For People Old Enough to Remember

Was there this much hatred of TNG when it started by Trek fans as there are now with fans hating NuTrek? I know there was no such thing as Internet then. I was in elementary school. To young to pay attention to that. I remember reading about it in my Weekly Reader and thought it was cool.

 

I remember Deep Space 9 got all sorts of crap when it was new. Now, I believe that it stands with TOS and TNG as the benchmark for best Trek.

 

There was a lot of resistance to TNG back in the day, especially before it aired. I remember seeing my first grainy pic of the Galaxy Class Enterprise and asking myself who could have come up with a ship that fugly.

 

My Mom is a first generation TOS fan and she could never stand TNG. She just isn't there for Star Trek if Kirk/Spock etc. aren't involved. She like TOS and Kelvin and that's it.

 

There was plenty of hatred at the start. A lot of the early chatter about the show was quite negative, usually along the lines of "this isn't really Star Trek." Our local newspaper had a section written by high school kids every week, and their review was a brutal pan.

I was iffy myself at the beginning. I liked the cast fine. I'd been a fan of Patrick Stewart since I, Claudius. (Watch that if you haven't.) But I wasn't a fan of the ENT-D design, and a lot of the early scripts were weak, derivative, or both.

Obviously, I stuck with it..

Back in the day, we actually did have some online discussion capability. Anyone else remember CompuServe? I didn't get online until.. Heart of Glory, maybe? (Macintosh SE and a 56K modem, using pulse dialing since the rest of the house still used rotary phones.) When Tasha Yar died, there was... quite the reaction. But mostly positive, since the main criticism of the show was that it was trying to avoid drama. "Conspiracy" went over well, too.

 

Not just fans, even some (most?) of the actors from TOS were public with their negative opinion on TNG prior to launch. They seemed to think similarly to a certain section of the fanbase, that the magic could never be replicated with different people.

 

Even a certain lead actor was convinced the show wouldn’t last (and didn’t unpack his suitcase for months) because everyone in Hollywood had told him that there was no way anyone would ever be able to replace Kirk and Spock. So, it wasn’t just the fandom that was up in arms. Pretty much no one in Hollywood believed in the show either. And yeah, the TOS cast was quite loudly against TNG as well. There were flyers at conventions that asked people to boycott TNG. Etc etc.

 

I was only 9 years old when TNG debuted, so I don't know much about the adult reception. But I can tell you that I loved it from the get-go, as did most of my friends.

And when I started running a sim group -- now who remembers those?! -- in the early 90s on IRC, almost all of us were TNG fans and there wasn't a single ship in any of the big fleets that was TOS-era (although there were a few movie era ships here and there).

 

It's amazing that TNG managed to prosper, given the sheer amount of adversity it apparently faced. Again, I didn't see, but I got a good look at the reactions to DS9.

So maybe someday, people will be gushing over Picard and Discovery, too.

 

Not only do I remember negative fan reaction to Star Trek the next generation, I remember negative fan reaction to Star Trek the motion picture. Specifically, to the new klingons. "How dare they change the klingons?" The more things change..

 

Yeah, we know the rest.

 

Anything is possible, but not many people gush about the first couple seasons of TNG or DS9. Or VOY or ENT, actually.

 

Aren't people already gushing about PIC and DISC?(I at the very least remember @Kilana2 being a huge PIC fan, form my visits to that show's forum) Seems like enough people are really, genuinely enjoying the shows, just like I genuinely enjoy LD and SNW (at least what I've seen of it, I haven't had time to catch up on the episodes in weeks!) And at the very least SNW had an uphill battle to fight with me due to being set in (roughly) the TOS era, and managed to win me over anyways.

Also, I am not entirely sure that it is what you are trying to say, but dismissing dislike for a show just because it's a recent instalment of a long-runnign franchise is too easy. Personally I have given PIC credit were credit is true (at least the first season, haven't watched beyond that), but if it was 30 year old show with the same elements and so on, I would still have the same problems with it. It's not always just dislike for new things.

 

A good question. My personal group of friends and I were excited. When I got on my first BBS (the summer Picard got Borg'd), there was already a thriving fandom discussing & speculating much like we do here.

 

Looking back for those old enough to remember at the time, did anyone else just cringe when they saw the Enterprise-D for the first time? I sure did.

I just remember thinking that the design looked god-awful. And while it does have a few flattering angles, it remains (to me) one of the butt-ugliest designs in Trek. The Sovereign Class, in my opinion, was an ENORMOUS improvement.

 

Even now the first two seasons of TNG are rated poorly. The popular acclaim for the series is mostly carried by seasons 3-5, with a handful of exceptions as noted. DS9's early episodes aren't actively loathed to the same degree, but they are not really remembered at all compared to beloved later ones.

Trek series, in general, take a while to hit their stride (if of course they ever have one).

 

It's not a matter of dismissing, just reminding all that things change. When TNG was new, it was widely disliked. Look at it now. When DS9 was new, same thing. Many people regard it as Trek's pinnacle series now. 25 or 30 years in the future, DIS and PIC might have grown on people as well.

Or not, look at Voyager. While it still has its fans, it's been widely considered to be a disappointment, because it was sloppy and abandoned its premise.

 

But what I meant to say is that it might be true for general trends, but it isn't an idea that can be applied to every individual opinion somebody hears about something new. I mean yeah, as a kid/teen I was a huge Charmed fan and today I view that show as a huge pile of reeking garbage.
But on the other hand PIC, or nuBSG...I can guaranty you those are two shows I will never enjoy and if I live to a hundred and fifty (I don't like original BSG that much either, but I don't feel the raging hatred or sheer annoyance for it that I feel for nuBSG).

 

I wonder what the buzz was like in the various fanzines and/or fanclub newsletters and the like, before and after the debut of TNG.

Kor