I saw an ad promoting the new Star Trek movie as “This is not your father’s Star Trek” — blech.
“This is not your father’s Star Trek” is a phrase that has more significance to the generation of kids that grew up watching Star Trek reruns than it does to the kids it is trying to attract.
The phrase they are alluding to is “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile” — a ill-conceived attempt to get people my age to buy Oldsmobiles (rather than our parents/grandparents). The end result of that brilliant bit of marketing… no more Oldsmobile.
Oldsmobile’s Demise — What GM Could Learn From Radio. This article does an excellent job describing the way Oldsmobile alienated their long time customers and didn’t attract new customers to replace them.
We in radio know that its easier (and faster!) to blow off your core audience that attract a new one. Even so, we sometimes do make that choice…when our research shows that the station has a great opportunity to attract a newer, more desirable audience.
Olds had no such opportunity, just the wishful thinking of GM management! Olds was given a nearly impossible mission and not nearly enough time to achieve it. When sales predictably faltered, GM pulled the plug.
When it was phased out, Oldsmobile was the oldest surviving American automobile marque, and one of the oldest in the world, after Daimler and Peugeot. Something to think about.
It’s like they are intending to do the same thing to Star Trek — alienate the old audience while not bringing in a new one.
All the promos for this movie suggest that it will have lots of action, some amount of sex (at least that matches Roddenberry’s vision), some special effects nobody dreamed of in the 1960’s, and a total disregard for any of the Star Trek storyline that’s been built up over hundreds of television episodes and ten movies that have all been rabidly eaten up by fans. There are so many new directions they could have explored to extend Star Trek, instead of acting like they need to blot over the original good stuff (and it must’ve been good, or it wouldn’t still be being talked about 42 years later).
My feeling is that even if the movie is enjoyable, it sorta isn’t Star Trek. We’ll see.
I think I would have been happier if whatever they did, they just used different characters. There’s no need to make a “revised” version of Kirk, Spock, and McCoy when you can just as easily make up Tony, Sandar, and Griffith and let them have their own new adventures. That’s what made shows like Next Generation and Deep Space Nine so interesting and allowed the Star Trek storyline to advance and grow.
So that this doesn’t turn into a total dissing of all new Star Trek things, this is a video of Warp11 and their song She Make It So. I’ve been a bit of a fan of Karl Miller since around 2000 when he was doing promo videos for some fantastic video production/editing software. He is out there. You can get Warp 11 music here
I’ll finish off with Burger King. With their ever weirder and weirder ads I think Burger King has taken peculiar to such a new level that it’s cool… like an art style.