My answer to this is kind of tricky. As I remember it, my mother tried unsuccessfully to introduce me to Star Trek when I was four years old, so sometime between August 1970-71, most likely in September 1970, when our local NBC affiliate picked up reruns for afternoon syndication. I was very resistant. I was a sensitive child with an aversion to anything "weird" or "scary." At that age, I was all about sitcoms, especially the ones aired by our CBS affiliate, and Star Trek had been counterprogrammed against Gilligan's Island. As soon as weird music started playing during the first planetary beamdown, I said, " Nope. Too scary, " and hightailed it outside to play.
Shortly thereafter, Star Trek was taken off the afternoon schedule.
When I was five, however, my tastes broadened to include adventure shows like The Wild, Wild West and Lost in Space. I was all about those Jim West fight scenes.
In September 1972, when I was six, Star Trek returned to the afternoon schedule, starting this run, oddly enough, with "The Gamesters of Triskelion." This time, I was hooked.
In September 1973, the animated series premiered, and for a time, I had Star Trek six days a week. But soon, the afterschool live action reruns ended, moved to 5 and 7 a.m. on Saturday mornings. Even as a kid, I was never a morning person, and I generally didn't get up before nine a.m. on weekends.
During that enforced absence from live-action Trek, we had upgraded our cheap/freebie hotel cast-off black and white VHF-only TV (no UHF tuner built-in) for a used color TV. On May 31, 1974, we moved into a new house. As my bedroom did not as yet have curtains AND was on the East side of the house, the sun woke me up at 6:50 a.m. on the morning of Saturday, June 1st. I was up in time to watch that morning's live action Star Trek rerun, only this time, IN LIVING COLOR. So, the first episode I saw in color was a rerun of "A Private Little War."
By 1975, live action Star Trek disappeared altogether from my local television market. From 1975-September 1979, the only times I could see it was on hotel televisions when we took vacations to King's Dominion or the Blue Ridge Mountains, so until 1979, there were many episodes I only experienced through their Blish adaptations.
(Oh, and on the night we hurried out to see TMP, we had to leave in the middle of my first viewing of "Journey to Babel." Yes, thirteen year old me was conflicted about that. )
