Star Trek - Space: The Final Frontier

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III is a solid movie, I never understood where the hate for it comes from.
Nearly the entire movie was spoiled in the promotional material. Even the title is a spoiler. It was a very perfunctory movie but improves incredibly as part of the II-III-IV arc in retrospect.



You don't have to be one or the other. Star Wars was a spent force by the time The Next Generation came out. There was no rivalry.
I didn't say there was a rivalry. More like a natural selection. I feel like I'm not getting my point across here. I'm not trying to encourage anyone to dox their age but this entire topic is highly age dependent and I'm specifically referring to the RLM nerds and their specific age bracket. Not other people who were Trekkies who were obsessed with TOS and going to conventions and devoted to the 80's film franchise. Perhaps Mike was a few years older, I dunno, but only a few. But Rich would have been a child in the CORE age range for TNG and children do not into things this way. He was prime for TNG. Not Star Wars. Star Trek: The Next Generation, with a wide gap between it and Star Wars and basically any other watchable genre TV show by literally years that wasn't some Glen A. Larsen -produced they-fight-crime guy with sci-fi supercar / gimmick device type show. Sci-fi TV in the 1980's was terrible outside of TNG and yes I'm saying the first two seasons weren't terrible because they weren't.

This idea that a literal child is experiencing all the hype for TNG and then watching it - in the context of other 80's television available at the time - folding his arms and saying "no, not my Captain" is fucking. bananas. to me. This sounds more like either
(a) a ret-cope to somehow seem like a person with a wise-beyond-years preternatural grasp on the state of television and culture at the time and ingratiate themselves into all the revisionist thinking about the 80's that ABSOLUTELY turned on a dime overnight for most people who grew up in that era. Sort of the inverse of all the insufferable milleni-zoomers who think they'd be listening to Kate Bush if they were kids in the 80's because Stranger Things made it seem cool when they wouldn't, they'd listen to Billboard Top Whatever in their genre like everyone else.​
or​
(2) a fag regurgitating his uncle or older brother's opinion, which is to say someone who was 10-16 in 1977 instead of 10-16 in 1987.​
What strikes me about his comments was that they made it seem like they somehow knew better at an age when you don't know shit.

I don't think the black people episode was that racist. Bad? Not more or less than the first season episodes. But I honestly don't see the racism. It's a 80s version of Wakanda.
Agreed. It was neither particularly bad nor particularly racist by 1980's standards. It's the dangers of unchecked meme opinions combined with motivated memory, which is kinda my whole point.
 
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Nearly the entire movie was spoiled in the promotional material. Even the title is a spoiler. It was a very perfunctory movie but improves incredibly as part of the II-III-IV arc.
#3 is the best odd-numbered flick.

What really hurts it is that it is between #2 and #4, arguably and widely considered the best of the Trek films.

That it has Spock returning, the destruction of the Enterprise, and the death of Kirk's son... well while it may be the best odd-Trek film, it's also the most disappointing Trek film. No other Trek film has had as much sheer, raw potential for greatness as #3 and failed to fully realize it.

#5 I enjoy ironically - it's probably the one I've seen the most because it's just so goofy. The novelization is actually halfway decent because they bothered to fix a lot of the plot holes in it.
 
This idea that a literal child is experiencing all the hype for TNG and then watching it - in the context of other 80's television available at the time - folding his arms and saying "no, not my Captain" is fucking. bananas. to me. This sounds more like either

...is English your primary language? Because I don't have a clue what you are trying to say.

TOS wasn't a big deal back in the day. It was just some syndicated show that was on Channel 5 at 8 PM Saturday nights. TOS movies were still going strong during most if not all the TNG era and overshadowed the series for the most part. I don't get the nostalgia glasses of thinking TNG was some big thing. Trek had a respectable run putting out a combined 21 seasons during the 80's and 90's.

III is a solid movie, I never understood where the hate for it comes from. V is just Shatner's personal memetic device - which suffers from the absence of ILM, but otherwise it's pretty good.
It suffers from being a middle chapter movie sandwiched between the two best Star Trek movies. The only really bad Star Trek movie is V. Even TMP is a decent movie.

Biggest negative with III is that it Rian Johnson's what happens in II. Getting rid of Kirk's son and reversing Spock's death. When I saw it with my dad as a little kid that's the biggest problem I had with it.
 
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What really hurts it is that it is between #2 and #4, arguably and widely considered the best of the Trek films.
Yeah, that too. ILM did some really amazing work for Star Trek III, though, and I don't think that was apparent to a lot of people until Star Trek V with it's underwhelming SFX.
  • Excelsior
  • Klingon Bird of prey
  • Mushroom starbase
  • Oberth-class (cute!)

#5 I enjoy ironically - it's probably the one I've seen the most because it's just so goofy. The novelization is actually halfway decent because they bothered to fix a lot of the plot holes in it.
It's the most Shatnerian of all of them (for good reason). Moments of intentional lameness that borders on disrespect punctuated by excellence.

...is English your primary language? Because I don't have a clue what you are trying to say.
TOS movies were still going strong during most if not all the TNG era and overshadowed the series for the most part. I don't get the nostalgia glasses of thinking TNG was some big thing.
Hey it's alright bro, we don't have to argue about it. You might be right maybe TNG was a massive flop. Shit, I dunno.
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It was a different world back then. Star Trek TNG was on television every fucking day. On different channels and different times. Back in the 90s, you could turn on your TV anytime between 5:00pm and 9:00pm and find an episode Star Trek TNG playing somewhere. It was inescapable, a part of life. Even if you didn't watch the show, you recognized it and the characters because you flipped by it hundreds of times. To call it a failure or not a big thing is to ignore its sheer recognizability. Nobody would have given a shit about best of both worlds if they didn't already know who Picard was. It permeated the public consciousness even if it didn't bring in huge viewing numbers (but it got those as well).
 
I guess it depends on what market you were in. We could find TNG airing once or twice a week during its original run. In the latter half of the 90s it would air late at night, 11 or midnight if I recall. I knew a few people who watched it, but to be an actual fan of the thing was much rarer. But I'm one of those gatekeepers who thinks you aren't a real fan if you don't know the difference between dilithium and verterium cortenide, so maybe I'm too exclusionary.

TNG had a respectable number of viewers, though it wasn't doing prime time network numbers. If Nielsen ratings are a proxy for cultural impact, it was much less important to the development of the popular culture of its day than Home Improvement, Rescue 911, Murphy Brown, or Monday Night Football. I think it has had more staying power than any of them so its cumulative effect is greater, but if we're only considering public consciousness during the original broadcasts, there you go.
 
I was mainly a Star Wars kid but I was exposed to Trek really early with my mother... Mostly watching TOS on TGIF with her every week, it became our little thing because she loved Star Trek. When my oldest sister started getting serious with her high school boyfriend and he became her fiancee and my father let him move into our spare bedroom, be brought these with him :


STTNG.png


il_fullxfull.1083126073_9pah.jpg


Mind you, this was still the way early 90s, I don't even think Desert Shield happened yet, much less Storm. TNG was still actively on the air making new episodes, The Undiscovered Country I don't even think came out yet (but he did get it to complete his box set like pictured when it did).

I can't speak for people who watched TNG from the beginning when it first aired but as someone who managed to catch it in the middle of its run before they even started making TNG movies, I always enjoyed it. Maybe because of how young I was, I don't remember any negativity towards the show from my peers and I do remember after First Contact, everyone thought it was fucking awesome.

I was born in the mid 80s so yeah my frame of reference is the 90s but I honestly don't remember any kind of active hostility towards TNG that people professed to have had back then. The only real thing I remember was the outrage over Kirk's death in Generations (for which Malcolm McDowell received real death threats for). Not saying this property has always been beloved and above reproach but I agree with other posters that the early hate boners described sounds like some revisionism. Sure the first couple seasons were lame in ways but it's not like you had a whole lot of choices back then.
 
Yeah, that too. ILM did some really amazing work for Star Trek III, though, and I don't think that was apparent to a lot of people until Star Trek V with it's underwhelming SFX.
  • Excelsior
  • Klingon Bird of prey
  • Mushroom starbase
  • Oberth-class (cute!)


It's the most Shatnerian of all of them (for good reason). Moments of intentional lameness that borders on disrespect punctuated by excellence.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=WLzJAebfEIg


Hey it's alright bro, we don't have to argue about it. You might be right maybe TNG was a massive flop. Shit, I dunno.
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No I never said Next Gen was a flop. Flops don't have seven year runs. It was a first run syndicated show that did not have a timeslot on the big three networks. Local independent stations and network affiliates purchased it to fill holes in their schedule(s). Mostly UHF stations. These two factors limited it's reach because (1) UHF reception is considerably weaker than VHF reception. A lot of independent stations were in the UHF range. (2) due to its syndicated nature, it aired at different times/days in different markets. Even with those constraints the series put up good enough numbers to survive a rocky start (Gene Roddenberry, writers strike during season 2 that forced them to reuse Phase II scripts) to find itself in later seasons and be favorably regarded towards the middle/end of its run.

Sometimes towards the middle of its run, stations picked up its reruns package which also helped it gain popularity. I think it was on WLVI 56 @ 7 PM weekdays. Since this was before home video was a thing it was the only way to catch up with seasons one missed.

As for VFX. Those weren't important for Star Trek as opposed to Star Wars. TOS/TNG won on story. Nobody was looking for blockbuster effects. TOS is mostly solid movie wise. TNG movies were mostly bad. They dumped what made TNG great in favor of ACTIONPICARD! I'll never forget being excited to see Generations and be horribly disappointed by how boring it was. First Contact was an improvement but suffers from ACTIONPICARD! The other two are dogshit. Fuck the hippie aliens and fuck clone Picard. Lame. Gay. Stupid.
 
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Like many people born in the 90s but raised in the 2000s, I was into X-Men, Batman, SpongeBob, Simpsons, Futurama, Pokemon, Digimon, Yu-Gi-Oh, DBZ, Mario, Zelda, Sonic and especially Star Wars. However, I still had a very little soft spot for Star Trek and really haven't gotten into it until my 11 year old days with YTMND and Newgrounds memes, and by that point I ended watching old vintage TNG and DS9 and they were awesome.
 
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I think my first Trek was TAS on Nick and viewmaster or record and storybook or whatever of WoK, then by the mid 80s I was catching vhs replays of the midnight UHF run, as my dad headed out for late shift at about then so it was easy to hit rec as he dipped
I think I saw Trek 4 and onward in these

I def had some mixed feelings about TNG being okay but NOT MUH
 
As sometimes would happen in 1960's television, there would be crossovers from one TV series to another, as happened between Batman and The Green Hornet in 1966. Ratings-wise, Batman was the stronger of the two series, so the crossover was an attempt to boost the ratings of The Green Hornet:



But a far lesser known crossover occurred between Star Trek and Gilligan's Island by arranging a guest appearance by actor Bob Denver, to see if a comedy spin-off of the space show might catch on. Sadly, it did not....

STAR TREK GILLIGAN.jpg
 
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