Uncyclopedia:Pee Review/Star Trek (2nd)
Star Trek [edit source]
I wrote this from scratch about a year ago. The original article was moved to Star Trek: The Original Series and heavily edited. I want to eventually make this featured. Any help will be appreciated. InMooseWeTrust (talk) 18:37, 5 April 2014 (UTC)
Afterthoughts .... I wrote the following review a few days back. After I wrote it I read the pee review guidelines and found out how the numerical scoring is supposed to work. In case you have read the guidelines, I should say something about it...
In particular, I found out that "Adequate" is supposed to be a 7 and anything below a 5 is, like, take it out and burn it before it infects anything else. Consequently, I did not intend to be nearly as harsh as the numbers make it sound. So, when you read the review you should mentally just kind of bump all the scores up a couple notches.
Sorry about that... Snarglefoop (talk) 00:53, 17 April 2014 (UTC)
| Humour: | 4 | Warning: I own all of ST1G on DVD, along with all the ST1G movies, and I've seen all of them (mostly when they first aired), as well as an assortment of episodes and flicks from later generations. That may make me a trekkie. And in that case this review may not be NPOV.
With that little detail out of the way, I'll address the humor in the piece. As an aside, I've read the Mad Magazine parody of ST1G and it was pretty amusing. I saw the SNL parody of ST1G and it was really pretty funny. But I didn't find this page funny. In summary, the issues that I see with it are:
I'll now go over the page in a series of skips and short hops and point out details which illustrate what I just said. The very first sentence -- "Star Trek (Klingon: Hov trek) is a science fiction franchise loved by [...] people because of its vision of a future where everything doesn't suck." That's insightful. I read that, and said to myself, "Wow, that nails it, that is why people like it, and it's even why I like it." Articles should also hang together. Continuity errors don't help anything. Third sentence: "Unfortunately, as the shows will demonstrate..." But nothing on the rest of the page really provides the demonstration, and without further explanation it's just a "Joe was really smart"-type comment hanging in space. (Don't just say Joe was smart -- show him doing something smart.) Skip down to "Early days". You say the show is "terrible", by implication a compromise, and that neither Rod nor the network wanted it that way, and it sucked, and was canceled after a short run. It's a bald statement of the situation, which really just says "It was awful". That's not funny. If you said Shakespeare was a terrible playwright, there'd at least be some cognitive dissonance there, but with ST, the show was poor enough by a number of measures that the paragraph is not shocking, not outrageous; it just comes across as a sincere statement that the show stank. Again, that's not funny. As to what was actually wrong with the show, it was low budget, with uneven acting, low grade FX, cheap sets, and with a script done by a different author every week, leading to terrible continuity problems. So, there's a lot of reason for saying it was "terrible"; again, given the context, your statements slamming it sound perfectly serious. Revival -- This is a rant, pure and simple. There's nothing even vaguely funny here, just a short and bitter hatchet job of the Abrams flicks (which is probably quite well deserved, based on what I've seen and heard of them). What you said may be worth saying, but not on Uncyclopedia, where things should make people laugh, not cry. Series -- 'Started out pretty awesome' -- mouse over and the rest of the text appears. Not enough of a surprise, sorry, it just reads like another rant. And while it's cleverer to say it "eventually went all JJ Binks" rather than saying "Boy the third season was cash cow time at NBC, it sucked rocks the size of the Boulder Dam, how could they make Spock into a hippie for crying out loud, the hippies were all about emotion, didn't those execs know anything???" it still doesn't make it funny. (Actually I kind of liked ol' JarJar. He made me laugh.) Let's skip down to the movies. First statement -- 'movies start out barely watchable and just get worse' -- It's not funny, it's just an insult, it reads like something in a serious movie review. And what's more anyone who suffered through the first movie and then watched any other movie in the series knows it's also not true. ST:TMP -- OK, I laughed out loud at this. I've just gone back and boosted your humor score. Good job here -- it was a horrible movie filled with ridiculous premises, and you managed to describe it as a horrible movie filled with ridiculous premises and yet make it sound funny. Excellent! The rest of the movie descriptions, unfortunately, don't rate up there with STTMP. Your comment on ST5 is mildly amusing, but it was a sufficiently horrible movie that it seems like you should have been able to pull more silliness out of it than that God needs a space ship to travel. ST6 -- sorry, we're back to ranting here. Nothing slightly funny. Skipping to STTNG -- Sorry, but I didn't find the reviews here amusing. Again, it just comes off as a rant. It might have been worth mentioning the ST books by Shatner after ST7, BTW. If you haven't read them, you might. It seems that Kirk's alter ego couldn't stand having him just left under a cairn on some planet or other, and so the series of some four or five books opens with a deus ex machina coming down from the sky and stealing Kirk's body from under the pile of rocks, followed by a restore from backup tapes and a reboot. (Oh wait, I've got that mixed up -- it was some other episode where they learn how to restore people from backup tapes. Oh well they did something along those lines to get him back on the rails.) The publisher was happy to take money for the books but none the less wouldn't accept them as canon so the universe forked at that point, with the mainline still lacking a Kirk (and some time later it forked again, with Enterprise, and yet again, with the advent of Mr. Abrams). OTOH Shatner's anguish over Kirk was apparently unable to sustain him past the first volume or so, as a result of which the last three or four were ghost written. But whatever, they were good reads anyway. ST 11,12, 13 descriptions really, really just sound like a sincere rant by somebody who hated them. Not good. (Probably deserved, but still not good.) |
| Concept: | 3 | This is a really hard concept. You are undertaking to write, humorously, about 13 separate full length movies and an uncountable number of television shows, which are based on a wild variety of premises, and which are connected only by the very tenuous thread of being set in the "Star Trek universe", which is, unfortunately, riddled with continuity errors and restarts.
To do this really well, you'd either need to be a serious expert on Star Trek, with good knowledge of all the shows and all the movies and a really, really good memory, or you'd need to be a team of people. The latter would probably be the better approach. If you could start over, I would suggest starting with the same title, but only writing about one series, or one season, and then inviting others to write other sections. If you didn't get swarmed with volunteers, you could add sections, slowly, over a period of time, after re-viewing the shows involved. I think that would have a better chance of not deteriorating into a factual description of the shows, or coming across as nothing but a rant. Perhaps the most striking example of how hard this concept is was your description of ST6: "A bunch of fast deaths, action sequences, and Klingons. I barely remember anything except for the end where Kirk goes on his final voyage and Sulu gets his own ship." Where's the humor in that? It's just a fan talking about how unmemorable the film was. Again, to do this right without killing yourself, you'd want a team of people working on it, and whoever got the short straw and had to review ST6 would go and watch the film again before writing it up. Depending on 20 year old memories of an unmemorable movie is not going to do the job (not unless your memory is way, way better than mine, for sure). Aside -- You never mentioned continuity errors, which might be worth bringing up. I don't know about the later series, but ST1G had a different author every week for much of the series. The result was inevitable disconnects, particularly when something was introduced which would "break the universe". I'd need to do some serious research to come up with a decent list of them, but the discovery by Dr. McCoy of a way to "turn on" superpowerful telekinetic powers in anyone via a simple injection sure ranks up there. It made its debut in one (shocking) episode and then was never heard from again, 'cause man, it really would have wrought havoc in the ST Universe if they'd kept it around. (2 points to anyone who can recall why that episode was considered shocking at the time.) |
| Prose and formatting: | 9 | Good grammar, good spelling, nothing wrong here. The prose doesn't contribute anything on its own, it just conveys the information, which is why I don't give you a 10 here. (See UnPoetia:Tao Te Ching for an example of an article where I think I'd give the prose a 10 -- half the humor on that page is in the prose.) |
| Images: | 8 | Three images. Two of them are blah. But that "Who the Hell is Chris Pine" image is hilarious, worth the price of admission. |
| Miscellaneous: | 6 | Said it all already. |
| Final Score: | 30 | Speaking as a Trekkie, I found this review rather painful to do, because so much of the page reads like an attack. If I hadn't been reviewing it I would never have read the whole thing. (And then I would have missed that picture of Kirk, so I'm glad I read to the bottom of the page...) |
| Reviewer: | Snarglefoop (talk) 21:44, 12 April 2014 (UTC) | |