Somebody has resurrected Harve Bennett’s old script for Star Trek: the Academy Years over at Ain’t it Cool News; it seems the guy is really interested in the story. I hate to break it to him, but any story placing the original series crew together in Star Fleet Academy just couldn’t be considered canon; that’s not the way that the series developed originally.
Not that this would be unprecedented. Of the entire four year run of Enterprise, only two episodes could be considered canon. That would be the In a Mirror Darkly two-parter. Spock was established to be the first Vulcan in Starfleet in one of the first Star Trek episodes. There is no way that T’Pol could be an officer on a Starfleet vessel in the normal Star Trek universe. However, in the Mirror, Mirror universe this is not a problem.
I don’t understand this need to mess with cherished memories. Why does Hollywood have to re-invent every show that was once successful? Do we really need to make a Star Trek Babies movie? Do we really need to cast someone else in the roles of Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the others?
I didn’t need to see Scooby Doo as a live action film. I didn’t need to see King Kong without the stop motion animation. I didn’t need to see The Brady Bunch, Bewitched, etc. on the big screen (in fact, I didn’t see those. Bullet successfully dodged) do we really have to go there with Classic Trek? Watch someone else play James T. Kirk? Someone other than Leonard Nimoy wear Spock’s ears? I won’t be paying for that, myself.
If they just have to do a Star Trek: the Academy Years do it without including the classic characters, or you can count on this classic Trek fan sitting this film out.
Postscript
Rev. 03/19/22
