Star Trek vs Star Wars: The space battle that will never end
It’s a conflict as old as time, raging exhaustedly in some distant corner of the galaxy, like a rivalry between two stars so ancient they’ve burned down to their red dwarf phase. Well, OK, it dates back to 1977, when Star
Wars came out: 11 years after the debut of Gene Roddenberry’s original Star Trek series on NBC and two years before Star Trek: The Motion
Picture in 1979. Long before the Millennium Falcon hove into view, Trekkies were already a fully established phenomenon, even though Roddenberry’s original series only ran for a piddling three seasons. Soon after it premiered in 1967, pointy ears started appearing at sci-fi conventions; in April of that year, Leonard Nimoy had to be rescued by police when thousands of fans mobbed him at a parade in Oregon.
Come the mid-Seventies, with the cancelled series syndicated to 125 American TV stations and 60 other countries, the media were reaching for Beatlemania comparisons, so rabid was the show’s thriving fanbase even with little new material other than their own fanzines to feed off.
The initial reaction of hardcore Trekkies to Lucas’s Johnny-comelately space opera is not that simple to gauge. You suspect some guilty defections: nothing they’d been given had had this scale, this oomph, this widescreen majesty. But the tone and plotting of Star Wars established the fault-line between the two franchises that has grown into a fissure over the decades.
Lucas announced his intention to deal with grand, mythic themes, archetypes, and political power struggles, where Roddenberry’s
Star Trek preferred to traffic in philosophical conundra, turning over eternal human questions in a probing spirit of intellectual enquiry.
This philosophical head-butting has become a favourite game for science fiction fans over the decades, inspiring regular online flame wars. Some of these have been irate geekouts that go on for pages. Others have been so tongue-in-cheek it’s a wonder the participants can get any words out at all.
There’s not much evidence of legitimate animosity between Trek and
Wars factions creatively speaking, only between their fans. Though not well-acquainted, Lucas and Roddenberry did meet at least once — there’s a photo of them shaking hands at a 10th anniversary Star Wars convention in 1987, where the much older Roddenberry, just a few years before his death, turned up to congratulate Lucas. By all accounts, it was a mutually respectful encounter, and something of a role-reversal, since Lucas had attended Trek conventionsinthe 1970s, and is said to have admired everything Roddenberry achieved with his limited resources.
It’s ultimately in the dungeons of sci-fi fan-nerdery that Trek vs Wars debate gets more acrimonious. Is one of them fascist? Are they both? You’ll find adherents to every imaginable position: one on end there’s Lucas’s famous homage to Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl at the end of Star Wars, and the undercurrents of Right-wing thought in writer and theorist Joseph Campbell’s work; but you can just as easily talk about the primacy of Starfleet in the Trek universe, which lends itself to a view of the Federation as less an enlightened democracy than a military dictatorship.
Trek fans will often point to these tensions as the subjects specifically being wrestled with on a script level. In the more action-driven Star
Wars, they’re more subtexts to be teased out, perhaps. And then there are the villains: Darth Vader as a more humanly relatable foe who turns evil, Khan as a kind of bornbad Nietzschean product of genetic engineering, convinced of his eugenic superiority.
At any given moment, the pecking order in this inter-franchise slanging match is easily guessed from their commercial fortunes. Robert Wise’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) looked like a Trekkie’s wet dream, until many of them realised how dull it was.
The film owed its whopping budget to the combined successes of
Star Wars and Close Encounters; you wouldn’t call it an outright flop, but Paramount had somehow let it balloon to a mammoth-for-its-day $46m, far more than the first two
Star Wars films combined. It was certainly a disappointment, and Roddenberry got much of the blame — his proposal for a sequel was rejected, and Paramount decided to proceed with one he would have very little to do with.
Meanwhile, the glowing critical and popular response to The Empire
Strikes Back (1980) had firmly installed Lucas as the golden boy of Hollywood, locking legions of fans into lifelong devotion, and selling who knows how many zillions of action figures.
This must have been a particularly lonely time top refer Star Trek. A corporate re think was in progress which more or less rescued the brand, thanks to the thrifty, lively, and fanpleasing Star Trek II: The Wrath of
Khan (1982), which cut costs down to a quarter of its predecessor’s. Some of the effects barely functioned, but this make-do-and-mend approach weirdly fitted the thoughtful Trek personality better than Roddenberry’s ballooning grandiosity.
A lot of credit goes to the self-described “healthy disrespect” of director and co-writer Nicholas Meyer, who confessed that he’d never seen an episode of Star Trek, and managed to humanise the Enterprise crew a little more with irreverent character notes — from now on, they weren’t just wooden mouthpieces for whatever ethical position was under dispute.
Something of a franchise hero, Meyer would return to write Star
Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and to write and direct another of the best installments, Star Trek VI:
The Undiscovered Country (1991). It’s often been said that the evennumbered Trek films are the keepers: those are Meyer’s, at least up until First Contact (1996).
What you might call the second wave of Trek-mania coincided, quite handily, with fallow years in Lucas’s universe, at least creatively speaking. After the mildly disappointing
Return of the Jedi (1983) and a few spin-off adventures on TV for Droids and Ewoks, Lucas claimed to have no desire to expand the universe further, at least until the mid-1990s.
By this point, Star Trek had found it swayback to the small screen again, where many would argue it more properly belongs, meaning that this now-insatiable worldwide demographic no longer had to wait two or three years between movie inst al ments, but had the overlapping pleasures of not one( The Next Generation, 1987-94), not two (Deep Space Nine, 1993-99), not three (Voyager, 19952001) but four (Enterprise, 2001-5) TV series to roam around in. Though many were doubtless
StarWars fans as well, the kill-or-bekilled purists must have witnessed the loud popular dismay towards Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999) with a certain amount of schadenfreude. Here was Lucas both overreaching and underreaching, confirming everything that elitist Trek-hards had ever argued about his slapdash characterisation, boring Manichean worldview, and non-understanding of their pet words like Manichean.
Can you imagine their horror after the announcement that the same director, JJ Abrams, would be shepherding both Wars and Trek franchises to their future destinations? His 2009 Trek reboot, though a widely appreciated mainstream hit, was at best tolerated in the inner sancta of franchise enthusiasts — it wasn’t “really” Star Trek.
Into Darkness — voted the worst film in the entire canon at2013’ s Trek convention in Vegas — was another matter. Here was Abrams meddling with the mythology almost as if he was actively determined to piss them off. He pulled the curtain back on a “surprise” villain whose identity everyone had already guessed, so much so that the only way to keep the surprise alive, promotionally speaking, was to lie about it.
In contrast, 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens — a record-breaking blockbuster that managed to capture the spirit of the original trilogy and win over the vast majority of hardcore Star Wars fans — probably left inveterate Trekkies muttering at the back of cinemas, sitting there as withered and bitter as Emperor Palpatine and reminiscing about the good old days.
It remains to be seen whether the Abrams-produced Star Trek Beyond, directed by Justin Lin and released this week, will be an unexpected Trekkie triumph…or whether, like its predecessor, it will simply leave the fandom seething anew. Reviews so far have been lukewarm.
But either way, with Star Wars spin-off Rogue One due to hit cinemas this December and a new Star Trek TV series heading to Netflix in early 2017, one doubt’s sci-fi’s greatest rivalry is over yet.