What people now want out of a movie is to be stimulated for a couple of hours by fast cuts and 'splosions.

Harmy's Despecialized Editions FTW!

I'm sure we'll get "official" copies of the original OT again at some point, what with Disney having the rights to the Fox stuff finally.

I do feel like there were a few worthwhile things that came out of the SE of ANH in particular and wouldn't mind seeing in some "hybrid" version though. The fixing of the more obvious bad effects (grey squares following TIEs around in some spots, Ben's lightsaber sometimes looking like it was about to burn out during the Vader fight, etc.) only helps. Also I didn't hate the extra scene in the hangar where Luke gets to see Biggs briefly, since otherwise it's totally out of the blue that he knows him during the battle, randomly talking about "Beggar's Canyon back home" and being particularly shook when he gets taken out. If there were somehow a good place to fit it in and the footage were usable, I wouldn't even mind if they had put back the original scene of Biggs talking to Luke on Tattooine and confessing that he's joining the Rebellion.

Fox owns distribution rights on Star Wars forever and on Empire and Jedi for a few more years. So Disney could only re-release the original trilogy in partnership with Fox.

Kathleen Kennedy is the biggest problem and deserves the most blame for the new Star Wars movies. Imagine if Kevin Feige were in charge instead.

Star Wars fans should be petitioning for her removal.

What did she do?

More like "what she didn't do".

Been covered in this thread previously if you want to look.

Cliffs are: having zero vision and zero guidance and a horrendous, incompetent, abysmal approach to a trilogy where they have zero idea what's going to happen from 7 to 8 to 9. Who lets a trilogy start with open-ended questions and mysteries, while having absolutely no idea what the answers are or where it's going to go or how it will end?

Just a thought and maybe I'm totally off the mark here but I think some of the problems with episodes 7 and 8 is that they should actually be episodes 8 and 9 in the story. They have skipped what should be episode 7 entirely and thus we are missing huge parts of the backstory that should set up the story.

Thanks.

Correct. That's not how they write movies and planned trilogies.

Well, that's not how they should, at least. In this case, that's obviously what they in fact did, and failed at it.

You will never stop painting the kettle black when it comes to meltdowns, mr no self awareness german guy.

Anyway, TOS is objectively good and is one of the most important tv shows ever made, you can dispute that as even basement dwelling ginger virgins have opinions.

As someone who is currently and for a long time slogging through TOS on Netflix, I second Sugar Nut. It's really, really, really bad and didn't age well at all. Roddenberry created a great world and it was improved upon over the decades. The TOS in isolation is crap. The stories are mostly on the level of cheap pulp magazines, or they are some copy of a part of history (Romans, Greeks, Nazis, Mongols etc. BUT IN SPACE! Yeah!). The climax is mostly a badly choreographed fist fight because that's what naturally happens when two very advanced space ships engage in battle.

Its almost like it was made in the 60s.

Its a hard watch now, but that is just about where we are now as viewers.

It was a ground breaking show, an iconic show, as a kid it was great and if it was just as straight up **** as you and SN are arguing, it would have just disappeared off the radar and no way would we be discussing it now.

Star Trek owes most of its prominence to the subsequent movies and series. TOS does contain some good elements but overall it's a mess. It's like a reverse Star Wars. TOS is the prequels and what comes after it is the original trilogy.

I'm definitely on the side of TOS not having aged well. And I think it's a very tough sell to get the average viewer to watch it now, you'd kinda have to be into TV history or something.

It's not objectively bad, but when you have to preface a show or movie with "this is great, you just have to understand this and this and this about the time it was made and the context around it, and hey maybe you should watch this other thing so you understand what shows were like in this era, then you can watch it", you lose most people.

You have a weird definition of "objectively good" where it depends entirely on context and subjectivity. Insofar as there's such a thing as "objectively good" in art, objectively good things shouldn't become a "hard watch" just because of "where we are as viewers". There are plenty of old movies that people still watch and enjoy today, even though cinema has moved on. TOS happened at a time when television was not really art and sci-fi was thought of as simply pulp. It was a groundbreaking show and good for its time, but "good for its time" doesn't equal "good". Louis is correct that the problem isn't just budget, you could remake TOS episodes with a high budget and they would still suck. The scripts suck. I also don't think you can entirely handwave this away as a product of its time. Philip K. Dick wrote at a time when scifi was largely pulp and managed to produce work which is still highly thought of today.

The argument that Star Trek still being on the radar means it must have been good is ludicrous. 1950s Superman comics are not good art merely because Superman is still a thing.

"TOS is objectively good! That is if you make up for and take into account these factors which make it terrible to watch today."

Gotcha!

Show me one TOS episode that even comes close to TNG's "The Best of Both Worlds" levels. Or some of the slower paced episodes like the immediately following "Family" (what an awesome and powerful piece of Star Trek) or "The Inner Light" which is no less powerful in the slightest bit.

Three episodes all about Picard. TNG was objectively bad in S1, and the whole show only lasted as long as it did because of Patrick Stewart.

TOS had it's flaws, and no one needs to spend an hour of their life watching an average episode today.

However, if it was as bad as some say it would not have spawned 13 films and 5 further series. And TOS is still syndicated every day at 6pm in the UK.

In the Star Trek (2017) thread, I recommended these episodes from TOS to a new watcher.

Star Trek
City on the Edge of Forever- this is almost always cited as the best episode of the original series

Balance of Terror- this is a early first season episode that introduces the Romulans. It's a good cold war parable.

The Menagerie- this is the original series only two-part episode.

Mirror, Mirror- a fun episode showing what an evil Star Trek universe would look like.

Get a star treck thread where you can wear your pijamas and argue whether Picard or whoever is the sexiest!

You can apply all the above to claims it is objectively bad.

We could have a long debate about this, but the argument that you can as a subject take yourself out of your specific time and place contexts and judgements ect thereby, and make a perfectly independent "objective" pronouncement on the merits of a cultural artefact of another time and place is not one the body of western thought is going to get behind.

Lets revisit the supposedly far superior TNG when it is 52 years old in 2039 and see how many people want to pronounce it objectively bad. Probably quite a few Sugar Nut analogues.

TNG in 2039 is not going to be winning many friends imo.

My 10 year old son already refuses to watch it because he finds the effects so bad.

Also as regards original superman comics, however much you dont like them or consider them art etc, they are massively important artefacts in the history of western culture and originals are worth big $, one sold recently for 3.2M dollars.

It didn't take until 2018 for TOS to look bad. In the 90s I was enjoying each of the other Star Trek series but when TOS was on tv I could never make it through 5 minutes of an episode. I imagine most people in the 60s felt similarly, or else the show wouldn't have been cancelled for poor ratings and kept alive in syndication just by cult followers. TNG was actually popular during its time and was cancelled in its prime because they thought they could make even more money by moving those characters to the big screen and starting spin-offs with lower-paid actors. I don't think TNG has aged well, but after 30 years it's still watchable.

When pitching TNG, no one said lets make a reboot of that insignifcant show, that no one liked and had no cultural traction.

They said the opposite,because TSO was still relevant at the time.

This was before reboot mania.

Name 5 more culturally important shows from the 60s?

Defining objective good/bad is going to be hard, well impossible, but the above pretty much disqualifies bad as an objective reality.

I agree with all the points here.

It's also worth pointing out that TNG failed hard until they made it more contemporary, so even 20 years after it was made TOS had aged to the point that TNG had to be more edgy to succeed, so it's no surprise that both shows look dated now.

However, dated does not equal objectively bad.