Oh Boy

[kyburg]

J. Michael Straczynski proposes 'rebooting' the Trek franchise by going back to the original show - recasting, and redoing from scratch.

Revising the Prime Directive.

Refocusing the conflicts.

..

Guys.

I had over fifteen years of fan fiction before the first movie ever hit production. I've been around this franchise since I was ten years old - and guys? It's the big Four Six this November. That's thirty-six years of everything you can do with it.

I DO NOT NEED MORE KIRK SPOCK MCCOY. I don't. I don't.

You want to make a good show - get your own characters and go for it.

"Just like Coke, only better!"

Pepsi marketing, at its finest.

Enough already. These people are perfectly capable of doing Really Good Stuff all on their own. I don't need a film noir version (ala Battelstar Galactica) of Star Trek.

I don't. Really.

Give me something I haven't seen before. Please.

..


...*grumble* People wonder why I watch so much anime *grumble grumble grumble*....

Comments

I dunno...

[jenkitty.livejournal.com]

Joe's take on it:

http://www.jmsnews.com/msg.aspx?id=1-17286

He argues that in that 36 years, they haven't done everything they can do with Trek. Political considerations, the need to keep things all nicey-nicey... they're getting in the way of what could be some really good stories. Maybe it's just the ultimate in fan fiction for him to do this reboot thing, but I'm just intrigued enough to give it a look.

2 things to note

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

One, that proposal won't happen - it's been superseded by the new movie JJ Abrams is doing. (Which may rock or suck for its own reasons.)

Two, I respectfully submit that you are much, much mistaken about the new BSG being a "film noir" version of the original - its not dark for darnkess' sake, it's dark because the basic premise is inherently dark, even though Glen Larson didn't play up that aspect.

Re: 2 things to note

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

Dude, you could have kept the basic premises and did just as well as was done with BSG, without retaining all of the names. That's about all that came over. Seriously. The rest is basic archetypal mythos, basic to any storytelling. You doubt me, go back and read your Joseph Campbell.

*pants* GHAD, I hate having to reiterate that every time I discuss that show. It's fabulous. But that little piece just irks me no end.

JJ Adams is doing or is developing? Development hell is a very real place, lemme tellya. If it makes it out of there, then you might have something.

Re: I dunno...

[kyburg.livejournal.com]

This just scares me.

"In the rebooted Star Trek Universe, there is a Prime Directive, but it is not about non-interference in the matter of other races...."

EX-CUUUUSE me?!

Hell, write your own, JMS. Please.

Re: 2 things to note

[porpentine.livejournal.com]

One of the producers, writing screenplay, attached to direct the new Star Trek movie.

[moropus.livejournal.com]

Would a bit of creativity be too much to ask for? And can we please stop having new excuses for Star Trek? Each show/movie/whatever is worst than the one before. I knew I was done when I fell asleep during a STNG movie and refused to be told what it was about.

I'm OK with some episodes of the original show, but I am sick to death of the rest of it. I've been buying up DVDs of old shows I liked and watching TVLand which is what they call the ancient rerun channel here.

And while we're ranting, would somebody please stop George Lucas from ever doing anymore projects, ever?

[lefresne.livejournal.com]

I very rarely get riled about *anything* in the teevee universe, however THAT would be an exception.

Original Trek means a lot to me. It saved my life (really--by giving me a fantasy world to escape to as a 10-11-12 year old and throughout my teenage years) helped forge my identity (I've attended cons since the age of 11) and just gave me a well happy place.

It cannot EVER be remade. It doesn't make any sense at all--especially with the cult status it has and how identified with the parts the actors are. Oh this must not stand.

Aside--Next Gen is my favorite, but Original will always be my security blanket when the world gets confusing.

[secanth.livejournal.com]

*sigh* Somehow I think he's missed the whole point of the thing. Trek was never supposed to be 'dark' and 'moody' and such like. The original Trek was a reflection of it's time (which just happens to be the time I grew up in). Going back and redoing it will piss off the original fans, and probably have very little interest for the fans it's gained since that time. Trek fans don't want 'retreads', or 'do overs'. They aren't interested in going back and covering old ground. You want to do a new Trek? Start again where you left off, give us a new vision of that future.

Would anyone seriously think of going back and recasting the original Star Wars Trilogy and redoing it? Of course not, because the fan base would have fits. So why does he think he can get away with it with Trek?

Oh come on...

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

The names aren't all that came over - the fundamental plot and some core characters are still intact, as are a lot of the ship designs. If you're gonna slam what the new BSG is doing as "basic archetypal mythos", then you have to slam the original for the same thing, since, if anything, the original was even more of a generic "we are a lost people looking for a home" plot.

[foogod.livejournal.com]

To be honest, they have not done everything that could be done with Star Trek. There's a lot more that could be done, and I sorta wish would be done. That's not to say it hasn't gotten horribly derivative and repetetive over the years, to the point where I stopped watching two series ago, but that's more because the chimpanzees they've got for writing staff used up all their typewriters about 15 years ago and just fell back to cut-and-paste for all their ideas.

That having been said, "rebooting" the Star Trek universe just so some stupid ego-centric fanboy can go off and get his own screwed up wank fiction on the air under the billion-dollar banner name without being constrained by inconvenient aspects of the universe is stupid.

Yes, I'm calling JMS and ego-centric fanboy. I used to have a lot of respect for him, but if this is what he's proposing, then that's what he is. This is the idea of a thirteen-year-old. Deal with it.

This is a perfect example of the biggest problem I have had with the new BSG. Now, because of that piece of crap idea that somebody managed to get on the air and make popular, everybody's going to try to "reimagine" all of the old stuff into some gritty parody for no good reason, and it's just going to completely screw up what has made all the classics, well, classic in the process. And all because nobody has any imagination of their own these days..

Thank you so much for saying this. I was beginning to think I was the only one who felt this way about BSG and the trend towards "reimagining" old stuff. I do have to disagree with one other small point, though:

Pepsi marketing, at its finest.

No, this isn't Pepsi marketing:

"People seem to like this new sort of product better at the moment, so lets dump all the tried-and-true history behind our most beloved classic and make it taste just the same as the new stuff instead, but keep the same name to trick people into drinking it!"

This is New Coke all over again.

Re: Oh come on...

[secanth.livejournal.com]

I was a fan of the original, actually. And to be honest, I barely recognize the characters that are 'wearing' the old names. The original BSG wasn't great literature, no, but it didn't take itself terribly seriously either. It was 'escapist TV', and enjoyable to boot.

The current version? Yes, it's wonderfully written...but it would be just as effective had they come up with entirely new characters, scrapped the old ship designs, and started out fresh. But, of course, they wouldn't then have had the BSG name to draw people in.

[washuotaku.livejournal.com]

I guess it is because there are a rehash of restarting old franchises lately. Movies are doing it with Batman Begins, Superman Returns (following events after Movie 2, I have heard, ignoring movies 3&4), Jame's Bond Casino Royal, Texas Chainsaw Massicar, etc...

Face it, Hollywood is out of ideas!

[dudemungus.livejournal.com]

I think what they need to do to make the show good is to make a good show. I liked the first couple of the "Enterprise" stories--it had action, and fights and thrills, and was more like buck rogers than it was Star trek. Then the old hackneyed plot lines of lets all love one another and lets do no harm came in, and then they had to decide who was in love with who, and all that deep space nine nonsense, and then the long winded story lines that you had to see from the start to keep up with, and they lost me. It just became another lame star trek franchise. WHich was a shame, because they had some good potential and some good momentum in the first season.

If they were to try again, a good idea would be to give everybody involved in producing them the heave ho, and let a couple new faces take a shot at it. And yeah, I'd love to see the red shirts and the mini skirts come back!

The new doctor who isn't dark and gritty exactly, but it's better than the original and it moves and it's a lot of fun. There is hope for everything, they just need to let start trek be for a while.

Re: Oh come on...

[turandot.livejournal.com]

Well, the way I look at it is: most of the fans of the originals really hate the new series for some reason, and the producers pretty much became aware of it as soon as the original miniseries aired. Anyway, it's to the point where most of the new series' viewership is comprised of people who either were never fans of the original BSG, or just never had seen the original before (hadn't even heard of BSG at all before the new series came out, I freely admit, but I did watch some classic BSG, and it turns me off for the same reason the original Star Trek turned me off as a kid - terminal cheesiness). So at this point the decision to keep the names there might as well just have been a producers' predilection. They've both made it pretty clear that the idea had always been to take the characters, and make them unrecognizable when compared to the originals.

And, so to avoid derail the original topic any further, I think the whole reboot of Star Trek has already been done with Enterprise to a certain extent- hadn't really followed it beyond the first season and some, but I got the impression from it that much of the series basically rewrote the whole origins of the Federation from scratch. It's not that a reboot wouldn't work, it's that to work, it would need producers and writers that don't suck ass, and who are willing to take narrative risks, rather than write stories based on their own fannish conception of what the franchise was or is.

The problem as I see it is that after TNG, which imho was a vast improvement over the original (which I've hated since I was a kid), the people who took over after Roddenberry's death decided they had to bring the stupid back into it, at least for their own pet creations (DSN doesn't count, as it was always the red headed stepchild of the franchise). So basically they can do whatever they please to the franchise in my book, so long as they bring in new people to do it.

Re: Oh come on...

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

I think there's a lot of arguments that need to be disentangled here. Kyburg was claiming that all they brought over were the names from the original series, but I think there are several elements that have carried over.

Now, what you seem to be arguing is that the new series is A) different and B) they didn't have to use the old series as a basis for the new one. Let's take these one at a time -

Is the new series different? Absolutely, it's unquestionably darker and grimmer - if you liked the old series because it's escapist, then I can see why you might have reservations about the new one. And it's absolutely true that some of the characters are very different - some started out a long way away from the original versions (Baltar), while some started out relatively close to the original version, but have since been taken in very different directions (Boomer, and lately Starbuck). But at the same time, there are also characters who still remain pretty close to the original concepts (Adama, Apollo), and I think a big part of what's interesting about the new series is how those characters struggle to remain true to their original concepts (strong, honorable, straightforward men) while at the same time facing situations and complications the original characters never did.

Now, did they have to use the old series as a starting point for the new one? Well, as you pointed out, they wouldn't have had the BSG name on it if they didn't, and I think we have to recognize that for the people actually deciding what shows to make, the name is nearly all that matters. Universal/Vivendi owned the Galactica franchise (such as it was) and they wanted to make a new show with it. Ron Moore got the job to do the new show, and the rest is history. But the important thing is that Moore was not the instigator of the new series - it's not like he was planning something very similar to this and said, "oh, hey, I'll just rip off the BSG names to bring more people in." Good or bad, dark or escapist, there was gonna be a new BSG show because there was money to be made. If the show was not called BSG, there would not be a new show in the first place, regardless of how good Moore's ideas were.

At the same time, though, I think there's a substantive argument to be made that the ideas of BSG are integral to the new show. It is a very different show in outlook, in what it's willing to show and where it's willing to take us. That's what makes it good. But at the same time, it's still a show about the survivors of a genocide drifting through space trying to find Earth, it's still a show about space battles and evil Cylons, it's still got the military camaraderie of a bunch of hotshot pilots saving the day, and it's still a show about the paternal relationship between the commander and his actual and figurative children (even more so now, actually). That's what makes it Galactica.

IMHO, anyway. ;)

Re: Oh come on...

[secanth.livejournal.com]

*chuckle* As someone who grew up with both the original Trek and the original BSG...well, yes, I'd imagine they look cheesy now. Of course, at the time, they (Trek espically) took more risks and went into more controversial subjects than any *other* show on television. And for those of us that grew up with it, it shaped a lot of our attitudes towards things like civil rights, war, and peace. I'm just waiting to see how 'cheesy' TNG and the current BSG look in forty years, should I be around that long, and listen to the grandchildren of the TNG crowd telling them how 'cheesy' *it* is because they aren't in 3-D/holograph/whatever the current standard is. *smile*

The thing with 'reimaging' a franchise, be it Trek or Swars or the current crop of movies, is that quite often in the course of reimaging it, the whole concept is warped out of all recognition. Gene Roddenberry created a concept of a universe where people tried to get along, where the concepts of individual freedom and equality were considered important, and war was something to be avoided. To some people, that's 'cheezy' or trite. *shrugs* To each their own, but I must admit to being irritated when the original is judged with no regard for *when* it was made and the world as it was then.

So if the idea was to warp the characters in BSG out of all recognition, why keep the name and call it 'BSG'? Why not actually be original? Because, of course, the 'BSG' name drew people in. Some stayed to watch, because it *is* a good show. Others watched and realized that the only thing it had in relation to the original was someone's desire to 'reinvent' it in their own 'fanboy' image. To each their own.

[murphymom.livejournal.com]

I'd much rather see the "Enterprise" incarnation make the transition to the big screen than have anybody tamper with the original - as far as I'm concerned, Bones and Scotty died when DeForest Kelley and James Doohan did, and at this point, Shatner and Nimoy are just too old...but no one else can be Spock, or Kirk, or Sulu, either.

Maybe there needs to be a hiatus before the next Trek movie, just as there was between the original series and the first movie- only, not as long this time, or I'm afraid I may be seeing it with my grandkids (who haven't been born yet.)

Re: Oh come on...

[coldjones.livejournal.com]

Actually, I think the Trek history is a little different than that - to an extent, Roddenberry walked away from Next Generation around the second season or so, which is when (and possibly why) the series started to get good. The guys who did DS9 (at least at first) were largely responsible for the latter seasons of TNG.

But at the same time, they were the guys who made Voyager and Enterprise as dull as they were - they saw that the ratings for DS9 weren't as good as those for TNG, and I suspect they blamed some of the more interesting aspects of the show (dynamic characters, plot arcs, a willingness to break from tradition) for the drop, rather than simply accepting that TNG was a phenomenon that wasn't going to be repeated in a fragmenting entertainment market. So everything that was interesting about DS9 got scrubbed from the later series, and as a result they got watched by people who'd watch anything with the Trek name on it (and I include myself in that group, to an extent) but not by anybody else.

Which is to say that somebody probably could do a good job rebooting Star Trek from scratch... but they'd really have to be willing to go out on a limb, and I dunno that that's gonna happen.

Re: Oh come on...

[secanth.livejournal.com]

I never said I had reservations about the new one. It's well written, holds one's attention, and is for the most part a good show. I even have it on DVD. But I also still like the original, for the very things that you seem to think make it cheezy. But the basic plot for either one isn't all that original...it's been done in SF literature for a long time now. BG was just the first to take the elements and do it on television and not in print. Star Trek certainly wasn't taking brillantly original concepts and using them either, since the concepts themselves had been around for decades. Swars took the basic myth of the hero and put it in futuristic terms.

The quality of any series is in the writing. At the time BG ran originally, it had a pretty loyal fanbase, but it wasn't one that continued for long after the show went off the air. Trek is a different creature in that respect. The fans kept it alive until the first movie was made. Those fans are, quite likely, *still* fans. If anything was learned from 'Enterprise', it should have been that you piss off the fans at your own risk. (But of course, Berman and company couldn't admit *they* screwed it up...) I remember when the first movie came out...and as much as the fans wanted it, the comment I heard the most was 'It was interesting, but it's not Trek'. The second came a whole lot closer, as far as most fans were concerned. Trek fans have very definate ideas of what Trek is 'supposed' to be, and a director or producer 'reimages' that at their own risk.

[dawnmipb.livejournal.com]

What. You. Said.

My son is sixteen years old and HE'S disgusted with the remake madness. Half the time, he's yelling at the TV: "Make up your OWN damn stories! I am!"

And he is.

We both totally agree with you on the anime thing. We have withdrawals around here without it.

Re: Oh come on...

[turandot.livejournal.com]

To me, it was never about how cheesy Star Trek looked, it was always that there was this cheap cheesy subtext of sexual conquest that seemed a bit out of place at first, and offensive later on. Space aliens met for the week more or less had to include a woman who would end up having sex with James Kirk. I understand that it was the 60's, and the camp of that was largely intended, but no... it still makes it pretty dumb macho shit, and I've always hated that type of programming.

The reason TNG was a vast improvement in my book was not that it looked more technologically advanced (and it isn't - the effects were ridiculously cheap and primitive looking even before the series ended), but that there was a little bit more of a purpose to watch it than to see who the good old captain was shagging this week. It actually had a few story arcs that went beyond the "captain and select crew visit a planet, woman has sex with the captain to distract him, captain sees through it but has sex with her anyway, and then the crew disentangle themselves from danger", which is why TNG is the only show in the whole franchise that I ever followed willingly on my own, instead of mostly watching along with someone else (original - mom was a huge fan, imagine that; DSN, Voyager, Enterprise - husband was/is a fan of franchise, in theory if not in practice anymore).

[joggingguy.livejournal.com]

More Robin - Witch Hunter please! :-D

Re: Oh come on...

[secanth.livejournal.com]

Ah, but that cheesy subtext was something that at the time the networks thought was bringing in the teenage boys. (Back then, it was thought only boys were interested in that science fiction stuff) *wry grin* And even at the time, was considered a topic for jokes among the fans. And of course, women's liberation was just getting started at the time, the 'free love' generation was considered an abberation, and the idea that a woman *might* be strong and not at all interested in the handsome captain was a concept the studio bigwigs had problems with. (This was still the age when belly buttons couldn't be shown on television...) The dumb macho shit *was* the norm back then.

For the time, Star Trek got by with a hell of a lot. TNG and the rest had it a bit easier, since they were the golden geese for the network for a while and could do no wrong. While the point of some of the original Trek shows may well be lost now, episodes like 'Let This Be Your Last Battlefield', 'City on the Edge of Forever', and 'Miri' made those of us who watched at the time think about things like bigotry, sacrifice, and aging. We didn't watch to see who the Captain was shagging, we watched in spite of it.

[pseudicide.livejournal.com]

Except it is strazynski... But I have to agree.

[caitlin.livejournal.com]

*SIGH* JMS... thy ego is larger than the universe.

Get over yourself already.

Besides, considering this is the same man who FIRED some of his actors over the fact that they also went to play roles in Star Trek? This comes across as hypocritical and arrogant.

Which may explain why, beyond First Season B5, I have no use for him.

C.