Thoughts on Star Trek's 50th Anniversary

I wasn't going to write anything about this, but then I realized today that everyone and their brother was either writing about Star Trek or tweeting about Star Trek.

And so I thought: "Oh, alright then.  Why not jot down a few words?"

I spent some periods of my life being obsessed with Star Trek.

The first time was around 4th through 6th grade. (Roughly 1987-1989).

I was introduced to Star Trek via the movies, and then only later found that there was a television show attached to them.

Whisky Prajer, 10 years my elder, expressed surprise at this: "That's interesting -- it never occurred to me that a kid could see all the movies before watching a single episode of television"
But I think this was pretty standard for kids in the 1980s.  The movies were really, really big back then,  while the show was less of a staple of network TV than it had been 10 years previously.
(Although granted in my case, my TV viewing as a child was fairly restricted, so I tended to have less of an encyclopedic knowledge of everything on TV than some of my classmates did.)

It's interesting to consider how popular those movies were in the 1980s, because when you re-watch them now, they don't seem like summer blockbusters at all.  The pacing is slow, and, by today's standards, there's not nearly enough action to attract audiences.  But people loved them at the time.

Once I discovered there was a Star Trek television series, I started to watch that obsessively as well.
It was in my nature as a child to become obsessive about everything I was interested in.  (The technical term for this kind of personality trait is "geek".)  And so not only did I watch the TV show religiously, I read The Star Trek Compendium (A) read  the tie-in novels (The Pocketbook series (W)), and read the comic books.

When Star Trek: The Next Generation came out, I already considered myself a long-time fan.  Which is funny, because Star Trek: The Next Generation came out in 1987, so I could only have been a fan for about half a year at that point.  But time moves a lot slower when you're a child, so that half-a-year was like an eternity.  I fully felt like a long time fan, and I had a long time fan's sense of propriety over the franchise.

I tried to convince myself that I liked Star Trek: The Next Generation, but the truth is that in those first two years, I had a hard time warming up to it.  It was just so boring.  The original Star Trek could always be counted on to include some overly dramatic stage-choreographed fist fight, but on Star Trek: The Next Generation, all they did was talk, talk, talk.

Nowadays, the first two seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation are looked back upon as some of the worst Star Trek seasons of all time.  (Everyone says it's a miracle the show survived.)  But at the time, nobody knew how good the show would eventually become.  And conversely, nobody knew how bad the first two seasons would eventually look by comparison.

Children  are constantly told they don't appreciate adult entertainment because they are too young to understand it, and as a result I think children are reluctant to criticize any media based on its intrinsic merit. I knew I wasn't really into Star Trek: The Next Generation, but I assumed the fault must have been with me, and that I should just train myself to appreciate it.

I did eventually stop watching the show however.

I came back into the fold around 1991, by which time Star Trek: The Next Generation was in its 5th season, and had actually become good.  (I had started picking up on the buzz the show had generated, and started watching it again).

I stuck through till about 1996, when I gave up due to Star Trek exhaustion.  (Counting the re-runs in syndication, there were at that point 4 Star Trek franchises I was trying to watch every week.  And some of them, like Star Trek: Voyager, felt like more of a chore to sit through than an enjoyment.)

So, that's my history.

Here are my thoughts on the original:

The original Star Trek was already dated when I first fell in love with it in 1987, but I never really noticed how dated it was at the time.  Possibly this I was only 8 years old and couldn't yet distinguish these things.  Or possibly because in 1987 Star Trek was only dated by 20 years, and now it's dated by 50 years.  Or possibly a combination.

Watching it now, though...Oh boy!  You can't get away from how incredibly dated this show is.  The special effects are of course the most obvious, but it's everything else as well: the music, the corny humor, the cultural values, and that old style of stage-fighting which was so popular on television in the 1960s, but which we don't see anymore.

On the other hand, seeing how incredibly dated Star Trek is makes the aspects of it that were ahead of its time all the more striking.
I mean, nowadays geek culture has taken over mainstream media, so everyone is expected to get obsessive about the continuity in all the shows they watch.  (And DVDs, Netflix, and the Internet has made this so much easier to do.)

But it's amazing to think that back in 1966 Star Trek was already introducing this kind of world building to their series.
Considering the original Star Trek aired long before serialized television would become popular, and long before the Internet, there's an incredible amount of things 1960s fans were asked to keep track of.
The original series did a ton of mythology building around the race of Vulcans, but it also expected its fans to keep track of the characteristics of the Klingons, and the Romulans.  (The Romulans had some sort of mysterious ancient connection to the Vulcans which I always found fascinating, but was only hinted at in the original series).  And of course, there was the Federation itself, and all of its internal politics.

That was really impressive for the 1960s.

That praise aside, I don't think the original Star Trek was ever meant to be adult entertainment.  I like it now because of the nostalgia factor, in the way I continue to maintain a fondness for all my childhood obsessions.  But the show was not meant to appeal to a fully grown adult.

But man-oh-man, this was certainly the greatest show ever when you were 8 years old.

Sidenote: Whatever happened to those elaborate stage fights on television?
I grew up on 1960s television only through re-runs, but I grew up on a fair amount of 1960s television nonetheless.

Whatever happened to all that elaborate stage fighting we used to have on television.  For all the advancement we've made in special effects over the years, the art of fight choreography on television  seems to have been lost.

I mean, do you still see choreography like this on TV nowadays?



And not just Star Trek, of course but remember Disney's old Davy Crockett TV show?



Other Posts on Star Trek

My review of Star Trek Beyond here.
My review of Star Trek Into Darkness here,
My review of the original 2009 reboot here.
My review of Star Trek Enterprise here.
My 4th grade report (1987) on the original Star Trek series here.