Sci Fi wasn't exactly a new thing in 66. Serious Sci Fi maybe, but even that is debatable, Forbidden Planet & even Twilite Zone & the odd 50's Sci fi movie could well be considered serious Sci Fi. However, it WAS perhaps the 1st serious Sci Fi tv show. That would be in my top 4. Not neccessarily in this order, I'd go with this.. 1. Serious Sci fi, ( interesting futuristic technology & humanistic drama, instead of just monsters & green men). 2. Metaphysical & Far out type ideas were just coming into vogue 66-67. Timing was pretty good. Age of Aquarius, Flower Power era. 3. Great cutting egde special effects, combined with awesome designwork, Enterprise in particular. Before that it was mostly rocket looking spacships. 4. Last but not least good stories nailed by great actors. It seems to work for any age group, which cannot be said for many other shows of the same timeframe.
It's hard to say why lightning strikes where and when it does. Actually, predicting lightning is probably easier than formulating show business hits. There was likely a catharsis to a positive, harmonious vision of the future in the social turbulence and optimism of the sixties. The show depicted a society beyond nationalistic and other boundaries of inequality. It had a measure of good old fashioned sense of wonder, which is what Science Fiction is for, ain't it? And...miniskirts.
Could you really say the show was "successful"? I mean, it wasn't a failure, it went three seasons (which is a heck of a lot better than a couple other of my favorite shows, Eerie, Indiana and The Adventures of Brisco County Jr., each of which lasted only a year), but were the ratings ever really considered that great? I thought -- but I'd be glad for some hard information on this -- that the ratings were seldom more than mediocre.
The way voggmo defines the early days, 1966-1979, any success had to be toward the end of that period. I would restate the question as why was Star Trek successful enough that they decided to make The Motion Picture? It might make for more interesting answers. 1) The stories. Star Trek was intelligent sci-fi at a time when most popular culture sci-fi was meant for kids. Star Trek was not unique this way. There were movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, but for every The Andromeda Strain or Slaughterhouse Five, there was a Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla and The Cat from Outer Space. 2) Syndication. As mentioned above, Star Trek was a failure on NBC. Did I, as a college kid in the early 1970s, sit around with my buds doing bong hits while watching Star Trek? Ahhh, yeah, man. 3) The fans. Star Trek meant something to us. Silent Running was a great movie but you didn't find Huey, Dewey and Louie references in popular culture. Spock became a cultural icon even before the movies. 4) The time. Science was still viewed as good. It would be hard, with the anti-science attitude that permeates today's culture (creationism, worries over the CERN accelerator, a feeling by many that "back to nature" instead of better technology will solve global warming) to see Star Trek catching on today. None of these are revolutionary concepts for the success of Star Trek. But just because they have been mentioned before doesn't make them wrong.
Yes Outpost, that's about right. I would mention that the show was doing ok 1st 2 years, then it got bumped into a crap timeslot. So IT wasn't so much a failure as were the execs that made that bumble decision. But essentially Outpost has it right.
My top 4 reasons: 1.) I was young, so the ridiculousness of the sets and monsters (which to my wife, now are idiotic) were convincing. 2.) Gorgeous women in scant outfits. 3.) Topical material: racism, war, societal ills. 4.) Success? Really?
One factor that helped the show's success in syndication was the fact that there were no home VCRs, no Tivos, no internet downloads in the 1970's. The shows aired when they aired, and if you missed one you had to wait three months or more before it was shown again. You couldn't watch the same episode over and over again in the same evening like you can now, so when a favorite episode finally rolled around again it still seemed fresh and you could enjoy it all over again, having had time to distance yourself from it a little. Although not being able to see the episodes on demand might seem like a disadvantage from today's viewpoint of the instant gratification era, in some ways it was a positive thing. It kept the show from becoming saturated too soon. You could be a fan for five years and still not have seen all the episodes. This allowed the show to remain popular in reruns for almost the entire decade of the seventies.
That's an interesting point. I suppose the same could be said of Dr Who, it was hard to see it 70's-80's, which like anything, makes one want it more.
Lack of competition was very important. There weren't a zillion TV sci-fi alternatives. ToddPence makes an excellent point about the shows always being fresh because years could go by before you could see a favorite episode a 2nd time.
This was true. When I first recorded the 79 episodes in the early 1980's, I knew there would be one or two I'd never seen before, and there were.
Cutting edge special effects? Com'n the cutting edge effects were mostly camera tricks. Not bad, and probably necessary when you have cardboard sets. Nothing against the show, but I don't think they were cutting edge even for the 60's. I say good writing, and pretty good acting. Having never seen any actors besides Shat and Keonig play a different role, it's hard to judge acting ability.
Nimoy is a very good actor. I had a LaserDisc at one point (I still may have it) that had him playing Theo Van Gogh, Vincent's art dealer brother. It was a one man play that Nimoy performed for a period after Star Trek. He was very good in that role. For one, he was quite emotional. While playing Theo, you never thought of him as Spock.
First, it was so well written. Second, as I have pointed out in another thread -- the whole country was caught up in Apollo fever. We were going to the moon. The greatest accomplishment of the 20th century was about to occur. I mean, think of it. Imagine yourself standing on the moon. Right this second. On another world. Look down. Kick the dirt. Hear your breath in the helmet. Know that you are 250,000 miles from earth, one of the farthest-travelled human beings of all time. Look back over your shoulder. Do you see that tiny blue marble? And we all did it with Neal Armstrong, live on television. Many of us considered "Star Trek" as an adjunct to NASA, and the flight controllers did, too. Somewhere out there is a photo of them all wearing Spock ears.