>>10484958The issue isn't wokeness. It's a combination of show quality and market penetration. Trek has always been on the Vanguard of cultural issues. The quality of the writing has varied from the subtle to the ham fisted. It could be argued that the more recent Treks have lacked subtlety. But that's really secondary to the second point, Market penetration. The 90's were a Golden Age for Trek, and TV Sci Fi in general because the market wasn't that fractured. When Next Gen started in 87, most cable services had between 12 to 24 channels available. A lot of those were local independent stations looking for content, and Next Gen and the other crop of syndicated shows jumped in to fill the gap. Most stations would run Next Gen on Saturday night in their open syndicated time slot, and runic again on Sunday night. In some markets, the show was on two or three times over the weekend on different stations. It was the most successful Trek show in regards to normies paying attention to it. Snuff dipping Rednecks at work who normally couldn't have cared less about Sci fi in any form talked about it at the break room at work. People I would have never thought would talk about Trek brought up the Best of Both Worlds cliffhanger at work. Next Gen was as big as Trek ever got. Galoob tried to go with Star Wars 3 3/4 scale figures, but they kind of flopped. At the time, late 80's, early 90's, Star Wars and GI Joe 3 3/4 were dead brands and were mostly off the shelves. But Playmates had a monster hit with TMNT. So, when they got the liscence, they adopted tge slightly cartoony asthethetic they used with TMNT for their Next Gen line and it blew up and stayed a strong seller for years. So, what happened?
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