Virile Trek
Feb. 27th, 2003 10:57 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tmcgWith ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aka_tippi around, how could I not link to a Salon.com piece that opens with a description of Captain Kirk's package? Mark Simpson goes on to discuss "the crucial difference between the sweaty, highly Freudian original 'Star Trek' series and the sexless, sweatless, p.c. 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,'" among other "spayed spinoffs."
To read the whole thing, I got a free daypass, because it required me only to look at some ads for Six Feet Under, a show I happen to like. The drawback wasn't the ads, it was the temptation of unrestricted access: I ended up reading an entire column on Hollywood glamour by my former boss Tina Brown. The innumerable ironies...agggh, I'm not going to start. But it was still worth it to read the rest of the Trek piece.
Classic Trek was more intense and affecting than any of its spawn. It's not just nostalgia that makes me partial to the original. I liked all the series, but they don't bear rewatching; the same for most of the movies. In one form or another--as a private, at-home addict throughout my childhood and adolescence, at nightly MSTing sessions in college, on VHS and then DVD thereafter--I've been watching original Trek for the better part of four decades. I watched the other complete series once through each, and that was plenty. And Enterprise just doesn't hold my interest. TV in the fifties and sixties still resonated with the sound of feet on stage planks, still had the timing and immediacy of live theatre, the gestures and movements too large for the screen. The more televisiony TV got, the smoother it got, the more processed, and the later Trek series were post-Mixmaster: pretty, palatable, politically correct, and lacking the raw melodramatic intensity of the original. Fanfic finds the seams and pries them open with interesting results, but that renders something like Voyager interesting not for what's on the screen but for what a vivid imagination can postulate is going on between the pixels, and that's to the fiction's credit, not the show's.
I put the "IMO" on this because someone very dear to me, whose opinion I value and respect, loves TNG above all, and watches the TNG marathons, and hasn't much use for TOS. 'Scool. But as far as I'm concerned...
Classic Trek is flawed, but it's got balls. Maybe that's the metaphor Simpson was reaching for when he made Shatner's equipment the lede in his piece.
Here's another link, in case the one at the top doesn't work.
aka_tippi around, how could I not link to a Salon.com piece that opens with a description of Captain Kirk's package? Mark Simpson goes on to discuss "the crucial difference between the sweaty, highly Freudian original 'Star Trek' series and the sexless, sweatless, p.c. 'Star Trek: The Next Generation,'" among other "spayed spinoffs." To read the whole thing, I got a free daypass, because it required me only to look at some ads for Six Feet Under, a show I happen to like. The drawback wasn't the ads, it was the temptation of unrestricted access: I ended up reading an entire column on Hollywood glamour by my former boss Tina Brown. The innumerable ironies...agggh, I'm not going to start. But it was still worth it to read the rest of the Trek piece.
Classic Trek was more intense and affecting than any of its spawn. It's not just nostalgia that makes me partial to the original. I liked all the series, but they don't bear rewatching; the same for most of the movies. In one form or another--as a private, at-home addict throughout my childhood and adolescence, at nightly MSTing sessions in college, on VHS and then DVD thereafter--I've been watching original Trek for the better part of four decades. I watched the other complete series once through each, and that was plenty. And Enterprise just doesn't hold my interest. TV in the fifties and sixties still resonated with the sound of feet on stage planks, still had the timing and immediacy of live theatre, the gestures and movements too large for the screen. The more televisiony TV got, the smoother it got, the more processed, and the later Trek series were post-Mixmaster: pretty, palatable, politically correct, and lacking the raw melodramatic intensity of the original. Fanfic finds the seams and pries them open with interesting results, but that renders something like Voyager interesting not for what's on the screen but for what a vivid imagination can postulate is going on between the pixels, and that's to the fiction's credit, not the show's.
I put the "IMO" on this because someone very dear to me, whose opinion I value and respect, loves TNG above all, and watches the TNG marathons, and hasn't much use for TOS. 'Scool. But as far as I'm concerned...
Classic Trek is flawed, but it's got balls. Maybe that's the metaphor Simpson was reaching for when he made Shatner's equipment the lede in his piece.
Here's another link, in case the one at the top doesn't work.
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no subject
Date: 2003-02-27 11:24 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2003-03-02 09:12 am (UTC)Congrats on the promotion!!!!
no subject
Date: 2003-02-27 07:13 pm (UTC)Excellent!
I always thought it a pity that Picard didn't get more action, because I thought he was just a wiry little bald bundle of sexy. But noooo, it was bland old Riker who got all the space-nookie. Ptooey!
no subject
Date: 2003-03-02 09:14 am (UTC)Hmm...that gives a whole nother meaning to the term "package store"...
no subject
Date: 2003-03-01 05:04 pm (UTC)But I might have to go read about Captain Kirk's package....
Deb
no subject
Date: 2003-03-02 09:11 am (UTC)I also liked Janeway as a captain, and Mulgrew as an actor portraying a captain, both of which were maligned almost as much as Kirk and Shatner. :)