The Time Has Come... For Another Star Trek Vs. Star Wars Thread!

[Tenebrae 8]

Ah, yes... the decades old question. This one was spawned by the thread about the new Star Wars games - Force Unleashed... which looks pretty awesome. The thrust of the tangent which I instigated was... why are Star Wars games so much more capable (an empirically provable fact) of awesome than Star Trek?

 

This breaks down into what is Star Wars vs. what is Star Trek?

 

Star Wars is a galaxy at war... pretty much good vs. evil - every time.

 

Star Trek is... a complication. Not only in the sense that it's complicated - multiple races and factions, no singular dominant force... a mish mash of morality etc. but also that the continuity is more than a little muddied...

 

Does anyone have any new insight into the age old battle?

[TetsuoShima 28]

Pretty sure it's not a new insight (considering how much discussion about this on the internet), but one thing that came to mind when reading your post was the time scale:

 

On Star Wars you pretty much have millenia of basically the same war, it's easy enough to pop in a new storyline somewhere in the middle of all that time (cfr kotor), while in case of star trek, mostly everything is pretty well *cough* defined in a fairly limited time period (compared to sw, it's only a couple of centuries after all), so creating a new and interesting storyline in that time frame seems quite hard to me, without messing with continuity even more (we all know people hate it when the authors have messed with continuity again, be it voluntarily or not).

[hayden 1]

I have a fairly low brow way of looking at this, Star Trek is way better and Star Wars is gay.

 

sorry :P

[maybrick 3]

I'm not hardcore fans of either series. I only like the original series of Star Wars and Star Trek (and Enterprise), but over the course of the past 30 years Star Trek has done a far better job at expanding it's Universe. Star Trek has expanded both forward and back in time, but Lucas is perpetually stuck in prequel-ville. And no, for the sake of my argument, I don't count anything outside of the movies/shows (ie games and novels) as canon so they don't apply. I realize they're entertaining, but they can be too easily dismissed when and if a new film is released.

[Tenebrae 8]

I have a fairly low brow way of looking at this, Star Trek is way better and Star Wars is gay.

 

Low brow isn't the expression that came to mind...

 

Anyway, if you're going to restrict Star Wars exclusively to the films, it's at something of a disadvantage because you've got 12ish hours of film vs. 3 solid weeks of film and TV shows. I suppose one could argue that is both an advantage and a disadvantage in this kind of debate but really, didn't Star Trek give us a fairly persistent vision of the galaxy with all that? Weren't we ALWAYS hanging out with a bunch of Starfleet types?

 

I'd also question whether we know more about how the Star Trek universe works... we seem to have the contrast between the colonies - which are rubbish - and Earth which is regularly depicted as a utopia. Everything is very homogenised as well. Alien races might well have different shaped/coloured ships but for the most part, they're humanoids who speak perfect English and probably are pretty similar to us, living in similar futuristic cities on similar planets. Oh sure, they might randomly kill everyone that gets to 60 or something like that but they're not so different.

 

With Star wars you got a good variety of planets -no M class malarky... you've got a long history to draw from... science praise KOTOR, PRAISE!

 

I find it strange that people are being so disparaging of Star Wars... ok, the prequels were kinda lame but you're trying to tell me a Star Destroyer isn't awesome? That Jedi aren't awesome? That a blaster isn't cooler than a phaser? That

 

Believe me, I've had my fill of both franchises but I always feel Star Wars will just always be cooler. There's not really much coolness in jumping into your shuttlecraft and going to warp, getting in your Ebon Hawk, punching it etc. etc. That's pretty cool.

 

And I know my sci-fi cool, boyos.

[Ulysses 6]

Its simple

 

Star Wars = for the brain dead

Star Trek = for the intellegent

 

[Amnot Borg 11]

I like both of them for different reasons.... but the reasons all seem to have two X chromosomes.

[hayden 1]

trying to tell me a Star Destroyer isn't awesome? That Jedi aren't awesome? That a blaster isn't cooler than a phaser?

 

when you say it that way it reminds me of tyhe brevado of harrison ford, and anything with harrison ford is awesome awesome. yes its intentional.

I would definatly have to say a phaser is the gayest scifi weapon going round, however romulan disrupters, thy're a pretty sweet weapon.

[USWhoFan 8]

Its simple

 

Star Wars = for the brain dead

Star Trek = for the intellegent

Well that's not very nice. :'(

 

I enjoy both, although I do believe in recent years they've both begun scraping the bottom of the barrel. (IE: The Star Wars prequels and Enterprise.)

[Tenebrae 8]

Its simple

 

Star Wars = for the brain dead

Star Trek = for the intellegent

 

 

Spot the irony.

 

To be honest, I'd hardly say that Star Trek is intellectual... it certainly hasn't been in its recent history. It likes to THINK it is, sure... but it's generally better at being pretentious.

 

And yes, both have been of questionable quality in the last few years.

[Ulysses 6]

saying that i have both star trek and star wars on DVD lol

[Finabair 1]

When StarTrek was first aired in 1968, I avoided watching it. I think I was expecting something more akin to "Lost in Space" than something that made your brain cells kick into warp drive. When I finally *did* start watching the series, it had already been shelved, so I turned into a second generation Trekkie. I went goofy when the VCR hit the scene and started buying -- at $24.95 a pop -- all the VHS tapes of StarTrek, bless'em.

 

I think what made the comparison between StarTrek and Star Wars so inevitable was each one's uniqueness, yet sameness. Which is better? It depends on your frame of mind: Do you prefer mind-numbing (for the time) graphic effects or intellectually stimulating conundrums?

 

In a perfect world, you'd get both (whether you preferred one over the other or not) and this would satisfy most.

 

Unfortunately, the world isn't perfect, but because of our differences, we get to compare and debate the greatness of one over the other.

 

Me? I prefer Wolverine to Spiderman...sorry.

[Tenebrae 8]

And both of them are actually fairly boring, massively over-rated fanboy favourites (Spidey and Wolverine)!

 

Yes, it's really about mindset... and of course, some people won't like either.

[maybrick 3]

Bah. This debate is dumb, anyways. Neither one can hold a candle to THE BLACK HOLE.

[dr_strekge 0]

Star Wars Original Trilogy is a good set of movies or "saga" like LOTR and D&D in it's respective kind with tons on fans and everything else.

 

Star Trek techno-babble has gone ('boldly') beyond of that, with it's more often renewed 'skins' over the series marks somehow the tendency for nowadays techie design of many of our current 21st century gadgets and items.

 

I prefer Princess Leah hairdress, her youth, beauty and royal 'air' in the film, someone could say Capt. Janeway's hairdress was a cheap imitation &)):). This absurd "mugen" encounters may continue indefinitely as follows: 

 

Worf vs Chuwacca 

Data vs C3PO 

Borg Queen married with Darth Vader? :),

JEDI's a "serious threat" to Starfleet Intelligence 'smartie cons'...

etcetera.

 

For me the original CommonWealth has enough power to wipe out 10 to  30 Death Stars daily using only 1 Andromeda WarShip for hundred years or so.

[bbbb 0]

Sounds odd I'm sure but I liked both Star Trek and Star Wars equally even though Star Wars was only 6 films and star trek was much longer.

 

They were both unique and hard to compare accurately in my opinion.

 

There's supposed to be a new live action Star Wars tv series coming out in the next couple of years. I wonder if it will compare to the trek series? Again it is hard to compare the two but if sw hits the small screen we may have something to work with.

[dBLOOD 1]

I like both Star Wars and Star Trek, although I'm a STar Trek-fan.

The number one difference between the two is that Star Wars is space fantasy, while star Trek is science fiction. Technology in Star Wars is handled in a very mundane way, with a few words, it has no focus, unlike in Star Trek. As Arthur C. Clarke said once "...science fiction is something that could happen - but usually you wouldn't want it to. Fantasy is something that couldn't happen - though often you only wish that it could."

My biggest problem with Star Wars - other than the fact that Disney destroyed the franchise - is that until the Disney movies, only prequels were made, no proper material about the actual present of the SW universe.

[subspatial 3]