Is Star Trek dead? - Page 2

Battlestar Galactica is the dullest sci-fi show since stargate sg-1 and stargate atlantis. All as bland as dishwater.

Oh c'mon, Hair you know Cylons disguised as ugly porn stars and that head-ache causing cam per Micheal J. Fox is sci-fi gold!

I would add it's duller than Andromeda.

Glad to see Deep Space 9 get some love. The last great trek series. Runner-up in greatness behind TOS.

ABSOLUTELY!!!!!

Boring shit.

Remakes are for hookers and fat people.

Andromeda was more wasted opportunity, first season was ok, but after that I lost interest. I love the Sci-Fi genre so much it hurts me to think that is so much wsated potential out there in tv land. I fucking miss the first 2 seasons of Seaquest DSV, as cheesy as some of it was, it was alwyas entertaining and Fucking Roy Scheider dude! Space: Above and Beyond rocked the house too, fucking FOX axed that too, just when it really hit it stride. While not scifi, the tv show Spy Game was just a fun action show in primetime, it was on mondays right before Buffy(remember when that show was good?), both shows were their first season, and I actually cared about tv on Mondays back then. Sorry, didn't mean to turn this into Hair-Metal Hero's scifi nostalgia thread.

Star Trek took a turn for the worse when it strangled to death its finest creation: The Borg. The limp, autonomous cyborgs of Star Trek: First Contact and Voyager (Seven of Nine) bear very little relation to the ruthless, communal-minded, unrelenting and totally Alien conquerors seen in Q-Who?

The sight of the utterly inconsistent Borg Queen lusting over Data in ST:FC left the entire franchise rolling around on the floor begging for mercy, IMHO.

Just released (for what it's worth):

Peter Weller cast as Colonel Green on Enterprise's finale. (Historical archive recordings.)

Hunh. If they can somehow work the "Optimum Movement" into it, I can watch ENT die a happy lad.

With little to do this afternoon other than nurse a banging hangover, I decided to undertake a bit of research into the writing behind the original and animated Star Trek series. Stripping away entirely unknown writers and Roddenberry himself (who penned 11 scripts, I think), I came up with the following [rough] list of recognized SF authors who contributed to both:

Russell Bates: “How Sharper than the Serpent’s Tooth” (A)
Jerome Bixby: “Mirror Mirror”, “By Any Other Name”, “Day of the Dove” and “Requiem for Methuselah”.
Robert Bloch: “Wolf in the Fold”, “What are Little Girls Made Of?” and “Catspaw”.
Fredric Brown: “Arena”.
Mike “Meyer” Dolinsky: “Plato’s Stepchildren”.
Max Ehrlich: “The Apple”.
Harlan Ellison: “The City at the Edge of Forever”.
Dorothy C. Fontana: “Tomorrow is Yesterday”, “Charlie X”, “This Side of Paradise”, “Journey to Babel”, “Friday’s Child”, “By Any Other Name”, “The Ultimate Computer”, “The Enterprise Incident” and “Yesteryear” (A)
David Gerrold: “The Trouble With Tribbles”, “More Tribbles, More Troubles” (A), “Bem” (A), “I Mudd” and “The Cloud-Minders”.
George Clayton Johnson: “The Man Trap” (first episode).
Richard Matheson: “The Enemy Within”.
Larry Niven: “Slaver Weapon” (A)
Jerry Sohl: “The Corbomite Maneuver” and “Whom Gods Destroy”
Norman Spinrad: “The Doomsday Machine”.
Theodore Sturgeon: “Shore Leave” and “Amok Time”.
Howard Weinstein: “The Pirates of Orion”.

(A) denotes animated.

Granted some of these shows weren’t particularly memorable (if it all), but with top SF authors such as Spinrad (Bug Jack Barron), Niven (Ringworld), Matheson (The Shrinking Man), Sturgeon (More than Human), Brown (What Mad Universe?) in tow – Trek not only had a populous and diverse writing team, but a fiercely creative one too.

With the ilk of the above giving Kirk, Spock and McCoy plenty to work with (not to mention the animated show), it’s not difficult to understand why the ubiquitous Braga/Berman collaboration wearies many a Trek follower.

Star Trek is dead and should remain in state, unless...

SHATNER RETURNS! The Emperor Tiberius from the Mirror Universe invades our reality and topples the Federation! Our show would follow a single starship crew fighting a guerilla war against the evil Kirk!

I haven't watched Star Trek since the end of The Next Generation (which does not hold up, incidentally), but the above premise would have me warming up my DVR.

I love SHatner, but, at this point, he's just too old and chubby to make a convincing Bad Guy. I mean, old chubby Kirk killing Christopher Plummer and Malcom McDowell is one thing. Old chubby Kirk invading the federation, ahhh, no. If he was still young, I'd say rock n roll, but its like the SImpsons said: Star Trek: "So Very Old"

They need to just jump to 200 years after the TNG-DS9-VGR timeline and start anew. Preferably with a major war already beginning with a new threat. No cameos by other series stars, just all fresh faces and designs.

Is he as old as the Emperor Palpatine? Or as chubby as Baron Harkonnen? What exactly would keep Shatner from hamming it up on a throne while Vulcan henchmen enact his decrees throughout the galaxy?

Ah, your point is well-taken. But I can dream, can't I (like this would ever happen anyway)?

Dude, write to Shatner, you know he'd take this premise and have his shadow-writers run with the premise in the SHATNERVERSE of books.

well If B & B can put almost every week a babe in underwear rubbing herself with oil and destroy an entire Akira class ship at every season finale the franchise could go on.

Oh it has been done , sorry then, I agree it deserves a decent RIP like a movie or something.

The time after Enterprise and before the original series is wasted area. They need to MOVE ON. BADLY. You can't recreate the original magic anymore, especially without all the original cast. Besides, there's too much preconcieved notions of that time period in the fans heads, it will only disapoint. I weep for what used to be an excellent franchise.

If the SHAT is to return one last time, I want it in an adaption of ASHES TO EDEN.

THE best piece of Trek fiction ever.

For now, lets just bury Trek, give it a good solid eulogy it deserves and put it in the groud already.

What doesn't hold up exactly? It's a fine piece of SF writing and a candidate for the best episode of the series.

Ignore.

I guess I wasn't clear. It's not the ending EPISODE that doesn't hold up but the whole touch-feely new age Next Generation series. There are a number of individual episodes that hold up as honest to goodness good science fiction (INNER LIGHT and DARMOK come to mind for TNG). It's just that the series as a whole is starting to seem as dated as TOS. Another ten years and our kids (if they're geeks, God willing) will be laughing at the clothes, hair, and effects. I'm already chuckling.

Sci-Fi doesn't have to be timeless to be good.

Yawn.
After reading the concept for the new movie, I still think they need a nice five year hiatus an come with something really new, which this does not sound much like.
It's sounds alittle bit too much like it is pitched at the hard core fans, and the last two Trek movies showed us what happens when you do that.....

At its best, Trek in whatever format was a framework to tell space-related sci-fi short stories. It could be any captain or commander on a rocket ship encountering this strange situation. TOS was mostly this, seeing as how "Star Trek" as a phenomenon was a few years away. INNER LIGHT (my favorite TNG episode) was like this as well. There are some real stand-outs in each of the series.

At its worst, Trek focused on a personal crisis for a single cast-member for an entire episode. Bumpy-headed aliens and the fact the we never left the "spaceship" sets didn't help either. These are the forgettable episodes. This was epitomized when, like, the 2nd episode of DS9 featured some kind of threat to Lt. Dax. Who gives a rip about a character we just met 5 minutes ago?

Also, just for fun, let's see how many episodes we can name where the "solution" is Data hitting a few buttons on a tricorder.

I'll start: THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS, PART 2

And which further proves that Gene Roddenberry most bodaciously and adamantly was *not* "Star Trek."

Gene Roddenberry was a huge, personable, extremely lucky salesman whose greatest talents were having topnotch friends and co-workers, and the ability to peddle ice-boxes to Inuit.

His pilot for Star Trek was unmarketable, because he did not deliver what he'd promised to deliver. He made several more pilots, and the one that was accepted was written by Sameul A. Peeples, who re-wrote G.R.'s rather seriously botched series format in the process. (Peeples was vastly more SF-competent than Goddenberry, and was the one G.R. went to for help when the whole project was on its way down the tubes.)

Herb Solow, the man who went to bat for G.R. and the project, and got him more chances after he'd muffed the first couple, also deserves some fairly massive credit as being "IS Star Trek." Most of what was good about Old Trek came from contributors like Dottie Fontana, John D.F. Black, Gene Coon, and particularly Sam Peeples, who should probably be listed as series co-creator.

Goddenberry would be delighted with anything with his name on it that stayed on the air and earned money. G.R.'s mooshy sweetness-and-light garbage was the worst part of TNG, and almost torpedoed the series; DS9's major recommendation was that they were at least *trying* to tell stories with a bit of scope. Lacking conflict, there is nothing to generate a range of interesting plots.

But with Goddenberry's intense involvement with recreational pharmaceuticals and his perpetual ethanol-induced smiling haze, it was a bit difficult for him to apprehend the fact that any problems existed, and his ego prompted the termination of anyone who argued with him or tried to contribute anything worthwhile.

Wow, I did not know there was so much hatred for ROddenbury out there.
But the fact remains: Without Roddenbury's ability to sell refrigarators to Eskimos, there would have been no Star Trek at all. And hiring creative people is what makes a great producer.
I agree that Roddenbury was not "Star Trek" but to totally dis him is a little over the top.
Yeah, I think he got loopy in his last years, and his constant optimism might have hurt the show a little, but this is going too far, guy.

Didn't really intend to come off that way, though. I sincerely don't "hate" the guy -- it's simply the way it was.

He accomplished some truly fine work across the years, even if you are willing to overlook some top notch scripts he did for shows like Have Gun, Will Travel...which I'm not. Now, don't get me wrong; Roddenberry could and did do some superlative script work while sober and rested, but this state did not often obtain.

(Compare the work he did on the two-all-nighter rewrite pass on Ellison's "City on the Edge of Forever," which yielded a *shootable* script at the last minute, under great pressure -- with the work he did on a script called "The Omega Glory," which work he felt respectable enough to submit as a *pilot* sample...yortch.)

Roddenberry was also the most parsimonious skinflint in town, with the possible exception of Irwin Allen. G.R. never even reached for the check at a McDonald's, if he could get a fan to grab it first, and he took massive advantage of a large quantity of fennery. While he did put together some massive mailings at a couple of points, it's worth noting that the studio usually took major hits for these efforts, in terms of stationery and postage and envelope-stuffer time. (When he had Bjo on the lot, he wasn't paying her salary.) As for "organization," the man had little to spare. His secretaries, affaireuses, and fans like Trimble provided the "organization."

Gene's major creativity tended to manifest itself as tremendous embroidery of his own personal and professional history.

Read A. E. Van Vogt's composite novel, Voyage of the Space Beagle, and reflect on the fact that, at one point, G.R. had optioned movie/TV rights on the book. Compare early episodes of Trek to sections of Space Beagle. Another example: Wesley Crusher was Roddenberry's own projection of himself as he'd like to have been as child...bear in mind his whole name was Wesley Eugene Roddenberry. "Data" was simply "Questor" with a gold paint job. Roddenberry himself joked about this on many occasions.

Piller, Justman, and even Berman in the early/mid-TNG days were more important in making the franchise work. The Franchise was unkillable at that point, since ViaMount was willing to throw more than a million per episode at a series sans decent writing and format, just to insure airability; the show came with a built-in fan base that was sufficient to guarantee continued production, albeit in syndication/small networks.

One major difference with that regime and the earlier 1960's one: Roddenberry's massive and legendary involvement with booze and recreational pharmaceuticals mitigated hugely against any ability to put in post-midnight hours writing witty and conversational prose to amuse the fen. Not only did he not have the time, by the time of day when he'd have had to be doing his writing, he was typically twelve sheets to the wind with the halliards fraying. (Let's just be urbane about it and say that he'd not have gone over well today online.)

As another example, there was the affair involving Frederick Brown and his original story for the TOS episode "Arena." After much wrangling, Fred and his story finally got a credit frame at the end of the show....typical behavior of Roddenberry during the first year or two, when he was still trying to deal fairly with the SF community and the writing community in general. Think of the way GR handled it when he wanted to do a "haircut" of Paul Schneider's "The Enemy Below"...he simply hired Schneider to write a particular "type" of script, "Balance of Terror."

The Outer Limits did a yarn similar to "Arena," "Fun and Games," in spring of '64. The credits read for story, Robert Specht; and script, Specht and Joe Stefano. Although the O.L. script was actually closer to the story version of "Arena," it wasn't derived from it. Bob Specht came up with it all by himself, and turned in a good job for a tight budget. Note that "Villa Di Stefano" was very very good about paying SF writers for story rights, and had a good reputation for square dealing with original writers.

Later on, a large number of the resignations on the TNG writing staff were the direct result of directives to do something in violation of the Writers' Guild ethics and standards. Most of the good writers on the TNG series became ex-TNG writers, because they refused to rip off other writers, or give Roddenberry half-credit on their scripts so he could collect writing residuals he hadn't earned.

Roddenberry's long-time fondness for booze, doping, and debauched excess left him in a pitiable intellectual state much of the time. By the time he got boosted out of the show-runner's seat, he was no longer able to differentiate between stories he invented and stories he'd read somewhere, or had pitched to him.

This didn't cause a lot of trouble back during the late Original Series epoch, since Fred Freiberger was such a totally inept toad that Trek wasn't even trying to do Real SF any more under his management. The few good aspects of the show in the third year were due to prior inertia and previous-year script acquisitions.

Beagle is also credited as being a major influence for Ridley Scott's Alien. The similarities between the xenomorph and Van Vogt's Coeurl are quite startling. So much so FOX had to settle out of court.

Probably not Van Vogt's best novel (he drifts dangerously close to L.Ron Hubbard-style Dianetics), but it is certainly very popular today.

Yup. Although those A.E. Van Vogt stories were sort of crudely battered together into a "novel" at that time, it's become one of the acknowledged mid-range classics of the genre. "Dark Destroyer" and "Discord in Scarlet" are both in it, and those will give you an idea of the classic treatment of the stories.

After the release of Alien, the U.S. court system pointed out to Dan O'Bannon just how indebted he was to Van Vogt for the use of concepts blatantly derived from several of Van Vogt's stories. Brief history: O'Bannon and his pals ended up on the wrong end of a lawsuit. They had to make public acknowledgement of Van Vogt's work and its contribution to theirs on Alien, and a token payment, about $50K.

AND...about 55 years back, Van Vogt wrote a story about members of a vampire race from outer space coming to earth to slurp up human life force. It was called "Asylum," and for the era, it wasn't at all a bad yarn. (May, '42 issue of Astounding; it's been reprinted a lot.)

Decades later, occasional SkiFfy-Fantasy dilettante Colin Wilson had an idea for a variant on this story, and being an ethical man, contacted Van Vogt for permission to write the book. Van Vogt happily gave him permission, and Wilson specifically acknowledges this in his foreword to the first few publication versions of his The Space Vampires. Fast-forward a few years: O'Bannon gets involved in a movie production based on Wilson's book, which results in the Tobe Hooper film Life Force, and since it was derived from Wilson's book, credits Wilson... but not Van Vogt.

(And all copies of the republished source text printed since the movie, at least that I've seen, have elided the acknowledgement to Van Vogt. Sort of a "Gotcha!")

Note that O'Bannon worked with Tobe Hooper a second time, on the remake of Invaders From Mars, to no greater critical effect. Dark Star was shot on a very tight student budget. What isn't acknowledged is how much post work, FX consultation, and borrowed equipment and lab facilities that went into it were generated by family contacts and out-of-hours access to professional studio gear. It was actually a much more expensive film.

While I applaud the fact that they got anything done at all, it simply wasn't very clever, wasn't very funny, and wasn't nearly as good as it should have been with all the resources brought to bear on its creation.

Interesting, I didn't know that. Did you read Damon Knight's now famous savaging of Space Beagle? It was pretty brutal.

I was very surprised to find he retracted that letter years later claiming that Van Vogt's popularity and sales figures meant he was a better writer than he originally gave credit. Stanislaw Lem slated Knight for his "cowardly" volte face.

Don't know about the Space Beagle item nut...

I DO know that the movie that sued Fox for story plagarism in ALIEN was IT: TERROR FROM BEYOND SPACE! If you see the movie, you'll see that, beat for beat, it pretty much is ALIEN (minus the chestburster).

My favorite story about Roddenberry is about how there are LYRICS to the original Star Trek theme.

Yes.

Roddenberry himself wrote lyrics to the theme, knowing full well they would never be heard on the show, so that he could get 1/2 of the royalties whenver the music was played.

Looked 'em up. Here they are:

Beyond
The rim of the star-light
My love
Is wand'ring in star-flight
I know
He'll find in star-clustered reaches
Love,
Strange love a star woman teaches.
I know
His journey ends never
His star trek
Will go on forever.
But tell him
While he wanders his starry sea
Remember, remember me.

Source: http://www.snopes.com/radiotv/tv/trek1.htm

Jesus Christ, Those are worse then Bill Murray's Lounge Lizard lyrics for "Star Wars".

....TOO MUCH INFORMATION!!!

Yup, those are the lyrics that Gene Roddenberry whipped out in a few minutes and pasted on top of Alexander Courage's music before he sent the material over for registration; by doing this, he was able to claim co-writer credit on the music, and nab 50% of the royalties for said music every time the theme music aired. And even without the words being sung on the top, since the official credit frame read "By Alexander Courage and Gene Roddenberry." So, no; the lyrics are not for "real," they're just something that got slapped in, placed on file, and allowed Roddenberry to grab off half of Alex Courage's money.

Note also that there was a "vocal" component in the open-titles soundtrack music for the first year. Since this part was sung by an actress, she got money every time it aired. As a budget-cut, the vocal component was elided after the first year, so they wouldn't have to pay her any more.

Roddenberry's "libretto," if I may use such a grandiose term for such doggerel, was only sung on the air one time that I know of, and appeared as a track cut on the original record album. It could have been bettered by anyone who was sober, or was willing to take five minutes to pick words whose syllables would break at the appropriate beats, instead of requiring a singer as skilled and devoted as Nichelle Nichols to make it sound good.

Nichelle Nichols has a gorgeous set of pipes, and in the sixties could have made a killing recording records, blues and jazz. I've always thought it amusing that Nichols' singing talent motivated Janet Kagan to write Uhura's Song, one of the better trekkiebooks. In fact, Ms. Nichols was *SO* good that she was able to make Roddenberry's leaden, ugly lyrics for the main title music sound something like an actual song....

There are many acrid jokes about the Trek main title music; one is the standing yuk that Roddenberry was really Courage, going by Roddenberry's willingness to believe he had a right to half of another man's earnings; and another (apocryphal, but I *wish* it were true) story goes to the effect that Courage used to get even by introducing himself as Roddenberry, and charging five bucks for a Genuine Original Gene Roddenberry autograph.

Suffice it that Alexander Courage, fine man, talented composer, and topnotch arranger and director, was ill-used in the Great Bird's search for a few more bucks; and I'm glad for his sake that the music was *NOT* performed on the show with Roddenberry's ugly words pasted on top, because it would just have been one more case of inserting small screwdrivers under the fingernails and rotating the tips. And with Paramount's massive investment in The Great Fiction, it would have been impossible for them to do something as genteel and civil and recognitory as asking Mr. Courage to step up to the stage and receive a check for the fifty percent he was bilked out of, all those years, plus appropriate interest.

Tenacious D do a great cover of the Star Trek theme with lyrics.

Leto, your knowledge of this subject seems first class. Please stay on this site, we need people like you.

I agree.
BTW I just thought of the perfect guy to sing Roddenbury's lyrics...WIlliam Shatner of "Lucy In The Skies With Diamond" fame.

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