J-Sun
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- Joined
- Oct 23, 2008
- Messages
- 5,323
In a sense this article is just a really high-grade advertisement to sell the book of which it apparently forms a part but it's still a complete stand-alone essay that - after a somewhat awkward bit of internal double-advertising using an incomplete excerpt from yet another essay and a paragraph trying to excuse it - gets very interesting.
I have many minor quibbles but found the whole thing interesting and hope others do, too.
Some of the minor quibbles:
He says "[t]hree seasons' worth of programs is what you need to sell a viable syndication package" when that actually understates another minor miracle in Star Trek's success - at the time, it was almost an iron-clad requirement to have five seasons and even today you ideally need four. Granted, ST shot a high number of episodes for those three seasons but also not so high for some shows at the time.
In the network-to-syndication-to-movie sequence, he left out the existence of the animated series though what the significance - pro or con - of that show was, I don't know.
While mentioning them, I think he significantly undersells the 50s movies and predecessor TV - especially Serling who, unlike others, seemed to actually appreciate print SF - and all this was successful before ST, though perhaps not as successful, which may explain partly explain his emphasis. But some of the most appreciated ST eps like "City on the Edge of Forever" arguably play almost more like the best of TZ than ST and were perhaps made more likely because of it.
There's a really unfair (though funny) comment on The Thing: yes, it's a pale shadow of the story that I imagine Campbell may not have appreciated, but it still makes for a decent flick.
Spinrad has the pitch being "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea--in outer space!" but maybe he's only being metaphorical. I recall hearing that ST was literally pitched as "Wagon Train--to the stars!"
While saying some interesting things about Spock, he undersells Kirk and McCoy and, possibly most importantly, the dynamic between them. TV today seems to be utterly dominated by female demographics but I think the show relied heavily on young boys more than slightly older girls and women to gain its initial fan impetus, so psycho-sexual profiles of Spock don't explain things as much as "identification" with the Captain. Kirk wasn't just a standard "Captain", else we wouldn't have these "who's the best Captain" threads with Kirk generally placing well.
I'm not sure he gets the relationship between Gernsbackian fandom and the newer and largely distinct ST fandom quite right but I'm not a part of either and not conversant with ST fandom's history in details. But he does, despite all his focus on Spock, miss another feature - every "secret" society needs its "secret" handsign and the Vulcan fingersplit gave it that.
I have many minor quibbles but found the whole thing interesting and hope others do, too.
Some of the minor quibbles:
He says "[t]hree seasons' worth of programs is what you need to sell a viable syndication package" when that actually understates another minor miracle in Star Trek's success - at the time, it was almost an iron-clad requirement to have five seasons and even today you ideally need four. Granted, ST shot a high number of episodes for those three seasons but also not so high for some shows at the time.
In the network-to-syndication-to-movie sequence, he left out the existence of the animated series though what the significance - pro or con - of that show was, I don't know.
While mentioning them, I think he significantly undersells the 50s movies and predecessor TV - especially Serling who, unlike others, seemed to actually appreciate print SF - and all this was successful before ST, though perhaps not as successful, which may explain partly explain his emphasis. But some of the most appreciated ST eps like "City on the Edge of Forever" arguably play almost more like the best of TZ than ST and were perhaps made more likely because of it.
There's a really unfair (though funny) comment on The Thing: yes, it's a pale shadow of the story that I imagine Campbell may not have appreciated, but it still makes for a decent flick.
Spinrad has the pitch being "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea--in outer space!" but maybe he's only being metaphorical. I recall hearing that ST was literally pitched as "Wagon Train--to the stars!"
While saying some interesting things about Spock, he undersells Kirk and McCoy and, possibly most importantly, the dynamic between them. TV today seems to be utterly dominated by female demographics but I think the show relied heavily on young boys more than slightly older girls and women to gain its initial fan impetus, so psycho-sexual profiles of Spock don't explain things as much as "identification" with the Captain. Kirk wasn't just a standard "Captain", else we wouldn't have these "who's the best Captain" threads with Kirk generally placing well.
I'm not sure he gets the relationship between Gernsbackian fandom and the newer and largely distinct ST fandom quite right but I'm not a part of either and not conversant with ST fandom's history in details. But he does, despite all his focus on Spock, miss another feature - every "secret" society needs its "secret" handsign and the Vulcan fingersplit gave it that.
