Star Trek Continues Meets Kickstarter Goal, Aims For Stretch Goals

jdavidb writes: A couple of months ago on Slashdot, I learned about Star Trek Continues, a faithful continuation of the Star Trek original series five-year mission, lovingly recreated by Vic Mignogna and a dedicated cast and crew. The original Enterprise set from Desilu has been recreated, great scripts have been written, fantastic guest stars have been enlisted, including stars from the original series and other Star Trek voyages, and the three episodes filmed so far look like they genuinely came from the era that produced the original series. Continues has now turned my children on to original series Star Trek, and we eagerly await more episodes.

Continues has two more days to go in their Kickstarter campaign. They have already raised enough money to produce two more episodes and meet their first stretch goal: creating a set for Engineering. They're also bumping up against their next stretch goal: creating a planet set so the Continues Enterprise team can visit strange new worlds and experience the tragic loss of nameless redshirts.

Comments

Now they just need intensity from the actors.

[Anonymous Coward]

I want to care about this. I really do. But the acting is justflat. None of them feel like they've got skin in the game. I don't know what it would take but the entire series would become a different thing if they could somehow be gotten INTO the story. Because for now they're really not.

Re:Now they just need intensity from the actors.

[Shakrai]

And speaking of flat, ST:TNG doesn't hold up. I remember back in 1987 when it first came on and how excited I was to have a new Star Trek. Watching on Netflix now, I can't help thinking what a piece of shit it was

WTF are you talking about? ST:TNG is the only Sci-Fi show from my childhood that stands the test of time. There were some hokey episodes to be sure but the underlying theme of humanity exploring the cosmos, under a semi-abundance economy where we've moved past the need for greed and work instead towards self-improvement and discovery? How can you not like that?

TNG explored themes as diverse as brinkmanship (The Defector and The Enemy), individual liberties (The Measure of a Man), paranoia driven by external fears (The Pegasus and The Drumhead, a massively underrated episode that seems downright prescient when one contemplates current events in the post 9/11 world), terrorism (The High Ground), eugenics (The Masterpiece Society), the morality of deadly force (The Most Toys), veterans/PTSD (The Wounded, Family, and The Hunted), old age (Half a Life and Sarek), torture (Chain of Command), revenge (Reunion), and betrayal (Preemptive Strike).

Those are just the issue episodes that come to mind. TNG could also do action (several of the aforementioned, plus Power Play, Conundrum and Starship Mine), first contact (First Contact, Darmok), and even comedy (Deja Q).

Some of those episodes were better than others but I dare say that they're as good as anything that's on television today and were light-years ahead of their peers in the 1980s and 1990s. TNG was at its best when approached as a character and issues driven drama; in that respect I think it set a standard that is never going to be equaled in television Sci-Fi. It had more than its share of gimmicks (engineering failures used as plot devices, apparently the concepts of fail safe and even the lowly circuit breaker don't exist in the 24th Century) but on balance it stands the test of time.

It was also uplifting escapism entertainment that could still do serious drama, something I think we've lost with the current emphasis on dark violent dramas. Even the genuinely scary episodes of TNG (The Best of Both Worlds can still send shivers down my spine) never left you feeling depressed and melancholy. The only other show from the 1980s that I can still re-watch is Magnum PI, for a lot of the same reasons when I thi

Hmmm...

[rmdingler]

Sometimes the thing that makes a series a classic is the finite nature of its run.