As I Was Saying

Okay, apparently I did not do the comparison in the book report for Firefly: Still Flying (I compared Firefly to Battlestar Galactica because of a famed reboot).

But a more apt comparison might be to Star Trek.

Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987, roughly 20 years after the original series.

When TNG appeared, the Star Trek franchise had been pumping stuff out fairly well over 20 years. How does the Star Trek franchise compare to Firefly’s in the first 20 years?

Star Trek
Firefly
Television Series 3: Star Trek, Star Trek: The Animated Series, Star Trek: The Next Generation 1
Movies 4: The Motion Picture, The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Voyage Home 1: Serenity
Books 85:
12 Star Trek episode novelizations by James Blish
16 Star Trek New Adventures titles
10 Star Trek Log The Animated Series novelizations by Alan Dean Foster
4 film novelizations
28 other novels

15 nonfiction
16:
6 novels
10 reference
(most in the last five years)
Comics 61:
49 DC Comics
12 Bantam photo comics
19 Dark Horse
plus a couple of graphic novels and Free Comic Book Day shorts

I won’t belabor my point by delving into the number of games, video and IRL, that each franchise spawned. And just for fun, I won’t compare how the Star Trek franchise has fared in the last 20 years–but it does include 6 television series and 4 movies.

So one of them really has legs. The other has Disney needing content for Disney+. So maybe the next 20 years will be comparable between the two, at least in video formats. I think the Star Trek fans skew older and probably read more, so there might be more books for the Star Trek franchise until they die off and no longer buy the books. But time will tell.

Buy My Books!
Buy John Donnelly's Gold Buy The Courtship of Barbara Holt Buy Coffee House Memories