I like Star Trek...and Ewoks
So, where do I stand on Star Wars and Star Trek?
As a kid, I was a Star Wars fan and not a Star Trek fan. But when I was in sixth grade, I started watching reruns of the original Trek, and was struck by the fact that they told SF stories with the social speculative fiction element one might expect of written SF. Not just monsters, or fantasy warriors in space, or war stories, but lots of wild and different things. It won me over.
Of the later Treks, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise are probably the least that kind of SF, though they have their good points. They took fewer big concepts and then tried to realize them more fully; that's hardly a bad thing.
I call DS9 "fantasy geography;" it imagines a larger world in which people can do what people do. With diplomacy and war.
Enterprise gets an oddly bad rap, but it could be pretty decent fanfic, though a different kind of show than the original series. And I liked the theme song; it fit. I was not happy with the last season's attempts to "placate the Trekkies." I think they should have kept more their own identity (and I don't really like their attempt to "explain" the different Klingon makeup effects).
The Next Generation, Voyager, and the animated Star Trek are more like the original, I think, with strange new worlds and all. Voyager indulged the soap of its regular characters more.
I've watched great chunks of all the series, and maybe all of Enterprise.
Star Wars? Star Wars is interesting in that it's a toy line with some movies. The bigness of the world the movies hint at is seductive. I liked the Marvel comics as a kid, and I watched the various Ewok spinoffs. I had a Wicket W. Warrick t-shirt! But I kind of gave up on Star Wars long before the prequels; I never got into the books.
The last SW movie I actually watched all of was The Phantom Menace. It had some good ideas, in how it used Palpatine, and honestly I appreciated Jar Jar as a comic relief character (like the droids in the older movies). But there were some awkward retcons, and it took a long time building up to the "wars."
I haven't actually made myself sit through anything Star Wars since. I'm so far out of the fandom it's not even funny.
As a kid, I was a Star Wars fan and not a Star Trek fan. But when I was in sixth grade, I started watching reruns of the original Trek, and was struck by the fact that they told SF stories with the social speculative fiction element one might expect of written SF. Not just monsters, or fantasy warriors in space, or war stories, but lots of wild and different things. It won me over.
Of the later Treks, Deep Space Nine and Enterprise are probably the least that kind of SF, though they have their good points. They took fewer big concepts and then tried to realize them more fully; that's hardly a bad thing.
I call DS9 "fantasy geography;" it imagines a larger world in which people can do what people do. With diplomacy and war.
Enterprise gets an oddly bad rap, but it could be pretty decent fanfic, though a different kind of show than the original series. And I liked the theme song; it fit. I was not happy with the last season's attempts to "placate the Trekkies." I think they should have kept more their own identity (and I don't really like their attempt to "explain" the different Klingon makeup effects).
The Next Generation, Voyager, and the animated Star Trek are more like the original, I think, with strange new worlds and all. Voyager indulged the soap of its regular characters more.
I've watched great chunks of all the series, and maybe all of Enterprise.
Star Wars? Star Wars is interesting in that it's a toy line with some movies. The bigness of the world the movies hint at is seductive. I liked the Marvel comics as a kid, and I watched the various Ewok spinoffs. I had a Wicket W. Warrick t-shirt! But I kind of gave up on Star Wars long before the prequels; I never got into the books.
The last SW movie I actually watched all of was The Phantom Menace. It had some good ideas, in how it used Palpatine, and honestly I appreciated Jar Jar as a comic relief character (like the droids in the older movies). But there were some awkward retcons, and it took a long time building up to the "wars."
I haven't actually made myself sit through anything Star Wars since. I'm so far out of the fandom it's not even funny.