My first clear memory is watching Best of Both Worlds Part I the day that the second part premiered. Our local affilate that carried Next Generation, Fox 50 (WKBD in Detroit) would run "last week's" episode on Sunday mornings (11am or 12pm depending on the year) before the nightime premiere (between 6PM and 8PM). I remember my father kept talking about this episode before I saw it. He said "Move over JR" at one point. lol. I remember watching Captain Picard being taken from the Enterprise and having it explained to me that he was the Captain and what a Captain was ("like your dad"). I was 6-years-old at the time. My first Star Trek movie was The Voyage Home which my father would play and I would usually go to sleep to. When I'd wake up, he'd turn it off so I only saw it in bits and pieces. I didn't understand the concept of different Enterprise ships, so I thought Kirk and Picard had been Captain of same Enterprise. As the movies and TNG ran side-by-side, I was deeply confused.
My fandom would grow once my parents seperated in 1992. My brother, who was now 12, would entice me to stay up and watch the re-runs on Fox 50 (11PM, news was at 10PM), and then eventually the TOS episodes that aired after TNG. He would tape them, use a boom box to record them to audio a few years later, and I lived on those tapes for 6 years. I didn't watch the first season of DS9 in its original run because it was banned from my house (quotes about a darker Trek). That was fine with me because my father, unknown that it had been banned at Mom's, used to turn on episodes. Because it didn't look familiar and there was a lot of talking, I didn't get into it. I would yawn and be bored constantly trying to get my father to turn it off.
I remember the last season of TNG like it was yesterday. I remember the promos leading up to All Good Things... and I was so excited to see Star Trek: Generations in the movie theatre. My first Star Trek experience and I would see all the TNG movies on opening day, a span from 4th grade to my first year of college. Also, I would buy Star Trek figurines and the sets (TNG's Engineering, Bridge, etc) and my brother would dismantle them, use legos (to replace the male end of the bridge chairs) and Waffle Blocks to build our own sets. We had the Enterprise, the Intrepid (commanded by William T. Riker), and the Defiant. It was fantastic trying to unify the three crews. Picard was off at Starfleet somewhere, an Admiral we didn't like. When I started to fancy myself a writer, I would try and come up with interesting episodes for a DS9-spinoff "Star Trek: Defiant." I used production art for the USS Valiant (the original name of the ship to be stationed on DS9) to conceptionalize the ship. I came up with about 8 episodes for that. We would read the novels and take ideas from there. My brother and I would memorize lines of dialogue from all over the Trek universe (he was, and remains better at this than I). In short, it captured the imagination.
After DS9's last season (my favorite show in my freshman year of High School) and Star Trek: Insurrection, I was burned out. I didn't start to seriously re-sample Trek until they released Star Trek '09 and most of my opinions come from that time on. I would see Star Trek '09 in an all-but-empty movie theatre some 2 months after it premiered. I was blown away watching Scotty and Bones, Kirk and Spock on the big screen for the first time in my life. When Leonard Nimoy came on the screen, I about cried.
My father has been dead some five years now. I used to watch this stuff with him. I related to Kirk in that scene. I think he would've liked this movie. It was so fast and exciting. It was the first DVD of Trek movie I bought. I've seen it about 20 times. lol. I guess I live up to the moniker and my fandom is back!
