5150 Cruiser wrote:1.- The last ST movie was awesome, And you know why? Because it apealed to the masses. For the first time you could walk into the theater without having any prior knowledge of Star trek, and could understand everything. but Many Star Trek fans seemed to hate aspect of the movie. As a result many ST fans seemed to hate the last ST movie the same way many TF fans seem to hate Bay's movies.
I have to agree with this. The fans require coddling and praise and being placed on a pedestal for being "true" fans for 25+ years. They can't see past their own nose.
As you said, the Star Trek reboot appealed to the masses and made it easy for everyone to learn the basics of. You're absolutely correct.
The original story is 40+ years old and there are only so many places you can go with it.
When the original series was canceled, it took a decade to bring it to the big screen. When those revitalized the series, The Next Generation came along and broke records. Great! Right? Well...then the spinoffs of a spinoff came along.
I never could get into Deep Space 9. I tried, I really did, but it bored me to tears. Some thought it was fantastic, that's fine.
I couldn't get into Voyager, not at first and not at all during it's 7 year run. (I have since gone back and watched the entire series and loved it.)
I wasn't able to get to Enterprise when it was on the air, plus it went back and was out of sorts with the time line. Bugged me, at first. Found it on DVD/Netflix and fell in love with it...aside from season 3. The Expanse arc was just horrible overall...
So...we had the original, we had the future, we had an outpost with martial law and spiritualism, we had a female captain and we went back to how it all began. Plus we had 10 movies. Star Trek tried. TRIED. Still crashed and burned. Only way to save it was to go back to where it truly started (Kirk & Spock) and instead of trampling all over everything we know and love, they branched it off into a new timeline and continuity, keeping both the original and the new. The fans couldn't process it, the general audience did and it opened new doors and made way for the biggest Star Trek movie to date. Both critically and financially.
TransFormers has been around for 27 years. We had SEVEN series, three of which were the G1 continuity and three which had their own. We had one box office disaster of a movie. (Check up on the original film, critically and financially a failure.) We had a lull with no toys, no shows and it looked hopeless. They banked on Jurassic Park and tried Beast Wars. It worked. Beast Machines? Not so much. RID? Quite successful, but went back to basics in a lot of ways. A/E/C? Eh, show was a mixed bag, toys as well, but Cybertron showed real promise on both fronts. Then...it was all gone. No shows, no toys except a filler line. (Of course, we all knew they were working on a movie behind the scenes of everything else, but for the time being, all we had was the last of Cybertron and the filler of Classics to tide us over.)
The movie was a reboot, plain and simple. It borrowed elements of what came before, but didn't trample all over it. (And if the rest of you can put away your rose colored glasses for a moment, you'd see that.) It opened to a wide audience, not just us and it turned out to be a success.
ROTF came along, tried to borrow some of G1's ludicrous ideas and bombed with some of the fans and all of the critics, but made a tremendous amount of money and wooed even more new fans.
DOTM came along and went serious, but had a human side without too many humans (get your torches and pitchforks ready, bring it.), it looked fantastic, it was fun and powerful and handled both well. Made record breaking money, a rather sizable portion of critics liked it, wooed some fans that weren't so sure and brought in even more new fans.
You cannot live in the past forever. After a while of the same old, same old, you're going to hit a dead end. Unlike Star Trek, which crashed head on into that wall.... TransFormers did not. We could've come close, but smarter minds prevailed and they made it work. Even if you don't like the movies, you can't deny what positives it did give us. More money for Classics/Universe/Generations development, Human Alliance figures, TransFormers Animated and TransFormers Prime. Even if you don't like the toys or the animation style, one thing that can't be denied is the storylines. Animated and Prime both had/have BRILLIANT writing and edgy stories that push the boundaries of a kid's cartoon, while being accessible to everyone.
If the fandom gets their way, we're screwed. We're doomed to repeat history and will have learned nothing. If Hasbro gets their way, everyone will have something. Little kids have Rescue Bots, tweens/teens/adults have Prime and the movies. And everyone has access to G1/BW/BM.
The best way to put it is this: I'll let the words of Albert Einstein say more than I could.
Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Albert Einstein
The fandom is doing just that.
We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.
Albert Einstein
Hasbro and Hollywood knew this and used it to their advantage.
Any intelligent fool can make things bigger and more complex... It takes a touch of genius - and a lot of courage to move in the opposite direction.
Albert Einstein
We're intelligent, but we tend to be foolish. We think WE can make it better. Hasbro took the courage, used the genius of others and moved in an opposite direction.