Your "last episode" and syndication cuts.

I guess this would be aimed more at old timers. My Star Trek watching began around 1970 in afternoon syndication. I watched all the episodes I could before I even knew how many episodes there actually were. Not until 1973 when I read the World of Star Trek did I know that there were 79 episodes and what they were.
I probably had a handwritten list prior to that. LOL. After I had the book I checked off every episode that I had seen and finally in 1976 one afternoon I saw the last episode that I hadn't before seen which turned out to be the Omega Glory. Not the best episode but exciting at the time.
Then after that at some point I became aware that the episodes I was seeing were edited and probably as the 70s moved along they were being cut more and more. From books like the Star Trek compendium I gleaned a bit of information here and there about scenes that were cut but certainly I was not aware of what 90% of the cuts consisted of.
Finally in the 1980's I purchased about half the episodes on VHS and for the first time I saw those particular episodes in their entirety. But economics prevented me from buying every episode. I don't think it was until I bought the actual Blu-rays that I finally saw every bit of every episode and that would have been around 2009!
So I'm wondering what was the last episode that you finally saw to complete the series and when did you finally see the episodes in their uncut forum.
Edited to correct the name of the book

 

The Making of Star Trek came out in 1968, and its list only went to the end of the second season. So I think you mixed up your sources.

But now I can't remember for sure where I first got the "79 episodes" number, and my first published list of all of them. The Star Trek Concordance came out (as a professionally published book) in October 1976, and I snatched it up at the bookstore I haunted.

The first issue of Starlog magazine came out months earlier in 1976, and it had a complete episode guide. That might have been my first published list of all three seasons. It was dated August but would have hit the stands by June at the latest.

I have no idea what my last first-viewing might have been. I was too young to keep track, but it happened in the very early 1970s.

 

I started watching in syndication in the mid-70s (around age 6-8). My parents were first-run watchers. We'd watch the early evening re-runs during dinner. I've still not seen some episodes (Cloud Minders comes to mind) and many I've only seen once (Turnabout Intruder for example). I am slowly rectifying that by watching TOS-R on Netflix with my boy (age 12), in Netflix airdate order.

 

Update: I think Grant's book with the complete episode listing was The World of Star Trek by David Gerrold. Published May 1973. The guide is in the middle of the book, just before the second batch of photos.

And that would be my first complete list then, as well. So there was the Gerrold, then Starlog number 1, then the Concordance, and then the Star Trek Giant Poster Book published a list in 1977. Those were the early episode guides.

 

Up until 1978 as a teenager I always thought that Arena was one of the later episodes produced for season three. But that came from the BBC continually repeating the show and at one time finishing the series with Turnabout Intruder and carrying straight on with Where No Man Has Gone Before in the now legendary Christmas Holiday Star Trek season of the mid seventies! Or not as I've just looked up and Enemy Within seems to be the first episode scheduled for that fest!
JB

 

I saw all the episodes, in order, when they were first broadcast on NBC in the 1960s. The first episode I saw was "The Man Trap" in September 1966, I was nine. The last episode I saw was "Turnabout Intruder" in June 1969, just before I turned 12 and a month before Apollo 11 landed on the Moon. My parents purchased a 21" RCA Victor console color TV in 1962, so I got to watch all the episodes when they first aired and in color.

 

Yes it was indeed The World of Star Trek by David Gerrold in 1973 with the picture of the Enterprise being filmed on the cover with the blue screen!!

 

Yep. To be clear, just so I don't look like a fool, you have now altered your original post, changing The Making of Star Trek into The World of Star Trek.

 

Fear not. Nobody would think that.
And also I noted at the bottom that I had changed the title of the book to the correct title you had mentioned

 

As for me, at age 6 I'd seen some episodes near the end of the third season as Star Trek completed its run on NBC in 1969.

From 1969 to 1975, syndication was sporadic in that the channel I first remember starting to watch TOS on regularly was channel 13, KCOP in Los Angeles. But I remember that they did some striped syndication for about a month and then stopped. They would occasionally start up again but they would never do a complete run of all 79 episodes (at least that's what I recall as I grew up through elementary school and went into junior high school.)

In 1975, channel 5 KTLA started running Star Trek on weekends (an episode on Saturday and again on Sunday at the same times.)
^^^
That's when I started to catch and watch TOS on a regular basis; and as I recall they went in production order and not broadcast order; so I was immediately enthralled by the first two episodes I watched which were "Where No Man Has Gone Before", and the episode that remains my favorite Star Trek episode to this day (across all of the Star Trek series from TOS, TNG...etc. all the way through Star Trek Discovery and Star Trek Picard); and that's " The Corbomite Maneuver".

That's also when I fell in love with TOS's first season, and while yes there were a lot of good episodes in season 2, and a small few in season 3; I honestly felt TOS lost a lot after its first season in how it played out episodes.

To the question of which one was the last "new" (for me) episode. It was S2 "The Doomsday Machine". Like others I had found out the number and the names of all the episodes, and in 1977, just before Star Wars hit the scene, That's when I finally caught "The Doomsday Machine" and realized I had seen every single Star Trek episode made.

Like others I didn't realize that they edited things out of the episode and for syndication to make room for more commercial time. The first time I realized this is when I took a trip to San Francisco in 1978; and caught a rerun of the TOS S3 episode, "The Enterprise Incident" - and it had the scene where the Romulan Commander is speaking to the Enterprise and talking about it following the Romulan flagship to a Romulan port etc; but it had a part that I had never seen were after Mr Scott states he will blow up the enterprise and take as many of the Romulans as he can with him, The Romulan Commander states:

"You humans make a brave noise..."
^^^
That small section was not in the version that I saw being aired on channel 5 KTLA.

So yeah that's when I realized that they were cutting little snippets out of the episode to make room for more commercials, and I became interested in what I may have been missing.

The first time I saw uncut TOS episodes was during the time the Sci-fi channel, (which is now known as the SyFy channel) began airing their Star Trek special editions; which expanded each episode to 90 minutes which included the uncut version of the episode plus a bunch of interviews with cast members interspersed in between during commercial breaks.

I actually disliked that because it made the actual episodes hard to watch because there was so much stuff in between the actual episode.

So like others I didn't really get to see every single episode completely uncut until I picked up the original yellow, red, and blue clamshell DVDs In the early 2000s; and then I went through each and every season in production order and over a one-month period after work finally saw all 79 episodes (plus the restored original pilot episode of "The Cage"; including the extra footage they had in case they were going to turn it into a B-movie style feature film release, if they didn't sell the pilot.)

And once I saw the unedited episodes, I couldn't watch the series on actual television anymore because I felt the cuts they made really hurt the majority of the episodes I really liked (like for example TOS S2 "Amok Time", Where they started to cut out part of the dialogue between T'pau and Spock where Spock is telling T'Pau that he will do what he must, but not with Kirk.

I remember watching it and syndication one time, and the line from T'pau where she says:

"Thee has prided thyself on the Vulcan heritage. Art thee Vulcan or art thee Human?!" (And her voice was dripping with disgust when she asked that final bit.)
^^^
That an editor could decide that bit of dialogue is something that could be cut to fit 15 seconds of commercial time just really pissed me off; and I could understand why a fan of TNG who had never seen TOS before it had gotten to this heavily edited state, would think TOS isn't all that great by comparison. A lot of times the edits really hurt the episode in which they occurred.

That said, there's one terrestrial channel that I believe has stations in a lot of markets that still broadcasts TOS episodes completely uncut, and still in a 60-minute time frame; and that's HeroesandIcons TV. I know for a fact it's uncut because rarely do the commercial breaks go more than a minute, and I've seen the DVDs enough to know that nothing's missing.

A few years ago BBC America also ran TOS uncut, and they did that by airing a block of episodes where each episode ran one hour and 15 minutes with commercials. They also ran the HD versions so I was a little miffed when they finally stopped and went back to just airing TNG and VOY, although now they've dropped VOY and pretty much air TNG and DS9.

But yeah, if you have younger fans who are interested, try to expose them to a few completely uncut TOS episodes and see if their opinion changes (It probably won't, but you never know.)

 

"plus the restored original pilot episode of "The Cage"; including the extra footage they had in case they were going to turn it into a B-movie style feature film release, if they didn't sell the pilot."

I'm certain this is wrong. The pilot was always just over an hour long.

The 'extra footage' was simply footage cut from what was used for The Menagerie.

I think you are thinking of one alternate option for the pilot - if no series was made and to use the footage rather than it and the expense of the pilot going to waste. That being, for the pilot to have newly filmed footage (including the crash of Vina's ship and the original Rigel fight/aftermath), to turn it into a feature film.

 

I don't know and I don't know.

Star Trek has been as constant in my life as eating and breathing. I was born in 1971, so I only saw TOS in syndication. I cannot remember the first time I saw an episode. I can tell you what my earliest Star Trek memory is (I, Mudd), but I know I'd already been watching Star Trek at that point.

There were long stretches of time where I could watch TOS 5 days a week. Sometimes during those weekday broadcasts there were stretches where I could catch 2 episodes the same day. There was a long period of time where I could watch 3 episodes on Sundays within a 4 hour time frame. All this before VCRs or any type of playback ability.

I recall reading that in the early days each station would make their own syndication cuts. Since I grew up watching Star Trek on as many as 3 or 4 stations between Indianapolis and Louisville, I probably saw the same episode with different cuts. It was in the mid 80s when I finally noticed "Hey! They cut that!"

Now, since TAS was never in syndication (as far as I remember), I do remember when I was finally able to catch that. Nickelodeon picked up the rights to show TAS around 1985 on Saturdays. Finally! After hearing about this for YEARS, I was finally able to watch these. Now, that was a treat. Almost like discovering Trek for the first time.

 

I saw nearly all the TOS episodes on the show's original network run. The only episodes I recall missing the first time around were "Galileo Seven," "What Are Little Girls Made Of?" and "Wolf in the Fold."

When the show went into syndication, it was picked up by channel 13 (KCOP-TV) here in Los Angeles. In those days they were broadcasting from 16mm film prints, and it was impossible not to notice the splices where the episodes were edited for more commercial time. Boy, did that suck!

 

The CBS affiliate in San Diego ran the syndicated episodes. The station’s film editor/film rapist would literally tear whole scenes from the episodes. It was horrific to watch the devastation!

 

Couldn't tell you. IIRC, in early 1970s Tyler, Texas, we had only the following VHF channels broadcast locally:
4 (CBS out of DFW, now Fox)
5 (NBC out of DFW)
7 (local ABC)
8 (ABC out of DFW)
9 (WGN out of Chicago)
11 (independent out of DFW, now CBS)
13 (PBS out of DFW)

I think it was 9 and 11 that ran Star Trek episodes as part of their afternoon lineups off and on with different schedules. At one point they were "back to back" so two hours of Star Trek in an afternoon. Did a lot of my homework at the coffee table during those two hours.

 

I wrote more about it here, but the last new-to-me episode was "The Lights of Zetar," in reruns around 1987/1988 (17/18 years old).

The first time I watched every episode in (production) order was in the late '90s, videotaped from a local station that ran them in the early AM hours.

I saw a few episodes on VHS, but I couldn't afford to buy them all and the rental places had a limited selection. I didn't see the whole series uncut till the DVD sets.

It was rerun where I lived, for a short time IIRC after TMP came out. I don't know if it was syndicated or if NBC put it back on the network. Below is my local listing for Saturday morning 29 Sept. 1980, note they specified "cartoon"!

 

Thank you! Yes, that was it! I think they were on in the late afternoon/early evening. We'd watch it with my parents during dinner (or maybe just before...). I was 6, so my memory is hazy.

 

I had Lincoln Enterprises catalogs in the early days, and by sometime in 1969 their catalog listed all the episodes (because they were selling the scripts, dont'chaknow?) So I knew of all 79 episodes a short time after the series was canceled.

 

As I recall, the last “new” TOS episode was “Turnabout Intruder” in 1997 (although, I could say that my last one was when I got the TOS Volume 40 DVD in 2002 and saw the all-color “The Cage” for the first time). My local library had the entire TOS series on VHS, and that summer vacation from school, every 3 days I would bike down to the library, return the 3 I had borrowed and borrow 3 more. And I would watch one episode every morning with my brother & sister. I had seen various episodes on the CBC over the years, but I still remember going through the VHS’s and finding new episodes that I had never seen, including the b&w/color version of “The Cage”.

Of course, if you want to include the animated series, I didn’t see any of that series until the DVD set was released in 2006. So my last “new” TOS/TAS episode was “The Counter Clock Incident”.

 

Strangely enough, the last episode that I had never seen before was The Cage, and I watched it for the first time a only a few years ago.