Age and how you got here...

[T'Bonz]

56.

I was aware of the show as a kid, but my parents scoffed at it (and we had only the one TV). I probably saw one or two first-run though and Mum says we saw some but I have no memory of it.

In 1971 I started watching the reruns, due to a friend in junior high who loved it. A small group of us became fans .

Still love TOS the best, but DS9 is a very close second (and hey, Mutai, I like B5 too).

 

[HarryM]

49, started watching the reruns with my older siblings sometime in the early 70s. Then we'd go outside and act them out too, my brother made some rather nifty wooden communicators with metal grid flip-tops, very fun!

 

[Maab]

I'm 42 (that's the answer!).

In Italy TOS arrived in the '80s, more than 10 years after it was originally cancelled, so I've seen it during its "first run" here, when I was about 10. It was love at first sight.

I ended up here (a long time ago) looking information on deleted scenes from the motion pictures.

Maab

 

[RandyS]

I'll be 45 in April but like all males, I'm going on two.

I got into Star Trek at birth in April 1970, and watched it with my mom, who was a fan since 1966. She and I saw all the movies together up til Nemesis, and watched all the spin-offs together, except for DS9, which mom didn't like much, although she did watch and enjoy the Tribbles episode (obviously), and the Quark as the Roswell Alien show. We watched all the rest together until she died in April 2003.

Hey, Randy, see my Post above. I am so sorry about your Mom. A while ago, but never forgotten, I am sure. Bet our moms could have shared some stories, eh?

Yeah, they probably could. My mom also instilled in me a love of reading. Curiously, she didn't read much science fiction. Some Asimov, maybe others, but when it came to books, she was more into romance, and thrillers. I loaned her some of my Star Trek novels once, and she gave them back a few days later saying she couldn't connect the characters she knew from TV with the people in the books. I didn't understand that but different strokes, and all that.

 

[Duncan MacLeod]

I'm 55 and I have a dim memory of watching an episode on a Friday night back in the summer of '69. I think it might have been The Cloud Minders. But I really got into Trek in first run syndication on channel 56 out of Boston in the early 70s. I've been a fan ever since, and yes, like so many other, I can quote many scenes verbatim even after all these years.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I'm 42, and I came to Trek through a comparatively unconventional route. It was on telly when I was a child, repeated often, but all I can remember from that time are a few colourful images (the Enterprise in a blue sky from Tomorrow is Yesterday, and being creeped out by the wavery Balok head). I saw The Motion Picture when it first premiered on UK TV, I would have been about eight years old, and I know I slept through most of it. But when I was eleven or twelve, I saw The Wrath of Khan for the first time. It would have been 1984, back when we bought our first VHS, and of the three videotapes we got with that machine TWOK went on one (Chisum went on the other and The Looney Looney Looney Bugs Bunny Movie went on the third). I watched and re-watched TWOK till I'd memorised it backwards...

But I really didn't grasp just how much Star Trek there was, until I started borrowing Star Trek novels from the library. My first real exposure to the universe was through Trek Lit, and I read and re-read books like Uhura's Song, The Klingon Gambit, Web of the Romulans, Ishmael, The Covenant of the Crown, Mutiny on the Enterprise, Corona, Yesterday's Son, The Tears of the Singers, The Prometheus Design, Triangle, Killing Time (the unexpurgated version), The Entropy Effect, very much The Final Reflection, and not so much Shadow Lord, all of which were released as Book Club Hardcovers, and which I devoured. That got me started collecting Trek Lit, and it's when I read the Blish novelisations of the episodes that it clicked with me that there was actually a TV series. From age 14 onwards, my pocket money went towards buying the Star Trek videos, usually on sale, and usually in no particular order, but in a couple of years, I had all 79 episodes on VHS, in production order, which I watched repeatedly to the point that the tapes were starting to degrade. I've actually nursed those tapes ever since, even if I hadn't watched the series in ten years now until I finally got the Blu-rays. Would that I still had a VHS player and the tapes were still mint, as in some ways I prefer them to the Blu-rays.

That's how I got hooked on Trek (the same thing happened with Doctor Who, a show that I discovered through the books in my library first, after spending the Tom Baker years cowering behind the sofa and not actually watching the show). By 1987 I was in love with the original series, had bought the first three movies on VHS, just seen The Voyage Home in cinema, and heard about the Next Generation, and instantly hated it out of general principle. That hate lasted as long as it took to actually watch it on TV, and it turned out to be pretty good. By this point a hobby had turned into an addiction, and I religiously bought everything I could with the Star Trek logo on, books, videos, computer games, soundtrack CDs (thankfully there weren't all that many of the latter two in the eighties and nineties). That obsession lasted all the way through TNG, DS9 and Voyager, but it was with the latter that the shine started to fade. I didn't think it was all that good. And when Enterprise came along, it was a four season long nail in the coffin. I didn't even bother buying the DVDs for the latter. I've watched my Voyager tapes twice. I love DS9, and having heard that Blu-ray is off the cards for that, I'm finally getting around to ditching the tapes for the DVDs for that series.

I tend to think of myself as a lapsed fan now. I'm happy with what I've got, but I don't really want anything new, not unless it's on sale mega cheap.

 

[BillJ]

I'm 51.

Syndication, 1973, WXIX, Channel 19.

Sir Rhosis

1975, but it was still on WXIX at that point. Then moved to WLWT, channel 5 for a while.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

An interesting effect of that is that, having been exposed to movie-era TOS and some of the later novels before most of the episodes, it surprised me when I saw some of the earlier incarnations of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy dynamic, especially Spock and McCoy. Especially in Season 1, they were often written with what seems more like open hostility, and that kind of threw me.

An odd effect for me in this vein is that having devoured TWOK, and read all the spin-off novels with their grander scope and vistas of the imagination, when it came to the Blish novelisations of the episodes, I read them with movie era special effects and production values colouring the prose. It was a bit of a shock when I finally got around to watching the original series. Fortunately a short-lived shock.

 

[maneth]

Currently 41 and my first experience with Trek was a youngster watching reruns in the late 70s/early 80s though certain episodes were skipped by the Beeb.

I was a fan of science-fiction before I saw Trek (from my father).

Currently 43 and my earliest memories of Trek are from mid-80s reruns while my parents were stationed in the UK. I remember being fascinated by Spock at the time. I was also reading my dad's collection of Asimov, Clarke and Heinlein books by that time (as soon as my English was good enough).

That said, however, I can't claim to have been turned into a trek fan until much later. I did watch TNG in its first run here in Finland in the early 1990s, but I missed a lot of episodes.

I tend to prefer long story arcs over episodic shows, so although DS9 and the 3rd and 4th seasons of ENT are my favorites in the ST franchise. My overall favorite sci-fi show is Babylon 5.

 

[CrazyMatt]

27, and I started watching Star Trek before I can even remember. It was paired in syndication with Star Trek: The Next Generation, which started in first run syndication shortly before I was born.

27?

I'm surprised, Harvey, because I had the impression you were older by at least a decade if not twenty years.

Interesting.

I say we fact check that!

 

[CrazyMatt]

54.

Watched Star Trek first in 1972 on UHF Channel 21. First episode I saw was at 4 pm on a school day afternoon. Naturally, it was "The Doomsday Machine" and I was hooked on Trek from that day forward.

 

[RandyS]

My overall favorite sci-fi show is Babylon 5.

That shows excellent taste. For me, Babylon 5 is number two behind the overall Star Trek universe, but still, good choice.

 

[MGagen]

I'm mid-50s. Saw the first episode broadcast as a wee lad back in '66. Recall several scattered episodes during the initial three years. Was very excited to see the series come into syndication so I could see all of the episodes (countless times). Somehow never encountered "Wolf in the Fold" until the mid-'80s when I rented it from a local video store.

 

[Warped9]

My overall favorite sci-fi show is Babylon 5.

That shows excellent taste. For me, Babylon 5 is number two behind the overall Star Trek universe, but still, good choice.

For me TOS rules and closely followed by B5. Everything else follows after that.

 

[Maurice]

51.

I have a vague recollection of once seeing Star Trek "late" at night, but I'm not sure if it was an NBC "death slot" airing or an early syndication. I recall seeing the show when I lived in Las Vegas at the dawn of the 70s, along with Lost In Space, Get Smart, and Batman. We moved to a smaller town in 73 and I really got into the show with 3:30 PM reruns after school. I kinda lost interest in Jr. High, then Star Wars came along and I got interested in the idea of making a film just based on photos about the film months before I even saw it. ST:TMP brought back my Trek interest, but over the subsequent movies and into TNG it gradually diminished until I stopped watching regularly in TNG season 4, and never stuck out any of the other series for more than a handful of episodes. I've never picked up the habit again, although I like TOS and a few of the movies. I'm kinda of more interested in the "making of" side of it than watching it, funnily enough.

 

[Melakon]

But, does not...wisdom come...with age, Master?

Attend, Grasshopper. Quickly as you can, take the pebble from my hand.

When you can take the pebble, you will be as wise as Mutai Sho-Rin.

 

[Mudd]

I'm between 60 and 69. I watched TOS on NBC from the beginning. I honestly don't remember how I found TrekBBS, but I think it was just before the turn of the century.

 

[Melakon]

Wow, Dennis, that was over 100 years ago! Oh wait.

 

[TREK_GOD_1]

Trek: discovered it as a small child during early 1970s syndication, and was hooked from the start, which included Blish novels, AMT kits, Mego action figures, and more ST items than I care to list.

Age: Timeless.

 

[Albertese]

I'm 35, having been born not quite 11 years after the last new episode of TOS aired. My dad raised me on a steady diet of Star Trek and Perry Mason reruns, both of which where shown every weekday on KPTV, channel 12, the local TV station broadcast form Portland. I also have vague memories of Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica reruns from the same period. And every time we went to visit my uncle and his family up near Seattle, me, my brother, and my cousin would watch any of the Star Wars movies on VHS and then spend the rest of the time in the basement playing with Star Wars toys and, later, playing the Nintendo.

In those days all the sci-fi blended a bit in my young mind. And yet, Star Trek, probably because the 60's production values set it apart from the late 70's and 80's stuff, really always felt like it's own thing to me. I do remember when TNG premiered. I was way into it. I was already drawing MSDs when I was seven years old. I know this because we moved to a different town shortly after that and remember taping my drawings to the walls in our old house in Vancouver. By the 90's I was a die-hard TNG fan but actually preferred the look and feel of the TOS movies. I always got the most excited when TNG had movie-era stuff crop up.

But after 1994 and TNG's end, what with DS9 not really doing it for me (I have since changed my opinion of DS9... I love that show as much as TNG now) I started to refocus back on TOS. By this time, KPTV was still airing them daily, but it was at something like 1:30 am or somesuch. Being the only one in the family who knew how to program the VCR I was able to compile a collection of most of the series taped overnight. And I watched them over and over. By my 20s I was finally a bigger TOS fan than the other shows.

Now, honestly, I don't hardly watch any Star Trek at all. I still enjoy when I do, but my interest as a fan is currently mostly tied up with the technical fiction about the ship itself and the surrounding universe rather than the stories or characters themselves. And I almost never buy new Trek merchandise... though every now and then.

Recently my youngest brother, himself only 19, has expressed an interest in getting more into Star Trek. So I went to a local used book store and grabbed up a few reference books and gave them to him. It felt good to buy Star Trek books again and to hand them off. Maybe he'll start to get into this show as well.

I have a son of my own, currently five. I was about his age when my dad first started watching Trek with me and I have a model starship on top of my TV, which my boy already knows is named the Enterprise...

--Alex