Shared universe with other franchises

[Christopher]

Just compare the early pre-show publicity background setting material released online for Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda with how the series developed, especially after the first season!

Oh, yes, absolutely. I became a fan of the online material before the show premiered, so much so that I wanted to write novels in that universe. And I got to know most of the original writing staff on the fan boards, where they were very active. So it really hurt when the show failed to live up to its potential and then degenerated into utter idiocy after Robert Hewitt Wolfe was fired as showrunner. Particularly since I'd had preliminary conversations with one or two of the writing staffers about potentially pitching for the show, a possibility that evaporated with RHW's firing.

Although I wasn't really surprised, since I'd seen it happen before with Gene Roddenberry's Earth: Final Conflict from the same production company.

 

[The Wormhole]

Season 1 aspired to be a hard-SF show making plausible projections of future technology, but at the end of the season they threw that out and did a ghost episode and an alien episode,

The ghost episode was actually relatively early in the season, eighth episode out of twenty-two.

 

[JonnyQuest037]

(and there was an anniversary story in Detective Comics in the '70s or so where an exceedingly old, well-preserved Sherlock Holmes showed up alive to help Batman and DC's other detective heroes solve their big team-up case).

Detective Comics #572 (Mar. 1987), the 50th Anniversary issue. Batman and Robin teamed up with the Elongated Man and Slam Bradley to solve a lost case of Sherlock Holmes.

Although DC Comics did have some Sherlock Holmes connections in the 1970s. Denny O'Neil and E.R. Cruz did a Sherlock Holmes one shot that adapted "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House," and there was a 1976 issue of The Joker where the Clown Prince of Crime went up against Clive Sigerson, an actor who thought he was Sherlock Holmes.

BTW, Mike W. Barr, the writer of Detective #572, is in dire straits right now due to medical and financial difficulties. His GoFundMe can be found here. Please contribute if you can.

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

Well s***, now I want to watch season 2. I don't think it made it through the first season as a kid.

Didn't everyone know about whale and dolphin intelligence by then? Isn't that why Star Trek 4 existed?

It was still considered a fringe theory.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

As others have stated above, we've had TV shows that crossed over with Trek via main character dreams. But to my knowledge, we haven't had the reverse - a Star Trek character on a Star Trek episode who (dreams or otherwise that they're) stuck in the world of a different real show that's also a show to them (i.e. if there'd been an episode of TNG where Picard dreams he's hanging out with the characters of Full House, all in character)

 

[Christopher]

It was still considered a fringe theory.

No, my experience was that cetacean intelligence was taken seriously by much of the scientific community (and most of the science fiction community), but others were skeptical, and it hadn't gained much mainstream awareness outside of people like me who consumed science magazines, books, and documentaries. I recall that some prominent science popularizers like Carl Sagan and Arthur C. Clarke were convinced of dolphin intelligence from their personal encounters. Rick Sternbach (who worked on Sagan's Cosmos) was also a proponent as far back as the '70s (featuring technologically equipped dolphins on more than one of the novel covers he painted, including Larry Niven's World of Ptavvs), which is presumably why the TNG Technical Manual he co-wrote introduced the idea of Cetacean Ops.

As others have stated above, we've had TV shows that crossed over with Trek via main character dreams. But to my knowledge, we haven't had the reverse - a Star Trek character on a Star Trek episode who (dreams or otherwise that they're) stuck in the world of a different real show that's also a show to them (i.e. if there'd been an episode of TNG where Picard dreams he's hanging out with the characters of Full House, all in character)

Isn't that what holodecks are for? We saw Picard "dream" of being a noir detective and Bashir "dream" of being James Bond, essentially. Not to mention alien-generated illusions, like Q making the crew cross over with Robin Hood.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

True, I meant in the same way that other shows do - with members of the cast of a particular show playing the same characters they do in their show, interacting with the characters of another show.

 

[Christopher]

True, I meant in the same way that other shows do - with members of the cast of a particular show playing the same characters they do in their show, interacting with the characters of another show.

I think that sort of thing would've been way too cheesy for Trek to do. I mean, I can buy a character from some 1990s UPN sitcom being enough of a Voyager fan to have a dream or fantasy about it, say, but what are the odds that some 1990s UPN sitcom would become such a cultural icon on a par with Sherlock Holmes or Robin Hood that a Starfleet officer 400 years later is dreaming about it?

Okay, granted, Tom Paris was a fan of an obscure 1930s adventure serial, but for Trek to have played along with depicting an actual network show of the time as some enduring cultural icon would've been pretty mercenary and shameless, and wouldn't have aged well if the sitcom met the usual fate of non-Trek UPN shows, dying quickly and fading into obscurity.

I'm reminded of how UPN's execs initially wanted Enterprise to feature scenes where real bands performed their songs in the mess hall or something, the way that other shows of the era like Buffy and Charmed featured regular scenes in bars or nightclubs so they could do cross-promotion with contemporary bands -- never mind that the show was set centuries in the future on a ship too far from Earth for people to just drop by and visit to throw concerts for the crew. Which is presumably why ENT was one of the few UPN or WB shows able to get out of doing obligatory pop-band promotion scenes. (Even Smallville eventually had Lana Lang open a club so they could hop onto the band-promotion, err, bandwagon, though I don't think they stuck with it long.)

 

[The Wormhole]

Which is presumably why ENT was one of the few UPN or WB shows able to get out of doing obligatory pop-band promotion scenes.

It was actually because Berman fought UPN on the matter to the point UPN eventually relented, but made drastic cuts to Enterprise's budget in retaliation.

 

[Christopher]

It was actually because Berman fought UPN on the matter to the point UPN eventually relented, but made drastic cuts to Enterprise's budget in retaliation.

Yeah, but the fact that it made no damn sense in the context of what the show was about probably helped him win the argument.

 

[Phoenix219]

Has anyone mentioned Webster on the bridge of the Enterprise with worf?

I really don't think I'm making that up lol

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Yeah, earlier. It's from the boy's POV, though, not Worf's.

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

Yeah, but the fact that it made no damn sense in the context of what the show was about probably helped him win the argument.

All they would have had to do was have someone listening to a song in theirr damn quarters. Would have ben worth it to preserve the budget.

 

[FormerLurker]

All they would have had to do was have someone listening to a song in theirr damn quarters. Would have ben worth it to preserve the budget.

A better choice would have been a video playing in the cafeteria. That way they get the band onscreen, which was the idea.

 

[Christopher]

A better choice would have been a video playing in the cafeteria. That way they get the band onscreen, which was the idea.

Yeah, but then we'd have to believe that a bunch of little-known pop bands from the early 2000s had all won Beatles-level enduring fame so that people were still watching their videos 150 years later. I mean, presumably the whole incentive for these cross-promotions with shows like Buffy and Charmed was to give the bands a chance to raise their profile and sell more albums, so they can't have been that famous.

Although I guess they could've done the thing where the real band pretends to be a fictional band in the future, but then we'd have to believe that 2150s pop music styles are identical to those from a century and a half earlier. Oh, well -- we know from TOS that 1940s-style dance music makes a comeback in the 2260s.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

Some styles/genres and works are more believable as future classics than others, though I suppose it depends on who you ask. I suppose some of the people living when classic 40s songs came out would have dismissed it as ridiculous if you'd asked them, "will people still be listening to this 50 years from now?"

The further ahead you go, it becomes less likely in some people's minds because eventually, all those who heard it first in its own time would have died, so most of what you'd have are people whose parents/grandparents introduced them to it. A song hits different when you hear it as an "oldie" rather than an example of the latest thing.

 

[IRW Bloodwing]

Yeah, but then we'd have to believe that a bunch of little-known pop bands from the early 2000s had all won Beatles-level enduring fame so that people were still watching their videos 150 years later. I mean, presumably the whole incentive for these cross-promotions with shows like Buffy and Charmed was to give the bands a chance to raise their profile and sell more albums, so they can't have been that famous.

Although I guess they could've done the thing where the real band pretends to be a fictional band in the future, but then we'd have to believe that 2150s pop music styles are identical to those from a century and a half earlier. Oh, well -- we know from TOS that 1940s-style dance music makes a comeback in the 2260s.

Better than the stuffy pretense that only classical composers survived into the future.

 

[Henoch]

I'll probably be listening to 1980's music for the next 500,000 years.

 

[FormerLurker]

Yeah, but then we'd have to believe that a bunch of little-known pop bands from the early 2000s had all won Beatles-level enduring fame so that people were still watching their videos 150 years later. I mean, presumably the whole incentive for these cross-promotions with shows like Buffy and Charmed was to give the bands a chance to raise their profile and sell more albums, so they can't have been that famous.

Although I guess they could've done the thing where the real band pretends to be a fictional band in the future, but then we'd have to believe that 2150s pop music styles are identical to those from a century and a half earlier. Oh, well -- we know from TOS that 1940s-style dance music makes a comeback in the 2260s.

We also need to remember that in 1962 the Beatles were a skiffle band from LIverpool that had just finished a gig as a house band in Germany. They weren't big or popular, but would become so, and when they did everyone wanted to listen to everything they'd done to that point.

 

[Christopher]

We also need to remember that in 1962 the Beatles were a skiffle band from LIverpool that had just finished a gig as a house band in Germany. They weren't big or popular, but would become so, and when they did everyone wanted to listen to everything they'd done to that point.

Yes, but the point is, how many other of their contemporary bands achieved comparable fame? I could buy it happening once or twice, but not with every single early-2000s band that might've done a cameo in an ENT episode if they'd gone through with this crazy plan. It's a matter of statistics.

I mean, if you went through a list of every singer or band that performed in the Bronze on Buffy the Vampire Slayer or P3 on Charmed, how many do you think would still be popular today, let alone a century from now?