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It's basically sports teams for nerds as well.
Interesting that this applies to me, despite not really being a central example of a nerd (bounced between Africa and the UK and came to America relatively late) . I never really had "my" Star Trek show, I did catch some episodes and Nemesis (which didn't help) but I was more of a Star Wars/Stargate and then Battlestar kid. My impression was that I simply fell through the cracks between major ST shows but I checked and Enterprise was airing right up until the time of BSG's first season and Voyager and SG-1 overlapped so those shows were out there.
Might just be a change in values or people tiring of it? Stargate was milscifi without the utopianism.Battlestar was self-consciously made by former Star Trek writers to avoid problems they thought Trek had (and to be much darker in a post-9/11 world). Just as Sci-Fi Channel took BSG and Stargate out back and shot them when they were seen as outdated. I thought it was absolute folly but they may have been overcorrecting due to past experience.
Specifically, Ronald D. Moore had been a writer on DS9 and went over to Voyager after DS9 ended, but left Voyager not too long afterwards due to disagreements with the producers over storylines, basically in that they were reluctant to take seriously the implications of the premise -- that Voyager is on its own, without support, and their situation should be getting more and more desperate as time goes on. There was an interesting interview some fanzine did with Ron Moore after he left where Moore more-or-less ranted on this subject at length (and I wish I remembered the name of said fanzine and knew if that interview was online). It's interesting to think of that interview in light of the Ron Moore edition of BSG, which is more or less an attempt to "do it right" in this respect for both Voyager and the original BSG (which was also rather inconsistent on the whole issue on how desperate the Last Surviving Human Refugee Fleet is -- one week everyone's fleeing the destruction of the 12 Colonies, the next week everyone's whooping it up on the casino ship like nothing's wrong...). I like to imagine that every Friday night after a new episode of the Ron Moore BSG aired, Moore prank-called Brannon Braga and said "See! That's what Voyager should have been like!" and then hung up.
Which is not to say that Ron-Moore-BSG is not without its problems, they're just different problems -- the main one being that Moore tried for a massive story arc like JMS did in Babylon 5, but didn't want to spend the time obsessively planning out 5 years of stories like JMS did, so he decided to wing it as he went along. The thing is, Ron Moore is almost good enough for this to have worked, for a while anyway; the wheels didn't start seriously coming off the thing until season 4.
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I've never actually watched either Stargate or Battlestar!
My parents are boomers, so they watched Star Trek and The Next Generation when they aired, and especially saw the films when they started coming out. Talking to them about movies is an interesting experience: they remember a time when movie theaters were everywhere, and going to see a movie was almost an everyday occurance. My dad talks about how when Star Wars came out in 1977, he saw it several times before it left theaters.
So I grew up on watching Star Wars films with my parents, we'd pull the lounge chair into the center of the living room and I'd curl up with my dad and watch the OT. When the prequels came out, we watched those too, but my favorite was Empire, obviously. When I was a little older we started watching Star Trek too, I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
Star Trek and Star Wars have always been the most mainstream of the space franchises, so I grew up with them as normal popcorn movies that my parents liked. Now, if you start talking to my mom about Lord of the Rings, that's where you'll start finding the nerdiness.
So part of this is that I grew up on a bit of an older wave of nostalgia, and I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.
And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.
Yeah, she’s been a fan since the 80s! Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college. She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
Nope! The Motion Picture with V-ger was a movie I really enjoyed. It could be slow but the V-ger accumulations over time and the sequence of them flying in to the center of the mysterious spaceship was so epic that it impressed itself on my memory. I also like 4, and as an adult I like it more than 1 because of the character moments (and Spock swearing) despite thinking that it has a weaker overall concept than 1. “What if the voyager probe gained sentience and RETVRNED to Earth?” is just a more interesting premise than “what if whales seek revenge on humanity?”
Oh, no, I'm mixing up the premises of 1 and 4! I'd like to say that it's the scriptwriters fault for going to the "mysterious alien menace threatens Earth and the twist is that it's actually connected to 20th century humanity" well more than once, but I'm just trying to rationalize away my own shame.
I think he had a lot of loyal followings. My first introduction to Tolkien by name was in writing by Isaac Asimov (Jewish atheist), and of course modern medieval-fantasy from D&D onward is like 80% Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off.
Of course! Especially the Two Towers extended edition - the theatrical version didn't include Saruman's death, and without knowing that Jackson had made that change to the plot it was unnecessarily disappointing to see The Return of the King end with no scouring of the shire.
Also, you have to watch the Hobbit films either first or not-at-all. My kids got to enjoy them for what they were, not having seen the Lord of the Rings first, but then looking back after the LotR trilogy they understood how disappointed I must have been.
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RDM complained about Star Trek tropes and went out of his way to avoid them, only to then fall into the basically-unbuilt mystery box nonsense we had to deal with for a decade after Lost launched (to add insult to injury Lost probably also paid off its myth stuff much better than he did)
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