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Oh. My. God.
When I saw the title page of this leaked PDF, I think my inner nerd wet his pants.
“Star Trek: As Reimagined By J. Michael Straczynski”
And Paramount PASSED on this? I HATE YOU, MISTER HOLLYWOOD.
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about 4 years ago
Paramount would never give into something like this because they are totally afraid of losing what little they have.
Plus, I don’t know what JMS does Paramount, but their history is a mixed bag of evil rumors. Even if those rumors are NOT true, the weight of the rumor stone alone would probably cause friction between them.
A “re-imagining” will happen eventually, if only because of the success of Ron Moore with the cheese once known as Battlestar Galactica, which is now setting the bar for intelligence on the planet.
about 4 years ago
If ONLY.
But life is just never that kind. Can you imagine how much cooler the Ferangi would be if JMS took charge?
Actually, Star Trek is the reason I discovered Babylon 5. I stuck with Voyager for about a season and a half. Babylon 5 aired the hour before. One day I turned on the TV a little early, and caught Walter Koenig – AKA Chekov in the original Star Trek series – in a very menacing role as the ultimately cool Bestor in Babylon 5. After that, I started turning on the TV an hour early before Voyager for several weeks.
After being able to contrast the two shows for a few weeks, I began turning the TV *OFF* after only one hour. B5 won out. I completely lost track of what happened on Voyager, and still can’t bring myself to care.
about 4 years ago
I havent had teh urge to watch a trek show in a while. I would totally watch that.
about 4 years ago
A “reboot” of the ST universe would be great, and to add to neuraljazz’s point, Ron Moore has proven that it can not only be done successfully, but it can be done in a way that honors the original material. A Star Trek modeled on real physics, believable (and flawed) characters, engaging stories that are not concluded by re-routing the whatsit through the deflector array, and most importantly, sans Berman, would be the shiz.
Alas, Paramount has neither the courage to do such a thing, nor the motivation. They have a cash cow they are happy to milk for as long as it produces. Unfortunately, as long as die-hard Trek fans continue to prop up the franchise, we can look forward to decades of sub-par stories of holo-decks, disinfectant goo, aliens-because-they-have-prosthetic-ridges-on-their-nose, and oh-look-another-time-travel-tale.
about 4 years ago
One more thing – Kill Wesley Crusher!!!
about 4 years ago
He wants to re-do the original star trek, but with modern twists?
Sorry, that’s still boring.
Just bring back something resembling TNG again. That was the best one IMO. Just fly through space on the new enterprise searching for new stuff, with the occasional mingle with the old stuff, good acting, good character development, and all that reverse tachiyon pulses.
Or, you know, let Star Trek stay dead for a while. I don’t mind.
about 4 years ago
With JMS making it, half of every episode would be one of the main characters giving a speech about how they’re the nicest, most caring person on the planet and everyone who isn’t agreeing with their solution to the problem of the episode is a horrible, evil dirtbag. in tos, the crew got caught up in other people’s problems that were analogies of problems on earth. in the new treks and pretty much every other space-faring scifi show, the crew are not our window to a different perspective on an issue, but the issue itself, making the aliens just part of the background rendering the whole scifi setting moot.
Goe, against reimagining the old when there’s so much that hasn’t been imagined the first time yet.
about 4 years ago
“We know that the Enterprise was once infested with tiny cute Tribbles piled three fight(sic) high in some places…but what if they came equipped with an agenda, an attitude…and teeth?”
Why, then they would be crap, Mr. Straczynski.
about 4 years ago
Straczynski’s Murder She Wrote was the hardest hitting shit around!
about 4 years ago
Damn.
Where’s a door to an alternate dimension where this *did* happen when you need one?
about 4 years ago
Admittedly, the tribble comments (or the female Scotty) didn’t thrill me. But invoking the planet-killing “Doomsday Machines” sure did, especially tying them into a larger plat.
The single best comment:
“By way of example, note that the original Enterprise never needed a holo-deck so that the characters could have exciting adventures because there were more than enough adventures, more than enough excitement, to be found in the real world they occupied every day. If you need a holo-deck to make an interstellar starship on the bleeding edge of the unknown interesting, something is seriously amiss.”
about 4 years ago
A female Scotty would rock.
Kirk: Scotty, I need more power!
Scotty: Jesus Christ, you’re the captain of a starship, how much more power do you need? It’s always about you, isn’t it! Have you ever thought about what I need? Hold me.
about 4 years ago
I’d much rather see Star Trek as re-imagined by Joss Whedon. Picture Kirk captured by Garth of Izar, and Uhura going all female super kung-fu on his ass to save him.
Bruce
about 4 years ago
On the upside, JMS does make good sci fi. There’s still things in B5 that raised the bar. And the ST franchise could definitely benefit from a reimagining (or reboot as JMS calls it). Considering the ST series has always suffered from stand-alone episodes that don’t quite match up it makes a lot more sense than making ST:The Next Next Next Generation
On the downside… JMS doesn’t seem to be able to write an ending to save his life. Truly great concepts just… end. The whole 5th year of B5 just kinda… well… it sucked. It was, for lack of a better term, an entire season of denouement. It set the stage for a fantastic Telepath Wars should JMS get around to it but as an end to such a good story… it was anticlimatic. The fact that Claudia Christian didn’t get renewed thanks to TNT didn’t help.
Still, I’d like to see it happen. JMS at least produces good solid episodes and realizes the importance of running storylines in modern sci fi (something he helped to put there). So why’d it fall through? Some of my thoughts
1. At the time, ST:E was being or already was canceled. Making a new ST series at the time made little sense. The public is burned out on the ST franchise. One guy who worked on TNG and DS9 (now with BSG) I think aptly put it when he said “Now the franchise returns to the fans”.
2. You need some settling to occur. BSG, by comparison, was a series out of production for around two decades. There was some novelty interest in seeing the series resurrected due to the fact it still had something of a following (albeit slim). ST, on the other hand, was started in 1965, got canceled three years in, got picked back up in 1989 and was in solid production for some 16 years afterwards over 4 separate series (not all of which was worth watching). Keep in mind that ST:E probably flopped due in no small part to the fact that there’s burnout on seeing the same storylines rehashed over and over. There is a good argument to be made that the fans of “Universe A” were going to either be too jaded to care or would riot over “Universe B”. Either way, it didn’t bode too well. Plus BSG wasn’t a cultural icon. Find one person who hasn’t heard “To boldly go where no man has gone before” or “Live long and prosper”.
3. At the time JMS was working on a B5 movie deal (since fallen through
). Probably didn’t score him any points with Paramount.
4. A belief that space series were declining in ratings in general. Note that Farscape was canceled just prior. Focus seemed to be shifting to the we-dont-need-no-steenkin-ship series about conspiracies and such (hence why SG1 was untouched). In a twist of irony
5. Somewhere, deep down, Rick Berman wants to be the one who reinvents Star Trek.
about 4 years ago
Like the new BSG, this could be something wonderful if they did it right or something completely horrible if they messed it up. It’d be hard to do something this extreme and hit somewhere in between those two marks.
So either way, at least it wouldn’t be dull. That’d be a nice new change for Trek these days.
But it’s been passed on? For sure?
about 4 years ago
The 5th season of Babylon 5 was kind of an accident. JMS thought that the series was going to be cancelled at the end of season 4, so tightened up the story arc as much as he could. Originally the plan was to end it with the liberation of Earth, then have Sleeping in Light be the final episode. At the last moment TNT picked up B5 for another season.
Once you realize that the postscript nature of the last season makes a good deal more sense.
Scott, terminal b5 fanboy
about 4 years ago
Picard already solved the great DNA mystery. See TNG season six, episode 20.
Are there politics or something to explain why they didn’t use BSG as an example?
about 4 years ago
Am I the only one who noticed that this was written in 2004? Unless Paramount runs a really slow and very tight ship, this is just not going to happen.
The problem with Star Trek is there is too much inertia. I cannot think of any media franchise with this much baggage. You want to ditch the baggage and start over? Make a different series. Do not further sully Star Trek.
about 4 years ago
********THIS IS A NEWS BULLETIN FROM RADIO NEWS********
This just in…Parmount Studios ARE IDIOTS!!
****************************************************
Yeah, to more than one confirmed Star Trek the original series nut, this proposal sounds like an exceptional idea. But to studio bean-counters who have driven the whole Star Trek universe into the ground like a stick and broken it off at the base, yeah this sounds like a good way to lose money.
The original Star Trek wasn’t made by a pack of retarded bean-counters, that’s why a pack of retarded bean-counters (Parmount Studios in the present day) can’t make a re-imagined Star Trek now.
about 4 years ago
Note the date on the PDF: 2004. While the BSG pilot movie was out the series wasn’t quite what it is today. The series was a slow starter and took some warming to. I don’t think you could have stated it was a runaway smash hit in 2004.
I’ve read all the JMS notes (you’re not the only B5 fanboi
) and he explained that Sleeping was filmed at the end of season 4 (which is how Claudia Christian got in) and that the actual Season 4 end (which is, as he puts it, “a giant middle finger composed of red neon fifty stories tall, that will burn forever in the night”) was made when TNT bought in for season 5. Still, it wasn’t the best end to B5. On the one hand they made it to the end of 5 years (more than ST:C did) but, on the other hand, it was mostly dull. It would have been better done worked into a standalone series.
On a sad note, I didn’t realize Andreas Katsulas (G’Kar) died in Feb
about 4 years ago
Personally I don’t think much of Battlestar Galactica re-immagined. Call me an idealist, or naive, or white bread, or whatever you want, but I like characters that I can root for. Ones with a few less flaws and a few more virtues than you might find in your average joe. People of principle and character. For this reason, I don’t watch gangster movies, or pretty much anything produced by HBO, or Battlestar Galactica revisited.
Captain Kirk and his crew or Picard and his for that matter are heroes. They believe in goodness and decency and put all of their effort into living up to their principles, rather than giving in and justifying letting things slip into a mire of human weakness and deficiencies. That goodness – that common decency, applied to a whole culture that believed in it is what drew people to Star Trek and what has made it endure.
If the re-imagining impinges on that decency for our entertainment, so that we can feel more cultured or more nuanced than past audiences I think we would be making a great mistake. Both for loss of the message of the original, and the loss to us in giving up the dream for humanity that Star Trek envisioned. I require more out of a show than a good plot line, and good writing. I require people I am willing to spend my time getting to know, and to care about. Modern shows made up mainly of flawed, mean, desperate characters don’t do it for me. I could care less about them and I won’t spend my time watching them.
about 4 years ago
I love JMS, but this sounds like “Star Trek: The Search For Vorlons” to me. The five-year mission does make sense if you’re supposed to be mapping nearby spacefaring races, and finding planets to colonize. Hence why they get the best captain and science officer in the fleet, and the biggest/fastest ship.
about 4 years ago
What Sweetmeat said:
If I wanted a soap about flawed ‘human’ characters I’d go sit in a busy street and watch real life.
I personally aspire to be better than a flawed human, I expect the heroes of the fantastic TV I watch to be the same, heroic, with few flaws and many virtues. They should be giving us something to aspire to, not someone to look at and say, “It’s not so bad, even the heroes can’t cope.”
about 4 years ago
I’d prefer to see Star Trek left alone, not re-imagined nor re-done. I’m sick of remakes and redos. Is everyone all out of ideas or something?
I very much enjoyed Firefly. I’d love to see something like that – only new! – done on FX, the most innovative network out there these days.
about 4 years ago
“Goe, against reimagining the old when there\’e2\’80\’99s so much that hasn\’e2\’80\’99t been imagined the first time yet.”
Evangolis, who usually doesn’t agree with Goe as much as he does on this one.
about 4 years ago
The only thing better than JMS doing five seasons of original Trek would be JMS doing six seasons of original Trek.
about 4 years ago
Well, I for one would love the idea of a reimagined ST, as long as drivel like ST:TNG is kept far far away from it, I wojuld be happy.
Me, loved the original and the last part of ST:E
about 4 years ago
Two words. Battlestar Galactica.
That’s all JMS is trying to do here, ‘re do’ another classic SF series, since the ‘re do’ of Galactica was a roaring success. (Not sure I agree with that, I am slowly coming to accept the new imagining, I do like the alcoholic Col. Tigh, but I still can NOT accept Starbuck as a woman, cigars or no)
So this is hardly a new idea from JMS, and Paramount probablly didn’t want to be accused of ‘me tooism’ like all the reality shows after Big Brother/Survivor.
about 4 years ago
“Now imagine a new Star Trek calling upon the talents of writers like Neil Gaiman, Stephen
King, Ray Bradbury, Dean Koontz, Michael Crichton, Anne Rice, Kurt Vonnegut, Anne
McCaffrey, and others.”
Ok, I’m imaging that.
It sucks tremendously.
about 4 years ago
Yea, you can’t do origionals when you’re dealing with THE derivative series.
Snort.
JMS is very good at what he does, and I enjoy the vast majority of what he works on.
about 4 years ago
I’m actually amazed JMS went back to Paramount after the whole B5-Deep Space Nine crap (apparently, he pitched B5 to Paramount in the early 1990s, who turned it down and then announced DS9. You know, about this space station far from Earth…).
I’m not amazed that Paramount turned it down. Having worked with the franchise twice, which means working with Paramount twice, the only surprise here is that JMS’s brain didn’t explode when faced with the total idiocy that can result from Paramount inertia and paranoia regarding ST. Note that they are not bad people, generally; just caught up in nervousness of maybe breaking the goose that lays the golden eggs and getting blackballed. This can result in some truly outstanding institutional stupidity.
An example, you ask? OK:
While producing ST: TOS games for Interplay back in the mid-1990s, we had to submit all story ideas to a “canon” person, who would make sure we weren’t completely destroying the ST universe. One of our writers submitted a story for one of the games based on “The Ultimate Computer” episode, with Dr. Daystrom having been rehabilitated and trying again with the ‘M’ series computers.
When we received the hand-written comments from Paramount’s “canon-eer”, as we called her, there were only two lines of comment on that story treatment, which were:
“What is this M5 computer shit?”
“This isn’t canon; get rid of it.”
When we gently enquired about this (while restraining the Producer from jumping in his car, driving to Paramount Studios and strangling the woman with the cord from her desk lamp), it was discovered that she had never watched a single Star Trek epsiode. Ever. Not ST:TOS, not ST:TNG, nothing. How did she get that job? Apparently, she was the secretary for her predecessor and when he left, they just dumped the work on her as a cost-cutting measure and decided that was much cheaper than hiring another lawyer to look all that stuff over. Talk about pressure; the poor woman was probably ready to crack, anyway.
That’s just one example.
So, no, it is not surprising that Paramount wouldn’t want to reboot the series; that just makes far too much sense.
about 4 years ago
JMS is great, but I wouldn’t want to see his take on Trek. I love Whedon to death, but I would also not enjoy his take on Trek either. Trek isn’t their show, they both require complete creative freedom to deliver good shows. Inside the confines of Trek canon they’d just be flailing about trying to redesign things so that they make sense – and that’s kinda not how Star Trek works.
Granted, they both do superior work in comics but they *started* with creations that were wholly theirs (Fray, Rising Stars) in addition to their adapted franchises before they were given near complete authority over a major and established franchise.
Of course J.J. Abrams actually will be “revamping” the series for really reals…
about 4 years ago
I think the point is that, right now, Star Trek doesn’t ‘work’.
about 4 years ago
None of it looks bad- I’d probably like this show- but it all looks really obvious:
And so on. Not much about how you’d actually do that. There’s a proposal for a mystery at the heart of the universe, but it’s just another Von Daniken god-race. You can practically hear that producer asking Harlan Ellison if he could put Mayans in somewhere.
Where stories are suggested, they seem to miss the point of the source material they’re reusing:
Then they’re just rats with an agenda. The only reason “The Trouble with Tribbles” works is that the tribble “threat” is absurd. Compare that to Ron Moore’s reuse of the Pegasus. He kept exactly what made the original Caine story interesting, then built the new story around it.