Your Trek moments...

[Silvermane]

* Watching Spock battling his emotions in The Naked Time. 7 Years old, it hit me like a truck.

* Loving every Spock/McCoy argument and just knowing they really cared for each other.

* Begging for, and receiving, a tricorder, phaser, and communicator model set for my birthday. Doing a horrible job of assembling it.

* Also, seeing it for the first time in color. Gold uniform shirts; who knew?

* Finding the book, Star Trek Lives!

* Seeing the full page ad in the newspaper heralding naming a space shuttle, Enterprise. (Finding out later it would never go to space.)

* Seeing a bearded McCoy "checking himself" when transported to the Enterprise in TMP.

 

[MGagen]

- Seeing the premiere broadcast of The Man Trap with my dad as a 5-year-old.

- Waiting for the bus in my grade school cafeteria and seeing a model of the Enterprise that a kid had brought for show & tell.

- Seeing Leonard Nimoy at our local J C Penney's during his season three record tour.

- Getting my first copy of The Making of Star Trek

- Seeing a rare first printing of the soon-to-be-released Franz Joseph blueprints at a local Trek fan club meeting (Star Base 6)

- Seeing the newly released Star Fleet Technical Manual at the bookstore in October 1975 . . . and asking for it for Christmas.

M.

 

[Warped9]

- Waiting for the bus in my grade school cafeteria and seeing a model of the Enterprise that a kid had brought for show & tell.

M.

Wow! Way back I was a kid who brought my first AMT Enterprise model to school for show-and-tell. While I was excited I was also terrified that something could happen to the model. And given the crappy support pylon attachment design the model had then didn't make it any easier.

 

[Joel_Kirk]

My top moment was holding my newborn son while Balance of Terror was playing. He was only a few hours old and was sleeping away. When the episode ended he started crying.

Amazing.

He was moved by the episode as well...

 

[EnsignTOS]

I guess these don't exactly count as "moments" but here are a few of mine:

1. Hearing that glorious theme song for the first time. (The good one--not the one with the singing girls!) I can't really explain it; hearing it for the very first time, in a darkened room, able to hear all the combined sounds of the orchestra--from the horns to the bass--really gives you this sense of happiness and adventure. Yes, I was completely entranced. The very first episode I saw was "The Devil In The Dark". (Not at all bad for an introduction to the series.) And I've been a Trekkie ever since!

2. Annoyance at "Spirk".

3. Frustration that I wasn't around in the 60's or 70's when Star Trek was new and "all the rage". I could have collected a lot of memorabalia! Maybe even have met the entire cast.

4. Empathy for Spock. Being bullied and trying to pretend that none of it bothers you can make one crazy.

5. Any time I can get my hands on any kind of "Star Trek" material from shirts to magazines.

6. Trying to teach my toddler cousins to do the Vulcan salute.

 

[Warped9]

When you start thinking about this things come back to you.

Way, way back I started collecting the James Blish adaptations. At the time I probably hadn't seen all the episodes yet so coming across each new volume was exciting. It was the same later with the Alan Dean Foster adaptations of the TAS episodes which at the time (and in some ways still so today) struck me as more adult than the actual TAS episodes.

Back then new books were few and far between, unlike much later and today, so every new publication was exciting. Books like David Gerrold's The World Of Star Trek really opened my eyes to the existence and widespread extent of fandom.

 

[SPCTRE]

1996, FC, my first Trek movie in theaters.

 

[F. King Daniel]

*Age 5 or 6, I came home from school one day, my mother and grandfather were waiting with a shoebox wrapped up in wrapping paper. Inside was a second hand, beaten up Dinky Toys Enterprise. That toy will always be more awesome to me than all the screen-perfect replicas in the world put together.

*The AMT/ERTL Enterprise-A. Build and then glue, play, engine pylons break off, glue, play, break, repeat. Eventually I used Lego to build a shipyard where the Enterprise could land for repairs, with cranes and scaffolds - just like we'd see on film 20 years later

*Coming home from school one day, age 9 or 10 and finding out Mum had bought me the entire first set of Playmates TNG figures.

*Asking the guy at the RNIB bookshop if he had any more Star Trek novels, and getting laughed at. He took me to the back, where he showed me a crate full of them. I offered £20 and he very grudgingly accepted. Little did I realize that he meant ALL the crates in the stack which were ALL Star Trek. And I just got it all for £20. I remember sitting at home surrounded by 350 Star Trek novels, almost everything up until 2000 and loads of duplicates. Trek's world got a lot richer and deeper in the months that followed.

*All the hype for and then finally seeing Star Trek from 2007-2009. It was the Trek film I'd been waiting for forever.

*Seeing all of TAS on DVD, having previously only seen about half the episodes over a decade previously.

*Watching "That Which Survives" on my TOS DVD run through two years ago. Somehow I'd managed to miss this episode until then!

*Star Trek Into Darkness in cinemas last year. Saw it in the UK three times and then in the US with Yeoman Randi who I forgive (but only just) for not liking it.

 

[BeatleJWOL]

That awkward moment when you realize that Star Trek fanfiction invented and/or popularized the entire idea of modern "slash" fiction.

 

[EnsignTOS]

That awkward moment when you realize that Star Trek fanfiction invented and/or popularized the entire idea of modern "slash" fiction.

Fanart, too.

 

[EnriqueH]

Here's a few more:

*) Reading the "Taste from Armageddon" fotonovel over and over and over...

*) Reading a TV Guide blurb about Star Trek TNG's "Yesterday's Enterprise", and wondering whether it was about the TOS characters/Enterprise and tuning in. It was the first episode of TNG I ever watched (I had not bothered with the show until then), and I was hooked. I loved the show.

*) Watching TNG on Saturday nights in the early 1990s. Season 3-5.

*) Coming home from my high school graduation to watch "All Good Things..."

HOLY.

SHIT.

I just made the connection while writing this: Graduating kindergarten and watching TOS; graduating high school and watching TNG. There's a cool story there somewhere...

 

[eyeresist]

I have a bunch of memorable moment, but I think the one that affected me most is this:

For a while in the 80s I read a British magazine called Voyager (or New Voyager), which focused on science fiction film and TV, especially in relation to SFX and model work. They would feature some very impressive dioramas by their readers, and have "how to" stories. No, I never got into model building! But I remember they had an issue with extensive coverage of the upcoming Star Trek III. Some vivid, filmic stills were spread across a series of dark pages (I think the text was printed in white on a starfield), creating a sense of anticipation in me that felt momentous and magical.

Of course, as usual, the reality did not live up to the anticipation, but still, watching the film felt like a culmination and fulfilment.


To undercut the magic just a fraction, around that same time I believe I was also highly anticipating the Supergirl movie! That too was good, in its own way....

 

[SPCTRE]

*Coming home from school one day, age 9 or 10 and finding out Mum had bought me the entire first set of Playmates TNG figures.

Wow, your mum is amazing

 

[Commishsleer]

My top moment was holding my newborn son while Balance of Terror was playing. He was only a few hours old and was sleeping away. When the episode ended he started crying.

While not TOS, my wife was in labor with our oldest son when the Voyager episode "Scorpion, Part I" aired the first time. The doctor and I watched the episode while my wife was having contractions.

She hasn't let me forget to this day.

You sound like my husband. And not in a good way.

The moment my daughter was born my husband left to listen to the football on the car radio and I was left in the delivery room literally holding the baby.

Keep giving him heaps Mrs BillJ!