![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
I don't know ... the only thing the cancellation of Enterprise brings to me is a bit of regret that this is going to make life duller around rec.arts.startrek.tech, where the conversation is great but slows down when there's not new Trek material to go over. The liveliest ``rerun season'' conversation lately started from someone who heard the Next Generation Technical Manual says there are dolphins aboard Enterprise-D, and found that the most outrageously offensive idea ever. It's fun pointing out yeah, space dolphins might be stuck inside watery cages but the space humans are stuck inside airy cages, but that's not fun forever.
Partly I suppose that's because my Trek fanboyism reached a peak in the late 80s and early 90s, and since about the fifth season of Next Generation I haven't felt bad missing any of it. Also Enterprise felt like a prequel to the original series in about the same way Baby Looney Tunes feels like a prequel to A Wild Hare. (In today's show Baby Sylvester is mad because the arrival of Baby Pepe means Baby Lola and all don't think he's the cutest anymore and stop walking him in the carriage and all. Baby Sylvester discovers skunks, adorable as the babies are, grow up to stink, and he's ready to use this to destroy Baby Pepe -- but calls it off when Baby Pepe's first word besides mumbling ooh-la-la is ``Sylvester.'' Is that honestly worse than Captain Archer's Ferengi Folly Revue?)
Still, from reports they were finally getting organized. And I'll miss the Usenet talk. They should've let me design the show.
Trivia: The standard communicator weighed 200 grams and had a range of 12,000 kilometers. Source: Star Fleet Technical Manual, Franz Joseph. The Modern Trek folks probably screwed that up too.
Currently Reading: Giants Unleashed, Edited by Groff Conklin.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 03:35 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:05 am (UTC)Y'know, I was just watching ``This Side of Paradise'' and they use the communicators to track the missing Spock; could the modern bunch even think of doing that?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 04:13 pm (UTC)Use the original Enterprise, but with Captain April or Pike.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 09:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:08 am (UTC)It's a fine Trek movie (though the show is actually a better parody of Next Generation, apart from the Captain) ... In some ways it's a shame they didn't make a sequel, but a sequel wouldn't have the emotional core anyway.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:27 am (UTC)Hm. Wonder what the writer(s) of GQ have done since? Oh. :-P According to David Howard's IMDb entry (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0397232/), nothing, as far as movies go - Galaxy Quest's the only title listed.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 06:00 am (UTC)It is a marvelous film, with only a few missteps and otherwise a nearly perfect accomplishment of what they were trying to do by making it. I'm surprised David Howard hasn't done something more, although doing one thing perfectly well is admirable. (The other screenplay writer, Robert Gordon, (http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0330565/) has done screenplays for Men In Black II and for Lemony Snicket, neither of which I've seen, but might now that I'm aware of it.)
It's a shame there wasn't more Galaxy Quest, although I guess they couldn't add much without harming what was right about it.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 11:51 pm (UTC)One of them does use Captain Pike though, and it's almost worth it to see their version of Kirk with the most horrifying hairdo imaginable.
One I definitely would recommend though is Starship Exeter. (http://www.starshipexeter.com/) ()
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:11 am (UTC)I heard one of these fan-made productions was able to get the guy who played Mister Leslie to act. They made him an Admiral.
Starship Exeter I noticed from one of the set pictures decided Exeter was built in Singapore ... I can't describe the silly thrill that was.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:06 am (UTC)I'd be happy to see a prequel to the original Star Trek, but I don't think the bunch that have been in charge could do it. The rumors I've heard about Year Four suggest if they'd been running the show from the first nearly everyone would be happy with it, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 04:45 pm (UTC)And if you read MY rant about this, you'll notice that I'm annoyed that the apparent reaction to anything finally improving after getting rid of crappy stories and writing that fans hated ... is to cancel it. WTF? When it's GETTING BETTER? I was actually starting to like it!
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:20 am (UTC)I'm trying to understand somebody else's problem, mind you, but near as I can figure his objection is that it's enslavement of the dolphins and they Don't Enslave Animals In The 24th Century. When it's pointed out that whales in the Trek universe are provably intelligent and have languages and can be asked things, and that it's therefore reasonable to suppose that dolphins can be intelligent and be conversed with (if the Universal Translator works with swarms of two-dimensional insects from another universe, it should work on river dolphins) he switches to The Federation Is Enslaving Sentients!
His complaint seems to be based on the assumption the dolphins would be taken against their will, stuffed into boxes barely big enough to contain them, and left to sit for years at a time. The objection seems to assume that the dolphins can't possibly be there voluntarily, or happily, and that the ship is designed to make them miserable.
I don't get it myself; and I don't mind dolphins (from Earth or from other worlds -- wouldn't a Vulcan Porpoise be a neat concept?) serving.
For cancelling the show just as it's catching on ... well, I'm not surprised, really; it's always like that. It's infuriating they wasted years driving away all the casual and traditional Trek fans until the group that was left couldn't sustain the show long enough for people to hear that they stopped making it bad on purpose. The Usenet chatter's been really positive, and -- to judge from the quality of the nitpicks -- the show has to have been doing pretty well. (Year Three only just started in Singapore, and Year Four probably won't until late this or early next year, so I haven't got any opinion on it.)
It's a shame they can't take all the hours wasted on go-nowhere, do-nothing stories like that whole Temporal Cold War nonsense and put it into making a Star Trek-based show.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 04:45 am (UTC)And I agree that the show did suck for a while, and I wasn't too enthusiastic about it but did watch it anyway. I was finally getting excited about it again! ARGH! I should write to them ...
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 06:12 am (UTC)It can't hurt to write, anyway. I mean, it worked for Cagney and Lacey.
As I say, the ``dolphin problem'' isn't my complaint, so I hope I'm not badly misrepresenting the ``enslavement'' notion. It seems to be based on the idea -- if he's not taking the tack that Dolphins Can't Be Sentient So Having Them Is Enslaving Them -- that it's impossible to carry water-based species on a spaceship. After all, how would they join security to repel intruders in the corridors? How could they beam down to Planet Vasquez Rocks? How could they push buttons in Phaser Control? How could they get to escape pods if evacuation is needed?
Clearly, it's working from the unimaginative assumption that the dolphin tanks would be some cheap $25.00 vinyl above-ground pool tossed in the middle of a cargo bay and forgotten. It's kind of fun hogpiling on him pointing out that nobody has successfully repelled intruders in the corridors, and that Picard would be helpless if they had to beam down to Planet Aquatica. And that mermaids would look lovely in Original Series-style miniskirts.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 12:30 am (UTC)There seems to be remarkable inconsistency in the way animals are treated in the Star Trek future. In an early episode, Riker haughtily tells someone, "we no longer enslave animals for food." Not just "no longer kill" -- the term "enslave" implies a radical rethinking of the human/animal relationship. Yet in other episodes, it is apparently revealed that they do still "enslave" horses for riding. And in DS9, it is implied from time to time that they consider eating "real meat" (which I take to mean nonsynthesized) to be a special luxury.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-06 11:40 am (UTC)They've been referred to, although from what I gather from the Trek Tech talk is that their, uh, ``canonicity'' is regarded as dubious, since one of the references was on the timeline-altered Enterprise from ``Yesterday's Enterprise'' and another was from that humiliating episode where some dumb Ferengis were able to capture the ship from our even dumber heroes, and Riker and LaForge and all tried to baffle their captors with confusing doubletalk.
Me, I'm fine supposing there are dolphin (and dolphins-from-outer-space) crew aboard; it makes the ship less of a humans- and humans-with-bumpy-foreheads club.
The Modern Trek era attitude towards animals is maybe more frustratingly confused than their attitude towards money and/or currency. I'm inclined to write off Riker's comment about ``enslaving animals for their meat'' to First Season Smug. Though it's hard to deny there doesn't seem like a lot of need for many meat animals once replicators are a proven technology. If nothing else some Gnu Public License-type would fairly quickly put out some ``open source'' ground beef patterns or whatever.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-03 09:53 pm (UTC)Of course, as we've seen from ratmm, a series' cancellation doesn't mean the newsgroup goes away. ^_^ (Hmm. What happened to that sci-fi pilot show Best Brains was (were?) working on a while back?)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:28 am (UTC)Baby Looney Tunes, from what I've seen, isn't funny except by accident or in short musical segments (where, unfortunately, Baby Bugs comes across as a real jerk), and the characters only have dim outlines of their grown-up personalities (really crippling Baby Lola, who doesn't have a personality when she grows up).
But the stories are genial enough, if based on ``One Baby's Feelings Are Hurt And They Have To Get Better,'' but they're all right so far as that goes. Honestly, it's the sort of show sensitive adults make because they think kids need more help feeling what they already feel. The animation style's fair enough in that competent 1980s way with watercolor backgrounds and character designs that are nice to look at. The characters sound like higher-pitched Tiny Toons impersonators.
I don't think any of the shows Best Brains were working on went anywhere. Cynically one might suppose the Sci-Fi Channel only said they were interested in working on new shows to keep fans supposing there might be new material right around the corner, and maybe turn any anger aside. (Kind of like how Paramount is so insistent that a new Trek movie is ``in the early production stages'' and a new series is ``being worked on.'')
(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-04 12:04 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-02-05 01:09 pm (UTC)Aw, thanks. There's only a few things I fear more than being boring.