StillPaisleyCat @ StillPaisleyCat @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

While he was a Shakespearean actor at Stratford in Canada, and in fact was Christopher Plummer’s understudy before taking on leading roles himself, Shatner’s US career kicked off in the 1950s in film noir. He was considered a quite serious actor.

Bezos was particularly jerky about it when its established fact that Shatner was one of the celebrity calls that astronauts asked to have in the early days of the space station when communication was more limited.

So this actor, who was an inspiration for astronauts, had been asked to talk to them during their missions and hear their perspectives for morale benefits. But when he finally has his own experience, Bezos assumed no one wanted to hear it. Just tone deaf and uninformed.

Star Trek was considered big budget television in the 1960s. It was early peak broadcast television made to show off colour technology.

Roddenberry modeled and pitched the original pilot (The Cage) on MGM’s movie Forbidden Planet, which was the most expensive science fiction movie to date when it was made in the mid 50s.

Some engineer friends think it’s failure by design to avoid greater risks - much like a fuse burning out.

But why not do it more safely?

In the 32nd century, ‘rocks’ would just be the result of programmable matter ‘bricking’.

Earlier though…

Dressing is the regional term in many parts of Canada. Sounds like the same may exist in parts of the United States.

What I would like to see is Moriarty vs Garak, ‘cutting remarks’ for the win.

TNG and all the 90s shows finessed their way around the date of the Eugenics War.

The writers at the time (e.g., Moore & Braga) would rationalize in response to fan questions that the Eugenics War was going on but we just weren’t aware. Or something. But they assiduously avoided dealing with the issue onscreen despite trying to write around other inconsistencies like Klingon foreheads.

So, it was left to SNW’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to spell it all out, including moving Khan’s birth back by decades. It’s worth putting a priority on seeing that episode just for that clarity.

Encounter at Farpoint probably isn’t the place to start.

We tend to assume our kids will get into it the same way we did, but different generations respond differently.

Our kids are fans, but they like the franchise on their own terms. We started them with the TAS DVD set, after priming them with Odd Squad. They loved it.

When they hit school age, I tried them on a curated set of TNG episodes. Didn’t really stick, but Voyager they adored. By high school they’d tried most of it but would only watch the occasional episode of DS9 or Enterprise. They watched the early seasons of Discovery with enthusiasm even though I had to fast forward through some scenes.

In high school, their interest fell off as they explored other fandoms, but they’ve come back to it on their own terms. And their favourite shows at the moment aren’t ones that I would ever have predicted.

Wow, definitely different school learning protocol here.

Our kids were fussing at me to close my tabs as I go by the time they hit middle school, and when they were younger we had a ‘clear tabs automatically on closing’ set up in their browsers.

The big temporal shift took place when TNG’s premiere ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ was written to place WW3 and first contact into the mid-late 21st century.

TOS was very specific in saying that the Eugenics War was a precursor to WW3.

Roddenberry wanted to ensure that the franchise’s optimistic future was always a future possibility for viewers. So he insisted that TNG reset the date of WW3.

At the time TNG appeared, there were die-hard gatekeeping TOS fans that argued that this time shift broke canon and meant TNG was in a different universe despite McCoy’s appearance in the premiere.

SNW just confirms the physics of temporal slippage in the Prime timeline as the consequence of all the various intertemporal incursions over the history of the franchise.

I’m convinced that many people don’t appreciate DS9 until their 30s.

Cool that the 90s shows each seem to appeal to different demographics even though they were all in theory designed for mass audiences ( unlike in the current streaming era).

The problem seems to be that a lot of younger fans that get into Voyager & TNG, just cringe at DS9 or find it boring. Once they’ve had that experience they’re hard to convince to give it a fresh shot when they’re older.

As others have said this isn’t the infinitely expanding manifold time of DC or MCU (pre Loki season 2).

SNW season two confirmed what we could infer from the premier of TNG when the date of WW3 had shifted back decades. It also happens to line up better with the understandings of modern physics.

The Prime Timeline in Star Trek is a resilient enormous river. It can be shifted a bit in its course, slip forwards and back.

BUT major events remain largely unchanged

• those changes that aren’t large enough to create a major fork shift to a very different future as in TOS City at the Edge of Forever

OR

• it takes an event of the order of the Romulan Supernova to create a new branch universe (Kelvin U).

The OP’s point is that there were old fans gatekeeping and downtalking ‘NuTrek’ pretty much since fan organizations took out full page newspaper ads in the US trying to stop TAS from being aired.

I was going to Star Trek cons in 1990. No matter how objectively great season 3 of TNG was, many TOS diehards were still campaigning against it.

Longstanding TOS fans could still be pretty toxic at that point to new TNG fans in person too. The guests at cons were still largely TOS cast. It was hard even to get a TNG t-shirt then.

Fast forward to 1993 and TNG cosplay was everywhere, the guests and panels were TNG and DS9 was the exciting new thing.

Don’t forget . . .

Any social media crowdsourced rating is going to be vulnerable to review bombing/brigading.

You can get some sense of the perspectives with IMDb if you look at not just the score but the distribution of scores (available in the app). A huge spike of 1/10s tells the story.

It’s not that bona fide statisticians can’t get useful data out of crowdsourced surveys, but a public platform like those ones attracts brigading and the score is not adjusted for demographic balance.

Anyone else have Ukrainian farmers come to mind?

Not that I’m suggesting mixing in a political war meme here, but that’s what popped up first for me.

Looking back at that, I think Roddenberry was lampshading the expected social discomfort expected in the audience when those words were put in Pike’s mouth. Regrettably, the rest audience reportedly still wasn’t willing to accept Number One.

It’s odd though given the prominent women characters in Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea which was very popular a few years before.

But you missed Alison Pill!

Our very own very nice Canadian Borg Queen.

Agree. But Boimler should still be much taller than Bean.