May, 2009. I’m sitting in a crowded movie theater watching my old friends
Captain Kirk and Spock shooting aliens, covered in grease. The kind of
grease John McClane always seems to be covered in at the end of those
cool “Die Hard” movies. The theater is packed. There are girls there.
Girls.
The
audience “ooohs” and “ahhhs”. While having “Star Trek”, the thinking
man’s science fiction franchise, turned into a wham bam action flick
stings, it doesn’t even matter. “Star Trek” is cool. A girl I know saw
it twice. Twice. Girl. Star Trek. Cool.
But I realize I may be in the minority here. I’m weird about continuity in that I’m all for a reboot or remake that starts fresh, but absolutely abhor anything that sweeps a dangling plot-point under the rug, or has me going “Hey, what about…?” for an entire season.
What are your most hated continuity problems, in wrestling, movies, and TV? What are your favorite ret-cons?
The earliest one I remember being confused by was the Made-for-TV movie “Not Quite Human” where Alan Thicke builds a robot son. The sequels had him building his son again, and the technology they used for robo-heart kept changing. Of course I was a kid so maybe I missed some detail that explained it, but it was the first time I got a sense that sometimes movies and TV shows forget important details until its too late.
Regarding ‘Star Trek’, I’m of two minds. While it sucks we’ll likely never see Kirk or Picard or Data or Sisko or Odo again, it was probably for the best. TV and Film is a business and intellectual, high-minded, ‘lets sit down and talk about this’ kind of entertainment isn’t really financially viable anymore, especially in a Sci-Fi setting where audiences would tend to expect action pew-pew and space battles.
The Plinkett “Star Trek 09” review explains it well.
When it comes to comic books, I’ve avoided diving in due to the sheer amount of bone crushing continuity* in the main universes, so I’ve stuck to side-stories and collected pieces like “The Long Halloween” and such. I will say there was something *really* cool about picking up the first 100 issues or so of “Ultimate Spider-Man” and discovering the ultimate universe for the first time.
Regarding ret-cons, one of my favorite little details in recent years was the quip that
“The Avengers” kept talking to each-other despite not having any
ear-pieces. In Iron Man 3, and then in “Agents of Shield” they make a
point to show these tiny little ear-buds that you can’t see. It’s a cute
little detail I appreciate.
Also I think my favorite thing the WWE did, was when Foley got fired from being the commissioner, they shot footage of him signing like a huge stack of documents, in essence building in a backdoor to literally anything that happened in the next few years. I can’t remember if they used it a lot or not, but it was a cool little way to get around pretty much anything that came up.
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Blog Otter Award: Your_Favourite_Loser for Dem Legs. DEM LEGS man.
*This is a phrase I read on this very blog, that I have used over and over again in many places. Sorry Scott!