Star Trek's 50th Anniversary

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What a groundbreaking series in the history of television! My first memories of it was in initial reruns in the early 70s I believe


Launching rockets (or missiles in my case) is so easy a chimp could do it. Read a step, do a step, eat a banana.

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Gladly, Sadly, I watched them as they aired for the first time. It was great family time and a very unique TV show. Star Trek did for TV what Star Wars did for Movies.
 
I have to say I like TNG/DS9 more than TOS, but only because TOS is a little hard to watch. I'm just wondering what if there's a Star Trek episode where they land on a planet where nobody talks. They try to communicate to these people who never talk but release some weird radio transmission that they can't understand. A few red shirts die, and McCoy says "He's dead, Jim". They finally decode the message and it turns out they communicate by texting. Then Kirk texts them back, invites them to join the UFP, and everyone's happy... except for the red shirts who died...
 
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I'm not sure I would consider the anniversary date to be when they began filming the pilot. It seems like the anniversary would be counted starting from the date the first episode aired. I think it first aired in 1966, which is also the year I first "aired" (production started in 1965). So Star Trek has literally been around my entire life. I don't remember when I first saw the show, but I was just a little kid, and I liked it from the very beginning.
 
First there was TOS, which boldly went where no man had gone before. Then there was TNG, which was politically correct by boldly going where no-one had gone before, and factually incorrect because someone else had got there first otherwise there wouldn't be anyone for Enterprise to meet.

I did like watching most of them, except Voyager. I fell asleep during the first episode, tried to watch it again, fell asleep again, tried once more, and then gave up. I watched a few more episodes and finally concluded that I had more interesting things to do with my time. Some time later I thought that maybe I'd judged it too harshly on the basis of a few first season episodes, tried again, this was the episode in which they got trapped inside a singularity and escaped by shooting a hole in the event horizon, and I concluded that I'd been right after all.

There was one year when BBC2 showed TOS and TNG in parallel, TOS on one day of the week and TNG another day. One week, the TNG episode featured Geordi making a normal speech about solving this episode's problem by messing with the main deflector. The same week's TOS episode had Scotty start to go on about reversing the polarity of the neutron flow, then Kirk interrupted and said "Never mind the technobabble, just get on with it". And I sat there thinking "Yes! This is why I prefer TOS".

In TOS, redshirts were the expendable security or engineering people whose job was to die horribly and show the threat on this week's episode, while goldshirts were in command. In TNG it was the other way round. I want to see a film about the Redshirt Revolution. :D
 
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.
 
The thing that bugs me the most about all of the Star Trek shows was that everybody was an officer.

You had a Lt. Commander handling the helm. If I’m not mistaken in the U.S. Navy the helm duty is limited to a Second Class Petty Officer or BELOW.
 
Yea now that you mention it, I don't ever recall seeing any non-officers in Starfleet. Could it be the prerequisite to serving on a starship is to join Starfleet, and if you graduate Starfleet Academy (notice they are called Cadets) you become an officer. Or perhaps since the purpose of Starfleet is exploration, not military, so they simply do not have soldiers or NCO's. Even redshirts are officers.
 
Every branch of the service has its school/s for officers. Annapolis and West Point come to mind. But no service, military or otherwise, can function with everybody being an officer with everybody having to go to the Star Fleet equivalent of Annapolis or West Point.

IT’S JUST NOT DONE.

I never could understand why Roddenberry structured the show this way.
 
There may have been enlisted personnel on the original Enterprise. In some of the earlier episodes, like "The Man Trap", which featured the shape shifting salt vampire, some of the extras were referred to as "crewman". It wasn't consistent throughout the show. Star Trek wasn't the only show with rank issues. I never figured out the rank structure on Battlestar Galactica.
 
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.

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.
 
There may have been enlisted personnel on the original Enterprise. In some of the earlier episodes, like "The Man Trap", which featured the shape shifting salt vampire, some of the extras were referred to as "crewman". It wasn't consistent throughout the show. Star Trek wasn't the only show with rank issues. I never figured out the rank structure on Battlestar Galactica.

Since there were 437 people on board the Enterprise, and we only ever got to see 30 or 40 of them, I always assumed that the enlisted men just weren't worthy of TV time. :wink:

Seriously, though, since Trek tried to present a humanistic future without poverty, crime, or war, maybe they were trying to say that everyone was an officer, since everyone could get a college education. Maybe the idea of enlisted men was passe. Who knows?
 
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.

I think you are right about that. But whether it was in the pilot or not, those aliens were Buttheads.
 
Yea now that you mention it, I don't ever recall seeing any non-officers in Starfleet. Could it be the prerequisite to serving on a starship is to join Starfleet, and if you graduate Starfleet Academy (notice they are called Cadets) you become an officer. Or perhaps since the purpose of Starfleet is exploration, not military, so they simply do not have soldiers or NCO's. Even redshirts are officers.

What about Yeoman Rand? Or Chief O'Brien?

Presumably, the enlisted ranks were people who didn't wander the decks that the principle characters frequented.
 
OK, that show was my life for a while. In school there were fights over who could kick who's butt, Kirk or Han Solo.
 
Huge Trek fan here.

The original series - even with all the hokeyness/bad science/etc, is simply terrific. Nothing else can touch it.
Next Generation - it certainly had it's moments, and Picard & Data are awesome, but it never was a favorite for me.
Voyager - yeah I know I'm in the minority, but I actually really liked it. Some great stuff in there.
DS9 - loved it. I could do without the Ferengi, but if you simply eliminated all the Ferengi plotlines and silliness this series was outstanding. Two episodes that were just stellar were the one where they went back to the original Enterprise (and Tribbles!), and the one that went back in time and Sisko was a science fiction author - absolutely fantastic.
Enterprise - ok, you can't really call me a true Trek fan, because I watched one or two episodes, got bored and never saw anything else.

Anywho, although not a "Trekkie" (I have no desire whatsoever to dress up in costume and go to conventions), I'm a major Star Trek fan that loved watching the shows.

s6


Oh, and Han Solo wouldn't stand a chance against Kirk - not even in the same league by a long shot!
 
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...Anywho, although not a "Trekkie" (I have no desire whatsoever to dress up in costume and go to conventions)...

I took my mother to a Star Trek convention when she was 65, she'd was a Star Trek "viewer" she would say. She bought quite a bit of stuff though...

Oh, and Han Solo wouldn't stand a chance against Kirk - not even in the same league by a long shot!

Solo shot first. Wimp.
 
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I know it didn't happen in the movies, but if Han Solo became a Jedi... well let's just say "I find your lack of faith disturbing"...
 
Solo shot first. Wimp.

Solo shot first, smart. Ain't no second place in a gunfight that close. Or any gunfight, really. I just started watching Star Trek TOS, but some of my earliest memories are Star Wars, and I still toss in a Star Wars movie to play while I'm puttering at least once a month, which is all a really long way of saying I'm biased. But Kirk is never dirty and appears to have morals. Solo, he's dirty and lacks most moral standards. Solo will make a plaything of Kirk every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
BUT, Kirk is smooth and probably saves some coin, when Solo probably had to pay for a woman's company prior to meeting Leia.

And I think I am now an official dork having made my first public assertion of one fictional character over another to people I will probably never meet.
 
Solo shot first, smart. Ain't no second place in a gunfight that close. Or any gunfight, really. I just started watching Star Trek TOS, but some of my earliest memories are Star Wars, and I still toss in a Star Wars movie to play while I'm puttering at least once a month, which is all a really long way of saying I'm biased. But Kirk is never dirty and appears to have morals. Solo, he's dirty and lacks most moral standards. Solo will make a plaything of Kirk every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
BUT, Kirk is smooth and probably saves some coin, when Solo probably had to pay for a woman's company prior to meeting Leia.

And I think I am now an official dork having made my first public assertion of one fictional character over another to people I will probably never meet.

Yah!
 
Or Kirk vs Darth Vader...

Kirk: We come in peace *gags*
Darth: I find your lack of faith disturbing...
 
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