TOS fans age range survery

Your parents really liked that one,huh?

 

I was born early in 1980 and my dad raised me on a steady diet of Star Trek and Perry Mason (I still enjoy watching both shows and comparing the guest stars.)

I recall being 7 when TNG first aired and being pretty excited. I stayed with it through it's whole first run but DS9 lost me after about a year. I tried again with Voyager and Enterprise and those shows didn't last long for me either.

To this day I still think of TOS first. And as much a fan of TNG as I am, I must admit that a friend kept praising DS9 so I watched it all the way through and I think I might like it just a bit more than TNG. I'm having a similar experience with Voyager right now, only about half of year 7 left to see on my Netflix binge. That show took longer to get good than DS9 did, but by now, I'm really enjoying it. I never could get all the way through Enterprise.

But that said, any time I want to do something creative with Star Trek (fan art, model building, table-top role-playing games) I always open up the TOS tap. Something about the imagery and the spirit of that show. Not to mention that TOS started out strong and got a little harder to watch as it drew on, while the other shows started out weak and had to grow into themselves.


--Alex

 

If it was a TV show, I guarantee it wasn't that one. I don't think my dad has seen an episode of Star Trek to this day.

 

I'm older than Miri but younger than Flint.

 

I'm 38 and now twice as old as when I first registered here. You have no idea how bizarre that is.

Of course, someone is probably bound to say, "Twice nothing is still nothing."

 

49. I remember watching in syndication in the 70s.

 

59 and just joined up here. If anyone wants to ask about what it was like when Trek was young, please do.

 

Welcome to (going by this poll so far!) old grognards central.
And a informative and (mostly) friendly forum.
I am just three years behind you at 56, and been on this forum for a few years now. Its certainly been an interesting ride!

 

There's a "slingshot maneuver" joke here somewhere.

 

45, going on 46 in October.

I was on the front side of 30 when I joined.

 

If it counts for anything, I envy the people who got the chance to see Trek when it first aired. Must've been a better time when liking Trek was more of a special club than anything else.

 

I suspect that the majority are in the 35+ age range as for many in that bracket they'll remember a time when there was no other Star Trek show but Star Trek (and a few movies)

 

Yep. Lived and died Star Trek back then. It's all there was. Heck, I remember when there was no STAR WARS.

 

I'm 55, and by age 11 when TAS came along (1973), I was already a dyed in the wool fan of The Original Series. Deep-dyed. Star Trek was the biggest thing in my life.

The biggest differences back then:
- There was no home video yet. The only recording I could do was to hold a microphone up to the TV and get the sound on audio tape. I also used my parents' camera on a tripod to take still photos of the TV, with the 11-footer, the bridge, and props as my primary targets. Then I had to drop the film off at the store, wait two weeks for it to be developed, and make a second trip to pick up the prints and negatives. It was a different century.

- There was a much smaller population of fans, and no Internet to connect us. I had no sense of "community" at all until Starlog magazine came along in 1976.

- With only 79 episodes and TAS to worry about, I had (seemingly) absolute mastery of the ST universe. It was a kind of trivia expertise that's impossible now that there are 800 hours of programming and uncounted novels out there.

- You could own "everything there is" back then, every book at least, because there was so little to buy. I took pride in my complete ST collection and haunted a bookstore within bicycle distance of our house to catch the new titles.

It must have been 1981, well into the TMP era at Pocket Books, before I gave up on the idea of owning every book. The novels started proliferating and some weren't very good. I distinctly recall the moment-- I was on a city bus going home from my summer job-- when I gave up on the idea of being a Star Trek completist (although the word completist wasn't in circulation yet; like "TOS" it was a thing of the future). Post-TMP publishing had both expanded the show into a franchise too big to own, and changed the whole esthetic into something I barely recognized (pastel footed-pajama uniforms, Sulu as the lead in some books, etc.).

It was a turning point I'll never forget. Star Trek was something I would no longer have complete mastery of. And this was before TWOK even came along, let alone TNG.

 

Depends. You have to remember that Star Trek ran endlessly in syndication, back when there were only four or five TV channels, tops, so it wasn't just a cult thing. It was on every weekday after school, along with Gilligan's Island, Wild Wild West, F Troop, etc. You didn't have to be part of a special club to watch Star Trek reruns or know who Mister Spock was.

I honestly didn't discover "organized" SF fandom--with clubs and conventions and all that--until I went to college in the eighties. Before that, I just watched STAR TREK on tv like everyone else.

 

I recorded The Doomsday Machine like that.