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.

marlowe221 ,

The perspective is interesting and enlightening. For me, TNG was MY Star Trek. The first episode aired when I was 5 years old and I watched every episode with my dad over the seven year run.

Part of me grew up on the Enterprise D!

eran_morad ,

I got into Trek only a few years ago. My son was curious and wanted to watch a few episodes of TNG. It was pretty captivating.

kamenlady ,
@kamenlady@lemmy.world avatar

I don’t have kids, i can just imagine the joy of watching Stat Trek with mini-me

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

I’m counting down the days. Even got mine a onesie that says “The Next Generation”

kamenlady ,
@kamenlady@lemmy.world avatar

That sounds like a Picard worthy Maneuver!

SulaymanF ,

I totally know what you mean. There’s a VR remake m of Enterprise-D called Stage 9. One of the live streamers broke down in tears of joy being in the shuttle bay in a VR headset.

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.

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!

JoMiran , (edited )
@JoMiran@lemmy.ml avatar

I remember when it first aired. I was not a fan. Having re-watched the entire series in a loop since the first airing (I recorded the broadcasts on VHS), I can comfortably say that the first season is pretty shit. Once it finds its stride though…

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

I think there are still a lot of people out there who watched the original and never gave TNG a chance. Yeah, once it grows the beard, it’s peak trek for me.

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

I can heavily agree with that. The first season of TNG is kind of stinky. But once it gets going its unstoppable.

Lorindol ,

My feelings exactly.

I saw TOS when I was 9-10 years old and it was mindblowingly good compared to almost anything else you could see on TV at the time in my backwater country.

Few years later I learned that this new series TNG will start airing and I was very excited. My disappointment was endless when I saw the pilot.

I strongly disliked the general production aesthetics and Enterprise-D looked just stupid compared to the iconic original/refit Enterprise of TOS era. The characters felt so empty compared to the old crew and the first season scripts weren’t so great, so I gave up on the series after seeing few episodes. This was in the early 90’s.

15 years later I saw a few episodes from the later seasons and to my surprise found that they were good. So I watched the entire series and enjoyed it. I still prefer TOS and love the new SNW, there’s something about the older era setting that just hits me in the feels.

Nostalgia is a powerful thing.

kamenlady ,
@kamenlady@lemmy.world avatar

Really fond memories tend to hit the right Spock.

paddirn ,

I watched it as an impressionable 6 year old and loved every minute of it, but yeah, watching through it again, the first season was rough.

Damage ,

I rewatched it recently and I found it better than I remembered. My partner who watched it with me for the first time loved it from the start.

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.”

MoistTummy ,

Might be wrong but I think they used a picture of Bronson Pinchot instead of Brent Spiner. Now I really wanna see Data acting like Balki from Perfect Strangers.

ArtieShaw ,
@ArtieShaw@kbin.social avatar

I really want to see both characters and actors swap shows.

"Back on Meepos, Unlcle Kalvash would reconfigure the deflector relays to reinforce phasers at random intervals, thus disrupting the enemy's shields. That certainly keep sheep on their toes!"

"Cousin Larry, before you approach that woman I must inform you that your chances of dating her are approximately 1.78X10^48 to one."

I would watch the hell out of that. So many wacky mixups!

thallamabond ,

You might enjoy Bob Wheeler who he played on Night Court.

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.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

It’s also funny that the article suggests that Laforge is the new Spock, and not obviously Data.

Coehl ,
@Coehl@programming.dev avatar

Yeah, the author was pretty obviously decided on his position and accuracy was an afterthought. But if you check his name, you’ll realize he makes a mean spicy chicken sandwich fwiw

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

I just noticed that he also spelled Riker as “Ryker”

drewx0r ,

That one actually isn’t a mistake. His last name was spelled “Ryker” when they were developing the show.

memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/William_T._Riker#Cha…

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Ah, I wondered! They were clearly thinking that the Y makes it more science fictiony.

transwarp ,

If you read the initial material, Data is drastically different. There is no explicit mention of being unemotional, just that he tends to speak more formally. He’s supposed to be more like the Ilia probe than Spock.

Worf didn’t exist at first, so Geordi the teacher with bionic vision would be the most “other” character. If they’d seen any of the early press material for Phase II, Spock’s replacement there was a very junior officer.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Wow, could you imagine the show without Worf? It just wouldn’t feel right.

transwarp ,

The idea was that the Klingons had joined the Federation and we’d see Klingon Starfleet personnel in the background. When they did add Worf, he was to be more frequently Data’s relief than Yar’s.

lightnsfw ,

Help Geordi is staring into my soul.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

There had to be a better picture of him to use, lol

WizzCaleeba ,

Nope, that’s the best picture I’ve ever seen of him.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Counterpoint:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/8fa37ea9-cfbb-45ac-a1f8-306ccece3b70.png

eran_morad ,

dope af

musictechgeek ,

LeVar Burton has striking eyes to begin with. When a person is used to seeing him as Geordi with his visor on, seeing him with it off is like he has 100 watt bulbs screwed into his head.

misterundercoat ,

“LeVar Burton: The new Spock” 👀

paddirn ,

“The Reading Rainbow guy on MY Star Trek?! Oh god, is he gonna read a book to the shields to get them to hold?”

JoMiran ,
@JoMiran@lemmy.ml avatar

It was mainly “Kunta Kinte?!?” coming from the boomers at the time.

Anticorp ,

He reads several actually. He even turns documentation into a holographic representation of a woman and makes out with it. Typical Geordi.

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Yeah, you don’t become chief engineer by never reading a book.

collegefurtrader ,

Then acts all weird when the real woman isn’t into it

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

An engineer falling in love with virtual women but being awkward with women in real life? That seems a little farfetched.

collegefurtrader ,

The writers were a little TOO good sometimes

Anticorp ,

She was married, if I remember correctly.

demlet ,

That’s some tasty retro-nerdiness.

Sanctus ,
@Sanctus@lemmy.world avatar

At least it reads like they were upset about diversity

maegul ,

Honestly, those people, or rather their opinions, can all go to hell.

A new star trek series then or now won’t take away, alter or affect in any way TOS and their ability to enjoy it. Not to mention how incredibly un-Trek like it is to literally avoid “explore[ing] strange new worlds” like the plague.

I get that Trek is comfort food for many of us, and that probably creates a strong form of protective nostalgia, but staying in the past to the exclusion of the future is just awful (not to mention that I’m personally bothered at the extent to which this has happened with modern Trek and it’s proclivity for reboots and prequels, SNW becoming increasingly both).

Also, is that picture of Stewart from Dune (1984)?!

Screwthehole ,

There is one legit worry in the article, that the new show would impact TOS movies. But the rest of the article is spent talking about how it would be impossible for the new show to be good. It’s wild to read it with the benefit of hindsight lol

The_Picard_Maneuver OP ,
@The_Picard_Maneuver@lemmy.world avatar

Especially knowing that they went on to make 6 movies!

drewx0r , (edited )

Two of them were made after this article came out (he mentions four movies being made. Star Trek IV came out in 1986, TNG premiered in 1987). So Star Trek V 😬 and Star Trek VI 👍 were yet to be made.

maegul ,

how it would be impossible for the new show to be good. It’s wild to read it with the benefit of hindsight lol

But also, so what if it turns out to not be good? You can’t know ahead of time in the same way no one knew TOS would be good. Plus, if being progressive was remotely anything these fans valued in Trek, there was plenty of room for improvement. Like, how has Trek fared against the Bechdel test? I’d imagine it takes up until Voyager that you start to get consistent episodes that pass (I’m not sure how often Jadzia-Kira and Troy-Crusher conversations happened)

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