Classic episodes now considered "lame" - ?!

[JonnyQuest037]

And a lot of "reaction" shtick—like, I suspect, whatever started this thread—is acting like you're smugly superior to what you're watching.** (Thankfully, there's plenty of more wholesome, open-minded reaction content out there, which is why this thread confuses me a bit.)

Yes. One of my favorite YouTube reaction channels is Addie Reacts, where she has pretty positive reactions to older media and doesn't judge it by the standards of the present. She came out of the Christopher Reeve Superman movies with a huge crush on Christopher Reeve. She's currently going through the Sean Connery Bond films from the 1960s and she's genuinely enjoying them. Her enthusiasm if infectious.

But the scope of "The Menagerie", behind the scenes, is genuinely innovative. At the time, so young in the Trek universe's run, with no past apart from only Kirk episodes and how many of the audience believed that the Pike material was prepared specially for this 2-parter at the time, it was very novel. It was also as novel to see "past lore" given a glance, as well as a novel way to cut costs as Trek, up to this point, was the most expensive thing ever made by the studio, complete with two pilots and all, so why not chuck 'em in?

"The Menagerie" was pretty exceptional for the time, because it gave the Star Trek Universe a past.

Even though "The Cage" had been made just three years before, it genuinely looked like it belonged to an earlier era than TOS, looking more like Forbidden Planet than a modern production. It was easy to believe we were seeing a mission from 13 years before. "The Menagerie" established the Enterprise as a ship with history, with a Captain and a crew who preceded Kirk taking over. And unless I'm forgetting something, it was the first episode that established that Vulcans were longer-lived than humans, with the Spock of 13 years before looking not too much younger than the Spock of the present day.

Suddenly, the universe of Star Trek seemed like a place with real history, and that gave the show a verisimilitude that it might not have had otherwise.

 

[Warped9]

I cannot say I now find any TOS episodes lame. Some of them are somewhat disappointing in that they could have been better, but they’re still not totally lame. There are TAS episodes I wish they hadn’t done, but I still wouldn’t call them lame.

The reactions I’ve watched on Youtube have been overwhelmingly positive from younger people having little to no previous experience with TOS. None of them ever suggested they found any of the episodes lame.

 

[Maurice]

Even though "The Cage" had been made just three years before,

Just under two. It was shot at the end of 1964 and "The Menagerie" aired in November 1966,

 

[Shawnster]

Not even SF giant Robert Heinlein quite predicted the ubiquity of personal computers by 1996 in 1966's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress...

But he did predict the iPod nano.

Which book was it? Starship Troopers? He described a character listening to music from a device the size of a stick of gum.

 

[The Salt Umpire]

I heard younger viewers are anti-nudity these days. It's not the 70s and 80s anymore, where you had random nakedness.

Jenny Agutter and Mathilda May have joined the chat

 

[The Salt Umpire]

But he did predict the iPod nano.

Which book was it? Starship Troopers? He described a character listening to music from a device the size of a stick of gum.

My dedicated MP3 player that I have forgotten the name of had the proportions of a half kit-kat bar. It even had a little video screen that could play very small format mp4 video like 144x144 or 96x96. I could barely get all the Beatles albums on it. Now? My phone has a bigger screen and much, much more storage

 

[Ragitsu]

Jenny Agutter and Mathilda May have joined the chat

From burning bras and being proud of the human body to...becoming apoplectic over a bit of skin.

 

[Cicero]

Predicting events 50 years in the future? Not even SF giant Robert Heinlein quite predicted the ubiquity of personal computers by 1996 in 1966's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress - Mike was a mainframe AI that everyone on the Moon used as a sort of proto internet with apps, but he was close. But he definitely predicted Nehemiah Scudder and the society that made him, so I'll give him that one.

Assigning dates is hazardous unless it is some future date like 2001. Oops. (I still sorta consider 2001 the future, it was that for so long, instead of 25 years ago) Consider the dates of events an artifact of when the show was made for plot purposes, not some future that should have happened by now.

It's not fifty years, but Isaac Asimov came very close to predicting the timeline of the Cuban Missile Crisis in his 1948 story "The Red Queen's Race" (substituting an abortive World War III in 1965 for the 1962 standoff over Cuba).

If you've read it, it's the one that starts "Here's a puzzle for you, if you like. Is it a crime to translate a chemistry textbook into Greek?"

 

[The Salt Umpire]

It's not fifty years, but Isaac Asimov came very close to predicting the timeline of the Cuban Missile Crisis in his 1948 story "The Red Queen's Race" (substituting an abortive World War III in 1965 for the 1962 standoff over Cuba).

If you've read it, it's the one that starts "Here's a puzzle for you, if you like. Is it a crime to translate a chemistry textbook into Greek?"

I haven't read that one. The golden age SF writers were so prolific and were published by so many different sources that only a collected stories anthology can gather them all.