Rich Evans and Mike Stoklasa put on real Discovery-era Klingon costumes, sat down, and delivered one of the more clear-eyed teardowns of the Kurtzman era Star Trek has gotten in years.
I would recreate the TOS sets, even expand them a bit based on technical Enterprise plans released over the years.
I would also recreate the miniatures and other practical effects.
Casting would be the absolute hardest part. Original TOS actors were classically and stage trained, but the first doesn't exist anymore and the second is nothing but gay theater kids nowadays. You can't cast in Hollywood or any Nu industry location like Toronto, London, or even Georgia.
My first calls would be to get 3-4 respectable graybeards online. Then, a nationwide hunt, signing actors to 5 season deals, no outs, no exceptions, then 6-12 months of acting training overseen by said graybeards.
I'd then take 60ish TOS episodes, a number of the animated series episodes, any scripts and ideas lying around from original writers and/or the original show (especially DC Fontana), expand them to 60 minutes to give characters beyond the big 3 some extra screen time and add connective tissue/lore/fan service. Giving Yeoman Rand and Nurse Chapel expanded roles too. TOS is still the best, but let's be honest, outside of Kirk's green space lasses, it was mostly a sausage fest.
I'd then reorder those episodes into five seasons with overarching stories and connected plot threads, grouped into their own arcs: Romulan first Contact episodes, Klingon Neutral Zone/Cold War episodes, deep space exploration, Federation space patrol, and even collect the Nazi/Monster/Greek Gods and other Parallel Earth episodes in a special (possibly Q related) sector of space.
I'd film those episodes like a taskmaster, 25ish a year, for five years, and release them once a week in twice annual batches to keep viewers going no more than a few months between episodes.
And I'd do all of that for less than a season of STD.
"Original TOS actors were classically and stage trained, but the first doesn't exist anymore and the second is nothing but gay theater kids nowadays."
Rolling my eyes.
They do just fine casting shows like The Gilded Age, thank you very much, though they may not all be American. And yes, a lot of them come from the theater community. They've even gotten American actors to speak with credible foreign and regional accents, which is something I do criticize about actor training in the US.
OK, rolling my eyes right back if you honestly think the modern day entertainment industry could EVER produce another Shatner or Kelly, let alone another Nimoy.
The industry does however excell at producing Takeis though, so maybe 10% of the cast would be easy to find.
What exactly are you going on about accents? Is it because I said nationwide? Fine, I'll admit some Amero-centrism in my original post thanks to TOS being an American production. A worldwide talent search would be fine, but no gender or race swapping nonsense.
Shatner is a scene-chewing ham. A charismatic one in the right role, but nothing particularly special. I've been told he gives a helluva fun tour in Ticonderoga, though. Kelly and Nimoy were fine character actors, of which there are hundreds plying their trade on stage and screen.
Circling right back to The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector strikes me as someone who'd make a fine lead in a Star Trek show. And there's a whole slew of Broadway vets among the women in their 30's and 40's in the show who I'd love to see playing modern takes on captains like Janeway and Garrett.
Sorry, the accents line wasn't directly in response to anything you said. It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that when movies and TV shows are set in areas of the country with regional accents, the cast is invariably larded down with British, Aussie or Kiwi actors because those actors are still trained in the craft of acting, including dialects and accents, while American training seems to be based mainly on "The Method." There's family history involved, as my dad was a character actor in and around New York for 30+ years. My apologies for diverting the conversation unhelpfully.
This has me scratching my head. The acting in Star Trek is...fine. It is filled with serviceable character actors, and a few standouts like Patrick Stewart. It also has people like Gates McFadden and Takei who wouldn't be able to make the soaps.
What makes or breaks Star Trek is the writing and showrunning.
Budgets grew while new writers were brought in who didn't care for the original meaning of the story. Same thing that killed AAA gaming killed Star Trek.
I would also strongly suspect that no one in their writers rooms had military experience, unlike Roddenberry himself. And maybe not even an interest in military history or military SF/fantasy.
The only thing necessary to make Trek great again is authors who actually sell novels in the open market. It really is just that simple. The Hollywood writers can not tell a story that anyone wants to read or see. Original Star Trek was great for a few reasons. First, it was episodic and not story arc driven. These season spanning stories are just so unnecessary, over-written, under-thought and boring as snot. Second, Original was written in large part by actual science fiction authors using actual science fiction storylines. Star Wars is Fantasy, not science fiction. Next Gen through today is melodrama or comedy in space with lasers. Just because there are space ships does not make a story science fiction. so, lastly, Original gave us a problem or an issue (technical, social, moral) and told us a story looking at the issue, addressing it, and resolving it. That is Science Fiction, a story about how humanity deals with tech, social, or moral issues usually in some future or alien environment. Where No Man, the very first episode of original Star Trek presented us with God in the body of Man and how that power distances the being from mortals and how the rest of us might deal with that being. Charlie X revisits that theme along with the journey to adulthood. Nothing since, not one single episode in any of the spin off series followed that pattern or told a story as well.
The problem with the new Startreks is that the creators have contempt for both the franchise and its fans. The original series and first few follow ups were thought provoking and although they often focused on social issues, they didn’t do it by insulting half the audience by being annoyingly preachy. The new series are woke parodies that are impossible to watch.
RLM have always made it clear what they think of "NuTrek", especially Rich, but they had often slipped it between the lines, into offhand cynical remarks, skillfully hid it under their own brand of humor, or simply criticized it by not reviewing most of it. Now, for the first time, they've been pretty sober & open, which almost surprised me. On the issues themselves, they've always been right… for the most part. So nothing new here, really, but the tonal shift is noticeable. Or they've just become old hack frauds. ;)
I would not remove the comedy. That's a bad idea on the surface.
Star Trek III and Star Trek IV are objectively funny movies.
It's all about context. How the humor is used. In Star Trek III, the humor doesn't undercut the story, it relieves the tension. Same as in Star Trek II, but turned-up just a little bit more. "Don't call me "tiny"," "Up your shaft!" "Fine, I kill you later." Star Trek IV was obviously a farce, but it worked because of the fish-out-of-water aspect of the story.
Even in The Original Series, humor was used like a pressure relied valve. Like in Amok Time when Spock thinks he's killed Kirk, only to react with surprise and joy to find out he didn't, and then immediately clam back up as the emotionless Vulcan after he saw Kirk, Bones, and Chapel's bemused expressions. The problem with The Next Generation is it often was too self-serious and humorless, which is why Deep Space Nine is so much better. DS9 embraced the humorous aspects of TOS.
Don't get rid of the humor, just use the humor well. Something Nu Trek does poorly, at the expense of the characters as opposed to with the characters.
Using humor well is a struggle for even good writers and failure to have balanced tone(too goofy, or too serious) is a recurring problem in genre shows. Nu-Who was consistently among the least funny shows on television in its comedy episodes.
True, but the article is written as if this is something new. RLM has been saying the same exact things for half a decade. There is a brief mention that older fans have had these complaints but no acknowledgment that the criticism of Kurtzman/Bad Reboot trek by online critics began at its conception and been pretty consistent of years.
The music to the original series is the most instantly recognizable soundtrack in TV history. Not the theme song, I’m talking about the incidental music to the episodes themselves. No other show’s music has ever sounded like that. No other Trek series has understood that, to their detriment.
The very first thing you'd have to do is get someone who understands that Star Trek is based on two related bedrock things in the real history of this planet just IN SPACE.
1. The Age of Exploration (1492-1920) Captain Kirk was Captain Cook, Magellan, Columbus, Byrd, Drake and all the other men who mapped the world from the deck of a wooden ship.
2. A Navy of the early and mid 20th century. Roddenberry served in the USAAF in WWII in the Pacific, and knew how a Space Navy should work- how command works, how an officer behaves, and how a military thinks. The same for the rest of the cast and crew-all had direct memories of the 1930-1950s era.
Old Trek worked because the men who made it were firmly grounded in those two concepts. New Trek fails because no one making it has any conception of either.
The humor in Orville/lower decks is hit or miss. I wouldn’t discard it entirely. Rather, it’s bad when it’s “try hard”.
There are some episodes where it’s perfect. The Orville episode about upvoting/downvoting people out of existence. The episode where the robot commits suicide (the lighter tone makes this easier). The lower decks where they are running a recruiting tent to get people to join the federation. The episode where boimler tries to get to 100% in the borg scenario.
The thing about “do TNG again” is that TNG eventually go cancelled because its formula was running out of ideas. I’m not saying modern trek is good, I’m saying that the need for a new take was real.
I enjoyed Lower Decks, but did notice that they were basically just good TNG episodes with more humor, which I actually liked. I'm not sure there's a need a full-on Star Trek comedy series, but if they were to make a season of 20-26 episodes, I certainly wouldn't mind if some of them leaned into the funny.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Prodigy, though I haven't seen the last half of Season 2, yet. Really, really enjoyed that.
And everyone should take a tour of the recreated TOS sets in Ticonderoga, New York, the regular one, if not the pricey ones led by Shatner or Takei. It's a lot of fun, and the scale of the engineering department that they were able to fake on the show was just amazing, and is beautifully recaptured here.
I would recreate the TOS sets, even expand them a bit based on technical Enterprise plans released over the years.
I would also recreate the miniatures and other practical effects.
Casting would be the absolute hardest part. Original TOS actors were classically and stage trained, but the first doesn't exist anymore and the second is nothing but gay theater kids nowadays. You can't cast in Hollywood or any Nu industry location like Toronto, London, or even Georgia.
My first calls would be to get 3-4 respectable graybeards online. Then, a nationwide hunt, signing actors to 5 season deals, no outs, no exceptions, then 6-12 months of acting training overseen by said graybeards.
I'd then take 60ish TOS episodes, a number of the animated series episodes, any scripts and ideas lying around from original writers and/or the original show (especially DC Fontana), expand them to 60 minutes to give characters beyond the big 3 some extra screen time and add connective tissue/lore/fan service. Giving Yeoman Rand and Nurse Chapel expanded roles too. TOS is still the best, but let's be honest, outside of Kirk's green space lasses, it was mostly a sausage fest.
I'd then reorder those episodes into five seasons with overarching stories and connected plot threads, grouped into their own arcs: Romulan first Contact episodes, Klingon Neutral Zone/Cold War episodes, deep space exploration, Federation space patrol, and even collect the Nazi/Monster/Greek Gods and other Parallel Earth episodes in a special (possibly Q related) sector of space.
I'd film those episodes like a taskmaster, 25ish a year, for five years, and release them once a week in twice annual batches to keep viewers going no more than a few months between episodes.
And I'd do all of that for less than a season of STD.
"Original TOS actors were classically and stage trained, but the first doesn't exist anymore and the second is nothing but gay theater kids nowadays."
Rolling my eyes.
They do just fine casting shows like The Gilded Age, thank you very much, though they may not all be American. And yes, a lot of them come from the theater community. They've even gotten American actors to speak with credible foreign and regional accents, which is something I do criticize about actor training in the US.
OK, rolling my eyes right back if you honestly think the modern day entertainment industry could EVER produce another Shatner or Kelly, let alone another Nimoy.
The industry does however excell at producing Takeis though, so maybe 10% of the cast would be easy to find.
What exactly are you going on about accents? Is it because I said nationwide? Fine, I'll admit some Amero-centrism in my original post thanks to TOS being an American production. A worldwide talent search would be fine, but no gender or race swapping nonsense.
Shatner is a scene-chewing ham. A charismatic one in the right role, but nothing particularly special. I've been told he gives a helluva fun tour in Ticonderoga, though. Kelly and Nimoy were fine character actors, of which there are hundreds plying their trade on stage and screen.
Circling right back to The Gilded Age, Morgan Spector strikes me as someone who'd make a fine lead in a Star Trek show. And there's a whole slew of Broadway vets among the women in their 30's and 40's in the show who I'd love to see playing modern takes on captains like Janeway and Garrett.
Sorry, the accents line wasn't directly in response to anything you said. It's been a pet peeve of mine for a long time that when movies and TV shows are set in areas of the country with regional accents, the cast is invariably larded down with British, Aussie or Kiwi actors because those actors are still trained in the craft of acting, including dialects and accents, while American training seems to be based mainly on "The Method." There's family history involved, as my dad was a character actor in and around New York for 30+ years. My apologies for diverting the conversation unhelpfully.
Or I’d go to talk about Star Trek post Dominion War. Oh wait I’m already doing that.
This has me scratching my head. The acting in Star Trek is...fine. It is filled with serviceable character actors, and a few standouts like Patrick Stewart. It also has people like Gates McFadden and Takei who wouldn't be able to make the soaps.
What makes or breaks Star Trek is the writing and showrunning.
Sounds like a good plan. I'd watch it!
Budgets grew while new writers were brought in who didn't care for the original meaning of the story. Same thing that killed AAA gaming killed Star Trek.
I would also strongly suspect that no one in their writers rooms had military experience, unlike Roddenberry himself. And maybe not even an interest in military history or military SF/fantasy.
The only thing necessary to make Trek great again is authors who actually sell novels in the open market. It really is just that simple. The Hollywood writers can not tell a story that anyone wants to read or see. Original Star Trek was great for a few reasons. First, it was episodic and not story arc driven. These season spanning stories are just so unnecessary, over-written, under-thought and boring as snot. Second, Original was written in large part by actual science fiction authors using actual science fiction storylines. Star Wars is Fantasy, not science fiction. Next Gen through today is melodrama or comedy in space with lasers. Just because there are space ships does not make a story science fiction. so, lastly, Original gave us a problem or an issue (technical, social, moral) and told us a story looking at the issue, addressing it, and resolving it. That is Science Fiction, a story about how humanity deals with tech, social, or moral issues usually in some future or alien environment. Where No Man, the very first episode of original Star Trek presented us with God in the body of Man and how that power distances the being from mortals and how the rest of us might deal with that being. Charlie X revisits that theme along with the journey to adulthood. Nothing since, not one single episode in any of the spin off series followed that pattern or told a story as well.
The problem with the new Startreks is that the creators have contempt for both the franchise and its fans. The original series and first few follow ups were thought provoking and although they often focused on social issues, they didn’t do it by insulting half the audience by being annoyingly preachy. The new series are woke parodies that are impossible to watch.
Its all money laundering
RLM have always made it clear what they think of "NuTrek", especially Rich, but they had often slipped it between the lines, into offhand cynical remarks, skillfully hid it under their own brand of humor, or simply criticized it by not reviewing most of it. Now, for the first time, they've been pretty sober & open, which almost surprised me. On the issues themselves, they've always been right… for the most part. So nothing new here, really, but the tonal shift is noticeable. Or they've just become old hack frauds. ;)
I would not remove the comedy. That's a bad idea on the surface.
Star Trek III and Star Trek IV are objectively funny movies.
It's all about context. How the humor is used. In Star Trek III, the humor doesn't undercut the story, it relieves the tension. Same as in Star Trek II, but turned-up just a little bit more. "Don't call me "tiny"," "Up your shaft!" "Fine, I kill you later." Star Trek IV was obviously a farce, but it worked because of the fish-out-of-water aspect of the story.
Even in The Original Series, humor was used like a pressure relied valve. Like in Amok Time when Spock thinks he's killed Kirk, only to react with surprise and joy to find out he didn't, and then immediately clam back up as the emotionless Vulcan after he saw Kirk, Bones, and Chapel's bemused expressions. The problem with The Next Generation is it often was too self-serious and humorless, which is why Deep Space Nine is so much better. DS9 embraced the humorous aspects of TOS.
Don't get rid of the humor, just use the humor well. Something Nu Trek does poorly, at the expense of the characters as opposed to with the characters.
Using humor well is a struggle for even good writers and failure to have balanced tone(too goofy, or too serious) is a recurring problem in genre shows. Nu-Who was consistently among the least funny shows on television in its comedy episodes.
The real problem is Berman isnt around to reign in the commies.
My only surprise is how late to the party this article is.
Red letter Media has been saying this, along with pretty much every other YouTube critic of modern Star Trek since Bad Reboot took over the franchise.
True, but the article is written as if this is something new. RLM has been saying the same exact things for half a decade. There is a brief mention that older fans have had these complaints but no acknowledgment that the criticism of Kurtzman/Bad Reboot trek by online critics began at its conception and been pretty consistent of years.
The article should credit this.
Yes, but the Red Leather Media* episode this is addressing just came out recently.
*Shamelessly stealing top YouTube comment referring to their costumes.
claude writing
The music to the original series is the most instantly recognizable soundtrack in TV history. Not the theme song, I’m talking about the incidental music to the episodes themselves. No other show’s music has ever sounded like that. No other Trek series has understood that, to their detriment.
We've got a two or three good series from the 1960s to 1990s. Nothing needs to "come next".
No creative freedom to write compelling stories, show some skin, show flawed women or minorities. Trek deserves to crash and burn.
The very first thing you'd have to do is get someone who understands that Star Trek is based on two related bedrock things in the real history of this planet just IN SPACE.
1. The Age of Exploration (1492-1920) Captain Kirk was Captain Cook, Magellan, Columbus, Byrd, Drake and all the other men who mapped the world from the deck of a wooden ship.
2. A Navy of the early and mid 20th century. Roddenberry served in the USAAF in WWII in the Pacific, and knew how a Space Navy should work- how command works, how an officer behaves, and how a military thinks. The same for the rest of the cast and crew-all had direct memories of the 1930-1950s era.
Old Trek worked because the men who made it were firmly grounded in those two concepts. New Trek fails because no one making it has any conception of either.
The humor in Orville/lower decks is hit or miss. I wouldn’t discard it entirely. Rather, it’s bad when it’s “try hard”.
There are some episodes where it’s perfect. The Orville episode about upvoting/downvoting people out of existence. The episode where the robot commits suicide (the lighter tone makes this easier). The lower decks where they are running a recruiting tent to get people to join the federation. The episode where boimler tries to get to 100% in the borg scenario.
The thing about “do TNG again” is that TNG eventually go cancelled because its formula was running out of ideas. I’m not saying modern trek is good, I’m saying that the need for a new take was real.
I enjoyed Lower Decks, but did notice that they were basically just good TNG episodes with more humor, which I actually liked. I'm not sure there's a need a full-on Star Trek comedy series, but if they were to make a season of 20-26 episodes, I certainly wouldn't mind if some of them leaned into the funny.
I also thoroughly enjoyed Prodigy, though I haven't seen the last half of Season 2, yet. Really, really enjoyed that.
And everyone should take a tour of the recreated TOS sets in Ticonderoga, New York, the regular one, if not the pricey ones led by Shatner or Takei. It's a lot of fun, and the scale of the engineering department that they were able to fake on the show was just amazing, and is beautifully recaptured here.