StillPaisleyCat @ StillPaisleyCat @startrek.website

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2 yr. ago

Kurtzman’s making shows for a streamer that says its strategy since the merger has become is “franchises, familiar faces and fandoms.”

I do suspect the needle has moved towards more legacy characters. It seems only the shows targeted at a younger audience get mainly new crews. Starfleet Academy and the 32nd century seem our best hope of seeing new characters and settings.

StarTrek.website is an instance dedicated to the Star Trek franchise.

It is a solid, well functioning medium-sized instance, and the largest one specific to a particular show, movie or franchise. It was created by mods of related subreddits.

It’s communities cover Star Trek television shows and movies as well as tie-in books, comics, games and merchandise. It also has a general discussion (off topic) community.

I very much wanted SNW to be its own show for at least a few seasons.

It’s not the Pike’s Enterprise I fan-campaigned for based on The Cage or Discovery season two.

I’m enjoying it for what it is even so, and accepting that the powers that be at Paramount wanted ‘familiar faces’ in their new Star Trek offerings, which means legacy characters. It’s the best of the new live action Trek whatever. All to say that I appreciate your frustration, I’ve decided to make peace with it myself.

Season 3 was originally scheduled to start production May 2nd, just before the start of the strike. It’s only the impending strike date that caused them to stand down on that.

This tells us that the script for the season premiere has been locked for some time.

This exactly. Using something closer to the xenomorphs of Alien, introduces a truly frightening species that is sufficiently different that their kind of intelligence and motivations are believably difficult for Federation humanoids to understand.

I know there are other older fans struggling with this, but I think it’s saving the Gorn and Arena from absurdity.

No matter how compelling the story, TOS Arena’s ridiculous rubber suit Gorn has become one of the most recognized images from the franchise in popular culture.

Even as a child watching the episode in its first run it seemed more like silly monster movie stuff. It didn’t have the quality of truly scary monsters of that era such as the Creature of the Black Lagoon. It wasn’t in any way reaching Roddenberry’s target high value sci-fi standard of Forbidden Planet or even The Cage.

More, with so many later stories of Kirk and other captains welcoming the strange and different, coming to terms with very alien species, we need to be shown why Kirk was so hostile to the Gorn by the time of TOS.

While they could have gone for some other kind of reptilian, I like SNW’s choice to go with a the biology of parasitic R-breeder. Roddenberry’s original concept for the Ferengi was closer to the parasitic bat people of Andromeda than what TNG and DS9 gave us. The updated Gorn can be viewed as incorporating that idea and making them as terrifying.

Well, the silver lining is that you have some content with the original cast yet to see.

Bottle episodes don’t perhaps save as much as they used to.

With the UHD, the bottle episodes involve a great deal of interior ship scenes with extensive lighting issues. Anson Mount has talked about ‘bridge days’ as being some of the most gruelling shooting days on Discovery.

Yes can bottle episodes save on new/redressed sets and new props, but they also cause more wear and tear on the sets themselves. The makeup challenges are no less although SNW has just has Spock with prostheses within the main cast.

In the end, we have to accept that for new shows to be visually engaging for new fans, they need to be up to the same product standards as other new science fiction. That standard is very high and there are few short cuts.

TAS is imperfect, and for some the Filmation animation is hard to get past. It does however have some great episodes, and several were written by TOS writers. I can’t imagine skipping it.

Also not Sulu if Sam Kirk is hanging around. Sulu was some kind of xenobiologist (xenobotanist?) in the opening episodes of TOS. The move to alpha shift helmsman came later.

Up to Edmonton is the long way round. I’d stick to the southern routes.

Either way, going through Winnipeg, it’s worthwhile to hit the Manitoba Museum (natural history) and historic sites of the Red River settlement (The Forks, Riel House) but the favourite with the kids will likely be the Assiniboine Park Zoo.

In Alberta, Head Smashed In Buffalo Jump is another site that your kids will cover in school, so it’s worth taking in.

Banff and Jasper are options, but the old far southern route through the Crowsnest pass offers other interesting sites, including the Frank Slide. Given the current fire, I can see avoiding that and Osoyoos, but otherwise the chance to see real desert in Canada, including rattlesnakes and scorpions in the Nk’Mip interpretation centre, is something kids find fascinating.

Martin Quinn (Montgomery Scott) was reportedly born in Paisley, Scotland.

Dropping in to note that I’m feeling very smuggly self-satisfied that I decided not to completely abandon my alias when we migrated from the other place.

I guess that I must now become an unrepentant SNW Scotty stan. I look forward to seeing the character grow.

In Prodigy’s case, I would say that nostalgia is the opposite of what they’re trying to do.

The show is intended to pull kids and families with no Star Trek experience into the franchise. It is a gateway into Trek’s massive library rather than using the legacy characters to pull viewers in.

The main cast is primarily original characters, but using Janeway who has been demonstrated to appeal to 8-11 year olds as a heroic captain who will protect her crew is a smart choice.

Now, it’s fairly clear that having Janeway and now Voyager is a way to get established fans to show Prodigy to their kids and grandkids, as well as to have them join in the viewer base. But that’s clearly a secondary goal or Paramount would have kept the show on Paramount+ where it outperformed every other original digital animated show other than Lowe Decks in 2022.

It seems the real problem is that Prodigy wasn’t reaching enough of the new viewers on Paramount and Nickelodeon to fulfil its mission to expand the audience base for the future. It will be interesting to see where it lands.

TNG Picard was a better captain, I can agree.

Not sure I can say that about movie Picard, and would definitely disagree that Picard in Picard was better than Kirk in TOS or the movies.

I’m from an older generation that saw TOS and loved it long before TNG existed. Taking the long view, I think it’s great that the shows are demonstrating that different kinds of leadership work, and some work better in central contexts than others. SNW seems to be making that point directly, but it’s also not afraid to laugh at itself and ask us to join in.

In the 90s, I became a huge TNG fan, loved its more serious tone, idolized Picard as an leader, and found TOS’ campiness hard to take. So I stopped watching TOS other than the movies that were still coming.

Another 30 years on, TNGs flaws (and Picard’s) are more evident to me. At this distance, TOS is such an artifact of its time that I can just accept and enjoy it again for what it is.

But in the 90s, there were other, vocal, OG TOS fans who never got that Star Trek feeling from TNG. They wanted more adventure, but I suspect that some also wanted more of the cheekiness and cheesiness that TOS delivered with a straight face. I felt at the time that both Voyager and Enterprise were to some extent designed to bring them back to the television side of the franchise, but in hindsight were also very much a reflection of the era in which they were made.

Its really good to hear from 90s Trek fans who are willing to give TOS and new shows like SNW and Lower Decks a genuine try and appreciate them for what they are.

Now, I hope you and OP will give TAS a try. There’s some great stuff in there!

Family oriented seems the target.

It’s pretty gritty for kids, but many school aged kids are up for that. It’s especially so given that Prodigy uses the classic situation of exploited orphans who are given hope and opportunities for something better.

It’s also taking advantage of the fact that Janeway in particular and Voyager generally has been the gateway for preteens into the franchise since its been available on streaming.

It was originally targeted for Nickelodeon, but children’s linear television viewing has dropped severely since 2017.

Worse, Paramount’s US cable carriage deal with Comcast would have required Paramount to wait at least 6 months to stream after a Nickelodeon premiere. So, they flipped it to run first on Paramount+. The show got decent views, but didn’t necessarily get to the target family and kids. Paramount seems to be reducing its focus on reaching kids as a streamer.

With Nickelodeon tanking further in the pandemic, it’s too expensive for them so the cable-led option is still a nonstarter.

I’ve been trying to think of which non-Disney streamer has enough of a kids and family audience globally to make Prodigy both profitable and reach the target demographic.

Distributor Wildbrain Spark (formerly DHX) has had a deal with Paramount+ and PlutoTV to carry some of its extensive kids library, so they could reverse and have Paramount license to them.

Wildbrain Spark (run principally through YouTube) has 168 million subscribers globally and 21 million unique views monthly in the US alone. They tend to skew younger, but may be extending into the older school age and middle school market.

Most of the active fic writers I know are talking to one another in closed discord groups that come out of fandom discussion boards like the ones here.

It all has the feel of the old mimeo groups that sent one another stories before printing them in fanzines. Basically, someone has to invite you.

“Such deals are very slow moving…”

Understandable but still very unfortunate.

Meanwhile, Paramount will be facing a major gap in its Star Trek releases in either winter 2023-24 or following Discovery season 5’s run - like both.

Glad to have you with us!

It’s also something that happens in real navies and the coast guard.

Sending a candidate for captain or first officer to shadow on another ship before a command level promotion is regular practice. In some cases, they are expected to complete shadowing on as many as two or three ships other than the one they regularly serve on.

I like it when the new shows incorporate regular naval or military practice even though many fans, unfamiliar with military service, take unnecessary exception. (This goes for negative fan reactions to Ortegas behaving exactly like many combat pilots in real life.)

I suspect many of us also take exception to the intransigent insistence on using the perjorative ‘STD’ when that is not and never has been the short form for Discovery. (We haven’t see ST:TOS and ST:TNG in use in decades.)

I love Prodigy and am advocating strongly for its return. What I have no tolerance for is denigrating another show in the franchise, that has been successful in its own audience niche, to promote the ones I most wish to see.