Fans reacting to the announcement of Star Trek: The Next Generation
Fans reacting to the announcement of Star Trek: The Next Generation
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.
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Were you really a Trekkie if you thought TNG was going to be good in 1987?
Kidding, sort of. 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.
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".
Man, that cereal box really launched Wheaton's career. Haha
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)
I liked him in Leverage
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."
@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.@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.
@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.
@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.
@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.