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1986... before TNG...

I was in high school, & a big fan of the TOS films & show. Me & My dad were excited about Trek returning to tv, but also a bit uncertain. I remember not knowing much about it prior to its premier, except that it was coming. The premier was a very mixed feeling.

On one hand, I loved the way that technology had been used to bring the series into the modern times. No show at the time was spending the money, to look like a Star Trek or Star Wars movie. The days of cardboard sets & dangling models were finally over. In that way, I was excited to see what would come

On the other hand, Kunta Kinte & the redneck from Night Court, who were all I was familiar with, left me a bit worried, & maybe he was only 47, but Picard looked old for Star Trek. So much so, I thought "Why is our replacement as old as the people we're replacing?". Sometimes I still wonder why they didn't just shave off all Stewart's hair. The bits of white fuzz is all that made him look old

Needless to say, we stuck with it, through some rather uncertain times, because it still did manage to be Star Trek, & that was good enough for me
 
Funny how people felt Picard was old. Stewart was only 47. Mulgrew was 46 when Voyager ended. Brooks and Bakula was like 50 when their shows ended.
I was a kid. A bald guy with a little gray hair was ancient to me.
I was directing that toward the ones who were old enough to have watched TOS during the original run ;)
 
I had a mixture of anticipation and apprehension prior to TNG's debut in 1987. Then I saw "Encounter At Farpoint" and any anticipation was thrown out the window and all I knew was apprehension. :lol:

The entire episode was mostly a series of :wtf: moments.
 
I was too young to remember TNG's hype and premere, but a friend of mine was in college at the time and told me what it was like for him and his friends. His roomie was hyped as all hell. He bought posters for TNG, read everything on it, before a second of it had aired. He even had a party in the lounge for fellow Trekkies on the night it aired. When Encounter at Farpoint ended, the audience stared blankly, before said friend exclaimed:

"What the hell was that?!"

:lol:
 
Around 1985 or '86 I think is when I started to hear solid rumblings and news about a new Star Trek series. We soon learned that the original crew were not transitioning back to television and would remain on the big screen.

We began to hear about a new starship Enterprise with a new crew set a century after the original era. And this ship was supposed to be on something of a 10-20 year voyage of exploration, and consequently also had families aboard. We learned there would be a Klingon as a member of the new crew and that the ship's navigator was blind! We also began to get early pics such as one of Geordi with his visor.

My initial reaction was a mixture of apprehension and intense curiousity. How could you do Star Trek with Kirk, Spock and the rest? Could it even be close to as good? Or, heaven forbid, could it even be better?

Regardless of your opinion after TNG arrived what did you think and how did you feel about it all at that time leading up to TNG's debut?

I know exactly how I felt!!! Vindication for cancellation on TV!!

RAMA
 
I was stationed overseas when it premiered and hadn't heard about it, for some time. I got out of the military in late 1991 and began to watch the show (somewhere around the start of season 4), sometime shortly after that. I hated the E-D, but it eventually grew on me. I had a hard time comprehending some of the crew and their ideals since I missed a few seasons. I remember seeing Picard for the first time and saying "hey it's the guy from Excalibur".

Once I began to catch on the reruns i began to like the show more and more. Finally, after all these years, I just purchased the entire series on DVD and have started to watch from the beginning. After watching most of season one, it had some struggles, but there were some interesting episodes.
 
I had a mixture of anticipation and apprehension prior to TNG's debut in 1987. Then I saw "Encounter At Farpoint" and any anticipation was thrown out the window and all I knew was apprehension. :lol:

The entire episode was mostly a series of :wtf: moments.

While both The Cage and WNMHGB are better than Farpoint, if you started TOS in the 80s with those episodes, and then showed the rest of the series, you'd also have the reaction of :wtf: moments...from Spock yelling, to the poor editing, rough uniforms, odd performances from some of the secondary cast as well as lack of continuity. First season STNG went on to get 7 Emmy nominations and a Peabody Award, and a Hugo nom (for Farpoint ironically) for its efforts, as well as record syndication ratings, which often broke records held by TOS. There was never any doubt that it would be renewed. It met every expectation, but luckily the show got even better as it went along, reversing the trend set by TOS.

RAMA
 
^^ If you had shown "The Cage" and WNMHGB as is. But keep everything the same except for better production standards and they blow "Encounter At Farpoint" into the weeds.

Actually they also blow it away as is.
 
I was in the 7th grade. Was a fairly big TOS fan, and had been collecting some TOS-film era comics for a while, which of course I still have. I fondly remember being scared out of my wits with some of the TWOK scenes (was in 2nd grade for that). Yeah, both my folks were sci-fi fans. I don't remember, but I was even at the premiere of Star Wars at 2 1/2 years old. Don't worry, folks, I was an abnormally quiet and well behaved 2-year old.
I don't remember hearing much about TNG. The excitement began to build when my father was telling me about the new ship, which we both thought was awesome. I was on VCR duty.
As I recall, my 7th grade opinion of early TNG was pretty critical. I loved the new ship and effects, but found the show almost painfully awkward at times. (As was TOS) I think my favorite S1 episode was the first Klingon episode.
 
^^ If you had shown "The Cage" and WNMHGB as is. But keep everything the same except for better production standards and they blow "Encounter At Farpoint" into the weeds.

Actually they also blow it away as is.

Well I wasn't talking about overall quality or story, where the TOS episodes are clearly better....only the WTF moments...and comparing the premiere episodes of two shows, in which there are moments that do not really fit in either production-wise or character-wise later in the series.

RAMA
 
I had a mixture of anticipation and apprehension prior to TNG's debut in 1987. Then I saw "Encounter At Farpoint" and any anticipation was thrown out the window and all I knew was apprehension. :lol:

The entire episode was mostly a series of :wtf: moments.

I know what you mean.
I was 13 when the show started and was too much in teenage awe of it, but a few years later rewatching the first season and you see characters reacting to others in odd ways and with odd dialog at times.
I mean the way people would react to some of Data's harmless questions or statements. I can't think of any examples right now. Maybe in that second Q story where he gives Riker powers and they see the beasts in French uniforms and they all don't know how to tell Picard...odd and went on too long.
It was sort of like George Lucas was writing the first season.
 
I was 9 when TNG premiered in 1987. The first I heard of the new show was from a magazine I happened to pick up in a waiting room, several months before the premiere. I don't think I got to read the article, but I remember this picture:

1st_tngcast.jpg


And I remember thinking that it just wasn't recognizable as Star Trek at all. If not for the article saying "This is the cast of the new Star Trek" I wouldn't have known what I was looking at. My dad theorized that perhaps they wouldn't even have starships and would just beam everywhere, since the technology was supposed to be so much more advanced.

I can't imagine a 9-year-old enjoying "Encounter at Farpoint", but I did. Back then, I didn't know that there was such a thing as "bad" Star Trek. I knew I liked Star Trek, and thus anything with the Star Trek name on it had to be good. That mindset kept me from realizing how terrible the first and second seasons were. Of course, this was the decade when we were entertained by tripe like Knight Rider and The A-Team, so the bar was set much lower.

In fact, I didn't become critical of TNG until sometime in sixth or seventh season, when it became obvious that the writers had run out of ideas.
 
I don't ever remember the blue uniforms being that shade. And Troi's outfit looks ridiculous.

In fact often in reruns the red uniforms have seemed to have a rose like tint to them.
 
I don't ever remember the blue uniforms being that shade. And Troi's outfit looks ridiculous.

In fact often in reruns the red uniforms have seemed to have a rose like tint to them.

The blue and red uniforms obviously looked different on TV. The red looked pinker and the blue was lighter and flatter.

As for Troi's look in the pilot, she really did look like some kind of space cheerleader. A cheerleader whose main cheer was "Paaain!"

Actually, that would be a great basis for a comedy skit: "Deanna Troi, Cheerleader". She'd be on a cheerleading squad, but instead of performing the cheer the others were performing, she'd just should "Paaain!" all the time, pissing everybody off.
 
What's with Brent Spiner's old-school rapper pose and shit-eating smirk in that photo?

Umm...Spiner is not smirking in that picture. He's very straight-faced. In fact, there isn't a smile in the bunch.

At least Gene isn't in this version. He ruined the one he was in with HIS shit-eating grin.
 
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