Nostalgia Is Destroying Star Trek’s Future – Cracked May 4, 2022

I saw this recently on Cracked – Nostalgia Is Destroying Star Trek’s Future: https://www.cracked.com/article_33762_nostalgia-is-destroying-star-treks-future.html/. Longer article.

By: Ryan Menezes May 4, 2022

When the 2009 Star Trek movie came out, many people enjoyed it, while also dimly aware that we were all being played for fools. The big appeal of this movie was watching the roster of the original Star Trek show (now with fresh actors in the parts) assemble and newly find themselves in the roles on the Enterprise that we knew so well. The actual plot was a battle-filled space opera very unlike what Star Trek had been about, but just seeing these familiar characters convinced Star Trek fans they were being catered to. 

Was this the future of movies? Nope. It turned out that the future was much worse.

In the decade to come, people’s hunger for nostalgia would grow much more strong. Today, we’re getting Star Trek: New Worlds, true, a prequel with new actors playing old roles much like the 2009 movie. But more often, even that isn’t enough to satisfy the demands of today’s nostalgic viewers. Today, in Picard and in too many legacy sequel movies, we demand to see old characters again and further demand that they also played by the original actors. It may be 20, 30, or 40 years since we last saw them, but we need to see the same (slightly more wrinkled) face doing the same thing.

Or at least vaguely appearing to do the same thing. A show like Picard doesn’t use the same tone as its predecessor, or the same message, or the same style of storytelling, but it brings back the old icons, and that scratches viewers’ itch. You might think that if someone enjoyed one show, they’d enjoy another show influenced by it rather than a follow-up that just reuses the icons, but here we are.

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