Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
- Thread starter Noeland
- Start date
CessnaDriver, thing is... As with the Star Wars Prequels, there's a lot that was in the TOS+ lore that intrigued. The Romulan Wars, the Eugenics Wars, the Third World War, the "disastrous" first contact with the Klingons, the Axanar Peace Mission, the Vulcanian Expedition, the Mind-Control Riots... There's a lot of backstory to potentially explore -- if done well. Re-casting central characters I feel is a bad idea. I feel we didn't need to revisit Kirk, Spock, et al, in the 2009 film. But Pike and Number One were only ever in the first pilot (not counting the recast crippled Pike in "The Menagerie"). That's enough wiggle room that, if you respected how they crafted their characters, casting new actors in the roles who bring the same "feel" would work -- as long as continuity was respected and the canon adhered-to. For instance, I'd find someone who had the right voice and build and digitally face-swap so they looked like a young Leonard Nimoy. Because that's Spock. We grow with him over decades, experience life, death, and life with him, follow his career and family. He's established. Far more than the rest of the characters in that one outing.
Hammer3246
Sr Member
Sorry tough guy, my bad.
Well done missing the point AND not being able to answer a simple question.
If they stuck with canon I would be more receptive, but it's so screwy now. They can't even depict the Enterprise correctly. As if they are ashamed of it. Though I guess there are still licensing issues perhaps.
Now, what I think would have been a cool idea, if they were going to do a Pike series...first, get a completely new creative team with the right mindset...and then make the first episode a complete reimagining of “The Cage”, and then kick of the series from there. It would be neat to present the series as an “alternative” history of “what if ‘The Cage’ had been sold as a series“, and go from there.
Alas, with this creative team, we will what we have been getting with STD and STP.
Alas, with this creative team, we will what we have been getting with STD and STP.
I'm almost with you on that. I'd like to start a littler earlier in Pike's time on the Enterprise. Maybe build up over the first season to the disaster on Rigel VII and have the season end on the cliffhanger of Pike having been captured by the Talosians.
The title of this new series we're getting makes me squirm a little, because I'd floated the notion... geez, over twenty years ago now... I was reading an interview in the Communicator with the original maker of the original Enterprise filming miniature. One of the things that resonated with a lot of us at the time is that many people working on TOS on the visual effects stage, Matt Jeffries, and, later, Andy Probert... There's a sense with them that the "real central character of the series is the Enterprise". I had the notion of a macro-series called Enterprise, which started with the launch of NCC-1701 under Robert April and followed his command for a number of seasons, called collectively, "The Final Frontier"; then jump to Pike's tenure, those seasons called "These Are the Voyages"; TOS and a remastered TAS could slot in there retroactively as "Strange New Worlds"; then jump forward to the Enterprise-B -- under Harriman, Demora Sulu, or Savvik (as long as it was Kirstie Alley, dammit), those called "To Seek Out"; then the advent of the Enterprise-C as the Federation undergoes some drastic shifting in the wake of peace with the Klingons and the Romulans disappearing, called "New Life, New Civilizations"; TNG and DS9 are retroactively "To Boldly Split Infinitives" -- er, "To Boldly Go", and Voyager and after (where I had hopes we would still be spending time) "Where No Man* Has Gone".
I side-eyed the "Strange New Worlds" anthology series of books at first, but it ended up not being what I had been talking to people about. I feel like this show is named after that. But it still fills me with that sense of what-could-have-been-if...
[*I use this in the sense Gene did originally -- Man with a capital 'M' being humanity as a whole. Insert my linguistic rant here about societal brokenness of centuries past hanging baggage on all the terminology we use for gender. Mann was a person, woman is derived from wiffmann, meaning "wife-person" -- i.e., less than fully recognized as human. Latin's no help -- female is a deviation from the norm of male. Boy and girl are no better, but I won't belabor that here. Point is, Man when it shows up in sci-fi usually doesn't mean exclusively Y-chromosome-havers, it means our species as a whole. When Gene changed it to "no one" for TNG, it wasn't to include women, it was because Starfleet was less of a, ah... "Homo sapiens-only club" by that point. That went over most people's heads, though, including people working on the show. I use the original term, because Star Trek was originally about exploring the human condition, rather than lifekind in general, and in Voyager, they were definitely out where no human had been before -- but there were certainly other races who were there.]
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’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.
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.; 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. It’s no longer about quality storytelling and characterization. Just explosions, tokenized, one- dimensional characters, and “smashing the patriarchy”, or some other such nonsense. STD is fronted with a blatant Mary Sue (and, as a bonus, she’s a long-lost relative of an iconic character people actually DO love), Starfleet is a now matriarchy, and there’s a guy in a friggin’ wheelchair on the ship.
If they just went off and did their own new shows and characters, that would be one thing. But, no, due to a lethal combination of cash-grab nostalgia-milking, creative bankruptcy, and (as they see it) “problematic” earlier iterations, they have to go right to the core and reboot/rewrite/destroy those original iterations. 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. Spock is turned into a dyslexic basket-case who needs Mary Sue Burnham to teach him how to BE Spock. And so on. One affront to iconic characters, iconic stories, and beloved canon after another. Can’t wait until they recast James Kirk and take him to task for being a “toxic” straight white man with a healthy libido.
There is no respect, here. No intelligence, no art, no honor. We now live in a post-post-POSTmodern era of nerd culture. All of the sacred cows must be milked and then sacrificed on the altar of wokeness and greed. Stupid people crank out stupid products for stupid people, and dissent—in the form of legitimate criticism—is called out as “racist”, “sexist”, and “toxic”. The studios hate their core audience, and have no respect for what has come before. They have gravely underestimated the passion and intelligence of the people who have loved these franchises through thick and thin, and the steep drop in both sales and popularity of these franchises is proof of that. But, because they are ideologues and hacks, they will continue to double down, and will reboot, remake, recast and rewrite our beloved mythologies to suit their greed and shortsighted agendas.
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.
And the last gasp of anything resembling the real STAR TREK—the STAR TREK which valued true diversity, good storytelling, intelligence, and compassion—has been dead since 2005. Ever since then, it’s been the Bad Reboot crew exploiting its corpse with dumbed-down schlock and endless attempts to reboot and rewrite the characters and histories we know. Standing on the shoulders of giants whilst pissing on their heads. Disgusting and unforgivable.
Well, no thanks. I’ve been done supporting this trash with my dollar for quite a long time. That’s all it takes. Just say “no”. Because any purchase at all is an affirmative vote for more of the same, no matter how much you like or dislike the product. I saw the writing on the wall long ago. The hype surrounding AbramsTREK ‘09 and THE FARCE AWAKENS were just the false euphoria created by snake-oil salesmen like Abrams and Kurtzman, who love their empty, soulless mystery (misery) boxes.
I will never again spend a dime on any of these franchises. Because the mythologies I love have been ripped to shreds, the fandoms melted down, and their legacies destroyed. This is the era of The Franchise Apocalypse. Everything we’ve known and loved will die—MUST die—, and, hopefully, a new generation of talented creators will come along to build new mythologies to replace the ones we’ve lost.
It’s over. They killed it. 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. The people making these shows lie and cheat and spend their time on social media attacking their core audience. Talented writers like Walter Mosley in the STD writers’ room (which should be a “safe space” for free expression of ideas) are tattled on to HR for using words not approved of by the woke collective.
“STAR TREK” now consists of garbage shows—hidden behind a paywall—made by hacks who hate the fanbase they’ve inherited, and will do everything they can to trick them into parting with their money. In, say, five years, no one will care. They’re just going to continue salting the proverbial Earth with shows like this new one, which will absolutely go right to work on undermining, rewriting, and outright replacing TOS even moreso than has already occurred. They’ll keep announcing new shows to project the illusion that all is well, and some may even get produced. But I don’t care.
There is no hope. The damage to both these franchises and their fanbases is too extensive. For those who know what I refer to, we’re entering the final phases of the Geeker Gate, now. The current iterations of these franchises will come to an end, and the parasites who have destroyed them from the inside-out will then move on like locusts to the next healthy franchise. You know, like how, after killing both STAR TREK and STAR WARS, Abrams is now getting his sticky fingers into the DC movies over at Warner.
I’m just waiting to read all of the (unauthorized) books which examine the trainwreck. The best we can hope for is to learn from this disaster so that it never happens again.
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.
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.; 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. It’s no longer about quality storytelling and characterization. Just explosions, tokenized, one- dimensional characters, and “smashing the patriarchy”, or some other such nonsense. STD is fronted with a blatant Mary Sue (and, as a bonus, she’s a long-lost relative of an iconic character people actually DO love), Starfleet is a now matriarchy, and there’s a guy in a friggin’ wheelchair on the ship.
If they just went off and did their own new shows and characters, that would be one thing. But, no, due to a lethal combination of cash-grab nostalgia-milking, creative bankruptcy, and (as they see it) “problematic” earlier iterations, they have to go right to the core and reboot/rewrite/destroy those original iterations. 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. Spock is turned into a dyslexic basket-case who needs Mary Sue Burnham to teach him how to BE Spock. And so on. One affront to iconic characters, iconic stories, and beloved canon after another. Can’t wait until they recast James Kirk and take him to task for being a “toxic” straight white man with a healthy libido.
There is no respect, here. No intelligence, no art, no honor. We now live in a post-post-POSTmodern era of nerd culture. All of the sacred cows must be milked and then sacrificed on the altar of wokeness and greed. Stupid people crank out stupid products for stupid people, and dissent—in the form of legitimate criticism—is called out as “racist”, “sexist”, and “toxic”. The studios hate their core audience, and have no respect for what has come before. They have gravely underestimated the passion and intelligence of the people who have loved these franchises through thick and thin, and the steep drop in both sales and popularity of these franchises is proof of that. But, because they are ideologues and hacks, they will continue to double down, and will reboot, remake, recast and rewrite our beloved mythologies to suit their greed and shortsighted agendas.
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.
And the last gasp of anything resembling the real STAR TREK—the STAR TREK which valued true diversity, good storytelling, intelligence, and compassion—has been dead since 2005. Ever since then, it’s been the Bad Reboot crew exploiting its corpse with dumbed-down schlock and endless attempts to reboot and rewrite the characters and histories we know. Standing on the shoulders of giants whilst pissing on their heads. Disgusting and unforgivable.
Well, no thanks. I’ve been done supporting this trash with my dollar for quite a long time. That’s all it takes. Just say “no”. Because any purchase at all is an affirmative vote for more of the same, no matter how much you like or dislike the product. I saw the writing on the wall long ago. The hype surrounding AbramsTREK ‘09 and THE FARCE AWAKENS were just the false euphoria created by snake-oil salesmen like Abrams and Kurtzman, who love their empty, soulless mystery (misery) boxes.
I will never again spend a dime on any of these franchises. Because the mythologies I love have been ripped to shreds, the fandoms melted down, and their legacies destroyed. This is the era of The Franchise Apocalypse. Everything we’ve known and loved will die—MUST die—, and, hopefully, a new generation of talented creators will come along to build new mythologies to replace the ones we’ve lost.
It’s over. They killed it. 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. The people making these shows lie and cheat and spend their time on social media attacking their core audience. Talented writers like Walter Mosley in the STD writers’ room (which should be a “safe space” for free expression of ideas) are tattled on to HR for using words not approved of by the woke collective.
“STAR TREK” now consists of garbage shows—hidden behind a paywall—made by hacks who hate the fanbase they’ve inherited, and will do everything they can to trick them into parting with their money. In, say, five years, no one will care. They’re just going to continue salting the proverbial Earth with shows like this new one, which will absolutely go right to work on undermining, rewriting, and outright replacing TOS even moreso than has already occurred. They’ll keep announcing new shows to project the illusion that all is well, and some may even get produced. But I don’t care.
There is no hope. The damage to both these franchises and their fanbases is too extensive. For those who know what I refer to, we’re entering the final phases of the Geeker Gate, now. The current iterations of these franchises will come to an end, and the parasites who have destroyed them from the inside-out will then move on like locusts to the next healthy franchise. You know, like how, after killing both STAR TREK and STAR WARS, Abrams is now getting his sticky fingers into the DC movies over at Warner.
I’m just waiting to read all of the (unauthorized) books which examine the trainwreck. The best we can hope for is to learn from this disaster so that it never happens again.
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So many thoughts, Gregatron... A few things that popped out at me:
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.
To address two specific things you mentioned:
...and...
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...
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.
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).
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.
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.
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:
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...
Okay, that one I'll give you. But...
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...
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.
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.
Ah. Yes. Quite. He listed Marvel and DC in the same breath as Star Trek and Doctor Who, so my brain was lumping it all in the moving-picture medium. The comics didn't even occur to me -- which makes me sad to think about how long it's been since I've read nearly anything from either company. I get the Star Wars comics from Marvel, and quite like most of them, as well as Ms. Marvel... *sigh* But that's it, and that's been it for some time, now.
patrickivan
Sr Member
Well, you make a great point. We stop changing and redefining things because people are hung up on little things like an entire history of women pretty much being relegated to the backseat. Babymakers, barefoot and pregnant who didn't even have a right to vote until the 20th century.
You're right, let's insert your little rant about what amounts to semantics because you don't like how it sounds.
My background is museum operations. I love history and the preservation of artifacts. Things PEOPLE made throughout time. Your statement would be like suggesting that a collection should stop with one thing because it worked, and all future versions of that should be dismissed. Unfortunately that means dismissing what people do: They change.
You don't hang on to everything old because YOU can't accept change. Definitions of things CHANGE. People change. That is literally what we do.
And the fact that you felt the need to insert that not so micro-rant about the use of Man as the classic way to encompass humanity, shows that you not only don't understand why humans change, but you also hold back that change. Your attitude may be your opinion, but your opinion does not make you correct.
The rights that women have now, have been given to them by men. How pathetic and sad is that? And they're still playing second fiddle to men in almost every aspect of power. Seriously, how do you not see that?
WORDS matter. The definitions of words MATTER to so many people regardless of if you see it or not. I really don't understand how anyone can be so into Star Trek, as you state over and over with massive undertones of entitlement to your opinions, yet within your essays you post, you seem to still miss the spirit of what Star Trek is.
Something, something, forest, trees... You're kinda talking about the same thing I was, but from a different direction. I was saying that "where no Man", when it was written back in the '60s, wasn't sexist in context, and that the "where no one" of TNG was because there were more than Humans participating in Starfleet by the late 23rd century. Enterprise and, more, Discovery retconning things to have lots of non-Humans onboard is more inclusive, yes, but also contrary to established canon and lore. And a wasted source of dramatic potential. It had gotten bad enough by the mid-23rd century that Starfleet mounted an expedition to Vulcan to try to get them to participate, and the result was the all-Vulcan USS Intrepid -- no mixed ships for them. Not yet, anyway. Secondary sources had the Andorians starting to involve themselves around then, too. Lots of non-Humans participating in Federation stuff, not so much Starfleet stuff.
I was mindful of the fact that in the years between there had been a sexual revolution, a women's movement, and the rise of political correctness. The word Man itself hasn't changed definitions, but the popular-culture context sure as hell has shifted. The questioning of gender roles and gender identity has thrown the meaning into sharp relief. The hunt for new pronouns that cover "neither" or "both". The conscious or subliminal awareness that "woman" and "female", being derived from "man" and "male", respectively, by their existence cast XX-chromosome-havers in the role of "other". I know all of that.
Just as I know that part of Gene's optimistic view of the future included sex and gender not mattering except when it came to mate-selection -- or lack of, for the Aces out there. Why he made Number One a woman in 1964, when such a thing was unheard-of. Why, when the pilot began production, the women were wearing pants, at a time that was frowned-upon (my mom, in college then, wasn't allowed to wear trousers until the temperature was -20°F).
It's a reflection of the times that the women still had different tops, that Bill Theiss -- a gay man -- designed such skimpy and revealing outfits for the female characters, that of the stories pitched by Gene and Herb that was the one NBC went for -- the one that dealt with a captive-breeding program and sexual fantasies. Gene was a horndog, yes, but he'd also included, among his twenty-odd pilot proposals, stories that would become "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "The Omega Glory", and "Mudd's Women". So I'd lay odds that it was about a fifty-fifty chance any story Gene wrote would involve sexualization. 'Cause that's how he rolled and there was no one to gainsay him except studio leads. That's how we got Ilia and the hyper-sexual Deltans in TMP. That's how we got Data being "fully functional" and the Edo in TNG. I feel the best Trek is when writers have been able to separate Gene's vision from his libido.
I applied the "where no Man has gone" phrasing to Voyager's temporal setting in that proposed macro-series because of that ship's complement. Difficult to keep up with crew deaths and new acquisitions, but in 2377 140 of the 146 crew members were Human. I do not know whether that counts half-Humans like B'Elanna. That was the first Starfleet ship that far out. The other two that had made it to the Delta Quadrant (a Human appellation in mapping the galaxy, I might add) hadn't made it as far out, and were also never heard from again back home. There were, however, lots of other sentient species living there when they showed up. To quote Lord Vetinari, via Terry Pratchett, "If someone was sitting by the river having his dinner when the explorer turned up, then said explorer couldn't possibly have found it first", which sort of recasts much of Starfleet's role through history as that of benign trespassers. A lot of the places we "discovered" already had someone living there. But that Human-centric blind-spot is part of the setting and its evolution. I don't feel it should be retroactively undone, in universe or in the real world, and part of that is being mindful of the words and when and how they were used.
I was mindful of the fact that in the years between there had been a sexual revolution, a women's movement, and the rise of political correctness. The word Man itself hasn't changed definitions, but the popular-culture context sure as hell has shifted. The questioning of gender roles and gender identity has thrown the meaning into sharp relief. The hunt for new pronouns that cover "neither" or "both". The conscious or subliminal awareness that "woman" and "female", being derived from "man" and "male", respectively, by their existence cast XX-chromosome-havers in the role of "other". I know all of that.
Just as I know that part of Gene's optimistic view of the future included sex and gender not mattering except when it came to mate-selection -- or lack of, for the Aces out there. Why he made Number One a woman in 1964, when such a thing was unheard-of. Why, when the pilot began production, the women were wearing pants, at a time that was frowned-upon (my mom, in college then, wasn't allowed to wear trousers until the temperature was -20°F).
It's a reflection of the times that the women still had different tops, that Bill Theiss -- a gay man -- designed such skimpy and revealing outfits for the female characters, that of the stories pitched by Gene and Herb that was the one NBC went for -- the one that dealt with a captive-breeding program and sexual fantasies. Gene was a horndog, yes, but he'd also included, among his twenty-odd pilot proposals, stories that would become "Where No Man Has Gone Before", "The Omega Glory", and "Mudd's Women". So I'd lay odds that it was about a fifty-fifty chance any story Gene wrote would involve sexualization. 'Cause that's how he rolled and there was no one to gainsay him except studio leads. That's how we got Ilia and the hyper-sexual Deltans in TMP. That's how we got Data being "fully functional" and the Edo in TNG. I feel the best Trek is when writers have been able to separate Gene's vision from his libido.
This baffles me. I'm neither oblivious to or trying to stifle cultural change. I was pointing out understanding fifty-five-year-old context shifts perceived meaning of a thing in the present cultural setting. That the words themselves are problematic, and will remain so. I've lived through a lot of that period being very socially aware -- because of my parents and extended family, because of where I grew up, and because of Star Trek. I can't say a whole lot more without risking the banhammer. I've already tapdanced around sensitive topics more closely than I'm comfortable in this answer.
I applied the "where no Man has gone" phrasing to Voyager's temporal setting in that proposed macro-series because of that ship's complement. Difficult to keep up with crew deaths and new acquisitions, but in 2377 140 of the 146 crew members were Human. I do not know whether that counts half-Humans like B'Elanna. That was the first Starfleet ship that far out. The other two that had made it to the Delta Quadrant (a Human appellation in mapping the galaxy, I might add) hadn't made it as far out, and were also never heard from again back home. There were, however, lots of other sentient species living there when they showed up. To quote Lord Vetinari, via Terry Pratchett, "If someone was sitting by the river having his dinner when the explorer turned up, then said explorer couldn't possibly have found it first", which sort of recasts much of Starfleet's role through history as that of benign trespassers. A lot of the places we "discovered" already had someone living there. But that Human-centric blind-spot is part of the setting and its evolution. I don't feel it should be retroactively undone, in universe or in the real world, and part of that is being mindful of the words and when and how they were used.
patrickivan
Sr Member
Can you reply to something without writing an essay? Sometimes the more someone says, the less it means.
You literally went through the effort of justifying your point by stating: "Insert my linguistic rant here about societal brokenness of centuries past hanging baggage on all the terminology we use for gender. Mann was a person, woman is derived from wiffmann, meaning "wife-person" -- i.e., less than fully recognized as human. Latin's no help -- female is a deviation from the norm of male. Boy and girl are no better, but I won't belabor that here. "
Don't try to explain your way out of it with your long winded and frankly confusing response.
"Voyager and after (where I had hopes we would still be spending time) "Where No Man* Has Gone". " This is a series YOU proposed to be titled AFTER Voyager, to be on TV, a series that ended in 2001. You would have a Star Trek series entitled "Where No MAN has gone" in the 21st century.
It just does NOT resonate with where societal values are heading. It's not that you can't or shouldn't use it in its context related to TOS. But it just doesn't apply or belong to a Star Trek series in our contemporary society.
And maybe it could have been dismissed as a nonissue, but it became an issue when YOU decided to add your little rant. YOU called it a rant. YOU clearly have an issue with gender-related issues. You don't want to have pushback about something like this, then don't post it publically.
jarroth
Sr Member
Why so much, you like this or that show so you suck?
Are we going to have mayor riots about a mid engine corvette?
I do not care much about who likes what or why. I just like or dislike shows as they are. I do not think back as in: in that episode of tos this happend and that had no mention of ever happening in tng. I watch them as seperate all together. It is fiction, not factual.
Are we going to have mayor riots about a mid engine corvette?
I do not care much about who likes what or why. I just like or dislike shows as they are. I do not think back as in: in that episode of tos this happend and that had no mention of ever happening in tng. I watch them as seperate all together. It is fiction, not factual.
patrickivan
Sr Member
I'm not sure anyone here has dumped on anyone for liking or disliking the show. We've had secondary off topic arguments where I know I'll certainly dump on another member here. But if we didn't all love Star Trek, we wouldn't be so passionate about it. And that doesn't mean I can't move past things or hold grudges. I just don't see that here.
And we know it's a fictional show. What's factual is the story woven throughout all the series that created a comprehensive universe that makes the series of shows more fascinating. Except for when the new series cherry-picks things to click bait fans into watching, and we get blatantly lied to about things. Then of course we're going to be pissed off about it.
No, we're not going to have riots (what a bizarre suggestion) over mid-engine corvettes, because no one likes corvettes older than the 1967 models, and well they shouldn't.
For the record I absolutely hate the new Corvette.
I had a horrid thought about this new show. Since Spock is in it and we know in his later years he learned how to time travel, even though it was with Kirk and not Pike, it would not surprise me to see them time travel to check on the Discovery and his sister. It also wouldn't surprise me to see Spock and Kirk show up in STD in the future since anything goes with the idiots that are making and writing these shows.
I had a horrid thought about this new show. Since Spock is in it and we know in his later years he learned how to time travel, even though it was with Kirk and not Pike, it would not surprise me to see them time travel to check on the Discovery and his sister. It also wouldn't surprise me to see Spock and Kirk show up in STD in the future since anything goes with the idiots that are making and writing these shows.
NakedMoleRat
Master Member
Was looking to find the little 8” 1:2500 scale Enterprise model from Discovery. Very happy I didn’t as I see this is coming out.
U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek Discovery 1:1000 scale from
www.culttvmanshop.com
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