William Shatner’s thrilling sci-fi series is designed to defeat the Matrix

by Zach Zagranis
| Published 31 seconds ago

The year is 1989. Paramount has just released it Star Trek V: The Final Frontierthe first and only Star Trek film directed by William Shatner, was met with almost universal disappointment. Many fans immediately called it the worst Star Trek movie ever made.

How can such a complete disaster be followed up? Well, if you’re William Shatner, try starting your own business Science fiction It’s called franchising Coal.

William Shatner was the first to conceive Coal During production The final frontier. The franchise began as a series of novels produced by Shatner and written by Ron Goulart.

The series follows former police officer Jake Cardigan as he attempts to obtain the illegal drug TEC from the high streets of Los Angeles.

The novels somehow produced A television Series, comic books, and even a video game although no information is known about it Coal The fans are there. That might be a bit of an exaggeration, but let’s put it this way: You won’t find any Jake Cardigan cosplay at your local Comic Con.

I’m willing to bet that anyone reading this has never heard of it before Coal Or they forgot it existed until they just saw the words on their screen. The reason for this is simple: it just wasn’t very good.

Suspicious name TekWar

It might be more accurate and a little nicer to say that William Shatner Coal It wasn’t very original It starts with the name.

Tek and Trek look so similar, there’s no way this could have been done on purpose. Statistically speaking, Coal He must owe at least one short-sighted sale Star Trek a fan.

Even the addition of the word “war” seems calculated, as if Shatner wanted to confuse star wars Fans buy the books as well.

William Shatner enters the world of Dullbladerunner

And there is a world Coal It’s populated by nothing but sci-fi clichés and highly derivative ideas. By the time William Shatner created TekWar, ​​drugs, and high-tech concepts like the Matrix that some people could tap into, had been staples of the Cyberpunk genre for years.

CoalThe s autonomous robots, nicknamed “Andies,” are being snatched up practically on the spot Do Androids dream of electric sheep? The novel Blade Runner Depends on. I’m not the first to make this comparison. One review of the television series used the term “Dullbladerunner” to describe the show’s aesthetic. Oh.

TekWar becomes a publishing franchise

Even a generic sci-fi story will sell with a big name attached to it, and William Shatner was a big enough name to guarantee that CoalModerate success. Shortly after the first couple of only Novels were published, marvel I started publishing a comic book based on Coalhas been strangely renamed TekWorld.

The title ran for two years, from 1992 to 1994, before being canceled amid Marvel’s financial crisis in the mid-1990s.

The TekWar television series began the same year the comic book was cancelled, and ran for only two years, like the comic, ending in 1996. William Shatner himself co-starred in the series. Coal As Cardigan’s employer, Walter Bascom.

The future of TekWar

An adult animated reboot of TekWar has been announced for 2021, but nothing has been produced yet.

Although CoalThe Big Cultural Imprint Apparently, almost no one talks about the franchise anymore. Maybe this is for the best. William Shatner’s TekWar is the perfect example of a ’90s property that was best left in the ’90s.

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