It looks like the publicity machine for the Star Trek remake is really starting to crank up. First, there’s a slightly re-edited version of The Trailer floating around, which features a glimpse of an elderly-looking Leonard Nimoy as Spock. This version of the trailer is reportedly an exclusive gift from Paramount to Ain’t It Cool News, but naturally it’s already escaped into the wild and can be seen in a lot of different places, including here. I understand it’s not intended to be shown in theaters, so if you’re curious, you’ve got to watch it online. (Be aware that it’s not all that different from the trailer you’ve probably already seen; they’ve just shuffled a couple scenes around and added a moment with Nimoy right at the end.)

The other noteworthy item for today is a cool website that’s just gone live, a promotional tie-in with Intel that provides an interactive tour of the USS Kelvin (that’s the starship we see getting pounded to bits in the trailer). The site is nicely designed (it’s done up like a shipyard) and I thought it was pretty fun to play with. I presume more information will get added to it in the coming weeks (like maybe a tour of the new Enterprise?).

I don’t know… I’m still dubious of this whole project, but I’ll admit that my resolve is beginning to weaken. That interactive tour of the Kelvin has whetted my appetite and also given me some hope that Abrams might have some idea of what he’s doing after all. To explain, I’m going to have to go all uber-geeky on you, so if you were repelled back in college by those sniffly guys who always sat by themselves in a far-off corner of the student union obsessing over imaginary objects, you might want to come back later.

I’ve placed a couple images of the Kelvin below the fold, along with my nerdy remarks. Some of the details I’ve been able to glean could be considered spoilers, so beware.

And… here we go…

(Screen grabs of the USS Kelvin courtesy of Vic over at Screen Rant.)

So, here we’ve got a good look at the unfortunate vessel that’s only glimpsed in fast cuts and in between explosions during The Trailer. It’s instantly recognizable as a Federation starship with its saucer-shaped primary hull and the blue-glowing deflector dish. But wait, you might be saying if you’re familiar with the usual Star Trek vehicle architecture, there’s something screwy here: the secondary hull (that’s the bit that sports the deflector dish and the shuttlecraft hanger in the back) is on top of the ship, not below as on pretty much every other Starfleet vessel ever seen in a Star Trek TV series or movie. And there’s only one engine nacelle? Has J.J. Abrams gone insane? Is this the sign we’ve all been looking for, the proof that he’s abandoned all the established Trek lore and is waving his private parts at the existing fanbase? (Can you tell I’ve been hanging out on the fanboy message boards again?)

Well, no… in fact, I take the Kelvin‘s layout as a very positive sign of exactly the opposite. But you’ve probably got to be a real old-timer like me to recognize the clues. You see, the Kelvin is highly reminiscent of the very earliest design sketches for the good old Enterprise herself, which were upside-down relative to the way we’re familiar with her looking. You can see one of these sketches on this page (scroll down to the section labeled “Artwork”), and several more in the old book The Making of Star Trek, if you can track down a copy of that. I think they were reprinted in the excellent book Inside Star Trek, as well (for my money, that one is the best volume ever written on the history of the original series).

As for the single-engine controversy, it’s more-or-less understood nowadays that in the Trek ‘verse, you need to have two nacelles, but that wasn’t always the case. Way back in the ’70s, even before Star Trek: The Motion Picture — the Golden Age of original series fandom, in my opinion — one of the primary sources for young nerds was a book called The Star Fleet Technical Manual by Franz Joseph. This volume was considered official “canon” for years until Gene Roddenberry decided it wasn’t, and as I recall, it contained several one-nacelle ship designs.

But wait, there’s more: the technobabble pop-ups on the Intel Kelvin tour describe the ship’s phaser weapons as emitting “nadion particles,” a term that was established (if I recall correctly) on Star Trek: The Next Generation. And the Starfleet Database tab on the Intel site mentions that the first officer of the Kelvin is George Kirk, who readers of the miscellaneous tie-in novels over the years will recognize as the father of young James T. (I think I read somewhere that the scenes involving the Kelvin take place 20 years before the main action of the film, so I’m guessing that George will be killed or declared MIA after the apparent destruction of the Kelvin, which causes a traumatized young Jimmy to become the kind of reckless punk who drives 300-year-old Corvettes off cliffs, a direct pastiche of one of those old tie-ins I read years ago…)

I know that all of this is just so much gobbledygook to the uninitiated, but to a guy who spent a lot of his youth living and breathing this crap, it’s all evidence that Abrams (or at least his research staff) is far more sensitive to the existing material — all of the existing material, apparently — than we older fans had any reason to expect. I have some misgivings about whether he ought to be attempting to unify all the various incarnations of Trek, if that is in fact what he’s trying to do — the reference to the Next Gen “nadion particle” explanation has me wondering how many other references to the spin-offs we’ll see, although that particular piece of ‘babble may appear no where except on that Intel site — but I’m pleased he seems to be respectful of the older and semi-canonical stuff at all.

Don’t misunderstand: I haven’t been won over by a simple image of a ship that I suspect will appear only in the first five minutes of the movie before getting destroyed. I still have a lot of doubts about what I know of this new movie’s storyline, about the cast, and about the necessity of this project in the first place. But a big part of the success of any remake project, in my opinion, is how much heed the project pays to the original. Obviously you have to come up with a new spin on the material (or else why bother?), but you also have to retain many familiar trappings or you risk losing the identity of the thing you’re trying to rejuvenate and you may as well go off and create something wholly original (this is one of the issues I have with the new Battlestar Galactica, among other things). I’m beginning to see signs that Abrams understands this.

Abrams’ Trek will never replace the original for me. But I don’t necessarily want to see it go down in ignominious flames, either. I’m beginning to feel some degree of hope that it won’t.