Star Trek: Re-Boot the Universe
Jun. 20th, 2006 12:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
khaosworksIn 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.
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.
