Wars vs Trek

(Originally posted on Wednesday December 10th 2008)

If there are two scifi franchises that really define what is the heart of the genre in the modern western conception, they have to be Star Wars and Star Trek. Nothing else comes close to having the same breadth of undersatnding and popularity as well as acceptance as a part of modern popular culture than the legacies of George Lucas and Gene Rodenberry. While older generations might look to the works of pioneering authors in the genre or the tv serials that dominated in the middle of the last century, for my own there is nothing more powerful than the Rebellion and the Millenium Falcon on one hand and Starfleet and the Enterprise on the other.

As a kid in the UK there was no real way of avoiding either franchise as you grew up. ITV seemed to show Episode IV every xmas without fail and the BBC almost always had TOS running in an evening slot one day of the week. But Star Wars always seemed to have the edge, what with the comics, the action figures and then the cartoon series Ewoks and Droids (pants additions to the Star Wars Universe, perhaps a forboding omen of what was to come?) that kept the flame burning. Star Trek on the other hand was a series mired in kitch and bad effects that did nothing to arouse the interest of the average kid. Sometimes you saw the films, but they were as lumpy as the series itself.

All that changed in the early 90s, when the BBC got its hands on TNG and finally I was the right age to appreciate the Rodenberry message of tolerance and understanding. That was coupled with the fact that the new captain was a figure of gravity and quiet dignity rather than the bombastic and somewhat sweaty man in the corset who seemed to be the centre of the films. Granted it took a while to get going, but the ideals of TNG soon began to feel more real than the vague mutterings about the "Living Force" of the other franchise. In TNG people did not solve problems from the cockpit of a fighter or with the business end of a lightsabre, often it took intelligence, diplomacy and hard decisions to win the day.

But by then Star Wars was already the greatest cult phenomena of our time (and probably always will be) and the interest was reignited big time by the release of the original trilogy with added scenes that sometimes enhanced and sometimes detracted from the experience. More importantly, these saw cinematic release and provided the first opportunity for many fans to see the films on the big screen. News that the mysterious backstory would be told in a new trilogy brought the franchise fully back to life like an old man with a new hip.

In the meantime Star Trek kept things going with DS9 and later Voyager as well as a typically mixed bag of cinematic outings which peaked with the still enthralling First Contact (which in my opinion beats all the Star Wars prequels hands down). All three series broke new ground and the march should have gone on with the prequel series Enterprise, killed off at the very point that it had started to gel and really make something of itself. With that and disappointing box office results for Insurrection the last TNG era film, Paramount pulled the plug.

Back in Star Wars land everything was in place to cement this as the greatest franchise of all time and Lucas as a genius who could do no wrong. I walked into the cinema, sat down and listened to the music roll...and watched it go downhill from there. You see for me Star Wars was a wonderfully baffling combination of mysticism and tech as idelists, warrior monks and charismatic rogues faced off against the implacable evil of the Empire. Instead we had claggy dialogue, villains who looked like kitchen appliances, cgi characters only slightly less annoying than the Crazy Frog and Jedi who were crushing bores. Two more films and I was begging for mercy.

Now it seems as though Trek may have the chance to change everything as it joins so many other defunct franchises on the track to a major revamp. I had my doubts and my flesh crawled at the first trailer, but the new ones and what I read about the plot have me hoping that something fantastic could emerge. Let's face it, all they have to do is produce something watchable and coherant to outstrip the Star Wars prequels!

I always wondered why Trek seemed to be the poor cousin of the two, why its fans were seen as wierdos and nerds who flocked to conventions whilst Star Wars was the epitome of mainstream. Even Samuel L Jackson wanted to be a Jedi.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that Star Wars is a space opera, filled with mythical themes and having very little to do with the real world other than making vague noises about politics and spirituality. It's so wide open that people can almost interpret it in any way that suits them as the modern Japanese do with Samurai in the modern day.

Star Trek on the other hand is a distinctly political and ideologically driven franchise that has unapologetic stances on both who we are in the present and where we are going in the future. While we can escape to fictional worlds in Wars, in Trek we always have to come back down to Earth...or Terra, if you prefer.