Furthermore, Variety claims that Ellison’s goal is to turn Paramount into a MAGA-friendly environment, with content in the TV and movie divisions expected to be more “America-centric” and geared toward “the middle of the country.”
RIP any future Star Trek property.
“OMG, when did Star Trek get so political?!”
Um… 1966.
So hilarious and so apt… I will absolutely laugh at the idea of, well what’s effectively been a socialist utopia for the vast majority of contexts in it, and the show that broke the interracial kiss barrier. (on top of inter species/galaxy ones… but obviously far more shocking at the time that a white guy kissed a black woman, than a white guy sleeping with a bunch of green aliens.
I reckon we could get 4 seasons into a Terran Empire based series before the MAGAs figure out they’re being made fun of.
You could get away with a Starship Troopers Star Trek Terran Empire series literally forever, The Colbert Report ran 11 seasons and people still think it existed to balance out the liberal bias of The Daily Show.
Star Trek: Ferenginar will probably be on the list to be made and the pilot episode will be called Make Fereginar Great Again.
MAGA would see the Ferengi aversion to war, xenophobia, and genocide as “too woke”.
“Let me tell you something about Hew-mons, Nephew. They’re a wonderful, friendly people, as long as their bellies are full and their holosuites are working. But take away their creature comforts, deprive them of food, sleep, sonic showers, put their lives in jeopardy over an extended period of time and those same friendly, intelligent, wonderful people…will become as nasty and as violent as the most bloodthirsty Klingon.”
Followed by Star Trek: Lobes
Star Trek: The Final Front Ear
There’s already an Angel Studios. We don’t need another one.
RIP any future Star Trek property.
I’m sure they will find new ways to try to reboot it, completely stripped of any social commentary or social thought experiments, devoid of all optimism and inspiration for what our species can become. Probably like, another retelling of a plucky crew getting into space battles with generic, non-stereotyped-but-kinda alien terrorists who don’t have relatable reasons for being bad guys.
It won’t have heady concepts and wild ideas about how civilizations can develop and what humans can become, but that’s okay because it will have a roguish captain who likes to break the rules and a strict, by-the-book 1st officer that he has sexual tension with.
I remember having multiple discussions with a guy I knew who was adamant about various works of fiction, including the original Star Trek TV series, and how, in his view, if they have any kind of subtext to them, that it was not intentional and it’s entirely in the eye of the beholder, meaning, that people just make it up as they go.
These included, but were not limited to: OG Star Trek, Dune (book), LoTR (books), and even the NARNIA series. I mean, Narnia. I think I first read them around the age of 10 or 11, and the Christian parallels practically hit you between the eyes it is so obvious. Even to a kid…I mean, I’m pretty sure Lewis has gone on record with the clear intent on proselytizing his faith via that series.
I wish I was joking, and this guy read most everything when it came to old sci-fi stuff. If that is his take on reading all those classic sci-fi stuff, I was just gobsmacked as to what he was getting out of it.
I have the feeling that there might be more people like him, but I just don’t get it. Even things like WWE have the basic outline of the hero’s journey to them, FFS.
He’s not wrong that the reader/viewer can take what they will from a work and translate it through their own lens… but come on, that is some neutron-star density if you can’t read the deliberate social commentary in Star Trek. Roddenberry himself has spoken about it.
It makes me pretty convinced that person, and those who share his views, are people who feel called-out or attacked on some level by whatever social issues are being highlighted, or feel insecure that they don’t “get it.”
There is a really wild segment of the human population who seem totally incapable of working out abstract ideas like ethics and values on their own and rely on systems like government or religion or unfortunately, content creators to guide them. This is a bigger problem than we realize and we take for granted that just because we all grew up watching the Ninja Turtles beat Shredder that we can all discern that “good is better than bad.” Not everyone gets that, and this is everyone’s problem.
Yeah, I know the guy could be an intentional contrarian just because he thought that was the way to show his intelligence. And I think he is on the spectrum. But I don’t think he was kidding or merely being contrarian about this. Probably why I talked about it to him so much. Sure, many things have multiple interpretations, and I often thought that some pretty basic English lit teachers thought there were “rules” to how to interpret literature and that there were “correct” answers to what something like Old Man and the Sea “means”. I can understand rejecting that.
But rejecting that even things as blatant as Narnia and Star Trek are not intentionally conveying a message? Mind-blowing. I don’t even understand why you’d be all that interested in fiction of any kind at that point.
And yeah, as you point out, this kind of obvious intelligence in one way, but a glaring of lack of intelligence in others is highly problematic in the moral sense.
I was going to suggest that he might be on the spectrum, as it’s pretty stereotyped that autistic spectrum disorder can make it hard for some people to pick up subtext, nuance, overtones and other forms of communication that aren’t direct. (I was diagnosed recently as an adult but I’ve never had problems dismantling all the layers of media or reading emotions so it’s probably a different part of the spectrum.)
But this is also exactly why so many people on the spectrum identify with science fiction and fantasy, because in many of these franchises the social narrative or analogy isn’t exactly subtle.
And it opens up so many questions - like, what DOES communicate social messages and life lessons? What kinds of media DO convey ideas about society? Only documentaries about politics? What about non-fiction movies? What about fiction stories and movies that aren’t sci-fi or fantasy? Does he even watch stories about human emotion or abstract works of fiction that are STRICTLY social commentary? I would immediately start asking him so many questions LOL.
Honestly though, I would take this. I would prefer someone who says openly that they’re disconnected from social narratives than the people who pretend that they understand ethics and values communicated to them, but are actually just horrible sociopaths trying to act human.
Yeah, I found it weird for sure and I did have so many questions. I don’t see him any more. I still think about it even now, even though these conversations were maybe 10 years ago, LOL.
I think part of it was his stubbornness to admit being even a little bit wrong in a prior statement?
I mean, as you point out, OG Star Trek is something that even as a relatively young and sheltered kid who didn’t see much TV, I’d watch them at relatives houses in syndication and even I could “get it”. It fairly smacks you over the head now that I’m an adult. How some of this got past the censors still looking for any kind of subversive content is beyond me. I’m assuming the network censors just saw aliens and checked out mentally, or maybe were the type that cannot really handle abstractions of any sort…
As to that last paragraph, absolutely right. It’s one thing if people struggle with social cues and so on and it’s quite another for people just faking human emotions in order to exploit others.
All of those series you mentioned have easily found interviews with their creators where they specifically say what subtext they were intending when they made them. You can disagree with the subtext, but was intentionally put there. That’s some willful ignorance.
Yeah. I’m pretty sure I asked him about that supposed wager between Tolkien and Lewis and how they kind of goaded one another to write fiction containing new myths that had, at root, the “true myth”, in their view which was related to Christ, since they were both Christians.
I also asked him about original myths themselves - do they contain allegory, etc? I think he may have conceded that, but for some reason, seemed to want to have some kind of arbitrary delineation between ancient myths and virtually everything else.
I don’t pretend to understand. I was utterly baffled by it. I remember asking about The Matrix, too - was that just a lot of cool FX and well-choreographed fight scenes? The answer was something I don’t remember, but I know I was baffled by it…
Narnia and Dune are so up-front about their messages that after a couple books it stops being subtext and just becomes text, so they’re technically correct there.
Well, Narnia hits one like a 2x4 square between the eyes. 🤣
I remember reading the first Dune book during the first invasion of Iraq and the parallels between the two were very interesting I have to say. Not sure how much the author meant, but it was sure weird…
I mean the Author meant nothing to parallel a war that happened 25 ish years after the book was released. Dune 1965 first Iraq war 1990. Any similarities are all on you.
Ha, yeah, of course it was not about the particulars of the first Iraq war which happened decades after the book was written. I’m talking more about the struggle in a desert planet with a people that are being oppressed by colonizers while there is a struggle for a resource that the planet has a lock on that virtually everyone needs. Not to mention all the Islamic references and influences…I had not read the book before 1990 and had only seen Lynch’s Dune prior to that.
Seeing that list of stars, I didn’t even need to open the article to see if Paramount was just conflating anti-genocide with anti-semitic.
They are, in case it wasn’t immediately clear.
They are, in case it wasn’t immediately clear.
Basically, my eyeballs just slide off the word “antisemitism” like it’s fucking mental Teflon at this point.
Good fucking job Israel, we spent nearly a century committing our entire civilization to stamping out ideas like antisemitism and bigotry against ethnic groups, and you just dragged us back to the start.
Well, I just canceled my paramount+
Same.
We’re quickly spiraling into a Star Trek evil timeline origin.
We’re actually right on schedule for the Prime timeline. Things got really, really bad before humanity finally got their shit together. Of course, we won’t be doing that.
I’ll never understand one more people aren’t on the high seas. It’s the best.
We need some people paying for it so the stuff we like keeps getting made.
Sounds like we need a Paramount boycott
I’ll start by continuing to not watch nor consume Paramount shit in any way.
Zionists owning Hollywood turns out to be reality.
Israel has set back the push against actual bigotry and antisemitism by a century by literally leaning into every right-wing conspiracist talking point and wild notion about jewish conspiracies.
They’ve squandered any good will a sane person could have for Israel.
The monstrous acts against Palestine haven’t changed the way I view Jewish people as a whole, because I can separate religious beliefs from the actions of a nation state, but so,so many fucking idiots won’t.
Israel can go fuck itself, but I really feel for all the sane Jewish people outside (and inside, though I don’t think they’re super numerous) Israel that are going to be targeted by actual fucking antisemitism by nut jobs.
The only issue is the vast majority of that group, even the “sane” ones you empathize with, still support these policies. Only pacifist Orthodox jews oppose these genocidal policies amongst Jewish people. There is, unfortunately, not many cases to separate Zionism and its consequences from Jews.
Case in point.
I sometimes wonder if this was intentional - fanning ridiculous theories such as “space lasers” - in order to make it easier to discredit other/future criticism. The Republicans have been using similar tactics for awhile now,.
Intentionally seeding radical and absurd social and political narratives on both sides of every issue is part of the KGB handbook for destabilizing nations. Russia has done it repeatedly, but it’s not isolated to them, basically it’s how politics is conducted entirely now by every actor.
When you stop trusting the narratives and stories you hear, you start tuning out all arguments on either side of an issue and either lose interest entirely, or you default to trusting the “official” channels like state media.
Boycott, divest, sanction. Paramount about to get the Disney treatment.
At some point you just have to boycott all media. Did you know if you torrent you basically achieve that and still get to enjoy movies? This is why it is a moral duty to torrent.
And by “antisemitic”, they are still going by the hilariously outdated notion that maybe last held sway in the 90s, and that means “not sufficiently subservient to just whatever the fuck Israel wants to do”?
Um, it’s holds quite a lot of sway all the way to 2025, sadly. It’s not outdated because things are getting worse. In the 90s nobody would have agreed with that definition. Yasser Arafat was an extremely popular dude in the 90s. He won the Nobel peace prize because of how popular his work was in the 90s. But he would have been considered hands down antisemetic by today’s modern BS definition.
Not everything that is bad is from the past. Some of these things are recent developments. The strangle hold of Israel on US politics is an increasing problem more than it is an outdated past problem.
Also support for Lebanon was very popular in the 90s. Just watch a Kids in The Hall sketch. The 90s doesn’t deserve to be maligned with the assumption that all views from then must be worse than the views we have now. You clearly never lived in the 90s.
Heh. I most definitely did live in the 90s. I’m talking about how until being able to talk directly to one another at scale, the old notion of “antisemitic” mostly held sway over us and it was a fantastic way to silence a lot of/most of dissent about Israel. Back when a handful of broadcast networks, cable networks, and newspapers were able to gatekeep nearly all discussions about Israel.
These days, that definition is openly mocked, even on corporate news, no less. Just witness the exchange between Stephen Miller’s wife and Cenk Uygur. Stephen Miller’s wife tried that nonsense and Cenk was able to rebuke her w/o having his mic cut off.
Not all aspects of being able to do an end-run around gatekeepers is necessarily a good thing, of course. So yeah, not everything from the 90s vs now is good or bad, it very much depends.
Soon to be rebranded as Paramaga, to cater to “the middle”
“Coming soon to Paramount+, a unique look at Hitler: A tyrant? Yes, but also an artist and dog lover, let us explore the middle side of history this fall!”
No wonder South Park is trying to speedrun their contract with Paramount
I would think they’d love being there as a giant fuck you to them.
What happened for those not in the know?
Really how? The contract is for episode numbers not season. And they seem to be releasing episodes slowly.
Like they’re daring them to cancel the contract and prob pay out a shitload of money if they do. South Park wins either way.
Oh man. Star Trek is the only tv show I watch. I guess it is time to sail the high seas.
Torrent.
MAGA and Jewish space lasers on the same side. I guess they are that stupid.
Here is the twist, they don’t have the actually anti-semitist people there because definition of this word completely warped thanks to Netanyahu and zionist lobbies. Bask in the glory of your stupidity.
Blacklists are the hallmarks of fascism.
Is that a bad thing? As in, there are some good actors on that list which won’t be making MAGA-friendly films at Paramount.
It’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility, since Hollywood loves to blacklist folks in general for opinions outside work. But to outright claim X, Y or Z won’t be working at Paramount seems a bit of a stretch.
There’s a lot of wiggle room in that article. It’s reporting on ‘sources told Variety’ that Paramount is making a list, but that they’re not sure who’s on it. But that they assume these people would be.
It’s all silly anyway. Even folks like Kevin Spacey eventually get back to working in Hollywood. Hollywood principles only go so far once the media attention dies down.
