We just finished Star Trek TOS. POS is more like it!
I get that Roddenberry had a vision, and that elements of the show were unique for the time. And I imagine most TV from mid-late 60s would appear to have many flaws if viewed today. But goodness, there was a lot of badness in those 80 eps.
Yet it spawned how many different TV and movie series.
Feel free to convince me TOS was more than what we perceived it to have been. But I’m mainly interested in suggestions of commercial franchises that derived from more modest origins.
I disagree of Star Trek being bad, especially for the time.
So much was cutting edge, a Japanese officer only 21 years after WWII, a black woman bridge crew member (who by the way had an ear piece like our modern blue tooth ones).
Spock was a great character.
Many episodes explored subjects that couldn’t be done on tv at the time.
The Avengers started as a standard police show. John Steed was a secondary character and not in all the episodes.
But in season two, Steed was given his classic wardrobe and partnered with women, singer Venus Smith and anthropologist Cathy Gale. Gale’s portrayal as an equal to Steed - and her all-leather outfits - quickly made her a star, and the show became must watching.
Honor Blackman, who played Gale, left the show after season three to become a Bond girl. British television was known for its meager salaries. So in season four Mrs. Emma Peel replaced her. She was intended to be as capable as Steed and as sexy as a Bond girl. (In British slang sex appeal was written as man appeal or M-Appeal, which sounds like Emma Peel. Subtle.) Diana Rigg was all that and more. The writers upped their game too, with some of the finest television of all time, bending all the rules to take advantage of the freedom of the 60s.
Rigg was being paid less than the cameraman during season four. She got a raise but anything else paid better and she left after season five. There was a sixth season with Tara King that is not a fan favorite. The New Avengers followed in the 70s. It had its moments but budget constraints were obvious and so was Steed’s aging. But Joanna Lumley did a great job as Purdey.
From a nothing to a candidate for greatest of all time. That’s a rise.
Yeah, the concept was something. But wading through all 80 eps, precious few of them are real keepers.
Of course, we felt the same way the last time we worked through all of Next Gen. And FOund DS9 unwatchable.
(We were a VERY BIG ST family, from when I watched OS reruns in college, to being excited when the first movie came out, watching TNG with our kids as infants, etc…)
I kind of feel like ST:TOS is a lot like Tolkien; maybe you watch/read it now, and think that it’s pretty good, but don’t really understand the hoopla.
But in their day, they were THE sci-fi series on TV and fantasy novel set that all others have been judged by ever since.
I also think that the longer episode counts of network TV sort of mandate that some degree of episodes are going to be abject crap. It’s just hard to crank out 22-25 episodes a season and have a large proportion of them be excellent, or even good.
Superman started in 1938 as a comic book, then climbed the ladder as a newspaper comic strip, a radio serial, movie serial, movie cartoon, low-budget TV show, lower-budget TV cartoons and finally made it as a major motion picture 40 years after it began. In the meantime, it spun off almost as large a universe as Marvel.
Speaking of humble beginnings, don’t forget Mickey Mouse.
A lot of this depends on what you count as the “franchise” and where you count it as starting or ending. If the three standalone Wolverine movies count as a franchise, each one was better than its predecessor and capped off by the excellent Logan. Similarly, if the Puss in Boots movies count as part of the Shrek franchise, The Last Wish was a wonderful film elevated well beyond it’s Smashmouth-underscored predecessors.
You’re not wrong about there being a lot of bad episodes of ToS. There were also a lot of good episodes though, many of which were written by actual science fiction writhers like D.C. Fontana, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison, and even Richard Matheson (the I am Legend guy). But in 1969 who the hell would have throught Star Trek would have had a motion picture just a few years after it was cancelled let alone the franchise it eventually became? It’s fair that made it you example.
I only remember the one good movie, the first one, when did they make two more good ones?
In the spirit of the thread, I’m happy to submit Warhammer 40k. For those of you who don’t know, Warhammer 40,000 is a science fiction table top miniatures war game produced by a company called Games Workshop in the United Kingdom. Games Workshop started in 1975 mostly producing wooden boards for games like go and backgammon, moved on to being the company handling the distribution of Dungeons & Dragons in the UK, and in 1978 they created Citadel Miniatures which would produce minaiture figures for use with D&D and other games.
It would take too long to go over their entire history, but last year Games Workshop took in a total of £445.4 million in revenue with Warhammer 40k being their most profitable IP. You can find Warhammer 40k novels, video games, toys, movies, other licensed products, and of course you can still buy the miniatures and rules to play 40k. As far as miniature war games go in general, there’s Games Workshop and whoever is in 2nd place is so far behind it really doesn’t matter.
Peanuts (Charlie Brown, Snoopy) started as a modest daily comic strip in 1950 and spawned dozens of animated TV specials and a handful of theatrical movies.
Way back, 1887
Sir A. Conan Doyle wrote a magazine story about a fictional detective.
A Study in Scarlet. In a Beetons magazine.
Now Holmes is a household name. Many books, many movies and TV shows. In many media forms from animated children’s versions, ads and commercials, to Holmes and Dr. Watson in a modern time versions. Many “in the style of” books by various authors.
The Simpsons started as a handful of animated shorts on the Tracy Ullman Show. A 1/2 hour weekly show was started based on those shorts and has been running for 35 years already. One movie has been made already, Simpsons merch abounds, and the show is scheduled to run until the heat death of the universe even though it hasn’t been any good in years.
Reading through the replies, it seems to me that starting from humble beginnings (very few candidates mentioned were ever mediocre in context IMHO) is the default scenario, and how could it not be? Hits aren’t made, they happen, if they happen.
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