Had a wonderfully exciting conversation last night at a brew pub with three incredible fans of Trek and Wars. We talked about how people like Trek for its trekkiness and Star Wars for its camp, and some people really screwed up when they tried to make Trek more like Wars. We talked about how the Enterprise, far more than even Kirk, is the face of Trek. The Enterprise is a character in the franchise that people love, and the first time it was destroyed on-screen, people cried. But it was a huge mistake to then destroy the ship in every subsequent film.
Note to Directors: You have to let a character build a relationship with the audience before you kill it off for shock value. So put a moratorium on killing the Enterprise for a while.
As a subset of this conversation, we talked about one of the major differences between Trek and Wars. I feel compelled to point out that nobody in the conversation ever once said that one is better than the other. We all like both Trek and Wars. (This is allowed. I checked.) But if you refuse to acknowledge the differences, then you’re missing the point.
One such difference is how the two franchises treated the concept of fascism. The message from Wars: Fascism is bad, even if you have to fight it with religious fanaticism. We compared this to the TOS episode, Patterns of Force which discussed fascism not only in historical context but how it can come about even with the best of anti-fascist intentions.
Memoirs of an Earthling 