Done with season one! What did you think overall? Was it different from what you expected/remembered?
Done with season one! What did you think overall? Was it different from what you expected/remembered?
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6 responses to “Done with season one! What did you think overall? Was it different from what you expected/remembered?”
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Great fun. It’s nice to get a chance to see certain episodes I had missed until now, like “Tomorrow is Yesterday”. It is interesting what a diverse show it was.
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I am counting the days until year two. I watched “Amok Time” already.
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Trying to pick favorite episodes out of such an embarrassment of riches brings home how incredible Star Trek Season One is. It’s been really fun watching the show come together and evolve. I like the earliest episodes perhaps the best, before they had figured out how to boil down Kirk/Spock/McCoy into a regular piece of shtick. Just when you’re afraid the show is going to start imitating itself, however, it lays a whopper on you like “Space Seed” or “The City on the Edge of Forever.”
Because most of us grew up in a world with Star Trek, it’s easy to miss what a radical departure it was from anything anyone ever imagined before. Filmed science fiction was either anthology shows like The Outer Limits or The Twilight Zone (a short story from a pulp sf magazine brought to life each week, no world building or continuity), or it was exploited for a situation comedy type show like Lost in Space, or it was monster movies like The Thing From Another World. What was the best piece of filmed sf before the premier of Star Trek on 9/8/66? The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)? Nobody had tried to seriously imagine the future as a place we could live in, week after week.
But Star Trek doesn’t have to depend on its place in history for its claim to significance. This isn’t science fiction as an excuse for monsters and people in sexy outfits (two of my favorite things, btw). They used it to tell stories that needed telling. Stories that changed television, changed the world, and changed me.
Watching and blogging Star Trek from the beginning is one of those ideas that sounded good on paper. The reality has been even better. Thanks, everyone, for coming along.
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I really need to watch Metropolis.
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Great comments, everyone! We all seem to agree that this first season of Star Trek:TOS was a terrific one, with powerful stories, good acting and production values, and lots of variety. Since they had so little time and money, the special effects were a shortcoming, so I’m glad that Paramount re-made most of the effects for their remastered DVD set, despite the dangers of tampering with history that way.
I believe that written science fiction was generally better than the filmed variety when ST premiered in 1966. Writers like Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Clifford D. Simak, Robert Heinlein and others were at their peak by the 1950s.
Of the filmed sci-fi prior to ST, my fave is “Forbidden Planet,” although “The Day the Earth Stood Still” is up there too. “War of the Worlds” was another very good one. And I like “Metropolis” a lot too, as well as “Frankenstein” and “The Bride of Frankenstein” to the extent those are sci-fi as well as gothic horror. And “Twilight Zone” and “Outer Limits” did some very good individual sci-fi episodes. “Things to Come” is thought provoking, although I don’t really enjoy it much. But I agree with you, Kevin, that prior to ST, no one had put together a series of sci-fi films that showed a well-thought-out future week after week like ST did. It was groundbreaking in that sense.
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I’m embarrassed to admit I haven’t seen Forbidden Planet, either.
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