I knew that the upcoming movie is a reboot, figured that’s just Hollywood. But I recently read that the story actually retcons the Star Trek timeline, by having history be altered so that Kirk & Co. meet up years before the continuity of the original show. Is it really official canon that the stories of the original show are not valid anymore?
It’s fiction. Can’t you just choose to believe whatever you want? Why does it matter to you what the “official” canon says? I’m not being snarky, I truly don’t understand why anyone would care what’s “official” or not when it comes to a fiction that’s been around for so many years; why the dictates of others would affect you at all. Like, if the official canon invalidates the TOS episodes, you won’t be able to enjoy watching them anymore?
Roadfood - One of the things I enjoy about long-running series, whether the genre is Science Fiction, Mystery or Fantasy or whether it is a series of books, films or comics is the capacity to consistently self-reference throughout the series.
Yes, it is fiction; but I love it most when care has been taken over the grand arc of the story to treat even passing details as established fact. Rather like the way in which the Classics adapted and expanded on each other - Homer is, after all, only fiction, but Virgil was not allowed to say that Homer got all wrong! Virgil had to come up with clever ways of troping the story without contradicting it.
I’m sorry I have no answer to the OP. I’m sure it will be enjoyable no matter what, but I, too, am hoping they haven’t completely chucked out what has gone before in the chronology of the story telling in search of a new story line.
I doubt we’ll see much continuity to TNG, DS9 or VOY either, so may as well just treat this as a whole new continuity. When you write your fanfic, just be sure to be specific.
Kirk stood by the edge of the massive canyon watching the sun of the alien planet fall over the horizon. The canyon did not remind him of the time he drove a 1958 Chevrolet Corvette down a cliff while being chased by a cop riding a hover bike. Nor did it remind him of the time Captain Pike gave him a pep talk after a bar fight. It did not remind him of those times because neither event ever happened.
While Kirk was not remembering things that never happened. Doctor McCoy was silently standing next to him waiting for further orders. Seeing as McCoy is a doctor and not a mind reader, he would have to wait for Kirk to issue those orders verbally.
Yeah, either way I’d view it as a new continuity, rather than a retcon of canon.
Once something has become big and unwieldy enough over a period of decades, each new vision for the resetting of the franchise is establishing a new, localized canon.
If you look at the Masked Rider TV series in Japan, each new series reboots the entire story, giving new origins for the characters, a new explanation for their powers, a new explanation of the workings of the universe, etc. though of course it all fits within certain general guidelines. But outside of that, there’s novels and manga, t-shirts and toys, based upon that particular incarnation. The TV show is at the center of the universe, so it–and the principal visionary behind it–decides the ultimate canon for that continuity, but that doesn’t impact other seasons.
The big question is whether this will be the beginning of a new franchise reboot, or simply a one-off. And if it is, whether it will turn into a TV series, or continue as a set of movies.
I’m inclined to embargo any further Star Trek nonsense involving time travel. The idea of a Star Trek 90210 is nearly as offensive to me as the job done on Starship Troopers by that Verhoeven person.
Oh, and the nacelles look like they’re capped by gumball machines.
I might just watch the bits with the female yeomen.
Yes, and in the case of Trek, much of the so-called “canon” accreted quite accidentally for a while, rather than in a consistent systematic manner. TOS, originating in a time long before story-arcs were expected, had its niggling inconsistencies but avoided becoming majorly self-contradictory, ironically enough, by NOT pretending to give us a look at the Big Picture/Rest Of The Story, and hewing to an actually very small Universe consisting of the Enterprise, her command staff, and what happens during a 5-year mission, with any references to the past or to what happens beyond their immediate surrounds being exclusively that which moves the plot of the episode in question.
By now, however, with all the later material including “First Contact” and specially “Enterprise” you’ve introduced plenty of inconsistencies vis-a-vis the “canonical” setting at which TOS “inserts” into the timeline, so you would have had to either do an It Was Just A Dream on a whole heap of that post-78 “canon”, in order to get us back to the world portrayed in TOS Season 1, or ANYWAY change that world to something that matches all the deuterocanonical material from the films, TNG and its derivatives, and Enterprise. You might as well reboot and do neither and both at the same time – events from various continuities come together and out emerges a whole new one.
That said, it WOULD have been nice to see a non-reboot, unintervened “Trek Begins” with young Kirk working his way up through the ranks and slowly accreting his group of friends and colleagues and maybe saying in some cases “when I have my own ship I’m going to want YOU on it”.
Of course, their mildly abused parallel-timeline gimmick always allows you to re-reboot. (Which is not to say that I’m not annoyed when you take things to the extreme like the major comic-book publishers, who have been rebooting their universes twice a decade yet still pretend to maintain continuitiy.) But I’m quite willing to give this redo a fair chance.
Or at least the immediately preceding bits that led to his assignment to Enterprise. He got to Captain quickly for a reason - let’s see it.
The “Ultimate Marvel” line of comics took characters with overly complicated backstories and simplified them - giving characters new origins, etc. The Ultimate storylines are independent of the original storylines, which are still being continued. I think of the new Star Trek movie as being “Ultimate Star Trek” - and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Star Trek novels and comics that continue the TOS continuity as well as novels and comics that follow the new movie’s continuity.
The nice thing about any series where you have time travel is that you also have a handly explanation for any canonical inconsistencies. IOW alternate timeline.
I forget where I read it, but some sci-fi author made the point: It’s your fantasy world and you make the rules of reality be whatever you want them to be. But once you make them you have to stick with them, they have to stay internally consistent, or else the illusion cannot hold.
This movie trades on the ST brand and that brand comes with fans who have a real appreciation for the characters and the universe they inhabit. To benefit from that branding without staying consistent to the characters and/or their universe is, well, cheating.
Cheating may give a good result, we’ll see, but it still disappoints on its face.
Star Trek has always been very poor with its continuity, even before the movies and TNG. If the new movie doesn’t contradict a lot of previous information given in the franchise, well that it wouldn’t be Star Trek, now would it?
That only applies if a single writer is creating - or at least overseeing - the world. The Trek universe, OTOH, has been created haphazardously by dozens of creators of varying ability and with little to no quality control. Even if you consider Roddenberry the ultimate creator - which Roddenberry? The two-fisted, all-American Roddenberry of the 60’s or the utopian, touchey-feely Roddenberry of the 80’s?
The fact of the matter is that there is no single coherent Trek reality. I personally, love the universe of TOS and loathe what it’s become, so to me, this reboot is a very good thing.
Yes, once you see the new movie, you will have no recollection of TOS or any of the Star Trek Films that featured the original cast. No Motion Picture. NO Wrath of Khan, NO Search for Spock, NO The Voyage Home, NO The Undiscovered Country and Parts of Generations will make no sense as Kirk will be invisible.
Don’t go see it.
Other Star Trek fans agree that the new movie is horrible.
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/trekkies_bash_new_star_trek_film?utm_source=a-section
A sequel has already been greenlit.
You say that like it’s a bad thing. 
If you can guarantee me that after seeing this movie I will have no recollection of Insurrection, Nemesis, and the majority of Voyager and Enterprise… I would like to buy a ticket, now, please.
Tom Servo’s cousins?
But you will have TOTAL RECALL of STV:The Final Frontier!
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!