Okay, it gets poked fun at a bit today — but when Star Trek debuted forty years ago (!) tonight … egads.
SF on TV to that time had been in a couple of forms: kiddy shows (Space Patrol), anthologies (Outer Limits, Twlight Zone — but both had gone the way of all TV anthologies), and goofy dreck from Irwin Allen (Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). Star Trek was something different — SF that took itself seriously, that pulled in real SF writers, that considered human problems from the perspective of alien situations.
ST:TOS was hardly the perfect SF series of all time. From the perspective of today, it’s melodramatic, crudely crafted, facile, and a host of other sins. But the same could be true of practically any other TV series from 1966-68.
There’s a reason it still holds such influence, even today, forty years later.
I have two memories of ST:TOS during its original run. The first is an image of a huge plasma bolt hurtling toward the viewer’s perspective — probably one of the ones fired by the Romulans in Balance of Terror. And I also remember how upset I was one evening that I wasn’t allowed to watch the show (bear in mind I was about Kitten’s age then), and, when sent to bed, I locked the door in the hallway, so that when my parents retired for the evening, they found themselves locked
out of the back of the house. (To add insult to injury, their tapping on the window could only wake up my brother, not me, who needed a chair and special coaching to get the door back unlocked.) Yes, I have always been a fanatical geek.
At any rate, my congratulations and appreciations to the creators and talent of the Original Star Trek. You really did take us someplace where no one had gone before — and we’ve enjoyed the trip ever since.
Yeah, I can’t watch many of the eps now but back then it wasn’t just head and shoulders above the competition: the competition needed binoculars to see Star Trek’s knees way up there in the heavens.
OMG, all you need to know is that the contemporaries of TOS, as far as prime time SF, were all Irwin Allen productions: Time Tunnel, Lost in Space, and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. The golden age of TV SF, the great anthologies of Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, were no longer around. And basically, after TOS went off the air, it was even more of a dead man’s land until Star Wars came out.
Years in the wilderness, man …
Well, there is a tiny, extremely cheesy place in my heart for both Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
LiS took the cheesy Trek sets and rather than trascending them like Trek did, reduced itself to the camp that styrofoam rocks implies.
Voyage was really a military show with a few SF elements thrown in. Although the flying mini-sub = totally awesome!
Actually LiS predates TOS — hence, the first season’s black and white goodness. Alas, after the first season, which was cheesy but fairly straight adventure of a (Space) Family Robinson, the cheese level was ramped up in color by making it more about the adventures of Dr Smith, Will, and the Robot. (And a lot of the exteriors were changed into interiors — all styrofoam / paper-mache, all the time).
VttBotS started out a lot more straight action-adventure, too — fighting the commies was big in the first (black and white) season. With color came more of the Attack of the Giant (Human-Scaled-Compared-to-the-Seaview-Model) Critter episodes.
I love both shows, and have Voyage (S.1) on DVD (and LiS S.1 on my wish list).