I’ve enjoyed and been glad of all the various series that came after TOS & TAS, from TNG onwards (and unlike some, I’ve basically loved the Kurtzman era). But at the same time… as an increasingly sad and nostalgic 57-year-old, I do also miss those for-me youthful days when TOS and its films were simply what Star Trek was. (And everybody was still alive.)
It wasn’t just TOS and the films. It was all the novels, comics, RPGs, fanzines, and reference books like the Concordance, FJ Tech Manual, etc. which expanded on the show and movies to a huge degree and created its own ‘canon’ before canon was a thing, until Roddenberry killed it all in 1987.
Sure (and The Best of Trek, never forget The Best of Trek), though TOS and the films was what it was centered around. I mean, we knew it wasn’t really canon, but it was easy (and fun) to pretend that a lot of it was.
But I mean more the sense of it, in the 70s. With posters and poster magazines in the stores, and the early conventions, and the MEGO action figures and toy sets, and the show on local stations all the time. (For a while, WPIX in NY had nightly airings of two back-to-back episodes.).
The FASA RPG is really cool, very interesting take on the setting.
I'm a year older.
Those were exciting times. When Star Trek meant a show about specific characters on a specific ship doing space shenanigans. Where you had to wait for one of the syndication stations to run an episode. If you didn't have TV Guide, you waited to find out which episode it was. And you sat through it, commercials, cut scenes and all.
You'd be at a drug store with your mom and in the books and magazine section see a James Blish volume or the Puzzle Manual and snap them up. James Blish and Fotonovels were your gateway to episodes before the next rerun. ADF helped remember the animated series. Reference books were just starting to come out and a lot of fan produced stuff was out of reach if you didn't do mail order.
Oh and the model kits and Mego stuff. They made after school playtime so fun (getting the Enterprise nacelles even was a hopeless task). The Donmoor shirts, along with the Remco utility belt or maybe the Walkie talkies completed what passed for Cosplay.
If you didn't live it, all of this sounds - at best- quint. At worst, limiting. "One show?" Yeah. One show.
If you did live it, those were magical days.
Personally, I miss the days when people remembered that Generation Y comes in-between Gen-X and Millennial and weren't erasing my identity because they think generations need to be 25 years long...
It would be very difficult for me to forget The Best of Trek as I had an article published in the BoT #15 anthology (I even used the word canon in my second paragraph).
Those were good days indeed.
Hey, good for you! I loved those books.It would be very difficult for me to forget The Best of Trek as I had an article published in the BoT #15 anthology (I even used the word canon in my second paragraph).
Those were good days indeed.
That is truly very cool. What was your article/piece about?
It was a review of TNG entitled 'Beyond the 23rd Century: What the future holds for the Next Generation of Trekkers'. The show had just begun its second season at the time, so the piece is pretty dated. I submitted the article to TREK magazine, but it wasn't until I laid my hands on the anthology that I found out they had published it.
Ah, that does bring back memories. Those covers were cool, even if they were several shades removed from established Trek images.
Sadly, #15 is the only volume I still have in my collection, along with my set of original Bantam novels.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, those were definitely good times, when each new novel or non-fiction book on Trek was like finding a gold brick.
Sadly, #15 is the only volume I still have in my collection, along with my set of original Bantam novels.
At the risk of sounding like a broken record, those were definitely good times, when each new novel or non-fiction book on Trek was like finding a gold brick.
How did you survive such a massive blow?! I think that offense would’ve struck down a lesser human being!
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