Five Year Mission?
- Thread starter T'Girl
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Considering the dismal failure of "That 80's Show", there was no way in hell they were gonna even think of letting "That 70's Show" cross that line.
They never gave a year they were in(at least I don't think they did) , so for all we know the 3 years the show ran could have been one year?
and how many Christmas episodes were shown in the 12 years the show ran?
and how many Christmas episodes were shown in the 12 years the show ran?
I recall the Giants beating the Dodgers coming pretty late in the run. Winchester lost a bundle on that game.
http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_many_Christmas_episodes_of_mash_were_there
The answer given here if five. Granted, this forum's answers come from folks who take the time to answer, so they may not be one hundred percent accurate.
Sir Rhosis
The answer given here if five. Granted, this forum's answers come from folks who take the time to answer, so they may not be one hundred percent accurate.
Sir Rhosis
And on a technical nitpicky note, Hawkeye once mentioned B-52 bombers. The B-52 hadn't been fielded yet during the Korean conflict. But it WAS the quintessential Viet-Nam-era bomber, and MASH was, after all, meant to be an allegory and commentary for Viet Nam.
I smell a M*A*S*H/Doctor Who crossover story...
I'm thinking a bit more involved, like the 4077th is temporally displaced, shifting back and forth between 1950 and 1953.
That reminds me of a quip from some football coach who was asked why he had a "five year plan" to rebuild a losing team. He said "It's because I have a five year contract." I know Hollywood contracts aren't guaranteed, but I wonder if GR or somebody who wrote the opening teaser had a five year commitment to the show. Pure speculation on my part of course.
Pure guess, but based on what I've surmised of GR's thinking processes, I suspect he was operating under a theory that sticking around on a show longer than five years is a bad thing. You find yourself fixing things that aren't necessarily broken. Just get those five seasons, start raking in those syndication bucks, and move on to something else.
Not to mention the episode where Radar was seen reading a 1969 issue of The Avengers, a comic that didn't debut until 1960.
Roddenberry did have a five year development deal with Desilu, but a year of that had already been used up by the time Kirk's narration was written and the show began airing on NBC. It seems more likely (and Inside Star Trek: The Real Story suggests this) that five years was suggested because that would have been golden for syndication.
Four years was considered a minimum in order to be assured a syndication deal, because of that magic 100 episode point, five made for a nice bit of insurance, unless your show was insanely popular (for instance, "The Addams Family" only ran two seasons, but still got syndicated), and at the time, Star Trek's overall popularity was still an open question, so the first reaction to the cancellation at the end of the third season was, "well, that's it, we're dead."
antiquityscion
Commander
I always assumed "5 year mission" meant that Kirk himself was assigned to the Enterprise for 5 years, along with his hand-picked crew. Then at the end of the 5 years, the Enterprise returned to port, was overhauled, and given to another Captain and crew. That is basically what happened with Pike's crew, and Decker and Spock afterward, no?
We know that Pike was the Enterprise captain before Kirk and commanded the ship for around a dozen years before Kirk did, with Spock as a member of his crew for most of that time, so that doesn't apply there. And I don't know what you mean by "Decker and Spock" in this context, since Will Decker and Spock were together on the Enterprise for no more than a day and a half.
There's simply no reason to believe there were any 5-year missions other than the one in TOS. Like I said, a single example is not evidence of a recurring pattern. Different "missions" could range in duration from a week to a decade depending on their specific parameters. For instance, the Enterprise's trip to the edge of the galaxy in the second pilot was most likely a separate mission from the 5-year tour, because the ship clearly underwent a major overhaul and rebuild between the second pilot and the first season. So that would've been a specific mission of probably a few months' duration -- travel to the edge of the galaxy and probe beyond it, then return and report -- followed by a refit, followed by a general exploration/frontier-patrol tour with an expected duration of 5 years.
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