was because the show was miserably executed, afraid to follow its core premise without grafting a kewl time war on top of it. It tried to juggle too many balls and dropped them all. The 23-24th century tech was an irritant, the sand in the bathing suit that gets bitched about the most but wasn't the worst thing to happen on a bad day at the beach.
You're playing absolutist here. Every point about the problems which you just made is entirely true, but it in NO WAY demonstrates that my point is not ALSO true.
In other words, it's not a matter of either/or. General audiences didn't watch Enterprise for largely EXACTLY what y ou said, above. The "core audience"... or what PPC had considered the "guaranteed viewership group"... even THEY weren't happy, and they were quite vocal about being annoyed by being fed this stuff.
My point was about that. The people who WERE watching, who PPC had done these things, supposedly, FOR (after all, "general audiences" couldn't care less!)... didn't like them. "Pandering" to the fans... or "talking down to them" by assuming that without trappings that are identical to what we had on the last shows... was what we got. And that's what I'm responding to.
Giving everyone exactly what they supposedly "expect to see" is simply pandering. And that never works out as well as the panderer expects it to, does it?
Is the ship's speed going to be measured in "time warp factors"?
Why not? Why NOT assume that "Warp factor" is just the shortened form of that other term? It's not like there's REAL SCIENCE that's invalidating one and supporting the other, is there?
Is the bridge going to have those desk lamps on every console?
Well, they weren't lamps... but you already know that. They were intercom units, with video built-in. Personally, I would LIKE to see that, though if they're shaped differently, I won't complain. And as a simple module component, there's NO issue with them looking one way at one time, another way at another time, and being removed completely at yet another time(and presumably integrated into the existing console hardware). Hell, replace the video portion with a holographic projected display. It's TRIVIAL, and not worth quibbling about, unless they purport to show the exact same ship at the exact same time in the exact same situation, is it?
A printer? I think not. They won't use those Pike era references just like they won't use lasers.
Really? So you've been through a time machine and know this with absolute certainty?
We have computers today. We have IPods and smartphones and big-screen monitors and so forth. But ya know what? We still print stuff out. Why? Because it's far more convenient in certain circumstances.
Think about it not from a "what I'd do if I were making up a tv show" but rather "why might they want this, and how would I go about replacing the need this fulfills in some other fashion?"
I can't see a situation where hardcopy in SOME form would ever be eliminated. Now, maybe there'll be "smart paper" that can be written and rewritten, rather than tossed in the trash. Something you can record on and then erase, just like you do with magnetic media (tape, hard drives, etc). Nobody's saying it needs to be pressed wood pulp with organic die compounds added through a dot-matrix or through typesetting or whatever. But I really can't imagine a situation where hardcopy would NEVER be useful. Can you?
The general public doesn't know about them and doesn't care.
The general public knows a lot more about printers than you might think, it seems... and also "knows" a lot about lasers. Granted some of what they "know" about lasers is wrong... but they still "know" it nevertheless.
Come back in a few years and I think you MIGHT be more likely to be right. But right now, the PPC board of directors is more likely to overreact in the OPPOSITE direction. ("The @#$*ing fans didn't like being given the same thing... then give the @#$*ers something totally different!")
They're taking enough risks with the recasting, design changes (subtle or not) to the costumes, sets, and ship, why take more? Change only what you must to update the product for a new audience. Anything else isn't necessary and counter-productive to their long-term goals.
I don't disagree with you. But WHY are they taking these risks? It's simply because they've been given a chance to discover if the recent failure of Trek is due to the prior management (ie, due to EXECUTION) or if it was due to "franchise fatigue" (ie, the audiences simply don't want to see it at all anymore!). This was discussed in depth in the last two stockholder's meetings, actually. They're taking a risk with JJ Abrams (he took the pitch to THEM, they didn't take it to him, remember), but he's a hot item and they gave him this as one condition of him doing some other work for them. They're treating this as an EXPERIMENT. And part of that experiment is to simply ignore the recent stuff and go back to basics... to the stuff that, historically, WORKED.
That's why I'm 99% sure that we're not seeing a "reboot." They want to see what worked in the past, without the more recent trappings added onto it, to find out if it really was "BermanTrek" that audiences are tired of or if it's ALL Trek that audiences are tired of. It's a gamble... but it's a good gamble, I think.
What we're seeing is just as risky... attempting to recreate a feel and a chemistry that was as much due to the actors, directors and writers, and everyone else for that matter, from 40 years ago, as it is to anything "conceptual" in nature.
95% of the potential audience won't give a flying ... leap... if they have lasers, phasers, phase-pistols, or "nerny-nerny-beam guns." ONLY the hardcore Trek fans could possibly, POTENTIALLY, be bugged by the use of ANY of those things. That's why the argument that "it needs to be phasers" falls flat. That argument is based upon an underestimation of the mental faculties of non-fans, and an OVERestimation of how much they care about that sort of thing.
