That’s amazing dude.
OMG yes Rich, that looks amazing.
I’m disappointed he didn’t mention that in the first episode Troi was more than an empath, she could read minds. It was dumb.
Probably my favorite of all Star Trek episodes, regardless of series. And, lord help me, I’m old enough to remember TOS when it was original.
The finale of the series was also just top notch, I mean Q is back, the trial never ended, and he asks after 7 years if Picard has learned anything?
So good.
Great closing line: “And the sky’s the limit!”
In 1966 I was 14, and my best friend at the time had the only color TV in the neighborhood. I would go running to his house 3 evenings a week to watch TOS and Batman (In Color!)
We got our first color TV the following year, in time for the second season. I remember that, watching football games, the Cleveland Browns orange helmets looked sort of magenta and the Green Bay Packers yellow helmets looked orange.
Well, if we’re going to take a stroll down memory lane … I unfortunately missed out on seeing TOS on TV, but I am old enough to have been prime semgraphic for the Stsr Trek cartoon. Now looking back on it, the show wasn’t that great. Looking back, I’m not sure it was a great cartoon, the animation was pretty shoddy … but I loved it. It was more Trek, and it was one of my favorite things as a kid, at least until Star Wars came along.
I sense disappointment.
To be honest, I’m not sure how much you actually missed out on. At the time, especially in the first season, it was excitingly different from anything else on TV, and seasons one and two had some really good stories, like “The City on the Edge of Forever.” Season three, however, was almost universally awful, sprinkled with unintentionally funny, like “Spock’s Brain.” And the special effects were always low-budget and sometimes British TV cheesy. Even in the 1960’s, the Gorn looked like a guy in a rubber lizard suit. You were probably better off coming along later when you could pick and choose from reruns and video.
But Arena is one of my favorite episodes! The cheese factor just makes it that much better, like fine nachos.
I think you just coined what’s going to become one of my favorite descriptive phrases!
I was so hyped for TNG when it debuted, and bitterly disappointed with what I saw. I think the show got off to a rocky start. But over time, it found its stride and became a great show. Hard to argue with episodes like Ship in a Bottle, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Darmok, Lower Decks, etc.
I’m still a TOS man if push comes to shove. But part of my brain still lives back in the '90s when the world was bright and TNG was a going concern.
That Honest Trailer was fantastic. I forgot just how often Worf got his ass kicked on the show until they reminded me. Worst…Klingon…Ever. =)
I was 17 when TNG premiered. A couple of years later, when I switched my college major from Broadcasting to Information Technology (long story), a surprisingly large number of my classmates at the time cited the Star Trek movies, TOS and TNG as their motivations for going into the technology field. Star Wars was a distant second. I had almost the opposite reaction. While I enjoyed TOS for what it was (I only ever watched it in syndication) appreciated the movies as entertainment, and was somewhat impressed by the depth of the first couple of TNG seasons, the show itself never really had an impact on me in terms of pushing me towards a career in tech.
Instead, it was taking apart my old Atari 800XL, 130XE, 1050 drives and eventually my first Nintendo Entertainment System (after my apartment flooded while I was gone and it got submerged in 12" of water) that got me interested in tech hardware, and countless hours of messing around with code and gaming on those systems and an IBM PC XT that sparked an interest in software and connectivity. That and a BIG assist from Blade Runner…
The TNG first season is definitely full of a lot of stinkers. But definitely agree there’s a lot of gems ones you get past the first season. I guess it’s a sign of pent-up Star Trek demand from 18 years off the air that TNG stayed on the air long enough for it to gain its footing.
I grew up coming home from school and then going to the TV to watch our daily TOS rerun. So I’ve got a lot of TOS in my heart, cheese and all. We even owned the TOS books, which were essentially collections of short stories about the TOS episodes. I think we had all 12 of them.
And Spock’s Brain is one of my favorites. “Brain and brain! What is brain?”
Now you’re gettin’ nasty. :)
The TOS effects varied in quality (though the design was often outstanding), but seldom dipped to the level of, say, '70s Doctor Who.
The Gorn’s lips didn’t move, but it was still a strong Wah Chang design. The Salt Vampire on the other hand was awesome.
And they were making stuff up as they went along. Like the transporter effect.
When I first viewed the transporter effect, I was as curious as anyone else might be and asked the inventive Darrell Anderson how he achieved it. Darrell said, “I just turned a slow-motion camera upside down and photographed some backlit shiny grains of aluminum powder that we dropped between the camera and a black background.”