And that’s an argument that is stupid! You are basically saying that by changing the design and by introducing new elements DIS belongs to a different timeline. But that’s stupid! They had to modernize the uniforms, technology and whole design because the design of the 1960s is so out of date that really no one (except some ■■■■■■■■ fans) would accept them as futuristic. Technology has marched on as has the whole SFX department. Things are today possible that the creators of Star Trek did not think of. And these things had to be included because if not no one would have believed it. But that’s the problem of science fiction in general, especially if it is several decades old.
And the “many” contradictions with TOS continuity were either explained or were no contradictions at all. I am talking about the proto holodeck from DIS season one. We have seen something like that already in TAS. And TAS is canon!
Remember that Roddenberry himself saw no need to explain all the changes he made for TMP because for him these were no changes. New technology allowed him to to update everything that was already dated nearly a decade after the last TOS episode.
I think many fans hate DIS because Paramount ‘killed’ their pet project Axanar and told avery different version of the story they wanted to see in Axanar, which was visually based on the first two pilots.
Do not cling to the visual design as if it were the only thing that defines Star Trek. The visual design is always based on contemporary fashion and style. And we all know how fast those things can change!
Do not cling to the technologic shown, because technologic that was considered science fiction fifty(!!!) years ago, may be common today and completely outdated in the time science fiction story takes place.
Concentrate on the story, but remember that we were not told everything in the episodes and movies that we have seen. Star Trek had not been created as a roleplaying game with dozens of sourcebooks. And don’t tell me TOS was not without contradictions. There were contradictions, there were costume and other errors, …
For my part, while I agree with the idea of being able to see Star Trek as something to aspire to, a hopeful take on our own future… I’ve never been able to see TOS as part of that.
I’m 34, so TOS was nearly two decades old before I was born, and by the time I started watching Star Trek, TNG was the current iteration. I’ve never really been able to look at TOS and see “our future”, because it looked dated to my eyes even then; it required more suspension of disbelief to assume that environments that looked so primitive were futuristic.
TNG, and then DS9 and Voyager to follow was less effort to envisage as the future. Touchscreens as ubiquitous was still a way off, and their effects capabilities and budgets were bigger, and grew with the years, so suspending disbelief was never as difficult as it was for TOS. Enterprise was deliberately set up to look more familiar than other Star Trek, with uniforms that weren’t too distant from the garb what real astronauts wear, but even that ran up against the issue of “needs to look more primitive than TOS… except TOS now looks archaic and anachronistic”… which is an inevitable problem when you consider how much of an inspiration Star Trek has been on technological development. And that’s before we get to navigating around TOSisms like the presumption that the 1990s would be a time of global conflict against genetically-enhanced super-tyrants who would be sent into space when the war ended.
It’s similar to the issue with a lot of cyberpunk fiction and gaming - they stopped representing the future a while ago, and started representing what the 80s thought the future would look like. Retrofuturism isn’t particularly to my taste, so a lot of that leaves me cold even though the things beyond the surface detail are interesting and engaging.
So, I’ve long seen TOS through the lens of “that was they best they could do with the technology and resources of 1960s network TV”. The first change of Klingon appearance was old news when I was born, and the idea that they changed it because now they had the money to make the Klingons look more alien has always made perfect sense to me (and acknowledging it in DS9’s Trials and Tribble-ations, and then explaining it in Enterprise’s 4th season, have always seemed unnecessary, even if I see potential story hooks that can stem from that explanation). I’m content with the idea that everything in TOS happened within continuity, but not exactly as depicted in individual episodes, because the ability to depict those events was limited by the constraints of producing a TV show. The same is true for me to a lesser extent of all Star Trek - the Star Trek I imagine is more cosmopolitan, more diverse, and smooths over a lot of the rough edges, because I’m not limited to a production budget, or to casting only the actors available in LA at the time, or contractual issues around royalties that limit recurring characters, nor am I beholden to studio politics influencing the kinds of stories told, or missteps like the sexism in Turnabout Intruder or the racism in Code of Honor, or minor details imagined off the top of a writer’s head for a single episode never again referenced, or the niggling inconsistencies that come from trying to rationalise an episodic series that lasted three years into a franchise and a setting that’s endured for fifty-three years.
Discovery is easy to accept for me, because TOS, at least aesthetically, was always hard to accept at face value. The Enterprise, and her crew’s uniforms, as seen in Discovery’s second season, are reimaginings that are easier for my brain to accept as futuristic… and as I was already internally presuming that things in the setting were more sophisticated than they were depicted on TV, it means I don’t have much issue reconciling it all.
My issues come when people try to hold Star Trek to a standard of internal consistency higher than it has ever actually managed, and declare that [new thing] breaks canon, as if canon was a singular and sacrosanct concept that had been etched in stone in 1966 by a single man… when Star Trek has always been the works of many people, with many different ideas, and the seams and incongruities between those different ideas and different stories and different incarnations has never been well-hidden.
NONE of TAS is considered canon - especially the Slaver Weapon episode. Larry Niven’s Kzinti are a completely separate storyline - BUT The Periphery IS shown on the map of STA! So?! Does this mean the developers are leaving the option open to include them? After all, what is included in one’s game is up to the GM.
Thank you! 
And that’s not completely true. Paramount removed TAS from canon in 1988, that’s true, but with the release of TAS on DVD the studio revised its decision declaring that every movie and every episode are canon. And BTW TAS gave us much background information that is canon!
“Mike and Denise Okuda did not include the animated series in their Star Trek Encyclopedia, but could not resist adding information on Spock’s life from D C Fontana’s excellent animated episode ‘Yesteryear’ This makes the animateds as official as adding the entire series. Most importantly, Gene Roddenberry kept my early Star Trek Concordance on his Paramount office shelf, and he used it often for his research. I visited the studio frequently, so GR had more than 10 years to ask me personally to remove the animated episodes from any reprint of my book. Even if Gene later came to dislike the concept, the series was originally acceptable to him and is now a part of the Star Trek legend.” - pg 76 - Star Trek Concordance (1995 Titan Books) - Bjo Trimble
if TAS is good enough for The Great Bird of the Galaxy and Bjo it is good enough for me
Falconer – nice post. Clearly, you and I are of a similar mindset and it’s unfortunate that Caranfang chooses to resort to name calling about our viewpoint.
I’m a person who loves TOS Trek the most, and I’m sure that a lot of it has to do with my own nostalgia for the show. For folks of our era, the look and feel of the series is important and I dislike having younger folks step in and dismiss this as if our opinions don’t matter. (I have this same discussion with my son who likes the first three Star Wars movies best, while I prefer the original trilogy. He likes the flashy special effects and amazing force powers, whereas I see those same things as negatives to the prequel trilogy.) For us, there is a certain magic in the look and the feel and the style of TOS that has never been replicated in any of the later series.
The three things that Falconer mentioned from Caranfang’s post are the same three things that bother me about prequel Trek series, both Enterprise and Discovery. (I watch both, by the way, and enjoy them.) I understand that the new technology has made cinematography more advanced, but I do wish that they would try to make the new similar to the old. The JJ Abrams Trek movies had a lot of the traditional uniforms and they didn’t look bad on the big screen, so I have no idea why Discovery couldn’t do this as well. DS9 had a “tribbles” episode where they replicated the original props, so there is no reason why Discovery couldn’t have tried to be more similar even if upgraded somehow.
Perhaps these are only things that bother folks of a certain age. Fans who grew up on TNG, DS9 and VOY maybe don’t have the same nostalgic feel for TOS that we older gamers have. I just wish posters would have more tolerance for others with differing opinions.
Becaue it was not possible. These designs are linked to the Kelvin timeline, but DIS was to be part of the prime timeline. So using them would have linked DIS to the Kelvin timeline and that’s something they did not want.
As I have already written, the problem is that the design of TOS is based on the view of the future from the 1960s. That design was already outdated a decade later. Using it several decades later may have pleased some fans but not the casual viewer. It would left them bewildered. And a bewildered audience is no audience at all. No one wants to watch a new science fiction show that does not look futuristic but as it was made half a century ago!
Remember that Trials and Tribble-ations was a special episode celebrating thirty years of Star Trek.
I’m only 34, but I watched TOS as reruns and TAS on VHS tapes from the library more often than I watched TNG. So I do love the aesthetics of the show a lot.
If we are really going to talk about “this doesn’t look futuristic now”, then hey buddy… DIS doesn’t look futuristic either, as an engineer, the “futuristic” look of DIS still looks very dated to me because writers are not very good at thinking about the future.
???
Well, they had to keep the basic Star Trek design. And they could not do everything that they could think of, because it still had to be less technological advanced than TNG. And remember how some fans ranted about the use of holograms in DIS. The rants would have been worse.
The Kelvinverse movies didn’t use the traditional uniforms; they use two updates of the TOS uniforms, but they’re different in numerous ways. Once you’re familiar with the differences, you can spot the difference between them at a considerable distance (uniform-spotting is part of how I’ve passed the time at Star Trek conventions between demo games). Part of that difference is accounting for modern, high-resolution digital cameras, rather than 1960s film.
In both cases, they’re reimaginings, updates using modern costuming, modern budgets, just like the versions seen on the Enterprise in Discovery season 2 (my favourite reimagining of those uniforms); a new take on an old design.
And “new take on an old design” is what I expect from modern Trek, at least aesthetically, and it’s what Discovery seems to be leaning towards, particularly in season 2 (right down to having footage from The Cage used in a “Previously on Star Trek” segment in front of one episode). Expecting everything to look exactly as it did in the 60s creates something that would look laughable on modern TVs - new Trek is being made to be seen on 4k, High Dynamic Range TVs, so the level of detailing in makeup, costuming, and set design - to say nothing of CG and other VFX - needs to be massively increased.
You can thank TSFS for that. In the original script Kruge stole a Romulan Bird of Prey in his quest for the secret of Genesis. Later revisions removed this subplot but retained the designation (and design) for Kruge’s vessel, now a Klingon design not a Romulan one. That’s the reason both Klingons and Romulans have Birds of Prey.
Right. And it irritates me every time I see one!
That’s perhaps the best known script error which became canon (and not just fanon like the assignment patches).
Why is “Slaver Weapon” not cannon?
The K’zinti?
I just consider them an offshoot or related to the Caitians.
I agree, Caranfang; I’m guilty of it myself!
In fact, I use John M. Ford’s “The Final Reflection” as my cannon of how the Klingons became as they are and as such the events in Enterprise and Discovery just didn’t happen.
Except the Caitians and even I think, an Edoan, were used in later movies.
The Kzinti are not the only reason. The whole story fist into Larry Niven’s Tales of Known Space but not into Star Trek lore. It is a rewrite of one of Larry Niven’s stories, done by himself, on Roddenyberry’s suggestion, after his original ideas for a TAS episode failed.
Seeing as how the very first “episode” (as a GM) you run changes official cannon and therefore splits off your own personal timeline!
i have allowed some things which i started out thinking would not work by asking them to explain how it could work in
one player wanted to play a gorn, i offered to just create a new but not mentioned in the show race but then he was able to create a backstory. he was found in a drifting nearly destroyed ship as the only survivor and a young child. thus he grew up not even knowing his race or culture. he is now the adopted brother of the captain (three of the players are linked in their pasts)
one wanted to be a joined trill but not have been raised an the home planet which i could not see as being joined is rare and a privilege. he was raised by parents who were researchers and is enough of a genius to have tasted well and been brought back to the homeworld for the training (my husband has a tendency to play brilliant but odd autistic characters)
if a backstory can be made that i can be made to understand then i figure why not