Fans reacting to the announcement of Star Trek: The Next Generation ( lemmy.world )

It’s so bizarre to read this in the present, knowing how incredible TNG was, but I get it - the original crew WAS Star Trek to them.

The dedicated fans revived this series in syndication, well after it had gone off the air in 1969, and felt attached to the characters that they had obsessed over between then and the 1980s. Like modern fans, they thought that departure from what they knew would ruin it.

I wish I could go back in time and tell them that TNG is going to rock.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Hmmm. Came back here looking for the snippet but the image link seems to be broken … any chance of digging it out again?

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Sure thing. Here it is! https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/7cc618ab-6abf-4835-8411-20fee992914d.jpeg

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Thanks!!

mothersprotege ,

I recall this being posted ad nauseum on r/startrek, and the comments were always full of people using it to dismiss any and all criticism of Discovery and/or Picard. Nice to see that not being rehashed here.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

The discussions on here are usually really positive.

I haven’t even seen Discovery or Picard yet. I just love TOS and TNG and thought this was surreal to read.

ImpossibleRubiksCube ,

Nobody knows how to hate on Star Trek like a Trekkie.

decadentrebel ,
@decadentrebel@lemmy.world avatar

I still remember when they Poochied the lesbian security guard.

Asymptote ,

If you’ve seen the original Battlestar Galactica you’ll know why they were worried.

Only good thing about that show was that in space, bras were unpopular.

EhList ,
@EhList@lemmy.world avatar

They made a soft scifi show that little kids could enjoy featuring the guy who likes animals and did Alpo commercials. BSG wasn’t bad. It just wasn’t great like Dr Who or Buck Rodgers were at the time.

Asymptote ,

Don’t get me wrong I love braless women in the prime of their 20s.

GratefullyGodless ,
@GratefullyGodless@lemmy.world avatar

That’s because, according to renown space expert George Lucas, wearing a bra in space would strangle the wearer, which is why Princess Leia jiggled her way around the Death Star. So, it’s not that they were unpopular, just that they were a safety issue.

AEsheron ,

I mean, she wasn’t jiggling. Carrie had often complained about how tightly bound she was, he specifically didn’t want that look either. Nothing at all in that outfit would have honestly made a huge difference in how the whole thing felt I think, at least in hindsight it would really cheapen it.

ICastFist ,
@ICastFist@programming.dev avatar

The only thing I wish TNG did from the get go, or kept from season 2 onwards, was Dr. Pulaski. She was simply a much better character and doctor than Crusher, she fit in with the rest of the crew much better as well.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

She was so reminiscent of McCoy

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Including, most importantly probably, naturally having the believable ability to stand up against the captain. There’s natural chemistry in that sort of dynamic, you’re almost waiting for a plot line to come along that splits them against each other.

xT1TANx ,

I was fine with the character but hated the actress. She was an old crone and didn’t mesh into the ensemble IMO. The same for Natasha. Her acting chops were simple subpar.

Maho ,
@Maho@lemmy.blahaj.zone avatar

I don’t remember Tasha being more subpar than the rest of the cast, the first two seasons were abysmal compared to seasons 3+.

xT1TANx , (edited )

I may be biased. I started in s4 and then went back to watch everything. I had no idea who Yar was and then didn’t like her acting. Her reactions to things seems forced. Her character had a rough upbringing but how the actress tries to portray it felt disjointed to me. The same for when she was trying to be attractive in scenes. I felt like she didn’t know how to act. And then when she was made to play a Romulan omg. She was terrible.

startrekexplained ,

This is why I don’t pay attention to the initial nerd reception

NathanielThomas ,

I never got into original series (and I existed before TNG) but something about TNG clicked.

Picard was a man of culture, not some Macho man to sleep with aliens of different colours.

Riker really came into his own as a second and had a different personality and perspective that added to the show

Data explored the concepts of AI and sentience and that mankind could create a new being (The measure of a man episode).

Jordi Laforge was inspiring that people with disabilities could be important and high ranking and overcome those challenges.

Sure, OS has its charm with fake Scottish man and Sulu and the radical idea not all Russians were insane. But I mean, Bones was just such a cliche (dammit Jim) and never really grew on me the way I’m sure he did the generation that loved John Wayne.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, what was revolutionary in the 1960s (humans of all nationalities working together) wouldn’t have been enough in 1987, but I appreciate that it set the groundwork for the series as a whole.

The acting in TOS is over the top and often silly, but I try to watch it as a product of its time - audiences didn’t really want their shows to have an edge or get deeply philosophical back then, so Roddenberry and team had to sneak that type of stuff in where they could. I have a soft spot for TOS and the campy characters and still think it’s a fun lighthearted watch.

ANuStart ,

How the hell does Gates McFadden look better now than she did 20 years ago

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

It’s all that ghost magic.

Gamaxray ,

Seriously, What a GILF!

TimewornTraveler ,

Haha, Spock wasn’t replaced by LaForge. Spock was replaced by Data.

theangryseal ,

Yeah, who even thought that for a second?

I grew up with Next Generation first, sitting on my dad’s lap watching the show with him.

When I first watched TOS I remember seeing Spock and saying, “oh yeah, the original Data”.

T156 ,

Especially since Spock was often described by Bones as being a walking computer, and Data was described as an Android. It would be less of a logical leap than having Geordi be the new Spock.

TimewornTraveler ,

I remember thinking, “I don’t wanna watch a Trek without Spock,” and then Data came along and I was hooked.

Blimp7990 ,

Somehow every character except the black man has a name, and every actor except the black one gets a serious headshot. hmm.

maegul ,
@maegul@lemmy.ml avatar

Yep, I noticed that too … it’s pretty damn obvious actually!

WhoRoger ,
@WhoRoger@lemmy.world avatar

Wdym, Burton has a normal photo and the character is named among the others. Stewart’s picture is from a performance, so also different.

Also funny how you’re complaining about someone not getting named, and you’re just referring to him as a black man.

Blimp7990 , (edited )

you’re just referring to him as a black man.

yes, in this case the pertinent piece of information is not that he is hero of all 80’s childrens’ childhoods, book advocate and reading rainbow star LeVar Burton. what matters for the point i am trying to make is that i am presuming the pov of the editor of that article: oh, hes the black guy who is gonna be the new spock. (his character name is not “the new spock”)

its ok to do that. I don’t think LeVar Burton is going to not get the point.

NoSpotOfGround ,

It also feels like they intentionally picked that photo for contrast value: smiling so broadly when that is something “the original Spock” never did. They were going for the outrage factor, truth be damned.

Blimp7990 ,

i like this idea, could buy that

CeruleanRuin ,

Was that part of the marketing at the time, or just some bizarre leap from the author? I’m having a hard time finding any good comparisons between La Forge and Spock. In season 1 Geordi wasn’t even in engineering, let alone the science officer. He was a helmsman, so in that sense more comparable to Sulu or Chekhov, and he certainly doesn’t have anything like the relationship with the captain that Spock did.

Is it just because he was a recognizable name at the time? It’s just a weird jump to make.

hesusingthespiritbomb ,

I mean let’s be real here they had every right to be concerned. TNG had serious problems in the beginning and had some pretty big flaws even as the show got going. Off the top of my head

  • The first few episodes (besides Q) were straight trash. Even if you take out the ample racism and sexism, they still kinda suck
  • Worf didn’t become a thing until Yar died. He was just kinda there. Also his hair looked ridiculous
  • Riker was half as sexy in terms of looks and a quarter as sexy in terms of personality
  • Picard was a dick. Not firm but fair. A straight up dick.
  • They straight up got rid of crusher for a season
  • The Ferengi were awful. Not like in a “lol what shenanigans is Quark up to now” but in a “TOS Gorn” way
Kolanaki ,
@Kolanaki@yiffit.net avatar

Riker was half as sexy in terms of looks and a quarter as sexy in terms of personality

Without any other context, you could easily assume that Riker’s beard is what really made TNG work.

wjmalik ,
@wjmalik@noc.social avatar

@Kolanaki @hesusingthespiritbomb
Whoopie Goldberg's desire to come in the show probably helped a bit, too. Or did she come for the beard?

loom_in_essence ,

Oh she came for the beard ;)

loom_in_essence ,

I love the first few episodes, I prefer babyface riker, and I think Dick Picard was a cool badass who I fully support.

But they should have kept Crusher, and the political conflicts were a ridiculous joke epitomized by the cartoonish ferengi. S3 gave us much better aesthetics and politics (though the new character driven storytelling might be a matter of taste).

cloudy1999 ,

I’m watching TNG now with someone who’s never seen it before, and that’s making me ‘see’ the show with fresh eyes. The first few episodes are so hard to get through. Some are straight up cringey. Many remember Code of Honor and Last Outpost as being horrible, but Naked Now is awful in its own way. Don’t get me wrong: TNG goes on to be an excellent, culture-defining show. When people talk about how good it is, they’re probably thinking about Measure of a Man, Inner Light, Darmok, and Best of Both Worlds.

Let me add that DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise got to build on the risks that TNG took. Those shows were more consistently good at their starts.

Electricorchestra ,

Hey Naked Now has Data laying android pipe and therefore is fully functional in terms of canon.

cloudy1999 ,

Jokes aside, it’s a great point. It adds even more meaning to Data’s evident attachment to Tasha later on.

Blimp7990 ,

and tryina get busy with the borg queen a decade later

hesusingthespiritbomb ,

Do you think the structured Soong’s character around the idea that he’d 100 percent be the type of guy to ensure Data had a fully functioning Penis?

Electricorchestra ,

Honestly from what we know of the Soong’s they probably almost never get laid so they 100% would try to make their androids studs in the bedroom.

Ilari ,

The Naked Now was a bizarre choice for such an early episode. It’s the very first one after the premiere, and it’s based on the crew acting out of character – before the audience has had time to learn what their personalities are supposed to be.

nxdefiant ,

Completely irrelevant to the topic, but my personal head canon is that Janeway admired Worf’s S1 Hair and copied it when she was given Voyager to command.

CeruleanRuin ,

She definitely wore it better.

NathanielThomas ,

Sigh.

Ok, let’s hear what you think the racism and sexism was.

Blimp7990 ,

well when I googled “racism in star trek tng” i got “code of honor” so maybe start there

result number 2 was also “code of honor” followed in third place by…well, the 1960s.

4 is code of honor, 5 is ds9, 6 is 1960s, and 7 is ‘beyond the stars’ one of the best episodes of all the treks, but only present in the results because it discussed racism. in the 60s (ok 50s so shoot me).

CeruleanRuin ,

Have you watched season 1?

ImADifferentBird ,
@ImADifferentBird@midwest.social avatar

Did you skip over Code of Honor? Wouldn’t blame you if you did, of course.

Blimp7990 ,

The Ferengi

they were awful, but they did give me a good basis for imagining wolf-of-wall-street types

T156 , (edited )

They straight up got rid of crusher for a season

I believe McFadden was fired, which was why she disappeared for no reason or fanfare.

TNG had serious problems in the beginning and had some pretty big flaws even as the show got going. Off the top of my head

You’re not wrong. I think the only main character that really had any development in the first 2 seasons is Dr Pulaski, going from someone completely unfamiliar with Data, and conscious machinery, to being an ardent supporter of his. We had a little but in Data settling into being an emotionless Android trying to learn to be more human, and Geordi becoming Chief Engineer, but they were very minor background tweaks to the characters.

Everyone else barely changed at all in that time, except for Lt. Yar, who went from being a living breathing person to corpse.

scarabic ,

I’ll bet that any TOS fans who were furious at the time probably did not go on to like the show. If they were looking for that witty love/hate triangle of Spock/Kirk/McCoy they didn’t get it.

But as the name suggests, TNG reached a totally new generation of fans. American culture had changed a LOT between these two shows and anyone attached to the old one was either old themselves or hooked on reruns.

TNG didn’t slap big right away, either. It took time to get good and find its audience. But I’m so glad they succeeded.

I say all this to point out that angry fans weren’t actually wrong. The Trek they knew was never coming back. It became a whole other thing for a whole other group of people.

The difference between this and, say, the Star Wars sequels is that those sequels disappointed fans AND failed to find a new audience that was just as dedicated and even larger.

People like to use this article to show that angry fans are just idiots- always there and usually wrong. But the TNG miracle hasn’t been repeated many times, if ever, by any of these other franchise rehashes that a Hollywood has shoved out to grab for cash.

BlinkAndItsGone ,

I’ll bet that any TOS fans who were furious at the time probably did not go on to like the show.

As a TOS fan who wasn’t too happy with what I had heard before TNG came out, I would bet against you. Most of them probably became TNG fans eventually, because the most impactful thing a show can do is simply to be great. Canon complaints are mostly about nostalgia, and if the show is compelling (especially if it’s compelling in a similar way to the old show), nostalgia can’t compete. If anything I’d guess that the people in this article were more likely to become fans of TNG, because it would have exceeded their expectations, which can make things seem better than they would otherwise.

AngrilyEatingMuffins ,

Angry neckbeards never change. Check out the reaction to the casting of Burton’s Batman

Blackmist ,

Or Heath Ledger as The Joker.

misterundercoat ,

“LeVar Burton: The new Spock” 👀

BlinkAndItsGone ,

Were you really a Trekkie if you thought TNG was going to be good in 1987?

Kidding, sort of. But I remember thinking it was going to be a cash grab, and I still think I was right to think so at the time. Keep in mind, you couldn’t go on the Web and instantly know everything about an upcoming TV show. I think I learned it was in production from the back of a cereal box. I didn’t even know Gene Roddenberry was involved. The Enterprise-D design was pretty weird, and the cast of characters was more than a bit out there–a Klingon? On the Enterprise crew? Come on.

twopaw ,
@twopaw@meow.social avatar

@The_Picard_Maneuver TNG was the first new-run, live television show- Trek show, too, fairly put- I asked and obtained permission to stay up to watch. I was 9 years old for most of 1987; on my 10th birthday that year I got to see Star Trek IV in a film theatre with my two older brothers, both Trekkermen themselves, who got their Sir Klingon into the brotherly business of Trek, comic books and science fiction soon and unquickly met after I was oot the chute at the end of 1977.

I always mistake The Voyage Home's release date for 1987 and not 1986, because the former was my ceremony.

twopaw ,
@twopaw@meow.social avatar

@The_Picard_Maneuver I knew that depending on the rented reel-print, some pressed cannisters of The Voyage Home included an early-remit trailer for The Next Generation by timing; I have no recollection of whether I saw that preview or not on my birthday at the Palace Theatre on Pape Avenue, north of Danforth Avenue, 36 years ago. I know I eventually saw a transcoded copy on Youtube, sometime probably in the last 15 years.

To be fair, I really liked and like TNG, despite its limits; although in retrospect I think it missed the point: Humanity by then is not perfect, but never wished to be.

twopaw ,
@twopaw@meow.social avatar

@The_Picard_Maneuver And therein really lay the rub for me, why it was often difficult to take seriously, even if some of TNG's stories were likely as good as the best science-fiction I've ever enjoyed and I posit were indeed so: every major character on the show who stuck around for all seven seasons was a caricature I could see right through, certainly full-time cast members.

It was like watching The Landlord's Play from The Big Lebowski, with the parts played by Starfleet officers and their families onboard taking the parts of high school popularity and jock and nerd clique students.

twopaw ,
@twopaw@meow.social avatar

@The_Picard_Maneuver And everything they did was completely defensible, no matter how horrible, how absurdly careless and abysmally stupid, despite their irony by cosmone in claiming perfection; they said it was Trek, Reborn. Oftentimes, it was Trek, Reduced. It really didn't quite understand what it was, most of the time, although I don't remotely fault any one actor, writer or idea man or woman involved.

Hell, the head prop designer, Rick Sternbach, is a fellow Furry enthusiast, and by a far earlier generation than mine a big fan of Steve Gallacci's Albedo: Anthropomorphics.

twopaw ,
@twopaw@meow.social avatar

@The_Picard_Maneuver And TNG almost yeeted me off the Trek-boat closet airlock.
One character in particular, a throwaway living prop and emotional forcefeedback character foil, written up by a minor, unprolific sci-fi writer with only two episodes to her name- the other DS9's Babel, which wasn't even entirely of her authoring; it was co-written by the showrunner Ira Stephen Behr- and who's now very happy to claim she invented him (bullshit; he invented you), happily rode off his coattails when it turned out people thought he was a better person than everyone who called him Broccoli.

LedgeDrop ,

As a kid, I saw a contest on a box of cheerios(?) where you could be an child extra in one of the first TNG episodes. So for most of the first season, I sincerely thought Wil Wheaton/Wesley was the winner.

Anyway, the first few episodes during season 1 were not great, but I was content to finally get some new material. I’m glad TNG had enough time to “find its own groove”.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Man, that cereal box really launched Wheaton’s career. Haha

Siliconic ,

Well, he didn’t have much of an acting career after TNG. I would highly recommend Wil Wheaton’s book Still Just A Geek that he just published a few months ago, I’ve been listening to the audiobook (read by Wheaton) and it’s really good, and there’s some stuff that’s “exclusive” to the audio version (stuff he thought of as he was reading it again lol)

kamenlady ,
@kamenlady@lemmy.world avatar

I liked him in Leverage

MajorHavoc ,

It’s fair to have expected TNG to be a cash grab. I’m sure TNG was a cash grab among all the other things it was. We all want to get paid, after all. I’m just glad it turned out to be so much more as well.

I’m reminded of the letters page of Aquaman in the issue after he lost his hand.

“To those of you saying we did it for the shock value, we have this to say for ourselves: we sure didn’t do it for the boredom value.”

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