Staving off the colossal anticipation associated with this movie, that is the challenge.

Nuff said.

I think you’re right!

Vedek Anon said it best: “So, please, continue the nits, the picks, and the praise. Its all part of the joy of being family. ” It amazes me how people see the shows so very differently. One thing for sure, it’s never dull in a Trek thread or chat room!

Just look how much things have changed in the past 80 years.

All pieces of art are a product of their times. You can’t expect a show created in the 1980’s to reflect a 2008 view of the world, or of a 1960’s view of the world.

I’ve been rewatching some of my favorite episodes of TNG on DVD, and there are some darned good pieces of work in that seven seasons. The only stumbling block for me is that the special effects are looking very dated by today’s standards.

But again, what do you expect? 2008 special effects in a 1988 TV show? Gimme a break, lol.

Cripes, for it’s time there wasn’t a TV show on the planet that had effects as good as TNG on their TV budget. It’s not fair to compare a movie effects budget with a TV effects budget, either.

Redo the effects for TNG, and I think the show would outdraw first-run episodes of BSG. Mind you, I like and watch BSG.

I don’t feel that way. Roddenberry resented alot of the loss of control with TOS, and decided to make another show born from his revisionist view of what Star Trek was all about to begin with. That revisionist view included the “utopian” angle. Instead of being a “wagon train to the stars”, he changed it completely to represent what he thought would be a utopia (The trouble with that, for me, is that one man’s utopia is another man’s prison).

I agree with Dom in that TOS and TNG are completely different productions, with completely different approaches to things. TOS was something I could relate to, with its fantastic characters, cutting edge social commentary, and that feeling of “frontier” life among the stars.

To me, TNG was more watered down, holier-than-thou, sterile, and far less romantic. I would hardly call that “an evolution”. It is more aptly described as “sanitized”.

While I understand some of the reverence for GR, let’s be honest. While he certainly laid some of the groundwork, it was Gene Coon, D.C. Fontana, Justman, etc. who made Star Trek “great”. Gene’s Trek writing(meaning his episodes) was often mediocre at times. Even TNG got better once he left the show. The characters certainly became more interesting. Unfortunately, they had already lost me.

To my generation, Star Trek is TOS and the original 6 films.

I enjoyed some of DS9 and ENT, but I won’t stop for TNG (unless it’s “YE”–which is just great writing) or VOY reruns.

To my kids, they only know Kirk and co. from the movies. Trek, to them, is TNG-era. I think it is all very age-relative to some degree.

The only thing that has me here on this site and at all excited about “new” Star Trek is the fact that Trek is going back to its roots–the iconic Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty, space exploration without a tech solution for everything, without holodecks, Klingon friends, children on the bridge, or artificial people in Starfleet.

#61—Very well said.

#63—Nice perspective…I’m glad to see someone else who doesn’t take it personally.

So, please, continue the nits, the picks, and the praise. Its all part of the joy of being family. May the spirits of the celestial temple look over you all. PEACE.

I agree that humans got a little to full of themselves and a little stuck up. There is a more communist view in the 24th Century. Proving themselves to be better than they are today is better than enforcing those values upon others.

What I find interesting in Star Trek is that the aliens are excellent showcases of human behaviours of today. Ferengi are very much a representation of our greed, which is still very apparent today.

There are characters I love on TNG I love equally to TOS. I love Data. I am a fan of androids, cyborgs and robots in sci fi and how they are used to understand humanity.

We had the character of Kirk who was our clear hero of the story. And rather than have a Devil on one shoulder and an Angel on the other, Kirk had brains (or logic) on one shoulder and heart (emotion) on the other. These were in the characters of Spock and Bones.

TNG seemed to get away from that. I always felt like they were characters who were not only were better than us, but they constantly rubbed our noses in the fact. Were the origianl crew had clear enemies who were threats, the next generation was more like we’re friends with everyone. It was kind of like the original show was like the U.S. and the Next Generation was what the U.N. was meant to be like (but in my opinion isn’t.)

Even the spin off, Enterprise, leans closer to the Next Generation. Archer said to an alien race, “You hunt here? Our people stopped hunting fifty years ago,” or words to that effect. It sat wrong with me. Because it felt more like the writers are telling me that if you’re a hunter, you are a savage. Another had a character who had lung cancer. She was to get a cure in a matter of minutes with a shot Phlox was gonna give her or a pill or something like that. When I saw this episode I realized that if there was indeed a simple cure, people would undoubtedly take up smoking again because there is less of a threat. But they don’t do that in Enterprise or Next Generation. Because they are clearly better than me. They drink synthetic alcohol on TNG. Did anyone drink too much? Never saw that on TNG and based on Troi in First Contact I guess not. No one even drank too much. Kirk and his crew made those mistakes. And I loved them for that.

I never felt that way with Kirk and the original crew. Make it relevant to today Abrams says. And I agree. Kirk made mistakes. Let him stumble. Let him learn. I don’t know. Give him the Andorain clap that has to be treated with a shot of penicillin. Let him have anti Klingon feelings (sure it’s calling Kirk prejudiced, but we see that he realizes it in The Undiscovered Country.

Why was the origianl cast and show better? Because while they were more advance from us, and better educated they still fumbled. But they learned from it. That’s more hopeful to me than a society that is better, knows it and always seems to be rubbing it in my face.

Also, the original show seemed to show the good and the bad with new technology. Where the Next Gen. etc seemed to always show the good things that are done. The internet is a great tool for getty all sorts of information. But it’s been used for bad too. So has the car for that matter. Even the phone is used in crimes today. But, I digress. I feel there is more hope in seeing a group of people make some mistakes that are human and learning from them than a group of folks who know what the right thing is and show us that they know it all the time.

Unless he meant relevant in that he wants to have the technology upgraded so that they’re using communicators more like todays phones rather than the communicators of old. Then I just missed the entire point. But I am quite dumb.

Many fans of Star Trek see TNG as a completely different show that merely uses some Star Trek ephemera like names and terminology. Not to say it’s a bad TV show, merely that it doesn’t have much to do with Star Trek.

Even the name is a falsehood. ‘Star Trek: The Next Generation’, if it was genuinely what it says on the tin, would be set on the Enterprise-A post-Kirk or the Enterprise-B at most.

A ***spin-off*** from Star Trek, for commercial reasons, would have made crossovers with the original cast simple. Crossovers between Star Trek and TNG proved doomed to failure, because the shows aren’t related beyond the usage of some naming and a few designs. Rodders knew that was the case, since he stated that the two shows should never cross over!

TNG isn’t an ‘evolution’ of Star Trek any more than TMP was: it’s Star Trek’s creator having different ideas for something new and using the Star Trek name to sell it.

With TMP, the studio, the cast and the public pretty swiftly realised that they were being sold a movie claiming to be Star Trek, but wasn’t, so Rodders was out the door! And TNG is, stylistically, a spin-off of TMP.

I guess there’s also a generational misinformation thing in it. I grew up with Star Trek reruns, while the generation after me grew up with TNG on air or in reruns. That generation’s view of what Star Trek is was shaped by TNG, so, misinformed, they look at Star Trek in the wrong way.

Also, Star Trek fans didn’t (and don’t) go in for the Cult of Roddenberry. We know he created it, but we have also always known about the likes of Robert Justman, Gene Coon, DC Fontana, John Meredyth Lucas, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson and Harlan Ellison, whose vital contributions to Star Trek have always been acknowledged by us. These names mean just as much to us, if not more, than Gene Roddenberry’s.

It was the TNG-era publicity machine that focused everything on Roddenberry in the 80s, even ignoring David Gerrold’s vital contributions to TNG. The sad thing, when you read Gerrold’s novelisation of Encounter at Farpoint, is that he was striving to make TNG feel like a continuation of Star Trek. The novelisation has humour in it, there’s genuine conflict between characters and even mild profanity. The book covers pretty much everything the TV episode covers, but the emphasis is different. Where a line is intended to be funny in the book, the delivery in the show is unemotional. When a character is angry, the same thing happens.

None of this is to say that TNG doesn’t have merits as a sci-fi television show. But for fans of Star Trek, the live action show that ran from 1966-1969, the cartoon series from the early 70s and the five proper films, this is a big moment for us. It appears that Star Trek, as we know and love it, is coming back for the first time in 18 years. At last we get to show people what pure, unadulterated Star Trek really is and why we love it so much.

In DS9 conflict was a part of the show because all sorts of humanoids were there and a space station that operates as a port cannot have a unified culture as a starship can. Remember when Sisko (in reference to the issues with the Cardassian Treaty that abandoned Federation Citizens) said, “The problem is Earth” and explained how its too perfect and too much of a paradise. People’s experiences do not allow them to understand the situation that his part of space was in and to really understand what the Federation had done to its own people. As a result people like Commander Eddington and the Maquis left the Federation.

In Enterprise Captain Archer had said (paraphrasing), “They are humans, there is a code of behavior they are expected to follow” and that was the beginning of it.

So lets stop the TNG bashing, it was different for a reason, as DS9 was different from TNG.