All Things Star Trek — Page 66

Yeah Roddenberry left nothing to his first wife and two kids from that marriage and in books and TV specials about the making of Star Trek and his life he acted as if they didn't even exist.  All because he wanted to carry on having affairs and after about five years of that his wife dared to divorce him, so he punished not only her but his kids as well.

To the point where even the media helps him cover up these fact because Paramount tries to make him look like Mr.Perfect all of the time.  I had to dig pretty deep back in the 90s to find out anything about his first marriage or his kids.

Also Lucas never wrote lyrics to a piece of music just to bilk the composer out of royalties.

So why I may not care for what Lucas has done to Star Wars or how he treats the fans, as a person I think I would get along a lot better with him then I would with Roddenberry.

At least with Lucas he seems like the type of guy that as long as you didn't bring up the prequels or the SEs he would be fairly easy going and fun to watch a movie with or talk about the rules of story telling in general. 

Roddenberry on the other hand I get the impression that he would always be preaching at me with his self rightouse BS about how evil everyone else in the world is, while at the same time treating his family in a way that would make me want to deck him.

In short I would rather hang out with Lucas.

Lies! Gene Rodenberry hit his head on a doorjam and all that was good in 60 years of Trek spilled out, completly without any help. All the bad bits were Bermans fault. Then Gene walked on water, ended segregation, and wrote that one show with Kevin Sorbo.

The man would be a saint, but gods outrank saints!

TheBoost said:

Lies! Gene Rodenberry hit his head on a doorjam and all that was good in 60 years of Trek spilled out, completly without any help. All the bad bits were Bermans fault. Then Gene walked on water, ended segregation, and wrote that one show with Kevin Sorbo.

The man would be a saint, but gods outrank saints!

 Yeah that is pretty much what you get from all the official star trek sites and books.

That is why in the 90s I had to look to unofficial sources of information when I wanted more details on the making of Star Trek.

To 100% fair in both cases Fred did face a reduced budget and was given less time to make episodes.  Also Space 1999 was pretty silly from the get go.

oh and from what I understand the network was putting pressure on him to make Star Trek more like Lost in Space since in the short term that series had made more money for ravel CBS.

FanFiltration said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

The more I read about Roddenberry, the less I like about him, both as a creator/showrunner and as a person.

 I think I had mentioned that I met that man a few times, and he swore like a sailor.  He truly enjoyed the adulation of his sycophants. I was not impressed.

 You know I have met some sailors who never swear.  I think in this day and age the phrase should be replaced with saying that someone "Swears like a comedy internet critic" :)

I am not saying it is wrong to enjoy the show or it was badly made, I am just saying that it could be silly.

I enjoy both it and lost in space but you have to admit when your show's premise is that the moon went flying out of orbit and now acts like a spaceship that never runs out of shuttles you are going to have a hard time getting scripts that are not silly.

I am not saying he is completely blameless but in both cases there were other things going wrong with the shows and he had to cope with reduced budgets, so I don't think he is some show wrecking monster who was a complete idiot and hated sci-fi as he is often painted.

I think he was most likely someone who was given a huge job and just wasn't up to the challenge. Sad but I don't think it makes him a bad person or a hack.

At least his bad stuff was the fun and campy kind of bad instead of the boring and depressing kind of bad.

SilverWook said:

DrCrowTStarwars said:

FanFiltration said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

The more I read about Roddenberry, the less I like about him, both as a creator/showrunner and as a person.

 I think I had mentioned that I met that man a few times, and he swore like a sailor.  He truly enjoyed the adulation of his sycophants. I was not impressed.

 You know I have met some sailors who never swear.  I think in this day and age the phrase should be replaced with saying that someone "Swears like a comedy internet critic" :)

 My Dad was a sailor, and he swore a lot. ;)

 Maybe I just need to spend more time hanging out at the docks.

Still the last time I did that I got hit on the head and woke up on cargo steamer, worst. summer vacation. Ever!

DuracellEnergizer said:

The more I read about Roddenberry, the less I like about him, both as a creator/showrunner and as a person.

 That's funny. The more I know about him, the more I respect him. Because he wasn't perfect, like so many fanboys try to believe. He was a flawed human being, he was an alcoholic who had sex with every actress he hired, and at the same time he was a loving family man. He would encourage his writers to go wild with his stories and at the same time he could be a real dick to them when they wanted to go too far. He had a wonderful relationship with the fans and the actors, but a horrible relationship with the studio executives. As a writer he wrote the best Star Trek stories. And at the same time the worst Trek stories.

I like him because he WASN'T perfect.

Yeah as far as I can tell everyone had a really complex relationship with him.  it doesn't seem like anyone outright hated the man and he could be nice but he could also be full of himself, get dumb ideas that he insisted on going through with, and he could treat his family badly.  He kind of reminds me of Homer Simpson and I don't mean that as an insult.  I consider Homer Simpson to be one of the most perfect examples of a fictional character we love despite his many flaws because of his lust for life and being likable despite it.

If I could pick one word to describe Gene Roddenberry I think it would be human.

That doesn't change the fact that if he started preaching at me or I had happened to meet him while he was treating his family so poorly that I would not have had the urge to smack him to try and get him to snap out of it, but I don't think I would have hated the man either.

It must be said he did have a vision for Star Trek that he thought for and even when he was very wrong and he seemed to forget what Star trek was about when he started it I could at least respect him for fighting for what he thought was right even if I think he was wrong.

Tobar said:

SilverWook please tell me how I can avoid ever watching that second transfer in your screencaps.

 Yeah I think it may be from the first DvD release as I remember not being too happy with that after spending $30 on it.

Whatever it is, it looks awful.

I've been watching through Voyager steadily on Netflix.  I don't know if I've ever had more mixed feelings about a show.  I love the characters (except the half vulcan female... she's annoying and I hate how she refers to other people as "Starfleet" as if she's better than them because she isn't originally from them.  I always want one of them to reply with "Woman we captured and graciously gave the mercy of joining our crew instead of spending 70 years in the Brigg... but enough about her).  But only about half of the episodes are any good, most of them have so much technobabble it's as if they put no effort at all into writing it.  It's all "oh let's put them into some horrible deadly situation, then just make up some preposterous bullshit to get them out of it".

That being said, I'm on season 2, and the episode "Resistance" (the one where Janeway encounters an elderly man with some sort of dementia or something similar who thinks she's his daughter) was awesome, it actually made me feel things, sentimentally.  Also, "The Thaw" was also fanfuckingtastic.  But on the other hand, I can't remember the episode, but the one where Paris breaks the warp barrier and then starts evolving, then inexplicably turns into some sort of lizard and has a baby with Janeway was just mindnumbingly horrible.