My 90's and 2000's Experience: Star Trek Generations

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. Sorry for my absence last week, but I decided to take the week off as there wasn't really anything that I really wanted to talk about. This week however is a different story. Today is the 30th of the theatrical release of Star Trek Generations, the first movie to feature the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation. So let's get into it.

Released on November 18th, 1994, my first encounter with the movie was when my dad and I went to see the 1994 live action version of The Jungle Book and I saw that the theatre we were at was playing the movie, so I asked my dad if we could go see that instead, not understanding that the tickets we were given were specifically for The Jungle Book, and not just a gift card for the theatre we were at. He said no and explained to me why. This was in January, 1995. I also had the movie's poster up on the wall at home, which was cool.

For Christmas in 1994, or maybe in 1995, my brother, my sister, and I each got an action figure from the movie, I got Picard, my sister got Guinan, and my brother got Worf. Because I hadn't seen the movie yet, I didn't know that the uniforms that the Picard and Worf figures had on were designs that had been scrapped in favour of the uniforms originally introduced in the first episode of DS9. I still thought they were cool though as they kinda reminded me of the uniforms worn by the TOS characters from The Wrath of Khan to The Undiscovered Country. Except for the base that came with her for her to stand on, the Guinan figure came with the exact same accessories the original figure from the TNG line came with, except here, they were orange instead of blue. The base was the combadge design made for the movie, but debuted in the season 3 premiere of DS9, rather than the original combadge design from TNG.

I eventually saw the movie on VHS when it came out in the summer of 1995. However, this release wasn't the retail release. It was the rental release. Back in the 80's studios often put their home video releases out to the rental market first, before releasing them to the public. By the summer of 1995 however, that was a practice that nobody used anymore, with the exception of Paramount for their home video releases of Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, and Star Trek: Insurrection for whatever reason. 

My parents rented it for us. While it's not the most popular Star Trek movie, it's still one of my favourites. I think because it has Kirk and Picard teaming up to take on a threat that Picard and his crew couldn't handle on their own, which was something the movie was heavily marketed on. Of course I was shocked by the destruction of the Enterprise-D, though nobody else was apparently because Paramount included it in the movie's trailer, like they'd done with the destruction of the Enterprise in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock a decade earlier, and would do again 22 years later with the trailer for Star Trek: Beyond.

I think I also like this movie because even though they used the TNG sets, they modified them to look more cinematic. The bridge especially looks really good. Though watching it explode was heartbreaking as this was how the production crew destroyed the TNG sets since the show was over, and they needed to re-dress certain sets like the transporter room, corridors, holodecks, shuttlebays, cargo bays, turbolifts, and possibly sickbay for Star Trek: Voyager, which was set to debut in January, 1995.

I also like Data's journey in the movie, from getting his emotion chip installed, to learning how to control his emotions rather than the emotions controlling him. I kinda felt that Scotty and Chekov were superfluous in the movie. But that's because they were only there because their dialogue was so generic that Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley refused to come back since the dialogue wasn't specific to Spock or McCoy. Which is unfortunate. Especially because Spock could've had a much larger role in the movie as he still would've been able to assist Picard and the crew in locating Kirk. So, here's the scenario for this that I came up with.

On the Enterprise-B in 2293, Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are on the ship with Captain Harriman and Ensign Demora Sulu. Kirk dies as he does in the movie, but Spock does not believe he is dead or anything like that. And neither does Guinan, who was also there during that era. Then, on the Enterprise-D in 2371, Picard and his crew are having difficulty in stopping Soran, and knowing that Spock believes Kirk is still alive, Picard recruits him to help locate Kirk before Veridian III is destroyed alongside the Enterprise, just as the ship is in the movie. 

My dad finally got Generations on VHS after the retail version came out in early 1996, and of all the Star Trek movies, I think this one, along with Star Trek III, and Star Trek V, is the one I watched the most, even by the time I got Nemesis on VHS in 2003, it was still the Star Trek movie featuring the TNG cast that I watched the most.

 

Sometime in the mid to late 2000s I got Generations on DVD. Specifically the 2004 two-disc special edition DVD release. Then in 2019 I ended up downgrading to the 1998 single-disc DVD release, along with First Contact, Insurrection, and Nemesis. I decided I didn't need both versions, and I didn't need all of the bonus features on the special edition DVDs, so I got rid of the four special edition DVDs for the TNG movies, and replaced them with the four single disc releases.

I vaguely remember my dad having the comic book adaptation of Generations published by DC Comics, along with the comic book adaptation of the TNG series finale, "All Good Things...", which was also published by DC, but I don't know what happened to either of them. I did get a copy of the comic for my own collection a few years ago, and I really enjoy it. 

I never owned it, but when I was in the sixth grade I borrowed the junior novelization of Generations from my fifth grade teacher's classroom library in January or February 1999, when I was stuck inside during the shorter recesses or the really cold recesses that we had. I don't remember much about the book itself, but I do remember that it had those eight, glossy, pages of colour still images from the movie, including one of Riker, Data, Troi, and Worf on the bridge either just after the Klingon Bird-of-Prey was destroyed, or as the saucer is crashing onto Veridian III.

Overall, Star Trek Generations is my favourite of the movies featuring the TNG cast. I still watch it pretty regularly. I own it both on VHS and DVD, and I love it. I can't believe it's been thirty years since the movie first came out. It's insane to me how that happened. The funny thing is is that I decided to do this post today because I wanted to talk about the movie. I had no idea it was the movie's 30th anniversary today until I looked at the release date on Wikipedia.

That's it for me for today. I'll be back soon with more posts. I'm not quite sure what I'll be talking about next, but in two weeks the series finale of Superman & Lois is airing so I'll definitely be talking about the end of the show after the finale airs. So join me for that in two weeks. In the meantime I have other posts I want to do before the Christmas season officially kicks off in December. So until then have a great rest of the evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

My 90's and 2000's Experience: The View-Master Stereoscope

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing okay. Today I'm going to be talking about something I didn't think I'd be able to talk about after experiencing it in the modern day as an adult. I'm talking about the View-Master Stereoscope toys I had as a kid, as well as the reels that were made for them. If you grew up in the 80's and 90's you'll remember these little devices. So let's get into it.

This is probably the version of the View-Master you'd remember if you grew up in the 80's and 90's. It's also the one you see in shows like Stranger Things or The Goldbergs whenever the View-Master is needed in an episode. I also had this version when I was a kid, but it was actually the second one that we had. I do remember seeing one of these at the hospital or at school when I was in kindergarten or grade one. 

This is actually the first one I owned. I honestly don't remember when I got it exactly or who got it for me, I just remember playing with it alot when I was a kid. In case you don't know what a View-Master is, it's this device that you place these flimsy white plastic reels which show images from a movie or TV show or just random pictures and you press a button or slider on the right hand corner (if you're looking into the view finder) to change images, much like you would on a Stereoscope from the 50's and 60's to look at old pictures on. Each press of the button turns the reels around to change the 3-D image you're seeing. I had several reels to go with my View-Masters. Let's take a look.

First up is a random preview reel (Canadian apparently) that shows single images from three cartoons, a live action show, and random shots of Calgary, Alberta, the CN Tower in Toronto, Ontario, and the Olympic Stadium in Montreal, Quebec. The cartoons are just a random shot of Spider-Man that looks like a cartoon but is probably from a View-Master reel set from 1977 or 1978, an image from the 1973 View-Master reel set, Superman Meets Computer Crook, and a shot of Mickey Mouse facing the bear from the 1939 cartoon, The Pointer. The live action show is from the Electra Woman and Dyna Girl segment from The Krofft Supershow, which first aired in 1976.

The next set I had was called Hollywood Mickey. This was actually the only set that I had that was complete. I think this was just some stills that were never part of a cartoon or TV show, because I can't find anything online to suggest that the reels are actually from a previously released cartoon and for the time it was too modern, if you wanna called early 90's modern that is, for it to be from a Mickey Mouse animated TV show (Mickey Mouse Works wouldn't come out until 1999). So it was most likely stuff made specifically for this View-Master reel set. 

Believe it or not, this next set was my introduction to the live action Ninja Turtles movies. I had reels A and C, but not Reel B for the first movie. While I'd seen the original 1987 cartoon series, which was my first introduction to the Turtles, and read the Archie Comics series, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures, I didn't see any of the movies until the early 2010s when I got the three live action movies and the 2007 animated movie on DVD in a four-pack. So this was my experience with the first two movies when I was a kid.

Yes, I also had the first two reels for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze. The reason that I didn't have all of the reels for these sets, besides Hollywood Mickey is because they were all second hand. Chances are my grandparents found them at a garage sale or something like that.

The last set we had, which I'd forgotten about until last week, is the set for Beauty and the Beast from 1991. We only had Reel B and Reel C, which goes from "Be Our Guest" to the end of the movie. I don't know why I didn't remember that. Probably because we had that movie on VHS and we watched it all the time. 

I don't have an image of it, but I remember we kept both View-Masters and the reels in a red and green The Real Ghostbusters lunch bag with Slimer on the front. The reason I even came up with this topic is because last week my dad was going through some stuff in our basement and found the second View-Master and all the reels we had. We got rid of them, but before we did, I spent an hour going through all of the reels. Which was pretty cool given that I hadn't seen them in about 20 years and I actually thought we'd gotten rid of both View-Masters and the reels back then. I'd had no idea that they'd stayed around for all those years since they were no longer in my personal possession. So it was cool discovering that we still had them stored away down here in the basement.

And that my friends is it for me for today. I've got some movies to watch thanks to my friends at the VHS Club Podcast, so that's what I'll be doing this weekend. I'll be back next week with more posts. Until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you later. Take care.

My 90's and 2000's Experience: Halloween

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for Halloween. As you can see from the title of this post, I was very intentional on when I was going to write it. I'm not going to be super fancy with this post, I'm just gonna talk a little bit about what Halloween was like for me personally growing up in the 90's and 2000's. I did this on my old blog, The Review Basement in 2020 for my now defunct series, Living with Disabilities, but this will be a broader look at it. So, let's get into it.

As many of you know I'm not a big Halloween person. I don't dislike Halloween, it's just not my favourite day of the year. It was different for me growing up because for most of my childhood I couldn't eat anything, so trick or treating never appealed to me the way it would other people. As it is, my parents took us to visit all the grandparents so they could see our costumes. It was the 90's, we didn't have social media and Messenger to send pictures to relatives on and being that it could be expensive to get a roll of film developed, we saved cameras for really special occasions like birthdays and Christmas, or any other time that Nana was over with her camera. 

Not being able to eat also meant that candy and chocolate was pointless for me, so my parents and grandparents had to get creative for treats for me for Halloween. So instead of chocolate or candy, they'd get me books or comics or a VHS tape or a toy. Something that I could have so I wouldn't feel left out since my brother and sister would get candy and chocolate. After 1993 it was a little easier since I could eat things like Aero bars and I could still experience the sensation of eating regular food without worrying about getting fat or things like cholesterol and other nutritional things. 

On the school side of things I actually got into Halloween a little bit more. We were allowed to wear our costumes in the afternoon throughout elementary school, as we'd have the class Halloween party that afternoon, or the afternoon closest to Halloween if Halloween was on a weekend that year. I had a pretty decent variety of costumes. Commander Riker, Batman, a Ninja Turtle, Robin, and Darth Vader were all characters I dressed up as. But for the most part, aside from the one year we went trick or treating in my neighbourhood, Halloween consisted of me listening to spooky songs on the radio. MAJIC 100, one of the local radio stations that was a staple in my house at the time, had an entire evening of songs like the theme from Ghostbusters to "The Monster Mash" lined up for people to listen to.

1996 was probably the most memorable Halloween for me. Mostly because we had a Halloween party at my house. My brother, sister, and I each got to invite one friend over to hang out, eat candy and chocolate and watch the Winnie the Pooh Halloween special that came out that year, Boo to You Too! Winnie the Pooh. The special aired on October 25th and I remember my dad taping it for us, so I think we watched it on VHS with our friends on Halloween rather than on October 25th, which was a Friday, with Halloween being on a Thursday, exactly like this year oddly enough.

The other thing that made Halloween in 1996 so memorable is that two days before Halloween, on October 29th, Toy Story finally came out on home video after being in theaters for about nine to ten months (it was in theaters for a long time even compared to other movies out at the time). Disney had commercials for it all over the place on TV for about a month leading up to the release date. Including several times during the October 25th broadcast of Boo to You Too! Winnie the Pooh. 

I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I just wanted to come on here quickly and talk about Halloween a little bit. Like I said at the beginning of this post, nothing fancy. But, I hope you all have an amazing Halloween and have fun whatever you're doing tonight. I'll be back soon with lots more blog posts, including one on something I thought we didn't have anymore, but just discovered we did still have, but are getting rid of. And that's the only teaser I'm giving you. You'll have to wait until next time to find out what that thing is. So until then have a great evening, Happy Halloween, and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

WildStorm's Star Trek Comic Book Series Overview

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm back with another Star Trek comic book overview. Unlike the DC and Marvel overviews that I did in 2022 and 2023, this one is going to be a single post as I'm talking about the WildStorm Comics run that came out between 2000 and 2001. And because all of the comics came out over the course of a year and a half, there won't be that much of an organization to how I talk about these issues. Basically I'm going to talk about them by series, beginning with TOS and going to Voyager. One more thing about these comics as well. I've never read a single issue of the WildStorm Star Trek comics. I didn't even know about them until over a decade after WildStorm lost/gave up the Star Trek license. So I'm not going to have a whole lot to talk about with them. Let's get into it.

The TOS run of WildStorm's Star Trek comic book series, is the shortest of the entire run. WildStorm put out two one-shots, All of Me and Enter the Wolves, and that's it. The first issue has to do with a scientist who creates a device that can bring people from parallell universes into the main Star Trek Universe, so as an example, it could bring Spock from the Mirror Universe into the regular universe, and the Enterprise is sent to investigate and stop him if necessary. The second comic tells the story of Spock and Sarek's relationship during the Lost Era, or the 70 years between Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and season 1 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. All of it was mentioned in the episodes of TNG that Sarek and Spock appeared in. The short version is Sarek opposes the Cardassian petition to join the Federation and is a sequel to the 1994 novel, Sarek, by A.C. Crispin, who also wrote this issue. What's bizarre about that, is in actual canon, the Cardassians never petitioned to join the Federation, and so Spock and Sarek disagreed over the war. Which makes more sense, since I highly doubt the Cardassians would join the Federation as a member world, given they'd lose their autonomy as the Cardassian Union. 

Next came the TNG series, which had three one shots, and two four issue mini-series in it's line. The first was the four issue mini-series, Perchance to Dream, followed by a one-shot called Embrace the Wolf which was the TNG sequel to the TOS episode, "Wolf in the Fold". Then another four mini-series came out called The Killing Shadows, followed by a second one-shot called The Gorn Crisis, which is the only WildStorm Star Trek comic I heard about as an article on it was published in a 2001 issue of the magazine, Star Trek Communicator. What's interesting about this one-shot graphic novel is that it was written by Kevin J. Anderson and his wife, Rebecca Moesta, who wrote the Star Wars: Young Jedi Knights series together from 1995 to 1998, and who each had individual writing credits on '90s Star Wars material. The final one-shot, Forgiveness, was published in 2001, wrapping up the TNG comics.

DS9 also had a comic book by WildStorm. However, it was a single four issue mini-series called N-Vector. I really don't know very much about these comics and trying to write a synopsis for each one-shot and mini-series would make this post longer than it needs to be. If you want to learn more there are synopses for all of these comics on Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki. As for WildStorm itself, aside from seeing ads for them in the comics that DC published in the 2000's, as the publisher became an imprint of DC in 1999, and reading a run of Gen13 and the 2005 Danger Girl mini-series, Back in Black, I'm not as familiar with WildStorm, being that they weren't part of the DC Universe when I was introduced to comics in the early 90's, and they were more mature and not appropriate for someone of my age in 1992. Even when I was in high school, WildStorm books weren't that easy to find compared to Marvel and DC, and again, because of my preferences, I wasn't interested in any of the WildStorm books. Even now, I have no desire to read comics from WildStorm.

At some point during this era, WildStorm did a four issue TNG/DS9 crossover comic called Divided We Fall. This story is set in the same continuity of the DS9 relaunch novel series, which began in 2000, so the comic involves the characters introduced in the novels. Which is interesting.

The Voyager comic consisted of three one-shots and one mini-series. The second one-shot was actually the comic book adaptation of the video game, Star Trek: Voyager - Elite Force, which came out in 2000 for the PC and the Mac, and 2001 for the PlayStation 2. The mini-series is also only three issues, instead of the four issues that the TNG and DS9 mini-series had. 

In January, 2001, a one-shot special issue was published. It contains six stories set in different eras. All four live action shows that existed in 2001 were represented in this issue.

The final comic I can talk about in this overview is Star Trek: New Frontier - Double Time. Star Trek: New Frontier was a series of novels, novellas, and eBooks written by Peter David that Pocket Books published between 1997 and 2015. Unlike other Star Trek novels, this series didn't include any of the core cast members as the central characters in the series. They might show up from time to time, but the series focused on original character, Captain Mackenzie Calhoun, and the crew of various starships called Excalibur. Calhoun's crew consists of side characters from various shows and books. Including Captain Elizabeth Shelby from "The Best of Both Worlds" and Zak Kebron, a Brikarian Starfleet Officer who was a classmate of Worf's at Starfleet Academy in the first three books in the Young Reader series, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Starfleet Academy. I actually wanna do a blog post on New Frontier sometime because it's pretty cool, but the series was created in response to the criticism that nothing could really happen in the Star Trek novels as this was before any of the relaunch series began publication and the TNG movies were still coming out alongside new seasons of DS9 and Voyager. With none of these characters showing up in the shows anymore, you could develop them and have them change and grow in ways that the main characters from the TV shows and movies couldn't outside of the shows and movies.

WildStorm had the shortest run of any Star Trek comic book publisher, being that it really only lasted a year to a year and a half with no ongoing monthly series. I think that's because by the time WildStorm had the license, Star Trek was becoming less and less popular, and with WildStorm being not very well known at the time, and Star Trek comics also not being as well known by 2000, it made sense that the comics probably didn't sell very well. Especially because the TV shows and movies were still coming out on a regular basis, so there wasn't that thirst for Star Trek stories in other mediums that there would be after Enterprise went off the air in 2005. 

I honestly don't know if I'll do an overview series on the Star Trek comics published by IDW. Mainly because there are just so many of them and most of them are mini-series and one shots like WildStorm published. Plus, even though I have read some of the IDW runs from the last five or six years, I haven't read any of them from 2007 to about 2018 or 2019, so that's a huge chunk of the comics I haven't read. So I don't have alot of history with the IDW comics, but I definitely have more than I do with the WildStorm and late 90's Marvel runs. We'll see though. In the meantime, I'll be back with more posts in the near future. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care. 

Books I've Read Recently: A Book Discussion

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well. I'm here to talk about a couple of books that I've read recently. Originally I had planned on doing individual reviews for each of these books, but neither fits into the way I do my blog these days since one of them is a Stephen King novel, which I didn't read until a couple of years ago, and I'm also not doing the "My Star Wars Experience" series on a weekly basis anymore, so this Star Wars novel also doesn't fit into the "My 90's and 2000's Experience". So I'm just gonna ramble about It by Stephen King, which was published in 1986, just before I was born, and A New Dawn by John Jackson Miller, which was published in 2014, a little over ten years ago. So let's get into it, starting with A New Dawn.

I cannot believe that it's been a little over ten years since A New Dawn was published (September 2nd, 2014). I also can't believe it's been ten years and 13 days since Star Wars Rebels debuted. The fact that I finally got to watch the show last year, before Ahsoka came out, and I finally got to read this book after ten years is incredible. I'll be honest, I really didn't know very much about this book when it first came out. I vaguely remember reading about it in an issue of Star Wars Insider, but I couldn't tell you what issue I read about it in. I just wasn't interested in it. By 2014 I had stopped buying Star Wars novels, even having stopped catching up on the Legends novels that I hadn't gotten to, having finished off with Scoundrels by Timothy Zahn (2013) and X-Wing: Mercy Kill by Aaron Allston (2012). There were just too many coming out, and I just wasn't as interested in them as I had been in the 90's and 2000's. Especially the ones coming out in the early 2010's.

Having watched Rebels last year though, I decided I wanted to read A New Dawn to see how Kanan and Hera met. Plus, having read John Jackson Miller's 2013 novel, Kenobi, last year, I was excited to see how he handled these two characters. Luckily the Force was with me because last month I went to visit my buddy Jonathan, who lives out of town, and he just happened to have the 2015 paperback edition of A New Dawn in his Star Wars book collection, and he lent it to me. I really enjoyed it. So much had been hinted at in Rebels, but it was fun to actually get to see the beginning of the relationship between these two awesome characters. I swear I could hear Freddie Prinze Jr. and Vanessa Marshall's voices as Kanan and Hera everytime I read their dialogue. I was also intrigued to see the beginning of Rae Sloan's Imperial career in this book, given that she's also the central antagonist of the Aftermath trilogy.

I'm not a big fan of Stephen King. Nor am I a fan of Horror. Yet, I'm a sucker for coming of age stories. I always have been. Which is what drew me to his 1986 novel, It. Especially after I'd seen the 2017 movie adaptation on Blu-ray a few years ago. I love the book. However, I'm not a fan of the edition that I own. I have the 2017 trade paperback edition, which is so heavy I could barely hold it long enough to get through more than one chapter at a time. Especially because of how long each chapter is. I at least tried to read two chapters a day, one chapter per reading session, and that worked well enough for me that I could get the book finished before the end of the month, it being the Halloween season now.

I found Richie to be way too obnoxious for my taste, but I liked the other main characters alot. Particularly Eddie, and Ben and Bill. Eddie, because he's similar to me due to him being medically fragile, and Ben and Bill because they were social outcasts. Plus their names are actually the same as two of the trains in the Thomas the Tank Engine book and TV series, and that was one of my favourite things when I was a kid. I know, I'm weird.

Also, it's funny because I actually knew who Beverly and Richie were before I even knew what It was. My very first Stephen King novel was the 2011 novel, 11/22/63, which is a time travel novel that deals with what might happen if someone prevented the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963. In the book, the main character, Jake, travels back to September, 1958, after the events of It. He briefly visits Derry, which is the town that It takes place in, and randomly meets Bev and Richie. I had no idea that those two characters were from It as I actually didn't know a thing about Stephen King or his books, and I still don't since I'm not interested in his books in general, with It and 11/22/63 being the exception.

That's gonna be it for me for today my friends. I just wanted to talk about these two books for a bit, and didn't feel like doing individual reviews for either of them. Though I definitely plan on getting a mass market paperback edition of It at some point and if I do get one, I'll try to do a blog post on it at some point. Until then though, I might have another blog post coming out on Friday this week. I haven't decided yet. Jonathan also lent me all five seasons of the 2004 animated series, The Batman, on DVD, and I'm planning on doing a post on that once I've finished watching it since it's a show I watched on TV when the first two seasons aired in 2004 and 2005. Until then have a great evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.

My 90's and 2000's Experience: The Star Trek: Voyager Relaunch Novel Series (2003-2020)

 Hey everyone, how were your weekends? Mine was pretty good. So today I'm going to be talking about Star Trek novels, specifically the Star Trek: Voyager relaunch series that began publication in 2003, two years after the series ended its run on UPN. Despite it ending in 2020, my history with it only goes as far as 2014. I'll get into that a little later. Right now I wanna get into the history of the series before I get into my personal history with it. Let's get into it.

 Beginning in June 2003, the relaunch series began with Homecoming by Christie Golden. The DS9 relaunch series had started in 2000 with A Stitch in Time, which was written by Garak himself, Andrew Robinson and I guess the series was successful because Pocket Books began doing the Voyager series in 2003 and the TNG series in 2005. If you don't know what I mean by relaunch series, it's simple. Each TV show ended in the 90's or early 2000's. TNG ended with Star Trek Nemesis in 2002, DS9 ended with the series finale, "What You Leave Behind" in 1999, and Voyager ended with its series finale, "Endgame", in 2001. Each of these book series continued the story of each series where the TV show or movie left off. The Voyager series continued with The Farther Shore, also by Christie Golden, which acted as a continuation and wrap up of the initial storyline of what happened after Voyager returned to the Alpha Quadrant. It was published a month after Homecoming.

 Up next was the two book subseries, Spirit Walk, which consists of Old Wounds and Enemy of My Enemy, written by Christie Golden, and published in 2004. This duology is set after the Homecoming books, and Chakotay has taken command of Voyager following his promotion to captain. It also deals with the animosity growing between veteran crewmembers who'd been on Voyager since the ship began its journey through the Delta Quadrant, and those Starfleet officers who'd fought, suffered, and lost, but survived the Dominion War. This is the kind of thing that Rick Berman, Michael Piller, and Jeri Taylor had promised the show would be about when they originally created Star Trek: Voyager in 1994 with the conflict between Janeway's Starfleet crew and Chakotay's Maquis crew, which lasted all of one episode. Two at the most. Probably because Berman and Piller were too set in their ways and with Piller and Taylor as showrunners, things were done the way they'd been done on TNG. But that's a story for another time.

Aside for the tenth anniversary novel trilogy, String Theory, no new Voyager novels were published from 2005 to 2009, with the publisher focusing on the TNG novels, and then the major crossover trilogy, Star Trek: Destiny, which featured characters from TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Star Trek: Enterprise. Both Janeway and Seven of Nine played big roles in the TNG novels leading up to the Destiny trilogy. I won't spoil anything major here, but something happens to Janeway in those books. She gets better though.

Finally, in 2009, the novels returned with Full Circle, which was written by Kirsten Beyer. If you recognize that name, but don't read the books, and have never read these Voyager novels, it's because she was part of the committee that created Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Picard, and was co-executive producer for the first season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. 

After a total of fourteen books, published over a span of 17 years, the Voyager relaunch series ended on October 13th, 2020 with the novel To Lose the Earth. The relaunch novels were ended because of Picard, Lower Decks, and Prodigy dealing with events following the end of TNG, DS9, and Voyager, and the novels contradict the new shows. Which doesn't make any sense at all given that Paramount went out of its way to set the Kelvin Timeline movies, Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016), in an alternate timeline/parallel universe. They could've kept these books going and have them be a separate continuity, given that the novels were never canon to begin with. Or, they could've just kept the books going since the novels take place before the destruction of Romulus, which was shown in the backstory for the 2009 movie, so there'd still be plenty of time for the backstory of Picard to happen. But, given that both Lower Decks and Prodigy revealed that Voyager was decommissioned as soon as she returned to the Alpha Quadrant, it makes sense that the novels would have to be discontinued.

My personal history with this relaunch began in 2003, as the books were being published. However, other than the Spirit Walk duology, I got every book up to Acts of Contrition, which was published in 2014. I had intended on getting Atonement, which was the next book in the series, which was published in 2015, but, between my parents and I getting ready to move, which ended up not happening until 2016, and me getting sick in December, 2015, I never got around to it. On top of that, there were also delays between books, after A Pocket Full of Lies was published in 2016. And with me not being able to get whatever the then current Star Trek official magazine was at the time, I had no idea that further books existed. And, being that Star Trek novels don't get talked about online very often, in particular on YouTube, I didn't find out that way either. 

I actually loved the Voyager relaunch novels, because, aside from Admiral Janeway appearing as a quick cameo in Star Trek Nemesis as Captain Picard's superior officer, we had no idea what happened to any of the remaining characters. And with Paramount being focused on prequels to TOS with the movies and TV shows since Enterprise started in 2001, both DS9 and Voyager were kinda just swept under the rug once the shows ended in 1999 and 2001 respectively. However, there was one aspect that I didn't like in the final two books of the series that I read, Protectors and Acts of Contrition. There will be minor spoilers for these two books, so if you're a Voyager fan and have never read these books, this is your warning.

In Protectors, Tom Paris's mother, Julia, consumed by grief over the death of her husband, Owen, decides to petition the Federation courts to declare Tom and B'Elanna unfit to be parents, effectively removing Miral, and their son, whose name I don't remember as it's been a few years since I read these books, from their care, simply because she's angry at Tom for having to lie to her about B'Elanna and Miral's survival during the Destiny trilogy, because of the fact that a renegade faction of Klingons were attempting to assassinate Miral. The hearing is shown in Acts of Contrition, but I had to wonder why, something as petty as family court to determine the fitness of two Starfleet officers to be parents was even being brought up in the first place. I get that these novels came out in 2014, when entertainment media had already taken more realistic elements, but from what I've read about Kirsten Beyer, she's a Star Trek fan, so why would she include this in here, considering the whole idea of Star Trek is that Earth is a utopia, where petty squabbles and disagreements over things like this no longer exist?

Especially because if you're doing this to someone like Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres, then wouldn't you have to do this to every Starfleet officer who has inadvertently put their child in danger simply by bringing them with them to assignments like on Deep Space 9, other starbases and ships like the Enterprise-D that allowed officers to have their families onboard? Because I don't know about you, but Jake Sisko was in alot of dangerous situations over the course of DS9's seven seasons. Same with all the children on the Enterprise-D in TNG. What about Naomi Wildman who was born on Voyager? I get Beyer was trying to add drama to the story and actually give Tom something to do, but, again, this is Star Trek, people in general shouldn't be THAT petty, but the wife and mother of Starfleet officers especially shouldn't be that petty when all Tom and B'Elanna tried to do was protect Miral from Klingon assassins. 

Unfortunately, there's no real information on the creative process behind the writing of these books, so I have no idea if this was something Beyer came up with on her own, or if she had help from Pocket Books. Paramount's licensing department didn't veto its inclusion, then again Paramount is so anti-Star Trek, and always has been, no matter what they say, the licensing department probably didn't care enough to veto it. Especially since by 2014, they were starting to get CBS All Access (now Paramount+) ready and getting ready to bring Star Trek back to television, not to mention preparing for the production of Star Trek Beyond. They probably weren't all that concerned about tie-in novels to a TV show that they had already ended thirteen years earlier, and wanted nothing to do with.

Aside from that, these books are great. It gave us more time with everyone from Voyager, given that they were being ignored in the shows and movies, AND at the time Homecoming came out in 2003, nobody, not even Paramount, had any way of knowing that Star Trek: Picard, Star Trek: Lower Decks, and Star Trek: Prodigy would be a thing twenty years later. Even the comics being published by IDW were ignoring DS9 and Voyager for the most part, aside from the occasional appearance of certain characters in the TNG comics they were publishing. So if these novels were the only way I was going to get more from the characters of one of my favourite TV shows of all time, then, yes, I was happy to buy and read them so long as I had the shelf space and the money to do so.

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for today. I'll be back soon for more blog posts in the very near future. In the meantime, I hope you all have a wonderful evening and I will talk to you all later. Take care.   

My Star Wars Experience: Vector Prime and the Effect It Had on Star Wars

 Hey everyone, how's it going? I'm doing pretty well for a Friday. Tomorrow is the 25th anniversary of the original publication of the first book in the Star Wars: The New Jedi Order series, Vector Prime by R.A. Salvatore. So I wanted to talk about that book and the impact it had on the franchise going forward. Let's get into it.

 Published on October 5th, 1999, Vector Prime was the first book in Del Rey's new line of novels set after Return of the Jedi. Bantam Spectra had begun their Star Wars novel program with Heir to the Empire by Timothy Zahn in 1991, but since then their approach, most likely due to the prequel era embargo they'd been placed under by Lucasfilm, things had gotten stale by 1999. Luke was too powerful, the Empire had been defeated, and there was no serious threat to any of the main characters. Especially since the Emperor and Darth Vader had been destroyed in Return of the Jedi and Thrawn was gone. So Lucasfilm, with the help of Del Rey, Dark Horse Comics, and author, James Luceno, developed a series where nobody was safe and there was uncertainty as to whether the New Jedi Order, led by Luke Skywalker, could defeat the latest enemy of the New Republic, the Yuuzhan Vong.

I first heard about Vector Prime and The New Jedi Order when I got issue #43 of Star Wars Insider. The news section, which was called "Star News" at the time, had a brief announcement article on the new series in that issue, and then by the time issue #46 came out in late 1999, the book had been published. I thought it was cool, but I didn't immediately rush out to buy the book in hardcover when it came out because hardcovers were pretty expensive 25 years ago. 

I did end up getting the book when it came out in paperback in the summer of 2000. I'm pretty sure I got it in August 2000, because I don't think I got it for Christmas or my birthday as I was focusing on getting the Bantam era novels, which I didn't own very many of at that point. I enjoyed it, but actually reading Chewie's death near the end sucked. I knew about it before I read the book because issue #47 of Star Wars Insider had a whole article on it. So I knew about it going into the book. That article did not prepare me enough that's for sure.

As I mentioned the novels published by Bantam had gotten stale by 1999, and with the world changing, and the Prequel Trilogy coming out, people were no longer interested in novels where there were no stakes because Luke was really powerful and the stories were disconnected from one another despite sharing the same continuity. Even to this day, the novels are no longer tied to Han, Luke, and Leia. And that was another problem that The New Jedi Order ended up fixing. That and the prequel era novels gave us so many other characters as well. Like Jax Pavan in Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter by Michael Reaves. 

While I do think The New Jedi Order was a bit too dark and not alot of fun, it was still important, because it revitalized the Star Wars book publishing program at a time where the books were just as important as the movies. But, it also signified the end of the importance of the novels as the franchise was entering into television with Genndy Tartakovsky's animated series, Star Wars: Clone Wars in 2003, and then Dave Filoni's animated series, Star Wars: The Clone Wars in 2008. Because we had weekly episodes of Star Wars coming out, people began gravitating away from the books and comics and they became the aspects of the franchise that the really hardcore fans experienced and the general audience had no interest in anymore. Which is fine, because Star Wars novels and comics are still being published today even though they're a more niche corner of the Star Wars Universe.

One thing that I feel is unique to Vector Prime is the marketing. While the Shadows of the Empire Multimedia Project had commercials for the toys and the video game, Vector Prime had a TV commercial, narrated by Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, for the book itself. I don't remember seeing the commercial for the book on any TV channel I was watching in 1999, but it exists. Which is fascinating to me because Star Wars novels and comics never got TV commercials before this, and I don't think any of the books had them after this. So this was an unusual way to market the book. 

According to Leland Chee, the former keeper of lore for Lucasfilm, and I did not know this until recently, Chewie's death in Vector Prime was one of the reasons that the Lucasfilm Story Group chose to relegate the original Expanded Universe to Legends, in favour of a new continuity in novels and comics. Which makes sense since you can't just retcon Chewie's death so that he can appear in the Sequel Trilogy movies, but keep The New Jedi Order and all the books that came after it in continuity. It just doesn't work. Especially when The New Jedi Order takes place within the same time period that the Sequel Trilogy movies ended up taking place in. 

Vector Prime, and just The New Jedi Order in general, revitalized the Star Wars novel publishing program in a way that caused it to grow to where it is now. Because, even the prequel era book program was slow to start following the novelization of The Phantom Menace and the first few books in the young reader series, Jedi Apprentice. I mean Rogue Planet didn't come out until 2000, and Darth Maul: Shadow Hunter and Cloak of Deception didn't come out until 2001. And that was because of potential spoilers for The Phantom Menace. So The New Jedi Order kept things going until the prequel era could be better explored once Attack of the Clones came out and authors could tell stories set during the Clone Wars.

Alright my friends, I think that's gonna be it for me for this week. I'll be back next week for more blog posts. So until then have a great weekend and I will talk to you later. Take care.