A thought on the new movie

[cmdr_zoom]

According to spoilers I've seen so far, the differences between the new Star Trek and TOS are explained by/the result of temporal meddling by the villain of the piece.

Does this not put Abrams himself in that role, at our level of the narrative? The entity who has altered the past, particularly the character of James Kirk, for his own ends?

Comments

[pjack.livejournal.com]

Which reminds me, I have an ultra-geeky Star Trek question for you. Where does the Starfleet symbol (the one everyone wears on their uniforms) come from? Is it meant to be a stylized rocket? Is there some in-canon rationale as for why it looks that way? Or did early Starfleet just go to a marketing firm and say, "design us something that looks spacey"?

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

Actually, each ship fo the fleet had their own emblem (take a look at the captain's uniform in Doomsday Machine), of which the swooshy thing just happened to be the Enterprise's. About the time of the first movie the decision was made to make that the universal Starfleet emblem - replacing all the other ship-specific ones - in recognition of how the crew of the Enterprise had saved the universe eleventy-skillion times.

[kowh.livejournal.com]

More detail: http://memory-alpha.org/en/wiki/Starfleet_emblem

[chadu.livejournal.com]

I love that other people in the universe have this ludicrous trivia floating around in their heads too.

GOOD FORM, sir.

[brianrogers.livejournal.com]

This was helpful because it gave a chance for me to design the ships logo for the USS Carter in my Trek game. Since the ship is named after ana rcheologist, their swooshy thing looks lore like an archaeologist's trowel.

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Someone else beat me to it. I will note that Enterprise's ship emblem/patch is two hyperbolas joined at the base; most of the other designs of that era were similar geometric constructs.

[chadu.livejournal.com]

Well-spotted!

[cmdr-zoom.livejournal.com]

Spotted, nothing; I read it somewhere. :p

[pjack.livejournal.com]

OK, cool. Looks like the rationale for the basic shape is that it's an evolution of the NASA logo.

As for why that specific shape... I guess Starfleet has design consultants whose job it is to think about these things.