End of Star Trek and Star Wars
Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 1:30 pmSo within the span of seven days the Star Wars saga will complete, and Star Trek has ended its 18 year run.
The gloomy Star Trek: Enterprise series ended with a wrap of the overall franchise rather than this least successful series. The signing of the Federation charter perhaps restored the message of hope that made the original show and "TNG" successful (in reruns if not its initial run).
And Star Wars (stop reading now if you don't want any spoilers at all) wraps up with the Republic Senate giving sweeping new powers to Palpatine to further their own greed rather than stand for what the Republic was supposed to be. Lucas decides to make this quite obvious political statement, in part perhaps due to criticism that the original saga took the focus of movies away from making such statements in the 1970s.
Both of these franchises were successful at least in part due to the messages of hope it brought: people of wildly different cultures working together for a better future, or at least for the common struggle towards what they believed could be one. Overthrow the Empire in one case. In the other, exploring new cultures being your own culture's[i] raison d'être[/i].
So what will fill the void in the coming years (besides reruns)?
The gloomy Star Trek: Enterprise series ended with a wrap of the overall franchise rather than this least successful series. The signing of the Federation charter perhaps restored the message of hope that made the original show and "TNG" successful (in reruns if not its initial run).
And Star Wars (stop reading now if you don't want any spoilers at all) wraps up with the Republic Senate giving sweeping new powers to Palpatine to further their own greed rather than stand for what the Republic was supposed to be. Lucas decides to make this quite obvious political statement, in part perhaps due to criticism that the original saga took the focus of movies away from making such statements in the 1970s.
Both of these franchises were successful at least in part due to the messages of hope it brought: people of wildly different cultures working together for a better future, or at least for the common struggle towards what they believed could be one. Overthrow the Empire in one case. In the other, exploring new cultures being your own culture's[i] raison d'être[/i].
So what will fill the void in the coming years (besides reruns)?