Precisely What Not To Do

PRECISELY WHAT NOT TO DO I am a Trekkie. I’m not the slightest bit embarrassed about that. Star Trek in all its many incarnations is superior. I like it, and I actually have loved it as long as I can keep in mind. Though I actually have never been professionally involved in the Star Trek franchise, I did spend a lot of years engaged on an analogous shared-world property: the Forgotten Realms. Working as part of that staff for a long time I tried to regulate what other transmedia properties had been up to, what helped them succeed, what drove them to failure or close to failure, what ignited their fan bases in a good way, and what sent them off into flaming rage. All the alternate Spock we’ll ever need. I quickly realized that you could’t please all of the individuals all the time, and it doesn't matter what you do, the web will present a discussion board for everything from well-considered and completely cheap dissent to babbling, hate-crammed nonsense. The only real method to filter via that to get a way of what works and what doesn’t is by looking at what sells and what doesn’t. A very small core group of Star Trek or Forgotten Realms fans will continue to purchase every little thing (or nearly every little thing) even if they really feel the folks in command of the franchise have failed them, but the largest part of the viewers will take a “fool me as soon as disgrace on you, idiot me twice shame on me” stance and can drop off when you give them stuff they don’t like. With the announcement of the brand new version of D&D burning up the internet I won’t get too deeply right into a discussion of my experience with 4th version D&D and 4th edition FR, simply to say that a complete lot of individuals were making an entire lot of selections that an entire lot of different individuals wished to make differently and everyone concerned with 4th edition (together with me) was blissfully pleased with some parts and miserable over others. It’s the character of a beast when t hat beast is made by committee. But last night time I finally sat down, due to Netflix, and watched Star Trek: Into Darkness. This is the primary Star Trek movie I did not pay to see in the theater. I didn’t even hire the DVD. I waited till I had already paid for it (through my Netflix subscription) and, nicely, I finally just couldn’t resist. And I didn’t simply not like it, it fully pissed me off. And right here’s the place we get to the title of this publish: PRECISELY WHAT NOT TO DO . . . Gee, nothing says “Star Trek” like a gratuitous underwear shot. Let’s say you’re good, resourceful, inventive, and fortunate sufficient to both create or inherit a massive worldwide transmedia franchise fueled by a giant military of rabid fans. What you have to do is method that like a health care provider would: first, do no hurt. Now, I know there are a minimum of a few people reading this who would say that the 4th edition Forgotten Realms did considerable harm to that settin g, and being part of the team that developed that, I share the blame if that was so. A lot of what went into the 4th version FR world was forced on us by radical revisions to the D&D recreation, particularly in the way in which magic worked. Some of the changes have been things I honestly believed, and proceed to imagine, would reinvigorate the setting, making it more open to players, authors, and game designers alike. And if 4th edition was a failure across the board everybody affiliated with D&D at Wizards of the Coast gets a spoonful of “blame”â€"but which considered one of us was assigned to know ahead of time that the complete world financial system would crash the second the game was released? That wasn’t me. And let’s face it, video games way back siphoned off the lion’s share of the D&D (and other RPGs) viewers so the large customer base from even the third version days wasn’t there to either prefer it or not. But one factor I can say with complete confidence tha t we did right within the improvement of the 4th edition Forgotten Realms was that we started with the straightforward idea that everything that got here earlier than is still good. Every FR novel continues to be canon. Every FR sport product continues to be canon. That, greater than anything, was why the timeline for the “base” setting moved up up to now in the future, so we could determine the way to apply the 4th edition D&D guidelines because the “new regular” in the FR setting while not tossing out anything you’ve beforehand read or performed. Drizzt wasn’t recast with a sizzling younger actor and sent through a reverse-order version of The Crystal Shard. Drizzt progressed into the new setting, a setting during which the events of The Crystal Shard have been a part of the history of the setting. Remember the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribble-ations”? Just precisely like that. Deep Space Nine was set within the “future” relative to the original coll ection, however was firmly based on the concept the unique sequence episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” actually did happen. Right? But the extraordinary violence that’s been carried out to Star Trek with these new motion pictures has accomplished simply the alternative. Using this time journey factor from the earlier movie we’ve been advised by the individuals who, whether or not they’ll admit to it or not, are short-term caretakers of Star Trek, the identical method that I was certainly one of a group of short-term caretakers of the Forgotten Realms, which is now within the palms of a brand new group, who, for what it’s value, are performing some really intelligent issues to maneuver the setting forward as they undo some of what the earlier version of the D&D game compelled on the setting. But the new Star Trek said to fans, like me, who've lived with this universe for our complete lives (I was two years old when Star Trek first premiered): “Hey, listen, all that tim e you spent watching Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, all of the previous Star Trek feature movies, and all the books, comedian books, and various and varied collectibles and whatnot? Yeah, all that’s no good anymore. But look, Uhura is basically young and skinny and has the hots for Spock!” “You wasted greater than 500 hours of your life watching all of those other Star Trek collection and films that suddenly simply by no means happened, however look: Scotty has a goofy sidekick now!” You have gotten to be f-ing kidding me. I sat by way of Star Trek: Into Darkness, appreciating the visualsâ€"I dug the aliens in the very beginningâ€"however the backwards-ass retelling of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, considered one of my all time favorite movies, and one I can actually recite line by line, was painful and depressing to watch. I didn’t deserve that. I’ve accomplished nothing however love you, Star Trek, and assist pay for you. And t his is the thanks I get? Everyone, including individuals who’ve by no means seen any Star Trek until this deserve lots various traces stolen from the actual film and otherwise a two-hour J.J. Abrams’s Star Wars audition piece (job properly accomplished on that rating, J.J., however Star Wars followers be warned). This is exactly what you don't do if you’ve received a preferred transmedia franchise. You do not stop and restart. Ever. You hold shifting ahead, and take none of your backlist off the desk, ever. And to think, we nearly did that to Dragonlance . . . â€"Philip Athans About Philip Athans I’m going to need to disagree together with your evaluation. Aside from having fun with the contemporary view of the brand new Trek versions, the continuity of the old stuff is, at greatest, suspect. At worst it’s horrible. Enterprise did really nasty issues to absolutely anything; that’s possibly why there are so many ideas that it was, in fact, “all a dream.” Also, sure, gratuitous underwear photographs fit completely into Star Trek. If anything, the new ones are too tame! I thought Enterprise was good TV however good Trek? I still haven’t made my thoughts up. I appreciated Enterprise however was, let’s say… nervous… about the entire temporal cold war factor. I even have a sense the series was cancelled before they had been able to tell the story they were really shooting for. The temporal chilly warfare was a really ambitious and engaging premise, it’s a shame it by no means reached its’ full potential. The solid by no means gelled as a crew for me, don’t k now what it was. Thank you for not destroying Dragonlance! That setting has it’s personal issues to work through and resolve earlier than new material can be introduced. Your proper, you can’t please all of the folks on a regular basis. With properties as old as FR and Star Trek you now have different generations involved and how many time do people from 2 or 3 generations agree. Just think, the guy who is now in control of Star Wars was in control of Star Trek. Can’t wait to see the rage that comes out of that movie. No matter how good or dangerous, it'll have the generations at odds. I share your dissatisfaction with Into Darkness. It had me sighing from the very starting, the volcano was absolute bunkham and as for the Enterprise coming out of the ocean? Urgh, they’re concealing themselves from the natives and they assume the easiest way to do this is underwater versus staying in orbit? The scene was just an train designed to look impressive and sure, the visuals were VERY impressive but it was blighted so much (a minimum of for me) by the truth that it made no sense. I thought the storyline was sound but the execution was poor. What drives me loopy is that Khan was performed by Benedict Cumberbatch quite than someone who had the same pores and skin tone and accent as Ricardo Montalban. They can’t use the alternate time line excuse as Khan went into the pod into the mid nineties and the time line didn’t split until long after that. Whatever colour he went in as he had to come out as so which was it? It can’t be each. Maybe it’s some scientific thing, Schrödinger’s Khan where he is each a Mexican and a white British guy, till you open the pod you don’t know. That doesn’t take something away from Cumberbatch, he was superb. I read somewhere that after they did a check screening of the first reboot movie the viewers mentioned they wanted more action and less Trek. I don’t know whether or not that’s true or not nevertheless it’s positively the way issues went. Indeedâ€"likewise Carol Marcus is suddenly Australian, but her father has an American accent. Why? Was she the one actress J.J. Abrams thought looked good in her underwear? Ah no, not Australian however English nevertheless it does still elevate the same question. All you can do was assume that maybe she was born, raised and educated in the UK however you s houldn’t should create your individual back story to explain the issues that don’t make sense. This was a huge problem throughout the movie and when I picked out the bits that niggled me somebody would say “Well perhaps it was because of this or perhaps it was that”. Robert Orci et al have been imagined to be telling a cohesive story but instead left us trying to find a logical explanation to make the nonsensical, sensical. And Alice Eve? If J.J. was so intent on having her play Carol Marcus why didn’t he simply have her use an American accent? I stand corrected re: the accent, although i rarely get that incorrect! And even though Ricardo Montalban was playing an Indian (Khan Noonian Singh) along with his Mexican accent… will we want to make that mistake worse? I don’t know… probably nitpicking now. But finally, Star Trek from 1966 on is way from excellent in terms of its own continuity and creative decisions, but when that was used by intelligent writers as a featur e, like the original collection klingons vs. the films/Next Gen klingons in “Trials and Tribble-ations” enjoyable was had by all. I can’t say I know much about Star Trek, however I do recall a good friend of mine being pissed off by the “actionizing” of his favorite sequence in the latest movies. Regarding Forgotten Realms, your efforts to maintain the continuity constant are very a lot appreciated. Thanks for the perception. As a 3.5 hanger-oner, and an enjoyer of the brand new ST films, I suppose I fall on the opposite facet of the road you could have drawn. But I respect and appreciate your earnest appraisal. Fill in your details under or click on an icon to log in: You are commenting utilizing your WordPress.com account. (Log Out/ Change) You are commenting using your Google account. 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