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I can clearly recall my first encounter with
Star Trek; it was a late night -- if not too late for a 10-year old -- and my great Aunt was over the house watching me and my younger siblings. There was nothing to do, so we switched to the local public television station; maybe she thought polka would be on, I don't know.
Instead, it was the old Trek, the first series. Still available for those sorts of airings. Sponsored by Cap's Comics Cavalcade, now long-gone; I'd never managed to see what it was like, since I was too young at it was too far away.
But that night did accomplish something: it lit the only interest in
Star Trek I've ever had. I've seen maybe three episodes of The Next Generation total, and absolutely nothing from the other series. I saw the Generations movie over a friend's house when it was sort of new, and I do remember catching the bit of The Undiscovered Country where the blood pours out into zero gravity in little orbs (you know the part) at a video store, but that was it.
It's not that I was bored or intimidated, or that I hate
Star Trek or anything, not exactly. It all just seemed so big and nondescript, kitschy in the wrong places and untowardly pompous. Everything about it screams ‘not for me,' although some of that's my fault; I built up a unique idea of what
Star Trek ‘was' from watching those old 1966-69 episodes, many of which I later saw on that same station. It was never so much the characters or the specific situations that appealed to me, but the
style, the hands-tied blend of period style (oh those uniform colors!) and restrained fantasy effects, forming something truly alien.
I mean, there were mostly humans running the Enterprise, but the show seemed put together by people from a distant world, only fit to be shown late at night, and that captured my attention. Even beyond the odd, unpolished effects -- plush Tribbles and orbs of gelatin superimposed against a star field with colored lights shining -- there was the unfettered idealism of it all, the overriding belief that an entire planet could be at peace and reach the stars to participate in torturous allegories for contemporary events! Hey, I knew the one with the half-black, half-white guy vs. the half-white, half-black guy was overcooked even back then, but it seemed
right, like the planet that produced
Star Trek was merely observing narrative tradition in crafting these fables!
Anyway, I grew up. I haven't seen those old episodes in a long time, and very little of the subsequent, profligate material has caught my attention. This, I think, puts me in an interesting position to comment on the hot new revival of the old
Star Trek series by cross-genre mini-mogul and reflecting light aficionado J.J. Abrams. I dig the lens flares! Haters might as well hit the back button now!
But wait - what the hell does this have to do with comics? I'm glad you asked, reader, because I'm happy to report that my viewing of the new
Star Trek absolutely bowled me over with cosmic revelations as to the inner workings of the very stuff of life: franchise revivals!
Think about it. You can hardly get through a conservative sampling of today's superhero comics without bumping into some new variation on an old character or a freshly-positioned reworking of an old series. Indeed, superhero comics are especially amenable to this kind of frequent realignment, since nobody in their right mind wants to contribute anything wholly original to corporations that insist on whole and perpetual ownership of anything you conceive, by which I mean everyone is fascinated with exploring the mighty living patchwork of conflicts and synchronicities that are a defining trait of the shared-universe superhero environment!
And right now, everyone is saying
Star Trek is the
ne plus ultra of franchise revival for this particular year, usually right before conceding that the plot is kind of dopey but dammit (Jim), they're giving it a positive notice anyway. I love it when critics do that.
So how
do you reach the dizzying heights of the current
Star Trek? Your first instinct, naturally, is to apply blockbuster action movie style to a recognizable property and release the enhanced product into a filmgoing season groomed by massively expansive advertising to facilitate the acceptance of said product as a public desire, but wait wait wait wait - comics can't do that. Mostly. Er, they can't do it
well, let's say.
No matter: here's three more steps, helpful and comics-ready, absolutely guaranteed to rocket your franchise straight to the top, although this guarantee is not legally binding in any way, shape or form.
STEP 1: UP THE STAKES - Hell, you don't want your franchise to look like wimpy stuff for babies, right? Audiences demand more from their blockbuster genre entertainment these days, a sense of danger and the thrill of the unexpected, of relevance and scope. You've got to take
risks, to ‘go there' with franchise entertainment, assuring everyone that this particular ongoing corporate concern is ready to take on today's jaded, globalized environment with relevance and danger, and definitely the unexpected!
So what's the recipe for success? One ingredient:
genocide.
That's right - everyone who reads
The Economist knows there's nothing more entertaining in this world than genocide, so you should put a lot of mass deaths in your comic/movie/adult computer game to ensure that your story
matters and
big things are happening.
Star Trek annihilates the entire Romulan homeworld in one timeline, and then has the big bad slaughter untold millions of Vulcans when their planet gets munched up in a different timeline, and then most of the action centers around the Enterprise crew attempting a c-c-combo breaker when good ol' mostly-human space is threatened.
There's so many lessons we can take from this. Mass annihilation is the perfect motive for a villain doing villainous things, even if the plot mechanisms don't entirely match up. Genocide also lets the heroes look extra sad when it's sad time in the story, although that's nothing a rousing action ending can't mostly fix, especially when Our Heroes pull off the heroism of preventing genocide in a region whose population looks like the audience instead of weird aliens, because that would be the real tragedy! Don't feel bad for Spock: he kissed Uhura and met Leonard Nimoy, who did the thing with his fingers!
STEP 2: RESPECT THE PAST, REVISE FOR THE PRESENT - Now this one's easy. Everyone knows you've got to abide by the classic attributes of the source work while making it relatable for today's thrill-crazy contemporaries, who want kicks, baby, kicks. Arguably, here's where you apply the crashing all-action style, particularly if you've got Abrams' not inconsiderable gifts for breakneck pacing. Make sure people say the famous lines and shit too.
But there's subtler updates you can pursue as well, nuanced balances. Take Uhura. She was a nice character before; competent and collected, well-liked by fans. But today's consumers need just a little bit more on their plate, so try and follow the patented
Star Trek example of making her especially headstrong and dynamic and educated; a genius, really. This way, everyone will be so satisfied that it won't matter that she entirely disappears around the halfway mark, save for her utility as Mr. Spock's love prompt when his frowning half-human lips need soothing from all that nasty ‘extermination of his race' business, which was almost as bad as when Winona Ryder fell off a high ledge. Choose your battles, artist!
STEP 3: DON'T BE AFRAID TO BE SOPHISTICATED - That's right. People know stuff these days. So why not let them
know they know it?
If you look really closely at
Star Trek, there's something special going on. Think - what's it
about? Eric Bana blowing shit up to torture Mr. Spock because his people got wiped out, in what may be some cack-handed allegory for the price of vengeance vis-à-vis contemporary political realities or something? Maybe.
But what
Star Trek's mostly about is just that:
what it's about! The entire film pivots on the very mechanisms that allow it to exist as a revamp: Leonard Nimoy going off in time and a new reality springing up. Eric Bana can't deal with this, so his mission of villainy is really to obliterate the young Federation, i.e. to prevent the
Star Trek revamp from happening, which is the most horrible evil of all, as you surely understand!
It's a revamp about how a revamp came to be, consistent with previously established continuity.
That's the plot - it's about
itself, and therefore becomes the perfect vessel to deliver favorite lines, meet-cutes, genocide, unexpected twists, vague mentions of destiny so as to smooth over the lumpier plot turns like how a stowaway deemed dangerous enough to literally strand on a frozen planet can subsequently come to command a starship essentially by announcing his pre-ejection-for-treason rank, and so much more. It's perfect, self-aware, and commiserate with the public's evolved understanding of revamps as a means of reliable profit in entertainment media.
Everyone wins, you see, particularly the franchise itself - where
Star Trek used to be about exploring new worlds and mating with their allegorical inhabitants, now it's no longer trapped in the domain of nostalgists or bonehead aesthetes on the internet, because
Star Trek is about
Star Trek! It's about new life for Captain Kirk and new civilizations in which the Beastie Boys may be played by Captain Kirk! The ecstasy of printing new money! To boldly go where few grosses have gone before!
Such focus! Such sincerity! Truly, in these monied May evenings, have we breached the final frontier!
Joe McCulloch is the fist behind Jog - The Blog. He posts to The Savage Critics, and prints with The Comics Journal, Comics Comics and Bookforum. Via fists.
The Watchman is ©2008 Joe McCulloch.
