So many thoughts,
Gregatron... A few things that popped out at me:
Here’s the harsh reality, folks. These franchises have been around for decades. Due to both the generation gap and the sheer volume of existing material, people can no longer agree on what the core elements of these properties are.
It doesn't matter if there's disagreement if one camp is demonstrably... I won't say 'wrong', but
in error where the facts are concerned. Gene pitched Star Trek as "'Wagon Train' to the stars". I didn't know Wagon Train, but, from the name, figured it was a Western of some kind -- in an era replete with Westerns. Since then, I've looked it up, and have even watched a lot of it. As the name implies, it's about America's nineteenth-century Westward expansion -- from an admittedly dated cultural viewpoint, of course. That was mashed up with Gene's description of Kirk as "Horatio Hornblower in space". So we had Starfleet as an exploratory and civilizing force (a la the Royal Navy of the early nineteenth century), trammeling the untrammeled tracks to prepare the way for the waves of pioneers who are following. In the process, they bump up against alien factors that make us take a look at ourselves. First-year college philosophy and ethics classes mashed up with morality plays. The '60s were a simpler time -- media-wise. For the '80s-'00s update, the underlying premise remained the same, but the media the setting and characters were in (TV, movies, books, comics) presented a more nuanced and less heavy-handed take. That's why it's referred to as the Star Trek canon. It's a largely consistent body of work that follows the same overall take on the setting and who Humanity is within it. Most of the inconsistencies are technical minutiæ that don't really affect the stories (with the exception of time travel, which I
won't get into here).
It’s been proven before that these franchises can be successfully reinvented for new generations. The prequels did not kill STAR WARS. STAR TREK ran continuously and with massive success on both TV and in theaters from 1987-2005. But that was because both George Lucas and the legacy team that began work with TNG were in charge. People who understood both the material and the fanbase.
Nrrr... If there's one thing I've taken away from decades invested in those particular IPs, it's that too often the person/people running them
didn't get one or the other or both. I can cite specific examples, if needed.
Now, however, there are two inherent problems. 1) These properties are played out. With so much material already existing, it’s very difficult to come up with something truly fresh and new. So, we get the abysmal Disney Trilogy (a dumb, soulless, woke remake of the original trilogy) and both the Abramsized and Kurtzmanized bastardizations of TOS.
Mm. Nope. Stop right there. That is utter horse manure. It treads toward your second point, but the reason we got the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy was a combination of George's fault/blind-spot, the people at LFL's hero-worship of the man, and Disney wanting to play it safe. From interviews and the few reference books we have available, there were a
lot of daring and interesting things the people making those films wanted to do (at least, before TFA), but got pulled back and back and back until it was what we got. And as for, well, just about everything from, to some degree, Voyager on -- the TNG films, Enterprise, the 2009 re-imagining, Discovery, Picard, now this... It's 110%
definitely because of corporate meddling, people in charge who don't get or don't like, or both, what came before. JJ found Star Trek boring and wanted to make it more like Star Wars. Les Moonves hated Star Trek (largely because he didn't understand it) and lost no opportunity to screw with it. I'll cite Trek09 is a prime example. A "Kirk and Spock at the Academy" movie has been being pitched since the late '80s, and wiser heads always prevailed. People who actually
know the canon know Kirk didn't meet Spock until he was made Captain of the
Enterprise.
But there's
plenty of untapped story potential in both universes -- The Powers That Be (and fans) need to be willing to unclench their grips on the comfort of the familiar. The TOS films had problems from the first one (Gene needn't have "demoted" anyone -- Kirk could have commanded the missions while Decker retained command of the ship -- happens all the time, including in TOS. Kirk could have kept horning in on Decker's side of things and eventually realized he had become one of those meddling Commodores he'd hated when
he was Captain...), II/III/IV all work as an arc, but then V and VI saw an utterly unrealistic state of things. You just don't get a ship with three Captains and three Commanders on the senior staff. At least they belatedly took Sulu off and gave him his own command... That he was originally supposed to get as part of the story in TWOK (but Shatner's ego couldn't cope with one of the "second tier" actors having the same rank as him and Leonard, so he kept deliberately flubbing the takes so the scene would get dropped). All because people kept expecting that familiar setting of "Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and the others on the Starship
Enterprise", no matter what. When TNG was announced, there was great hue and cry that it was a travesty -- you
couldn't have Star Trek without Kirk,
et al.
But definitely don't conflate the fact that those in a position to create story content can't seem to think outside the confines of the already-done (at least, not in non-dysfunctional ways) with there being little to no more story potential to be had.
; 2) These properties are now in the hands of hacks and ideologues who don’t understand or care about what they’ve been given, and are only using these franchises to make money and/or push their extreme sociopolitical agendas.
That's closer to the mark, but, I feel, overstated. None of us are enough on the inside to see more than fragments. I applaud increased awareness and push for diversity and inclusiveness. I do
not like it when they strut about it, and I have a feeling that's more the marketing people trying to play buzzword bingo to present the property as more with-the-times, rather than them just, y'know,
doing it. I have whole essays on how and why we ended up with the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy and Anthology films we did, why Voyager started out of the gate with one arm tied behind its back, why Enterprise was crippled by conflicting story/setting premises, where JJ-Trek dropped the ball, how Discovery and Picard could have kept ~80% of the content the same and been a million times better and more respectful of their antecedents... It's much, much more than political-correctness
run amok!!eleventy!
To address two specific things you mentioned:
Luke Skywalker is now a loser and a failure who is denigrated and Force-Skypes himself for death so as to make MaRey Sue look better while she steals all of his gear and accomplishments.
All the early-draft scripts of what would become TFA kept having Luke pretty much take over the story when he showed up, and overshadowing the new characters, so his reveal kept getting pushed later and later to try to avoid that. Problem is, duh. Last time we saw Luke, he was at his apotheosis. Over 9000. Peak form. We never had the screen time to see him come down from that and return to/help establish the New Normal. And that's because they felt locked into the "trilogy model" Lucas blind-spotted his way into. I ultimately have no issue with the actual
content of those films -- just the manner of presentation.
...and...
Spock is turned into a dyslexic basket-case who needs Mary Sue Burnham to teach him how to BE Spock.
Okay, that one I'll give you. But...
Can’t wait until they recast James Kirk and take him to task for being a “toxic” straight white man with a healthy libido.
This view of the character needs to just frikkin'
die, already. Kirk fell in love with three women over the course of TOS, and they had an unfortunate habit of dying on him. He had a few other lesser romantic entanglements, but there was no stigma to that because part of the vision Gene was operating from was that we'd evolved past our sexual hang-ups and prudishness by the 23rd century. Two consenting adults could do whatever they wanted with their relevant bits and then go their way again and it was no one else's business. Then there were the times the crew/ship was captured, and Kirk used the matriarch's interest in him to try and maneuver their freedom. And somehow, from all this, popular culture got "Kirk is a womanizer". I think it may have to do with the fact that the women Kirk was involved with were equally interested, and women weren't supposed to
be interested.
I somewhat agree with a lot of the rest of what you stated, even if I think you state it rather melodramatically, but one other thing...
And the damage is done. STAR WARS lies in ruins. DOCTOR WHO lies in ruins. Marvel and DC Comics lie on the edge of oblivion.
Whup. Make that two other things. Marvel's doing just fine. Twenty-odd films in, they've had two solid clinkers, and three others I've had some issue with, but the rest are pretty good to wonderful, and I trust the overall vision of where they plan to go from here unless and until proven otherwise.
In case you hadn’t noticed, no one cares about STAR TREK. Kids don’t know or care. None of my younger friends or coworkers know about or watch the CBS streaming shows. BEYOND was a flop. The merchandise has dried right up, because licensors know that this franchise is a beached whale. The older fans are aging out, and no young fans are successfully being brought in to replace them and keep the brand healthy.
Mmm... Simple view of a more complex landscape. I'll start with the merch end. Socio-economic ranty essay omitted to avoid banhammer, but in general consumer buying power is less. Many independent shops have gone away, to be replaced (if at all) by Amazon and big-boxes like Walmart and Target. For the experience of wandering in to a physical store and impulse-buying an action figure off the rack, we are reliant on underpaid department managers knowing about and caring about the properties to request merch, on up the chain. My local Walmart, for instance, does not have any of the 40th anniversary Star Wars stuff, no Black Series Boba Fett helmets, nada. Just a two-foot-wide section of shelf with some leftover TLJ and Rogue One figures no one wants. The department manager over-orders the initial figure wave and then waits for them to sell through before ordering more. They don't seem to know about different figures being in successive waves.
Multiply that out, and it's easy to see where a takeaway of "people aren't buying the toys" can come from. Well, yeah -- when we don't know they exist or can't find them until they're marked up 250% on the secondary market (if we're lucky)? No. We're not. We
want to, but we're not.
Then there's the "kids these days" issue. If, back in 1984, I had had a game like War for Cybertron, I would have spent all my time playing that, rather than with the physical toys I had to slowly transform by hand. With the ever-increasing and expanding world of digital interactive entertainment, the appeal of physical toys you have to work to generate the setting for in your head is much diminished. Not gone, but the market-share ain't there no more. Probably never will be again. Same with model kits. Same with a lot of things. Makers and retailers can recognize the shifting landscape and adapt, or go out of business like those who have failed to do so.
In a related vein, my friend's four-year-old
adores Star Wars. He sat rapt through TFA when he was two. They've recently watched all nine episodes on Disney+, and he is also bouncing around Clone Wars. Another friend of mine, in her twenties, who, despite the background noise of TOS that she never really paid attention to, her first exposure to Star Trek for realz was the 2009 film. She loves it and its two sequels and is sad the fourth got scrubbed. But the main thing is it whetted her interest in what came before. She started with TNG and
adores it. Most of her Trek stuff is TNG. She's working on Voyager now, and I'm doing a guided exploration across TOS -- "The Corbomite Maneuver", "Balance of Terror"... wanting to do "City on the Edge of Forever" next so she can read Imzadi... She appreciates the older stuff, even when a particular episode fails to land with her. This is going on elsewhere, too. It's not just the "fifty-somethings". And I take heart in the fact that younger people, as they discover Star Trek and Star Wars and Transformers, are, to a large extent, looking at what came before and, by and large, preferring the older stuff. I hope that message eventually propagates upward.