Oh, I know very well what it was. I just don't retain a clear sense memory of the flavor. I've been drinking real orange juice for so long that I don't really remember how the fake stuff tastes.
TOS Innovations
- Thread starter RookieBatman
- Start date
I remember Tang from the early 1970s, it was sour/tart. You are better off not remembering what it tasted like. The only good thing about Tang at that time was you got a free small plastic lunar rover with astronauts toy that came with it.
From the Season 1 episode "Charlie X":
KIRK[to the Chef]: On Earth today, it's Thanksgiving. If the crew has to eat synthetic meat loaf, I want it to look like turkey.
I don't know what synthetic meat loaf on the Enterprise was made of, but I hope it was not soybean. Did the James Blish novel of this episode go into any detail about it? This question goes out to any member not just to Christopher.
Navigator, NCC-2120 USS Entente
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I remember drinking Tang as a kid back in the 70's.
When I read this about Tang's taste, I had a sudden flashback.
To the taste of orange juice laced with dirty pennies.
Blish's adaptation (entitled "Charlie's Law") trimmed out a lot of material from the episode, including the turkey/Thanksgiving references. That was actually the first story in the first volume of Blish's adaptations, and those early ones were heavily trimmed and modified.
The 'modifications' were the direct result of Blish working from early drafts of the screenplays. The trimming seemed to me to be because of how many stories were included in each volume.
That's part of it, but it's a common misconception that it's the only reason things were changed. In fact, back in those days, it was commonplace for novelizers to change the stories they adapted, to bring their own creativity to the work and rewrite it as they saw fit. After all, they didn't have home video back then, so a novelization might be the only version of the story that a reader ever encountered, at least within recent memory. So there wasn't really any pressure to match the original version. (For instance, Isaac Asimov massively rewrote Fantastic Voyage and even changed the ending in order to make it less scientifically absurd. No one would ever be able to get away with that today.)
In the early volumes, Blish rewrote the TOS episodes to fit his own ideas and sensibilities. He even inserted references to elements from his own original science fiction -- for instance, in "Miri," he retconned the duplicate Earth into an Earth colony founded by refugees from the "Cold Peace," a tyrannical period from the history of his Cities in Flight series. And in "Tomorrow is Yesterday," he mentions the Vegan Tyranny, an alien civilization from the same series. He basically wrote the first few volumes as if Star Trek were taking place in his own universe. (Which illustrates how small Trek was at the time, compared to how big Blish was.) It was only in later volumes, as the show became widespread in syndication and fans began complaining about the changes, that Blish began to adapt them more faithfully.
A lot of that gets more into the 'why', rather than the 'what'. Anything Blish added to the adaptations from other works, especially his own, he put in as much because he wasn't working with the final shooting scripts as because of the disparity between his fame and Star Trek's fame, or whether the readers had seen the episodes in question.
Just from the first volume alone we got "The Unreal McCoy"(the original title), the adaptation of "The Mantrap", which was just about the most faithful adaptation in that volume, save for naming Professor and Nancy Crater 'Bierce'. And that may have been their name in the earlier draft. That says to me that the earlier draft there was rather close to what they wanted, and just needed some polish. But the differences in "Miri" may well have been because the earlier draft wasn't well developed, and he felt free to throw whatever he wanted into it.
In a later volume, 2 or 3, the adaptation for "Friday's Child" was similarly underdeveloped and therefore more differences show up, from the spelling of klugat(klegat or kligat in the episode) to Eleen not only being unfaithful to the Teer, but killed at the end. Blish may have felt he could put elements of his own work in, but he did it sparingly, seemingly only if he thought he could get away with it. Many of the differences were just omissions, probably to save space. Six or eight adaptations per volume with a page limit of what, 150? How many pages per adaptation does that leave versus how many does a full adaptation actually need? These were not full novel-sized books by any means.
Just from the first volume alone we got "The Unreal McCoy"(the original title), the adaptation of "The Mantrap", which was just about the most faithful adaptation in that volume, save for naming Professor and Nancy Crater 'Bierce'. And that may have been their name in the earlier draft. That says to me that the earlier draft there was rather close to what they wanted, and just needed some polish. But the differences in "Miri" may well have been because the earlier draft wasn't well developed, and he felt free to throw whatever he wanted into it.
In a later volume, 2 or 3, the adaptation for "Friday's Child" was similarly underdeveloped and therefore more differences show up, from the spelling of klugat(klegat or kligat in the episode) to Eleen not only being unfaithful to the Teer, but killed at the end. Blish may have felt he could put elements of his own work in, but he did it sparingly, seemingly only if he thought he could get away with it. Many of the differences were just omissions, probably to save space. Six or eight adaptations per volume with a page limit of what, 150? How many pages per adaptation does that leave versus how many does a full adaptation actually need? These were not full novel-sized books by any means.
Yes, thank you, I did, in fact, already acknowledge that lack of shooting scripts was part of the issue. I never denied that. It's just that a lot of people make the mistake of assuming it's the one and only reason for the differences, and that is a gross oversimplification. It's just one of the reasons, and it's erroneous to attribute all of the changes to it, not to mention unfairly dismissive of Blish's own creativity.
What people today often don't understand about novelizations back then, as I already pointed out, is that it was routine for novelizers to make changes. It wasn't some rare anomaly that needed a special explanation. It was what they did as a matter of course. The modern expectation that a novelization be a faithful copy of the source is a product of the home video era. Even if Blish had been working from the final scripts, even if he'd been sent film reels of the finished episodes, he would still probably have changed things, because that's what novelizers did back then.
I think that Sunny-D might be close in taste to Tang, though not as gritty.
I also loved Space Food Sticks.
I remember getting the space food sticks a couple of times in my elementary school cafeteria. That would have been back in the early 70s. To be honest, thinking back, I'm not sure how we survived that cafeteria food - nothing ever had a taste and was very unappealing (but we ate it along with our little carton of milk)
I'm from about the same era, but I don't remember that. Maybe it was really early '70s
To be honest, thinking back, I'm not sure how we survived that cafeteria food - nothing ever had a taste and was very unappealing (but we ate it along with our little carton of milk)
I admit to having had a certain fondness for the school-lunch version of pizza -- a rectangular piece of crust covered in some sort of ground meat and cheese, and perhaps some tomato sauce, though I'm not sure of that. I was actually kind of disappointed when it got reformulated to something closer to actual pizza.
And I liked the tartar sauce. The only reason I could stand to eat the fish sandwiches they served was because I could slather them in tartar sauce.
You are describing what we used to call pizzaburgers, because they were made on hamburger rolls not bread or pizza crust. I still miss those even though I haven't had one in more than 40 years.
No, they weren't made on burger rolls. They were on a floppy, thin rectangular pizza crust or flatbread. I've occasionally seen similar pizzas in vending machines in more recent years. I think the meat on them may have been ground beef, though, at least in the '70s.
Apparently I'm not the only person who's nostalgic for them:
http://953thebear.com/remember-the-rectangle-pizzas-we-had-at-school-in-the-80s/
My mom made her own pizza burgers. She used regular burger buns, but put on them pizza sauce, a full quarter pound patty of Italian sausage, and Mozzarella cheese. I always loved those. I'll have to make my own one of these days.
Yeah the pizza I do remember liking as well as the french fries. And yes - rectangular/square slices. Seems like sausage or hamburger along with the smattering of sauce and cheese were the common topping or maybe it was just cheese. This would have been 72-74 or so.
Yeah, that's my impression -- that we had ground beef (?) and cheese "pizzas" when I was in grade school in the '70s, but then they upgraded them to sausage, tomato sauce, and mozzarella in the '80s, which is what's in that link there.
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