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William Shatner Pitches 'Starfleet Academy' Show
Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that William Shatner recently pitched an 'Academy' show to Paramount. The series would feature teen versions of the Classic Star Trek characters Kirk, Spock and McCoy, and be set at Starfleet Academy. The studio turned Shatner down, but he's not letting go of the idea: Pocket Books has asked him to write a two-novel series based on the 'Starfleet Academy' concept. Also, Shatner apparently went over the head of Trek head honcho Rick Berman to pitch his idea straight to the head of Paramount - maybe after Enterprise ends and Berman leaves the franchise, the studio will be more inclined to listen to Shatner?"
All these new teen shows on the alternative networks are the big ratings getters because of 'teen girls'. Purely a niche play.
I think he is putting money before the vision of Rodenberry.
Maybe he will have a ton of models be the crew. Should get good ratings for a while until teen girls viewers get bored by scifi which takes about a year for these demographic shows.
Instead, why not do it with new characters? The only problem there is getting all the horrible "Next Generation" style moralizing out of it and keeping every character from being a different version of Wesley Crusher (jock Wesley, flirt Wesley, misunderstood loner Wesley, etc.) Hell, if you did it right, you could even bring back Wesley as an Academy instructor... why not?
Not sure I'd actually watch such a show, mind you, but it certainly doesn't sound any worse than the crap that's been passing for Star Trek in recent years.
Breakfast served all day!
No offsense, but noone takes Berman seriously anymore. Even Paramount has been less than cooperative with him as of late. Honestly, the guy must have a lifetime contract or something, because he should have been fired YEARS ago.
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Skip the Kirk/Spock tie-in and stick with the major premise:
There are a number of coming-of-age shows on TV right now that are well accepted (if not well done). Hospital shows about young doctors in training, for example. So long as it is more like a military academy drama setting sans the militaristic feel, and not like "Police Academy", I think it could fly.
-- Scott
Do NOT do a prequel to the TOS cast. If enterprise has taught us anything, it's that trying to write history to canon is full of pitfalls, and the nerds will never forgive even the smallest of errors. You'll also run into the problem that people had with enterprise in that the technology looked more advanced than TOS, simple because computer graphics were more advanced.
Also, it's a bit of a stretch to presume that all the TOS cast would be at the academy together. Kirk and Spock maybe, but all the junior officers are much younger than Kirk, Spock, and Bones (McCoy would have been at starfleet medical anyway).
An awesome show would be an academy show during the dominion war of an unknown group of cadets. So rather than being a futuristic "Saved by the Bell", you can follow these cadets in some of the extended duties they would have had to undertake during the war. We could even see how the attack on Starfleet Headquarters happened, since we only saw the aftermath in DS9.
I think there was some problem with ST Canon. Apparently Spock was about the same age as Kirk when they went through academy together. The was mentioned somewhere that at the time of the series both were around 100 years old. That's what future science had done for aging.
It smells like one of those things that has half a chance of working if you chuck canon and is doomed to failure if you don't. Kirk would unfortunately be a very cocky fellow and I think we've seen enough of that stereotype on TV already.
Effective cast:
Spock: Brainy, yet unassuming
McCoy: Face planted in medical books all the time
Kirk: Natural leader, is brash, adventurous and gets them into trouble and somehow they always get back out of it, maybe with only a scar or two. After all, they need to learn.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The only idea I would be at least interested to see is maybe a Romulan based show. As far as major races, they are one of the few that have not actually been explored extensively. You could still have the flavor of ST with meetings with Starfleet and all that but the other side of the story. Of course it doesn't have to be Romulan. Just any other storyline. How many ways can we depict how wonderfully perfect the Human race is (/sarcasm off)
And another thing, Bones was WAY older than Kirk (by 15-20 years, I believe)! Especially when you consider that Kirk was the youngest Starfleet captain ever! (canon, I believe) The only way Bones would have been at the Academy during Kirk's tenure is if he was the Doctor on staff!
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"I could care less about what happened BEFORE"
:)
Who cares what you want, I wanna see the Earth-Romulus War already! I wanna see the humans take all their anti-Vulcan aggression out on the other green-blooded, pointy-ear bastards!
In the episode where the Romulans were first introduced in TOS, they show a map of the Neutral Zone and it has Romulus on it, and yet Earth is nowhere on the map, as if the Neutral Zone is a whole lot closer to Romulus than it is to Earth. I wanna see that happen.
"give me BORG again."
God... why not ask for more Janeway while you're at it? The Borg were introduced as a whim to make a particular Q episode a little more interesting, and now the dead horse has been beaten for the better part of a decade. They can't even stay consistent for three seconds. How do you resolve the whole lustful Borg Queen with the way the Borg were originally portrayed, for example? They're supposed to be Daleks on legs, not the latest pin-up of the month!
Really. It'd be interesting to see a non-federation ship as the primary vessel. Better yet, make it a klingon mercenary ship to give them more plot oppertunities. Less goodie goodie prime directive, more honor.
Lets just let the whole thing be done and do something new. The problem with the trek universe is the TREK UNIVERSE every time someone tries to do something new it conflicts with the history or the prime directive or what someone thinks aught to be done. I say start fresh and different.
You can legislate morally you can't legislate morality
One of my favorite Star Trek books, called The Kobayashi Maru, involved several of the main characters re-telling stories of their academy days. It is really a compelling little book and extremely well written.
Several of the stories focus on the Kobayashi Maru doomsday scenario that's referenced in one of the Star Trek movies, but several deal with other aspects of a Star Fleet Academy education.
If Shatner had this type of material in in mind then the project might actually be worth while. Anyway, it's a great read for any Star Trek fan -- the author really captures each character's own nuances.
Just remember, it can't be any worse than the first (and for me, last) episode of Enterprise.
I used to hate Superman. I liked Batman and human superheros better. What kind of a turtured soul can you have when you can't even be hurt? How about being uncorrupted by ultimate power? No, Smallville gets it right. Internal conflict between a evil destiny and being raised with a apple pie morality. Good stuff. It also helps explain his relationship with Lex Luthor.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
Sorry, but I think Leonard Nimoy has always had a better since of humor about himself (and always been a better actor). Also, Nimoy directed the only StarTrek movie that didn't suck...
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Here is Shatner's monologue from the Just for Laughs festival in 2000. It is a parody of a famous Canadian beer commercial.
You sly dog: you got me monologuing! - Syndrome
Please don't let JMS have his way with Star Trek, B5 might have had an extremely loyal fan-base as well (I never belonged to it, for me the acting was bad and the story felt like it had been ripped from D&D's Manual of the Planes (Shadows vs. Old Ones, er, Grey Council), but that's not the point), but B5, simply put, is way more gritty, dirty and "Real Life" + "New Age" than ST ever was. JMS can obviously do quite successfull shows, with a lot of appeal for a large group of viewers, but his "style" doesn't fit into the ST-universe at all! Should he gain command of ST, then I'd know the franchise dead for good, at least for me. (And I think it's pretty much stinking by now, Voyager was utter crap and Enterprise had a nice pilot episode, which even includes the explanation of why all those time-line inconsistencies are ok to show up, if you use your brains once in while, but ultimately, it was plain boring and having T'Pol be the Sexbomb-of-the-series sure did its fair share towards that end...)
Stargate based on the mild success of the film and novelised version of the film; Battlestar galactica based on the 1979 series that itself had an earlier sequel in 1980 (banish the thought though as it was poorly done), Star Wars (mention of that is enough, no?) all demonstrate the same repetition. For those popular here: Farscape was an exaggerated space drama that still shied away from the epic scope of a space opera for some reason so ended with the extension of only a sequel mini-series; Firefly had promise but used overly of the same character types as the Enterprise derivative of Star Trek, so it failed from lack of popular franchise, and Enterprise failed due to overt similarity to Andromeda, that itself failed due to poor character design. Over saturation is the problem, and lack of hard sci-fi amidst the drama that will not plunge into epic space opera.
That is, the solution is to exceed one or more of those limits: hard sci-fi, or into space opera so that contrived drama does not overrun the plot and cast the show down amidst the myriad that have come before it.
TV is the same as movies or music. When Janis Ian did her /. interview, she mentioned that music studios actually pay you less for songs you wrote than they do for "covers." The idea is that a known commodity is guaranteed to be at least recognizable. It's insane -- that approach carried to an extreme would result in zero new hits -- but that's the way they pay. (Janice Ian would know -- she's never recorded anything she didn't write herself.)
Even the cable networks are hardly adventurous about what they program. They need to give you something you recognize, only they're able to push the standards of what can get shown and they can afford the ratings that go with a niche audience -- so you get Larry David remaking Seinfeld without the straight man, or a mob series with more language and violence than would pass on broadcast. You still know exactly what you're getting: S & The City was a big hit for HBO, but it's basically a sit com with more language and some skin.
I used to work in bookstores during college. Most of the mass market stuff is completely canned Stephen King-level genre work. But man, is there ever more "space" for niche authors in the book industry. It doesn't seem like the big media companies properly develop books as a seeding ground for their other markets, though. Individual authors get big money deals when someone's interested in the film rights, but what they should be doing is signing young authors to modest contracts early on. What you need, to get to what we both want, is some kind of farm system for developing young talent that can cultivate an audience over time. Seems like that'd be okay for the sort of authors who get called "promising," and great for the studios -- assuming they could view the money as a modest investment and not stand over authors' shoulders giving committee advice.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
No offsense to Wheaton (I know you're probably reading this), but wouldn't he come across as a bit too dopey for the role? Gary was supposed to be a hotshot competitor to Kirk that kept the both of them pushing their limits. In many ways, we can probably thank Gary for Kirk being the youngest captain.
Whoever plays Gary Mitchell *needs* to come across as a TopGun pilot.
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The one difference I think you're all missing is that all these films and series take place in a universe with a mature interstellar civilization, whereas in the Original Star Trek, space was still a relatively unknown quantity ("going where no man has gone before"). That is what created the sense of awe and wonder and that is what Sci Fi (and SF) are all about--the UNKNOWN--not some spaceship tied to Starfleet Command by a subspace umbilical cord. That was why Janeway was flung halfway across the galaxy, and still they continued to act like a Washington bureaucracy when determining how to proceed.
And along the way Star Trek became more and more about the characters, whereas in the original series, the crew were basically an ensemble cast that acted out new stories every episode. I.e., they were short stories, not parts of a novel. The great thing about this kind of ensemble acting is you don't have to get to know the characters over again. You can cut right to the chase and tell a story. This is why the idea of a Star Fleet Academy series is such a horrendously bad idea. It gets even farther away from the short story format and turns the franchise into even more of a soap opera. And I, for one, cannot abide soap operas pretending to science fiction.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
"The one difference I think you're all missing is that all these films and series take place in a universe with a mature interstellar civilization"
I'd have to say that Battlestar Galactica definitely does not fit into that category, and while in Stargate, there are races that have been out there building civilizations since before humans were on the scene, this compares favorbably to ST:ToS where humans were just starting to explore the galaxy which many older races called home for millenia or even MUCH more (Organians).
Nope, I fail to see the lack of a sense of exploration in Battlestar Galactica or Stargate.
However exploration is NOT the only useful theme in SF, and ST:ToS is not the only valid recipie for good story-telling. For example, a series based on the Foundation trilogy or Dune would have almost no exploration component at all. Same goes for most of the Culture books and a fair chunk of Nivin's universe (though some of it WAS clearly exploritory... especially the earlier books).
Except for: De Kelley was fairly successful at character work prior to Trek-- I believe I heard him say that he wasn't sure if he was typecast or not because he had not intended to go on working after Trek ended anyway.
Yeah, and that reason was that it finished it's plotline.
Agreed. The plotline was the reason that you could watch B5 week after week. It made up for the occasional bad episode or cringe inducing incident. It also led to rabid fans who kept the show going an extra two years. The reason year 5 wasn't the best is that it was uncertain that there was to be a year 5 so JMS sped up the plotline in year 4 leading to... the last season being kind of weak.
-- $G
...anthalogy series? In spite of the bastardization that Berman has made out of the Trek universe in recent years, I've always thought that the vast number of races and cultures touched upon during the TNG and DS9 years was enough "canon" fodder to last a lifetime of story-telling. So... Why not an anthology series, where the characters are never the same twice. (Think Twilight Zone or Outer Limits, only in Trek-space.) Each episode would tell a small story set somewhere -- hell, ANYwhere -- in the Trek universe, even at different time periods. The four-years war with the Romulans; the humanoid-possessing insectoids from the "Conspiracy" TNG episode (unfinished story!); what *really* happened to Guinen's race when the Borg attacked, and how'd she escape death/assimilation; hell, the potential war stories that could be told about the Cardassian occupation of Bajor are in themselves limitless -- think WWII mini-epics (Bajoran Dirty Dozen?? :)
I've always believed that there are far too many rich ideas in Trek to focus on just one ship or crew. Time to let the idea floodgates open...