Right? ...and, like, Starro the conqueror is just sitting at home, waiting for the phone to ring.

Instead we got Tom Paris, obsessed with muscle cars and 30s serials. Which makes as much sense as you and I being really into cave paintings.

Then again, the exact same could be said about Ronan the Accuser in GotG and that was still a good film.

Heh, I agree, though I often noticed that ST loves to do a list of 3 normal things from the past and 1 made-up thing. You know: “He’s the finest scientist since Newton, Einstein, Androxus III of Maximus Beta, and Edison!”

GotG succeeded because it satirized the typical megamanical comic-book villain in using Ronan as the films big bad. The look on his face when Star-Lord essentially challenged him to a dance-off was worth the price of admission. 

Another example of Star Trek future history, for which characters had nostalgia, is in DS9, where Sisko and Jake admire Buck Bokai, a fictional chubby baseball star from the 2020s-2040s. He’s referenced in multiple episodes, and materializes as a character in Season 1's “If Wishes Were Horses”.

Ah, Plxorn.  You beautiful doomed bastard.

Star Trek’s characters are nostalgic for things that we can be nostalgic for as well, and which could be produced on 90's tv-budgets. It makes sense from a storytelling and production-standpoint. If Data/Tom Paris/Dr Bashir went on a holo-adventure based on a late 21st century movie, the episode would have to explain…

Has everyone forgotten Vulcan Harp Music???

I always assumed that Disney kept extending the Copy Right Act into perpetuity so that even when the Holodeck was invented, nothing had gone into copyright since the 20th century and they had to make do with what was available.

Without even looking, I just know there must be fanfic titled “50 Shades of Earl Grey.” I don’t even want to speculate what it’s about.

It’s actually not that radical of an idea that by the time movies have been around for 200 years, they’ll have more or less exhausted all forms of cinematic novelty. No one’s to blame; when a medium is new, there’s all sorts of exciting new possibilities, but after a couple of centuries, all the permutations have…

I mean, other than the episode where a war criminal is shown touring the galaxy performing shakespeare and the whole crew are on the safe of their seats for a chance to see a vid screening of his performance...

In TOS the Eugenics Wars were in the 1990s. Maybe Khan was into Korn?  

Red Dwarf had a good version of this: “Why don’t you listen to one of the great classical composers, like Mozart, Mendhelson, or Motorhead.”

I too miss clever porn titles.

They had those space hippies in The Original Series and Riker played that videogame in TNG...

Just once in the what, 25 combined seasons of TNG, DS9, and Voyager, I wanted to see a gaggle of people heading to a holodeck in full original Trek garb. Just once. That one weird time travel DS9 episode doesn’t count. I wanted to see young Jake Sisko all dressed up as Kirk getting ready to fake date some green Orion…

I think the reason for that is you’d have to come up with something that could pass for a great future work of entertainment, and when a work of entertainment depicts another, fictional work of entertainment the work’s credibility suffers if the fictional work isn’t as great as it’s made out to be. 

I always had the same problem with Star Trek, where characters often have these nostalgic obsessions - film noir, movie serials, Westerns, Sherlock Holmes, Gilbert and Sullivan - but only as long that nostalgic thing is pre-21st century. Does the Federation just really suck at coming up with new pop culture? Were…