Only fair to credit Treklit author (and former marine) Dayton Ward for his Kirk-fu 2020 book and for coining the term.
Here’s an interview with Ward from the time of its release.
StillPaisleyCat
joined 1 year ago
The physical media merchandising team seems to be excellent.
Fans really showed up to buy the Prodigy DVDs, but they also had really put in the effort to promote them. They even came up with party ideas and recipes.
Don’t impose your preferences for doing things in sequence or being a completionist on new viewers please. This seems really bad advice and likely to turn off more potential fans than pull them in.
OP’s question is about how to figure out how to engage someone in the franchise who seems to have her own specific preferences, and things that put her off.
I’m a viewer who first saw TOS as a small child when it was in first run, and everything in first run after that. It for others, there’s a whole range of shows for different tastes, best to figure out which one suits someone’s tastes and pull them into the franchise with that.
When we wanted to introduce our kids to the franchise, we started with TAS, then curated episodes from the other series. Like many tween, Voyager turned out to be ‘their show’ and it makes sense that Prodigy is strongly tied to Voyager. Our kids have moved onto other Trek shows and other franchises as they’ve moved through their teens. TOS, DS9 & Enterprise remain shows that they’ll watch occasionally. But one can never say that they’ve not liked Trek.
It really depends on the person.
I wouldn’t assume that it works best in that direction even though that’s great for long time fans like us.
There is an entire new cohort of younger fans for whom Lower Decks was their entry point. It’s successful because you don’t need to get all the Easter eggs and references to still find it an enjoyable show.
In fact, I see a lot of those Lower Decks-first fans talking about how the show gave them enough reference points to really enjoy the classic shows and be open to their slower pacing.
There’s a ‘Where to start’ FAQ linked in the sidebar wiki for this community. I recommend going there and taking a look.
The best place to start largely depends on your personal preferences in terms of whether shows need to be action packed, have long term serialization vs episodic, and tolerances for 60s or 80s/90s trends in special effects, technobabble, Shakespearean acting styles.
I’m an older person who has been watching since TOS was in first run, and saw the original Star Wars as a teen. Alien 1 too. All to say, I saw all of it as it came out. We were just so glad in the late 70s that someone was making sci-fi movies that weren’t post-Armageddon dreary.
Trek has held my interest more intently, but I read more than my share of the SW ‘legends’ books as they came out. I can see a wide range of offerings in both franchises, appealing to different audiences and tastes.
It rather boggles me that there are folks who have tried one but not the other. It’s like someone who is a DC or Marvel fan and has never checked out the other. You may not find anything to like, but the potential of finding another universe of stories that interest you is more than worth the risk.
A word of caution. Just about Star Trek every fan thinks that the show they first watched or their favourite show is the best place to start. They’ll argue passionately that you’ll do best starting where they did. Ignore all of it. You’re you.
Read the ‘where to start?’, check out ‘Memory Alpha’ or Wikipedia for the basic description of the main series, pick one that appeals and try the pilot. Be also cautioned that many of the shows take a while to find their groove. Checking out a ‘best of’ list for early seasons is ok if you’re not the of a completist temperament. Hope you find the Trek that’s best for you.
It’s still on SkyShowtime in the Nordics, Netherlands and Eastern Europe where Paramount and NBCUniversal teamed up.
Uhm, would that be 5/10 episodes of the first half of season one (which has two x 10 episodes)?
Most fans view S1E6 ‘Kobayashi’ as the episode where the balance flips to be more Star Trek as it pulls new viewers in.
Really brilliantly done.
Did you watch more than a handful of episodes?
Most long time fans who’ve seen the entire first season describe it as the most ‘Trek’ of the new eras of shows.
It starts out intentionally in a location outside the Federation that is tonally more like SW, and with characters that either don’t know or are hostile to the Federation. It meets new viewers where they are and then brings them into the fold.
By the middle of the first season it’s celebrating everything that’s great about the franchise.
Not in real life, but there’s no way that all the Temporal Incursions (TM) in Voyager wouldn’t have had dates slipping a bit back and forth.
I’m so very glad that SNW took an episode to clarify what’s been lurking in the background as ‘inconsistencies’ ever since Roddenberry took the decision to move WW3 back a half century in TNG ‘Encounter at Farpoint.’ Makes better physics sense too.
Some members of the House are always trying to up the glam!
(This is from The Starlost 1975.)
Yes, ‘blank-Fu’ has been used since the 70s, but as a long time fan of both Trek and HK action films, I can’t say that what Shatner was doing in TOS was referred to in that way until recently.
Is it really so controversial to say 1) Kirk Fu became current in the fandom since the book was published; & 2) the meme is a clear lift from a published work and the drawings its artist Christian Cornia, they deserve credit?