When and how did you become a Star Trek fan?

Discussion in 'General Trek Discussion' started by Lance, Jul 27, 2018.

  1. Lance

    Lance Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    A place to share your Star Trek journey with us. :) What and when was the first Star Trek you saw? When did you get hooked on the final frontier?

    I have no firm foundations for when I first seen Star Trek. I've got vague recollections of STIII, though I would have been only two when it came to theatres, though seeing it on TV (in particular the 'Spock goes through Ponn Far' sequence). As I say, I have no firm idea when this was. I also recollect my four year old self upon being told by my big brother that Star Trek was returning to TV asking him if that's the show with the chair with buttons on it :lol: So I *clearly* had some early exposure to the franchise, but don't really remember when. I also have clear recall of seeing TNG's first season a year later, the episode I remember being one where the crew battle flying robots in a forest. I later learned this was "The Arsenal of Freedom", though again at the time I was waaaay too young to understand the story or follow exactly what it was I was watching! :D

    That came later. The time I became a fan is much clearer to me. And it wasn't the Movies or TV shows that hooked me. It was a videogame. The PC title, Star Trek: 25th Anniversary. I was by 1991 an avid player of point and click adventure games. Titles such as Monkey Island and King's Quest owned my life. So I played any adventure I could get my hands on, and the CD-ROM version of 25thA, featuring the full original cast reprising their roles as voices of the characters, was one of those. I suddenly realized how amazing these charjacters were and the incredible interplay between them. Spock and Boknes bickering with each other was hilarious, but I was also captured by the nature of this science fiction universe I was really discovering for the first time. In a great many ways, the game, a distillation of all the great things about Trek, but in a way that was interactive and engaged me as a part of the story, was the perfect 'gateway' into the show, free from judgments about low budgets or hokey effects. I fell in love with Star Trek the concept before I got around to seeing anything of the TV shows or movies.

    My subsequent "conversion" to Trek fan was rapid :) I ate up any Trek I could find. I hired the movies and original series on VHS casette from the local video library. Like many from the 1980s/1990s generation, I seen Khan's attempt at vengeance and his comeuppance in TWOK long before I ever saw Kirk sentence him to that fate in "Space Seed" ;) The Next Generation was also on TV and at the zenith of it's popularity during this time, so I became an avid viewer about season five/six. As time and finances, and saving of pocket money, gradually allowed I began to collect the Playmates toys and the episodes themselves on VHS (a particular nostalgic fondness for season two of TNG persists to this day from it being the only full season I owned so therefore the one that got a lot of replay :D). I was of course a fully paid up Trekkie by the time Deep Space Nine and Voyager premiered, and I watched both religiously through to their completions. Each of The Next Generation's movie outings were big events for me, and at the time I had no bad words to say about any of them not even Star Trek: Nemesis which I thought at the time was a fitting end to the adventures of these characters I'd grown to love (I was barely 20 when it hit theatres :guffaw: )

    What happened next? I didn't watch Enterprise for long after it's premiere. I found its premise as a prequel which looked more advanced than TOS and featured canon busting ideas to be too big a suspension of disbelief for me (in this way alone I have empathy for some of the Discovery haters, but only in this way alone :P ). I also found the characters unlikable and annoying and lacking the spark of the previous ensembles. It was during this period that I lost faith in Trek, and as I say never during its original run did I get around to seeing more than those first few episodes of Enterprise. That entering the work force and other life interests took over during this period is also, probably, a contributing factor. I greeted the news that the next movie would be a reboot/reimagining/prequel with considerable amounts of both disinterest and disdain. Ho hum, I thought, *another* prequel, *another* milking of the pre-TOS period and characters, I presumed at the time, because they didn't have any original ideas left. Subconsciously I put the 2009 movie in the same basket as Enterprise and didn't find myself engaged enough to care. I didn't even go to see it in theatres. I wasn't even encouraged by reviews stating it was good. By this point, it wasn't a lack of fondness for Star Trek, but more a lack of interest in where the franchise had gone and was, to my eye, still going. My appetite for Star Trek just wasn't there anymore, and I'd gotten into other things.

    But then... (dramatic plot twist :D :D )

    But then, I took a vacation to Canada. And during the long flight, I noticed that 2009's Star Trek was among the movies available on the seat back in-flight entertainment. Stuck on a plane on a long journey, I figured what the hell. I figured that even if I didn't like it, and I was approaching the movie with seriously large amounts of skepticism, at least it'd pass two and a half hours of my flight across the Atlantic, right?? What harm was there, I thought.

    And you know, it may have been coming at the franchise with the 'fresh eyes' of having been away from it for a while. Or maybe it was just the high altitude of the plane. :lol: But damn it if I wasn't hooked all over again. JJ Abrams Star Trek hit *all* the right notes for me. It was modern and had modern takes on the premise and modern effects, but I *liked* it. Because the characters, as reimagined by a stellar cast that made all these beloved favorites their own, also managed to be *to their core* the Star Trek characters I'd grown to love all those years ago. This new cast and new Star Trek put me back in touch with my teenage self and with these characters I'd fallen in love with back then. Everything felt note perfect, the characters felt authentic. Suddenly I had a compulsion to dig out my DVDs and revisit the original series again for the first time in some years. And through the lens of the 2009 movie I found myself seeing TOS differently, seeing it afresh, noticing details I'd not seen before *ever*. The 2009 movie reignited the dormant flame. I even ended up catching up with the rest of Enterprise and loving it.

    So that's my story of how I got to be here today. :) How about you guys??
     
  2. Kilana2

    Kilana2 Vice Admiral Admiral

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    It all begun with TNG. I was 11 or 12. A friend introduced me to TOS and the movies. Then I started to read and collect the novels. I liked Voyager, but I couldn't deal with DS9 at first. I started to read the DS9 novels and wanted to know more about the characters, especially Kira. That's when I bought the DS9 DVDs. Never liked Enterprise, though.
     
  3. BillJ

    BillJ The King of Kings Premium Member

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    Star Trek has been part of my life as far as my memories go back. I'll continue to be a fan for a very long time I surmise.
     
  4. Infern0

    Infern0 Fleet Captain Fleet Captain

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    Pretty much the only thing me and my dad did together was watch star trek. He was a huge fan, in fact funny story, he got hurt real bad at a work accident and had to have skin grafts on his arm, he woke up after surgery but was still way out of it from anesthetic but managed to stay awake for just over an hour to see the new DS9 episode on the ward TV and fell asleep straight after. He said he was fighting the anesthetic for the whole 45 minutes.

    It used to be on BBC2 at 6.45 on Wednesday nights. My family life wasn't great so it was good to have something we both liked, after me and my mum moved he used to tape Enterprise for me on VHS because we didn't have sattelite tv and he would send me like 4 episodes at a time.

    One day he bought me home the star trek encyclopedia which I scoured over and over, it just grew from there really. I love all trek from TNG-ENT. TOS was before my time but I can appreciate it more now as an adult.

    I had an amazon Kindle account with like 50 novels on but I lost the login info and have never been able to retrieve it which is sad.

    All the new trek post Nemesis I have enjoyed but I feel like TNG-ENT was "my trek" if that makes sense.

    I was devastated when ENT got cancelled.
     
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  5. Lord Garth

    Lord Garth Admiral Admiral

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    Very early 1991, I was 11, and my mother (who was a fan in the '60s) bought TVH on video. We just got a VCR in June 1990, right before the last day of school, after I kept asking for one. They were watching TVH, and they kept laughing. I was in my room, not interested in watching it at all (I saw TFF in the theater with my uncle in 1989 and it didn't exactly convert me over). Then I overheard the fateful words from my father, "I'm surprised [Garth]'s not interested in this!" So, then I went into the living room to see what the big deal was. And the rest is history...

    In short order, I saw all five (at the time) movies. I liked TFF better once I was an actual fan. I rented "Encounter at Farpoint", since they had a preview for it right at the beginning of the TVH tape. It scared me off of TNG, so I just stuck to the movies. I didn't look at TNG again until I read in TV Guide that Spock was making an appearance in "Unification".

    Since the 1991-92 Season was the first one where TNG was in strip-syndication, I got to see all of TNG made up to that point in short order. Then, for the summer of 1992, the station I was watching TNG on, showed TOS instead; which I immediately preferred to TNG. I already preferred the movies to TNG, so my wanting to see more of the TOS characters probably heavily greased the wheels.

    So that's how it all started.

    I couldn't wait for Star Trek VI. The trailer had me pumped. I had a T-shirt, I bought the novel, I bought the comic, and I saw the movie in the theater three times.



    It's probably a good thing I didn't actually see TVH in 1986. "Colorful metaphors" and being seven years old wouldn't have flown. At home or at school. Especially if I started using them. :p
     
    Last edited: Jul 27, 2018
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  6. Forbin

    Forbin Admiral Admiral

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    Basically, when Star Trek came on. I was 9, and it was awesome.
     
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  7. Riker'sMailbox

    Riker'sMailbox Lieutenant Commander Red Shirt

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    My mom like TNG when I was young, but it did not interest me. When I was very pregnant pregnant with my daughter in the summer of 2011, I really struggled with the heat and we had jsut gotten Netflix, so I stayed in the AC and binged TNG and loved it. I tried DS9 when I finished and hated it.

    Flashforward to early 2018 and I decided to try DS9 again. Low and behold, I loved it and felt it was so timely to the way the world is going. Once that finished, I started VOY and now I am on Season 4 of ENT. Still have never seen a movie, although I have vague memories of whales and Star Trek, so it is possible my mom took me to see one. Have never read a book or seen an episode of TOS.

    I have never been to a convention, but they look like fun.
     
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  8. Armus

    Armus Commodore Commodore

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    TNG was my introduction to Star Trek in 1987 or 1988 when I was in the 2nd grade. I knew Star Trek was the show with guy with the pointed ears but I heard there was going to be a new show with a new crew without Spock around 1987. I was 7 or 8 when I saw TNG for the first time in its original run. It aired on Saturdays at 7 or 7:30 and repeated on Sunday an hour earlier. If I remember, Charles In Charge or Love Connection with Chuck Woolery preceded it. The first full episode I remember was "Justice", hardly one of TNG's best outings but I was 7 and it was the coolest thing on TV. I related to Wesley and I saw Riker as the attractive hero of the show while Picard was a wise, reassuring father figure. I liked the adventure of each week's mission and the family feeling amongst the crew. It wasn't until 1990, during the 4th season of TNG, that I was introduced to the original series. By then I had seen all the movies and I was obsessed with buying any Star Trek comic, magazine, card, and action figure I could get my hands on. The Galoob figures were better sculpted but I went nuts with the Playmates figures. I still wish I got my hands on the toy bridge and phaser. How much money I've spent on Star Trek merchandise I do not know but it must be thousands of dollars. My only regret is buying the standard definition DVDs of TNG and DS9, which I sold for a fraction of the price I paid for them.

    At a certain point a fan becomes posessive of his show and takes issue with unwanted changes in it. That happened to me during the middle of TNG's run but I faithfully watched the show until it concluded. When DS9 premiered during TNG's heyday, I was very happy that there would be another Star Trek on TV for many years. Although DS9 lacked the iconic feel of TOS and TNG, was less well cast, and it suffered from The Berman 90's schtick(bland music and lack of spooky edginess) it was great to see a new series that had such colorful characters with a premise that had so much potential. After Duet and season 2, I was a big fan of DS9. I gave up on the show a few times only to be drawn back, due to the quality of storytelling and the likability of some of the characters. DS9 was the last Star Trek show I truly enjoyed.

    When TNG went to the silver screen I was very excited. There was a lot of expectations for Generations. It set the pattern for my disapointment in every subsequent Star Trek movie.

    I tried to get into Voyager and Enterprise but I never could.

    The JJ movies are well cast, well costumed, and well scored but I find them to be forgettable fluff and noise. I enjoyed the second one in the theaters but I couldn't sit through it on the small screen. Like many sci fi action movies today they are too fast, too computer generated, and too chaotic. There's no reality to them.

    I haven't seen Discovery yet but I am more curious about The Orville.

    Rewatching TOS, TNG, DS9, and the movies on bluray and DVD has made me reaccess which series is my favorite. In my teens and 20s I may have said TOS is the best. Certainly it had the best sci fi concepts and was the most original. I find some of it very melodramatic now. I watch the episodes less frequently than TNG and DS9, which give me the most pleasure these days. Amongst the movies I enjoy TMP and TWOK the most. TMP is flawed but it's still the most spellbinding at times.
     
    Last edited: Jul 28, 2018
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  9. Tosk

    Tosk Admiral Admiral

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    Dad took me to see Star Trek III when I was nine. The rest is history. :)
     
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  10. hbquikcomjamesl

    hbquikcomjamesl Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    When I was in 5th grade, one of my friends was heavily into ST, and the local Channel 13 (then owned by Chris-Craft, the automotive upholstery and boat manufacturing company) was running a strip syndication block with, if I remember right, Get Smart at 5 PM, Gilligan's Island at 5:30, Star Trek at 6, and I Dream of Jeannie at 7). I remember first tuning in early for Jeannie, and seeing the last few minutes of "A Taste of Armageddon," and then catching the beginning of "Space Seed," and then, finally, seeing "The Devil in the Dark" all the way through.

    And it kind of picked up from there. My first ST book was Blish's Star Trek 9. And my first science fiction convention was SpaceCon 4, at the Los Angeles Convention Center.
     
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  11. Nyotarules

    Nyotarules Vice Admiral Moderator

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    I watched the TOS reruns in the 1970's as a child. Uhura was one of few positive images of black females back then, I did not understand the plots but enjoyed what I saw. The first Star Trek movie I watched in the cinema was The Voyage Home.
    At the moment I am doing my visual Star Trek pilgrimage by watching the whole franchise (tv shows and movies) in universe event order. Next up to watch (again) is Discovery
     
  12. Redfern

    Redfern Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    I trail about 5 years after Forbin. Though I was alive when the original series debuted, I was not quite 4 at the time and really not old enough to have any clear memories of the show.

    It was latee August 1972. My father and I had just moved into an apartment mega-complex. Returning to the two story "townhouse' he had rented, my father told me he had seen two boys roughly my age playing at the edge of the newest building, still under construction. He suggested I meet them.

    The kids were playing with Tonka diecast metal vehicles upon a large sand pile. I introduced myself and quickly we were asking one another's favorite games, toys, activities and TV shows. One of the pair, Kyle, asked if I watched Star Trek. Being the early 70s, the series had recently hit the syndication market (where its popularity far outgrew the numbers it garnered during its initial primetime run). I confessed I was not that familiar with the series. For the last couple of years I was mesmerized by Irwin Allen's "Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea".

    Obviously, Kyle had been watching Trek, hence his question. He liked to act the role of Kirk in backyard games of "let's pretend" and given my near black hair and ever so slightly taller stance, he thought I might do well in the role of Spock. I had little knowledge of the show's premise other than a crew of hundreds flew in space within a ship much larger that the Jupiter 2 from "Lost in Space". Oh, and this Spock fellow had pointed ears. But i reasoned if he would be willing to let me play with him, I'd better "educate" myself and start watching those early reruns.

    After a few weeks of daily airings, I kinda' had the "basics". This Spock was supposedly very smart, a scientist and he let nothing get him frustrated or angry. That latter attribute really appealed to me as I did have issues trying to control my temper. Here was a character I could aspire to emulate.

    Anyway, soon Kyle and I were running throughout the complex, pretending to be intrepid space explorers. the decorative weeping willow trees (the apartments were called "Willow Bend") became alien lifeforms with spindly, grasping tendrils. The 3 or 4 laundry-mat structures became strangely advanced computer centers (ala Landru). The sidewalk sections that had tall solid retaining walls (It was very hilly terrain) served as military trenches. The thematic hanging globe lamps (with dimmer switches) suspended in our respective domiciles could a Romulan cloaking device, Sargon's "receptacle", or even a strangely glowing planet or star around which we could "orbit" our AMT Enterprise model kits. Emptied makeup compacts were our flip lid communicators and a binocular case with a shoulder strap was my tricorder. Mind you, this was still 2 years before AMT released its "Exploration Set" model kit/play set of the phaser, communicator and tricorder. (We thought we were in hog heaven when we finally got and built those kits!)

    Overly long anecdote cut short, I started watching 1972 to "win over" a new friend, but very quickly, it turned interesting unto itself.
     
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  13. Greg Cox

    Greg Cox Admiral Premium Member

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    I honestly can't recall when I wasn't a Trekkie. I have fuzzy memories of my dad letting me stay up past my bedtime to watch STAR TREK with him during its original run on NBC. And, of course, it was rerun constantly in syndication the whole time I was growing up, to the extent that I pretty much knew all the episodes by heart by the time I was out of grade school. Later, in college, I discovered organized sci-fi fandom, just in time to see the early movies with my new fan friends. And, thanks to fandom, I started meeting Trek writers like Theodore Sturgeon and Norman Spinrad and Vonda McIntyre, which put the idea in my head that writing STAR TREK was something real people actually did . . .

    Funny story: My college buddies and I used to play a game, "Name that STAR TREK episode," in which we'd turn on a random TOS episode and see which us could identify it first. This was a game played in in micro-seconds . . .:)

    Pre-credits sequence begins . . .

    "Return of the Archons!"
     
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  14. Brennyren

    Brennyren Commodore Commodore

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    My dad was a fan of TOS in its original series run, and rarely missed an episode. Since I was ages six through nine during the original run, I didn't understand what he liked about it, and rarely watched it with him. I have very vague memories of seeing "The Trouble With Tribbles" and "Spectre of the Gun." (Me: "I didn't know this was a western?")

    When the show came onto a local station for afternoon syndication, around '72-'73, I was curious to see what my dad had found so interesting, so I started watching it. I was especially curious to rewatch "Spectre," as I remembered just enough of it to know it was weird, and I wondered what had been going on in that episode.

    Well, by the time "Spectre" came around again, I had watched all the rest at least twice, and was obsessed. In December 1975, there was a local ST convention, the Pittsburgh Star Trektacular, which was where I discovered fandom and (more importantly to me) fanzines! I spent the next couple years buying what zines I could afford, and got a few for free by submitting poems and song parodies. Got busy and dropped out of fandom until the advent of TNG, though in the meanwhile I did keep up with all the movies.

    Joined the local Starfleet chapter in 1989, and fan clubs for a couple of the actors. And I got back to writing fanfic, publishing in several TNG zines. I met the man who would later become my husband in a fanfic writers' workshop. (We're still married 23 years later.) When Voyager came around, I joined more fan clubs, wrote more fanfic, and edited a few zines.

    I don't belong to any clubs at present, but my husband and I still go to the annual Shore Leave convention every year, where we perform our own filksongs. I still post fic on ffdotnet once in a while, though it may or may not be Trekkish. And of course, I occasionally crop up here.
     
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  15. Galileo7

    Galileo7 Commodore Commodore

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    When I was a young boy, I saw after school, mondays through fridays, reruns of TOS and I became a permanent fan.:luvlove:
     
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  16. Doom Shepherd

    Doom Shepherd Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born.

    Well, not quite. My dad was an OG Trekkie, and I grew up on what must have been the first set of reruns, on channel 22 out of Pittsburgh, a snow-filled channel our antenna only barely received. It never really got any better all the way into TNG. When I went away to college, finally seeing Star Trek clearly on a decent television - that was an experience.

    My father was a tall, thin, man with black hair, a van dyke beard, and a cool, restrained manner, who taught both chemistry (a science) and psychology, and often ran 'experiments' on his students when teaching about things like phobias and false memory. The comparisons to Mirror Spock were frequent and predictable.

    When other kids were building model cars and planes... my first model was NCC-1701.
     
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  17. alensatemybuick1

    alensatemybuick1 Captain Captain

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    From a very young age...watched on WPIX (tri-state NY-NJ-CT market) from the early 70s weekdays after school in my room on my hand-me-down B&W Setchell-Carlson TV. Was born in Feb. 1966 so if I did see TOS in its first run, I was too young to remember. Do remember watching the animated series in its first run.
     
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  18. lurok

    lurok Rear Admiral Rear Admiral

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    Lost in the EU expanse with a nice cup of tea
    Fuzzy childhood memories of blue, yellow, red. Epic music. VOY was first true love.
     
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  19. 1001001

    1001001 Serial Canon Violator Moderator

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    Never.

    I hate Star Trek.

    I don't even know what I'm doing here.
     
  20. Kemaiku

    Kemaiku Admiral Admiral

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    Northern Ireland
    TNG on the BBC back in the day.
     
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