Where Did "The Original Series" Retronym Come From?
- Thread starter Emperor Norton
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That World War I reference is fascinating - I remember when Pearl Harbor came out, amongst the many, many, MANY criticisms of the movie was the fact that Josh Hartnett referred to "World War II just hit us", but seems this was already accepted as a term for two years before his character said it!
TOS as a reference is to older series is the norm, but some things are different, like pre-2005 Doctor Who is referred to as "Classic Who" iin most circles. The NU prefix in regard to shows appears to be fairly recent, NuWho, NuBSG etc.
Strangely, it seems to happen mostly with genre shows. I've not seen reference to TOS or Classic Dallas as opposed to the NuDallas for example.
I don't know. I've looked at it, and are you sure it's animated?
So what is the first citation? The Star Trek Encyclopedia?
Wow, they really thought that? I'm stunned by the insularity of Americans who think that Pearl Harbor was the beginning of the entire war. The war in Europe had been raging since 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland -- and Americans spent two years watching with concern and debating whether to get involved or continue in their traditional isolationism (while many Americans supported the Nazis, since anti-Semitism was rampant in the US at the time). So of course Americans in 1941 would've been talking about "World War Two" and "the Second World War" for a couple of years -- and Pearl Harbor was indeed when that ongoing war finally "hit" America.
Heck, from the Asian perspective, WWII began in 1937 when Japan invaded China -- or maybe in 1931 when Japan invaded Manchuria. Although I guess it didn't become a "world war" until it encompassed both East and West.
That was because Filmation had gone bankrupt and the ownership of TAS was unclear at the time. So Paramount had to distance themselves from TAS until the legal questions were resolved. In fact, the animated series was the one incarnation of Star Trek over which Roddenberry had complete and unfettered creative control with no network or studio interference, so his later decision to renounce it is rather ironic.
Even though the term was already in use, it referred to the war in Europe, not the one in China. The US and Britain were not at war with Japan until after Dec. 7 1941, when the conflicts on both sides of the globe were linked into one big war. The US Navy was nearly at war with Germany in the Atlantic by then, so the character might have been guessing that war would be declared on Germany, too. But of all the things to criticize about the movie, that one seems pretty minor.
Trek Vanilla would be that one-shot with Jeffrey Hunter and the guy with the ears.
...or "Happy Days Again."
Really...who would confuse reruns on some independent channel with the first run episodes the audience were conditioned to its network position?
CHRISTOPHER ^^
I think it was more of accusing it of being an anachronism as in no-one was calling it a World War at that point, rather than saying that WWII started Dec 7th 1941. They were still wrong though!
Usually when they revamped series they would make changes to the title - The New Avengers, Bonanza The Next Generation etc.
I think it was more of accusing it of being an anachronism as in no-one was calling it a World War at that point, rather than saying that WWII started Dec 7th 1941. They were still wrong though!
Usually when they revamped series they would make changes to the title - The New Avengers, Bonanza The Next Generation etc.
Usually, but not always. As mentioned, the animated revival of Star Trek was called Star Trek. (Which was a little surprising; if it had followed usual Filmation naming patterns, it would've been something like The New Adventures of Star Trek, except that doesn't make any sense.) The 1988 revival of Mission: Impossible was just Mission: Impossible (although it was originally planned as a remake -- due to the '88 writers' strike -- rather than the continuation it ended up being). And there was a 1963-5 detective series called Burke's Law (revamped in '65-'66 into Amos Burke, Secret Agent) that was revived in 1994 under its original title. And there's the recent revival of Dallas as well, and the very short-lived Get Smart revival sitcom in the '90s, with Andy Dick as Maxwell Smart's son.
And that's not counting shows that were cancelled by the network and then revived on cable soon thereafter, like Airwolf and Viper.
And "Laverne & Shirley & Company"
That was back when they couldn't build a plot that would hang over to the next episode and things couldn't change or the audience would be "confused" Every little thing would have to be spoon fed to audiences or this tv thing wouldn't catch on.
abbreviated terms like BTTF, LOTR, AOTC are just distracting and (apologies in advance folks) a bit lazy.
That's a good one...almost.
It's just a reference to the FAO Schwarz toy stores. So technically, I'm using their abbreviation! But you get points for trying to keep me on my toes! 
Don't you mean World War One?
eye meen if abbreviating ees lazy...
Well, I always see it as World War I, so when in Rome...
Actually since you bring all this up, I should have clarified a bit more. Career-wise, I started out in newspapers. The general rule of thumb was if article referenced something, i.e. (oops, another abbreviation!
...suddenly they're everywhere! 
..) anyhow, if an article used, say, Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms, it was to be spelled out in its first use, then thereafter would be abbreviated as ATF. That's what's often missing in online conversations. I just find it confusing sometimes when someone starts out with "Rented BTTF last night, then I read a few issues of OHOTMU. Then watched some Star Trek, LTBYLB was on."When you see them often enough you get accustomed to them, and it's not so bad, but too often I feel like I need to be using a decoder ring to understand the conversation.
That's all I meant.
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...The general rule of thumb was if article referenced something, i.e. (oops, another abbreviation!
Even worse now in the era of text message and tweet inspired acronyms, which some people just assume everyone knows. I wrote for magazines way back when and what you describe is how we did it. You didn't just write "SCSI", you wrote "Small Computer Systems Interface (SCSI)" to make sure everyone understood what the acronym was. For instance, I could say "I attended a PGA event last week" but would most people know I meant "Producers Guild of America" instead of "Professional Golfers Association" unless I prefaced it?
I still find that common enough that some people assume that if you call yourself a Star Trek fan than they think you must automatically like everything Trek under the sun. It soon inevitably leads to me having to be more specific.
There weren't as many channels back then. It's possible that in many markets, the same station showed both the new episodes and the reruns in different time slots.
And not everyone pays attention to such distinctions. When I was 5 years old, I discovered both reruns of the original Star Trek and network airings of the animated Star Trek within a few weeks or months of each other, and I just thought of them as the same show airing at different times of the week. Although, granted, I was 5 years old.
Actually you did find a degree of serialization in a lot of sitcoms; it was more common in them than it was in dramas. Look at something like The Beverly Hillbillies, a pretty good example of a "lowbrow" show -- generally any given storyline would spread across two or three episodes. Each episode would have its own beginning and end, but the characters and situations set up in the first part of the arc would then continue to be present and cause new consequences in the next. And of course lots of sitcoms had recurring characters, continuity developments like marriages and births, and the like.
These days we assume that serialization is sophisticated and episodic stories are simplistic, but in the '50s through the '70s, it was generally seen the other way around. The classiest TV dramas of the early days of television were anthologies that put on a different play each week, eventually hiring quality playwrights like Norman Corwin and Rod Serling and Reginald Rose to create original plays for television. So anthologies, the most episodic and continuity-free stories possible, were seen as the pinnacle of smart, sophisticated drama -- whereas serialization and ongoing stories were the stuff of lowbrow entertainment like soap operas, movie adventure serials, and newspaper comic strips. Thus, every drama wanted to be an anthology. Continuing series were more practical since you didn't have to build new sets every week and could rely on audience loyalty to a regular cast, but even continuing series generally strove for an anthology-style format, setting up situations that would involve their leads in a totally different and unconnected story every week (e.g. The Fugitive and its many imitators with a hero constantly wandering into other people's lives and problems, or Mission: Impossible with the leads effectively playing different characters every week, or Star Trek with the heroes traveling to a different world every week).
So no, it wasn't because they thought the audience was too stupid to follow serialization. It's because they thought they were smart enough to prefer complete, self-contained dramas in the vein of a classy anthology. It's only our own arrogance that makes us look down on the tastes of our parents and grandparents and assume that we prefer serials because we're smarter than they were. They would probably think they were smarter than us, that all of 21st-century TV has degenerated to the level of soap operas and comic strips and that we've gotten too lazy to ever actually come up with an effective ending for a story.
It took me a while to figure out that middle one, and I was determined to decipher it without looking it up. The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe?
Christopher said:
Absolutely agreed. Serialized storytelling on television, even today, carries the mark of the movie theater serials of yore, in that a fundamental part of them is an escalation of the drama without providing a resolution. The trouble with that, though, is that you can only escalate it so far before it starts getting into silly territory and jumps the shark, as many viewers of serialized shows have discovered.
Both storytelling styles are valid in their own ways, short-form and long-form. But I do tend to lean more towards the idea that a writer having to tell a consistent and self-contained story within the confides of a single episode is by far more the mark of talent than being able to string things out over 26 episodes.
As I often say, category does not determine quality. There are ways of doing both approaches brilliantly and ways of doing both approaches as lazy hackwork. They're just different styles, like the difference between a short story and a novel trilogy, or the difference between a song and an opera cycle. And they're both worthwhile creative challenges in their own ways. They're not really trying to be the same thing, so it doesn't make much sense to say one is intrinsically better than the other.
So my point is that both sets of assumptions about one being better than the other are insular and egocentric. It's just the folly of mistaking "What I'm used to" for "What's objectively superior." The truth is that it's just a matter of taste. Serials aren't intrinsically better or worse than episodic stories, they're just currently more fashionable. And fashions are, by their nature, impermanent.
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