Regarding BG, the original was limited by the limitations of weekly TV at the time, but at least it had enough guts to try some things that were a _little bit_ original. For example, having the story be about the protagonists losing their homes and being pursued after losing a war with an enemy out of too much trust and self-deception was unusual for the time, and having it turn out later that the Devil (literally!) was behind the enemy was also somewhat daring too. It _wasn’t_ great art by any means, but at least it wasn’t pretentious politically correct tripe like the reboot, which is basically just an expression of Hollywood’s loathing of America. Of course the enemy _had_ to be self-manufactured, it _had_ to be the fault of the protagonists. And of course the whole source of hope has to be manufactured, it _has_ to be cynical and fraudulent, because Hollywood can’t believe in anything else.

As for Star Trek, I grant that this movie comes closer to recapturing the ‘feel’ of Kirk/Spock/McCoy than anything else since, the actors who played those roles actually did something impressive in that. I freely grant that. The YoungMcCoy character was especially IMHO impressively ‘right’.

Also, portraying a Very Young Jim Kirk as a very annoying jerk kid was probably spot on, that’s exactly what I picture him being, especially absent any serious adult male role model (his father being dead in this time line). Very smart, too successful with the ladies for his own good, everything comes easy, that’s the recipe for a jerk very often.

But oh dear Heaven, so many things were just wrong!!! The Spock/Uhura romance doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, having the old Enterprise be constructed on Earth’s surface is just silly, the Engineering sets with those big tubes of liquid running this way and that for no obvious reason, and the YoungScotty character is Just So Wrong. Scotty was never supposed to be the comic relief (he could be the occasional source of smiles, but the character is supposed to be basically solid).

Spock the Elder watches Vulcan destroyed from Delta Vega with his naked eyes. For old-time fans, Delta Vega was a planet way out on the edge of the Galaxy, thousands of light-years from Vulcan. Granted the time-line was already changed, but having Delta Vega moved to the Vulcan star system would be like me going back in time to save Abraham Lincoln, and returning to the present to discover that by doing so, I somehow moved England to the middle of the Pacific Ocean!! And of course a habitable world close enough to Vulcan to permit Spock to watch it be destroyed with naked eyes be destroyed would itself be wrecked in such a cataclysm.

The bridge set looked better than the Engineering set, I grant that it might even ‘work’ as a set for a different show, but this is supposed to be the same time as Kirk’s youth, so why doesn’t it look at least a _little_ like the bridge set of the original Enterprise?! I mean it doesn’t have to be identical, given the time-line change, and allowing for better visual effects, but it ought to at least _resemble_ it a little. Especially since of all the bridge sets we ever saw on Star Trek, the bridge of old series Enterprise is the only one that sort of looked like it made sense.

(The bridge is supposed to be a place where information gets gathered and directed in order for the Captain to make useful decisions. That old bridge had a ring of screens all the way around the set, lots of display possibilities, not just one big screen, and it looked ‘clean and efficient’ and businesslike, not like the misplaced coffee-bar ambience of the STTNG bridge set.)

And yes Thomas Hart you are so right that there is no way Kirk would go straight to starship command from undergrad status right out of the Academy! After the events of the movie, he very likely would be promoted, he’d be thought of as an up-and-comer, yes. I could imagine that after all that he might graduate as a Lieutenant and skip Ensign, or something on that order.

The ONLY way going straight to captain would make sense would be if _everybody_ else with line seniority above him (meaning basically all of Starfleet’s line personnel) were dead or incapacitated. Which was not the case.

And don’t get me started on how stupid the villain was.

Good choice. It’s definitely the best film version of the character. What’s particularly odd is that it’s basically the Batman: Year One reboot that Frank Miller did in 1987 and which preceded the Michael Keaton incarnation.  So there’s really no excuse.

The Byrne reboot removed everthing that was fun about the Superman mythos in an effort to make it more mature, and left us with situations where a villain named Sleez hypnotizes Superman and Big Barda and makes them do a porn movie. Really.

Yes, that is one isolated example, but it really captures the dark, soulless drudgery that was the Byrne era. Oh, Superman killed people too — intentionally.

I can give him credit for Lex Luthor as business man, and a better relationship between Clark and Lois, and these are both good things, but the wholesale removal of anything “childish” and the attempt to make Superman “mature” was a mistake.

Superman needs The Legion of Superpets, fifth-dimensional imps, the bottle city of Kandor, red kryptonite and the mermaid he dated in college. Without being surrounded by the ridiculous, his own ridiculous nature just stands out too much.

Superman can only be read by folks who are childish enough to think that super powered dogs are a great idea, or mature enough to suspend disbelief and enjoy a story that has a super powered dog.

(But, I will agree that “Lois and Clark” was awesome)