Joined: Apr 2004 Posts: 4,465Bib4Tuna
I will take you to Jabba
Bib4Tuna
I will take you to Jabba
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Joined: Apr 2004
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Also TOS and TNG are a product of the time they were made.
In the 60's we had the space program at it's peak in popularity. The future seemed to be at the grasp of our hands, as long as we averted war. So the mindset was that we would still be hard rocking and free loving the heck out of the future. From what I read of Roddenberry, he definitively was living large at that time. Shatner definitively was...
Then the 70's came.
In the 90's the vision of a space faring future seemed farther away (Columbia and Challenger disasters). The Internet put us in contact with all the good, but also all the bad in human nature in a very open way. The perfect future seemed hopeless unless we renounced our passions and greed.
So Roddenberry changed his utopia to be a bit cold and driven by different motivations than those of the present and moved it farther into the future. He must have had this vision in common with a lot of people at the time. Otherwise it would not have taken off.
As the years became more violent and more wars started, TNG seems farther away every day in terms of how their diplomacy and society works.
JJ's films are mindless action pop-corn films that do not delve too much in the present issues or how society will evolve. They play it safe with themes, so it appeals to the masses. They all act like people from 2016.
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
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PanzerMeyer
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Originally Posted By: Bib4Tuna
JJ's films are mindless action pop-corn films that do not delve too much in the present issues or how society will evolve. They play it safe with themes, so it appeals to the masses. They all act like people from 2016.
I think this is quite an accurate assessment. For lack of a better term, JJ really did "Starwarsify" the Star Trek franchise.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
The show was created in 1987. I don't see how you can project events from the 90s and 00's backwards to then. Time travel only happens on the series, not in the production meetings.
The events pre-TNG were Challenger and glasnost. While Challenger was a sobering reminder of the risks of exploration, the world outlook was brightening. It no longer seemed inevitable that there would be a nuclear war between the US and USSR in the coming years.
TNG got better in its later years, AFTER the fall of the USSR, after Desert Storm. DS9 started around the time of the WTC bombing yet there was also the PLO peace accords that made it seem like the Middle East was going to get better, not worse. The really bad stuff didn't appear until 1999 or so, when TNG was long gone, DS9 had just ended, and Voyager was nearing its end.
The Jedi Master
The anteater is wearing the bagel because he's a reindeer princess. -- my 4 yr old daughter
Someone once did an analysis which roughly stated that when times are good, art gets dark and vice versa.
So in the 90s, when we had the optimism of the collapse of the USSR, peace in the Mid East, a growing economy, and the defeat of Saddam Hussein, we had darker music like grunge and gangsta rap, darker films, and darker TV. Life was good, so people fantasized about dark times.
After 9/11, when people felt lost and hopeless, music got more upbeat, films took themselves less seriously, and TV went to reality shows where the bad stuff was getting voted out of the house for being an obnoxious slob. People wanted to be distracted from the horrors of the day.
Season 3 of Enterprise (and the S2 finale) was a direct 9/11 metaphor, so on the nose at times it became hard to suspend your disbelief. Yet it ended with an upbeat resolution and the small group that instigated the conflict punished or barred from further interference.
The Jedi Master
The anteater is wearing the bagel because he's a reindeer princess. -- my 4 yr old daughter
The big difference between ST:TOS and ST:TNG is that the former had the great chemistry between the main cast pretty much out of the gate while the latter took at least 2 seasons or so to gel.
To me, the TNG cast never really gelled. Or should I say characters, as I don't know how well the cast got along with each othe. I never really felt the characters were that close, they seemed almost more like casual co-workers.
For example, I don't recall any scenes from TNG that had this level of emotion between the characters:
Ken Cartwright
No single drop of rain feels it is responsible for the flood.
The big difference between ST:TOS and ST:TNG is that the former had the great chemistry between the main cast pretty much out of the gate while the latter took at least 2 seasons or so to gel.
I agree it took a little longer for them to gel as a cast.
I was one of those that refused to watch when it first aired. I think it was the third season before it caught my attention again. Once I watched a few episodes I was hooked and was looking forward to the next weeks episode. I didn't see the first two seasons until they started running them in syndication, which seems to have been about the 4th or 5th season for the TNG series.
IMO ST:TNG "suffered" the same implementation as almost every team-based series produced in the USA for a couple of decades now, that is the same character archetypes are employed in the same way. The Leader archetype. The aloof but proffessional. The geeky but genius. The pair that always have some sort of friendly competition. The counterpart to the Leader, also a leader but secondary. usually some sort of unspoken sexual chemistry that is never, for proffessional reasons, explored.
I'm sure everyone knows what I mean CSI, ST, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Stargate, all of them are pretty much identical when it comes to team makeup.
"They might look the same, but they don't taste the same."
#4296134 - 09/14/1601:37 PMRe: Happy 50th to Star Trek!
[Re: DM]
I'm sure everyone knows what I mean CSI, ST, Battlestar Galactica, Lost, Stargate, all of them are pretty much identical when it comes to team makeup.
True.
But all those were successful shows, hence the reason the trend continues
"In the vast library of socialist books, there’s not a single volume on how to create wealth, only how to take and “redistribute” it.” - David Horowitz
Joined: Apr 2001 Posts: 121,383PanzerMeyer
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All forms of storytelling whether they be film, tv or book involve the use of classic archetype characters to some degree or another. It's just like how there are really only about 30 or so archetype dramatic plots.
“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”
True, but I guess the appeal for ST:TOS is that there are only 3 main characters that drive the show. The leader, the logical and the emotional. Each one would eventually find himself in some conflict with the other two, or would require the other two to complement his solution in some way.
"They might look the same, but they don't taste the same."