"Married w/Children: Voyager"

[largento]

I just recently made an effort to watch the whole Star Trek: Voyager TV series on Netflix streaming and couldn't quite make it through it. It remains the only series I never watched all the way through.

 

Anyway, thinking about it, I remembered that I was active on the Star Trek newsgroups back then and remembered a funny (to me, anyway) post I'd written back when the show was first being announced.

 

Thanks to nothing ever getting deleted from the internet, I was able to track down the post. It basically was a mash-up of what we knew about the forthcoming Star Trek: Voyager and the still-on-the-air Married With Children show. I think all we knew was that there was going to be a middle-aged Vulcan security officer named Tuvok, a character with a limited lifespan and a female captain named Janeway. Rumors at the time were that Lindsay Wagner (from Bionic Woman) was being considered for the part.

 

This decision to have a female captain was controversial to some who thought it was merely "political correctness" and prompted somebody to suggest that maybe these people wouldn't be satisfied unless they had Al Bundy as captain. This also references the dreaded Copyright thread that had been raging at the time because the script for Star Trek: Generations had been leaked online. (Generations, when it was released in November of 1994, was the very first movie to be publicized by its own official website. This was that long ago.)

 

Anyway, this post is dated August 16th, 1994 and Voyager premiered on January 16, 1995. I think it still has some laughs left in it, especially if you were a MwC and Star Trek fan.

 

Note my "easy to remember" email address at the time: mlargent@sparc.MSMS.DoE.k12.MS.US :-)

[largento]

Looking further, I found this suggestion on how I would end Voyager (from September of 1995, when the show was entering its 2nd season.):

 

 

Newsgroups: rec.arts.startrek.current

From: mlarg...@EbiCom.net (Mark Largent)

Date: 1995/09/11

Subject: Re: How would you end Voyager?

 

The crew age and die, their hopes for reaching home dashing. The

holographic Doc is all that remains. His knowledge, greatly advanced by

nearly a century of new exploration, leads him to take on the form of the

entire ship. As he nears the edge of the Delta Quadrant, he encounters the

Borg homeworld. The Borg Intellect, fascinated by this "life form,"

attempts to assimilate it. Only, Doc (who has taken the name Voyager,

since he, for all purposes, is the ship) is far more advanced than the

Borg, and instead, assimilates the Borg Homeworld.

The Borg Intellect is far from completely vanquished, however, and

the assimilation becomes more of a melding of the two. Voyager begins to

do more now than just record data. It assimilates the data. Using

holographic projectors, it fashions itself as an enormous "multi-media"

tour of the galaxy. But, Voyager has forgotten his original mission: to

return home.

This it does, only to find that because of a tricky connection

between holographic projection and temporal mechanics, he has returned to

Earth's past.

Of course, that's where "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" picks up...

Mark "Suggesting this tongue-in-cheek, because to do so otherwise would

go against my personal belief that the events of ST:TMP never

happened" Largent

[John Bigboote]

That's like time-travel! Bizarre!

 

FOR THE RECORD... I would rather watch 10 hours of MWC than 10 mins of ST... MWC pushed boundaries that are yet unparrelelled even to this day. Imagine today having a show where the teenage daughter is the butt of most jokes, for being overly 'promiscuos', among other analogies. That show poked fun at middle America with no apologies... whereas ST is simply 'imagine if' nerdism unleashed. One lampooned reality, where the other escaped it altogether. I guess I am a lampooner!

[largento]

That's like time-travel! Bizarre!

 

FOR THE RECORD... I would rather watch 10 hours of MWC than 10 mins of ST... MWC pushed boundaries that are yet unparrelelled even to this day. Imagine today having a show where the teenage daughter is the butt of most jokes, for being overly 'promiscuos', among other analogies. That show poked fun at middle America with no apologies... whereas ST is simply 'imagine if' nerdism unleashed. One lampooned reality, where the other escaped it altogether. I guess I am a lampooner!

 

 

It was like time travel. Reading some of the posts was embarrassing.

 

I'm a big fan of both shows. An interesting thing that occurs to me when comparing the shows is that both became lampoons of themselves. This worked great for MWC. The more they strayed into becoming cartoon characters, the funnier the show got. (It was always jarring to go back to first season episodes and see Peg cooking.) It didn't work for Trek, where it just became formula and you could interchange characters without having any real impact on the stories, which more an more became pointless and solved by "reversing tachyon pulses from the main emitter" than anything clever.

[Gerry]

Lamb Pooner...that's a Dutch dish, isn't it?