50th Anniversary Rewatch Thread
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I haven't watched much TOS since the airing of TOS-R. I've looked through only a few episodes of the blurays. The other night I was inspired to finally do something TOS related to celebrate the 50th in some small way. So I watched "The Man Trap", TOS's big premiere episode, the one the TV Guide reviewer based the comment "Star Trek won't work". You know, he was right? At least in the 60s. Star Trek dropped 50% in the ratings and disappeared for a short while. He is also right that the episode doesn't work very well.
Here's the good. The dialogue itself isn't bad at all. As the reviewer noted, the actors are all trying very hard and they did a terrific job. Can you imagine what audiences seeing this in color thought? The world building..in this case, the starship building in both making the technology seem real and the shipboard life appear varied and interesting is terrific. The first real city in space and with humans aboard! There are welcome interactions between the secondary crew that slowly disappeared after the the first half of season one as the stars of the show (namely Nimoy, Shatner) were asserting themselves and given more lines, and then Shatner promptly tried to steal them all. The crew is diverse! Fantastic. But..
The episode isn't much like the rest of the series. It's kind of dreary and slow, and even surreal. Not the best example to start off on if you are trying to sell something to the audience. No wonder the TV Guide reviewer was thrown off.
It also creates a lesson and doesn't follow through. It's a problem with the writing. In an effort to create a threat and sense of danger, they make the supposedly intelligent creature go crazy. The problems could have been resolved any number of ways. Give it 10lbs of salt for God sake! Talk to it! In the process, the crew extinguishes the life of an endangered species. The buffalo have disappeared, just like old Earth. Why bring up the metaphor then? Just to show how tragic it is for history to repeat itself? Here's where the crew is not true to the "improved" humanity.
The episode has multiple groan moments with sexism, at least to our eyes today..though it's counteracted somewhat by the women acting very professional and Yeoman Rand comes off really well here as a character.
RAMA
Here's the good. The dialogue itself isn't bad at all. As the reviewer noted, the actors are all trying very hard and they did a terrific job. Can you imagine what audiences seeing this in color thought? The world building..in this case, the starship building in both making the technology seem real and the shipboard life appear varied and interesting is terrific. The first real city in space and with humans aboard! There are welcome interactions between the secondary crew that slowly disappeared after the the first half of season one as the stars of the show (namely Nimoy, Shatner) were asserting themselves and given more lines, and then Shatner promptly tried to steal them all. The crew is diverse! Fantastic. But..
The episode isn't much like the rest of the series. It's kind of dreary and slow, and even surreal. Not the best example to start off on if you are trying to sell something to the audience. No wonder the TV Guide reviewer was thrown off.
It also creates a lesson and doesn't follow through. It's a problem with the writing. In an effort to create a threat and sense of danger, they make the supposedly intelligent creature go crazy. The problems could have been resolved any number of ways. Give it 10lbs of salt for God sake! Talk to it! In the process, the crew extinguishes the life of an endangered species. The buffalo have disappeared, just like old Earth. Why bring up the metaphor then? Just to show how tragic it is for history to repeat itself? Here's where the crew is not true to the "improved" humanity.
The episode has multiple groan moments with sexism, at least to our eyes today..though it's counteracted somewhat by the women acting very professional and Yeoman Rand comes off really well here as a character.
RAMA
Personally I liked The Man Trap quite a lot! It really shouldn't have been the very first episode to be transmitted but apart from that it's a great tale with good old Alfred Ryder as the main guest star!
JB
JB
I wish the had started with "Where No Man Has Gone Before.". It was really emblematic of the whole series, not to mention that the title is likely the most famous line of the entire franchise, even among people who don't know much about the series.
Oddly enough, I was watching on Netflix, and it's really easy to click on other episodes...so I watched WNMHGB and I LOVE that episode. Still do. Would have blown the TV Guide reviewer away.
RAMA
So do I; That episode's got everything! Godlike powers, exploration of the unknown, the sudden reversal of the bad guy's accomplice... Plus Kirk wins by the skin of his teeth, which is always a good sign.
I'm not sure that offering the creature unlimited salt tablets would have worked. They were going to be supplying more salt, but it clearly preferred live food to have killed so many people anyway.
Also, if Kirk thinks that the buffalo went extinct, he needs to spend less time at Yosemite and more time at Yellowstone:
https://www.google.com/search?q=buf...ved=0ahUKEwj516TE8ITPAhUDOCYKHfjdB2gQ_AUICCgD
Heh...took one of these home as a souvenir...used to have it hanging on the door of the den in my old house:
Also, if Kirk thinks that the buffalo went extinct, he needs to spend less time at Yosemite and more time at Yellowstone:
https://www.google.com/search?q=buf...ved=0ahUKEwj516TE8ITPAhUDOCYKHfjdB2gQ_AUICCgD
Heh...took one of these home as a souvenir...used to have it hanging on the door of the den in my old house:
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Assuming this was an intelligent being, and assuming it as desperate or unbalanced through being the last of it's kind and in starvation mode, supplying salt would have simply returned it's normal diet. As long as it wasn't clinically insane from being alone there was no reason to believe it wouldn't return to being a normal being who wasn't desperate for sustenance. In fact, since it could talk, read thoughts, devise clever facades and make them believable to people we KNOW it's intelligent and probably not crazy. That's how they wrote it though..it was ugly so there was no reasoning with it..
At that point, you could say it still killed several crewman, but maybe Kirk would have considered extenuating circumstances.
Yes, according to trek the buffalo are extinct by this time, just like human beings made the whales extinct before STIV's time. There's certainly plenty of precedent for that.
RAMA
At that point, you could say it still killed several crewman, but maybe Kirk would have considered extenuating circumstances.
Yes, according to trek the buffalo are extinct by this time, just like human beings made the whales extinct before STIV's time. There's certainly plenty of precedent for that.
RAMA
I'm not sure that offering the creature unlimited salt tablets would have worked. They were going to be supplying more salt, but it clearly preferred live food to have killed so many people anyway.
Also, if Kirk thinks that the buffalo went extinct, he needs to spend less time at Yosemite and more time at Yellowstone:
https://www.google.com/search?q=buf...ved=0ahUKEwj516TE8ITPAhUDOCYKHfjdB2gQ_AUICCgD
Heh...took one of these home as a souvenir...used to have it hanging on the door of the den in my old house:
I don't think it was really intelligent. I think it acted more out of an elaborate instinct. Intelligence would have told him that killing human beings wasn't in his best interest, that it was safer to convince them to give him salt using non lethal means of persuasion. After all if he could appear as someone's ideal partner, he could probably hide in someone's quarters on the ship in perpetuity. So i don't think the creature qualifies as being intelligent or maybe in a small measure like a dog or a cat.
Or the creature may have been perfectly intelligent, but just had a completely alien thought process.
I am not talking about morality here. I am talking about self-interest. It wasn't smart to make enemies of the people on the ship as it only put obstacles between the creature and his food. It's never a good idea to give people incentives to hurt or to kill you, regardless of the circumstances.
In the mid 1960s, the U.S. wild bison were about gone. Without a lot of intervention restoring wild populations from zoo specimens etc., they would have been. There will probably never be the herds of thousands covering several states again.
It could be highly intelligent and simply have stronger sustenance drives. Like a Lion that has to eat a certain amount of food a day to remain functional and able to hunt..although with intelligence of course.
Here's the creature and Crater, a scientist who are both A) self-aware to discuss itself in a staff meeting as well as maintain McCoy's form, and argue it's intelligent.
MCCOY: Oh. Well, we could offer it salt without tricks. There's no reason for it to attack us.
SPOCK: Your attitude is laudable, Doctor, but your reasoning is reckless.
CRATER: (eyeing McCoy carefully) The creature is not dangerous when fed.
MCCOY: No, it's simply trying to survive by using its natural ability to take other forms.
CRATER: The way the chameleon uses its protective colouring, an ability retained no doubt from its primitive state, the way we have retained our incisor teeth. They were once fangs. Certain of our muscles were designed for chase. It uses its ability the way we would use our muscles and teeth if necessary, to stay alive.
MCCOY: And like us, it's an intelligent animal. There's no need to hunt it down.
SPOCK: A very interesting hypothesis, Doctor. Briefing room.
SULU [on monitor] All the halls sealed off. All weapons accounted for and locked away. Security four in effect on every level. Still no lead on intruder.
KIRK: Thank you, Lieutenant. Continue the search. Crater, we don't know who or what we're looking for. We need your help, and now.
CRATER: I demanded, I even begged that you get off my planet.
KIRK: Can you recognise this thing When you see it? Professor, I'll forego charges up to this point but this creature's aboard my ship and I'll have it, or I'll have your skin, or both. Now where is it?
CRATER: I loved Nancy very much. Few women like my Nancy. She lives in my dreams. She walks and sings in them.
KIRK: And it becomes Nancy for you.
CRATER: Not because of tricks. It doesn't trick me. It needs love as much as it needs salt. When it killed Nancy, I almost destroyed it but, it isn't just a beast. It is intelligent and the last of its kind.
While it might be a common myth that "only the privileged had color TV in 1966", I can testify that it's not totally true. I grew up in what today would be considered the lower-middle class. My dad was a house painter, mom didn't work. But they both had an extremely good credit rating, having always paid their bills on time. And since TV was an important part of our lives in 1966, they managed to get us a color TV back in the spring of 1966.
It wasn't the greatest color TV ever made - in fact, it probably ranked among the worst. It came from Sears, was a Sears-Silvertone branded set with a heavy metal cabinet and a 17" screen. It had two advantages over the prior black & white set it replaced: it was color, and it had a UHF tuner, but it was a slightly smaller picture than the 19" b&w.
We might have been among the first on my particular block to get a color TV. I can't say for sure as I never visited all of the 44 houses on our block. But our 2-doors-down neighbors sure enjoyed coming up to watch shows like STAR TREK and BATMAN in color.
I know that my school buddy with whom I discussed shows like STAR TREK also had a color TV. His dad owned a dress factory and usually bought big 25" console TVs with the stereo record player built in. They lived in a row house (town houses they call them now) too, just like us. Not exactly what anyone would consider "privileged."
The fact is that the promos for "Full Color Networks" and "All our shows will be in color this fall" worked. It got people into the stores and buying color TVs. And STAR TREK helped sell them.
And let's also give credit to that NBC Peacock that is my avatar. Everyone who saw that on EVERY program wanted to see it in color.
Harry
It wasn't the greatest color TV ever made - in fact, it probably ranked among the worst. It came from Sears, was a Sears-Silvertone branded set with a heavy metal cabinet and a 17" screen. It had two advantages over the prior black & white set it replaced: it was color, and it had a UHF tuner, but it was a slightly smaller picture than the 19" b&w.
We might have been among the first on my particular block to get a color TV. I can't say for sure as I never visited all of the 44 houses on our block. But our 2-doors-down neighbors sure enjoyed coming up to watch shows like STAR TREK and BATMAN in color.
I know that my school buddy with whom I discussed shows like STAR TREK also had a color TV. His dad owned a dress factory and usually bought big 25" console TVs with the stereo record player built in. They lived in a row house (town houses they call them now) too, just like us. Not exactly what anyone would consider "privileged."
The fact is that the promos for "Full Color Networks" and "All our shows will be in color this fall" worked. It got people into the stores and buying color TVs. And STAR TREK helped sell them.
And let's also give credit to that NBC Peacock that is my avatar. Everyone who saw that on EVERY program wanted to see it in color.
Harry
My parents were also lower middle class (at best), and we always had a decent-sized color TV in the living room as far back as I can remember (early '70s). Though I knew at least one kid whose family didn't have a color TV as late as the early/mid-'80s.
My Dad owned and managed a grocery store in Chicago. He worked there something like 75 hours a week, assisted by the rest of the family. He didn't have much time for TV watching, but took it seriously when he did, so we always had a nice set in the living room, with the older, smaller, black-and-white sets elsewhere in the house. We had a color set by 1963 at the latest, so far as I can recall.
(The grandmother with which we lived had the family's first color TV, maybe by 1960. I remember how unfamiliar relatives would drop by on January 1 to watch the Rose Bowl Parade!)
(The grandmother with which we lived had the family's first color TV, maybe by 1960. I remember how unfamiliar relatives would drop by on January 1 to watch the Rose Bowl Parade!)
Interestingly That was the first episode shown by the BBC in 1969 much more exciting. IIRC TOS was not shown so much in Wales due to its scheduled time clashing with Welsh language programmes so I did not get to see some episodes till recently.
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Oddly enough, I'm doing a watch-through of The Green Hornet now that H&I is showing it, and it was airing the night after the TOS Season 1 episodes, so I'm coordinating that with my 50th anniversary rewatches, just because I can.
I just watched The Man Trap. It is a good episode. I would have started with The Corbonite Maneuver. That is a good episode that introduces all of the main characters, I believe. Where No Man Has Gone Before is outstanding, but, I think the difference in the uniforms would have confused viewers. At least that is what I think the network thought would happen. I like that we get to see Sulu, Uhura and Rand have actual conversations. Major parts in the episode. I like Uhura flirting with Spock. I like Rand and Sulu's conversation. Alfred Ryder is a fine actor, always good in whatever he is in. I had watched the entire series in airdate order not too long ago, and I noticed that Scotty did not appear until episode 3 or 4. So I found that to be strange.
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