Exactly, which means something different than it does today. Today it's "whatever product with the Star Trek brand on it." Much different than the hunger for those same 79 episodes and more time with the characters within. We already knew the quality of them and looked forward to the reunion movies. Movies we looked forward to not because "new Star Trek product" but because they were reunions. More Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, Uhura, Sulu and Chekov.
It wasn't "I have to watch/like it because it's called Star Trek." Again: one show. And that made our little club, well, little. And that was the exciting part.
I have zero issues with people who look at the entire franchise that way. Actually, I wish I felt the same way they did. But I haven't gotten legitimately excited for new Star Trek in decades.
It's all a matter of perspective. I was born in 1987, so I lived the first 18 years of my life during a time when there was always brand new Star Trek episodes on the air. My earliest memories of Star Trek are of my grandpa watching TNG in its original airing. So TNG was my first association of what Star Trek was. I remember going to a video store and would see Star Trek videos available for rental, and to my astonishment it featured a different leading character. It wasn't the bald guy I saw on TV, it was someone else entirely, and he had hair!* I think Star Trek is the first title I ever came across that happened to have
two different sets of casts. That was so unique to me at the time. Superman was just Clark Kent. Batman was just Bruce Wayne. Star Wars was just Luke Skywalker. But Star Trek? Depended on which show you were watching!
So yeah, it's interesting to think of a time when Star Trek literally was just Kirk and Spock. Had TNG bombed in 1987, it would have been regarded as that weird oddity that only a few people know about. One of many spin-offs of successful shows that only lasted 13 episodes. But the Star Trek I was getting into in 1994 was four shows and six films. In fact, I didn't actually see any TOS episode until well after I saw the first six films many times. For whatever reason, the local station that aired TOS only did so late at night at 1am. My only way of ever watching it as a kid would be to set up the VCR timer, which I only did one time because my dad wasn't going to do this for every episode. That very first TOS episode I ever saw? "The Enterprise Incident". Imagine only knowing the TOS cast from just the movies, suddenly seeing them in an older show where they were younger? It was wild! I knew it looked like it has a smaller budget than anything that came after, but I didn't care, because I thought it was great to see these characters again in something aside from the six movies I watched over and over.
It's interesting to read from older generations regarding when Trek changed from what they knew to something different. For many baby boomers there's the original show and then there's everything that came after. I guess my breaking point would by 2005. Not because I felt everything since 2009 has been lesser, but I refer back to the top of my first paragraph. For the first 18 years of my life, a Star Trek series was always on air. From elementary school to high school. I became a fan in 1994, and by the 2000s it was so normalized I took it for granted. I didn't watch every episode, and there were times I dropped out of Voyager and Enterprise. But suddenly, in 2005, it no longer was, and I
felt the absence. Four years isn't much, but for me at that time it felt like a longer gap because I had never experienced a time when no new Trek was being made. It's probably the closest I could experience what fans felt in the 70s, but that's very apples and oranges admittedly.
*=Or so did I thought!
. I was born in '57 and graduated in 1975, with the rise of leisure suits and blow-dried hair and we were on the cusp of (ugh) disco. I feel like we're totally different generations, tho we're both technically boomers (our Dad was a WWII vet - he just took his time having kids 
