When they fired the phasers out of the torpedo tube in Darmok I thought they were just detonating the torpedoes in the tube and directing the explosive force via a beam instead of the effects guys just making a blunder.
This is kind of embarrassing. Generations was the first Star Trek movie that I saw. I watched it shortly after it was out on video. It was also one of the first Star Trek productions I watched, period. So I wasn't very familiar with the casts yet. I knew Kirk and Spock, but that was pretty much it. Anyway, at the beginning of Generations I thought that Chekov was Sulu and that he was introducing his own daughter to Kirk. I think it might have been because Chekov, for some reason, had intimate knowledge of when Kirk last saw Demora. I still think that was weird.
When Star Trek debuted in 1966, most of the cast was unfamiliar to me. I thought Leonard Nimoy's name was stressed on the second syllable (nih-MOY) and George Takei's name sounded something like "tacky."
I was hoping you guys would "get" it, but In Star Trek 2 and 3, Spock's casket is a torpedo that says Mark IV. So, as a kid, I though his name was Mark...
In the episode The Changling, when Nomad became confused and said "error error," I though it was saying "air air."
This is more about my ignorance of TV production than Trek but on TNG I used to think every new room on the ship was a new set and there was a vast set for the Enterprise on the Paramount lot. Only later did I realise they reused the same sets again and again for different parts of the ships. I used to believe the turbolifits worked too. Oh to be young again...
The bridge really faces downward, since the artificial gravity can be oriented any way the designers wanted. The turbolift makes a 90 degree turn as it comes up. (Actually, that's a mistake made in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY. We see a stewardess walk 180 degrees around a circular hallway to enter the cockpit of the moon shuttle. External shots of the model show the viewports on the top of the craft, suggesting the pilots lay on their backs, as with all real rocket designs. So the stewardess should have walked up the wall and into the cockpit.) Maybe the botanical garden in the movie Enterprise was green, or the lavender color of "grow lights," but the color did not carry through to the movie screen. After all, the TOS command shirts were a green-gold. Television has never been known for its color integrity. (TV engineers jokingly say that NTSC stands for "never the same color." However, the material of those shirts was partly responsible for the color ambiguity.) So what technical detail did I get wrong? I thought the silver control near the barrel of the phaser 2 was symmetrical. I can't remember when it was finally brought to my attention, but even in the series it is evident that the control is only on the left side of the weapon. I guess one of the side effects of the Eugenics War was the elimination of left-handedness. Sorry, Mr. Flanders.
Well, in the British Army everyone has to learn to shoot right-handed, because their bullpup-type L85 rifle will eject its shell casings right in a lefty's face.
In TOS I did think the Mk1 Phaser was fired by pressing down of the top of it on that raised section below the silver plate. It was not until MUCH later I found out the raised thing was a sighting viewer and the real firing button was a small nub underneath. I still to this day cannot figure out how the TOS Tricorder is supposed to be operated with three lights and three knob/buttons- no matter what exotic thing you want it to scan for it is just a tap/twist away...
I used to think that the Menagerie was a 100% "new" episode and Jeff Hunter played the crippled Pike.
When i was a little child my older brother would watch Wrath of Khan, Search for Spock and Undiscovered Country a couple times a week. I would sit in the room and watch the films but not really pay attention or understand what was happening and so i had a fairly jumbled idea of the plot. In fact the three movies tended to blend into one in my mind so it wasnt til i was a little older that i started to wonder why Khan and his crew didnt have forehead ridges like the other klingons. Eventually i caught the episode Space Seed on tv back when they were reshowing TOS and also rewatched Wrath of Khan and discovered they were genetically enhanced supermen and not klingons. Needless to say Wrath of Khan and the following movies made a lot more sense after that.