Alternate and Non-canonical Star Trek Roundup

Compiled by Carl Slaughter: (1) Deadline reports “Quinton Tarantino’s Star Trek will be R rated”:

After Deadline this week revealed that Quentin Tarantino pitched a Star Trek film to JJ Abrams and Paramount, the whole thing is moving at warp speed. Tarantino met for hours in a writers room with Mark L. Smith, Lindsey Beer, Drew Pearce and Megan Amram. They kicked around ideas and one of them will get the job. I’m hearing the frontrunner is Smith, who wrote The Revenant. The film will most certainly go where no Star Trek has gone before: Tarantino has required it to be R rated, and Paramount and Abrams agreed to that condition. Most mega budget tent poles restrict the film to a PG-13 rating in an effort to maximize the audience. That was the reason that Guillermo Del Toro’s $150 million At The Mountains of Madness didn’t go forward at Universal, even though Tom Cruise was ready to star. The exception to this rule was Fox’s Deadpool, but that film started out with modest ambitions before it caught on and became the biggest R rated film ever.

(2) Most lethal Star Trek captains

(3) ScreenRant tells about “17 Canceled Star Trek TV Shows And Movies We Never Got To See”:

(4) Dodged the bullet: ScreenRant tells “15 Ways Star Next Generation Was Almost Completely Different”.

  1. Gene Roddenberry Super Did Not Want Captain Picard Or Patrick Stewart

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry did not like Patrick Stewart. Actually, that’s putting things pretty lightly. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry hated Patrick Stewart.

He didn’t want Stewart to play Captain Picard, he didn’t even want him to audition for the part. The creator famously described Stewart as both “too old and too bald” to play the iconic captain.

Roddenberry pushed heavily for Yaphet Kotto to play the ship’s captain. While we can’t imagine The Next Generation without Stewart’s devilish smile and never-ending sense of fun, but it’s hard to actually argue with Roddenberry on this one.

Had Kotto been cast in the role, he would have given the Star Trek franchise their first black captain decades earlier. There’s just nothing wrong with that.

(5) Trek online game: “Bridge Crew drops its VR headset requirement”

There’s no question that Star Trek: Bridge Crew benefits from VR — it helps fulfill that fantasy of helming a starship. Most people don’t have the VR headset you need to play the game, however, which makes gathering a crew rather difficult. Red Storm and Ubisoft’s solution? Make the game playable for everyone. It just released a “non-VR” update that makes the game playable for anyone with a PS4 or sufficiently capable PC. You can play with others whether or not they have headsets, and there are even graphical enhancements for non-VR players to take advantage of the lighter processing requirements.

3 thoughts on “Alternate and Non-canonical Star Trek Roundup

  1. On Tarantino and his desire to make an R-rated Star Trek movie:
    They should have told him “Hell no!”
    Doing it his way will kill that film and possibly the TV and movie franchise.
    (Do they even realize how much of the existing market is (a) female and (b) over 25?)

  2. (4) Some of the items on that last don’t surprise me at all. Roddenberry clearly always thought of the captain as a wish-fulfillment version of himself, and his attitudes toward women were entirely retrograde even when the series first came out. (He liked to tell everyone at conventions how he was more progressive than the network, but their complaints about Number One had nothing to do with putting a woman as second-in-command and everything to do with Roddenberry’s complicated relationship with Majel Barrett at the time.)

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