Star Trek TOS

                                       

I remember my brother and sister talking about a new science fiction show that was going to premier on television that night. I don’t know how they heard of it or how much buzz there was about it before it aired. Somehow they had heard about it and they infected me even though my mother said that she didn’t think I should be watching one of those weirdo shows (this is how she described pretty much all science fiction.)  I was seven years old at the time.  I liked science fiction. Some kids my age liked westerns, some liked cop shows, some liked war shows, and some liked sports. I liked Science fiction. It spoke to me. Maybe I was more open to speculative ideas, maybe I liked science itself more than the average kid, or maybe I just liked cool ray guns and special effects. I watched cartoons like Jonny Quest and Space Ghost, and live action series like Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. So I was determined to see this new show.

The new show was called Star Trek (I did not know what the word ‘trek’ meant. Remember I was seven. And yes you can look up the original air date and figure out my age. Good for you). That first episode was called “The Man Trap.” It turned out not to be one of the best episodes, but not one of the worst either. In any case as I started watching it, I could see that this was different from anything I had ever seen before. There was an alien with pointed ears on the command staff of the Enterprise, yet he was not scary. He seemed quite reasonable. He was kind of different from the others on the ship. Logic and science ruled his world. Hey I liked science; I could identify with him. The episode was mostly about Dr. McCoy and his ex-girlfriend, though as we discover, it is not really his ex-girlfriend but an alien. As the episode progressed a sense of foreboding grew in me as crewmen began to die. When the monster finally showed itself, it was a bit much for my seven year-old sensibilities. I . . . had to go to the bathroom. I wasn’t fooling my siblings. They knew I left the room because I was scared. I stayed at the edge of the doorway, listening until it was safe to return. I did not see every episode of that first run, but after the show went into syndication, I saw them all, over and over again. I was not alone. Star Trek’s popularity continued to grow after it was cancelled. 

Why was Star Trek so popular (eventually)? Why did it produce numerous spin-off shows and many movies? As I said, there was something different about it. It felt more real, more like an adult show than other things on TV at the time. It certainly bore little resemblance to Lost in Space. There are those of us for whom Star Trek TOS (the original series) is still the king of the Star Trek brand. For me it is probably because I was there at the beginning. I was impacted by how this series was so different. The original had its flaws. There was occasional scenery chewing, and a few of the plotlines were cringingly bad. But the overarching continuity and he characters made up for it. We cared what happened to these characters. They got into our heads and hearts. To me, the later series’, even though they had great actors (like Patrick Stewart) and better special effects, the stories did not seem quite as good. It was too sanitized, too politically correct. I think it was trying to be too many things for too many people. I did not care about the new characters as much. Even though they got into peril and some of them even died, it never felt as though these characters had as much to lose as the original ones did. That is just another way of saying I was not as invested in the new characters.

Whether you like one particular series over another is probably determined by where you were in your stage of development when you first saw it. For me, I was there in 1966 when everything changed.  

(My novel Star Liner, is now available as an e-book or paperback through Amazon, or the other usual online sources)

Star Liner