Galaxy Quest should get the Orville treatment and bring more comedy to space with Tim Allen back in the captain’s chair.
When Tim Allen and the rest of the cast agreed to join Galaxy Quest, no one expected this film to still be this beloved 20+ years later. The movie perfectly caught lightning in the bottle, not only with its brilliant acting and writing but also with its ability to capture what it was like to be a Star Trek fan at the time. The passion, the obsession, the understanding of every little detail of the show; all of that was captured and put into the film.
For those unaware, Galaxy Quest was a 1999 parody of the original Star Trek series with some slight alterations. Generally, though, the show, (set in the ’80s) is a perfect encapsulation of what the original series and it’s stars dealt with behind the scene. Allen played the William Shatner/James Kirk stand-in Jason Nesmith. Much like Shatner in real life, some of Nesmith’s colleagues can’t stand him.
The film has an amazing cast, including Sigourney Weaver, the late Alan Rickman, Tony Shalhoub, Sam Rockwell, Daryl Mitchell, and Enrico Colantoni.
Essentially in the film, a group of real aliens comes to Earth to recruit Nesmith, thinking his show was real and that what they were seeing was broadcasts of their real triumphs. Because of some miscommunication, Nesmith and the rest of the series cast get involved in an interplanetary conflict, and all-out brilliance ensues.
It’s a long-beloved film, and while it didn’t earn its place on its initial release, the franchise is still beloved and cherished today. If a sequel of any sort is going to happen it has to happen soon. These are the three reasons why it would work.
Unique alien races can be further explored.
The film established several unique aliens right off the bat. In one scene the crew beam down to a planet and after dealign with deceptively cute aliens, have to fight an alien lifeform made up entirely of rocks. The entire sequence was beautifully done, not only was it played for laughs but it showed the crew that they couldn’t trust anything they saw. That wherever they went, they couldn’t just assume everything was like it was on Earth.
The scene’s also made better by Sam Rockwell’s Guy Fleegman, who was essentially Galaxy Quest’s version of a Redshirt. This is something he constantly brings up all the time, that his character was just there to die. The alien lifeform scenes were as perfect as it could be thanks to Rockwell.
The other aliens in the film, Thermians and the Fatu-Krey. The Thermians are squid-like beings that have the ability to change their appearance as to not cause concern among the cast of the Galaxy Quest television show. They’re peaceful creatures and just want to exist. The Fatu-Krey are large lizard-like humanoids who want to destroy and snuff out the Thermians.
The design of the Fatu-Krey is brilliantly wicked. The design work on them in 1999 was fantastic and really has aged well, opting to use costumes instead of CGI. To think about what the writers could do with these types of base designs and explore outwards into other alien species is really intriguing.
That’s something The Orville has done right, creating an interesting cast and crew of aliens to discover and explore. We already know what Galaxy Quest has done, so it’s all that much more exciting to think about what they can do.
The Orville shows a “funny Star Trek” could work.
We already know a “funny” Star Trek works, thanks to the Orville. While critics lambasted it, the fans of Star Trek absolutely love it. The show mixes classic Star Trek morality laden drama with outlandish humor. It’s done wonders for the fan community and the appreciation is obvious.
So any doubts that a Galaxy Quest show would work in a modern audience should go out the window. The series would absolutely be a hit. With it being a sequel, a dip back into the nostalgia pool, and part of a winning formula, there’s almost no way this show doesn’t make its producers rich.
Some will wonder why have both and that’s a simple answer. While The Orville is a comedic take on the Star Trek series, Galaxy Quest would be a meta take on the near hilarity that happens behind the scenes of Star Trek.
When the film first came out, an on-the-nose parody wasn’t really what fans were looking for. It was a time of the “extreme” and the “real”. Fans wanted to be challenged, with films like The Sixth Sense, the Matrix and Fight Club dominating the box offices, there wasn’t much desire for a series that poked fun at a show that was over 30 years old at the time.
With Star Trek fans not being too fond of Galaxy Quest at the time either, the film really landed on deaf ears. This was at a time when Star Trek was everywhere, but fans were often still mocked for liking it. This caused resentment for parody properties. With geek-culture being integrated into the everyday zeitgeist, it’s very likely that the biggest audience supporting this property would be in fact Trek fans.
If you keep a tight enough budget, that’s all you’d need to have a hit.
Endless possibilities with the creative side of things.
The series borrowed from real-life parallels involving the early days of Star Trek and how the crew of the series got along behind scenes. If they did. With so much happening from reboots, to completely different entities being made within the realm of Star Trek, this would serve as a unique opportunity to really blow the lid off of things.
Imagine Tim Allen and Sigourney Weaver meeting their younger, hotter, rebooted selves at a convention before the four having to go off with the Thermians to stop some kind of disaster. There’s also the possibility that if the series is a hit, and say the Allen’s and Weaver’s of the franchise depart, you could actually hand it off to the rebooted crew, or the Next Generation version of Galaxy Quest.
On top of that, there’s the possibility of bringing in a character that is based on certain modern Star Trek figureheads. The in-show idea that the current executive producer of the new Galaxy Quest series is attempting to kill the Galaxy Quest brand in order to allow an alien invasion to happen would be something twisted and beautiful. Proponents and opponents of the new Trek would find that such a tongue-in-cheek type of moment that it would be nearly impossible to screw up.
You could also have aliens stop fighting in the middle of a space battle and slam on their desk before looking at their viewer and saying something to the effect of, “we can’t keep this battle going, Captain. Our budget has been depleted”, before blitzing off into space.
The endless possibilities to embrace the meta of the Star Trek fandom and make it into the lore of the Galaxy Quest series is too good to pass up.