Brannon Braga: Kirk’s More Fun Than Picard & Shatner More Fun Than Pine + Kirk v Picard POLL [UPDATED: Shatner Responds]

bragakirk

One of the biggest debates for fans is Kirk v Picard, but what is unusual is for one of the creative forces behind Star Trek to pick a side – but that is what Brannon Braga did in a recent interview. Find out what he had to say on that, Generations death threats and more – plus watch Braga talking about his latest space adventure – the new Cosmos (now out on Blu-ray).

UPDATE: Shatner Responds

After TrekMovie highlighted Brannon Braga’s comments, William Shatner took to Twitter to make the following comment…

William Shatner
‏@WilliamShatner

I see SOMEONE made the right choice… Though it’s 20 years too late! :-) @BrannonBraga

Original Article

Braga: Kirk was more fun + glad no longer getting death ‘Generations’ threats

The celebrity site TMZ ran into Star Trek writer/producer Brannon Braga in New York last month and asked him the age old question –who is the better Star Trek captain, original series’ Kirk or Next Generation’s Picard? Braga – who has writing credits on around one out of seven Star Trek: TNG scripts – gave a surprising answer…

Personally, if I were serving under a captain I would probably go with Kirk…I’d have a little more fun. He likes to have fun. Picard was kind of buttoned- down…so now Patrick Stewart is going to unfollow me on Twitter.

He also said given a choice, he would prefer to have a drink with William Shatner over Chris Pine noting "he’s the man!"

In addition, Braga – co-writer of the first two TNG feature films (Star Trek: Generations and Star Trek: First Contact) – confirmed that he still gets an earful for killing Kirk in Generations, saying…

Yes I do [still get flack for killing Capt Kirk in Star Trek Generations]. But it isn’t as bad as back when I was getting death threats.

Braga also opined on looking forward to the next Star Wars movie (directed by JJ Abrams), noting that as a kid he was more of a Wars fan than Trek.

kirkdead
Braga (with help from co-writer Ron Moore) killed off Capt. Kirk in “Star Trek: Generations” – which apparently generated some death threats

Watch the brief TMZ interview with Braga below.

 

POLL: You Decide!

So (of the two) who is the better captain?

[poll id=”725″]

 

Braga and Cosmos Team Paley Center Panel + BTS

In the last year Braga has been keeping very busy. He co-created the new WGN historical fantasy series Salem, which wraps up its first season on July 13th. He also co-created FOX’s rebooted Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey with Seth MacFarlane, which wrapped up last month. TMZ caught up with Braga in the video above when he was in New York City to speak at a Paley Center panel on Cosmos, along with his fellow producers Ann Druyan and Mitchell Cannold and host Neil Degrasse Tyson.

Cosmos was also recently released on Blu-ray, here is a clip of one of the bonus features, with Braga talking about the special effects for one of the episodes directed by Braga.

Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey is available now at Amazon.

 

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Does Brannon Braga mean that he would prefer to have a drink with William Shatner or with James Kirk played by Shatner as opposed to Chris Pine or the younger alt. James Kirk?

Certainly, TOS TV Kirk has been shown as more laid back, fun guy but then he has not faced what the alternate Kirk has faced in his shorter life.

Hopefully, in Star Trek 3, (Pine)Kirk will get a chance to kick back and enjoy a little and we will get to see the more easy going, humorous, quirky side to the Jim Kirk nature.

This just in from the test issue of “Duh!” Magazine.

http://www.fakenews.net/update/i/1994_12_10_k.jpg

I heard Brannon Braga and Ronald Moore went to Hawaii and smoked really good weed to come up with the “brainstorming session” that led to the script for ST: Generations.

They should have abstained and come up with a GOOD story.

Nah, that makes too much f*cking sense!

What a jack-off!

They need to brick back Prime Kirk, simple as that.

4. Admiral_Bumblebee

That’s easy: just do a 20-minute Kirk/Spock one shot for the Blu-ray release of the next film, the same way Marvel do and watch those Blu-ray sales skyrocket.

As for the old Kirk/Picard debate, it’s silly because you can’t compare the two completely different characters from what are effectively completely different shows. I know TNG claims to be Star Trek, but it’s something completely differ

Given there’s little relationship between the two shows, I’ll throw in that I’d rather have a drink with Bill Adama from 2003’s Battlestar Galactica, the coolest guv’nor of any spacecraft!

6. To add, given my iPad has knocked out half a sentence, not saying TNG is a bad show: I just don’t particularly see it as Star Trek!

Oh, I see, a tng hater again…
STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, created by Gene Roddenberry, produced by Gene Roddenberry,
And DOM say: « I just don’t particularly see as ST» Are you blind?

Oh, nu trek is not star trek, it is a caricature of TOS…Gijoe Trek produced and directed by a SW boy who despised ST and ST fans…If you love TOS, you should hate this caricature, the vendetta of a SW fan…

TNG and TOS are the best space sci fi shows ever…made by smart people for educated people…. True ST…

Picard probably a more believable Captain of a ‘naval’ vessel. Kirk more fun to watch and more entertaining.

“Better” is such a squishy, subjective term. Kirk was better for being out there pushing back the final frontier and forging the Federation, while Picard was better for being the diplomat that helped hold that Federation together. Two very different scenarios in the same universe. It’s like asking who was the better Joker, Heath Ledger or Ceasar Romero. Both were perfect for their era, and are neither comparable, nor interchangeable. IMO, of course.

Any plans for another season of Cosmos, or was that a one-off?

Of course, Kirk is more fun than Picard, but he’s also more likely to get your red-shirted butt killed. And Picard didn’t get as many women, but the ones he did get — especially Jennifer Hetrick and Donna Murphy — yum!

5 Dom — That drink is more likely to lead to 17 more drinks. ’03 Adama is a lovable lush, especially if Tigh is around.

#7: You are so melodramatic and remarkably un-self-aware. Abrams never hated Star Trek fans. That’s an extremely ridiculous and unsupportable comment. Plus, you’re hypocritical as hell–you get all worked up that someone doesn’t like TNG, then start trashing Abrams’ Trek films in the same breath. I’d watch the 2009 film over most of TNG’s first two seasons and last season any day–and I love TNG. Cut the “true” Star Trek crap–it’s that sort of socially inept mentality that gets people to make fun of Star Trek fans in the first place. Get a grip, kid, and learn how to be tolerant. You make us all look bad when you rant like that.

Kirk’s persona was apparently distributed in TNG’s formulation of the senior leadership of the new Enterprise. The scholarly, intellectual side of Kirk, as well as some of Spock’s wisdom, was overwhelmingly deposited in Picard’s character. The action-hero side of Kirk was given to Wiliam T. Riker.

While I’ve never seen such an analysis as far as I know, I think that this might easily be concluded by viewers of both shows. As well, Picard’s scholar-captain role was emphasized more as the series progressed. He can still be seen as an “action-hero” captain in the first season of TNG, but by the fifth or sixth season, he was more often contemplative, or took action in a “King Arthur” mode.

The Riker character was always intended to be a bit tough, a bit abrasive, and hard-core, so to speak. Riker, too, mellowed, but as we can see in the very last episode of the series, his Patton-like take-command personality was still central to how he acted. I think that Jonathan Frakes deliberately played him that way.

As a man of action and as a scholar, it would be difficult to find anyone in Starfleet or in real life naval forces who would compare to Kirk. Kirk combined the best features of both.

By the way, there is an actual James Kirk — a Captain James A. Kirk — in the U.S. Navy, who commands the largest and most advanced cruiser ever designed in the history of world navies. His ship is the USS Zumwalt, the heaviest surface combatant short of an aircraft carrier or amphibious assault ship. Its design is highly unusual, incorporating not only Stealth principles, but a tumblehome hullform not seen since the earliest days of ironclad ships. There were stories a few months ago about the strange coincidence — and the involvement of William Shatner. Here’s one:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2014/apr/15/navys-zumwalt-captain-james-kirk-gets-well-wishes-/

Clarification: The Zumwalt is the heaviest non-aircraft carrier, non-amphibious assault ship surface combatant except for the Russian nuclear-powered battlecruiser, Pyotr Velikiy (Peter the Great), a Kirov-class ship. The Russian ship was commissioned in 1998 and remains in active service.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_battlecruiser_Pyotr_Velikiy

Ah, my ol pal Braga. Still gettin dem trekkies all razzed. So proud. How’s klinker doing?

7 – just cuz it sez GR don’t make it immune from criticism … if anything, the opposite. TREK would never have become a phenomena without Gene Coon and other parties, GR just rode the wave he helped create. TNG is what GR wanted TMP and its successors to be … something that is not good drama.I see TNG (and to a much greater degree, VOYAGER and lil ENTERPRISE) and Abrams as the two extremes of FailedTrek, one being too flat, the other being all sound & fury & moronic horseshit.

DS9 is the only really worthy successor to TOS, though TNG has a couple dozen really great moments (almost inevitable given the number of episodes.)

It’s really the shoulders of Shatner’s Kirk upon which the entire franchise rests. His dynamic performance, coupled with the great chemistry with Nimoy, created the spirit that embodies the best of Trek. Kirk was a genius scholar, a warrior and a lover all at the same time.

Picard, while certainly a wonderful character portrayed with great talent by Stewart, just could not have provided the foundation for the phenomenon that Star Trek became.

Any other direct comparison would not be sustainable, given that each character is so much a product of the time in which he was created. It’s true that they changed over time, but each was written in a time that had very specific limits. TV writing of the 60s and 80s/90s was just different.

“The Grouch” is a hypocrite. He continually bashes nuTrek and puts down its fans, but flies into a rage when someone criticises TNG. He isn’t the arbiter of what makes “true” Star Trek.

As for Brannon Braga recieving “death threats”, I highly doubt that. People who do or say controversial things tend to inflate genuine criticism into something else as a way to deflect responsibility or to play the “victim card” to gain sympathy.

A lot of folks hated how Kirk was killed off. Obviously they were angry at Braga and co. It is their right. But I don’t think there were any death threats. This is simply a tactic to silence criticism

Picard is possibly the better captain but Kirk is definitely my preferred captain. Hands down!

5. Dom –

If you’re going to go there I’d rather have a drink or three with Malcolm Reynolds. :-)

@Son of Captain Garth, 16,

Well-stated. Kirk, as played by Shatner, embodied all the qualities you mentioned, and the ability to play him as such was facilitated by some of the tropes of Westerns that were still popular at the time. Heroic gunfighters in the style of Tom Mix were, by the 1960’s, a long American cinematic tradition. In fact, by the time of TOS, people had begun to look for anti-heroes, and in the fabled year of 1968, the counterculture movement really took hold. Anti-heroes — motorcyclist misfits, for example, became more fashionable. TOS in its celebration of the Kirk character was something of a last gasp for conventional, heroic depictions extending (in a manner of speaking) from the earliest days of Flash Gordon, to the oft-quoted Forbidden Planet “modernization” of that archetype, to the last days of “Gunsmoke” on American network television.

Post-TOS were the days of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), a more post-modernist interpretation of science fiction was on the cusp. By the time of Logan’s Run (1976), the genre had found itself presenting less of a heroic, hopeful vision in preference a much more cynical one.

Even as to this, there were outliers as well, including Zardoz, the surrealistic British SF picture that was an extension of the H.G. Wells vision of a dystopian future.

ST:TMP’s (1979) continued portrayal of a heroic, but somehow more solemn, Kirk was a return to the days of the early and mid-1960’s, with more conventional depictions of the protagonist returning. And William Shatner did an excellent job of modernizing Kirk for that movie.

The military was highly unpopular among the intelligentsia around the time of the counterculture, yet the military angle was in which TOS had catered to the conventional. The fact that TOS in a way disputed counterculture extremes (“The Way to Eden”), as well as incorporating a naval-force organizational structure and nomenclature, is one reason so many people in the armed forces regarded it favorably, and still do.

By the 1980’s, the counterculture movement had dissipated, and yet ironically some of its tenets — a suspicion of militarism — had become conventional. Thus, there were efforts to dispute the idea that Starfleet was in any way military, and all the comforts of civilian life were built in to the Enterprise-D — complete with a ship’s psychologist. Picard was still an adventurer, but it was found less appealing to play him as a military man, and more so to imbue him more and more with the qualities of the philosopher-king who only reluctantly authorizes action, and only after consultation and collaboration. A Kirk character would, indeed, have been out of place, and thus, I believe, Kirk’s adventurous side was transplanted into Riker.

Very few naval commanders, other than fictitious ones, are in the mold of James T. Kirk. Those, like David Farragut (1801-1870), that are, are exceptional.

7. Oscar: ‘Oh, I see, a tng hater again…’

Apart from your ‘Me Tarzan, you Jane’ standard of writing, no. I appreciate TNG as a scifi series set on a spaceship, but don’t see it as proper Star Trek. That’s not hatred. Life’s too short to hate.

‘STAR TREK THE NEXT GENERATION, created by Gene Roddenberry, produced by Gene Roddenberry, And DOM say: « I just don’t particularly see as ST» Are you blind?’

Quantum Leap and Airwolf have little in common and the same creator in common. What’s your point? Star Trek had been successful for years after Gene Roddenberry had been moved on. If anything, his return was a massive retrograde step. I don’t believe in the ‘Cult of Roddenberry’ made up in the TNG years. He was a TV producer who, like most people, was interested in putting food on his table, not a visionary.

‘Oh, nu trek is not star trek, it is a caricature of TOS…Gijoe Trek produced and directed by a SW boy who despised ST and ST fans…If you love TOS, you should hate this caricature, the vendetta of a SW fan…’

WTF?????? For all it’s failings, Abrams’ Trek is faithful to the action-adventure origins of Star Trek. Ivory tower snob types might have applied ideals beyond that to Trek, but I have precious little time for acadaemia.

‘TNG and TOS are the best space sci fi shows ever…made by smart people for educated people…. True ST…’

Get iTunes or Netflix or Amazon Prime. Watch The Twilight Zone, Battlestar Galactica and countless other great films and TV shows, come back in ten years when you’re in your 20s and we’ll chat then.

Oh, hai Brannon! You guys probably should have quit Trek after TNG when you ran out of ideas because the recycling shows in the later TV series (Voyager, Enterprise). You prefer Kirk over Picard? Oh, that explains why one was given more screen time and had more to do (relevant to the “plot”, that is). It also explains why Kirk was killed off in such a cheap way in BOTH versions of his death scene, because you just thought he was soooooo great. That’s not to say I had a problem with having Kirk die. But, really? That was it? Those were the two choices? A) Shot in the back or B) Drop a bridge on him? C’mon. You’ve done better before. I find it sad that the fans and movie reviewers thought of better ways for Kirk to go out (not to mention better versions of “Generations”). I suspect you have this opinion on Kirk now because you had plenty of time to actually watch the show and find out what Kirk was like. If that’s the case, that research might have come in handy before “Generations” was penned. Although, I ultimately argue that getting somebody that knew how to write full length feature films instead of TV episodes might have put out a better movie. You know, a REAL crossover.

#5 – “I know TNG claims to be Star Trek, but it’s something completely different”

No, not really!

No need to ‘polarizeI the hull’ here; this dusty summer article isn’t exactly a news biggie (with respect though).

#17

I could see Braga receiving death threats. It’s certainly possible. Because there’s a lot of nuts out there who take their icons and entertainment way too seriously.

Back int he ’70s Bruce Dern received death threats for “killing” John Wayne in “The Cowboys.” And Andrew Robinson got the same treatment for his role in “Dirty Harry,” and he didn’t even kill Harry!

And, not to mention, it was fan who shot and killed John Lennon in broad daylight. Scary stuff indeed…

Not surprising, TOS, in general,is much more fun than TNG. And I agree, that TNG is a poor representation of Star Trek. It is a decent, and even, at times, very good sci-fi…but, sadly, those “gems” like the Inner Light and Yesterday’s Enterprise were the exception, rather than the rule.

TOS is Star Trek. Those characters from1966 are what Star Trek is about. Those episodes laid the foundation. TNG, found its own identity by going in a whole new direction. In it’s conception and in it’s execution, TNG is so radically different from Star Trek that I can’t even refer to it as such… like the many spin-offs of TNG, those… along with TNG, are simply TV series set in the Star Trek universe, doing their own thing and marching to their own drum. And a lot of people dug that beat, and that’s cool…but the fact that the show’s “beat” was nowhere close to the tone and spirit of TOS can’t be denied. A clearer case of “apples and oranges”, I have yet to see.

Keachick, Vultan

Yeah, good points. There was also the Hispanic pop singer Selena who was shot dead herself by a nutjob “fan”.

But I also believe some celebrities claim to be threatened after doing or saying something controversial and it is their way of trying to silence critics and/or make themselves into a victim to avoid responsibility for their own actions and statements.

As for Trek itself, of all the spin-offs, DS9 came the closet to TOS in the depiction of humans in the future. You had the conflict, the action that some of the other spin-offs lacked, yet was different enough to blaze its own trail. It’s unfortunate that “Voyager” didn’t follow the tone and atmosphere of DS9 and instead became TNG-lite.

I enjoy and appreciate reading about others’ opinions about the various ST series, but I personally can enjoy each of the ST series, and each of the ST movies, on their own terms. I know that it’s possible to make distinctions between them, just as I have in regard to Kirk and Picard, and in fact even about the two respective series featuring them. But in the end, I like TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and ENT for being part of the Star Trek universe.

I would imagine that it’s not dissimilar to enjoying various of Shakespeare’s plays even though, for example, “King Lear” or “Hamlet” might be a favorite. “Romeo and Juliet” or “A Midnight Summer’s Dream” have their charms and I would enjoy seeing them performed.

I think that I would better be able to rank the series if given specific criteria. For humor and “naturalness,” for example, I would probably rank TOS higher than TNG. For presenting consistently entertaining episodes, even if not the very best, I would find TOS and TNG neck-and-neck. TNG wins on the quantitative score, as it ran for seven seasons. And so on.

As I mentioned, my nostalgia factor is high for ENT because I had somewhat left the series because of the press of business right when it hit its stride.

I find that my approach avoids the need to criticize various ST productions simply to support any particular one that I happen to enjoy the most at a given time. I find it so much more fun simply to enjoy them all for all the benefits I see in them at any given time.

To extend the Shakespeare analogy, we could theoretically make a distinction between any given play — say, “Hamlet,” — when performed live, and the same play if adapted for film. One could easily say that a movie adaptation of “Hamlet,” as in the one starring Mel Gibson, would be utterly untrue to the original intent of the playwright since it was, after all, a play, not a movie script. But by the same token, who is to say that had Shakespeare not had Hollywood at his disposal, he wouldn’t have written “Hamlet” as a script instead? We can enjoy both incarnations for what they are and for their own merits.

Aside from the fact that many despised the fact that Captain Kirk’s character was killed off in the first place…as someone once said, the idiot writers made him die on the *wrong* bridge!

And then that was compounded by the ignominy of having Kirk left under a pile of rocks by Picard. Hell, the movie would have been more fun if the writer’s had just done this –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPUr_hDr9gs

Is it any wonder I choose to look on the ‘prime’ TOS universe as ending with the ‘Undiscovered Country’ movie?…and all other ‘Trek’ series and movies as occurring in a completely different and separate ‘Trek’-styled, ‘alternate’ universe?…

#26

That’s because the tone and spirit of TOS can’t be replicated fully. As much as it was forward-thinking, it’s very much a show of its time, of the ’60s. When TNG came along in ’87, you could see it was trying to bring back some of that spirit, but it just didn’t quite work with that particular cast and the world of ’80s television. The show had to find its own path or else continue embarrassing itself.

On a similar note, despite bringing back the TOS characters, the Bad Robot movies (and series, if there is one) is going to have find its own path as well, and not lean so heavily on icons, stories, dialogue, and other references from the old continuity. They’ve made some good headways moving towards something different, but still haven’t quite fully committed to “a vision.”

In my opinion, each incarnation of Star Trek only becomes “real” Star Trek when it goes its own path. IDIC and all that. Like the different James Bonds, Trek has to adapt to the times. Nostalgia can’t do it alone.

@Vultan, 30,

That’s a good call, and I cited the Bond franchise for a similar point as well.

Another, perhaps more extreme example would be how a previously good interpretation of a common idea can become tired and a self-consciously campy version of its. I refer, of course, to the Batman series movies starting with the serious version with Michael Keaton (1989), followed by a slightly less impressive one with the same star (Batman Returns), followed by the even less credible Val Kilmer version (Batman Forever), followed by the tour de force of campiness (Batman and Robin) starring Arnold Schwarzenegger as Dr. Friese / Mr. Freeze — enjoying top billing over George Clooney as Batman himself.

The whole Batman franchise had to be rebooted with Batman Begins; the previous interpretation was unsalvagable even though the two versions are of the same character in the same universe.

A less extreme example would be the Superman films. The original Superman (1978) was fantastically appealing; the concurrently filmed Superman II was a bit less so; the third one, with Richard Pryor, was almost embarassing; and the fourth one was hardly watchable. All four starred the same actor (Christopher Reeve) as Superman, as well as the same actress for Lois Lane (Margo Kidder), The fifth film, 1996′ Superman Returns, is seen as both a continuation and something of a semi-reboot (according to the Wiki article, Superman (1978) and Superman II (1980) are paid homage, but the events of Superman III and IV are ignored, and the central character is played by a different actor who happened to look similar to Reeve, the latter having been paralyzed in an accident some years before). Thus, Man of Steel (2013) came to be. MOS was prescient in its medieval-Goth chic as well as the slight moral ambiguity that it introduced to Superman mythos itself.

Sooner or later, what ran strong eventually runs out of steam, and as I mentioned elsewhere, things that don’t grow won’t survive.

Even Star Trek IV; TVH was something of a new gloss on TOS, emphasizing the comedic sides of the classic series in a way never before seen.

We ought to give Abrams’ Trek its space to grow even if not all of us like all of the things it has presented. At its core, it is trying hard to manifest the distillation of what TOS represented, and it has succeeded in financially growing the enterprise as a whole. For that reason, it does deserve some degree of respect even if it isn’t all things to all people. After, can anything be?

^^ I suppose upon reflection I would have to say that there were comedic or semi-comedic or at least lighter episodes in TOS, such as the ones featuring Harry Mudd, so the “new gloss” comment I made is only relatively true. (The three prior Star Trek movies, and particularly TMP (which was positively solemn and devoid of humor) were much more serious than IV.)

Picard was much better. Kirk was more fun, certainly, but a starship captain has to be more than just fun. Picard seemed more like he knew what ye was doing, and less like he was winging it. I prefer Sisko and Archer though.

29 Makes a lot more sense – love it.

i like both of them it Brannon(the show runner/writer not the person as i don’t know him) i do not like,oh no dose that me he will not accept me as a friend on twitter now lol

Which one of you Pitards is threatening Braga for stating the obvious?

#31. Hat Rick – July 6, 2014

Why does everyone try to pretend the 1960s BATMAN movie doesn’t exist? If you had included it, you’d have realized that BATMAN AND ROBIN was a return to its tour de force original turn.

Surprised he didn’t try and get a job with JJ,since Braga too is more of a SW fan,lol! Well,at least growing up he was,or whatever he said. So that’s the question everyone is getting now? Are you excited about the new SW movie? Oh well,whatever.

J-R!

I can’t consider all the Treks as “Star Trek”, because they are not really like the Star Trek I know, which is Star Trek. They were kind of like “AfterMash”, for those who remember it, a focus on different characters, set in a different place, but in the same fictional universe. But with TNG, boy they changed I all. Story structure, design aesthetics, music style, no more action, no more conflict, less romance. Yeah, not much fun, and not much like Star Trek.

The changes in Bond have been related to casting (Moore being James Bond’s gay uncle to me and my generation) and the success of other films (SHAFT informing LIVE&LETDIE, STAR WARS causing them to postpone FOR YOUR EYES ONLY to cash in with MOONRAKER, DIE HARD & LETHAL WEAPON fueling LICENCE TO KILL, BOURNE triggering the alleged reality bond with the current ugly dude) to a large degree, plus a recent and uncanny ability of the producers to make films that are immensely stupid but get great critical response as well as disgustingly high box office.

Some of these things make a certain amount of sense (you can’t replicate Connery, so why not have Bond as Burt Reynolds, which is pretty much the whole Moore thing, and funnier when you consider Broccoli actually considered Reynolds and Eastwood at the time.) But others really don’t (why write Brosnan as a lightweight Moore type when he can bring Dalton-level intensity in TAILOR OF PANAMA? You don’t need to go to Mr Ugly for dramatic credibility if your current can do it, just get a director and screeenwriter who can bring that out in him.)

sorry, I’m just so appalled with the Bond franchise this century (except for a few minutes of QUANTUM) that my mean is coming out. I usually reserve that for nonDS9 BermanTrek and JJtrek.

@7: Relax, Oscar. Everyone’s entitled to his opinion. Besides, I get what he’s saying & to a point I agree. Roddenberry may have created Trek, but it wasn’t him that made the original series what it became & what people fell in love with.

Did you realize that if Roddenberry had his way there would have been NO humor in the original series? That would have changed things a bit.

Additionally, Majel Barrett stated that “true” Roddenberry Trek would have been like the first pilot, The Cage. She cited that episode as being ‘pure’ Star Trek (i.e. the one in Roddenberry’s vision of the series) I personally believe that had that been the way the show went, it would NOT have gotten the following it did, nor would it have lasted this long (as in subsequent shows & movies). TNG started off very much in that same vein…the first two seasons are often the lowest rated by viewers & fans (not all, but a LOT). Had that show not had some new blood come in & change things up a bit, bringing in some conflict between characters, etc that show, too, would NOT have survived.

You credit Gene. You SHOULD be crediting everyone else involved, at least as much if not MORE so than him since it’s because of them we all can continue to enjoy a very rich & long history of Star Trek.

How, as a grown man, can you get excited over Star Wars more than Trek?!

Trek on TV. NOW. AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MAKE IT HAPPEN.

Wow, Braga was “more of a Star Wars” fan…

…that should set well with the haters. :-)

Kirk may be an overbearing tin plated dictator with delusions of godhood but he’s … still the best captain ever.

#44. TonyD – July 7, 2014

Yep, he was a lousy dictator but the greatest starship captain ever.

Kirk and Picard both had their strengths and weaknesses. You should
also understand that Kirk and Picard were of two different Star Fleet
Generations. Kirk was a Maverick out in space and mostly away from
Communications, leaving him free within the Federation framework and
regulations to carry out his duties. A law man of the “old west”.

Enter Picard’s time. Most of the Federation space has been explored
and the times had changed. The “old west” frontier was all but gone
and a Kirk was no longer necessary but a liability whose time was
over.

My pick is for Kirk.

41. sorry, I’m just so appalled with the Bond franchise this century (except for a few minutes of QUANTUM) that my mean is coming out. I usually reserve that for nonDS9 BermanTrek and JJtrek.
———————————

I’m extatic that basically no one agrees with you on Bond. They took a calculated risk and it paid off enormously with Daniel Craig and you have the best Bond movies ever made coming out currently. I love them and am sorry for your loss. However, both franchises have moved past you and hopefully aren’t ever gonna try to win back the fandom of a vocal minority.

Since when was Kirk a “dictator”? He seemed like a fairly easy-going guy who was also able to discipline his officers if necessary.

Nor was he ever suffering from “delusions og godhood”.

For cryin’ out loud!

Those were the words of the Klingon when he described Kirk to Scotty. Chekov was about to get up but Scotty told him that a man is entitled to his opinion etc. However, when the same Klingon commented on the Enterprise as a ship only fit for hauling garbage, Scotty asked him to rephrase, which the Klingon happily did, saying “You’re right. The Enterprise should be hauled away AS GARBAGE”. At this point, all hell broke loose in the rec. room of the K7 space station…:)