TOS fans age range survery

[Noname Given]

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.

^^^
I did that - I had audio cassette tapes of a number of episodes (Corbomite Maneuver, Balance of Terror, The Doomsday Machine to name a few). <--- The interesting thing about that is over the years you could see what was 'cut for time' as the amount of commercials in syndication increased through the 1970ies.

 

[Morpheus 02]

I started watching TOS in Chicagoland, on channel 9, Tuesdays & Thursdays at 7pm....also the animated series...
I am 44.

This was way before the movies and TNG series...

 

[MANT!]

I was lucky; some of my friends in Jr. High also liked Trek. I didn't connect with fandom until the early 80s when I went to my first convention in Miami. Before that, it was books (some rather awful) and Starlog, which I devoured.

Actually got into fandom early in '75 when I went to a convention at Sacramento City College with a few HS friends in my freshman year, while there, I joined Sacramento S.T.A.R (Star Trek Association for Revival)..it was a different world then.

The Con's weren't excessively commercialized and were amateur affairs, you could get autographs for nothing, the vendor booths had still pictures of sci-fi movies and sci-fi TV shows, L-Ps of incidental music, home made props/uniforms/paintings and fan made books/fanzines/blueprints scattered with Star Trek/Sci-Fi novels and Franz Joseph's blueprints/tech manuals...with a few AMT model kits thrown into the mix.. it seemed that the fans owned the fandom back then..heck, even the costume contest had no pros..

But Starlog! That was the fandom's lifeline..best way to find out when the cons were happening..and what was being released into theaters.. That's how I found out about Star Wars...

Beginning with the mid-80s the cons became a business, and after the mid-90s , I no longer went..the magic was gone.

I recorded The Doomsday Machine like that.

As did myself..I had "The Doomsday Machine", "Balance of Terror", and "The Enterprise Incident" recorded on cassette
and wore those tapes completely out playing them on the weekends when Star Trek wasn't running..

 

[CorporalCaptain]

I audio-recorded all episodes in syndication in that manner, dutifully switching off the recorder with the switch on the mic during commercials!

 

[ChasFink]

Commander Kielbasa, sorry if us old-timers commandeered this thread when you were looking for other folks your age - but happy to see you seem to enjoy reading our reminiscences.

I enjoyed TOS from the beginning, but wasn't a REAL fan until my older cousin started to watch the early syndication broadcasts regularly. (He was overseas in the Air Force during the NBC run.) Seeing it on our first color TV sealed the deal - such a beautiful show in color!

Although I didn't do it, audio taping the shows was a popular fan pastime in those days. While not necessary with Trek, the practice has been known to aid with TV history: a missing episode of Dark Shadows was reconstructed with fan tapes and stills.

And yes, the fans owned fandom in the pre-internet, pre-geeks-are-cool, and even pre-Starlog era. The idea of paying an arm and a leg to get a photo or autograph would have been quite alien. Instead of web sites, there were dozens if not hundreds of fanzines, often produced with the equivalent of stone knives and bearskins - mimeographs, ditto machines, and hectographs. There were even fanzines that told you where to order the fanzines. Oh, and Rule 34 was already in full effect.

 

[Redfern]

I audio-recorded all episodes in syndication in that manner, dutifully switching off the recorder with the switch on the mic during commercials!

Similar experience here, though it was just "most" of the episodes, not all. I wouldn't catch my last "new" rerun (as contradictory as that sounds) until 1978. And like Mant, I would play them when the show was not airing, usually at night after I had climbed into bed and switched off the light. It was rather like listening to a radio drama.

For a couple of years I was lucky with the audio quality. My "personal" TV, a 15 inch black & white unit, had an audio output jack intended for an earphone. I found a cord at Radio Shack that let me feed that signal directly into my tape recorder, bypassing the microphone. In that manner, I had no external noises caught on tape like car horns, neighborhood dogs or my growing excited and "vocalizing".

 

[scotpens]

I usually just say that I'm looking at the front side of 60.

I usually tell people I'm somewhere between 60 and death. Actually I'll be 64 in October. I was going on 13 when Star Trek debuted on NBC -- just the right age. And the fall of 1966 was when we bought our first color TV set. Talk about serendipity!

 

[Joanna McCoy-Kirk]

I am 56, although I am told I act about 3. The first Trek I saw was TAS on Saturday mornings in the early 70s, but I discovered TOS in syndication a few years later. That is still my favorite series, followed by TNG and ENT (I just recently bought my first DS9 DVDs, so I don't know where that show will eventually rank in my preferences).

 

[SpockWeed]

My mom was a big fan. I was born just after the first season, though I am told I saw them I don't remember watching first run, but watched every day on reruns in the 70's. I also remember watching first run TAS on Saturday mornings.

 

[Desert Kris]

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)

Yeah, I'm in that range. I was introduced to Trek through reruns, which if I had to guess, were being replayed because of the movies coming out every couple of years. Loved the classic series, and was too young to know that the special effects were outdated. All I knew was that the effects in the TV show and the movies were different. Also, I watched Doctor Who, so I never cared about special effects quality all that much, I just wanted weird space adventure stories.

I remember watching TSFS as the first Trek movie I saw in the theater, and I subsequently remembering the details of it very badly. TVH was a massively exciting mainstream movie that many kids could talk about, whether they were Trek fans or not.

The coming of TNG was exciting, but it took me a while to get the hang of Picard. I locked in on Riker, as he reminded me generically of Kirk; and Data reminded me generically of Spock. I pretty much grew up with TNG, elementary school through to it's finish somewhere during high school, and still have a fondness for that; but I had a firm foundation with TOS and find myself returning to it more often.

 

[Forbin]

Watched Trek from day one in 1966.
For a very long time in the 70s, it was rerun every night at 6PM on WPIX channel 11 in the NY area. Much to my parents' chagrin, because I insisted on eating dinner in the living room so I could watch it every night. Pissed Dad off. The main reason, though, was to get away from the general cloud that had fallen over the family since my mother's father moved in with us. Dad hated him, I didn't like him much, and even Mom had a hard time taking him. Dinnertime was kind of rough with him there, so I used Trek as an excuse to get away from the table.