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Should Star Trek Die?
securitas writes "The New York Times Television reporter William S. Kowinski writes about questions of the Star Trek franchise's viability due to overexposure, audience fatigue and creative exhaustion. Star Trek actor and director LeVar Burton (Geordi La Forge) is in favor of a hiatus, and is quoted as saying, 'Star Trek's just not special enough, not anymore.... They need to shut the whole thing down, wait five years, create an interest, an excitement, a hunger for it again.' Also quoted are Leonard Nimoy (Spock) and executive producer Rick Berman. The article is particularly salient given the recent announcement of Star Trek Online, a massively multiplayer online game scheduled to launch in 2007. Remember that Activision sued Viacom over the Star Trek franchise last year, ending the license despite a 10-year licensing agreement that originally expired in 2008. So the question is: Should Star Trek die?"
a long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...
The good of the many outweighs the needs of the few...
If Star Trek would die, so would half of the conversations on Slashdot!
"In Search Of..." and "Reading Rainbow" (ISO and RR for those of us who know and love the Trek Canon) are two of the least-watched and certainly least understood of the Trek Shows.
ISO was a Spock vehicle, a spinoff meant to explore the mind of our favorite Vulcan. Week after week he would show off his latest research; giving us a sense of what he was doing, peering into that scope of his while Kirk was seducing the alien babes.
Spock's facination with UFOs (naturally) later gave way to an obsession with Uri Geller and the Bermuda Triangle, by which time, most Trekkers left feeling that this show had jumped the shark.
RR was a prequel to the TNG storyline -- wherein a very gifted warp physics engineer shows his softer side by reading children's books, set at a time before he was blinded in a tragic e-book explosion. Paramount, for reasons that are not totally clear, decided to set this futuristic space adventure somewhere in modern times, and sadly, the pilot that explains the temporal anomoly was never aired and is lost to posterity.
Hope that clears things up.