Question on Richard Arnold and his role

[JonnyQuest037]

Richard originally volunteered at Paramount, as Gene's gopher, and also did studio tours when fans came to visit GR. He finally went on the payroll after the flush of incoming cash due to the success of ST IV, and the preparation for TNG.

This is the part that I don't get about about Richard Arnold's bio. He started as an unpaid assistant to GR in what, the late 70s/early 80s? And I presume that it was a full time job, or pretty close to it. So how the heck did he have money to live on for all those years? Did he come from a wealthy family? Was he just living off of Roddenberry's charity? It just seems odd that Arnold was in a position to not earn a salary all those years.

This is a guy who, with a straight face, demanded that Peter David cut a romance for Kirk from one of his DC Comics stories because "Captain Kirk is not interested in women". He knew/knows a lot about Star Trek, but he never understood Star Trek.

Peter David has a LOT of stories about Richard Arnold disliking his Star Trek comic book scripts. PAD has said that his relationship with RA got off to a bad start when he laughed in Arnold's face when RA told him that the Gold Key comics were the standard to which all Trek comics should aspire.

RA had SO many objections to PAD's Trek comics scripts that PAD eventually decided to test him by submitting a script under an alias. It was intentionally more violent than the previous scripts by PAD that were rejected for being "too violent." It sailed through the approval process. After that, PAD was convinced that it was him that RA was objecting to, and not the content of his scripts, so he resigned to make editor Robert Greenberger's life easier. (And IMO, the Trek comic immediately became a whole lot blander under subsequent writers.)

BTW, the alias that PAD submitted his final script under was "Robert Bruce Banner." (PAD was also writing The Incredible Hulk comic at the time.) I don't think it says much for RA that he didn't recognize that PAD was writing under an alias, either. PAD's style is pretty distinctive.

The early novels were great because they were allowed to be weird and different. They weren't always good, but Star Trek has never felt so experimental than in books like The Entropy Effect, Corona, or The Final Reflection. Richard Arnold helped to kill that.

Agreed. He seemed to want everyone to only color inside the lines.

I would have loved to have had his job, but I know, without a doubt, that my own biases would have shown through.

Excellent point. I'm sure that would be the case with most any fan who was promoted to a position of authority.

See, stuff like this is why I can't stand the guy. He could have just said that the novels aren't considered part of the "main" Star Trek universe of the TV shows and movies but instead he had to be a raging dickhole about it.

Yeah, exactly. I have a very low threshold for fans who don't differentiate their personal opinions from fact.

So what was Richard Arnold's beef with Peter David tie-ins?

He generally thought that PAD got too cutesy and irreverent with his Trek stories (which, to be fair, he could at times). There was one Trek comic story that was at least partially penciled before it was spiked. The opening page shows several panels of Sulu, Scotty, and Chekov strapping on what looks like weaponry/armor, and then the double page splash after the page turn reveals that they were actually assembling musical instruments. (Scotty had a set of bagpipes, and Sulu and Chekov had some sort of fictional futuristic instruments.)

RA also insisted that the TAS characters of M'Ress and Arex be removed from the Trek comic (requiring time-consuming and potentially expensive re-scripting of dialogue and retouching of already-finished artwork). As noted above, they became the new characters of M'yra (named after PAD's then-wife Myra) and Ensign Fouton. Then, around one year into the 1989 Star Trek comic's run, the supporting characters of M'yra, Fouton, Kathy Li, and R.J. Blaise were all abruptly removed from the book without warning, pretty obviously at Paramount's request.

In PAD's 1991 TNG novel Vendetta, RA had a disclaimer put in the front of the book because he insisted that there were no such things as female Borg, because no female Borg had been seen at that point in Trek. (This was before the Borg Queen and Seven of Nine, of course). PAD rightfully thought that this was absurd, because why would the Borg only assimilate just the men of a civilization? There wasn't time to have the book rewritten, so the disclaimer was added at the last minute.

PAD's 1991 TOS novel, The Rift, grew out of three story outlines that PAD submitted for a TOS novel. PAD said in Voyages of the Imagination that he thought one of his story pitches was fantastic, one was just okay, and the third was just a collection of ST clichés designed to make the other two pitches look good. The ST office picked the clichéd story as the one they wanted developed into a full novel. Which again, shows that RA didn't have the best of taste when it comes to Trek. (PAD said that he ultimately liked the finished novel, though.)

There's another RA story that doesn't involve PAD, but it's too priceless not to share: For Michael Jan Friedman's 1989 TOS novel, Double, Double, featuring the return of the Kirk Android from "What Are Little Girls Made Of?", MJF featured Ensign Chekov in a supporting role. He got the note back that he had to remove Chekov from the story, as he wasn't on board the ship yet. MJF asked why. The ST office said, "Check your stardate." Eventually, MJF realized that instead of rewriting half of his book to remove Chekov, he could just change the early stardate to a later one, a relatively easy change to make.

But again, this shows that RA just didn't know what he was doing and was often missing the forest for the trees. Because really, what kind of idiot, when faced with a choice like that, thinks that it's better to advise an author to rewrite half of his book instead of changing one or two digits in a stardate?

Then [Berman] posted a photo of Denise Crosby's TNG badge calling it a gift she gave him, and she fucking savaged him for it and told a very different story where he ripped it from her chest saying she won't be needing it anymore.

 

[Sci]

Coming back to the topic of Rick Berman, I think it's important to bear in mind how incredibly misogynistic he was. Renegade Cut has a video on his homophobia and misogyny:

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Quoting Terry Farrell on the topic of Rick Berman in The Fifty-Year Mission: "The problems with my leaving were with Rick Berman. In my opinion, he's just very misogynistic. He'd comment on your bra size not being voluptuous. His secretary had a 36C or something like that, and he would say something about, 'Well, you're just, like, flat. Look at Christine over there. She has the perfect breasts right there.' *That's* the kind of conversation he would have in front of you. I had to have fittings... I think it was a double-D or something. I went to see a woman who fits bras for women who need mastectomies; I had to have that fitting. And then I had to go into his office. Michael Piller didn't care about those things, so he wasn't there when you were having all of these crazy fittings with Rick Berman criticizing your hair or how big your breasts were or weren't. That stuff was *so* intense, especially the first couple of years."

 

[David cgc]

In PAD's 1991 TNG novel Vendetta, RA had a disclaimer put in the front of the book because he insisted that there were no such things as female Borg, because no female Borg had been seen at that point in Trek. (This was before the Borg Queen and Seven of Nine, of course). PAD rightfully thought that this was absurd, because why would the Borg only assimilate just the men of a civilization? There wasn't time to have the book rewritten, so the disclaimer was added at the last minute.

RA's opinion was extra-wrong, since with home video, HD-upgrades, and crack Memory-Alpha researchers, we know that there were several female Borg drones in TNG. Granted, most of them were in "Descent," after Vendetta was written, but there was a Borg played by a woman in "Q-Who."

 

[Therin of Andor]

This is the part that I don't get about about Richard Arnold's bio. He started as an unpaid assistant to GR in what, the late 70s/early 80s? And I presume that it was a full time job, or pretty close to it. So how the heck did have money to live on for all those years? Did he come from a wealthy family? Was he just living off of Roddenberry's charity? It just seems odd that Arnold was in a position to not earn a salary all those years.

Like many volunteers, he went into Paramount on his days off, and hung around with GR at weekend conventions and university lectures. RA worked paid shifts as a bellhop for an LA hotel - to support his extracurricular ST life - when I first met him in January 1984. He became a salaried employee of Paramount in late 1986.

Peter David has a LOT of stories about Richard Arnold disliking his Star Trek comic book scripts.

In PAD's book of essays, "But I Digress..."

PAD rightfully thought that this was absurd, because why would the Borg only assimilate just the men of a civilization?

Because until the Borg took Picard in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1", we did not know that the Borg assimilated other species. They assimilated technology ("The Neutral Zone") and ignored human invaders on their cube, and grew their unBorgified young in maturation chambers ("Q Who?").

The movie "First Contact" showed us Starfleet members being Borgified en masse. We forget that Locutus was a rarity until then. Episodes of VGR introduced us to assimilated races dating back to "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1", but this would be what the "Nitpickers' Guides" called a "changed premise". Ditto ENT with its followup to the story of two unidentified, time-travelling Borg drones from "First Contact".

PAD's novel had introduced Vastator of Borg, a captured Ferengi, who was a replacement for Locutus. Still a rarity. Reannon Bonaventure was the Borg female in the book?

Edit: Another character, Delcara, was described as a "soul sister" of Guinan, because the Star Trek Office didn't want her to be an actual sister of Guinan. (It was too early for the books to be exploring El-Aurians.)

but there was a Borg played by a woman in "Q-Who."

Yep, I remember when someone noticed her! But not well-noticed before "Vendetta".

 

[Steve Roby]

Sorry for the detour, but this caught my eye on page 1:


Not specifically calling Christopher out on this because I see it everywhere in Trek fandom, but this widely held perception of Star Trek as somehow daring is rather exaggerated and oft repeated as if it were gospel.

Trek fans believe it because they've been told it repeatedly and since most 60s TV drama no longer get airplay (especially the half-hour ones) it's difficult for a modern viewer to accurately assess this for themselves. Sure, Trek did have things to say, but any serious dive into 60s TV demonstrates there were way more daring shows prior to and concurrent with it.

Solow and Justman's Inside Star Trek book attempted to demolish that particular myth almost thirty years ago. I think the whole thing, along with the Gene Roddenberry is a great philosopher stuff, arose in the 1970s as a way for fans to say, no, I'm not just watching guys in space pyjamas with laser guns going pew pew pew, I'm watching something POWERFUL and MEANINGFUL that speaks to today's youth. And yes, obviously I think Star Trek was powerful and meaningful, that's why I'm on this site. But it wasn't unique in those respects.

 

[Allyn Gibson]

I think the whole thing, along with the Gene Roddenberry is a great philosopher stuff, arose in the 1970s as a way for fans to say, no, I'm not just watching guys in space pyjamas with laser guns going pew pew pew, I'm watching something POWERFUL and MEANINGFUL that speaks to today's youth. And yes, obviously I think Star Trek was powerful and meaningful, that's why I'm on this site. But it wasn't unique in those respects.

Very much my feeling on the matter. I've sometimes said that I feel like Roddenberry began believing his own press in the 1970s. If fandom is telling him that he's a genius and a deep thinker, if he's reading books like Star Trek Lives! and The Meaning in Star Trek which talk about how deep and meaningful Star Trek is, if he's continuing to not have success making new television series but people keep telling him how great his old television series is, then he's going to take it in, believe it, and imagine a Star Trek in his mind that is more like that "meaningful" series and less like the actual series. And then it amps up in the 1980s, after Paramount takes the movies away from him, because his imagined series becomes a criticism he can level at people he believed didn't "get" his creation and believed were lesser lights than he. And Richard Arnold became an enforcer for that "vision."

 

[DGCatAniSiri]

PAD's novel had introduced Vastator of Borg, a captured Ferengi, who was a replacement for Locutus. Still a rarity. Reannon Bonaventure was described as a "soul sister" of Guinan, because the Star Trek Office didn't want her to be an actual sister of Guinan.

I think you mixed up Reannon Bonaventure with Delcara - Reannon’s plot involved Geordi connecting with her, trying to restore her humanity, and I don’t recall Guinan having much of anything to do with Reannon. It was Delcara who was connected to Picard and Guinan.

 

[David cgc]

The movie "First Contact" showed us Starfleet members being Borgified en masse. We forget that Locutus was a rarity until then.

While Part I does include a line where the characters are surprised that the Borg are interested in people now and not just technology, the Borg use their “biological and cultural distinctiveness” speech for the first time explaining what they’re going to use Picard to sell the Federation on surrendering to, and in Part II, Locutus is very, very clear that the Borg intend to do to all the people of the Federation what they did to Picard.

RIKER: We would like time to prepare our people for assimilation.
PICARD [on viewscreen]: Preparation is irrelevant. Your people will be assimilated as easily as Picard has been. Your attempt at a delay will not be successful, Number One. We will proceed to Earth, and if you attempt to intervene, we will destroy you.

...

PICARD: Worf. Klingon species. A warrior race. You too will be assimilated.
WORF: The Klingon Empire will never yield.
PICARD: Why do you resist? We only wish to raise quality of life for all species.
WORF: I like my species the way it is.
PICARD: A narrow vision. You will become one with the Borg. You will all become one with the Borg. The android, Data. Primitive artificial organism. You will be obsolete in the new order.

 

[Christopher]

While Part I does include a line where the characters are surprised that the Borg are interested in people now and not just technology, the Borg use their “biological and cultural distinctiveness” speech for the first time explaining what they’re going to use Picard to sell the Federation on surrendering to, and in Part II, Locutus is very, very clear that the Borg intend to do to all the people of the Federation what they did to Picard.

Yes, but that's "people" as a collective singular -- the entire species or civilization. It doesn't follow that they had any interest in specific persons, except in the unusual case of Locutus. So no, they didn't intend to do it to "all the people," in the sense of every single individual. They intended to do it to the collective entity known as humanity or the Klingon race or the United Federation of Planets or whatever. They didn't care how many individual members of that collective entity they acquired, as long as they succeeded in incorporating the distinctiveness of the species/culture as a whole. They could've done that by preserving, say, 5-10 percent of the population as a representative sample and killing all the rest as excess baggage.

So yes, it absolutely was a change in FC and VGR when the Borg suddenly started acting like Romero zombies and going after individuals as a matter of course. That changed it from a holistic focus to a reductionistic one -- from a focus on a people, in the literal sense of a population in the aggregate, to a focus on people in the vernacular sense as the plural of "person."

 

[Therin of Andor]

I think you mixed up Reannon Bonaventure with Delcara...

Sorry. Shoulda checked. That name wouldn't come to me and I was thinking it was the same character. Been a long time since I read it. I tweaked my previous post so others won't flinch as they read it. Thanks!

 

[JonnyQuest037]

RA's opinion was extra-wrong, since with home video, HD-upgrades, and crack Memory-Alpha researchers, we know that there were several female Borg drones in TNG. Granted, most of them were in "Descent," after Vendetta was written, but there was a Borg played by a woman in "Q-Who."

Interesting! Considering how extensive her Borg makeup was, I'm not surprised that hardly anyone noticed her as female.

Because until the Borg took Picard in "The Best of Both Worlds, Part 1", we did not know that the Borg assimilated other species. They assimilated technology ("The Neutral Zone") and ignored human invaders on their cube, and grew their unBorgified young in maturation chambers ("Q Who?").

The movie "First Contact" showed us Starfleet members being Borgified en masse.

Yeah, I know. But Vendetta was written well before "First Contact." I think PAD likely did the Reannon Bonaventure subplot to show that Picard's rescue from being assimilated was a one-time thing that could not be done with just any Borg.

PAD's novel had introduced Vastator of Borg, a captured Ferengi, who was a replacement for Locutus. Still a rarity. Reannon Bonaventure was the Borg female in the book?

I'd forgotten that there was a Ferengi Borg in the book! I always thought that would've been an interesting blending of alien makeups. Man, I remember doing doodles of Ferengi Borg back in high school, along with a few Klingon Borg.

Sorry. Shoulda checked. That name wouldn't come to me and I was thinking it was the same character. Been a long time since I read it.

Hey, you remembered it better than I did! I still have a copy on my shelf, but I don't think I've cracked its covers since sometime in the 90s.

 

[EARTHER]

As a co

Some people see novelty as intriguing and welcome, others see it as disturbing and wrong. It's hard for the two types to understand each other.

Although it always surprises me how many people in the latter category count themselves as fans of Star Trek, a franchise whose literal mission statement is to seek out the strange and new. You'd think that would select pretty strongly for the former group.

As a formulaic action adventure series, Star Trek needs to maintain a core continuity of characters, plots, tone, setting and dialogue so that every new iteration is recognizable as Star Trek. Otherwise, you’d have disjointed movies, TV series and books that don’t relate to each other.

Any franchise, be it burgers or SF, needs a certain, or even a total, level of homogeneity lest fans get angry or confused.

 

[EARTHER]

Trek novels sell in five to six figures, but the six-figure numbers are on the low end. Trek TV shows reach an audience of seven figures. It's simple math.

So let’s say a Star Trek novel sells 100,000 copies in total, including hardcover, softcover, trade, mass market, e-book, whatever. What sort of payment does the writer get? Roughly speaking.

 

[Christopher]

As a formulaic action adventure series, Star Trek needs to maintain a core continuity of characters, plots, tone, setting and dialogue so that every new iteration is recognizable as Star Trek. Otherwise, you’d have disjointed movies, TV series and books that don’t relate to each other.

What's wrong with that? Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Class are all wildly different from each other in tone and approach but still share a common universe. The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows on Netflix were much darker and more adult than the MCU movies, but they still had interconnections that the fans appreciated (though not as many as they would've liked).

Besides, you're 33 years too late with that argument. When TNG premiered, many fans insisted that a show without Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would never be "recognizable as Star Trek" and was doomed to fail. When DS9 premiered, many fans insisted that a show set on a space station instead of the starship Enterprise would never be "recognizable as Star Trek" and was doomed to fail. And so on. But they were all wrong. People recognized the spirit of a Trek story, the context of the Trek universe and its worldbuilding, the similarities that went beyond the superficial.

 

[EARTHER]

I

What's wrong with that? Doctor Who, Torchwood, The Sarah Jane Adventures, and Class are all wildly different from each other in tone and approach but still share a common universe. The Marvel Cinematic Universe shows on Netflix were much darker and more adult than the MCU movies, but they still had interconnections that the fans appreciated (though not as many as they would've liked).

Besides, you're 33 years too late with that argument. When TNG premiered, many fans insisted that a show without Kirk, Spock, and McCoy would never be "recognizable as Star Trek" and was doomed to fail. When DS9 premiered, many fans insisted that a show set on a space station instead of the starship Enterprise would never be "recognizable as Star Trek" and was doomed to fail. And so on. But they were all wrong. People recognized the spirit of a Trek story, the context of the Trek universe and its worldbuilding, the similarities that went beyond the superficial.

I totally agree with you.

 

[Therin of Andor]

I'd forgotten that there was a Ferengi Borg in the book! I always thought that would've been an interesting blending of alien makeups. Man, I remember doing doodles of Ferengi Borg back in high school...

Art Asylum had a prototype Ferengi Borg that was to accompany their Borg Klingon, Hirogen and Cardassian drone trio, but he got cancelled. He was to be my Vastator of Borg.


Art Asylum/Diamond prototype Ferengi Borg drone by Ian McLean, on Flickr

 

[Mysterion]

Art Asylum had a prototype Ferengi Borg that was to accompany their Borg Klingon, Hirogen and Cardassian drone trio, but he got cancelled. He was to be my Vastator of Borg.


Art Asylum/Diamond prototype Ferengi Borg drone by Ian McLean, on Flickr

Still incredibly disappointed this was never produced.

 

[Sci]

As a formulaic action adventure series, Star Trek needs to maintain a core continuity of characters, plots, tone, setting and dialogue so that every new iteration is recognizable as Star Trek. Otherwise, you’d have disjointed movies, TV series and books that don’t relate to each other.

Any franchise, be it burgers or SF, needs a certain, or even a total, level of homogeneity lest fans get angry or confused.

I for one am grateful that with the advent of DIS, PIC, and LD, that is no longer true.

 

[KRAD]

So let’s say a Star Trek novel sells 100,000 copies in total, including hardcover, softcover, trade, mass market, e-book, whatever. What sort of payment does the writer get? Roughly speaking.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but that is seriously none of your business.

 

[JD]

Peter David has a LOT of stories about Richard Arnold disliking his Star Trek comic book scripts. PAD has said that his relationship with RA got off to a bad start when he laughed in Arnold's face when RA told him that the Gold Key comics were the standard to which all Trek comics should aspire.

He seriously said that? Had he never read the Gold Key comics?

I'd forgotten that there was a Ferengi Borg in the book! I always thought that would've been an interesting blending of alien makeups. Man, I remember doing doodles of Ferengi Borg back in high school, along with a few Klingon Borg.

I think Ferengi is one of the few races we never saw Borgified during or after First Contact. I know I've spotted Klingons, Cardassians, I think Bolians, possibly Hirogen, but no Ferengi. I always thought it was pretty cool that once they retconned the Borg to be made up of members of other races who had been assimilated, they actually started combining the Borg make up with the makeup for those other races.