William Shatner On 'Star Trek' 50th Anniversary

[yuiyoshida]

[underpants]

1. We watched the entire first series over the summer.

[House of Roberts]

2. I watched the entire original series when it aired originally,

so there!

[Mike__M]

3. So, do you remember

What you were thinking at the end of the very first episode?

[House of Roberts]

4. Aye.

I was thinking 'That guy with the ears is cool!'.

[Mike__M]

5. And you were right. (n/t)

[hifiguy]

10. Every nerdy kid, me included,

gravitated immediately to Spock.

[underpants]

8. Actually my wife and daughter couldn't get through the pilot

Kirk wasn't in the Pilot. They later used the pilot as part of an episode - the one with the giant brain people.

We did goofed on a lot the mistakes, rocks bouncing off heads, and dead people moving. IMDB has great details. My daughter LOVED the show.

[hfojvt]

15. I swear I remember seeing the pilot

and remember Pike staying behind. I thought "How strange, this show just lost a main character, now what happens?" But I could not have seen the pilot, I was only four years old for the first season.

[Frank Cannon]

21. The original pilot, "The Cage", never aired until 1988.

Funny how memory works that way.

Network execs saw the first pilot and had a lot of problems with it, including the female first officer (Gene Roddenberry's girlfriend) and the alien science officer, who they thought looked like Satan. NBC asked for a new pilot with some changes made. Jeffrey Hunter was no longer available, as he thought himself a huge star at the time and demanded a ridiculous amount of money, so a new pilot, "Where No Man Has Gone Before", was shot with a cheaper Canadian TV actor in the captain's chair. The rest, as they say, is history.

The original footage from "The Cage" was later re-edited into the two-parter "The Menagerie", which is really a powerful episode for having basically been assembled from spare parts.

[hfojvt]

30. pssoible that I saw menagerie and misunderstood it

but I swear I remember Pike deciding to stay. I always wondered if that WAS the story line of the pilot. Since I was watching re-runs, can we be sure that "The Cage" did not somehow get included in the batch of re-runs that they aired, at least in MY obscure neck of the woods?

[Frank Cannon]

32. You are (sorta) correct, actually.

In "The Cage", Pike returns to the Enterprise, and the Talosians create an illusion of him that remains on the planet so that Vina isn't lonely.

In "The Menagerie", an older, disabled Pike (played by a different actor) returns to Talos IV to regain an illusion of health. The footage of him walking onto the planet and rejoining Vina was repurposed from the ending of "The Cage". Very clever editing.

The original "Cage" pilot never aired, because the editors cannibalized the original negative in order to make "The Menagerie". For a long time, the only known existing copy was a B&W 16-mm demo that Gene Roddenberry showed at conventions and lectures.

[Archae]

12. I was 6 years old and scared half to death.

Those peoples' eyes going silver scared me silly.

The salt vampire REALLY scared me, and two episodes gave me nightmares, "Charlie X" (that faceless woman!) and the "Lights Of Zetar."

[Frank Cannon]

22. Oh, my God, the faceless woman in "Charlie X".

You only see her for a second or two, but that shit gave me nightmares for a week.

[randome]

25. Both of those got to me, too.

The 'Lights of Zetar' was worse when those who had been 'possessed' were speaking in slow, garbled language.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]You have to play the game to find out why you're playing the game. -Existenz[/center][/font][hr]

[Mike__M]

6. I've never goten in at the beginning of anything like that

My dad was probably watching Flipper on another channel.

[House of Roberts]

14. Flipper was Lassie with fins.

I remember watching it, but there wasn't much on the other two channels when a show was a hit.

[Warpy]

13. I didn't have a TV

and had absolutely no clue what coworkers were talking about for years until I got a TV and it was in reruns. I thought it was OK but wasn't really much of a fan until STNG debuted.

[SusanCalvin]

26. Same here, and I wrote one of those "please don't cancel it" letters.

[Liberal_in_LA]

20. I rewatched original and next gen a few years ago

[longship]

7. Sorry. I have to do this.

BTW, I love Shatner. I just could not resist the THING on the wing.

R&K

[Snobblevitch]

9. I am fairly certain that my 80+ year old father

has never seen an entire episode of Star Trek. He has however, received a photo of Shatner's grand-daughters in a Christmas card.

[hunter]

11. My parents didn't let me and my siblings watch the first few episodes...

... they didn't know if it was appropriate for children yet.

Once they'd approved, we watched all of them.

Mind you, my parents are artists. I'd witnessed everything-- frivolous nudity, miscegenation, homosexual public displays of affection, and sometimes actual gun-grabbing violence -- all before I started kindergarten. Yet there were many things on 1960's television my parents did not consider appropriate viewing for children or anyone else...

[House of Roberts]

16. If your parents had been familiar with Gene Roddenberry's other work,

like the stories he wrote for Have Gun, Will Travel, they might have been more likely to let you watch. I never saw the HG,WT series as a kid, but it was a cut above the average westerns. Roddenberry stressed the same human dignity, respect for all cultures themes that later were revisited in those early Star Treks.

[hfojvt]

17. star trek music

[yuiyoshida]

18. That was awesome!

[Proserpina]

29. That was the best recycling project I've ever seen!

for the record, I hate STNG.

[MattSh]

19. Never a bad time to repost this one...

[Frank Cannon]

23. Wow. Thanks for that.

Although I love Star Wars, this video shows more than anything else why I have always been first and foremost a Trek fan my whole life.

[yuiyoshida]

24. excellent

wish I could rec this!

[Snobblevitch]

27. I was too young to watch Star Trek in the 60s.

Back then, Dad decided what the family would watch. What was on the other networks at the same time?

As a grade school kid in the 70s, we watched Star Trek after school. We 'played' Star Trek on the playground after lunch. I even brought a portable tape tape recorder that was roughly the size of the tri-corder. That made me 'Bones' in our playground recreations. (I'm a doctor, not a miracle worker.)

[lindysalsagal]

28. After school, every day, without fail. I remember when I realized it wasn't about aliens

It was about us all along. It was a great sociology experiment, because we were able to examine social issues with an open mind. We're willing to think critically about wierd aliens, but not ourselves. We'll be defensive about our own delusions and biases.

I believe we'll never really know the full extent of how much Gene Roddenberry raised the social consciousness of the world in the middle of the american civil rights era.

However, I am also thrilled about the way the new Star Wars film handled Rey with respect, as compaired to the drooling sexism and misogyny of the original Star Trek. No one sizes up Rey for her sexual value, not even once.

Way to go, J.J. Abrahms!