Captain Kirk thanks 'Star Wars!'

Kirk always seemed to find himself in a time paradox. There was even a DS9 episode where the Temporal Police called him one of the worst violators.

Star Wars takes place "a long time ago in a galaxy far far away", which predates the core Star Trek timeline of the future. He is definitely right when thinking forth dimensionally.

(And yes, I agree that the popularity of Star Wars helped revive Star Trek as a franchise.)

 

I've heard this before, possibly from him... Makes sense too. Star Trek wasn't that popular in its original airing, at least not popular enough to keep it on the air. Some cult following developed, though, the fan conventions set a trend that grew for lots of other films and TV shows thereafter.

But Star Trek itself... there were attempts to get it back on the air... the infamous "Phase II" project that would have been a cornerstone of a new Paramount network back in the 1970s, but that never happened... then, as Shatner says, Star Wars surprised everyone. Only George Lucas believed in Star Wars... hence how he financed it himself, and only when he was nearly done did FOX come in and want a piece of the distribution deal... but then that movie succeeded wildly beyond even Lucas' expectations and caught everyone by surprise. I heard other movie studios were scrambling to compete.

As an aside... across the pond, the BBC had their own hit TV series in Doctor Who... Tom Baker most famously in the role was hitting his stride in the mid to late 1970s... and they were working on a script for a theatrical movie with Tom Baker's doctor at the helm. So the story goes, until Star Wars hit... and they saw how incredible the F/X were in that movie... and they just folded the idea of a theatrical Doctor Who movie because they didn't have the budget for it!

Meanwhile, back at the space ranch... Paramount suddenly remembered they had Star Trek... and resurrected some of the Phase II ideas for that first movie. That movie was rushed, and did poorly... but what's funny is... over time, and with repeated viewing, that movie actually holds up a LOT better than some of the later Star Trek movies (I'm looking at you Star Trek VI !)

But those movies helped set the stage to get TNG on the air... and the rest is history.

 

Isn't the rule of thumb that odd Star Trek movies are the oddest movies?
Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979)
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984)
Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986)
Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989)
Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991)

Star Trek Generations (1994)
Star Trek: First Contact (1996)
Star Trek: Insurrection (1998)
Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)

I'm not sure the "even/odd" theory carries past the numbered movies ... but I certainly liked the even movies better. (The Next Generation movies being better or worse on their own scale as the series wound down.)

I, III and V were too much "sci-fi" and not enough "wagon train" for my tastes. It seemed like they spent more money on CGI than scripting. II, IV and VI had meaty hero stories that happened to take place on a spaceship.

Generations was a baton pass ... and the Nexus storyline was more sci-fi than action. Insurrection was another deep story. First Contact and Nemesis relied on action and character development.

I cannot forget that Star Trek was "wagon train to the stars".


From Wikipedia:
The "curse"
Fans commonly considered the films to follow a "curse" that even-numbered films were better than the odd-numbered installments. The tenth film, Nemesis, was considered the even film that defied the curse. Its failure and the subsequent success of Star Trek (2009) were considered to have broken the trend. The curse has been mentioned often in pop culture. One of the best known examples occurred in a 1999 episode of the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, where it was referenced by Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg; Pegg, quite conscious of the irony played Scotty in the reboot films.

 

I find I like V quite a bit more than VI. VI really just has one core concept "potential peace with the Klingons" and then goes off in several different directions that don't seem very much like Star Trek to me. V, however... "The search for God" feels very much like the type of story the original 1960s TV show might have done... They did stories very much like V actually if you think about it with meeting Gods who turned out not to be Gods, and traveling outside their known universe.

 

There were elements of the original Trek in all of the movies ... none were complete departures. "V" did introduce the concept that Kirk always knew that he would die alone. And the relationships between the core crew were explored. Perhaps it is because the "false god" stories had been done several times before the core story felt like a rehash.

While the Klingons were fought constantly throughout TOS, "VI" introduced a new concept: Peace. The movie was released after the fall of the Soviet Union and Kirk's reservations echoed those of our world. Could we learn to work with "the evil empire"? A people that many Americans learned to hate through our cold war. The peace was also an important turning point toward The Next Generation where Klingons were integrated into crews.

 

That's what bugged me about VI... it started with a core concept that was new and strong... but then most of the rest of the movie was about something else. Kirk and McCoy in a prison escape movie for a while... then a murder mystery almost Angela Lansbury style with Spock trying to find "the real killers"... most of the movie ended up not being about finding peace with the Klingons until the speech from Kirk at the very end. I basically find most of the middle of VI to be a meandering mess.

Yep... although, thanks to DS9 there is also one Ferengi graduate as well... but not another Klingon. Also, to be fair... Worf was raised by humans... so no Klingon-raised Starfleet members... Worf's son went and joined the Klingon military when he was of age!

 

There are other academies. I look at it as the difference between going through the Air Force Academy versus the Naval Academy or the Marine Academy.

 

I did not say the other academies were Starfleet.

 

James has a point, sort of... They have done things like the episode of TNG where they crew-swapped Worf's brother to the Enterprise and Riker to a Klingon ship. I think that made Riker the first human to serve aboard a Klingon vessel, right?

So... they have had other Klingons serve duty on Federation ships... just not as Federation officers. Only Worf. I forgot about B'Leanna... being a dropout... and while wearing the uniform, only being a pseudo Starfleet officer due to the situation they were in being stranded.

 

Why did I think it was Worf's brother? I guess I combined stories from a couple of episodes or something.