The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

I have a couple of column up at Bleeding Fool about the stupidity of the new Stark Trek show, Starfleet Academy and I don’t think there will be many more.

It’s not that the topic is exhausted, it is that I am the one who is exhausted. I was watching the fifth episode on Disparu’s Youtube channel and halfway through I just didn’t care. It was tedious.

As with Star Wars, my love turned into hate and is now indifference. Life is too short to watch crap.

There are good shows, awful shows, and shows that are so bad they are good. But sometimes there are just bad shows and I guess Star Trek has been cranking this out for a long time.

It’s sad and wasteful. Waste is one of the things that really gets to me. I hate it. It’s one thing to be without, but to have something and piss it away strikes me as profoundly ungrateful. This is why I got so worked up over the Star Wars prequels and finally had to write the Man of Destiny series. What a splendid opportunity it was, and it was totally squandered. The sequel series was even worse.

The is now true of Star Trek, which used to be the high-brow space franchise, the one that asked deep questions and tried to remain within the constraints of physics – or at least nod in their direction. Now it’s just another space fantasy, albeit a terribly written one.

Apparently, a Youtuber I’ve never heard of but who has millions of subscribers managed to self-finance a movie based on an obscure console game. It may have topped the box office, but the industry is apparently fudging the numbers in a desperate effort to conceal its runaway success.

I’ve no interest in seeing Iron Lung because horror films are of no interest to me, but I applaud the effort. For an investment of $3 million, the guy grossed $20 million, and it may continue to generate revenue.

Not only does this humiliate the Hollywood establishment, it is funding a rival entity. The author now has seed money for even more ambitious projects, and has built contacts within the theater-owning community, which is suffering from the lack of interest in Hollywood’s current slop offerings.

Some years ago it became apparent that Disney’s strategy had shifted from making quality, to monopolizing all IPs and then using that power to control ideology. This effort has failed, in no small part because of independent creators were able to capitalize on the lack of quality competition.

Hollywood is still a young industry, with talking films not even a century old. The notion that it is beyond obsolescence is simply unsupportable, and it will be interesting to see whether it is capable of course correction.

It will also be interesting to see if Congress at some point decides to repeal the near-eternal duration of copyright protection, and restore it to a sane length. This would clear the field for independent creators to create rival versions to unseat official adaptations.