If TNG/DS9/VOY were never made, would you have watched TOS?

Good point. Would I have stuck with TNG during its rocky first season if I hadn't grown up on TOS? Who knows?

 

TOS itself just never won me over. Sure there's some great episodes in there, but there's also some facepalmingly bad ones. That coupled with the 60's setting that just rubbed me the wrong way, I never could enjoy it much.

To me the TOS movies were way more enjoyable than the series itself. I probably would've seen those at some point, but they might have not been enough to make me a "trekkie" by themselves.

 

I'm pretty sure I still would have watched TOS, even if the other series had never been made. I generally don't judge a TV show based solely on its age. I love M*A*S*H, and it ended two years before I was born. And I Love Lucy was decades before my time, and I find it hilarious.

Plus I kind of love cheesy sci-fi. It's one of the reasons why I'm such a huge Mystery Science Theater 3000 fan.

 

TOS first aired when I was a teenager, so I never perceive what people call the cheesiness factor. But to put that in perspective, I'm usually able to watch the really really old stuff like Fritz Lang's original, black and white, silent film Metropolis, or Buster Crabbe's old Flash Gordon/Buck Rogers serials and accept them as visions of the future in the context of their times. It's likely thanks to the efforts of early fan-historians like Forrest J. Ackerman that I can appreciate things before my time.

 

Probably. I had already seen some episodes in late-night (midnight) syndication and essentially grew up in the TOS-film era. So I'm sure that, at some point, I would have gone back to watch the whole TOS run. I will say, though, that it was my love of TNG that ultimately motivated me to do it.

 

I love Metropolis! It's one of my favorite silent films. It's a shame that so many people haven't seen it, simply because of its age. I also love A Trip to the Moon. It always cracks me up to see guys in top hats and tailcoats walking around on the moon. People sure had strange ideas about space travel in the 1900s.

 

I don't know, it's nice to see a movie whose architecture has influenced many other movies but it is kinda like reading the early work of an author, in and of itself not that great.
Lang's stuff is interesting because his work unconsciously reflects many trends: Metropolis is fascist propaganda, M is anti-fascist, the silent Mabuse neatly show this post WWI moral and ideological emptiness. If it were more self-aware it wouldn't work.

 

I don't think Melies' A Trip to the Moon was ever intended to be taken seriously, as it's full of obvious sight gags. But it's important because Melies was one of the first to recognize how film could produce illusions impossible to perform on a stage.

 

I watched TOS in syndicated reruns before TNG even premiered.

 

Interestingly, TOS was 20 years old when TNG started
TNG was 20 years old when ENT started and JJTrek released

(anals, please treat both occurences of the number 20 above as aproximations)

Does the following question make sense?
"If ENT/JJ were never made, would you have watched TNG/DS9/VOY?"

 

I did not know that! I've heard of Woman in the Moon, but I've never actually seen it. I see it's been posted on Youtube, though. I'll have to watch it!

 

I was a child when TNG was on tv but i ended up watching TOS first because reruns were showing and my parents were fans. Its funny but at the time i enjoyed watching TOS episodes more than TNG which i only started watching because my older brother had control of the tv remote. I got attatched to the TNG characters and came to enjoy but as a child i somehow found TOS more understandable and relatable and fun.

 

Same here. I was born in April, 1970, and was "weened", you might say on TOS by my mom, who watched it religiously during it's NBC run, and all the years afterward. By the time TNG came along, I was 17, and had a well-defined "Star Trek love", if you will. So yes, I'd have watched TOS even if nothing else had ever been made.

But I'm glad they were.

 

I probably would have caught some of the episodes in syndication when I was a teenager.

 

Probably not. I remember TOS episodes before TNG premired back in the 80s. I found them unwatchable

 

Same with me. My parents showed me TOS even before I could think. So the TOS Crew was sort of a second family - on screen. But one of my oldest conscious memory of Star Trek was watching TNG in the living room with the family. We went so far as to record every episode and watched it for dinner, like a celebration.
But though I'm of the TN-Generation, TOS was a constant escort. All the gaps between the two generations/time frames (esp. in relation to our own time frame) were an important item to consider for my analysis.

 

TNG was the first star trek I was exposed to, and for a long time, it was the only one I liked. When I got to my late teens, I gave TOS another shot and fell in love. Now TOS and TNG are both my favorites, but TOS just feels more important, and iconic. I give TOS a slight edge these days.

Would I have become a TOS fan without TNG to pave the way? It's hard to say. I think I would have, since my father was a big TOS fan since he was a kid. If there had not been a TNG, I think he would have turned me on to it. I don't think I would like it as much as I do now if it hadn't been for TNG, though. I think TOS and TNG really enhance eachother. The Trek Universe feels so much larger when you take both into account.

 

This.

I started watching in 1976.

In the case of Enterprise it is a pretty big approximation as The Next Generation was two years shy of twenty when the former was cancelled in 2005.