TOS did good monsters . . . who often turned out to be more than meets the eye.
When and how did you become a Star Trek fan?
- Thread starter Lance
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TOS did good monsters . . . who often turned out to be more than meets the eye.
Some of those bacteriological diseases the crew caught were pretty scary too! I mean Miri was banned for twenty years in the UK and when you see those purple lumps growing on Yeoman Rand's legs you can understand why! Good episode though!
JB
JB
The Salt Vampire still gives me the freakin' heebie jeebies!
This becomes a loaded question given my age is directly tied to the launch year of TOS, so I'm dating myself to a very precise degree. I first became aware of ST when it was in syndication in the early 70's and watched reruns of TOS on a local station. I was so enamored with the show that I begged for a model kit of the TOS Enterprise, and was told by my mother that if I got good grades for that school year (I believe third grade), i could get the model. As it turned out I produced grades good enough to get that model, but as I recall I didn't have a very easy time putting it together and had glue and paint all over the place. Star trek was to become part of my life from thereafter.
The original motion picture came out and I recall being awestruck by the first beauty shot of the refitted Enterprise on screen. I waited in anticipation for each movie release in the early to mid 80's leading up to ST:TNG. I remember being predisposed to not liking it - I mean, it's not Kirk or Spock, what could they possibly come out with that could compete with that? Of course I was proven wrong from the first episode. TNG was shaky the first couple of seasons, but had enough brilliant episodes to make up for it.
ST became my companion throughout college and my young adult life. Each series holds a special place in my heart. Through the 90's the spinoffs kept me interested even though free time to watch TV became more and more limited. My favorite series, ST:ENT ran an all-too-short four seasons and I was really bummed out that ST was wrapping up for what I felt was going to be a very long time. During the ST hiatus, my daughter, age seven, begged me to watch ST:ENT, and so began a re-watch of of my favorite series, but this time through my daughters eyes. That began a journey in which my daughter and I spent almost four years watching all the series and movies. Her favorite was Voyager, with her reasoning being that Janeway was a woman and she liked that. She cried as each series would finish and then we'd start a whole new series. It really was a special time for me to be able to share this with her.
A couple years ago the 50th Anniversary of star trek came around and my daughter and I planned a trip to NY to attend a ST convention at the Javits Center(first time for myself as well). She met Terry Farrel (Dax was one of her favorite characters) and I got to meet Conner Trinneer. My daughter is 12 now, and we both watched Discovery together last season. Although DISC wasn't what we hoped we continue to hold out that hope for next season.
The original motion picture came out and I recall being awestruck by the first beauty shot of the refitted Enterprise on screen. I waited in anticipation for each movie release in the early to mid 80's leading up to ST:TNG. I remember being predisposed to not liking it - I mean, it's not Kirk or Spock, what could they possibly come out with that could compete with that? Of course I was proven wrong from the first episode. TNG was shaky the first couple of seasons, but had enough brilliant episodes to make up for it.
ST became my companion throughout college and my young adult life. Each series holds a special place in my heart. Through the 90's the spinoffs kept me interested even though free time to watch TV became more and more limited. My favorite series, ST:ENT ran an all-too-short four seasons and I was really bummed out that ST was wrapping up for what I felt was going to be a very long time. During the ST hiatus, my daughter, age seven, begged me to watch ST:ENT, and so began a re-watch of of my favorite series, but this time through my daughters eyes. That began a journey in which my daughter and I spent almost four years watching all the series and movies. Her favorite was Voyager, with her reasoning being that Janeway was a woman and she liked that. She cried as each series would finish and then we'd start a whole new series. It really was a special time for me to be able to share this with her.
A couple years ago the 50th Anniversary of star trek came around and my daughter and I planned a trip to NY to attend a ST convention at the Javits Center(first time for myself as well). She met Terry Farrel (Dax was one of her favorite characters) and I got to meet Conner Trinneer. My daughter is 12 now, and we both watched Discovery together last season. Although DISC wasn't what we hoped we continue to hold out that hope for next season.
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Balok's fake face shown at the end of the credits in season 1 used to freak me out as a child
ST09 drew me in! I saw it in theaters when I was 18. It was a great gateway drug for the world of Trek. From there, TOS, TNG, DS9 and now working my way through VOY and ENT simultaneously. Took me about 10 years longer than I expected to work through all these series.
Don’t knock the new films! They’re broadening the audience to a new generation
Don’t knock the new films! They’re broadening the audience to a new generation
Don’t knock the new films! They’re broadening the audience to a new generation
Absolutely
And reopening faith in the franchise to some of us older ones who'd become a little jaded about it, lol. 
And keep 'em coming guys, I agree with @Brennyren, really fascinating hearing all of your gateways into the series! 
The first Star Trek I saw where TOS repeats in the 80s, I don't remember which episode I watched first by I do remember liking it. A short time later TNG started (when I saw the first picture of the cast Imassumed Data was the captain because he wore yellow) and I was hooked immediately.
Star Trek has been on my life since I have memories. My dad used to sit and watch the old TOS episodes -we even go together to the cinema to watch ST:Beyond-
...and for years and years I developed a taste and love for those stories.
I definitely felt in love with TNG and since then I have learned to love and enjoy every reborn of the saga.
...and for years and years I developed a taste and love for those stories.
I definitely felt in love with TNG and since then I have learned to love and enjoy every reborn of the saga.
... I was born a TNG fan. It's infused into my very being ...
So refreshing to hear.Absolutely
The Squire of Gothos, first run. I was so young and this was such jarring input for me, but in a very good way, that I remember the feeling of my brain straining to catch up to it all and comprehend. I remember I thought Spock was the captain, since Kirk was down on the planet at one point, and Spock was in the big chair. As a kid very interested in astronomy, it was amazing to me when Trelane actually moves an entire planet to pursue them.
I still have one of those Lincoln Enterprises sales pamphlets... they announce the cancellation (after s3) and ask for letters to be sent. They were hawking the "IDIC" pendant.
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I didn't end up becoming involved in Trek fandom. It always seemed excessively serious to me. I eventually went with Dr Who fandom in the 80s. I've never stopped seeing original Trek as my #1 program, with the other series sometimes rising almost that high for me.
I still have one of those Lincoln Enterprises sales pamphlets... they announce the cancellation (after s3) and ask for letters to be sent. They were hawking the "IDIC" pendant.
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I didn't end up becoming involved in Trek fandom. It always seemed excessively serious to me. I eventually went with Dr Who fandom in the 80s. I've never stopped seeing original Trek as my #1 program, with the other series sometimes rising almost that high for me.
My tale is a long and strange one, in that Star Trek was always a part of my life, but in my case I was exposed exclusively to The Next Generation from the start, because that was all that was on the air for a long time. Since I was born in 1989, I was too small and too late to the party to see any of the classic Trek films, and I had no knowledge whatsoever of the original Trek. At around age 3 or 4, I caught a scene of "Best of Both Worlds, Part 1", the scene after the commercial break following the infamous "We have engaged the Borg" scene. In it, I saw something that would be permanently etched into my psyche, an image that strongly influences my entire life to this day. Here was a symbol of humanity at its peak of perfection, the 24th century starship Enterprise, commanded by a human named Jean-luc Picard, facing a no-win scenario (I would learn about the Kobayashi Maru years later) against a threat the likes I had never seen before. The stoic borg voice said "You will surrender yourselves or we will destroy your ship." I expected Picard to wet himself, hide behind his chair, or at the very least, try to escape. What happened next I could not have anticipated. He YELLED back at them. "You have committed acts of aggression against the United Federation of Planets!" He was angry. And he wasn't going to let those jerks win. From that moment on, to this very day, Picard has been a hero of mine, and the above is my argument for why he is the greatest Star Trek captain of all time.
The years passed, as they do too often. I got a playmates toys Enterprise that Christmas (which my little brother promptly lost the warp engines to) and when I was six, my dad set me down and gave me the space talk playmates 7" Picard and Riker figures, on the condition that I take very, VERY good care of them (I only wish I had). At age 7, my dad ordered a collection of Star Trek TNG vhs tapes, a subscription of sorts if I recall, since we got a new tape every week. Around this time I also got the blueprints to the Enterprise-D, and learned that much of TNG was inspired by The Motion Picture (more on that later). I am sorry to say that I never got into DS9 or Voyager very intensively, but after I saw Generations and William Shatner ("The guy from 'Rescue 911'"?) was revealed as a lost captain of the Enterprise, I had to find out more about him. And I did; by watching all six classic Star Trek films (except for TSFS, which my dad refused to watch for at-the-time unspecified reasons) and reruns of the original series on NBC. I fell asleep during The Motion Picture, but the death of Spock in Wrath of Khan felt to me as grave and serious as the death of Jesus Christ. Around this time I also saw First Contact, the only TNG movie I love.
For years I looked for a new Enterprise to replace the lost TNG ship, and my moment came in 1998, when I was once again offered a choice of the bridge crew from Insurrection, or the Enterprise-E from the same film. I chose the latter, and it lasted with me until the 2009 trek film was released. In 1999, I borrowed the Star Trek Encyclopedia from the library, and in 2001 I finally accepted my Trekkie destiny and went back to rewatch TNG. I needed more Trek, though (especially after I went to see my first Trek in the movie theaters, "Nemesis", and hated it), and for some reason I wanted to re-rent The Motion Picture, mainly because I remembered the theme music being the same as in TNG and the latter films. I didn't get a chance, however Christmas 2003. From that moment on, everything changed. I had been a moody teenager suffering from a broken heart and severe bipolar and depression, but Star Trek The Motion Picture was like a sponge for all my negative emotion, feeding me positive vibes in return. TNG may have been my first love, but TMP literally saved my life, and showed me that there was a future for me and others like me if I was willing to work towards it.
I went back and watched all the movies, even TSFS (which I later learned contained the death of Kirk's son, the reason my dad refused to watch it). I never did get to see as much of DS9 as I would have liked, nor Voyager, nor even Enterprise (although I enjoyed what I saw of the latter of those three shows, hence my avatar). But when These are the Voyages ended, I was CRUSHED. Not because I thought the episode was bad, per se (I am a rare Trekkie who enjoyed it for the most part, except for Trip's death), but because it was over. My whole life there had been a steady stream of Trek in the media, and now, there was nothing.
My tale is getting close to it's ending (at least at the time of this writing). In 2008, I went to see Cloverfield so I could see the Enterprise (and Star Trek itself) being rebuilt from the ground up. The next year, I watched with tears in my eyes as Star Trek returned. I loved that movie, and I loved Into Darkness. Then came Beyond, which I wasn't so fond of (seriously how many times do you have to blow up the poor ship?) but Discovery has rekindled my interest. And here I am waiting patiently for Discovery Season 2, and what may lie over that next horizon, as Captain Archer would say..
Fascinating recollections
I do recall both TOS and TNG being available by subscription on VHS, I remember TV adverts. Was it via Time Life? They often did those kinds of things...
Fascinating recollections
I looked it up based on the box art for the vhs tapes. It was from Columbia House, and it was called "Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Collector's edition". You can look it up on Memory Alpha, I'm just not sure if I'm allowed to post a link to it or not.
EDIT: More information: I must've started ordering in 1996, towards the tail end of the run, but VHS tapes kept showing up at my door years later, even into the 2000's, and after two moves. LOL
I had a relatively sheltered early childhood in regards to media. So, up until I was six years old, my idea of a spaceship was what Lego and Playmobil sold as spaceships, which back then were basically stylized jetplanes and space shuttles. I remember owning a Playmobil Space Station, which was a octagonal one-room thing. Wait, found a picture:
So, this was a station, with the ships having basically just a cockpit, and with that understanding, I one day found an audio cassette with the dub of a TNG episode ("Haven", btw) adapted into an audio play (something that was pretty popular back in the 80s and 90s here in Germany). The German title of the series was "Raumschiff Enterprise - Das nächste Jahrhundert" (the "Raumschiff" part, "Spaceship", being especially important). It was the bare cassette, no box and no cover which could provide a picture. All I had was the sound.
So, you can probably figure that little me was quite perplexed about how many people were on this Spaceship, and they went from the transporter room to the bridge to the holodeck, etc.. But, even if the episode in question may be one of the weaker ones, I was hooked.
I got my first glance at actual footage when my mom and I visited my little brother in the hospital (he had a broken arm or something), and he was watching "The Neutral Zone" on the telly. It was the scene in which Worf and Data find the frozen people. And my interest in this show grew. We didn't finish the episode, though. My mom was careful about what and how much TV we could watch.
So, one day a few months later, my mother would leave for a while (going shopping or visiting a friend or whatever), leaving my older brothers in charge. And as usual at the time, once my mom was out the door, the oldest brother would turn on the TV to watch something we normally wouldn't be allowed to. And on that day, we caught a rerun of TOS, "This Side of Paradise", and I simply accepted that there was another "Raumschiff Enterprise" without any idea how the two were connected. That stayed this way for a long time.
I found pocket books at the library with James Blish's prose adaptations of the TOS episodes, which I started devouring (as I still wasn't quite allowed to watch the show itself). On a trip to a flea market, I found a copy of John Vornholt's TNG novel "Masks". So that was how I distinguished between the shows, one was "Raumschiff Enterprise" by James Blish, and the other was "Raumschiff Enterprise" by John Vornholt.
And when I was eight, my mom would finally give in and let me watch the shows (which wouldn't run concurrently, but one would finish its run, then the other would take its place in the Mon-Fri afternoon timeslot). One episode per week, which I nowadays quite understand, since we were five boys, and whenever one of us would be allowed to watch something, all the others would watch as well. So I'd choose the episodes based on the title (and maybe the brief synopsis, when there was one) given in the TV guide. This situation led to the fact that there were Trek episodes I had not yet watched up until a few years ago.
But this all made me a huge fan, especially at that age. In fourth class, I got other kids (well, I'll be honest, other boys) into Star Trek, and we'd draw computer panels on sheets of paper and take them out in-between classes and play Star Trek, with the board being the main viewscreen in our imagination.
I also eventually got some of the TNG toys from Playmates, with the model of the Enterprise-D being the oldest toy still in my possession.
So, this was a station, with the ships having basically just a cockpit, and with that understanding, I one day found an audio cassette with the dub of a TNG episode ("Haven", btw) adapted into an audio play (something that was pretty popular back in the 80s and 90s here in Germany). The German title of the series was "Raumschiff Enterprise - Das nächste Jahrhundert" (the "Raumschiff" part, "Spaceship", being especially important). It was the bare cassette, no box and no cover which could provide a picture. All I had was the sound.
So, you can probably figure that little me was quite perplexed about how many people were on this Spaceship, and they went from the transporter room to the bridge to the holodeck, etc.. But, even if the episode in question may be one of the weaker ones, I was hooked.
I got my first glance at actual footage when my mom and I visited my little brother in the hospital (he had a broken arm or something), and he was watching "The Neutral Zone" on the telly. It was the scene in which Worf and Data find the frozen people. And my interest in this show grew. We didn't finish the episode, though. My mom was careful about what and how much TV we could watch.
So, one day a few months later, my mother would leave for a while (going shopping or visiting a friend or whatever), leaving my older brothers in charge. And as usual at the time, once my mom was out the door, the oldest brother would turn on the TV to watch something we normally wouldn't be allowed to. And on that day, we caught a rerun of TOS, "This Side of Paradise", and I simply accepted that there was another "Raumschiff Enterprise" without any idea how the two were connected. That stayed this way for a long time.
I found pocket books at the library with James Blish's prose adaptations of the TOS episodes, which I started devouring (as I still wasn't quite allowed to watch the show itself). On a trip to a flea market, I found a copy of John Vornholt's TNG novel "Masks". So that was how I distinguished between the shows, one was "Raumschiff Enterprise" by James Blish, and the other was "Raumschiff Enterprise" by John Vornholt.
And when I was eight, my mom would finally give in and let me watch the shows (which wouldn't run concurrently, but one would finish its run, then the other would take its place in the Mon-Fri afternoon timeslot). One episode per week, which I nowadays quite understand, since we were five boys, and whenever one of us would be allowed to watch something, all the others would watch as well. So I'd choose the episodes based on the title (and maybe the brief synopsis, when there was one) given in the TV guide. This situation led to the fact that there were Trek episodes I had not yet watched up until a few years ago.
But this all made me a huge fan, especially at that age. In fourth class, I got other kids (well, I'll be honest, other boys) into Star Trek, and we'd draw computer panels on sheets of paper and take them out in-between classes and play Star Trek, with the board being the main viewscreen in our imagination.
I also eventually got some of the TNG toys from Playmates, with the model of the Enterprise-D being the oldest toy still in my possession.
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