Rodenberry and Lucas; when did they break from fandom?

[godisawesome]

These two legendary filmmakers launched the two most successful sci-fi franchises of the 20th Century. One set a story into a future utopian society, and the other created a technological version of a fantasy series. One started his series as a call back towards western wagon train shows, the other created a callback to the serials adventures of his childhood. Both have iconic names with legions of fans who basically define the term "nerd" and "geek."

But both also, at some point, had their artistic vision of their franchises branch off in a radically different manner than the mainstream pop-culture view. Rodenberry's perfected Federation was a wet blanket upon basic conflict and character development, and had an almost visceral hatred towards the idea of Starfleet even hinting at a more military side. Lucas seemed to think the true tone of Star Wars was an odd hodge podge of adult politics and themes with juvenile characterizations and dialogue. One created Wesley, the other Jar Jar Binks.

Rodenberry was sidelined more and more in the running of the franchise, while Lucas excercised more and more power until selling the franchise.

So, who do you think went more off track? Who do you think maybe deserved the most wiggle room on that aspect, considering their contributions to their franchise? And when and how do you think these guys broke from what people now assumed made their franchises successful?

 

[Scarlet Spider]

Is Wesley Crusher really considered the Jar Jar equivalent of the Star Trek franchise?

Poor Will Wheaton.

 

[Teelie]

I think both of them are overstated for their contributions. Neither created their franchise in a vacuum and in fact had a great deal of input from other people who helped improve and sustain them well beyond what either could have done alone.

George Lucas had a lot of help from his then-wife Marcia. She is virtually erased from all official documentation on Star Wars. With Roddenberry he had writers who did some of the best episodes but are less recognized for their efforts in shaping the overall universe of Star Trek beyond just their most famous episodes.

Both of them came up with the skeleton but it was the work of dozens of other people who put the flesh and blood on it and created them. Lucas tried to wrest control from everyone else and create his vision which was the prequels. A disaster from most perspectives that only succeeded because of the Star Wars name.

Now with Disney running it we have had a hugely successful movie that doesn't need the name Star Wars to tell you it's a Star Wars movie. Watch that and you can feel it. The prequels always felt like fan fiction or an imitation.

Roddenberry similarly nearly killed the franchise for good with The Motion Picture before the subsequent sequels were more diversely handled by other people. TNG nearly died in its first season before writers and producers were able to improve on it. By the time TNG had hit mainstream popularity and success Roddenberry was near death and had very little input on the show.

So while they both deserve credit for bringing their ideas to the screen they don't deserve all the credit for creating them either. Without the input of others to say "this is terrible, do this instead" we might never have gotten either franchise.

 

[redhawk23]

While I really enjoy what Nicholas Meyer brought to the Star Trek films in terms of aesthetic and action, I do have to say what I love most about Star Trek is that it supports stories in which there are no real villains. Even Meyer knew to root everything more individual character conflicts.
While there are a few good naval standouts, many of my favorite Star Trek stories involve basically court room dramas or mysteries or just adventure stories based around science fiction concepts. A focus too much on the military side of Trek does indeed miss the point a lot of the time.
Roddenberry's vision need not have been a "wet blanket" for conflict, just many of the writers were not always good at finding the conflict inherent in stories of characters living up to those kinds of ideals. Certain writers were able to find those stories though. Nicholas Meyer may have brought the more overtly naval aesthetic to Star Trek but in Star Trek VI he wrote one of the best examples of drama based on characters having to over come their personal biases and set aside saber rattling to help create peace and understanding.

 

[batfreakforever]

The hate for Lucas is way unjustified. So he did some things that people don't like. I can see why he sold it. Why would you want to contribute more to your own series when fans dictate your every desision and then hate on you.

 

[redhawk23]

I think both of them are overstated for their contributions. Neither created their franchise in a vacuum and in fact had a great deal of input from other people who helped improve and sustain them well beyond what either could have done alone.

George Lucas had a lot of help from his then-wife Marcia. She is virtually erased from all official documentation on Star Wars. With Roddenberry he had writers who did some of the best episodes but are less recognized for their efforts in shaping the overall universe of Star Trek beyond just their most famous episodes.

Both of them came up with the skeleton but it was the work of dozens of other people who put the flesh and blood on it and created them. Lucas tried to wrest control from everyone else and create his vision which was the prequels. A disaster from most perspectives that only succeeded because of the Star Wars name.

Now with Disney running it we have had a hugely successful movie that doesn't need the name Star Wars to tell you it's a Star Wars movie. Watch that and you can feel it. The prequels always felt like fan fiction or an imitation.

Roddenberry similarly nearly killed the franchise for good with The Motion Picture before the subsequent sequels were more diversely handled by other people. TNG nearly died in its first season before writers and producers were able to improve on it. By the time TNG had hit mainstream popularity and success Roddenberry was near death and had very little input on the show.

So while they both deserve credit for bringing their ideas to the screen they don't deserve all the credit for creating them either. Without the input of others to say "this is terrible, do this instead" we might never have gotten either franchise.

Now there is a bit of an odd counter movement to over estimate Lucas' ex-wife's contributions to star wars.


Star Trek is much more of a collective work than some grand vision of Roddenberry's but with Star Wars, while Lucas certainly had help in creating a competent film, it is hard to over state how much of it was directly rooted in Lucas own experiences and obsessions.

It is often remarked upon that Star Wars works due to drawing from so many different sources but it was Lucas who combined his love of hot rod culture, Japanese samurai films, WWII news reels, 1930 sci fi cereals along with his own fixation on the Vietnam War etc. You can very much see where Star Wars sprung from by looking at Lucas' earlier films. In THX-1138 you have a very run-down, lived in high concept future with robots. In American Graffiti you have a very personal film of teenagers grappling with the implications of leaving home and generally hanging out in Modesto, California. Even as Lucas worked with different artists, sound designers, special effects modelers, etc there is a throughline of ideas and stylistic choices, particularly in sound design and sets.

 

[redhawk23]

The hate for Lucas is way unjustified. So he did some things that people don't like. I can see why he sold it. Why would you want to contribute more to your own series when fans dictate your every desision and then hate on you.

However there is a certain extent to which your contributions to the culture, particularly when they are so massive and influential move a bit beyond your own ownership. The Star Wars films exist as a historical benchmark in a lot of dimensions of filmmaking and marketing and Lucas made moves to essentially erase and suppress those films. Even the Library of Congress was only given the special editions when the films were added to the National Film Registry.

There is also the matter that Lucas continued making changes to films he himself did not make. You can make arguments about Lucas' "artistic vision" when it comes to all of the special editions and whatnot, but what about Irvin Kirshner's "artistic vision"?

 

[DarthSkywalker]

The hate for Lucas is way unjustified. So he did some things that people don't like. I can see why he sold it. Why would you want to contribute more to your own series when fans dictate your every desision and then hate on you.

Lucas actively shows disdain for Star Wars fans that don't believe everything he touched is gold. He is pouting like a child over The Force Awakens success. He literally hates it.

 

[Consona]

Roddenberry similarly nearly killed the franchise for good with The Motion Picture

The ST 1979 vs Wrath of Khan shows that majority of people prefer somewhat unsophisticated sci-fi action (at leat there's that Spock scene and Genesis Device moral dilemma) over thoughtful material. IMO ST the motion picture is probably the best true sci-fi film ever and I would love to see more big budget philosophical sci-fi films like that (thanks god for Interstellar), because this is what ST is to me, it's about philosophy and characters and not about pew pew space action.
So from what side of fandom did Roddenberry break? The thoughtful one or the pew pew one?


The SW side of debate... I think the prequels show that Lucas forgot what SW is about. Jar Jar stepping into some **** and smelling farts???!!! WTF??? This is like the worst idea ever, putting these things into the Star Wars saga, where fans were invested into this awesome mythology, into the characters and their relationships, the feeling of some epic destiny that the original trilogy contained. No suprise fandom would break with this vision. He really believes that SW is a soap opera, all that sitting and talking in TPM, all those cringeworthy dialogues in AotC. He has some great ideas and he is a great designer, I think the visuals in the prequels are phenomenal, he just needs somebody to work with him on the script and somebody to direct the films, like it was the case with TESB and TROTJ. Lucas just cannot execute those ideas, you can have all those political things, etc., but not presented as it was done in TPM.

 

[R_Hythlodeus]

With Trek it depends WHICH fandom you are referring to. fans who grew up watching TOS with the more space-adventure, wagon-trail-to-the-stars vibe, fans who grew up with the more militarized movies, fans who grew up in the 80s and 90s and the utopian society Trek? because every one of them would have a very different answer to your question

 

[Teelie]

Now there is a bit of an odd counter movement to over estimate Lucas' ex-wife's contributions to star wars.

Yeah but that's typical mysognist revisionist hate that a woman somehow contributed to their favorite franchise. I'm sure DC Fontana gets a lot for helping create Star Trek too.

 

[godisawesome]

With Trek it depends WHICH fandom you are referring to. fans who grew up watching TOS with the more space-adventure, wagon-trail-to-the-stars vibe, fans who grew up with the more militarized movies, fans who grew up in the 80s and 90s and the utopian society Trek? because every one of them would have a very different answer to your question

And the breakdown's even more diverse after that:

TNG has a bit of a split between those who think the first few seasons under Rodenberry's control are decent, while others like myself think they suck pretty badly because it's got the flaws of the original series without the corresponding successes. TOS has character conflict and enough fallibility in Starfleet and its members to make us really care about them, just like the westerns it took its cue from. TNG's first few seasons are so focused on the utopian ideal of the Federation that they feel like preachy idiots, and the application of the Prime directive in the first section is plainly disconcerting, while the characters are underdeveloped and uncharaismatic.

Fans like me infinitely prefer the post-beard TNG, which just had better execution of its themes, like the Data trial with Riker against Picard, or the Borg, or the witch trials of that one Admiral, or the stealth ship violations of another.

Ans I'm also a major Deep Space 9 fan, which I understand is anathema to other Trekkies!t:

I think part of the reason Rodenberry seemed to break from even the higher quality of TOS was because he became enamored with the utopian ideal of the Federation to the point where it blinded him to the flaws that were creeping into the series; there's nothing really wrong with disliking the military aspects of Starfleet, but making the ship incompetent and ineffectual at even basic diplomacy for the sake of the weekly external conflict was pretty bad too. And trying to remove any signs of dissent or internal conflict among Federation civilians wound up leading to sometimes frighteningly dogmatic characterizations and very shallow characters.

For Lucas, I think he became enamored with the scale that he could accomplish using modern technology to the detriment of other storytelling conventions. The Prequels are the films he made with the most resources, and he clearly loved huge, picturesque worlds inhabited by thousands of beings and showing how seemingly tiny actions could impact universal politics. But he lost sight of the polishing that others had given his scripts, of the more human characterizations others brought in, or of the "operatic" elements that he seems to have grown to dislike.

 

[Victarion]

Lucas has nothing to worry about. I think fandom hates Disney more than Lucas at this point.

 

[Octoberist]

Wasn't Trek 2: Wrath of Khan only possible when it broke away from Rod?

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

Lucas actively shows disdain for Star Wars fans that don't believe everything he touched is gold. He is pouting like a child over The Force Awakens success. He literally hates it.

If you watch older interviews with Lucas, he used to seem to understand his personal limitations and faults as a filmmaker and would frequently comment about how much help he got from friends and co-workers on making Star Wars what it is. Somewhere around the time production started on The Phantom Menace things changed and I'm not sure why.

 

[Orba]

If you watch older interviews with Lucas, he used to seem to understand his personal limitations and faults as a filmmaker and would frequently comment about how much help he got from friends and co-workers on making Star Wars what it is. Somewhere around the time production started on The Phantom Menace things changed and I'm not sure why.

Its been Lucas's revisionist attitude that put me off him far more than the PT. He has made lots of statements in the years after the Special Editions that are plainly not true, that the he was doing things because that is the way they were always meant to be, that he always had a plan for the films to be the way they were etc. Yet if you look back at interviews from when the OT was being made its easy to find statements he made that contradict his newer statements.

I don't understand his need to pretend that he always had a single vision for the films since it it plainly not true.

 

[godisawesome]

Wasn't Trek 2: Wrath of Khan only possible when it broke away from Rod?

Actually, I don't think Roddenberry really had that much input on any of the films. He was the main force making the first film get created, but considering his history as a writer, the fact that STTMP was a committee created reworking of a pilot script for a failed TV sequel series I think removes some of that film's pacing problems from his contribution.

Now, Khan was definetly the result of Meyer looking at the series and decided it was Horatio Hornblower in space, with the film series being controlled largely by him and the cast until the transition to TNG's films.

Rodenberry really gets more blame for the issues with TNG's first few seasons because he was back in the producer's chair. But he wound up being pushed farther back by other producers. I think it's fun to compare Rodenberry's TNG work to Lucas's more hands on turn in The Clone Wars; both showcased some serious skill there while also showing some flaws.

 

[AndrewGilkison]

Why did George Lucas want to do "something new" all of a sudden with Star Wars AFTER he sold it to Disney? Why didn't he do it when he had the chance? He owned it for decades, and he chose to write, direct, and produce the prequels instead which was an entire trilogy of movies designed to wallow in the past of the Star Wars universe and tell us **** we already knew. Now that he wasn't calling the shots anymore he had a problem with a "retro approach"? Talk about too little too late.

As for the "white slavers" comment Lucas had to apologize for, while Disney is a large corporation I don't see how they can prostitute Star Wars anymore than Lucas already did when he owned it. He was more than happy to merchandise and license the hell out of it and make as much money as he could off of it (and rightfully so). He was the one who made the special editions and the prequels, both of which were cynical money grabs. I can't see how Disney could do any worse in ****ing it out than the guy who originally created it.

 

[Teelie]

Lucas was pimping Star Wars from the very beginning. He took a paycut for the merchandising rights to the original Star Wars movie and then profited hugely off selling the license to toys and everything else he could stamp the name on. He's more of a hypocrite and revisionist than any other filmmaker I know of.

 

[dark_b]

Its been Lucas's revisionist attitude that put me off him far more than the PT. He has made lots of statements in the years after the Special Editions that are plainly not true, that the he was doing things because that is the way they were always meant to be, that he always had a plan for the films to be the way they were etc. Yet if you look back at interviews from when the OT was being made its easy to find statements he made that contradict his newer statements.

I don't understand his need to pretend that he always had a single vision for the films since it it plainly not true.

some are saying that the plan was to do the prequels from the start and some that Lucas had the idea after Return of the Jedi. what is the truth? i dont want to do a 1 week long research
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l3lbWba7xjQ

 

[I SEE SPIDEY]

Lucas actively shows disdain for Star Wars fans that don't believe everything he touched is gold. He is pouting like a child over The Force Awakens success. He literally hates it.

I have started laughing about Lucas's obvious bitterness over The Force Awakens massive success. He's the one who ****ing sold Star Wars, no one forced him to so why is he so goddamn bitter?

 

[MessiahDecoy123]

I have started laughing about Lucas's obvious bitterness over The Force Awakens massive success. He's the one who ****ing sold Star Wars, no one forced him to so why is he so goddamn bitter?

I think part of him expected for Disney to completely miss the mark and for the fans to end up crawling back to Lucas for forgiveness.

That ended up not happening.

 

[Teelie]

I agree. I don't think Lucas was expecting the movie to be as successful as it has been. I doubt anyone expected it to be this successful.

 

[I SEE SPIDEY]

I think part of him expected for Disney to completely miss the mark and for the fans to end up crawling back to Lucas for forgiveness.

That ended up not happening.

That has to be the explanation because it is the only explanation that makes any sort of sense.

 

[Kahran Ramsus]

The thing is, I agree with a lot of what Lucas said. It is the whole selling out to slavers stuff where he goes off the deep end. At least he apologized for it, and I'm willing to accept that.