MeTV is airing TOS again on Saturday nights at midnight Eastern. It's nice to know TOS is getting exposure like this again. Who knows--maybe it will make a new fan or two?
TOS Returns to MeTV Tonight
- Thread starter Joanna McCoy-Kirk
- Start date
MeTV cuts the episodes to allow extra commercials, or at least they did so in the past. Heroes & Icons, by contrast, shows intact episodes (although they do add one or two extra commercial breaks), so the only new fans that might be made are those who can't afford Netflix, can only watch broadcast TV late at night, and don't mind the cuts.
All broadcasters do, and have ever since the early days of syndication in the 1970s by the way. The only exceptions are when the time slots last over an hour and begin (or end) at off-times, such as what BBC America does sometimes and the Sci-Fi Channel (now Syfy) did back in the day.
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M
marlboro
Guest
Thanks for the heads up! I'm watching Svengoolie right now.
TV Land in the USA is the worst I've ever seen when it comes to butchering classic shows. A few years ago I took the time to measure how much had been cut out of an episode of Andy Griffith. The uncut episode ran a little over 25 minutes. On TV Land they put it in a 40 minute timeslot and still cut the episode down to 17 minutes. Entire scenes are removed. Jokes have setups without punchlines.
SyFy sucks, too. They chop so much out of the Twilight Zone that they don't even make sense sometimes.
I wonder how many young people get a bad impression of these shows, never realizing that they aren't getting the complete episode.
TV Land in the USA is the worst I've ever seen when it comes to butchering classic shows. A few years ago I took the time to measure how much had been cut out of an episode of Andy Griffith. The uncut episode ran a little over 25 minutes. On TV Land they put it in a 40 minute timeslot and still cut the episode down to 17 minutes. Entire scenes are removed. Jokes have setups without punchlines.
SyFy sucks, too. They chop so much out of the Twilight Zone that they don't even make sense sometimes.
I wonder how many young people get a bad impression of these shows, never realizing that they aren't getting the complete episode.
Any press is good press . . . I grew up watching the syndicated shows with cuts and it didn't affect me . . . .
Well, H&I says they broadcast the (remastered) episodes uncut, and I believe them even though it's a 60-minute time slot. If there are cuts, I can't detect them. I've seen every sort of butchery of Star Trek episodes in syndication, starting back in the 1970s on New York and Philadelphia stations (I lived in PA where both could be received), so I have a pretty good sense of when it's not happening. Nor does H&I seem to be speeding up anything, as is sometimes done on cable channels where opening-credit music is so sped up as to be in a different key (e.g., whoever's showing Malcolm in the Middle these days).
If anyone's seen a difference between what H&I broadcasts and what is seen on Netflix or disk versions of the remastered episodes, please say so. If I'm kidding myself, I want to know.
On Sunday nights, MeTV shows two half-hour episodes of the syndicated version of Night Gallery, and although most of those that originated as segments of the hour-long episodes are ruined to fit the 30-minute slot (that is, everything but the final season, 1972-73, which was a half hour to begin with), I have to give MeTV credit for omitting the Sixth Sense episodes that were crammed into the Night Gallery syndication package and given NG-style intros by Serling around 1974. (I still feel ashamed for him having to do so at Universal's behest in order to achieve enough episodes for syndication...)
If you can receive a "Heroes & Icons" affiliate station, they still broadcast TOS episodes uncut Sunday - Friday at 8:00 PM (PST)
If Heroes & Icons does broadcast TOS uncut, presumably with old-school, two-minute commercial breaks in order to fit into a one-hour time slot, then I stand corrected, and that would be a first AFAIK.
Any press is good press . . . I grew up watching the syndicated shows with cuts and it didn't affect me . . . .
It's true, I watched them for years like that and loved them, but then when our local Public TV WVIA started showing them with no cuts or commercials it was like seeing them for the first time all over again. It was glorious.
Me too! I used to watch WPHL and WPIX back to back Monday thru Friday, one at 11:30 and one at 12:30. That was in the early 80s.
Exactly! I never did figure out how stations showed the ones that didn't seem to have any syndication cuts, though. I think those were mostly in the third season. I remember Phil Farrand talking about them at length in his Nitpicker books, which were outstanding.
I remember on ITV in the seventies there were two breaks within an hour show! One about eighteen minutes past and the other before twenty minutes to! TV shows were made that way and didn't need cutting! The greedy corporations wanted more advertising so they could draw in more revenue so we the viewers had to suffer and our shows were cut to fit the new regulations! Televisions hows were fifty minutes back in the sixties and seventies and went down to forty eight and then forty six and at the time of TNG were forty four minutes! but I had noticed that VOY was only forty two minutes long!!! I usually record shows to watch on the hard drive and cut out the borefest that they call advertising breaks! 
JB
JB
Me, too, JB - we watch almost nothing live. 
I try not to watch anything new, Phase! It's almost like a religious command to me!
JB
JB
Any press is good press . . . I grew up watching the syndicated shows with cuts and it didn't affect me . . . .
Same here. On the contrary, when I first found out about syndicated snip snips and that the home video releases were uncut, it was like getting new Star Trek! Roughly 5 more minutes per episode! That's over six and a half hours of Kirk and Spock action action!
That and most modern day TV ramps up pacing to get around viewers noticing any plot holes, so the syndicated cuts just make it look like the 60s version wasn't seen as being any less sloppily scripted than how it already was when it was and at times it was. I hope I didn't get that backwards, I've cut back on the caffeine (nature's Adderall...)
The BBC cut something out of most episodes of Trek when I was taping the soundtracks and later from the video recordings I did in the eighties! So when I bought the clamshell DVDs I found so many extra scenes like Kirk first meeting Samuel T.Cogley and the Gorn commentating on the asteroid!
JB
JB
MeTV still shows The Sixth Sense as part of RSNG, in fact, TSS episodes are in rotation right now.
Reportedly, Serling demanded a pile of money to appear in those SS gallery segments, and Universal coughed up the money. Integrity (on Serling's part) be damned?
My local CBS affiliate would air episodes of TOS during the early syndication run. They wouldn't just cut the film (Yes, that was back when film was being used). The editor would literally tear the film to insert commercials. You could actually see the jagged edges. It was horrific to view!
Having grown up watching Star Trek on the BBC, the first time I saw it on a commercial channel was just weird.
Its on a loop on the Horror Channel in the UK just now and they butcher it with ads.
There's nothing better than watching it in an uninterrupted 48 minute slot.
Its on a loop on the Horror Channel in the UK just now and they butcher it with ads.
There's nothing better than watching it in an uninterrupted 48 minute slot.
That's what DVD and Bluray are all about. In 1985, you would pay about $1100 for the whole series on VHS tape. Adjusted for inflation, that would be like $2600 in today's dollars. The Bluray box is about $60. This is a golden age for home video.
The BBC did start showing the episodes uncut in the late 90s and I was furious because I wasn't recording them! 
Plus I couldn't spend another five years of my life taping them each and every week and then waiting for them to bring it back after a sports coverage marathon or whatever! Thank the stars for the beautiful DVDs! 
JB
Plus I couldn't spend another five years of my life taping them each and every week and then waiting for them to bring it back after a sports coverage marathon or whatever! Thank the stars for the beautiful DVDs! JB
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