Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe

[khaosworks]

In case you haven't heard, Bryce Zabel and J. Michael Straczynski have released their never-picked-up treatment for the revitalisation of Star Trek. Zabel's remarks on it can be found in his blog here, and the PDF file of the treatment can be downloaded here.

Essentially, they were going to reboot the Star Trek universe: i.e. start it from scratch, like the re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica or, as they put it in the treatment, the Ultimate Marvel universe of the comic books. It wasn't going to be as radical as the BSG reboot; they were going to tell stories of the original five-year mission, but adding story arcs, some changed characters, some readapted episodes, but basically trying to keep to the spirit of the original.

After reading the treatment, I'm not sure it would really have worked. Sure, they cite examples like Lois and Clark and Smallville, but those are reworkings of a comic book medium into a television one. Nobody expects a television treatment of Superman to be one hundred percent faithful to the source material: the budget just isn't big enough, and the dramatic conventions are totally different. You can do stuff in a comic book you can't do in a television show and vice versa, and fans don't expect the stuff to translate properly. Also, unlike BSG, this re-imagining would not have been as radical a shift in tone — it would have been trying to recreate the original. With BSG as markedly different from its source material as it was, they weren't trying to pander to the old fans, but this Star Trek reboot is, and so the dividing line between the original and the reboot is much, much, finer, and people would have expected more fidelity. And Trek fans are much more numerous than BSG fans, and their voices much, much louder by sheer numbers, if not volume.

Original Trek, especially the original series, is so firmly ingrained in the psyche of science fiction fans that it is impossible to dispel the figurative ghosts of William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy and the literal ghost of DeForest Kelley from the collective imagination, and people would be comparing them constantly to the new guys playing the same roles. It just would not be fair. Similarly, I'm skeptical about the new J.J. Abrams Trek movie, which aims to tell the story of the original meeting of the Big Three. Good luck.

But maybe I'm just being a grumpy old man, afraid of change. You read it, and you decide.

Comments

[lonemagpie.livejournal.com]

The problem with rebooting Trek is the mutually exclusive truisms that 1) to the general audience, Trek is Kirk/Spock/Bones on the Enterprise fighting Klingons, and 2) Shatner, Nimoy and Kelley are icons in those roles...

I also wonder how soon it'll be before JMS launches his first "Abrams is doing my story/Paramount have ripped me off again" broadside.

[tavella.livejournal.com]

What's the point, is all I can think. The original BSG was pure bad cheese, so reimagining it as a serious take becomes an interesting idea. The original Trek took things seriously (though obviously still ended up being cheese many time), and was pretty successful at it, at least for the first couple of seasons.

[wcg.livejournal.com]

On one hand, I'm thinking that I've seen many interpretations of Hamlet, and most were good.

On the other, I realize that not even Laurence Olivier was Hamlet in the same way that William Shatner was James T. Kirk.

On the tentacle, I'm thinking that JMS, for all his talent, isn't Shakespeare.

[sibylle]

Uh, my initial reaction was negative, and re-reading didn't change that ... it's an iconic show and so much in the public mind, I don't think it'd work - eaven leaving things like Roddenberry's vision and stuff aside, as I know they are being. Plus there's no real need (money, power etc not counting) for it - it wasn't too cheesy/serious/.../whatever for a re-booting to be sufficiently different from it.

[zanda-myrande.livejournal.com]

I'd have given it a chance. But then I'm not as jaded and cynical about sf as some of my friends...:) I can readily imagine someone else playing those roles, and I don't see it as pandering to the old fans. Original Trek was of its time, and that time was forty years ago. It could stand redoing in a more modern idiom.

But I guess now we'll never know.

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

My reaction to that is: they did do it in a more modern idiom: that was Star Trek: The Next Generation, which I have heard was allegdedly mildly successful. If they honestly want to retain strong ties with the original, move forward, not backward and not retroactively. Trek isn't damaged enough to require a reboot.

Imagine if they had gone ahead with the Doctor Who reboot in 1996 as they wanted to. The Doctor and his teacher Borusa roaming the universe on a quest to find his Daddy.

I'm with those that think that if they really want to do something like this, they should just call it by a new name, not Star Trek.

[pbristow.livejournal.com]

[NODS] It could've worked really well... Or it could have tanked spectacularly.

As always in large-scale creative ventures such as a TV series, the concept lives or dies on the people who are allocated to realising it (cf Buffy - the Movie with Buffy - Season 1. Or any year of Doctor Who with approx 50% of other years of Doctor Who...)

[madfilkentist]

If they're going to come up with a new series, they should put a new name on it rather than trying to cash in on the Star Trek name.

In the case of Superman, there really wasn't an initial coherent vision. Siegel and Schuster came up with a minimal background of a man from another planet with lots of powers. This has been reworked continually since 1938, with patches coming and going, and any attempts at consistency being mainly a result of reader pressure. Star Trek was a developed vision by a specific creator.

And if anything like "Infinite Repetitions of Infinite Crises" was done to the Star Trek universe in order to "reboot" it, I'd expect Gene Roddenberry to come back from the dead and fry the computers of every person responsible.

If I'm a grumpy old man afraid of change too, I'm proud of it.

[logam.livejournal.com]

Why can't they come up with NEW shows instead of rebooting old ones?