"So there's more than Voyager?"

Yes, network standards and practices in the '60s meant that Trek often had to deal in veiled allegory to get a point across. But that's not the only approach, especially where SF is concerned. For instance, practically everything worthwhile about nuBSG was in its allegorical handling of complex real-world issues. And that was the only way to approach those issues, because even in the 21st century, nobody is telling stories directly about, say, refugee crises or military occupations.

 

But nuBSG was telling stories about refugees and military occupations. It wasn't treating them through allegory or sugar coating them. It told stories about religious fanatics killing in the name of God, rather than turning that into a comedy where instead of theocracy people unquestioningly followed the morality laid down in a book about gangsters.

Trek told a story about draft resistance by inventing a planet where people had a civic duty to disintegrate themselves ( great show, BTW).

Trek tried to get away with commenting on anti-gay prejudice through a world of genderless people and no one but trekkies were impressed- they laughed at the awkward timidity of that.

 

Most kids take a teddy bear to bed. I had two teddy bears, a dog, and a stack of books. This was before I could read, but I loved looking at the pictures, particularly those in my mother's old school atlas (this contributed to a love of maps, geography, and eventually led to my becoming a Civ addict).

Eventually I did learn to read (the family started teaching me when I was 4), and over the half-century since then I've developed a reasonably varied taste in literature, including nonfiction. The only stuff my family tried to push on me included Zane Grey westerns and a series of pulp stories about The Golden Amazon. My grandmother and dad loved those stories when they were serialized in The Star Weekly, and after I got into Star Trek and branched out to other SF, my grandmother told me that The Golden Amazon was much better than Star Trek.

As I recall, that conversation happened when I had my nose in an Arthur C. Clarke novel, and I just snorted and kept on reading. I used to go book-hunting every weekend, at second-hand places, garage sales, every bookstore and bookstand I could get to, and finally found a couple of Golden Amazon novels. I bought them for my grandmother, and from her reaction, you'd think I'd given her precious gems. I still have them, although I haven't read them myself. I never got into the Zane Grey westerns, either, but a few years ago I got back into Bonanza and have started collecting the DVD sets and novels.

Oh, and Star Trek? It's all my grandfather's fault. We'd just gotten cable in the fall of 1975 and he was trying out a variety of shows. One night it was Star Trek and I thought it looked dumb (pointed ears? WTF?). He wouldn't let me change the channel, and said I could either sit down and watch the show, or go to my room. So I watched the show, found it not bad, and decided to watch another episode the next day. Within two weeks I was hooked, and the two Blish anthologies I found at Woolco were the foundation of a science fiction/fantasy collection that numbers in the thousands now.

Aren't today's parents generally too young to have first-hand appreciation for Forbidden Planet? Unless, of course, they went searching for the old stuff or their parents passed their own appreciation for it down to the kids.

As mentioned, my grandmother was into The Golden Amazon, so was my dad, and they tried very earnestly to pass that on to me. It didn't work, but I'll give them E for effort. Maybe if I hadn't found the good SF first, it might have. That said, I do have an awful lot of stuff in the book collection that makes me shake my head now and wonder what the hell my teenage self was thinking.

I had an earlier session of this when I finally waded through the kids' books and decided to get rid of the Donna Parker and Bobbsey Twins' stuff that had an unpleasant stench of bigotry and racism in some of the books. It's things that didn't register in the 1960s and early 1970s, but it might as well be a giant billboard now.

It's a shame how people are dismissing libraries nowadays, unless they use it to access the internet. When I got into science fiction in junior high, I discovered that my school library had a fantastic amount of science fiction that I hadn't even noticed - some of it was stuff I can't find anywhere else now, or at least not at any price that's affordable.

There's something a bit off-putting at hearing the decades of my childhood and young adulthood described as "vintage."

It's like a story in an Archie comic I read a couple of weeks ago. The kids are admiring some furniture and knickknacks in an elderly person's home and they remark that he has a lot of nice antiques.

"Antiques?!" the elderly person yells in outrage. "This was all brand-new when I bought it!"

Gilligan's Island is high culture. They did a musical episode in which the castaways performed Hamlet to the music of Carmen!

 

Amen. Those lyrics will be burned into my brain until the day I die.

 

I think that they'll like this show a lot more than TOS, TNG, DS9, and ENT, and just as much as VOY, if only for it having younger people and a person of color being prominent.

 

FWIW, cards on the table, I had never heard of The Golden Amazon until @Timewalker's post on this page of this thread. A little Googling was informative. Sounds a bit more bizarre than a lot of other pulp-era characters!...

 

So what?

Gomer Pyle, USMC was a shitty show to begin with, and (most likely) an insult to all of the real Marines who were fighting and dying in Vietnam (not to mention all of the draftees/recruits going through the very grueling Marine training.) It was an example of the massive social disconnect that TV was at the time in the mid-to-late 1960's, and there's no way that anybody of recent generations (and anybody in the U.S. Armed Forces in particular who's of the recent generations) would (or could) even relate to this show.

How kids get to school depends on where said kids lives-in the country in (most parts of) North America, I'd wager that they take the bus to go to school (it's like that here in the rural parts of of Ontario) and it's mostly like that in a lot of places in the U.S. as well. There are children that do take the (city) bus to school (or walk, if they live only a block away from a school like I did) or they're bused to school on the short bus because they have special needs like I did (I am autistic, but everybody though that I had ADHD or ADD mixed with dyslexia for years, so I was misdiagnosed until I was in my thirties.) People have different ways of getting to school or work, and they should not be looked at askance because they don't walk/bike to school, or work.

 

Not looking askance at anybody! Just genuinely wondering... have the social norms around what kind of distance is "acceptable" for kids to walk to school changed when I wasn't paying attention?

(Does anybody even keep track of such things? I know some people who do education policy research; maybe I should ask them. Could be an interesting research project in there...)

 

I don' know about anyone else, but when my brother and I were going to elementary school back in the late 70s-early 80s Mom and Dad let us walk the mile or so to school without batting an eye.
Or course it was through developments so we were off the main roads.
Fast forward 30 some odd years and when my niece and nephew were in elementary school they rode the bus the exact same distance that my brother and I walked.
So there's been some kind of generational shift in the perception of how safe it is to let kids walk to school, even if they're in groups.

 

Ironically, statistically it's safer now than it was back then.

 

For the record, I walked to school for most of elementary school and junior high. Never really rode the bus until the high school.

 

Younger than Kes?

TNG has it beat. And VOY had more people of colour that lived and had their names said on screen.
But I come not to bury DSC but to praise...

 

It's so bizarre someone would know about Voyager and not the rest of ST. Given that they have netflix, wouldnt all the other series pop up on their front page? A head scratcher to be sure. I'm just happy people are watching trek, though.

 

Did you ever post this fanfic anywhere? I searched for "Erdis Blaine" and this was one of the very few places she's ever been mentioned. I'm seriously considering trying to write fic of the Hulzein series and there's none on ao3 or on fanfiction.net ... so I was wondering where it might have been posted? or if it just never was finished... that's too bad.