Dunno. Anticipating a missionary career?
Now that you mention it, there are other fictional phenoms besides ST that garner fanatic devotion, at least in terms of how far their devotees are willing to go, both literally and figuratively. I have a co-worker who used to be totally into Highlander, travelled thousands of miles to conventions, and maintained a worldwide network of e-mail acquantances on the subject. She used to talk my unwilling ears off about it, until she found out that the star was something of a jerk.**
[/QUOTE]
javaman you would do well to note that, however many shows have devotees who behave this way now, it was in fact Star Trek fans who (if you’ll pardon the expression) boldly went there first.
**
Well you can think something is silly or over the top without devoting all that much energy to it. I think people who learn how to speak Klingon are silly. It doesn’t mean I put a whole lot of effort into it though. That would make me as obsessive as them.
**
Does something have to impact my life for me to have an opinion about it?
**
I’m not the costume wearing type but I think they’re pretty cool. I can’t imagine a convention without people dressing up. One of the coolest parts of Project A-Kon are all the people dressed up as anime characters. Of course one of my pet peeves are people who are way to fat to be wearing certain costumes. I’m sorry but if you’re 5’10 and 270 pounds then that Star Fleet uniform probably isn’t a great idea. But you have the same problems at beaches so what the heck.
**
Do you speak Klingon?
The fact that he spawned the most successful television franchise isn’t all that impressive to me. Especially considering that most of the last series and a healthy chunk of the one before that was crap. He did provide a future where people lived in peace but at the same time he gave us characters that were devoid of any humanity. Looking back at the best episodes of TOS how many were written by him?
But his influence on pop culture can’t be doubted. What American doesn’t know who Mr. Spock is?
Marc
astorian wrote:
Because there have been nine movies, not eight, you insignificant little Trekkie-wannabe! Get out of the way and let the real fans talk! 
My God, what have I started?
Please forgive me for answering in a general way; it’s hard to remember who said what.
Javaman, I went through a period of calling myself a Trekker about 20 years ago. Then I decided, “To hell with it. I’m a Trekkie.” No offense, but Trekker sounda a bit pretensious.
SPOOFE, the Big E could run rings around that lumbering whale at warp. And if you want to see a Star Wars nerd, catch Nitz on MTV’s “Undergrads” this Sunday Night!
kaylasdad99, I think that when the mainstream latched onto Trekkie and made it a synonym for geek is when Trekfans started looking for a more respectable term.
About conventions. A lot of people point to the antics of fans at a convention as an example of geekiness taken to extremes. I see them as a chance to express yourself around other hard core fans who understand your madness and to pretend that the Worlds of Roddenberry and Lucas are real, if only for a while.
I understand that a lot of fans DO fit the stereotype, but I have also met Star Trek fans in the oddest and most respectable places where you would never know they were Trekkies until they had to leave to catch DS9 or Voyager.
Me, I have gone in costume.(red and white jumpsuit from The Wrath Of Khan). I do know some Klingon.
As far as love goes, I met AtomicBitch at a con. (God, if she ever finds out I called her that, she’ll kill me!)We’ve been married 19 years and have a son who is merely amused at his parents’ craziness.
Thanks for the answers.
So why is it bad to learn to speak Klingon?
Is it any worse than Latin or Greek? Or Morse Code?
They have about the same usefullness as a communication tool, essentially amounting to a neat code to use with other people who have figured it out. Languages unsupported by actual living culture can all be called silly and a waste of time to learn.
So?
Silly people are the fun ones. So I’ll be hanging out with the weirdos in costume who play with the cool toys, and you can go be serious all you want. (You can’t make me grow up, nah!)
Its fun, its a hobby, life goes on, with flavor.
Well, Paul Riddell, the SF critic, echoes my opinions of drooling Star Trek fanboys, what he calls the Church of St. Spock the Pointyeared, inthis coulumn
I’ll add that Latin and Attic Greek were living languages with a vibrant literature. Klingon is an artificial language created by Marc Okrand, a noted linguist, for the third Star Trek movie. There is no Klingon Martial, or Plato, or Tacitus.
What really cheeses me off about Star Wars and Star Trek fans is that they have ruined science fiction. Fanboys will get rockhard over a juvenile piece of crap like “Star Trek:Insurrection,” but will stay away in droves from a genuinely visionary film like “Dark City.” They buy jejeune, badly written Star Trek “novels,” but they don’t support SF magazine and non-brand novels. “Amazing” and Science Fiction Age" died last year, and the remaining SF magazines all have reported declining sales. How many new worlds and compelling visions have we been deprived of because a writer needs to pay bills by writing a Star Trek juvenile instead of creating something original?
Science fiction has been called “the literature of ideas,” but there are damned few real ideas in Star Trek or Star Wars. Oh sure, TOS in the 60s did address contemporary issues, but that was then. Rob Berman, who inherited Roddenberry’s mantle, has turned out boring, unimaginative plots ion order to squeeze out a few more bits of revenue from an aging franchise.
Watch “Babylon 5” or “The Prisoner” to see how good televised science fiction can be.
Tracer, you bastard! After months of therapy, I had managed to completely forget “Star Trek: Insurrection,” and you had to remind me of it!
I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU, I HATE YOU!
Oh God, poor F. Murray Abraham! Little did he know when he collected the Best Actor Oscar that his career would fall to an odd-numbered Star Trek movie.
Now, I’m pissed. I cut my teeth on Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein.
My library is full of Niven, Harrison, Blish, Pohl. I haunt old bookstores to get hold of Weinbaum and Tenn. I camped at the newsstands to await the latest issues of Analog and F&SF, so I’ve got my science fiction props, boy.
I didn’t start reading ANY of this until AFTER I got turned on to it by watching STAR TREK.
And I bet my story is echoed by thousands of other fans.
**
sniff sniff I love you, man!
Marc
Ahh, but for plain neat-o factor <i>Dr. Who</i> trumps them both.
Think about it, a guy traveling through time in a spaceship which looks like a telephone booth.
And no toupees either.
What does Star Trek have that is so deserving of worship?
Special Effects: I’ll give them that. For a television show they always had good special effects.
Characters: They’re all pretty uninteresting. Few of them had any real flaws and none of them really changed during the series. Picard in season 7 was pretty much the same as Picard from season 1. I don’t expect them to be completely different characters in the span of a few years but I do expect some growth. And did anyone actually care about Data’s search for humanity or Wesley Crusher?
Writing: To be fair once in a while they came up with a few gems. Even Voyager had at least one good episode. DS9 didn’t really become a very good series until they started to imitate Babylon 5. Voyager was so bad they had to add a pair of tits and a nice ass to get people to watch. And they rely so much on really lame plot devices, usually based on techno crap, in order to carry the show. Voyager was probably more guilty of this then the rest.
How many tense moments were there in Star Trek? Very few because you knew in the end everybody would be ok and there would be few long term effects. DS9 had a few of course but that was after they copied Babylon 5.
So many people might simply laugh that so many people enjoy a show that really isn’t all that great. Granted a lot of people enjoy shows that aren’t all that good but you don’t see them going to conventions for them.
Marc
How about Connie Willis, Alexander Jablokov, Octavia Butler or other contemporary authors? It’s not enough to read the classics, you have to support today’s authors to keep SF an an economically viable literary genre.It’s great that Star Trek turned you on to written SF, but that doesn’t detract from Star Trek being vapid, juvenile, unimaginative dreck. Want an alien? Slap some latex on the forehead, give 'em an earring. Compare the Narn and Minbari makeup on B5, the enigmatic Gaim and P’akmara.
I think the problem with most current sci fi authors is that they aren’t that good. I haven’t read any good recent sci fi books myself. And to me wether or not the book is good matters more than the genere. The best contemporary authors I have seen are mostly fantasy or fantasy/sci fi combined.
And when you ask “why do this?” or “why do that?” what is your point? Other than to show that your not good at understanding that other people have valid reasons for their actions. Those reasons may not matter to you, but then again thats why your not doing it.
Michael Ellis:
Oh, even Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure had that.
It appears as though Atomic’s topic has been hijacked. And as one of the people who hijacked it I apologize. This isn’t suppose to be a thread about why Star Trek sucks or the current state of science fiction.
I’ll attempt to answer your question, AtomicDog.
I think a lot of people don’t take science fiction or fantasy movies, television, or books very seriously. Look at what sci-fi and fantasy has had to represent them for the past few years.
Hercules: The Legendary Journey
Xena: Warrior Princess
Battlefield Earth
Final Fantasy
Dungeons and Dragons: The Movie
Star Trek: Voyager
Andromeda
Highlander: The series and all the movies
Lost in Space
The examples of silly, childish, or just plain bad is found on television within this genre. No wonder people don’t take it very seriously. To top it off sf/fantasy fans tend to pay attention to every little detail to the point of obsession.
Don’t get the impression that I’m being hard on these people. I myself know scads of useless information about Star Trek and Babylon 5. I’ve even played wargames based on both series in the form of Star Fleet Battles and Babylon 5 Wars. I consider myself to be an obsessive fan and that’s ok. But there are still some fans that make me thing “Get a life, pal.”
Marc
Don’t be too harsh on the old hack. While I am no Roddenberry defender (he was, by all objective accounts, a Grade-A Bastard,) the decision to shelve Phase II in favor of ** The Motion Picture** was out of his hands from the beginning. The Suits at Paramount were pulling all the strings; Roddenberry had (thank God!) VERY little control over the franchise by that point.
I am just now finishing ** STAR TREK PHASE II, The Lost Series ** by Judith & Garfield Reeves-Stevens. I highly recommend it for the dedicated Trekker.
Learning a dead language like Latin is a waste of time. Learning a made up language like Klingon is just gay. It’s not even a language. The writers just make up words like k’blaght and use it to mean anything they want.
No, people who make a point of acting like wierdos to be different are tedious.
Also, examining the minutia of a any sci-fi series and attempting to reconcile it with actual laws of physics just sucks the fun out of the movie. It doesn’t matter to me if the Millenium Falcon is bigger on the inside than the outside for filming purposes. I don’t care if some made-up Star Trek ship’s specs doesn’t match with The 30yr Old Who Lives at Home With His Mother’s Guide to all Things Star Trek. Just try to enjoy the movie. It’s science FICTION.
And don’t forget:
Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
Starship Troopers
Wing Commander
Independence Day
The point is that it isn’t serious. It’s escapist fantasy stuff. And IMHO, very few directors can make good science fiction without a) being hokey b) sacrificing story and character development for SFX c) being derivative (how many slow-mo Matrix style shots have we seen?)
AtomicDog wrote, re. a Star Destroyer:
Now now, in one of the Star Wars novels, it was established that at least some spaceships equipped with hyperdrives were capable of performing a “hyperspace microjump”. This involved quickly jumping to lightspeed and then jumping back to normal space only a few million kilometers (or less) away from your original position. Furthermore, it has also been established (in the Thrawn trilogy) that while in hyperspace, a Star Destroyer is capable of cruising at 25000 times the speed of light, which is 25 times faster than Warp 9. If a Star Destroyer is capable of performing a Hyperspace Microjump often enough, it may theoretically be able to outmaneuver a warp-capable starship like the Enterprise.
Not that a Star Destroyer’s weapons are capable of hitting a target that’s moving faster-than-light, though. <ducking and running>
Now I’m pissed, too, and I regret backing you up earlier. Though I agree that it’s stupid to waste time with a made up language, I strongly object to your use of the word “gay” to mean “weird”. Gay is gay, weird is weird, remember it. Or did you mean “dumb”?
And Latin is NOT a waste of time. The great writers and historians of classical Rome are best appreciated in their native language. And Latin lexical fragments are so ingrained in modern English that understanding them gives one a great head start in understanding English.