Original Syndication of TOS
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I believe that the original flight of TOS was fall 1970. It did not come out the year it went off the air on NBC, which was 1969.
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The year 1972 seems to stand out to me as to when Star Trek began the syndication voyage.
I'm sure that Philadelphia and New York independent stations started showing reruns 5 days a week no later than fall 1971; we lived in an area that received both. There were cuts for length even then, IIRC, and horribly executed ones at that. It was a great treat to see episodes such as "Mirror, Mirror" not only at full length but on film at the one Trek convention I attended, in January 1975 in NYC.
I guess it depended on how big a market one lives in.
My casual search of The New York Times online archive turns up a hit for Star Trek in the ``Television This Week'' column starting from 20 September 1970, with daily hits in that column beginning 27 September. The only references from January 1969 through August 1970 appear to be reviews of other projects --- of the fourth season for Mission: Impossible and for The Devil's Architect.
I don't have the subscription needed to read the whole articles, but it looks to me like the start of syndicated Trek in the New York City area would be September 1970.
An interesting mention about this in Inside Star Trek by Solow and Justman, pp. 417-418.
Apparently Kaiser Broadcasting proposed buying the syndication rights to Star Trek in 1967 before it was cancelled. They went on to buy the right 1 1/2 years before it was cancelled. They owned low-powered UHF stations in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and San Francisco and scheduled them to be rerun at 6pm. When the ratings success story came in, other stations heard about it and wanted to run it, too, and share in the ratings bonanza.
Apparently Kaiser Broadcasting proposed buying the syndication rights to Star Trek in 1967 before it was cancelled. They went on to buy the right 1 1/2 years before it was cancelled. They owned low-powered UHF stations in Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, and San Francisco and scheduled them to be rerun at 6pm. When the ratings success story came in, other stations heard about it and wanted to run it, too, and share in the ratings bonanza.
The big push started around '72-'74 (I remember I first started seeing ads on Channel 4 for TOS after TAS had been airing for a while, and being rather excited that I'd finally be able to see the original episodes instead of just reading about them).
That being said, though, I recall catching bits and pieces of episodes on other channels previously (making for some rather fractured early memories of the show). I distinctly recall catching a bit of "Whom Gods Destroy" (the first "Queen to Queen's Level Three" bit) on Channel 9 on a Saturday afternoon, well before Channel 4 started running them weekday afternoons.
So, yeah, it started in 1970, but it took a couple of years for the fire to really catch on a big scale.
That being said, though, I recall catching bits and pieces of episodes on other channels previously (making for some rather fractured early memories of the show). I distinctly recall catching a bit of "Whom Gods Destroy" (the first "Queen to Queen's Level Three" bit) on Channel 9 on a Saturday afternoon, well before Channel 4 started running them weekday afternoons.
So, yeah, it started in 1970, but it took a couple of years for the fire to really catch on a big scale.
Sounds about right. My family moved from Japan to the SF Bay Area in January of '72 and I recall catching reruns on Channel 44, a Kaiser Broadcasting station.
No. It wouldn't be until after 9/2/1969 at least, as NBC repeated episodes during the summer of '69 until 9/2.
EDIT: According to some NY Times research I've just done, it debuted on, get this... the following Monday, 9/8/69 at 6:30 PM on WPIX 11.
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Gotta love life's little ironies.
I wasn't born until 1974 and didn't start becoming aware of TOS until I was a toddler(1976)based on the very crude pencil drawings and scribblings of Spock and the Enterprise in many of my childhood and toddler books. But I think my mom or dad once said that my area started showing TOS reruns around the time they got married, which would have been 1973.
Oh, good point: summer reruns. Well, that info is interesting; thanks! I think we watched it from an L.A. station all that fall/winter/spring of '69-'70 before we moved to the east coast. I remember watching it while we ate supper on the kitchen TV in that house.
That would be KCOP 13... based on some LA Times research. :-)
They started airing repeats on 9/22/69 with WNMHGB.
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