This is how I know I'm a geek

[cmdr_zoom]

I watch the teaser for the new Star Trek movie, and when the camera comes up over the bow to reveal "USS ENTERPRISE", I think: "Font's wrong."

(It should be "Air Force" or "Amarillo", not "Eurostile" or Microgramma Extended", which the Tech Manual (erroneously) and first set of movies used. Also, they wouldn't paint that on until construction was nearly complete...)

Comments

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Yes, and God help them if the uniforms are made of anything other than incredibly cheap velour like you'd put on a sofa cushion.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Damn right. *sits in grumpy old fan corner*

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Dude, I'm with you. I don't even know why they're making this one. Ooh, wait. Money, or the promise of same.

I know that they originally pitched this concept back in 1990 and the studio wisely shot it down. I'm not sure why it's rearring it's ugly head now.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

An entire generation's reached moviegoing age since then. This is where they'll get on the bus, and they don't, for the most part, particularly care how it was done on a shoestring budget, for a medium that had barely achieved the distinction of being in color, much less high-definition, in 1965.

I look at it this way: If you rinse your mind clean of preconceived expectations and go into it like the people for whom - like it or not - this film is being made, you might not have a good time, but then again, you might. If you don't, you definitely won't.

Therefore, doing so or staying away entirely are the only logical options.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

That argument rests on an entirely unsupportable hypothesis: that there are no other interesting characters or stories to tell in the Star Trek universe, so we are forced to restart the old bus. This is, to put it bluntly, lunacy.

To operate under the belief that this is being made for youth who are entirely unfamiliar with the Star Trek franchise - to get them on the bus - is have the fallacy that there are such interested youth. All of the previous shows are in constant syndication. Anyone with even a passing interest in Star Trek has seen them. The original stories don't need to be refashioned because they are constantly being retold.

There's nothing wrong with the idea of a movie set in that part of the Trek chronology focusing on a bunch of young cadets - it would be flashy, youth oriented and draw in a younger audience. I would love to see it if it's even moderately well scripted. But there is no reason to have those cadets be younger versions of well established characters whom, by your argument, the target audience wouldn't recognize anyway. Doing so just shows a monumental lack of creativity.

Not that this is a surprise for Hollywood, which has a long track record of making films for which we are supposed to wash our mind of preconceived notions so that we can experience them anew with an audience that couldn't care less if you paid them. Witness, say, the Josie and the Pussycats film, made decades after anyone who was a fan of the original had left the supposed target audience. So why base it on that at all? Either producer ineptitude or the hope of a crossover nostalgia draw. (You could stack other things, like moot of the recent remakes of 70's-80's TV in this pile as well.)

Make no mistake - using the original characters is not to get new fans on the bus. It's a hail mary to get casual fans of the original show and its movies back ON the bus, in the hopes of the holy grail of cross generational nostalgia draw. In other words, money. They don't want us to wash our minds preconceived notions because then we wouldn't care any more than the youth audience does and would not attend. They just want nostalgia to make us forgive them for being creatively lazy.

[z-gryphon.livejournal.com]

Assuming that a newer, younger audience will not be enslaved by the old material is not the same as assuming they will never have heard of the old material.

Also, the fact that you seem surprised that the producers of a major motion picture are trying to make money on the endeavor strikes me as, at best, disingenuous.

You've already decided you're going to hate it; great. That's your prerogative. I must suggest, however, that peeing in everyone else's Corn Flakes because you don't like what the Kellogg's people are doing with the franchise lately is, at best, poor sportsmanship.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

I'm not arguing that the only options are tabla rasa or chains and fetters. I'm countering your argument that the only way for them to get new people on board is if we rev up the 60's nostalgia bus. That is just not true.

Nor do I quite understand how you're assuming I'm going to despise it sight unseen - I am merely pointing out that the decisions leading up to its production are creatively lazy. And creatively lazy has a strong track record of equating to "Bad". And I wish, very much, to avoid a Bad Star Trek movie.

See it's possible, just entirely 100% possible, that I have a love the franchise and want to see it continue to do well. But to do well it will have to grow, which means introducing new characters, new life and new civilizations and do so well as to draw in an audience. Star Trek is in a nearly unique position of having done this before - successfully - for decades. Unlike other recent TV remakes, good and bad, it's not drawing on a small number of seasons in the dim mists of memory that need to be re-imagined to keep it up to date. It has been constantly evolving for decades, and can continue to do so.

Hence my conviction that returning to something that has already been done and trying to re-imagine it is, in Trek, a false road. It strikes of intellectual and creative laziness, the decision of a producer middle manager who doesn't wants a property where some percentage of the audience might recongize the name as a way of hedging his bets, but not to take any real risks. Which, again, usually leads to a bad film, a half baked neither here nor there muddle that will be held up to the original not because people of poor sportsmanship by the fans but because the film is advertising itself to being compared to the original. "It's like the original" is the marketing pitch, so how is a comparison unfair?

Finally, I highly doubt that my opinion has the force to sway anyone to enjoy the film or not, but I do strongly hold thay my sharing it does not endanger your breakfast cereal. For the sake of not continuing an argumet on a 3rd person Journal, this is my last word. Commander, sorry this went on as long as it did.

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

The lettering bugged me two and I had no idea why until you mentioned it's the wrong font.

[cathaus.livejournal.com]

You're right, they wouldn't paint it on yet... officially. They would have spray-painted the name on a piece of plywood and hung it up on the chain link fence around the construction site....

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Hee.