If you look at the wall to the right, behind the two actors there, there is a shadow on the wall, how would a "dissolved" character cast a shadow on a wall?
Debunking TOS exceptionalism
- Thread starter A beaker full of death
- Start date
So TOS wasn't first or even totally original. You know what? Big damned deal.
I didn't watch it because they invented the first (fill-in-the-blank), had people of color (I was already watching "Julia"), had the first interracial kiss or whatever.
I watched Star Trek because it had compelling, interesting characters, who were good enough to overcome sometimes crappy stories. When the stories were good - wow!
It was exceptional in that it's 40 years since I saw my first episode (that I remember clearly, I probably saw one or two first run, but my parents turned their snoots up at Star Trek, the dumbasses), and I STILL like to watch it.
I can't say the same about other shows in the 1960s or 1970s that I watched.
For a little while back then, Star Trek yanked me out of my "Oh God, I'm a teenager and everyone hates me and I hate myself" mode. It made me have hope about humanity too, in a rather dark, turbulent time.
Can't say I have that hope anymore, but I still like Star Trek! Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Often imitated, never duplicated!
I didn't watch it because they invented the first (fill-in-the-blank), had people of color (I was already watching "Julia"), had the first interracial kiss or whatever.
I watched Star Trek because it had compelling, interesting characters, who were good enough to overcome sometimes crappy stories. When the stories were good - wow!
It was exceptional in that it's 40 years since I saw my first episode (that I remember clearly, I probably saw one or two first run, but my parents turned their snoots up at Star Trek, the dumbasses), and I STILL like to watch it.
I can't say the same about other shows in the 1960s or 1970s that I watched.
For a little while back then, Star Trek yanked me out of my "Oh God, I'm a teenager and everyone hates me and I hate myself" mode. It made me have hope about humanity too, in a rather dark, turbulent time.
Can't say I have that hope anymore, but I still like Star Trek! Kirk, Spock and McCoy. Often imitated, never duplicated!
I agree. From today's perspective TOS mightn't seem so distinctive, but at the time it seemed damned distinctive.
Oh when are you people going to realize you should never argue with me over something that can be proven with a screenshot?If you look at the wall to the right, behind the two actors there, there is a shadow on the wall, how would a "dissolved" character cast a shadow on a wall?
Here're frames from the whole sequence. You can see the actors fade out and fade back. They dissolve away, which is all I'm saying. They did that for a reason, even if the reason makes no sense to us.
^^^
Cookie's looking pretty indistinct there...as are those shadows.
You can see the walls where Cookie's head and Adams' shoulder were. The crewman on the far left of the frame also completely vanishes. They. Are. Gone.
^^^
Cookie's looking pretty indistinct there...as are those shadows.
You can see the walls where Cookie's head and Adams' shoulder were. The crewman on the far left of the frame also completely vanishes. They. Are. Gone.
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Roddenberry apparently put Star Trek together while he was at MGM and pitched it to that studio. Given the repeated use to which set and costume elements of Forbidden Planet were being put by shows like Twilight Zone I've wondered for a while if he didn't originally hope to contain costs on his pilot by reusing that stuff himself rather than having everything designed and built from scratch. FP looks to have inspired almost every element of Star Trek other than visual design, after all.
I would say that, if anything, it's Trek fandom that is the larger cultural phenomenon.
For whatever reason, the show has touched each of us in different ways. We gathered together as a community to express our appreciation, and in response to that, Paramount has made five more series (I'm including TAS here) and 11 movies, and hundreds of novels have been published.
That's the phenomenon. The fact that this thread has gone on as long as it has, with no consensus being reached as to why the show is so popular, is evidence that there is no one reason. It just is. We all have our own reasons for enjoying the various series, and there's nothing that says that we all have to have the same reason for being fans. Hell, we're not all fans of the same series, necessarily. Some only like TOS. Some only like the shows that came after TOS. Some only like one or two of the shows. But we all like something from the 46 years that the Star Trek franchise has existed.
Other shows and films may have done the same things as Trek. Some have done things better, others worse. But for many decades, Trek was the main reason for the existence of media science fiction fandom. We may remember other series fondly, but you didn't see Twilight Zone, Lost In Space, or Tom Corbett, Space Cadet conventions everywhere in the 1970s and 80s. (Okay, Frankie Thomas was to be a special guest at the 2006 Worldcon, but he died about three months before the convention.)
I have always considered TOS/TAS on the tail end of the retro-futurism era.
I still say those are states beams. Why demat them at all?
I still say those are states beams. Why demat them at all?
Agreed, I was hooked on its vision of the future as a place of technical wonder and not just harmonious living when I started watching around the same age.
There were other science fiction shows on TV when I was that age (BSG, Buck Rogers, The Invaders, Doctor Who), Trek stuck for the same reasons the rest of them did, fun.
