Slashdot Mirror
TrekUnited Reports Mission Successful at Trek Rallies
Lord Prox writes "TrekUnited.com has the scoop on the LA/Paramount, Tel Aviv, and New York rallies. Surprises include a group of donors pledging a resounding $3mil and the appearances of cast and crew members. Reuters and Wired have details on the rallies and I took a few snapshots as well."
Major combat at UPN is finished?
The campaign to save the show is headed by Trekkie Tim Brazeal. Brazeal, 42, is galvanizing thousands of fans worldwide to collect $32 million to pay for the cost of a fifth season of Star Trek: Enterprise.
The contributed money is transferred to a secure account set up at ORNL Federal Credit Union which only multiple trustees can access.
Looks like they have things covered, no? After all, $32 million is not $32,000
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
c'mon people...
we need a 20 year break from teh Trek.
Okay before things get out of hand let me make a few points on behalf of myself and fellow Star Trek fans.
1 - To BSG fans, while it may be a good show, it's still not Star Trek. It's not set in the familiar setting and universe that Star trek fans like and know.
2 - Why is having only one good sci-fi show on good enough
3 - To all of you who watched the first couple of seasons, it's a gotten a lot better and is hardly the same show. I stopped watching midway though the second, but came back in the fourth and it's much better. If it continues the way it has gone in this past season it should easily pass Voyager in quality and could potentially reach TNG standards
I also watch BSG and the two Stargate shows, but I also like Enterprise, and would like as many options as i can get.
Cast members were seen laughing all the way to the bank.
They want their basement back.
nuff said
Just let Roddenberry's ghost rest in peace and stop milking the cash cow.
And I'm posting anonymously so all the fanboys who don't know good sci-fi from schlock don't start sending me hatemail.
Don't get me wrong, Enterprise is an okay show but there are many others out there that are so much better that don't even get to see the light of day. In an era where Battlestar Galactica and Babylon 5 are superior in almost every conceivable way is there really any room left for Star Trek?
TrekUnited campaign speeds up on an energizing Friday
Rallies draw attention on fan efforts / TrekUnited fund passes 50,000$
Posted by: Chris R. - 02.25.05
As fan rallies in Tel Aviv, New York City and Los Angeles to protest the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise have come to an end, first reports indicate a "Mission successful!"
On Thursday, Israel-based Star Trek fans met inside Tel Aviv University for an information lecture and Star Trek screening, as a first of several global rallies voicing support for the show. BBC Entertainment reported on the event.
In New York, rally participants had a busy Friday despite the icy temperatures, touring from CBS, NBC, Viacom, Paramount's New York headquarters and FOX station to the Sci Fi Channel office - the logical home for Enterprise, as a "Save Enterprise" funded L.A. times ad stated one week ago. Several members of the group managed to get on the "Today Show". Local media and ABC reported.
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, hundreds of fans gathered at the gates of Paramount studios for the main rally of the day, led by Tim Brazeal, founder of the SaveEnterprise and TrekUnited campaigns. From 8:30 in the morning, the rally did not only draw attention from the bypassing cars on Melrose Avenue, which showed their support by honking and driver's waving. Cast and crew of "Star Trek: Enterprise" present at the day joined the crowd and thanked fans for their help to save the show, among them executive producer Manny Coto (as he had promised during a live chat at TrekUnited the previous week), writers Mike Sussman and Judith and Garfield Reeve-Stevens as well as actors Jolene Blalock ('T'Pol'), Anthony Montgomery ('Mayweather') and Jeffrey Combs ('Shran') and Mike Okuda, Doug Drexler and Michael Westmore from the production team. Special guests Eugene Roddenberry, son of Gene Roddenberry, and Larry Nemecek from Star Trek Communicator also attended the rally.
Major media were present to follow the fan efforts, including ABC, WB, Discovery Channel and local tv and radio stations, interviewing fans and present Trek United staff members. Startrek.com devoted a special feature to "Demonstration Day". In a Reuters news article, Candice McCallie, director of PR, pointed out the creative peak "Star Trek: Enterprise" is experiencing during its 4th season. "We believe Star Trek is worth keeping", chimes in Chris Wales, Chief of Operations, at startrek.com.
The rally dispersed at around 3:30pm local time, with a special Trek United / Save Enterprise party coming up later the evening with Manny Coto, Larry Nemecek, Mike Sussman and others from the Star Trek: Enterprise production crew.
Just an hour later, the TrekUnited fund for sponsoring production of a fifth Enterprise season surpassed 50,000$, with contributions having sped up thanks to the tremendous positive attention for TrekUnited's bold mission as well as a single contribution of 5000$ by a devoted fan.
The earlier surprising revelation that a group of donors had pledged a resounding $3m to TrekUnited certainly helped to increase enthusiasm for the fan campaign and its mission to keep "Star Trek: Enterprise" on the air and Star Trek alive. "As long as we can make a major impact with funds and fan support, I think we have a chance here.", Tim Brazeal told wired.com
And the campaign keeps making an impact. Tomorrow, European Star Trek fans will rally in London, UK. Stay tuned for exclusive information and footage for Saturday's main event, as well as the rallies on Friday.
But I tell you, this outpouring of support is amazing. Say what you will about the quality of the show, or the usage of the money - and I know the flood of comments about what a pitiful waste of capital this is will be starting soon. Hell, I'd like to have $3 mil to blow on [name of pet project] - who doesn't?
But here on Slashdot we love to piss and moan about the state of the entertainment industry and how people ought to vote with their money. I, for one, see this is a perfect example of some devoted fans doing just that. Too bad we didn't get this for Firefly - but we've got a film coming, so...
Bravo, fans!
Is this another Star Trek series? I keep losing track. That's like, what, seventy or so now, right?
I'm just asking for clarification, because it seems like the different sites linked are displaying very different numbers for the amount of capital these protestors have amassed. Wired seemed to think that someone was claiming they'd give $3mil, but had not actually handed it over yet. Reuters said they had $48,000 or so. I'm just wondering whether the $3 million is in the hands of the fans right now or if there's just someone out there claiming to have a few million to spend on Enterprise. I mean, it certainly helps the cause get attention. I'm just wondering whether this money has actually been ponied up or not. Anyone have more details? Is there something I'm not seeing?
While true, note the past tense to this. It does not suck now. In fact, while I used to hate it, now I like it.
Networks are stupid. Anything actually good gets run, it dies. It's like a law or something.
i am a soviet space shuttle
I think when you see this level of support for a show like Star Trek it shows it has passed the point of being a mere "TV show" and has become a full-fledged cultural phenomenon like jazz or abstract art or classical music.
I have a friend who is a grant writer. She does work for charties applying to government agencies and private foundations for to get money.
I think there is a good chance of supporting Star Trek through the use of grants from the government and from charitable foundations, the way PBS and NPR do. Museums do this kind of thing all the time, look at the MOMA in New York, that thing isn't funded by selling commercial time. Someone from Star Trek should look into this.
Lets face it, "Star Trek" has had it's day. Let it die a dignified death people....
a few snapshots
Please, I'm eating. Oh good, the server is dead...
Not the series, the poor guy's server.
/sniff
http://www.western-alliance.net/lordprox/trek/
the photo server died so fast I really wanted to see the pictures can someone put up a mirror?
What happens to the money?
Theres a good chance they won't raise enough money, and a chance that even if they do the studio won't be interested or they won't find anyone to air it.
If such a thing comes to pass, what happens then?
...they are both of the "connection was refused when attempting to connect to www.western-alliance.net" race. I too would love to see who the nerds are (though the "vader" in the filenames seems a hint) but your server doesn't want me (yet). I'm hoping it's just (I use the preceding word cautiously) fellow Slashdotters blasting the bandwidth away.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big trek fan. I've probably seen every episode of TNG. I at the very least found all of the movies to be entertaining, even if they weren't that great. I actually liked Voyager a lot. But, Enterprise just doesn't feel like trek to me. I admit I haven't watched much of it. But, in my opinion the acting, the atmosphere, it's just not what any of the other trek series were (which is a bad thing). I don't have a link, but I remember reading an article where Gene Roddenberry's son commented that Enterprise didn't live up to the ideals that his father had for trek. Please Enterprise fans, use the money for something better. Do something to make the world a better place. Gene would have wanted it.
More power to the server - we are being slashdotted !!
Frankly, I think things would improve a lot more if Braga/Berman got day jobs and let someone else drive for a while.
Cheers,
Three million dollars? To save a television show? Doesn't anyone care about the tsunami that killed over 250,000 people? Or any other world problems? Jeez...
I'm starting a group to raise money to fight against all these idiots who want to waste millions of dollars saving the worst Trek franchise ever. Talk about some people needing to learn to pick their battles.
Why isn't anyone saying let's start a new series that doesn't suck? Or how about a Battlestar Galatica style "reimaging" of the original series? It's not like we would suddenly face a huge outpouring of purists demanding we stay true to the original...every single Trek series has been more than happy to rewrite Trek dogma where it damn well suits them.
- JoeShmoe
-- I wonder which will go down in history as the bigger failure: the War on Drugs or the War on Filesharing
But is it watchable, or does one have to suffer through 2 years of high-tech, soap-opera before quality becomes obvious.
Durring the first year they insulted the viewers with soft porn (shower scence). If I want quality soft porn I watch UPN. Ooops, I stand corrected, Star Trek along with another quality show WWE is on UPN.
When I heard the plans for the series, I was quite excited. A return to the less politically-correct wild-west attitude of the original series, as we see how the federation was formed, how the history that preceeded the original series occurred, etc.
... to have "The original series, rehashed" and "The next generation, rehashed", etc, to fill our Trek-lust for another 40 years.
I was not looking for a series that basically forked and shattered the timeline, in a way that says "never mind" to the series's of the past. Perhaps that's the plan
Maybe that's the plan, but it's not the series I was looking for.
The mistake here is that these dedicated fans are essentially casting their cash into the coffers of a company who has it out for their TV show. This shouldn't be viewed as a project that requires their donations to make it happen. This should be an investment, something with a potential return on their capital.
I agree with everyone who said that the first couple of seasons sucked, although it had its moments; season three was sometimes pretty cool, definately an improvement. The lack of other good shows on TV (I hate reality TV) kept me watching.
Now that Coto's in charge, season four kicks ass! Too bad so many people already wrote the show off. I just saw an episide that explains beautifully why Klingons looked different in the original series, and even fits in with Worf's comment in the DS9 "tribbles" episode ("We don't talk about it"). That's the kind of thing they should have done from the get-go, rather than screwing around with that "tempral cold-war" crap.
Here's hoping the show can continue!
We apologize for the inconvenience.
The thing is, these days, most young people see 'Star Trek' as a sort of nerdy, antisocial thing that only geeks and non-popular social outcasts would watch.
"These days"? I must have missed something - at what point in time was watching Star Trek up there with "Freinds" or "Seinfeld"?
Transmission from planet Vulcan to Lord Prox... thousands of nerd-like beings are trying to access your data... *bzzt, crackle*... Malfunction! Malfunction!
Sig cancelled due to lack of interest
"I'm starting a group to raise money to fight against all these idiots..."
Dern kids playing on my lawn again - I'll teach them!
Look, while you're at it, why not rail against the major networks for continuing their focus on crappy 'real life' series like Survivor or Fear Factor? Seems to me this sort of stupidity T.V. has FAR more worth fighting.
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Geeze - VC for free.
Donations are for homeless people and flood victims,
not TV shows.
If it comes up for a 5th season can the give control to some real sci-fi people instead of a coporate suit?
It would have to Really shock and insult the status quo - not parrot it.
Star Trek - TOS - did things to push the envelope and still appeal to everyone from 10 to 50 years of age...
Enterprise sould once again take on the 'establishment' and challenge modern accepted norms while setting the story in a far far away place.
I don't know... there's a market for quality shows. It's just not very big anymore.
Thing is, networks doesn't fund shows because of the desire of making a quality product (most of the time, at least). They want them to make money. That's why you see so many teen-soap-operas and reality shows: they have a limited life, but they milk every cent out of them in the meantime. When the cash cow is dead, they just raise a new one. Quality shows do have it's place and audience, it's just not big enough anymore.
It's a pitty. To be honest, i never cared much about Star Trek, but i hated to see Firefly go - similar deal. I just got hooked on BSG, and like it a lot aswell; The shield is another show (outside sci-fi) that i love unconditionally. I hate to never know if they're gonna be cancelled out of the blue someday. Hell, it happened to Family Guy.
They got 100 people to protest?
100????
And 48,000 dollars?
Hahahahahaha
Drop in a bucket anyone?
Someone in the shower == soft porn? Oh my, how prude.
Enterprise has the same problem that Firefly had. For some reason, they want to run directly against Stargate. That simply will not work. If Stargate was new, or sucked, then maybe they would have a chance, but neigther of these are the case. Just becasue you cans say "Sci-Friday" doesn't mean that every Sci-Fi show must run on Friday. I loved Firefly. It was a great show, that broke new ground. It tried something new, and it worked. Unfortuanatly, I didn't get to see it until it came out on DVD. I certainly wasn't going to miss a show that I KNOW I like, and have been watching for several years, in the hopes that maybe this new show might also be good. If it would have run on Tuesday or Saturday, I would have been a faithful view.
Oh Jesus, another Star Trek post ... OK, I should be able to suppress the display of these on my SlashDot home page. Lessee, this story was posted under the topic "Sci-Fi" -- sure, I'll be happy to suppress those. Hmmm, how do I do that? There is no "Sci-Fi" or even "Entertainment" section listed on the preferences page where I would expect to set this. Even if it's just that the Entertainment section is missing from that code, I wouldn't want to suppress all Entertainment stories, just the Start Trek ones, and if that means throwing out Sci-Fi then so be it ...
One simple rule for its versus it's
Contrary to popular belief, the best actors and writers are not necessarily the veterans: Tom Cruise, James Woods, etc. You can find awesome writers and actors who are fresh out of acting school.
Let's pool all the money from this "save Star Trek" campaign. Then, the head of this campaign spends the next year in going to Harvard, Yale, Princeton, etc. to hire some new graduates as writers and actors. They will be hungry for work.
Most of them will have some limited experience in the field, and I suspect that they will do a much better job than the current crew. I know of, at least, 2 actors who have had formal training from these top universities; the actors include Henry Winkler and Meryl Streep. They are relatively good at what they do.
To start things on the right track, I'll toss out an idea to explain away the "Enterprise" fiasco. The camera zooms in on a lieutenant, a new graduate of Star Fleet Academy. He is lying in bed. Suddenly, he awakes with a shiver. He has just had a nightmare.
He calls a friend on the mobile communicator and says, "I have just had the worst nightmare in which I lived a version of the ancient history taught at Star Fleet Academy. The entire universe was screwed up. Hand-held phasers are called 'phase pistols', and on-board phasers are called 'phase cannons'. Further, some incompetent moron was serving as Captain. Also, one of the engineers spoke Ebonics, which was eradicated from earth centuries ago. Also, there was this Vulcan with big breasts, and she tried to act sexy. Ugh. It just did not work. Bit breasts with a boyish haircut but without emotions just does not make "sexy". She looked horribly repulsive. It scared the living daylights out of me."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Don't worry. It was just a nightmare. Everyone knows that Vulcans do not have big breasts. <laughter> Go back to bed, James."
The lieutenant answers, "You have a wry sense humor. It will serve you well in medical school."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Thanks for the encouragement. I want to be called 'Doctor McCoy' some day."
if the season is financed by money from the public, then it will play without advertisements because they need recoup no money on it's production, right?
Not bloody likely. Why in the hell would anyone want to line the pockets of some TV station? If you like it that much, then make it a straght to DVD thing. OR...
at least give a dividend of the profits to each who contributes according to ratio of investment. I mean, really -- how daft is this? Why not raise public money to keep those cool beer commercials on the air, then? (snicker) What's the difference?
This is a buisness, folks, and this is daft.
What this tells me is that people are unwilling to vote with their money except for, in general, tripe. People will not provide material or spiritual support to change the status quo of the entertainment industry, but will provide both in great quantity to preserve the fact that status quo contains somewhere the name "Star Trek"-- though absolutely no preference whatsoever is expressed as to what is done with that name. We're doomed.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
That whirring sound is the twin-dynamo of MLK and Ghandi, spinning in their graves.
It defies satire! Guy Debord could not have had nightmares this bad! It is a demeaning insult to the people who have had to resort to protest actions for redress of real injury and oppression.
Then, tomorrow was another day
The morning found me miles away
With still a millions things to say,
Now, as twilight beams the sky above
Recalling thrills of our love
There's one thing I'm certain of,
Return, I will,
To old Brazil.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Why not hire those two blokes from Wisconsin who made that tremendous fan-film? Man, that one episode actually had me thinking they'd channeled old Gene's ghost.
I can't see the series here, we haven't gotten further than Voyager.
However, I would be more than happy to pay a subsciption and stream it from the internet. And if only that was possible, I think that many more would pay. But I do realise that it is not possible with the current biz model that TV runs on today.
Serenity all the way baby! Check out the pic.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
1. DS9 > TOS > TNG > VOY > ENTs3 > ENTs1 > ENTs2
2. ENTs4 > DS9
3. ENTs4 =~ BSGs1
I just watched the last episode today, and I'm loving it. All 15 episodes are great.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I would be all for saving Enterprise if it wasn't for the fact that every episode is a propaganda machine for the Iraq war. Ever since 911 most of the episodes have something that sounds like it came off the news channel, "We must stop terrorism", "A stable empire is good for us", "our enemies don't want your people to have peace, the only way to stop them is too stand up to them"..etc..etc
There is no creativity to this, it is simply hearing whats on the news and putting it in a Star Trek Universe. If they go back to exploring then it might be worth saving.
I'd like to make a large payment to bring Time Trax back on the air. Please swipe my AT&T Universal Card for payment.
it's all about panis et circencis...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
They need to do a Next "next" generation. Put Star Trek 500 years in the future.
"Jeremy, you need to get to an internet cafe and cut and paste some appropriate sentiments about me from the world wide
She's HOT! Even as a Vulcan. ;-)
Guys, why are you trying to solve chess? I know this incredibly obscure, little-known, infinitely more complex game called Go that you should try instead... oh, wait. Wrong thread.
Guys, why are you trying to save Star Trek? I know of this fantastic balls-to-the-wall pedal-to-the-metal action sci-fi show called Battlestar Galactica. You should watch that instead because it's not Star Trek.
Show was finally turning the corner, sorta like TNG did.
Sopranos. The Wire. Oz.
How many people subscribe to HBO these days, again? The market just isn't on the networks anymore.
---
Mod me down, you fucking twits. Go ahead. I dare you.
(I read with sigs off.)
ok, so they have $50k in hand and $3mil pledged already. It's not even march yet. i'd be taking that money to networks, and saying here, we'll buy all the ad time in this slot, at the same or better as what it currently is, if they air Enterprise in it. Who wants to pass on a sale the gives you market value or better for what you're selling, plus involves no real work on your part? The ad time could either be filled with more show, or re-sold by the fans collective to companies. The success of the campaign would generate enough media attention to well-publicize the shows new home, and everyone wins.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
i really liked that show.
/got nothin'
And here i thought licking envelopes from friends in the mail was a great way to distribute LSD.. this is cooler.
And when can i get my own helga? or whatever that card hologram was called. Come to think of it, the Emergency Medical Hologram from voyager copied this pretty thouroughly...
Does this mean that they convinced Paramount to give up and not bother airing the last... 6 or however many Enterprise episodes are left?
Read the subject line.
Nonsense. Good Show does not equal Ratings. The networks, UPN included, do not care about quality. They care about money, which means they care about ad revenue, which means they care about large numbers of people watching their network. Many Hollywood careers have been built on the reliability of Americans to devour cheap, mass-produced, pandering junk. Hell, promising shows are scheduled for timeslots after popular, established shows because executives know that viewers will be too lazy to change the channel! And that strategy works! Enterprise didn't fail because it was a bad show. It failed because it sure as hell doesn't belong on UPN. Just take a look at the front page of the UPN website! If that Star Trek Enterprise picture on the sidebar hadn't been there, would you have ever turned on UPN to catch the latest sci-fi series? Trek either belongs on Sci-Fi channel, or it belongs in syndication. Anything else, and nobody will continue to watch it, no matter how much money the fans pump into it.
I'm the last person to criticize why someone would want to tell someone what to watch, or how they spend their time or money relative to it. In general, I question the value these days of viewer campaigns (the Internet has increased their frequency, which, in turn, has diluted their value).
In the case of "Enterprise," I have to wonder. People are talking about funding an additional season on a network, in a serious fashion. And I do believe it is only a matter of time before a series is, at least in a significant part, funded by fans. I hope it is a quality gem that is given a truly raw deal by a major network.
However, I don't think "Enterprise" is it. It was given numerous renewals on the strength of shaky ratings. It's storytelling and acting are relatively weak. It has had some strong moments, but overall, I always found it lacking.
It's main redeeming quality has been that it is "Star Trek." Even that has almost been a detriment. When it tries to close a continuity loop with the other series, it does so with too much of a wink, and too much hype. It never felt much like "Star Trek," from the types of stories to the sets and costumes.
But it is this "Star Trek" connection that probably has given this campaign series traction. There is likely a noteworthy percentage of people who are rallying, raising funds, etc, for this simply so that Star Trek stays on the air, not "Enterprise." To them I say, "is this the Trek you really want to put your money into?"
Suppose it works. There might be one more season. But, unless you can truly identify and resolve the reasons for the poor ratings, you'll either have delayed the cancellation, or have to pass the hat one more time.
The only upside is that you'll prove the viability of a fan-supported show. And, one day, there will be a not-even-one-season wonder that benefits from fans funding the balance of a season/a second season. With luck, this provides the show a better audience, both by the simple fact it is still on, as well as because it gets a lot of publicity by being fan funded. A third season may become self-sustaining, perhaps even providing some dividend to the fan investors.
So to the people who want to fund "Enterprise" only to keep "Star Trek" on the air, I ask that you save your money, and get behind a new Trek show (already rumored to be in development (think 2006 or 2007)), or one of the new SciFi shows that demonstrates quality worthy of your devotion.
When the finale of TNG pulled in record numbers of viewers for first-run syndicated television. Say what you want about syndicated numbers being lower than network numbers, but that show struck a chord with people outside the fanbase.
Perhaps Archer rubbing down his dog == soft porn. I think that was another attempt to fit into the UPN demographic.
You! Have you ever kissed a girl? I didn't think so...
Meanwhile in Los Angeles, hundreds of fans gathered at the gates of Paramount studios for the main rally of the day, led by Tim Brazeal, founder of the SaveEnterprise and TrekUnited campaigns.
It's funny/sad just how inflated that number is.
I was there on Friday morning for about ten minutes as a photographer, and there were only about a hundred fans. Hell, StarTrek.com puts the number at about 120-150 fans.
A friend of mine stayed and documented the Enterprise rally with his videocamera, taping several hours worth of footage. He says that it picked up a little more after I left, but there were about 150 protesters at best, and that the stuff he captured rivals Triumph the Insult Comic Dog's roasting of Star Wars fans waiting in line for Episode I (speaking of which, some Star Wars fans crashed the rally by showing up in costume dressed as Stormtroopers and Darth Vader).
Still, I suppose the number of fans at Friday's rally easily beat the Captain Sulu rally five years ago that drew maybe 15 fans, many of whom showed up in costume(!).
A few more of those rallies and perhaps we can save cancer, aids, and maybe alzheimer's, too? If cast members show up for those too we can abduct them and get answers!
Amazing what people will do to get their tv fix, isn't it...
Eh.
Inflated numbers ... ...
... I love Star Trek too !!
... ... ;) ;)
Mythical anonymous donors
I really don't care
I phoned up all my "female" friends
Told them they needed to watch Trek
Help the ratings go up !!
It's not like I'm asking them to wear the pointy ears
(Not that it would kill them too
Cheers,
-- The Dude
I want Enterprise to die. Don't fuck it up!
And where were you lusers when we tried to get an Excelsior miniseries made, huh?
Assholes!
Really, in the end, all that is needed to save Enterprise is to make it worthwhile for someone to pick up the production and broadcasting of season 5 and on. It's basic economics.
How would the rights and revenues of a totally fan supported series work out? As far as I can remember from when I first saw the $32M number, it was supposed to cover production, but it isn't offset by whatever revenues would come from the advertiments aired during the shows, syndication, DVD revenues, sponsorships, etc. (Tangent: Why doesn't the series work in a few sponsorships? Movies do it all the time. Some of the corps today WILL exist in the ST:E timeline, it's only what, 150 years?)
Let's say Enterprise was close to breaking even on Fox. Maybe fans chipping in a few million dollars will make it worthwhile to carry on? Maybe in the form of precommitments to the season on DVD? If not, maybe someone else will crunch the numbers and decide to pick up the show.
IMHO, I doubt that fan donations will ever raise $32M; however, I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough there to catch the eye of someone who can provide the funds.
I've grown to like Enterprise, particularly the latest season. I really wish that Fox would host a BT link that included the advertisements. Come one if you're going to give it a shoddy timeslot, throw us a bone! Besides, you know the show will end up on the 'net anyways - there's no technology on the near-term horizon to prevent that!
WHO SAID YOU HAVE TO WATCH IT??? QUIT YOUR BITCHIN AND CHANGE THE CHANNEL. I mean, you are slashdotters, what are the odds you'd be home on a Friday night anyway?
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
I think it's great when people get and work together for something they feel strongly about, regardless of what other think about it. They (re-)learn the power that comes from working together.
That it appears to be having the desired effect is also very cool!
Kudos to them.
"Don't blame the log for the fire." --Andrew Ratshin
Just today I finally got around to watching that fanfilm.
I can't help but think that the dudes who put together "Starship Exeter" could probably get a lot more bang for the buck with that $3 million that anything Paramount could ever come up with.
Sure, the acting was obviously amature. Those guys are no professional actors. Strangely enough, it wasn't really that much worse than the average Shatneresque episode, and you had to give them credit for putting their heart and soul into those 35 minutes. And it showed.
And, heck, the audio and the video FX was far above than any computer-generated eye candy pablum that a few million bucks would buy you these days.
I say - if they can't raise enough cash to save the show, give whatever they got to the Starship Exeter dudes. They'll put it to good use.
I'll voice my support for Enterprise as well.. This season, is by far the best one i've seen yet.. The reason I like it, is because the episodes are more closly intertwined. Last season there were a couple of shows that deviated slightly from the main storyline but the overall theme seemed to be better handled than voyager.
In voyager we knew they were trying to get back home but alot of the stories had nothing to do with it.
Anyways, I hope the fans save it. I'll certainly miss it.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
He calls a friend on the mobile communicator and says, "I have just had the worst nightmare in which I lived a version of the ancient history taught at Star Fleet Academy. The entire universe was screwed up. Hand-held phasers are called 'phase pistols', and on-board phasers are called 'phase cannons'. Further, some incompetent moron was serving as Captain. Also, one of the engineers spoke Ebonics, which was eradicated from earth centuries ago. Also, there was this Vulcan with big breasts, and she tried to act sexy. Ugh. It just did not work. Bit breasts with a boyish haircut but without emotions just does not make "sexy". She looked horribly repulsive. It scared the living daylights out of me."
The voice out of the communicator says, "Don't worry. It was just a nightmare. Everyone knows that Vulcans do not have big breasts. [laughter] Go back to bed, James."
Your criticisms essentially boil down to "WAAAAH, IT WAS DIFFERENT FROM WHAT I'M USED TO!"
What was wrong with "phase pistols/cannons?" What would make you assume that "phaser" was not a contraction? "Phase" is not a transitive verb. You can't phase something.
Ebonics? What? Trip is from Florida and he has a slight Southern accent. If someone had an urban African-American accent, why would that be surprising? This show takes place not too far in the future after the events depicted in First Contact, and that wasn't too different from modern America.
T'Pol is a complicated character who happens to be hot. She is anything BUT a typical emotionless Vulcan.
Stop whining and pay attention to the content. Not everything in the Star Trek universe is going to be just like TNG or TOS, and you shouldn't want it to be or expect it to be.
Personally, I'd like to see another show focus on the civilian part of the Trek universe. Maybe something similar to Firefly.
+++ATH0
I remember watching an all day Star Trek marathon hosted by Leonary Nemoy and he said that the original series was considered to be too "intellectual" for people to really understand.
The new series is far from that. Star Trek has become way too mainstream, their sitcom approach to SciFi is intended either to build on that mass audience (which they have failed at, given the cancellation of the show) or they are stuck in a rut with the format of their series.
I for one, hope that the campaign to save Star Trek suceeds both in saving the show from cancellation and from the simple, uncreative, narrow, predictable series it's become. I hope that by raising $35 mil to pay for the show should allow the shows to be shown commercial free...or better yet, have it be the first live action serious show to be released completly free online...perhaps even taking a different format that would be more supportable in an online format, like a 30 minute video stream with new episodes coming out multiple times per week.
Now that they are free from the bonds of what commerical success demands, like fitting into an hour long format with exactly 22 minutes left for commercials, having the credits roll at the end to take up another minute or two...Star Trek has the opportunity to take the lead again in the SciFi world.
This is pretty insane on the part of the trekkers. I mean, they are DONATING money to produce a COMMERCIAL PROGRAM! The program gets produced, shown on tv crammed full of commercials and the studio gets to bank all that profit from the distribution.
Pay for production, get zero points in the profit. What a great investment!
A fool and their money...
Dedicated Cthulhu Cultist since 4523 BC.
...look at that great soon to be a cult classic series called the "9-11 investigations commission". Some of the best sci fi out there! Pure government funded! And who can forget the classic CIA animated short called "The official explanation of how and why TWA 800 crashed"? Eh??? That's *good stuff* man!
Norton stopped about 20 attempts to hit me with viri and trojans
Enterprise season 3, in my opinion, has been the best season of any star trek series to date, running neck-to-neck with DS9 season 7 or TNG season 6.
I think we will start seeing even more hard-core fandom actions including, for instance, hunger strikes.
If http://www.trekunited.com/ pulls this thing off and gets a season 5- this could be a windfall for fan-generated input for the next season.
Fans could 'demand' (as non-profit share-holders for a fifth season) a brand new Theme Song.
My theory is that the theme song for Enterprise is the whole reason viewers have been under par from the outset.
They could also demand the removal of R. Berman and the elevation of Manny Coto (who has total credit for making Enterprise as great as it has been these last two seasons.)
Anyone who disagrees with me can eat Targ!
Qa'pla.
Trek tattoos are cool.
Female Vulcans are generally hot.
Because for the same $30 million, they could launch 10 reality shows with talentless wenches who need to show mummy and daddy they can be a star. And they'd still have $25 million left over.
Until the trailer park class of the US decides that they want real entertainment, Hollywood is going to swing for the the slums.
I'll put on a starfleet uniform and have sex with a disinterested/xenophobic Paris Hilton in a grainy low lighting scene. Hell, it would last at least 60 seconds. Use the proceeds of DVD and "unlicensed" internet sales to fund the new series. I don't mind taking a bullet for the team.
Rick Solomon would probably sue you for copyright infringement. Even though he wasn't wearing a StarFleet uniform, his beer gut implied a Bill Shatner figure. Film at 11.
Who cares if they don't reach $32M? If this $3M from donors comes through and they can raise even just $3.2M or so, I say build a few damn sets yourself (a few thousand dollars), buy a few sweet cameras (more thousands of dollars), get a bunch of die-hard trek fans to write good scripts for next to nothing, and go back to the basics. You'd probably have enough left over to pay the cast their full Paramount salaries.
:)
Doing a slimmed-budget, independent fifth season for $3.2M would keep Trek alive AND get it out of Berman and Braga's hands at the same time.
Ok, now who's going to cough up some money to save Arrested Development? In my mind it's tied with the Simpsons' best 3 or 4 seasons as being the funniest show ever to be on television.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
We did. That's why Paramount cancelled the show.
You know what we need ? We need "open source movies" so that we don't have to put up with the crap which is fed to us on a regular basis.
- People who believe other people have no right to live, got no right to live ...
Isn't it kind of to late? I mean UPN is already advertizing the season final some time next month.
I think we can stick a fork in this heffer.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
I hope not.
I am a bug Trek fan, and contrary to most people, I actually liked Deep Space Nine and Voyager, of course they weren't as great as TNG and the original, but they held their own, and the fact they went 7 seasons to Enterprise's 4, means they apparently worked. Perhaps the plan would of better to have named the ship something other than Enterprise? I think that's why DS9 and Voyager did ok, it was different, some people like different.
When it comes to Enterprise, what did it in for them was UPN. Let's face it, UPN is a piece of crap network. Nearly no major cable company carries it, it has few supporting networks, hell, in the Connecticut area the only UPN station is WTXX, which of the late I don't even think shows UPN programming anymore (doubly so during UCONN anything seasons, they were always showing the UCONN games instead of UPN or FOX programming) the network has had nothing but WWE wrestling and horrible black comedies. I'm not being racist, The Cosby Show was quality, the crap UPN puts on, isn't.
You also have to factor the shift in television ratings now, everyone watches these silly reality shows on the major networks. More people mindlessly watch American Idol than anything else. Episodes of Survivor hands down beat anything on UPN, including WWE shows, which says a lot.
Fact is, don't blame Enterprise and it's crew solely for it's demise. If anything those fans should be doing is donating to move the franchise from Paramount to someone that might give a damn and be able to market it on a network more capable of showing it. Which is not UPN.
I think they need to do a series on the Origin of the Borg.
Look, the 18 seconds of "Enterprise" I saw this year included and alien dressed as a Nazi. An alien Nazi! It just underscores the lack of originality in Star Trek dating back to The Next Generation.
With stock characters and marginal writing, Star Trek has been on the decline for years. At some point the formula was "reinvigorated" by adding time travel to the 4 basic plots, "malfunctioning system", "alien takes over ship", "alien disease threatens ship", "fight the Klingons/Romulans/Borg". Of the episodes of "Enterprise" that I did see I was unimpressed by the acting, writing, and set design.
Why do people need to hold on to something that is obviously over? Sure there is more room for a decent sci-fi series, but I hate to say that Andromeda is far more interesting and inventive than Star Trek. The obvious thing here is to point out that "Battlestar Galactica" far outstrips "Enterprise" in production values, originality, writing and acting. Why not give up the ghost on what has become schlock level, sub par science fiction and back something with potential?
Why not put the money behind resurrecting "Firefly"? Or why doesn't someone concept something entirely new?
don't watch it dumbass, and let those of us who want to, to continue to watch.
What about those of us who want to watch it, but only if it doesn't suck? We're getting screwed!
You can't take the sky from me...
I empathise with your desire to have the show you like, but that line reads so much like the main reason I was given for why we have to use Windows instead of Linux.
Xix.
"Everything is adjustable, provided you have the right tools"
Something I've been noticing through the many articles that have been posted about Enterprise is that it has become somewhat trendy to hate Star Trek. People will just say that they hate Star Trek and want it to die, many times for no better reason as there are other shows that they themselves consider better. It's similar to how many people regard the New York Yankees, many people hate the Yankees simply because they are the Yankees. They have one of the best traditions in Baseball and a long history of success (something that Star Trek also boasts in the field of Sci Fi). And people will hate them simply for that. If you thought B5 was better than Star Trek, fine, but B5 isn't on amymore, and Enterprise still has a chance (albiet infintessimal) to stay on the air, which is what fans of the show want. It's almost as if fans of other shows are showing signs of envy that when their favorite show went off the air (Firefly, Space-Above and Beyond, whatever), their fans didn't mount an effort to save it that was nearly the size of the effort to save enterprise, and they want Enterprise to fail because they lost their favorite show. What also gets me is how people have written off the show because they thought it sucked in season 1. That's great, because everyone knows that when something sucks once, it'll suck forever and never get better (/sarcasam). Ask anyone about enterprise now, and they'll tell you it's some the best trek since the TNG/DS9 days, and yet people still cling to their arguments about how they stopped watching after 3 episodes in season 1, and haven't watched it since, even though everyone's saying how good it is now, but the won't watch it still, since they are confident the assessment they made 4 years ago is still valid, and nothing ever changes ever.
Oh, and for those people who stopped watching over the theme song, get over yourselves. There's something seriously wrong with you if 45 seconds of music makes you hate a show. Go get a drink or use the bathroom or whatever if it seriously causes you so much mental anguish. If it helps, can personally vouch for there being no soft rock in any episode of Entperprise after the theme.
The last good thing to come out of Star Trek was First Contact, and even that was sketchy what with the ruining of the borg concept.
But they ruined it in a sexy way!
AND we got to see Borgs shot, stabbed and Dataed! It was fun!
You can't take the sky from me...
(Guiness ad - don't spend 32 million on crap? Brilliant!) If this somehow succeeds it would be like a stroke of genius on the bart of Berman... make the show such so bad no one watched, then pull it back just in time to get it cancelled, all in the interest of getting a fan-funded show, most profitable to the network in history. Now, wonder how much money could be raised to a "let it die" fund.
"Waste not one watt!" - CZ
And therefore it would not have been canned due to lack of advertising revenue.
Except that good shows have been canned on that premise...
You can't take the sky from me...
Just take a look at the front page of the UPN website!
There's a huge cultural divide in the USA, and UPN is the standard bearer.
This also underscores the fact that UPN isn't even available in large swaths of the country. Imagine how many more viewers it would have if it was on a channel with large viewship to begin with. In fact, putting a show like Enterprise on a more mainstreame station would probably do far more good for Enterprise than any artistic changes from what they've got going right now (i.e. get rid of Berman).
"On a scale from 1 to 10, people are stupid"
Example: in Omaha, Ne there is NO UPN over the Air.
I cant watch star Trek UPN is not even on Direct TV as a National feed.
UPN is killing its selft by not allowing a national feed for Direct TV for free.
Money that is spent another tired Star Trek crapfest could be getting spent on a new show.
It's dead, Jim.
The cake is a pie
I thought DS9 was the absolute most boring star trek series ever created. I couldn't stand it. Voyager was hit and miss and the most recent season of enterprise has been rock solid.
It's amazing to me that so many people liked DS9. I forced myself to watch it for several seasons but other than a few choice episodes it was a soap opera in space and boring to boot.
The man who trades freedom for security does not deserve nor will he ever receive either. - Benjamin Franklin
I'll see your chain of US Sci-fi and raise you British Sci-fi:
Doctor Who > Blake's 7 > Red Dwarf > all the takes-itself-too-seriously-American crap
(Am actually a fan of the TITSAC so don't burn me too badly. Also haven't seen the new Doctor Who yet, which may suck relative to Tom Baker, so will have to wait and see.)
Well, if they truly can raise that much cash to continue the series, why not go all the way and collectively write the episodes? They could be edited Wikipedia-style, and the edits could be moderated Slashdot-style, so that the best storylines would ultimately bubble up. As for the filming, I'm sure there are hordes of film students and Trek enthusiasts who would be happy to volunteer their time as crew; and the money itself could go towards paying the cast and outfitting the set. Obviously, there would be licensing issues -- whoever currently owns the Star Trek franchise probably wouldn't be too keen on just giving it up for free development. Then again, though, perhaps the law is fuzzy on this issue -- an open source Trek might be considered fan fiction.
Its funny. That one is moderated as flamebait, but the one in response that calls him "dumbass" (namecalling gets rewarded when someone speaks an opinion?) and gets +1 insightful? Puh-leese. See ya in M2 guys. ;)
I watched quite a few episodes (the Space channel used to show ST reruns almost constantly) and while there might have been individual episodes that I enjoyed (none springs to mind) I never liked any of the series as a whole.
The main reason was that the audience was told what to think and what to feel.
There were usually the "good" choices vs. the "bad" choices, the morality was shoved down the audience's throats, everybody was so pompous (Voyager was the worst in that respect. Janeway's motivational speeches are a crime against intelliget life anywhere), everything was so stereotyped.
There was no room for independent thought on the part of the viewer.
That, and the fact that every problem can be solved by reconfiguring the sensor array.
If there was a science fiction show worth saving, it would be Farscape.
I feel sorry for the actors who signed aborad Enterprise. I'm sure they were expecting a nice 7-year ride and some chances to do some challenging acting once in a while. Instead, they got Breman and Braga'd into a 4 year soap-opera.
If you take a look at the history of the Star Trek franchise, the show's quality started out remarkably good (considering it was a campy 1960's wagon train in space). They got a good diverse set of writers to write about topics of the day and tried to both produce fluffy entertainment AND slip a few social messages through the censors.
When TNG was created, Gene Roddenberry had the chance to tell the kinds of stories he wanted to tell back in the 60's, but without the overwhelming concerns of money and the delicate ears of the country. The success of the original show in syndication(!) and the movies gave him all the clout he needed, and so he made a show that revived ST and fired it up for years to come.
Expanding the franchise, he came up with the ideas for DS9 and Andromeda. DS9 would be a story about the invasion and corruption of the Federation, possibly culminating in its fall. The show that is now Andromeda was originally to have been the story of what happened after the fall of the Federation.
All well and good. Unfortunatly, he had Beavis and Butthead -- errr... Breman and Braga as assistants from TNG days. As his health started to decline, he was forced to hand over more and more of the day-to-day operations of the show to them. When the network balked at the idea of the Federation collapsing, they rethought the whole dominion wars aspect of DS9 and came up with Voyager as a way to explore a galaxy without the Federation.
By that time, B&B had taken the helm and thrown the idea of social commentary out the window. They believed in old-schoold demographics. Ratings slipping? Ok, Hire 7 of 9 and put her in a illogically tight jumpsuit.
Just as DS9 was supposed to be about a seedy and corrupt corner of the Federation, and Voyager was supposed to be a dark Federation-less corner of the universe, Enterprise now took on the challenge of being the 'Really-Dark-This-Time' Trek. Pre-Federation, we wouldn't have to worry about Prime Directives, or about fleets of starships showing up to save them. Transporters were supposed to be flaky and unreliable. Phasers were supposed to be little more than laser guns. Communication would be limited to launched probes.
Instead, we got a captain who (through no fault of the actor!) has a split personality -- swinging back and forth between concerned pacifist and vengeful hitman. We got a hot vulcan chick who could have developed into a really interesting character -- if she were allowed to do more than change uniforms every season. And we get to encounter most of the familiar alien races which act much the way they acted towards us in the future... even though it should have been first contact.
I'll say what I said with Voyager. If Paramont wants to save the franchise, they must fire Breman and Braga and hire people who care about the show, not just the ratings. I can't remember which one (does it matter?) but one of them actually bragged about having never seen the original series.
Firefly probably made more money and had more fans direct from DVD - I wonder why more money isnt put into this kind of medium...?
Pre-order ?
TOS: Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekov (Sulu and Chekov were just kind of their in the series but improved in the movies, I thought.)
TNG: Picard, Data, Worf, Troi, O'Brian, Riker, Q, Wesley Crusher
DS9: Sisco, Quark, Kira, Odo, Worf, O'Brian, Weyoun and that fey Cardassian
VOY: 7 of 9, The EMH (Torres and Paris almost but they still ended up as milktoasts like the rest)
ENT: Shran, Trip, the Dog (I like T'pols breasts as much as the next guy but I don't care what happens to the character)
The lists are getting shorter!
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
It seems any time there's a discussion of TV and BitTorrent, it's:
"I'm gonna torrent my TV, download all the episodes, watch them when i like, who cares if the networks loose out on their add revenue."
No it's:
"Oh no, the networks are canceling the show, not enough viewers and therefore it dosn't justify the add revenue."
Instead of complaining, or pledging money, just STOP TORRENTING THE SHOWS, and maybe the networks will keep it running.
Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated up.
I'm not busting on anybody, but it always sort of bothers me when people talk about how "this season was good" and "that season was bad".
Consider the original Star Trek. How many episodes does Kirk destroy the computer running an entire civilization? Talk about an overused plot device! For every "Amok Time", "City on the Edge of Forever", and "Trouble with Tribbles" there were at least two examples of "Return of the Archons", "The Enterprise Incident", or "Spock's Brain"--three episodes which I thought were particularly lame.
For people who complain about time travel, by the way, let's look at the original Star Trek. We have "City on the Edge of Forever", "Tomorrow is Yesterday", and "Assignment: Earth". There's also "All Our Yesterdays", where they go back in time but into another planet's history. There's also a bunch of "pseudo-time travel" episodes where they don't end up back in time but end up on another planet whose past looks like old Earth: "A Piece of the Action" (Mobster-run 1930s Chicago), "Spectre of the Gun" (Wild West), "Bread and Circuses" (Roman Empire), and "Patterns of Force" (Nazi Germany).
Gratuitously sexy costumes? Well, it was the 60's, so there were some limits. I could make the argument that all the women in the short skirts came pretty close. Some of the crew-women also wore some low-cut tops. And tons of bare midriffs! Let's see..."Gamesters of Triskelion"? "Mirror Mirror"? "The Apple"? "A Private Little War"? "By Any Other Name"? (One TV's first apres-sex scenes) "The Way to Eden?" And, for the ladies, let's not forget all the times that Kirk lost his shirt...
As for Star Trek: The Next Generation, well, I got pretty sick of all the times the holodeck killed people and took over the ship.
In short, there are always bad episodes. There are always great episodes. Expecting a full season of network TV to be wonderful is pretty tough on any show. I've watched Enterprise since the beginning and while there were a few times where I went "This episode sucks", for the most part, I thought the episodes were entertaining.
But I think Star Trek, (at least, for the most part) has served an important role. I think it's kept us optimistic about the human spirit and about the future. That's the only reason there are trekkies. People like an uplifting message from time to time.
That having been said, I still haven't seen the final episodes of Season 3. The story arc was crap.
Season 4 on the other hand is quality. Although I'd like a few more non-mutli-parters, Enterprise has part of the original feel it had back in Season 1 back.
If you check my post history, you'll see I've called for the death of Entperprise several times. And been modded up heavily for it. I'm going to go right out and say it, Season 4 has made me rethink my position. I'm going to be sad when the show ends.
Spoiler warning.
Better? You call this better? Because I live in a TV-backwater, I just got to see the last episode of season three, which I had been led to believe was one of the good ones. What I got was a cliff hanger with time travel and Nazis. Please. All we're missing now is that they introduce a little kid...
I'm sorry, they screwed around with the background story too much in the first two episodes for me to be interested. So far, it is more fun to watch Buffy reruns. No Nazis, no time travel, and when they introduced a little kid, it wasn't a little kid at all.
I think that Enterprise was doomed from the start for a number of reasons. Star Trek fans footing the bill for another season will be dumping their money in the trash. While the third and fouth seasons have been better than the first two they are by no means on par with the other series in the franchise. I see this being the fault of two groups, Rick Berman and Brannon Braga and Paramount/UPN.
Berman and Braga have taken really awesome concept and driven it into the ground. Enterprise was going where no Trek series had been (pun intended), the beginning of the Federation. Enterprise could have been an awesome pre-history of the other series. Instead Berman and Braga have paid little attention to established pre-history of the later series. This wouldn't be so bad if their story arcs didn't require a reset button at the end of the series just for later ones to exist in the mythos. While sticking to Trek canon isn't required for the show to be successful it does help keep existing Trek fans interested. People who grew up watching Romulans and Klingons want to see Romulans and Klingons. New species are nice and all but there's a lot of untold history that Enterprise was well positioned to handle.
UPN is doing just as much damage as stupid story arcs and bad writing. UPN is a joke of a network and Enterprise on its lineup is the punchline. Unless Trek fans are also fans of stupid one-off sitcoms there's little on UPN's lineup to attract them or affiliates. UPN also decided to shuffle Enterprise all over their schedule making it difficult for casual viewers to keep up with the dumb story arcs.
While I appreciate people wanting to see more of their favorite franchise I think the world needs a break from Star Trek for a while. Berman at the helm of the franchise is driving it into the ground. TNG was a successful revival because there was a desire for more Trek that was more than a rehash of the original series. There's been continuous Star Trek on television since the late 80s. A break is required, as is some new blood at the helm.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Might I add that it seems weird to me that right frome here, slashdot, the place where nerds (what people think as nerds) are, a lot of bashing goes to Enterprise, another place where what people think as nerds, are. BTW, I like Trek for the message of a better future, of a place where there's hope, where each individual can make the difference. This is a good TV program to let your kids view.
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
They didn't used to set phasers to "appease" Holy Fucking Goddamn the moderation around here sucks balls of Kong. "Liberal" assholes who mod troll anything that offends them suck cocks in hell. That's not Liberal. It is Fascist.
Sometimes at night I imagine the darkness is filled with horrible things with too many teeth, like Julia Roberts.
"should pass Voyager in quality"
That's not saying much. Voyager sucked and should have never been a series in the first place.
2. They get some decent writers. Far too much of Trek in the past few years has been about moralising rather than just telling a good story. I definitely vote for Michael J Straczynski doing some of the writing for the shows.
3. They stop dicking about with the movies. Stop doing Trek movies "for the masses", keep them within the Roddenberry guidelines and for the fans. For example, I do not want to see our favourite bald captain spending 15 years or so following the Prime Directive only to tear around the surface of a planet like a lunatic in a sand buggy (as in "Nemesis")! Definitely not in Picard's character...
4. Go forward rather than back. Why wasn't Enterprise just set after Voyager rather than before TOS? Prequels always introduce plot discrepancies which are going to be picked up by a fan-base as involved as Trek fans are. This seemed the ultimate stupidity with "Enterprise", IMHO.
5. Look at entertaining the fans first, then worry about the money-making. If the fans like it, they'll by the merchandise and go to the conventions.
I'm a middle-aged geek who's followed the shows since childhood - TNG was great, DS9 was good, Voyager had about half-a-season's worth of good episodes, Enterprise was rubbish. Now I've about given up on Trek completely and won't be coming back until I feel I am being entertained rather than just ripped off by Paramount for as much money as possible.
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
Why didn't they just stick to the reruns? I know it works for Slashdot...
and I wouldn't flame you anyway, my post, beginning with the words "my take", was exactly stating my personal opinion. And, besides, I agree with you that the best moments of Sci-fi is when the writer does not take it too seriously.
Unfortunately, up until the Net age, living in the biggest USofAn colony (BR), I didn't have a lot of access to Brit Sci-fi. Can you refer me to some DC hub or BT site where I can find, for instance, DrWho, Bl7, RedDwarf eps?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Unfortunately, I think it's a very naive attitude to just pour money into something and expect to raise $30 million dollars. Couldn't the money be used for something more productive? Wouldn't, say, a cancer charity benefit from the money more in the long run?
Perhaps it would be better accepting that the series is lost, and perhaps giving the money to Paramount in order to secure a free, worldwide distribution of the final couple of episodes.
Think of the implications if a 100% legal HDTV (let's do it properly, make it at least a 1.5GB XVid) copy of the final episode is Bittorrented and available to anyone who wants to watch the end of (in my opinion) an excellent series.
PocketGamer.org - For the gamer on the go!
I really fail to see why they would bother spending $3 million on Enterprise, or any star trek series. Why not take the money and do something original? A William Gibson-esque cyberpunk series or something.
Why should every TV series go on forever? There have been 98 episodes of Enterprise already. What's the benefit in carrying on. What interesting story lines are there left that 100 hours of shows hasn't already used up?
TNG, Voyager, DS9 all had about one season's worth of good episodes over their entire run. Most of the other episodes were either "remodulate the phase tachyon pulse" endings, dull moralising about the superiority of "the human way", bad soap opera or just plain stupid (any borg episode).
Give up on the Star Trek universe and go spend the money on some new ideas.
Look at what happened to Friends, Buffy, The Simpsons, Angel, Frasier, ER, Sex and the City. Early on, all were excellent (or at least interesting): later seasons become formulaic, repetive and dull. There is a limited number of interesting stories that can be told with one set of characters in a fixed universe.
Enterprise is okay. Voyager was fair. TNG was decent. DS9 was pathetic. Movies went downhill. One thing of the things in common was Rick Berman. Personally, I feel that he has removed all creativity and intelligence from Star Trek. When they have a series (or movie) that he isn't involved with, I will definitely check it out.
...they vote with their money. That was actually what they were doing already, since eyeball time is money when it comes to ads. The company doesn't "have it out" for any show. If we, the consumers(tm) are willing to pay for it, they're willing to make it. Before they were looking at $X million, now they're looking at $X+3 million (plus some press) in return. That is return as good as any to them.
What exactly are you saying? That if there aren't enough money in ads and channel subscription fees, it should just die? Even though people are willing to pay extra to create the same revenue as if there were? Is money from donations somehow less valuable, or less real than ad or fee money? No. All it comes down to is people*avg.revenue. If Bill Gates wanted them to make a show so bad, noone else would want to see it, they'd do it. As long as the donation was big enough.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Can someone tell me why every person on the front page of the UPN website (except in that tiny Star Trek photo) is black?
This link was blocked where I work, having been categorized as "Pornography". Must've been a helluva rally.
My sig sucks.
How about the sciFi channel picking up Star Trek?
That would be a good match!
Why not donate the money to a worthy cause like Oxfam or Amnesty. Helping the less fortunate to "Live Long and Prosper"
Rather than pouring the money down the drain of yet another sub-standard season featuring ill-conceived plots and down on their luck actors.
That won't turn any heads at the studio. They bank on that much from a series/week run in advertising time. That might enable them to squeak one more episode out, but that's it. From what they have done so far with the series, I say good riddens. It has gone a long way in bringing down the Star Trek Empire.
The single most frustrating thing about the mess Enterprise is in right now is that you could have started this show up with any ten or so Star Trek fans plucked from any convention you wanted to get them from and they could have avoided the mistakes that were made over the last two years. You could bring in anyone you found walking around at a Star Trek convention today and correct whatever is still wrong with it.
Pandering to the obsessive fanbase isn't always the best way to keep a show fresh and original; on the contrary, it can sometimes be the reason a show disappears up its own arse.
Don't get me wrong; their opinion should be considered (as potential viewers *and* as people who know the show) but stuff that appeals to someone who lives, and has an obsessive knowledge of a show, might not appeal to the more general viewers needed to keep a show viable.
Generally, hardcore fans are obsessive about consistency; but this IMHO is sometimes what weighs sci-fi down and in the end kills it.
I mean, if sci-fi is about ideas, doesn't the need for consistency with 100 previous episodes kind of stifle this?
I don't know if it was pandering to the fanbase that made Red Dwarf series 7 and 8 so crap, but it certainly seemed to be too obsessed with serious details. Compare this to earlier episodes which didn't seem to bother that much with continuity or scientific coherence, except where it mattered.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I had completely erased those from my memory... :-) I was considering them as being the worse 3rd season ones :-)
But they brought an end (albeit a non-sensical one... *) to the temporal sh*t.
* = if the temporal cold war has re-set, shouldn't Enterprise still be in drydock instead of flying the Klingon home?
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Amen, Shagrat.
/. for a week recently, my crime was suggesting that possibly George B. had a brain cell firing when he cut taxes, and that possibly Canadians might be over taxed. (60%? Seems like a lot to me.) I had a whole string of comments modded down to -1.
This is nothing though. I got booted off
Its getting to be a badge of honor anymore. You have to browse at -1 to see anything that isn't dyed shocking pink.
Flame on, pinkies!
Andromeda? Never heard of that ...
Oh you mean Hercules in space. Sorry ...
I talk about stuff.
Why relative to Tom Baker? Was he your favorite Doctor? Personally, I preferred Jon Pertwee, but I think I would rank Tom 2nd in the pantheon of Doctors Who. (Peter Davison would come a close 3rd.)
Ben Hocking
Need a professional organizer?
Presumably if the fans finance (at least partially) a new series of "Enterprise", those same fans will also get a cut of the profits when it's sold to TV stations, sold on DVD and results in additional merchandise sales?
Yeah, right...
Gentoo Linux - another day, another USE flag.
so 150 or so ppl showed up and 20 million or so trek fans stayed away. i'd say it was a victory for
killenterprise.com
No matter what it is youre discussing, you can find thousands of people on the internet who think it is the worst thing ever.
I see people complaining about the poor writing & poor acting of Enterprise... Can you imagine what they might say if they took a look at TOS with those same critical eyes?
T'Pol may not be very Vulcan-ish... but at least she doesnt go around playing sarenades on her harp, giggling, or mind-melding with ROCKS (all things that Spok does in TOS)
The internet is a forum for praise, discussion, AND dissent. However it seems that dissent is the aspect that gets the most attention from the internet, and so no matter what the subject may be, politics, social norms, or TV shows, you can bet that the people who hate something the most will have the loudest voices about it.
Every trek show has its weak spot (theyre called season 1 and season 2), but every trek show also has its strengths (yes, even Voyager.) You have to take the good with the bad & hope they balance out.
Assuming the cancellation of Enterprise goes forward (and I hope it doesn't), what would UPN replace it with in their lineup? Some crappy teen drama? It's sure not going to be something original and daring, that's too risky for a big corporation. So, if they at least want to keep my eyes on their ad space (and I'm not suggesting they do), Enterprise is basically the only thing that will keep me watching.
Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun -Troy McClure
If people are willing to pay for the show, I wonder why the studios don't just release the show a la carte over the net or something? Perhaps shows that have a niche with a strong interest should ditch the advertisement model and just charge per show, or sell subscriptions to the series...
Am actually a fan of the TITSAC so don't burn me too badly
Tit sack? What is "TITSAC"? I googled for it, and half the results were stock reports, half were porn and one or two were blogs, including one with this choice classic: "Fuckin asshole was probably drunk and wondering which cousin he was going to get on this weekend. What a titsac."
-b
myselfmusic
I agree. I think it would go well with their Friday lineup. Maybe they could improve the storyline a bit too. I'm sure it would do better on SciFi than it's current home.
- dj
at the end of each weeks episode they (actors,writers) should all bring there torches to the bridge of the enterprise. at which point a hologram of gene rodenberry will appear. during this time the losing group be it the writers or actors will have to vote somebody off of the show...by throwing them out of the airlock. ratings will be at an all time high! and if the crew really hates the punk that was voted off they can take turns phazzoring him as he floats by.
If all I'm supposed to do is crusade against injustice every waking moment of every day and never engage in the superfluous, entertaining, or downright silly even for a moment, then you can just drag me out in the street and shoot me right now, because I'd rather be dead.
NEWSFLASH: The world's a shithole. Has been for time out of mind and doesn't look like it's going to get better anytime soon. I'm not saying not to do anything about it, and not to be concerned with the considerable problems we face. But as all which is Holy and Unholy as my witness, I reject utterly the concept that I cannot enjoy something in my life that may be trivial and banal because these problems exist. This is secular puritanism made manifest and I find it contemptible.
One thing that is not clear from the articles linked to in this story is who would hold the copyright to the fan-funded episodes of the show, should these fans contribute money for more episodes to be made.
Would this qualify as a work for hire (where Paramount studios arranges for casting people, writers, costumers, etc. to be available to anyone who has a few million to put together a show)? Or are these fans planning on treating a multinational corporation like a charity and donating their money to Viacom so that Paramount will make more episodes?
Digital Citizen
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
The Star Trek franchise is run by people with zero imagination and a Leftward slant like an A frame roof. To wit:
Scott Bakula's character (or any Trek captain for that matter) would be court martialed and cashiered in any military organization on Earth. If he survived the mutiny, anyway. He disobeys orders, he's insubordinate, he gets his ship shot up every goddamn time they go out. He behaves like a friggin' high school kid out for a joy ride in a stolen car. Not Bakula's fault, its the writing.
The Trek SOP for exploring a new planet: Come into a strange system at a high rate of speed, assume orbit over a planet and scan the place with active sensors. Finally, broadcast a big ol' "Howdy!" just in case the planet guys missed the armed alien starship painting their cities with targeting radar.
Trek exploration missions: we come in peace at great expense and for no particularly good reason,we're harmless humans who only mean well, but we still manage to shoot somebody about every ten minutes.
Alien chicks always find Trek crew members attractive. Crew boy goes for it every single time no matter how many times he's gotten shot, or got pregnant, or got a rash, or started a war... Rinse, repeat. And repeat, and repeat, ad nauseam, ad infinitum.
The Earth is at risk of being destroyed by alien bad guys with a planet buster and they send one ship to stop 'em. What, they couldn't buy another ship someplace? Or steal one? And that was a "good" season.
Space battles that only take place at point blank range, shields that don't, aliens that aren't, ray guns that can vaporize a truck but can't penetrate a wooden crate, bad guys that can't shoot straight, artificial gravity that stays on even in wrecked ships with no power. These are a few of our favorite things.
And that's why after thirty nine years people are turning it off. Paramount is quite right to pull the plug, nobody is watching it.
Maybe getting cancelled will wake the franchise owners up, but I doubt it. There's all that syndication money keeping them fat, after all.
Trek fans should lynch them, not raise money for the stupid bastards. Hell, at two million plus per episode for this sorry crap their shareholders should lynch them!
Now, all you little pissants can mod me down, but the fact that hard core fans have to protest and raise charity money to keep the bloody thing on the air is proof enough of what I'm saying.
Grow up, pissants. Just because you don't like it doesn't mean it ain't so. This horse is dead. Beating it isn't going to get it to run.
Trek is being cancelled just as Doctor Who is returning. Doctor Who was cancelled about a year after ST:TNG started. Coincidence? Conspiracy?
I've been a Star Trek fan for 30 years, from the time I saw my first TOS episode on a grainy far-distant TV station when I was ten. I've supported every ST series since, giving them each enough time to mature (two seasons, usually.) And then, better Sci Fi started showing up. Babylon Five, Farscape (what Star Trek TOS was really meant to be, by the way. Wagon Train To The Stars), and now the new Battlestar Galactica. Star Trek jumped the phase-shifted multi-dimensional klingon shark. Let's all give it a grand wake and move on to new pastures. remember: All good things...
You should read the introduction page and the FAQ at www.trekunited.com
Pumbaa! I don't wonder; I know.
I enjoyed all Star Trek. Its a good insigt to all the engineers out there. People dreamed of "cell phones", "automated doors", "transporters" in the 60s. In their view these would be inventions of the 23nd century. It ended u being our spoils during the 80's. During the movies, Enterprise B had that first voice regonition hardware, a spoil of 90's. The examples are many. Such insight leads to actual technology. The "use" of sci-fi. Heck, Stephan Hawkings enjoys the show (and actualy had taken a very short role playing poker against Newton and Einstein). Fast developement of technology in the last 2 centuries is often attributed to sci-fi noves/movies/tv serries. Of course its all fake else JPL people wouldn't be scratching their heads. I enjoy the insparation, while Enterprise was not my favorite I enjoyed the serries, several of my floor mates didint like it at first and now like it. I say give the show another try, and to experience special effrcts dont be close-minded. The financial support is how some fans attempt to keep their show. People dont sell their houses for the show but instead they pay 5$ to enjoy a show for another season. 5$ per a season isnt too bad.
"All your base" used to be fun.
I saw nothing in the introduction that addressed my question but the FAQ had this to offer:
Which tells me why I wouldn't donate a dime to this effort. These folks are seriously entertaining treating a corporation as a charity, donating money to Viacom so they can make money on my donation. They don't seem to understand that paying for something gives you increased control over that thing. This is what producers do--raise money for production of shows. If I'm helping to pay for the show, I would want something more than I get by buying a copy of a series I had nothing to do with on a DVD in a store. At least with a DVD of a show I didn't help pay production costs on, I get to watch a high-quality never-degrading copy of the show in perpetuity. With the Enterprise deal, I don't even get a copy of the DVD; I have to go out and buy it and the DVD I buy will give me no right to share even verbatim copies of it non-commercially.
I was hoping that these fans would have come up with something more creative than this. It's not too much to ask that since these fans would be, ostensibly, funding an entire season of Enterprise, they would control the copyright to the episodes and be able to license the episodes (thus eventually getting back some of their costs in syndication rights and DVD sales, then when the market for these episodes has dried up in a few years, they could release the episodes under an appropriate Creative Commons license).
But since this really is just a call for corporate charity, this effort strikes me as profoundly naive.
Digital Citizen
>Just an hour later, the TrekUnited fund for sponsoring
>production of a fifth Enterprise season surpassed 50,000$, >with contributions having sped up thanks to the tremendous
> positive attention for TrekUnited's bold mission as well as a
> single contribution of 5000$ by a devoted fan.
No please. Don't pay for this. It sets a really bad precedent. It's bad enough folks pay exorbitant prices for DVDs or VHS tapes of anything Trek, be it old episodes of TOS, let alone actually donating money for a show that will be completely profitable with national commercials paid for by others.
Add to that the possiblity that it could be placed on the Sci-Fi channel, makers and mismanagers of every brand of sci-fi dooms a show just making it's way out of mediocre writing into the land of little-to-no funding.
We would be better off seeing the show die before a single penny of donation money be used to produce a season of Trek.
"Love is like pi - natural, irrational, and very important." (Lisa Hoffman)
Except Family Guy is actually coming back with new episodes on Fox in the coming months. According to an ad after the Superbowl.
Can't one like several flavors of sci fi?
Hadn't you better get back into your tardis and play a little catch-up. Baker wasn't the last Doctor, when we are. TITSAC is a band...right? Besides, of the more serious type of sci fi, Babylon was the best, by far, except for the anticlimatic bit at the end of the series. It's the only series I sat down and personally taped every episode thereof (or almost every episode). But, then, I bought the final season of Voyager and liked it a lot. Also, the final season of DS9. I liked the original Galactica, in spite of the somewhat cheesey plotting and even cheesier acting. It seems to me that a lot of sci fi fans really aren't. They are fans of a particular show...not the same thing.
Oh, yeah! Does anybody know where I might get hold of The Tripods on DVD or download?
Was Tripods the Australian series where everybody had bowling ball style holes in their heads? The NC PBS chain showed just enough of it to attract my attention and then shoved it into the memory hole.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.