You know I really am more of a Star Trek fan than I am Star Wars.
It’s true, but you wouldn’t know it especially when you look at how much I talk about and write more about Star Wars.
I’m not sure what that’s about, but I do have a theory.
Marketing.
Well marketing and timing to be fair.
You see I personally believe that there is no finer marketing machine around any franchise than there is around the Star Wars one. If you don’t believe think back to Empire Strikes Back. Not once in that film do they mention Boba Fett.
Not once.
He is referred to as the bounty hunter, over and over. But I can tell you from experience that we all knew his name long before it was uttered in passing during Return of the Jedi (ironically Chewbacca actually speaks his name first, not that we’d understand).
The timing element is that Star Wars came out at a time to influence heavily the Generation X’ers who would go on to desperately grasp on to any artefacts of their childhoods. For a lot of material that meant rediscovering it today via remakes and DVDs etc but Star Wars has always been a constant.
Star Trek on the other hand influenced Generation X to some degree but the Original Series was before our time and The Next Generation was just a touch after our truly formative years. Yes the fandom was massive but there was long time between drinks and the franchise didn’t sell itself well. Star Trek fans were the easy targets for nerd labels and the franchises differ so greatly in content and themes. Star Wars naturally lends itself to being marketed, swords and monsters etc. Star Trek‘s marketing has always been in my opinion flawed. Even the latest one has horrible toys and very little in the way of iconically cool tie-ins.
That being said I still maintain that Star Trek has the cooler ships.
So with this affection in place it means that for much of the past twenty years or so Star Wars is the cooler thing to reference and Star Trek was a little cringe worthy. I’m not placing a value judgement on this either, as I say Star Trek is always my first love and I prefer it as my passion for choice. But at the same time with such distinctive characters the Star Wars universe is probably more fun to make derivative works of.
Which is why I think I seem to talk so much about Star Wars over Star Trek. Now that I’ve sat and thought about this what does that mean? Will I consciously make the effort to reference Trek? Well in fairness to myself I do have the Seventy-nine series running and Thoughts of a Storm Trooper is winding up, though I do have a new Star Wars related project on the boil…
I guess all we can do is keep an eye on the tag cloud on the home page and see when Star Trek matches the size of Star Wars as a keyword here on Quit Your Day Job.
If only firefly hadn’t got the ax.
Don’t forget your Ensign Dave series. That should balance out Thoughts of a Storm Trooper.
I have a theory with Firefly though, I’m happy to have 14 (or 13 whatever the actual number) perfect episodes. Had it continued they might have dropped in sheer bloody awesomeness.
Ensign Dave is a Midnight Movie Club franchise though