I don't recall either term being used in my fan circle back then.
"Enterprise" too advanced for 22nd Century
- Thread starter CaptainSpirk
- Start date
Not really. The concept existed, but it wasn't a fan obsession like it is now. What created that fixation was two things, mainly. One was the 1989 Roddenberry memo that claimed to decanonize the animated series (though that was never actually binding on anything but the tie-in novels and comics, since Roddenberry had no actual power over the show itself by that point), and the other was the claim of Lucasfilm Licensing that the Star Wars novels and comics represented a "level" of canon. Both of those things were exceptions rather than the norm, but they got a lot of attention, and they created the false impression in fandom that canon is some formal policy that has to be officially declared, that it carries the weight of law, and that it's a judgment of a thing's value or legitimacy.
And a large part of the obnoxiousness of it these days is the fixation on the actual label. Fans are more obsessed with arguing over whether something can be called canon than they are with examining the underlying ideas and issues beneath the label and the nuances that it doesn't cover. Too many people use labeling as a lazy substitute for actual thinking or understanding, treating the question of what to label something as the end goal of the thought process rather than its roughest beginning. So the greater popularization of the label in the '80s and '90s, thanks to Roddenberry and Lucasfilm, has fixated too much attention on that label itself, and I've found that gets in the way of understanding the real ideas and issues that it's supposed to represent, because the label has become an end in itself in people's minds rather than just a tool for understanding a larger idea.
Doug Drexler did look at the Bonnie when he was doing the NX concepting work.
