Star Trek's PA world and entertainment

1

10mmCurator

Mildly Dipped
One thing I never understood about Star Trek is that eventhough the nuclear war happened in the 2000's.. When any of the series mentioned entertainment from pre nuclear times, they never mention any entertainment that was released or published later than 1965.

Star Trek TNG:
They find a sleeper ship that has cyrogenically preserved people including a rock singer who died and were put into space until a cure could be found for whatever killed them. Their clothes and speech was very '60s

Star Trek Voyager:
They keep talking about a '50s sci fi show

Star Trek Enterprise:
They watch a western that was made in the late '60s

They never mention movies or books or singers that came about after late '60s... I don't know why but I find this incedibly annoying.

What do you all think?
 
10mmCurator said:
They never mention movies or books or singers that came about after late '60s... I don't know why but I find this incedibly annoying.

What do you all think?
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I don't know what logic they use to justify it in the world itself, but the real answer is pretty simple: The original show was made in the mid-1960's and had more or less the style and ideals of those times, and all the rest of the shows just go by the original.
 
True enough.. Still is annoying when refer to entertainment that happened 13 or more years before I was born and I haven't a clue as to what they are talking about without doing some research.
 
I am not sure why you think the frozen ship contained people from the 60s. I always thought they were modern (1990) people. They couldn't cryo-freeze people in the 1960.

Also Tom Paris from Voyager was a big fan of 50-60 Earth, that was just his "thing" I am not sure if it was ment as a meta-theme among all the star-trek shows.

But I agree with you, all earth history after the "war" is hardly ever presented in the show. However in the first and last episodes of the Next Generation, revolving around Q judging mankind, he gives great insight into the Earth during the 2200 or so.

Most people were poor, the world was in ruin, the army relied heavily on drug use (like buffout, jet and psyco). They abolished lawyers and an guilty until proven innocent form of justice was enacted. Mostly this is all from the first to episodes "Encounter at Farpoint Station" but they go back to this in the very last episode to finish the trial.
 
10mmCurator said:
Their clothes and speech was very '60s
Click to expand...
They were very 80's, as much influenced by their times as having a therapist on the bridge crew. Just like the original show had an episode with space hippies. Each show does tend to reflect the era it was produced in.

Tom Paris was established to be a student of 20th Century culture from early on in Voyager, not just the 50's and the 60's. He was also their resident expert when the ship was flung back in time to the 90's in Future's End.

I'm not sure why they decided to make his holodeck adventures in an old black and white serial, which was 1930's if anything. An homage to the Flash Gordon, Buck Rodgers and other film serials without which there probably wouldn't of been Star Trek or Star Wars perhaps? But why they didn't show more modern references, well for one thing the old films and shows reference are probably favorites of the writers, and they tend to be more iconic than more recent productions. Then there's the issue of copyrights, if the use a clip of a film or tv show then they've probably got to pay royalties every time that episode is shown, and Star Trek shows are repeated a lot. So they would use old clips that the studio probably owns the rights to and the actors are long gone.

Not to mention that using current material can date a show, notice how in TNG they are always listening to classical music, partially because of royalties again, but also an 80's soundtrack would make episodes look very dated. Or more dated if you prefer.

As for a reason in the ST universe as to why there's a lack of 70's. 80's & 90's culture shown it's perhaps because there was a war, well several of them, the Eugenics wars, WWIII, the Bell riots etc. While current popular culture might be everywhere now, how much of it survived? On the other hand as I said the older culture tends to be considered iconic, there's plenty of heritage and media museums springing up to preserve archived material and so the older entertainment might of been more protected and survived in greater numbers?
 
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