I was a freshman in high sk00l. and I misspell the name directly because the sk00l kept handing out book covers featuring the TNG class as opposed to teaching anything...
Anyway, I was there and a young teenager at the time, more busy wondering why so-called peers were walking around the hallways with shirts on reminding us that it was 1987 for no reason. Did people of the era not have calendars? Wait, I was there, calendars existed. What gives? Seriously, just a shirt with garish pastel 80s colors with the large, solid imprint of the number "1987" on them and people thought they were cooler than two slices of bread they feed their pet rock while watching reruns of The Smurfs....
*cough* I digress.
I was also in my anti-remake phase, which only increased in vocalization as TNG continued to get worse and worse with season 1. For that, also thank The New Leave it to Beaver, The New Monkees and The Munsters Today (and later, Bonanza The Next Generation and all sorts of other dead shows dug up solely to get the then-40-somethings to watch and feel good about while embarrassing whole slews of actors willing to act out any ol' dross... and, seriously, for the new Munsters, John Schuck, Lee Meriwether, Howard Morton, etc, were great at what they did but it was wasted talent...)
There were things that went over my head as a kid, but even I could tell that season 1 had some huge problems. "Farpoint" felt like cheese. Not gouda. "The Naked Now" was horrendously wrong on all levels. Even I could pick up on the use of contractions Data had, especially in "Datalore" and wondered how they could sit through the schlock of Wesley Wonderboy(tm). I think I tuned out for a while since I've no memories of original viewing of a lot of TNG seasons 1 and 2... Not sure what got me to watch in season 3, certainly not the ludicrous Okona... but I do remember the Borg finale, Transfigurations, and the horrible Apgar episode. And the one with the Shelliak where Data teamed up with the hawt guest star of the week (again, still a teen, the age range everyone hates most until they reach their mid-40s when they all wish they could be teens again and live it all differently... your "midlife crisis" concept but I digress...)
One other reason for going Trekless is because Star Trek V was such a pain to sit through in the theater. Picard's era was atrocious enough and true wannabe, and now Kirk's era had been dragged DOWN as a result with more jokey garbage. Yipes... but the late-80s felt largely shallow regardless. Thankfully Red Dwarf and In Living Color were almost about to hit the scene, as had reruns of 1960s Doctor Who since that show was a
lot better in the 1960s compared to 1987...
But back to TNG: It took me about 10 minutes from the start of BOBW to figure out that Picard would be cybertized into Locutus... and that was long before the moment the Borg voice specified they wanted Picard personally - which was anything but subtle as far as scenes go. (Ep1 , despite being obvious, still had some great stuff... but I'm more a fan of part two, where Locutus really gets to work and is later abducted and deborgified, in a fantastic plot reversal that part one brought, but more successfully handling the suspense since I had no clue as what they would do. Loved the Unix terminology, though! Really, who does not love root commands?
So if anyone asks me if I like root commands, I always answer "
Su betcha!"
bah-da-bump... )
I remember all the banal "Kirk vs Picard" wars. Naturally I sided with Kirk and always referred to Jean-Luc as "Captain Picknose". Keep in mind the time and place- 1987, a few months from a rather horrific situation I'd both endure and rather not remember but it's not the normal sort of cliche you'd expect - rest assured and it's not like it hadn't happened before under different circumstances though it had... But I digress again. These days I'd prefer Picard, except whenever I get asked the same question I answer "Sisko". But I think of Picard a lot more highly now than on original viewing, and even by 1993 I wasn't the only one who could feel a difference in TNG's style - the original half may have been cheesy but it did feel more like adventure. Season 6 TNG just had talky talk and music that must have been composed by people going to a pond and recording the bodily functions made by the frogs that lived on the logs in the bog sans any smog.
Nowdays, looking back on some episodes, and diverting back specifically to season 1, there are details no kid or early teen would have picked up on. Apart from the eye candy in "Angel One", I suppose. I, on the other hand, was still glued to 11001001 with the technobabble, since even then I already knew of 32-bit and faster bandwidth technology of the time so why did TNG keep it all limited to 8 or 16 bits... oh well.
When looking back, even I can appreciate some certain ideas that were in episodes like "Justice" - even if executed poorly, some basic ideas seemed cool. Little did I know even at that point the behind the scenes problems, and what episodes like "Justice" were originally like before rewrites took care of any ingenuity they had...
And, even better, at least Trek TNG had beige and gray instead of the pastel vomit that the other dug-up shows all had because - you know - it was the 1980s! People wore t-shirts with the current year on them! It was rad, dude! All the herberts were gagging on spoons! At least "Night Court" was getting better... Anyway, apart from the New Monkees (a show that had hired some genuinely good musicians, but being utterly suicidal from the start by branding the name "Monkees" for any number of reasons), at least the other shows were (far-fetched) continuations or sequels and not mere soulless reboots/reimaginings/regurgitations/etc to rake in mo money with.
And I shouldn't mock because some of the 80s styles I rather liked and still do to this day, and I'm also a devout fan of "The Munsters Today" (they did get the feel right, just turn the color dial to 0 and not only does the 80s pastel puke-a-rama go away, it perfects the authentic feel as a result) and wished it came out on DVD... In admitting that I hope I get a cookie and gold star...
