Star Trek HtH fights

[Darksider]

So I was watching "Way of the Warrior" the other day, and it hit me. All of star trek's HtH fights suck. Not just from a tactical perspective, but from a thematic one too. People using that shitty ass "kirk-fu" stuff all the time, it isn't even remotely exciting.

Why is that? I know the cheesy fist fights fit with TOS, but why did they keep the style for the following series? Was it a consious decision or did they just hire a shitty fight coordinator?

[Bounty]

IIRC the big problem were the prosthetics on the aliens. Someone in a full or partial face prosthetic often has impaired vision, restricted head mobility, and has to make sure the make-up doesn't tear, so flashy moves are out. Combine that with main cast members often having very little stunt fight experience and you end up with very stylized and slow 'fights'.

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

But the thing is, that isn't an impediment for a lot of similar shows. Off the top of my head, Supernatural has very excellent melees involving heavily-prostheticked actors, actors wearing hard contacts, and CGI effects, and Farscape had very exciting fights against aliens who in some cases required mechanical puppetry controls and heavily-protheticked actors at the same time (see any male Scarran).

[Darwin]

But the thing is, that isn't an impediment for a lot of similar shows. Off the top of my head, Supernatural has very excellent melees involving heavily-prostheticked actors, actors wearing hard contacts, and CGI effects, and Farscape had very exciting fights against aliens who in some cases required mechanical puppetry controls and heavily-protheticked actors at the same time (see any male Scarran).

it probably comes down to: good fight choreography takes expertise and time which adds up to $$$ and some just don't prioritize that highly in their budgets. By all indications, Farscape was an expensive show, and I don't know about Supernatural, not having watched it yet. It's the rare show that doesn't do fights 1: with extensive slow, telegraphed and 'staged looking' moves or 2: with 2 camera cuts per second so you have no idea what's going on anyway.

[neoolong]

Supernatural doesn't make with the heavily prosthetic demony guys for the most part. Demons and such tend to be human-looking.

Buffy, on the other hand, had a lot more and did have more elaborate fight scenes.

[Bounty]

Supernatural doesn't make with the heavily prosthetic demony guys for the most part. Demons and such tend to be human-looking.

Buffy, on the other hand, had a lot more and did have more elaborate fight scenes.

So a HtH-fight oriented show has better HtH fights than a show which only has HtH fights incidentally? Shock und horror.

[NecronLord]

But the thing is, that isn't an impediment for a lot of similar shows. Off the top of my head, Supernatural has very excellent melees involving heavily-prostheticked actors, actors wearing hard contacts, and CGI effects, and Farscape had very exciting fights against aliens who in some cases required mechanical puppetry controls and heavily-protheticked actors at the same time (see any male Scarran).

Big difference there is that a Scarran has many times the strength of a human. Most of a fight with one is it casually batting its opponent away and the human running.

Much the same as Khan, actually. Trek managed to make that look pretty damn cool - it's easy enough to depict super-strength.

[Stark]

Many times the strength of a human ... Like Klingons/vulcans/etc?

[Patrick Degan]

The hand-to-hand fights in TOS were about standard for action TV shows of the 1960s: most of the work being handled by stuntmen, with the regulars featured in carefully edited closeups with quick-cutting. The choreography was about what was usually seen in dozens of shows like Gunsmoke, Mannix, Mission Impossible, The Mod Squad and most other series of the time —nowhere up to state-of-the-art fight choreography of the movies, but decent enough for network television. The fights at least didn't look like a square dance with fists.

[Darth Wong]

Supernatural doesn't make with the heavily prosthetic demony guys for the most part. Demons and such tend to be human-looking.

Buffy, on the other hand, had a lot more and did have more elaborate fight scenes.

So a HtH-fight oriented show has better HtH fights than a show which only has HtH fights incidentally? Shock und horror.

Let me get this straight: they regularly did explosions, fire, and other stunt work for their action-oriented scenes, and one of their series spent YEARS on a story arc involving a huge interstellar war, but they were just not "oriented" in such a way that they could do fights?

I think the real reason is that they simply didn't take the entire subject of combat seriously. Space combat tactics, ground combat tactics, melee fighting tactics ... they were all treated with the same cavalier attitude. Horrible writing decisions were made which would have cost nothing to reverse, but the fact is that they just didn't give a shit. And why should they? The fans didn't seem to care.

Besides, when your melee fighting sequences are constrained to a cliche in which main characters far outmatch anybody else (even if these characters are skinny women), it's pretty much a given that the fighting is going to look cheesy.

[Darwin]

I think the real reason is that they simply didn't take the entire subject of combat seriously. Space combat tactics, ground combat tactics, melee fighting tactics ... they were all treated with the same cavalier attitude. Horrible writing decisions were made which would have cost nothing to reverse, but the fact is that they just didn't give a shit. And why should they? The fans didn't seem to care.

^
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This.

Most TV writers and producers have the same attitude as Pablo does for Star Wars. It's just Science Fiction (or Urban Fantasy or whatever) and you're not supposed to think about it or take it seriously. Many shows even ignore the most basic of considerations in making a fight, or weapons handling for that matter, realistic.

[NecronLord]

Many times the strength of a human ... Like Klingons/vulcans/etc?

Except of course, as you know full well, Klingons are rarely actually depicted like that. Witness, if you will, Kira kicking their asses in Way of the Warrior. Super-strength is something that exists, for them, in dialogue, not in actual shots.

[Darwin]

Many times the strength of a human ... Like Klingons/vulcans/etc?

Except of course, as you know full well, Klingons are rarely actually depicted like that. Witness, if you will, Kira kicking their asses in Way of the Warrior. Super-strength is something that exists, for them, in dialogue, not in actual shots.

Really, it's misleading from the start. From the baseline of an 'average human' by 20th century developed nation standards, a professional athlete is easily twice to three times as strong by some measurements, and dedicated bodybuilders and powerlifters up to five times, in practical terms. In that light, it's not as impressive.

[Bounty]

Let me get this straight: they regularly did explosions, fire, and other stunt work for their action-oriented scenes, and one of their series spent YEARS on a story arc involving a huge interstellar war, but they were just not "oriented" in such a way that they could do fights?

Exactly. BtVS was all about people beating people up. How many times did Trek do HtH? Three or four times per season? Tops? Most of the fights were, as you say, spaceship andf explosions and zappy laser beams, stuff you can do from the safety of an editing room, and a damn sight easier to do right than having guys in make-up pretend to know kung fu.

[Bounty]

but the fact is that they just didn't give a shit

Who didn't give a shit? If you read even a few of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans (and I heartily recommend Doug Drexler's blog for a taste of those), you'll be hard-pressed to say the people actually making the effects and doing the nuts-and-bolts work didn't "give a shit". But the sad fact is that when you are working against a deadline on a budget you'll have to cut corners somewhere, and if the difference between a cheap-and-perfunctory fight and a perfect display of fight choreography also meant the difference between getting the episode done on time or even getting a new season at all, what were they supposed to pick?

This dumb-shit blanket "lol nobody cared" cop-out is exactly the sort of stupid, short-sighted, asinine attitude that did a fine job of killing PST. Why bother discussing anything? Everyone involved with Trek didn't give a shit, case closed. What complete bullshit.

[Stofsk]

If you don't mind me saying so Bounty, I think you're letting this thread get to you just a tad. Frankly, I love Star Trek (TOS) but I'll be the first to admit that it has quite copious amounts of camp and cheesy moments. But like Patrick, I can look at it in perspective. That's just how TV shows were made back then, and it didn't mean that they weren't taking it seriously.

The problem is, fast forward to TNG or DS9, the latter in particular when the show switched gears and dropped its opening premise to turn into a war show, and what we get is... camp and cheesy fights. There was no sense that the franchise had evolved. TNG was heaps better with the some of the best episodes in Trek that depicted war: "Yesterday's Enterprise" and "Best of Both Worlds". In both those episodes we see a completely different atmosphere than on DS9. The problem is a lot of the time on DS9 it didn't feel desperate enough, or smart enough. I remember complaining in another thread recently that DS9 messed with what TNG established. I remember watching BOBW and thinking about what it implied the Battle of Wolf 359 was like, and then we see in "Emissary" that instead of a fleet of 40 ships blast the cube in combined fire, it was just pairs of ships shooting sporadically. And whatever anyone else said in the other thread has to say, BOBW established the loss of 40 ships to be devastating, while in DS9 hundreds of ships could be destroyed and it was a 'setback' that didn't mean the end of the war effort. That's just retarded anyway you spin it, but largely because it feels like a goddamn inconsistency with what TOS and TNG had depicted war and space combat to be like.

I agree with you that threads like these seem to exist purely to bash Trek. I don't actually have a problem with the hand to hand fights in Way of the Warrior, not in the way the OP seems to think, I think there are heaps of worse things in that episode than showing Klingons with swords. At the same time, Mike's completely right when he says that a lot of the time, it's just main characters prevailing in fights even when it seems unlikely that they should. They even had Bashir shoot a Klingon in that episode! What the fuck.

[Darth Wong]

but the fact is that they just didn't give a shit

Who didn't give a shit? If you read even a few of the behind-the-scenes shenanigans (and I heartily recommend Doug Drexler's blog for a taste of those), you'll be hard-pressed to say the people actually making the effects and doing the nuts-and-bolts work didn't "give a shit". But the sad fact is that when you are working against a deadline on a budget you'll have to cut corners somewhere, and if the difference between a cheap-and-perfunctory fight and a perfect display of fight choreography also meant the difference between getting the episode done on time or even getting a new season at all, what were they supposed to pick?

This dumb-shit blanket "lol nobody cared" cop-out is exactly the sort of stupid, short-sighted, asinine attitude that did a fine job of killing PST. Why bother discussing anything? Everyone involved with Trek didn't give a shit, case closed. What complete bullshit.

Oh, go blow it out your self-righteous ass. The fighting in Star Trek is terrible, and it would not break their budget to fix a lot of those problems. My 10-year old son David saw part of "Way of the Warrior" and he laughed at how stupid-looking the fighting was. He especially liked the bit where Klingon after Klingon kept running into a corridor to get shot by Garak. You act as if it would cost a lot of extra money to make the fighting look less retarded, when they could have simply had much shorter hand to hand fight sequences. You know, short melee fight sequences like you would expect in the sort of "not oriented to H2H combat" show you talk about. But you don't fucking get it: those long melee fight sequences were used as time fillers. They saved money rather than wasting it.

But oh no, this is just rabid warsies going "hur hur" and it has no validity whatsoever, right? And anybody who says otherwise is just anti-Trek! It's like the new anti-American.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I've never seen the Captain Kirk double-fist-whack anywhere other than in Trek. Its just silly.

[Darwin]

I've never seen the Captain Kirk double-fist-whack anywhere other than in Trek. Its just silly.

The double-hammerfist to the lower back is a classic, man!

[Darth Wong]

The double-hammerfist is only marginally less stupid than the Klingon bat'leth. As if anyone in his right mind would design a sword which you hold from the side.

[Darksider]

Where did the Bat'leth start becoming the primary klingon melee weapon?
Worf had that short sword thing he used in first contact, and Duras used a regular sword in his duel with Worf.

Was it DS9? It seems like DS9 is responsible for a lot of trek brainbugs

[tim31]

As a melee weapon? Sure, DS9. But we'd never seen Klingons engage in a large scale boarding operation before then. The first time it was shown was when Worf avenged the death of his fuck buddy and subsequently Shifted The Balance Of Power in the region(though not for long).

[Darth Wong]

Where did the Bat'leth start becoming the primary klingon melee weapon?
Worf had that short sword thing he used in first contact, and Duras used a regular sword in his duel with Worf.

Was it DS9? It seems like DS9 is responsible for a lot of trek brainbugs

Or one might say that DS9 merely took them to the next level. In TNG, it was still possible to write off the bat'leth as some kind of purely ceremonial weapon, rather than one that Klingons would seriously carry with them into battle. But in DS9, we saw that they would actually go into battle with the damned things.

[CaptainChewbacca]

I recal in TOS there was some episode with a throwaway line that Klingons were known throughout the quadrant to be excellent 'swordsmen', but I think they had rather regular swords in that episode.

[Serafina]

I recal in TOS there was some episode with a throwaway line that Klingons were known throughout the quadrant to be excellent 'swordsmen', but I think they had rather regular swords in that episode.

So its another brainbug?

Oh, and a Bat'leth is by all means one of the shittiest weapons i could imagine. You can hardly throw any weight behind a strike, it does not have a good reach, you can not fence, you can not block that good and you need two hands to use it.
Oh, and it is propably quite nasty to handle.

You would be better of with a dagger or a short sword. Or just a plain, old wooden club.