That said, there's also been some truly awful Mary Jane writing over the years. I stopped reading ASM regularly in the early 90s, but I can remember more than one really lame plot about Mary Jane's modeling or acting careers. She really needed to be grounded to reality. But the writers could easily have done that without (essentially) writing her out of the book.

The only reason this keeps happening is because there's a Venn diagram one circle is people who will watch any schlock if it's a property they like. Another circle is people who will watch something if it's decent. When the overlap is large enough, the studio makes a good reboot. When it isn't, we get Tim Burton's Planet of the Apes.

On the other hand--Claremont's X-Men is the best argument for continuity being a problem. Don't get me wrong--Uncanny 173 was my first comic book ever, and I went as quickly as possible to read all the back issues to the 120s. But his story lines dragged on *forever*, far beyond any reader's patience. I read X-Men from 5th-8th grade, dropped it in high school, and picked it up again in college. Imagine my delight to discover that it only took Claremont 17 years to resolve the plotline about Mystique being Nightcrawler's mother. (Spoiler alert: she is!)

Now, you could argue that this is an example of a writer getting worse. But sometimes a thing can collapse of its own weight.

Not really sure I can justify going to this movie. I'm pretty proud of the fact that I read that Vanity Fair article months before the rape of Indiana Jones was released and decided then that I could never give George Lucas any more of my money. Seems like I'd be compromising my new-found principles to see this movie.

Say hello to tedious exposition.

Haha, yes. Wiccan and Speed's backstory, though ludicrous, at least only took a couple years, IIRC.

I'm reserving judgement, because the trailer was mostly 'hey, Star Trek!' But it'd be nice to have the movie answer the question that's been dormant for quite a few years: what the hell's the point of all this? DS9 and TNG had some interesting things to say about civilization, war, and humanity. Voyager less so, and please, let's not talk about that awful show with Scott Bakula.

Something Trek has been missing since the latter half of TNG & DSN era....

(Time travel, Borg, Holodeck, More time travel, fancy technobable, time travel, blah)

The stronger Star Trek movies included numbers 2 (The Wrath of Khan), 4 (The Voyage Home), 6 (The Undiscovered Country, the last movie featuring the original cast) and 8 (First Contact, the one with the Borg). The weaker ones included 5 (The Final Frontier, directed by Bill Shatner no less), 7 (Generations, the 1st featuring the Next Generation cast), and 11 (Insurrection). The exceptions were number 3 (The Search for Spock, which is actually a good movie, just not as good as 2, 4, 6, and 8), number 10 (Nemesis, the disappointing swan song of the Next Generation cast, although it was a lot better than 7, 9, and especially 5), and number 1 (the Motion Picture, a mediocre, slow-paced film that is nevertheless better made than 5, 7, 9, and 10.)

Despite my better judgement, I still clinging to the hope that the JJ Abrams reboot will turn out to be a decent film, and do well enough for a truly kick-ass sequel (written by J. Michael Straczynski of Babylon 5, Ron Moore of BSG, or even Harlan Ellison.)

Sorry. This just came to me. Rant officially off.

No, it wouldn't have, because the only reason the film existed was because it was a Batman movie. Saying it would have been better as a "fresh property" is as nonsensical as saying it would have been better as a period drama set in Elizabethan England -- it would not have been identifiable as the same movie. You might as well say that Plan 9 From Outer Space would have been a better movie if it been directed by Orson Welles and the plot had been rewritten to focus on a journalist trying to find out the meaning behind the dying words of a ruthless newspaper tycoon.

I don't think a reboot is necessary though. Any writer good enough to pull off a reboot is too good to need to do one in the first place. Continuity need not be a shackle. Particularly if you're using new characters on a new ship. That said, I am fine with a reboot movie series. Kirk, Spock, et al. are iconic characters like James Bond, and probably have enough mileage in them for an similarly indefinite series of films. I hereby suggest this compromise: rebooters get the movie series, and continuity fans get the TV series.

As for resets to clear out the crud--I'd rather they came out with something fresh. It does work when someone has a good idea and works within the fantasy model of retelling a classic fairy tale--Battlestar Galactica does this. (I will allow resets here to the extent of joining in the consensus that Black Market never happened.) Done well it's a fresh spin an a classic story; done badly it's someone's stupid vision of a once-classic story--all execution of the tool.

As a bad continuity error--S2 Veronica Mars had a sexual abuse storyline that undercut the resolution to S1's rape story line--not that it completely violated what happened, but it tried to add a layer that wasn't there, and by doing so unravelled what had been very satisfying.

On good continuity flexibility--Bujold, my favorite sci fi writer, writes all over the Vorkosigan-verse chronologically. If you read them in Vorkosigan chronology, rather than date of publication chronology, it's clear that she hadn't worked out all the background of Cetaganda when writing books set in the 5 years after that. But that's because background you would obviously mention in passing is absent, not because characters change wildly or we pretend events didn't happen.

Then again, I don't think any of it is worth remembering. The purpose of reviving a franchise is for the next wave of new customers: 10-14+ year old boys.

There are some movies that should have been TV shows - stayed that way - and vice versa. The last Batman movie had enough material for a 13 episode program. Shows like Heroes and Lost are overly long 3+ hour movies in search of a plot and purpose.

Considering the time honored Hollywood discrimination trend, I'm surprised they managed to have a black woman in the film. I usually don't see too many of them anymore.

This is an excellent point, Greg. I've always thought Kirk and Spock are bigger than Shatner and Nimoy. TNG's handling of the legacy characters in general, and Generations' handling of Kirk in particular, suffered from making it about the actor and not about the character. (Which is a flaw in many of the "bad" Trek movies, come to think of it)

I mean, James Kirk shows up in Generations and basically dies an undignified, semi-heroic death, then Picard (so far as I can tell) buries him in an unmarked grave and neglects to mention it in his report. It was kind of shabby.

You said a mouthful there. I have this rule with my geek stuff ... Things with a talented cast or a talented director I catch on opening day everything else I catch on cable. I'll be catching Kenneth Branagh's Thor on opening day and Star Trek on cable. That last Indiana Jones film excepted, the policy has never let me down.

I'm just going to wait for the Star Trek MMORPG to come out, because I've all but given up on another successful, coherent Star Trek series after the tragedies that were Voyager and Enterprise.

I remember when TNG first hit the television screen. That was wild. The jump from the original world of Kirk to Picard was so exiting! The holodeck was just such fun! I've been hoping for an paradigm shift of such proportions with any new Star Trek franchise, but it sounds like that is yet again not going to happen.

Interesting that you all seem to loath Voyager so much. I rather liked it for the first three seasons, but then it just dragged on for too long, with too many story lines repeating themselves. I kept having talks with a girlfriend of mine who is a real full-works Trekkie, and who loved Seven of Nine, the character who bored me to death by the time the series finally finished. And too much time travel, indeed! Timetravel should be like truffle oil, measured out in small quantities like a rare treat. I must say, I enjoyed the fact that the top dog was a girl in her late thirties, even though most other characters were losers.
I sort of lost interest when Scott Pakula hit the scene. What was that about? A prequel in a sci-fi? Who cares about what happened before? I wanna know how our civilization will evolve beyond the Holodeck and socialism all round.
Also, i did not really care for the Vulcan lady with the grotesque boobs, but that's just me.

Every Star Trek has reflected upon the zeitgeist in which it was conceived. The current one will probably be about fear again, just like DS9. I guess I will probably hate this new one, if its a prequel and if it deals with our current state of mind.

In particular, it would be great to see a remake of City on the Edge of Forever, using Harlan Ellison's original script. As much I love the original tv episode, I must agree with Ellison that it would have been much more daring, meaningful, and truer to human nature for Spock to have prevented Kirk from rescuing Edith Keeler from being run over by a car, rather than having Kirk stop McCoy from rescuing Edith.

Say what? Bond just went through his own reboot with Casino Royale. He's both the same Bond and a different Bond. All the stuff that's happened to him, didn't happen.

Superman wasn't because Bryan Singer basically didn't.

Can't agree here either. Bryan Singer rocked X1 and X2. And he made Superman more interesting than I thought possible with Superman Returns. It was a lot better than X3, which Singer was supposed to direct, but the studio pulled him when they heard he was doing Superman and let Brett Rattner (Rush Hour 1, 2, & 3) do X3.

The problem with Superman is Superman. A hero that is invulnerable and strong enough to lift the space shuttle just isn't that interesting.

Star Trek has been bad because the storytelling has been bad, because they needed to make the Borg more huggable.

I can't say. I stopped watching Star Trek after a few seasons of DS9, which I mostly liked. I got hooked on Star Trek when there really wasn't anything at all sci-fi in the culture. That's very different.

Oh, and ignore the trailers, they aren't for you. They are a mass-market sell to people that can't list off the titles of all the ST movies from memory. Or even more than 2.

Funny, I kind of liked those years in retrospect. To me it kind of felt like a realization that the Australia years were a mistake (Didn't Storm admit to this when all was said and done?). I liked the idea of long-term consequences for some ill-advised decisions. I also liked that he found other ways for there to be consequences without killing folks, which seems to be the comic standard (aside from Storm's staged death). But I'm kind of weird that way. It also explains why I like "Battlestar Galactica" and can't stand "Star Trek" for the most part.

P.S. Apparently, Claremont originally intended for Mystique to be Nightcrawler's dad, if you can believe that.

As for Star Trek, I'd be hard-pressed to care less abou tit in its current state. The only series that resonated even the littlest bit with me was Voyager. Which is why a reboot actually could pique my interest.

In short, I'm not really too excited about the new Star Trek movie either. I don't think these dudes learned the right lessons from Star Trek's decline, and the last time J. J. Abrams was given a franchise he turned out the most efficient and lifeless, by the numbers thriller. So I'm not eager to see what his team comes up with here.

Any movie that takes itself seriously and has these two things will never suck.

1. Hire a few very talented writers.
2. Tell them you want 75 episodes or so with a huge story arc about how whatshisname conquered the Klingons and and it has to be chock full of Klingons backstabbing, dirty dealing, and kicking the hell out of each other.
3. Bask in adoration from geeks everywhere.

"Superman III -- underrated flick."

It had the advantage of being set on a space station, so it had a more stable cast of characters.

The best D.S. 9 episode, IMO, was the one where a Federation crew crash landed on some planet and was besieged by the Jem'Hadar. That episode had more suspense than any episode I can think of, in any of the Star Trek series. That it was shot on location (some SoCal park probably) and that the setting was plausibly written into script (the ship had crash landed there) helped.

See, this is why I preferred The Avengers all along. Sure, there was ongoing stuff with Vision maybe or maybe not being the original Human Torch, or the Scarlet Witch's kids being a figment of her imagination, but at its core what it was about was giant robots attacking the city, or the team going off into space to stop an alien invasion. Plus a new costume for Wasp every few issues and a new member every year or so.

It lost me in the mid-90s with that nonsense with teenage Tony Stark and the Wasp becoming insectoid, but then I was back on track when Busiek took over. But after a few years of that, each storyline had to top the previous one, and it just got too removed from believability. How many times can the fate of the entire world be at stake? Eventually you've got to just fight the Masters of Evil or Zodiac or somesuch.

X-Men under Claremont, though, was one long soap opera... which can be good if things get resolved every now and then, but it just had too much brooding and teenage angst for me.

For the genre, that intrigues me.

Batman and Iron Man, however, are humans without funky powers. They use technology and skill to fight. They are grounded in reality. The Batman reboot and the Iron Man reboot worked well because those tales can be believed. Even the Spider-Man and X-Men reboots worked precisely because there are more elements that can be believed, and the characters weren't just characters anymore (well, in the case of X1, the key ones).

Claremont's X-Men was one long soap but you have to remember, these people don't age. Seasons come and go and they are the same age, fighting yet another one of the same villains. The problem with these books is precisely because they never age.

How many times can Scott and Jean break up/one of them dies? This is why I lament the eventual death of Madelyne Pryor - she, at least, represented *moving on*. Reconciliation with Scott would have meant going forward instead of backward toward Jean. But unfortunately, she became a one-trick pony villain and was far more interesting in X-Man after her demise in Inferno.

Anyway, a reboot of the Trek franchise doesn't have to suck if J.J. can make it so that the characters are not just characters.

I will always resent Singer for going with Superman over X-Men 3 (a far better and more interesting property!) which was a decent popcorn film with flashes of major suck.

Eh, also not into JJ Abrams. Haven't liked a single thing he's done.

I mostly agree with this. He can only be beaten by deus ex machina (kryptonite). He's invulnerable, but here we have this rare rock from another planet that hurts him. It seems like the popular heroes of today can be beaten/killed by more conventional methods, even if that proves to be incredibly difficult to do.

As far as Superman Returns goes, it failed financially and creatively precisely because Singer couldn't decide if he wanted to "reboot" the franchise or do an alternate sequel to the Donner flicks, so he split the difference and the movie suffered for it. Also, he created a monosyllabic Clark/Superman who stalked his ex and tried to come between a fairly stable family unit. Plus Spacey's Lex was a buffoon that ignored the complexities that make Luthor an interesting villain (see Smallville's Michael Rosenbaum or Justice League's Clancy Brown to see how to a proper Lex Luthor.) I could go on about how awful SR is, so I'll stop.

I just finished rereading those Claremont Australian X-Men stories and was again shocked at how dark they were (Wolverine nailed to a plank of wood for a few issues, Zaladane torturing Colossus and the X-Men), how random they seemed (yeah - why cut back to Forge and Banshee, unless its to see the increasingly skimpier outfits Moira was wearing, and how Gambit just appeared randomly), and how drawn-out they were. Also, it's about this time Claremont's weird mind-control fetish began to take hold. Look at his X-Men/Uncanny X-Men he did when the movie came out. He's constantly making his characters do dark/sleazy/slutty things and having them think thoughts like, "And Goddess help me -- I love it!" Weird.

Remember the Claremont X-Men *were* a reboot. He selected the core characters from the original, fourth rate X-Men book whom he thought were essential to the myth or property if you will: The Professor, Cyclops, and Jean Grey and then not only threw out most of the original team and started over with his own brand-new characters, but he totally changed the tone and emotional tenor, adding the tasty mix of angst, conflict and borderline kinkiness that we geeks passionately fell for.

But thirty years later, the franchise is mired in continual re-elaborations of Claremont's material. It hasn't produced a single successful new character memorable enough to break into a wider audience since the 1980s. Singer basically created a masterful synthesis of that universe as given shape by CC.

The Grant Morrison run was the single bold attempt to break with that burdensome past, and the owners quickly backpedalled into more familiar territory.

I just finished rereading those Claremont Australian X-Men stories and was again shocked at how dark they were (Wolverine nailed to a plank of wood for a few issues, Zaladane torturing Colossus and the X-Men), how random they seemed (yeah - why cut back to Forge and Banshee, unless its to see the increasingly skimpier outfits Moira was wearing, and how Gambit just appeared randomly), and how drawn-out they were. Also, it's about this time Claremont's weird mind-control fetish began to take hold. Look at his X-Men/Uncanny X-Men he did when the movie came out. He's constantly making his characters do dark/sleazy/slutty things and having them think thoughts like, "And Goddess help me -- I love it!" Weird.

Oh, Claremont's a total S&M perv of some sort. That much becomes clear in retrospect. I remember him having Arcade dress up his X-Men robots in leather gear for "private" use or somesuch. And the tentacle stuff with both Jean and later Callisto. I wonder how that attitude colored his creation of powerful female characters. And he didn't seem to mind humiliating the male characters at times (except Wolverine).

Thinking back on the Australia years and what happened afterward, I think there was a reason behind the lengthy collapse and an overall message there, though I'm not sure Claremont really spelled it out himself. The X-Men deliberately chose to disengage from the world, except for the secret heroics. But the world moved on anyway and turned darker without them. And when things went to hell for the X-Men, there was nobody to help them recover specifically because of the decision to cut themselves off. So all the efforts Banshee, Forge, Jean and Moira, et cetera, had to go through to find them all was part of that consequence.

Apparently, around this time Claremont was planning the next "stage" of the X-world, where mutants were treated like commodities (the introduction of Genosha was the prelude for this) and some sort of mutant war was going to happen. They even promoted it, but then there was the falling out and Claremont leaving. I get the sense he was working toward something, and the whole breakdown of the X-Men's mission was a part of it, but whatever he was planning never manifested.

I can't read his stuff anymore, sadly. The comics world has changed, but he hasn't, so it just doesn't fit anymore. He's like Stan Lee and John Byrne and the rest. I'll always have fond memories of those books, but it's in the past.

But thirty years later, the franchise is mired in continual re-elaborations of Claremont's material. It hasn't produced a single successful new character memorable enough to break into a wider audience since the 1980s. Singer basically created a masterful synthesis of that universe as given shape by CC.
I agree in large part - the best of Claremont's X-Men lives on in the movies, although I'd say that the question of memorable characters is still debatable. Do you mean the stuff after the first reboot? I'd say that pretty much all the memorable additions to the team have all occurred under Claremont. Rogue, Gambit, Kitty Pryde. Longshot and Dazzler would be the only exceptions, as they are not Claremont's babies.