Not to derail the thread any further, but there was a Star Trek Voyager marathon on one of the cable channels this weekend. I tuned in for about 20 minutes when I came across it, then my 13-year-old daughter walked in the room and asked what I was watching. She usually likes to watch sci-fi stuff with me, but she took one look at the screen and said “Oh my god, what is this? It’s terrible! Look how fake all the aliens look, and what is with the ship, are they for real? How old is this show? You used to watch this? And not laugh?”.
As I turned a more critical eye to the screen I realized how lucky we are to be TV and movie viewers in an age of CGI and amazing special effects that allow us to feel as if we are actually watching people in spaceships or in Middle Earth or whatever. Even 15-20 years ago during Voyager’s run our imaginations had to do a lot more filling in of the gaps.
To be fair, that was my initial reaction to Star Trek: TNG as well when it first started airing. I didn’t think it looked all that great, even at the time. (I had not seen the original). But once you start paying attention to the stories and the characters, the low tech look kind of falls by the wayside and becomes unimportant.
This was especially driven home to me when I watched Babylon 5. I instantly became a huge fan. I thought the CG on it looked so much better than the models from Star Trek. Their sets still looked cheap though. But over the years even though I remained a B5 fan, watching that show really gave me a new appreciation for the things Star Trek does well: focusing on characters, good acting, low key but decent classical score in every episode. In the end, even though I liked both shows at the time, I remember DS9 and TNG much more fondly than Babylon 5.
One show that did great CG and still had the strengths of Star Trek was Ron Moore’s Battlestar Galactica. Such a great show. It’s a shame it had a poor ending.
The early and cheap CG of TNG, DS9, and even Voyager did not age well at all. It looks really bad.
Like I said above, the advantage of the old series is that with multiple decades, the cheesy practical effects have become charming to modern eyes. The laughably fake Gorn mask and suit is awesome looking now.
One of the worst things, to my eyes, is how the recent “HD” upgrade for the old series replaced the interstitial Enterprise model fly-by shots with shitty CG.
Another way to look at it would be to consider how lucky your 13-year-old is to be growing up in this era of so-called “Peak TV” where excellent sci-fi shows like The Expanse, Stranger Things, The Man in the High Castle, and Doctor Who are just lying around waiting to be binge-watched. A time when your greatest challenge is that you might miss a really good show simply because there are so many other excellent things to see.
Whereas we old folks were pretty much starved for ANY sci-fi content on TV back around the turn of the millennium. This is a time when we were having to set our VHS tapes to record an episode of Voyager, or Andromeda, or Lexx, or… I dunno, Cleopatra 2525. I think it was less about mentally filling in the gaps, and more about trying to deceive ourselves into thinking that Dark Angel had anything going for it other than Jessica Alba’s butt in spandex.
Yeah. I was born in 1965, and let me tell you, there was sooo little in the way of good science fiction on TV in the 70s.
Star Trek (TOS) and Twilight Zone were pretty much it for any kind of science fiction that took itself seriously. The alternatives? Stuff like Lost in Space (loved that when I was 6, was horrified at how bad it actually was when I saw it again at about age 12), Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea (cool ships, horrific monsters-of-the-week), and kids shows like Ark II and Land of the Lost. That was IT. The late 70s finally at least brought Battlestar Galactica (one pretty good season for its time, followed by the horrific Galactica 1980) and Buck Rogers in the 25th Century. (Where a guy named Hawk who had feathers for hair flew a ship that had talons for landing gear. :vomit:) There was also Space: 1999, but that was mostly notable for having the coolest SF ships this side of Starfleet with the Eagles.
TOS had issues, but compared to any shows of its eras, it has real SF writers doing stories instead of monster-of-the-week shows, it mostly took itself seriously (and had some fun times when it didn’t – “A Piece of the Action,” “The Trouble with Tribbles”), and only a few really terrible episodes. (I still think TOS beats all the other series for good-in-its-time to bad episode ratio.)
TV SF didn’t start getting decent until the end of the 80s, when we got TNG, Max Headroom, and Alien Nation, followed by Quantum Leap, DS9, X-Files, and Babylon 5 in the early 90s.
In the context of the SF TV wasteland that existed prior to TNG, TOS was pretty amazing, and nothing compared in overall originality and quality until the late 1980s.
Wait really? You’re going to shit-talk Hawk? That dude was awesome! At least I’m pretty sure he was! OK I don’t really remember anything about him but that feather 'do and his ship but they were awesome!
I’m pretty sure Hawk’s ship was actually called Talon, just to complete the circle of vomit-worthy screenwriting. That said, 10-year-old me LOVED Buck Rogers. Looking back it was complete shit, but that and BattleStar Galactica in the same time period was sci-fi heaven for a kid who had seen Star Wars a dozen times in the theater just a couple of summers earlier. Also, Erin Gray in those skin tight lycra future jumpsuits may be singlehandedly responsible for implanting a minor fetish that survives to this day…so shiny! ;-)
I also enjoyed the whole thing when I saw it on DVD in mid-2000s. It’s only when I was watching back in the 90s as it aired that for some reason I didn’t really realize what a gem the show was until Season 4 onwards. When I rewatched it all on DVD, I enjoyed nearly the whole thing. There was at least one stinker in each season I think, and the first season had a few mediocre ones, but other than that, I really enjoyed it this time.
I’m happy you’ve been enjoying the whole thing, and you haven’t even gotten to the best stuff yet.
[quote=“Telefrog, post:290, topic:77660, full:true”]One of the worst things, to my eyes, is how the recent “HD” upgrade for the old series replaced the interstitial Enterprise model fly-by shots with shitty CG.
Same here. I think the picture on the right looks way better.
And I love the HD version they came out with in general. The establishing shots of believable looking planets really helps set the mood way better than the original visuals.
Every part of this is wrong. The acting was on par for 60s dramatic television, which is to say decent. Others have already addressed the generally high quality of the writing. And it was, in fact, a tremendously expensive show to produce. That’s why NBC cancelled it in spite of generally high ratings.
Nah. The acting was on par for 60’s TV, which is to say hammy and melodramatic. No show on TV at the time gets a pass there. I’ll concede the writing was generally good. (Who am I to disparage Harlan Ellison?) As for expensive? OK. I still say the sets, costume, and special makeup are… “quaint” is the word I’ll use.
As for it being a ratings success, I’ll point out that the assertion that original Trek was secretly a success and NBC was covering up the real data is bunk. The show’s ratings dropped precipitously after the first couple of episodes. Coupled with the aforementioned expense, the network really didn’t have much choice to cancel even after the write-in campaign,
I think it would be an awesome show which followed one of the crew who didn’t know what was going on. Picard’s voice would come over occasionally over the intercom, and strange and baffling things would happen during the episode (“WTF are these aliens trying to kill us? why are these fluffy things EVERYWHERE? What are these spots growing on me?”).
It would be like the Office and the protagonist has no control at all over the overall outcome of each episode. He just has to make it to the next one and occasionally he gets saved by Data or Worf or one of the other command “stars”. Or maybe he inadvertently saves the ship from time to time, in the course of self-preservation.
Which episodes in the first couple of seasons of DS9 are critical for understanding the main plot? I tried going through it probably about 6-8 years ago and petered out either in the middle of season 2 or season 3. I just rewatched Emissary which was enjoyable enough, and was considering just trying to bull through the first couple seasons back to where I was before, but got bored watching Jake and Nog act as delinquents and Keiko setup the school again in the second episode. It was fine the first time, and I actually like Jake and Nog, but it’s just not that exciting as a rerun.
