Star Trek's 50th Anniversary

How about Han Solo vs. Harry Mudd!

Rob Campbell said:

Kirk would just talk Vader's cybernetic implants into committing suicide, which would kill Vader. Problem solved.

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Now that was funny!

adrian said:

I did like watching most of them, except Voyager.

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At first, I didn't like Voyager either. I wanted Neelix to die. It got much better in season 2 (for one, Neelix became less wimpy and irritating and more interesting) and excellent in season 3 onward. Eventually, mainly because of the characters, it became my favorite, second only to TOS which is my favorite for the same reason, the characters. There were some really exceptional episode stories, too, in Voyager. However, ANY episode that focused primarily on Chakotay totally sucked. Always. 7 of 9 was a 10 of 10 in my book both as a bod and a character. T'Pol in Enterprise was a distant second. I had zero fondness for any ongoing female character in TNG or TOS and it wasn't due to their less than stunning appearance. They just weren't interesting personalities/characters to me.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00062IDDS/?tag=skimlinks_replacement-20

If you look at the negative reviews there, most are about a lousy video transfer, not about the series.

I kinda liked Voyager simply because it mirrored my life in a way... being stuck away from home with no way of getting back, and now the episode in my life is Endgame...

However some episodes were not all that good... like the one where those liquids from the Class Y planet turned into the crews of Voyager and somehow went flying around space, while they slowly disintegrate because they could only survive on the Class Y planet... too dark for me.

I liked DS9, especially the Ferengi ones, because I hated Ferengis and anything to make them comically suffer is entertainment for me.

I sorta "burned out" on Trek after about the second or third season of DS9... about the time "TNG" went off the air. DS9 started interestingly enough (though it was "Berman Trek" not "Roddenberry Trek", which wasn't NECESSARILY a bad thing!) and had some REALLY good episodes along the way, the Brian Keith one sticking out in my mind as one of THE best Trek episodes of all the series, among many others... but DS9 took on a much darker, "grittier" feel as it progressed, and I slowly lost interest... I remember seeing some of the "Section 31" stuff which was intriguing, but that's the only high point to the later seasons I can recall... I watched the first season of Voyager and part of the second, and "phased out" of Trek about that time... Voyager had much the same feel as DS9 to me at that point; they both went off in the "Berman-Trek" darker/grittier direction, and I basically lost interest and tuned out, for the most part, catching only the occasional episode here and there of both series. I didn't watch "Enterprise" at all in its first run... sad to say, because when I FINALLY saw most of them on SyFy or whatever over the past few years in reruns, I was HIGHLY impressed by it (for the most part-- some of the story arcs were rather weird, the whole "time war" thing with the Xindi being the chief weirdness) and the characters and their performances were interesting and well done, for the most part, and the stories were well written and more like "classic Trek" (TOS) in a lot of ways than most of the DS9/Voyager stuff had been (which started to more closely resemble a serial drama like "Dallas" set in space than true stand-alone Trek episodes, which most of TOS and TNG was, with the occasional cliffhanger/two or three-parter episode). I was saddened to learn that Enterprise only lasted two or three seasons, much like the original.

IMHO, Enterprise probably suffered a lot from "burnout" by the time it came on the air as Voyager and DS9 piddled out. It wasn't the "dark/gritty" version of Trek that most loyal viewers of those shows enjoyed, and didn't get much carryover from "old-style morality play Trekkers" that weren't big fans of the dark/gritty Trek and had lost interest in those series by that point anyway, and probably (like me) figured Enterprise was probably just "more of the same dark/gritty Trek crapola" that had infused itself into DS9 and Voyager, and just didn't bother-- IOW, a retread "more of the same" way to cash in with a new cast and setting...

Anyway, I wish BBC would show TNG, DS9, Voyager, and Enterprise in their entire runs.... it would be wonderful to see. We DVR TNG on BBC, but they do a weird 'hodgepodge' of episodes in no particular order from several series, and play them pretty much repeatedly over and over for some period of time, before switching to another hodgepodge assemblage of episodes from different seasons... no rhyme or reason to it apparently... not good because TNG DID have a definite "story arc" to the overall series, with references to previous episodes and occurrences in previous episodes thrown in among the "stand alone" episodes which play perfectly well out of order. The "serial" nature of DS9 and Voyager (which had far fewer stand-alone episodes) would make it totally nonsensical to play in that format...

Later! OL JR

Don't remember watching it the 60's. Cuz if I remember right, we didn't get a TV until 68.
I do remember watching the moon landing with Walter Cronkite in B&W.
And the Trek re-runs in the 70's on the same Zenith console B&W. Record Player on the left, Radio on the right and full of vacuum tubes.
Also remember going out to launch a rocket or 2 after an episode of Star Trek
One in perticular I remember is Kirk and the Lizard man put on a planet while their ships were held hostage until 1 killed the other.
Kirk had remember how to make gun powerd, build a cannon, then revused to finish of the Lizard. Never forget the aliens voice...
"Theres hope for your kind yet" or something like that.

ThirstyBarbarian said:

The original pilot, "The Cage," was incorporated into the second pilot, "The Menagerie." Those episodes featured the aliens that ny friends and I called The Buttheads, because their heads looked like veiny, cellulite-covered butts.

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LOL....I thought I was the only one who thought this way about those aliens. To this day, as a grown man, I still call them the butthead aliens. Folks around me thought I was just weird. Now I see I am not alone.

cgould said:

LOL....I thought I was the only one who thought this way about those aliens. To this day, as a grown man, I still call them the butthead aliens. Folks around me thought I was just weird. Now I see I am not alone.

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And you don't want to be anywhere near one when he has a brain fart!

Rob Campbell said:

And you don't want to be anywhere near one when he has a brain fart!

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Imagining seeing that blow out his teeny, tiny nose 💨. Brain fart through a Venturi!

cgould said:

LOL....I thought I was the only one who thought this way about those aliens. To this day, as a grown man, I still call them the butthead aliens. Folks around me thought I was just weird. Now I see I am not alone.

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Let me reassure you. You are not weird. Those heads looked like butts. And anyone who cannot see that is a Butthead!

cgould said:

LOL....I thought I was the only one who thought this way about those aliens. To this day, as a grown man, I still call them the butthead aliens. Folks around me thought I was just weird. Now I see I am not alone.

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I am 47 years old and I knew exactly which aliens you were talking about. I have been calling them buttheads since I was young enough to think I was getting away with something by calling them that!

ThirstyBarbarian said:

The original pilot, "The Cage," was incorporated into the second pilot, "The Menagerie." Those episodes featured the aliens that ny friends and I called The Buttheads, because their heads looked like veiny, cellulite-covered butts.

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The Menagerie wasn't the 2nd pilot. "Charlie X", "The Man Trap" and "Where No Man has Gone Before" were!

As I've said before, Spock and Bones would discover Midichlorians and Kirk would overdose on 'em to make the Force his bitch. TOS for the win.

PhlAsh said:

The Menagerie wasn't the 2nd pilot. "Charlie X", "The Man Trap" and "Where No Man has Gone Before" were!

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"The Cage" was the first pilot, which was rejected. Footage from "The Cage" was used in the two part episode, "The Menagerie". This episode, according to "The Making of Star Trek" was specifically written around the old footage to cut production costs and get the series back on schedule. "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was the second pilot, which was accepted. "Charlie X" and "The Man Trap" were early first season production episodes. "The Man Trap" has the distinction of being the first episode aired.

I enjoyed STAR TREK the Experience , although it is more fun to go to Vegas to launch rockets !

Kenny

I liked Enterprise a lot. I thought it was a pretty cool "prequel" type thing. Anyone catch the fact in the new Star Trek movies that Scotty got in trouble for teleporting "Admiral Archer's" dog?

RocketMike said:

I liked Enterprise a lot. I thought it was a pretty cool "prequel" type thing. Anyone catch the fact in the new Star Trek movies that Scotty got in trouble for teleporting "Admiral Archer's" dog?

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I caught it. And it was a Beagle too!

RocketMike said:

I liked Enterprise a lot. I thought it was a pretty cool "prequel" type thing. Anyone catch the fact in the new Star Trek movies that Scotty got in trouble for teleporting "Admiral Archer's" dog?

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I couldn't get past the cheesy theme song, but did catch the pet abuse reference.

KenRico said:

I enjoyed STAR TREK the Experience , although it is more fun to go to Vegas to launch rockets !

Kenny
View attachment 248045

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Cool... I'd like to go to that sometime...

Later! OL JR

KenRico said:

I enjoyed STAR TREK the Experience , although it is more fun to go to Vegas to launch rockets !

Kenny
View attachment 248045

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So, how many quatloos did you lose in the casino?

It's dead, Jim

-Dr. McCoy on the series' future.

I did like "Enterprise", though not the theme song. Possibly I was not as susceptible to Trek burnout as some others here due to having skipped "Voyager".

Take a look at the top entry on PML's Special Projects page:
https://www.publicmissiles.com/pml_special_projects.htm

Has anyone other than PML tried building that?

adrian said:

I did like "Enterprise", though not the theme song. Possibly I was not as susceptible to Trek burnout as some others here due to having skipped "Voyager".

Take a look at the top entry on PML's Special Projects page:
https://www.publicmissiles.com/pml_special_projects.htm

Has anyone other than PML tried building that?

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Yeah, the theme music sucked bigtime... sorta like Kip Lennon's "Buck Rogers" theme...

There was a build thread on YORF where someone built Soren's missile...

Later! OL JR

I wonder if that Enterprise theme is supposed to reach out to a hipper crowd? It breaks the character of Star Trek for sure...

Rod Stewart's 'Faith of the Heart' from Patch Adams was better than Watson's "Where My Heart Will Take Me" Enterprise version.

I have enjoyed all the different Star Trek series to one degree or the other. These shows all aired before the existence of DVRs and I never really was that great about taping shows, so I missed a lot of them when they first aired.

I've seen all the original series shows now, and I actually have a DVD set.

I probably saw about half of TNG on a hit or miss basis. At the time, it was one of my favorite shows on TV, and I still like it today.

I think I would have liked DS9 a lot better if I had been able to watch it consistently. It had more lengthy story arcs than the other series did, and I was not able to follow well at that time because it aired at an inconvenient time for me.

Ironically, I think I saw more of Voyager than any of the other series due to it being convenient for me, but it really was my least favorite. I think Voyager would have been better if they had gone more rogue instead of sticking to Starfleet ideals as consistently as they did. They were cut off from Starfleet and had rebels aboard at the beginning, and I think it would have been interesting to see the crew start to abandon their ideals in the interest of survival --- maybe go a little bit space pirate. Maybe some mutinies and murders. Maybe more space battles and capturing of prize ships and building a fleet of desperate fugitives in hostile space. it would have been an interesting counterpoint to the rest of the franchise.

I liked Enterprise. It started off rocky, like a lot of shows do, but it got better and was just hitting it's stride when it ended.

taiwanluthiers said:

I wonder if that Enterprise theme is supposed to reach out to a hipper crowd? It breaks the character of Star Trek for sure...

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I think that was the goal. They forgot that trying to appeal to hipsters is very unappealing to them.

I could get past the theme music as soon as the show started and I saw Jolene Blalock. Sorry Spock, but T'pol was my favorite Vulcan! There were some pretty good " in jokes" in Enterprise too, like the time that Reed comes up with the idea to have weapons and shields come online automatically at the first sign of a threat. He says that someday they might call it a "Reed Alert"

RocketMike said:

I could get past the theme music as soon as the show started and I saw Jolene Blalock. Sorry Spock, but T'pol was my favorite Vulcan! There were some pretty good " in jokes" in Enterprise too, like the time that Reed comes up with the idea to have weapons and shields come online automatically at the first sign of a threat. He says that someday they might call it a "Reed Alert"

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Yep, Jolene Blalock and Linda Park were both certainly easy on the eyes... as was their "decontamination procedures"... LOL Way back before they invented biofilters for the transporter, they had to scrub each other down in their underwear...

I liked "Enterprise" quite a bit, even though I never saw it in the first run... I was sad to hear it only lasted three seasons...

Later! OL JR

Bat-mite said:

The Menagerie wasn't the second pilot. The second pilot was Where No Man Has Gone Before (with Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood). The Menagerie was a clever way for Roddenberry to air much of the show that the network rejected, kind of an in-your-face move on his part.

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While Roddenberry may well have had that feeling of triumph, that was not why he did it.

From Wiki:

"The Menagerie" is a two-part episode of the American science fiction television series Star Trek. It consists of episodes 11 and 12 (production #16) of the show's first season, and is the only two-part story in the original series. Part one of the episode was broadcast on November 17, 1966, and the second part was broadcast on November 24, 1966. NBC repeated the two shows on May 18 and 25, 1967. The episode's screenplay was written by Gene Roddenberry. Since the true 1965 pilot episode "The Cage" was not shown on television until 1988 and the original series began with the second pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before", Desilu—the show's production company—made a decision on what should be done with the wasted footage from the unused pilot movie.[citation needed]

Incorporating "The Cage" into the two-part episode, "The Menagerie", was actually a solution to a large and growing problem with the show's production. Its special effects, unprecedented for a weekly television production, were causing delays in the completion of each episode. The problem was cumulative, with shows getting delivered to NBC later and later. At its worst, episodes (filmed in Los Angeles) were being delivered to NBC (in New York) only three days before their scheduled Thursday airing. Sensing impending disaster, Roddenberry solved the problem by writing a two-part episode that needed only one week of production.

He did this by writing an entirely new bookend story, so that "The Cage" would serve as a backstory for the Starship Enterprise '​s early history. New footage would be combined with the old and placed into the continuity of the overall Star Trek storyline."

The Talosians (aliens) in the Menagerie were played by female actresses, with their voices changed/replaced and some areas, uh, wrapped tightly.

I've enjoyed all the versions of Star Trek, except the last 2 movies. And I'll keep watching the movies anyway, they are not unwatchable but just disappointing to not live up to the standards of true Star Trek and revising so much "history" (like destroying Vulcan).

Even watched the Animated Series (Saturday morning cartoon). However, I do NOT remember this episode....




BTW - I highly recommend "Star Trek Continues". These are new live-action episodes, written more in the style of TOS, and taking place on the TOS Enterprise and its crew during the "Five Year Mission" that was only shown for three years on NBC. And thus they are plot-story-character-based and NOT over-hyped-overkill-hypnotize-special-effects based like the two recent movies.

https://www.startrekcontinues.com/episodes.html

The first one, "Pilgrim of Eternity", involves the return of the Greek god Apollo from the episode "Who Mourns for Adonais?". Using the very same actor as the original, Michael Forrest. The story explains why he looks so much older than the last time the Enterprise crew saw him (a year or two, or few Stardates, ago in TOS Trekverse, not 40-something years). You might wonder WTH is going on halfway thru, but the writing really comes thru in the end.....very TOS-Roddenberry-like.

The third one I liked a lot too. Remember "Mirror Mirror", with the alternate universe, Terran Empire rather than UFP, Spock with a beard?



This episode literally takes up where that original episode ended. We see what happens on the Terran Empire Enterprise, after "our" Captain Kirk has issued a challenge to the alternate Spock to make a difference, Kirk and the rest are beamed back to their universe and the alternate Kirk group return.

The second one was nice too but the first and third seemed a bit better. Of course part of that may be how much the 1st and 3rd are also more like sequels to the TOS episodes (in a good way, not the "Mudd's Planet" way of seeing Harry Mudd again....ugh).

Also, BTW, in this series, Scotty is played by Chris Doohan (Son of James Doohan), and Sulu is played by Grant Imahara, of Mythbusters fame.

- George Gassaway