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[bulldogtrekker]

The Best Ways To Honor The 50th Anniversary Of Star Trek
Charlie Jane Anders, I09



Next year marks the 50th anniversary of space opera's grandest and most ambitious media series. But will Star Trek have a 50th birthday in keeping with its proud heritage? Here are a bunch of ways that we hope Star Trek's birthday gets celebrated......

And more to the point, something as influential and awesome as Star Trek deserves a huge anniversary celebration. So here are some ways that CBS/Paramount — and we — could honor Star Trek next year.

Greenlight a brave new TV series

This is probably the most important thing, which is why we're mentioning it first. Star Trek began on television and its natural home is on television. An ongoing series allows for more thoughtful storytelling and deeper examination of the series' themes than any one movie could. CBS needs to realize it's sitting on a goldmine, and put Trek back on television. Or Netflix. Or Amazon, or wherever. Already, some high-quality fan-made Trek shows on YouTube, like Star Trek: Phase II, show there's a nearly inexhaustible demand for new episodes.

Support human exploration of the solar system.....
Display a restored U.S.S. Enterprise at the Smithsonian...
Have a really killer party......
Champion diversity in the sciences....
Show a restored "The Cage" in theaters...
Spark a conversation about ending scarcity.....
Have an event that unites all the generations.....
Publish the best Star Trek books and comics ever.....
Embrace a brand new humanism.....
End the reboot trilogy in style....


FULL STORY AT THIS LINK:
http://io9.com/the-best-ways-to-honor-the-50th-anniversary-of-star-tre-1680719013

[bulldogtrekker]

Binge-Watching Guide: Star Trek
By Graeme McMillan , WIRED

Next year marks the 50th anniversary of Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, the flagship of a massive franchise that by all rights shouldn't exist. The show's first pilot was rejected, and the series was cancelled after three years—and yet it kept coming back. It's a phenomenon that seems curious until you actually watch the show, at which point you realize exactly why things unfolded that way.

Star Trek (or Star Trek: The Original Series, as it's now referred to) is many things: a drama, a comedy, a series about ideas and interpersonal conflicts, a competition to see which actors can eat the most scenery and much, much more. That variety is a strength; even if it's slow by today's televisual standards, the fact that you never really know what's coming next gives the series unexpected bingeability.....

What are you waiting for? Here's a quick guide on how to mainline the classic Star Trek.



Star Trek

Number of Seasons: 3 (79 episodes)

Time Requirements: Five weeks, assuming that you binge a couple of episodes every weekday and six episodes a weekend. That might sound like a lot, but they're pretty addictive; you might even get through it quicker than that.

Where to Get Your Fix: Netflix and Amazon Prime (Or, if you want to pay for it, Google Play and iTunes).

Best Character to Follow: We'd say the Enterprise, but then someone would spoil everything by pointing out that the Enterprise is a starship and not really a character. And yet, while Captain James Tiberius Kirk (William Shatner, who before he became an old ham was a young, surprisingly handsome, ham) might make for an entertaining leading man, it's hard to argue that he's the most interesting character in the show. Perhaps Leonard Nimoy's Mr. Spock would make a more obvious choice, but I'm going to offer a couple of other suggestions instead: DeForrest Kelley's Dr. "Bones" McCoy and James Doohan's Chief Engineer "Scotty" Scott enliven almost every scene they're in. Come for the square-jawed heroes, stay for the irascible space scientists.

Seasons/Episodes You Can Skip:go to link if you don't know
Seasons/Episodes You Can't Skip:go to link if you don't know

LINK:
http://www.wired.com/2015/01/binge-watch-star-trek-tos/

[Pye-Rate]

Butch and I honor TOS by remembering time we have spent with TOS cast members.

[bulldogtrekker]

When Will 'Star Trek' Get a Cinematic Universe?
The Hollywood Reporter

The recent announcement that Paramount is planning to extend its Transformers movie franchise into a cinematic universe was surprising not because the studio was looking to build a competitor to Disney's Marvel or Warner Bros.' DC universes (or, for that matter, Sony's mooted Ghostbusters universe), but because Paramount already has one in its catalog: Star Trek.

The lack of Trek focus is confusing in multiple ways ... The franchise's 50th anniversary celebration is upcoming — surely, if ever there were a time to try and concentrate attention on a property, it's during something like that. But also, Star Trek already has the shared universe experience that something like Marvel Studios enjoys, and indeed was one of the first genre properties to explore such a thing in mainstream media.

In the mid-to-late 1990s, Trek was doing a version of what Marvel launched with the 2013 debut of Agents of SHIELD: running multiple parallel narratives in the same shared fictional universe, across both television and movies. The trinity of television series Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Voyager and the movie continuation of Star Trek: The Next Generation shared characters and situations in much the same manner as the Marvel movies and shows of today, while building on a world (or worlds) established three decades earlier.

More importantly, those three parallel properties each explored different facets of the core Star Trek concept: The movies centered on the flagship of the Starfleet line in grand adventures, while Deep Space Nine focused on the political machinations on board a space station, and Voyager was ultimately based around the social problems of a crew outside their traditional situation, forced to rely on people they don't trust for survival. In terms of proving that Star Trek can support multiple properties simultaneously, there shouldn't be any question: It's already been done.

....Of course, just because the material is there isn't necessarily enough of a reason to do something with it; even the 50th anniversary might not be seen as reason enough to revive the property beyond the movie series already in progress. However, Star Trek offers a couple of things that the Marvel, DC, Transformers and Ghostbusters universes don't: Firstly, a setting that can entirely bypass the world as we know it, thanks to the 23rd century space basis; and secondly — and arguably more importantly — a more optimistic tone, unlike the constant panic and struggle for survival of almost every other genre "universe" out there.

Star Trek has the (fictional) history, the depth and the ... real-world experience, for want of a better way to put it, that make it uniquely prepared to transition into the brave new world of "Cinematic Universes." Ultimately, the real question is, what's stopping Paramount from pursuing the chance to take advantage of a perfectly primed property?




LINK:
https://www.yahoo.com/movies/s/star-trek-cinematic-universe-040000461.html

[bulldogtrekker]

Shatner's Idea For A Star Trek 50th Anniversary Episode
By Jessica Rawden, CINEMABLEND

Star Trek originally premiered on network television back in September of 1966. In the time since, Star Trek has put together numerous films and TV projects, and has become a cultural icon for American audiences. Next year, Star Trek will be celebrating its 50th Anniversary, and lead William Shatner recently revealed he has an idea for a special episode of Star Trek. He also mentioned he has already pitched his new idea to Syfy.

[Pye-Rate]

Wheels for aviation fans via Captain Kirk.