Producers Talk Updating Star Trek

The New York Times spoke with JJ Abrams and company about updating Star Trek for today's audience and still try to keep old style Trekkies happy. The full article is here with segments of it below. Nothing new is really said (Abrams not a Trekkie is now, wants to update while keeping the core, etc).

“There’s just too much stuff out there to be loyal to everything,” Mr. Lindelof said. “Someone will find 50 ways to tell us we’re idiots, and it wouldn’t be ‘Trek’ if they didn’t.” At the same time they appreciate the perils of chiseling away at a cultural touchstone whose influence has remained enormous even as its reputation has varied wildly over the years.

If “Star Trek” fails, Mr. Kurtzman said, “it’ll be the biggest personal failure we’ve ever had, because we will have actually violated something that means a lot to us.”

For the “Trek” faithful there are plenty of nods to past television episodes and movies, familiar catchphrases and Kirk’s notorious solution to a supposedly unwinnable mission simulation. But there is also a conscious effort to inscribe this “Trek” in the storytelling traditions popularized by Joseph Campbell, in which heroes must suffer loss and abandonment before they rise to the occasion.

“You had to love genre at your core in every possible way,” he said. “And yet you had to separate it from what ‘Trek’ had been, to make it feel fresh.”

“We’ve become so familiar with the idea of space travel because of so many movies and TV shows that it’s lost its adventure and its possibility, its sense of wonder,” Mr. Abrams said. “Forty-three years ago it was not a boring idea.”