Parody fail

[scarfman]

Why do people always parody Star Trek captains with characters who behave nothing like Star Trek captains?

I'm reading the Doctor Who novel Blue Angel by Paul Magrs and Jeremy Hoad. The Federation starship captain in it is cranky, loud, goes into first contact situations shouting, and is jealous of his first officer for being more competent than he is. That's not parody, that's slapstick.

If you want to parody the behavior of a Star Trek captain, then have the villains tie your captain up, suspend him or her upside-down over a fire, and display visual of the starship being immobilized and ritually cut apart and destroyed with the crew aboard, while he or she is still saying, "I'm sensing some hostility. You just don't realize what the Federation can do for you."

crosspossted startrek doctorwho

Comments

[rose-cat.livejournal.com]

The novel sounds crappy :p But your example is an excellent parody of Captain Picard. Especially TNG S1 :)

[diabolicalfiend.livejournal.com]

Ok, you're not going to write such a novel and this makes me sad.

[scarfman]

[diabolicalfiend.livejournal.com]

See icon.

[kimber-mcleod.livejournal.com]

Honestly there were so very many things terribly wrong with that book, I really didn't have time to be properly disturbed by the the whole botched Trek Crew parody. Any book with Iris in it just goes mental about three paragraphs in though, as far as I'm concerned. Takes me twice as long to read them because I have to force myself to slog through the insanity.

[scarfman]

I've read one other Iris Wildthyme story, in a Short Trips collection I have, twice. I still couldn't tell you the plot, and the second time I was watching for it.

[baron-waste.livejournal.com]

Parody aside, I find the idea of a Fourth Doctor / TOS crossover fascinating. I'm sure it's been written, and badly. Done right, it would be delightful.

[scarfman]

There's a two-story series called The Doctor and the Enterprise dating from the age of print fanzines. The first story puts the Doctor and Sarah Jane on Kirk's Enterprise, and the second story puts the Doctor and Romana on Picard's Enterprise. I almost stopped reading the first story at the dialog tag seen only in bad fiction, "almost screamed"; I gave up for all time when Spock, having mindmelded with the Doctor to find out his identity, proclaimed a logical rationale for calling him "Doctor Who".

In my prose fanfiction, the Doctor is already on his sixth body before Picard meets him.

[pedanther]

scarfman has done a Fourth Doctor / TOS crossover, although I don't think it's been reprinted here on LJ. And I don't remember much about it - the main bit that stuck in my head was the scene where Kirk and Spock hear that there's a mysterious alien doctor helping out the natives, go "Aha!", and then get confused when it turns out to be some human named Harry Sullivan.

[scarfman]

That's The Secret of Siphis, which is not yet on LJ so I've linked here to it at my original fanfiction site.

[dave-iii.livejournal.com]

"I'm sensing some hostility. You just don't realize what the Federation can do for you."

That lays the foundation in my head for a "Dead Planet Sketch" with a Federation officer as Michael Palin. Maybe Kahn as John Cleese.

...It's not "dormant", it's bloody demised. Its biosphere is no more. It has ceased to be. It has expired past it's sell-by date. It is a rock. Bereft of life, it spins in darkness! If you hadn't tractored it into orbit it'd be falling into Ceti Alpha! It's biometric processes are now history. It is rent asunder. It has kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil, and joined the choir invisible! THIS! IS AN EX! PLANET!

[kickair8p.livejournal.com]

::gigglefit!::

~

[theta-g.livejournal.com]

The lazy parody of Star Trek isn't the problem. Star Trek has been so successful that even the broadest references to those characters are passable.

The problem was Magrs pulling that trick in a Doctor Who novel. It was only a matter of time before some scarf-wearing Trek fan picked it up.