That One Where....

[Red Ranger]

The one where Kirk meets the Romans!

 

[Nardpuncher]

That one where Kirk fights an albino gorilla-unicorn thing.

 

[EnsignRicky]

I like the one where the ship goes to that planet, they beam down, Bones Tells Jim that the guy in the red shirt is dead, Spock makes that speech about logic, Scotty has to fix something with the ship before it's to late and Kirk hits on the chick with the bare midriff; Yeah, that one.

 

[Elder Knight]

Our local station's announcer once pitched today's rerun as "Today on Star Trek: Kirk almost loses control of the Enterprise!"

My wife said "That could be almost any of them!"



It's nice that the show put the title on screen. Many shows didn't do that. Yes, many of them are quite memorable.

 

[The Grim Ghost]

"The one with the salt monster/vampire"

That is the one I have probably heard more than any other.

 

[Nardpuncher]

That one where they go to the old west but the sets were all really cheap.

 

[Gov Kodos]

The one with the lizard and the home made bazooka.

 

[Tan Ru]

The one where Kirk meets the Romans!

It was pretty cool where Kirk jumps on stage to do a duet of "Blitzkrieg Bop" with Joey and then pogos back off to surf the crowd.

GABBA-GABBA-HEY‼

 

[Nerys Myk]

The one with the flying pancakes

 

[Nardpuncher]

That one where people turned into piles of salt on the floor.

 

[trevanian]

Star Trek was certainly the most visual of all of the Treks, and yet it had the most primitive special effects. Tell you anything?

Not really. They're only "primitive" by today's standards. By the standards of 1960s television, they were beyond state-of-the-art. They were the most sophisticated, complex, technologically advanced special effects ever created for television at the time. Four top visual-effects companies rotated on the series because the effects were far too elaborate and extensive for any one company to handle on a weekly schedule. Whole new FX techniques were invented for or popularized/standardized by TOS, and the show garnered Emmy nominations for its visual effects three years in a row.

So if you're trying to make some kind of "less is more" point, you're way off base. By the standards of the day, TOS was as "more" as you could possibly get without a feature-film budget.

Point well taken, Christopher, but I was responding to the OP's assertion that Star Trek has the visual moments people remember today. I was amazed by Star Trek's special effects work as a teenager and agree they were cutting edge for their day. But that's not the point. The OP's point is how visually memorable Star Trek is today. The "gee-whiz" CGI effects of ENT, or even the often excellent model work of TNG, are not as memorable today as hundreds of furry balls all over the Enterprise and K-7.

There was a visual ethic to Star Trek that was often missing in later incarnations of Trek. Maybe it was because color TV was in its infancy and there was a push to make Star Trek visually striking. Now everything has pop and pizazz. Maybe it was because those striking special effects you mention were becoming available on a television series' budget and not just reserved for movies, although I think there is more to it than that. For some reason, Star Trek was more exciting visually than its contemporaries and certainly more than later Trek. Certain series have it. The Twilight Zone had it. So did Star Trek.

Bold rich cinematography and often very smart editing are a big part of how iconic or emblematic TOS looks. Current film stocks let you see more in the shadow (more like video), and so it is almost impossible to get that stark quality to shadows that you had with slower film stocks without resorting to these silly CSI-looking treatments, and I miss the hell out of that. There's a lot of mood lighting on TOS that never transitioned into ModernTrek (probably a Berman call) and that, coupled with the lack of really distinctive music, probably keeps the newer incarnations from ever seeming so bold and distinctive and memorable (plus they're just not as good most of the time.)

I don't think the TOS vfx rank quite as high (if you look at the pilot for TIME TUNNEL or SOME of the work Abbott's group did for the Irwin Allen shows, you can see why Trek didn't win emmies for FX, though I think the ship photography is often excellent in conveying scale and I like most of the planets and the series beaming effect), but it was certainly reaching for a lot, and your reach should exceed your grasp, otherwise it becomes staid and boring. Then again, I find a lot of early TNG fx to be downright terrible, especially considering the era in which they were made.