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A TV schedule listing for the first episode of Star Trek.
(source: The Bridgeport Post, September 8, 1966.)
I don’t find this episode puzzling or absurd in the least.This is yet more proof that Star Trek was dramatically ahead of its time. The general disdain of things strange or unusual in this TV listing is what borders on the absurd. It speaks volumes about what many completely missed about what Star Trek was attempting to do. It wasn’t tiptoeing around race or gender it was clubbing you in the head with it. It was asking moral, ethical, and philosophical questions, not through heady academic texts but through a medium people could truly interpret… if they were open to it. Look at the officers of the Enterprise, a dashing and yet sometimes reckless Captain who depends on the counsel of his friends and shipmates of tremendously different races and backgrounds, the logic and intelligence of Spock, the home spun wisdom and heartfelt emotion of Bones, the skills of Sulu, Chekov, and Scotty and the tremendous talents of Uhura, who was not only a woman, but also black and treated as an equal as well as a comrade.We’re talking about a show where all of these different people work together to meet even more strange and different species, to help them and protect them or to aid them in finding solutions to their problems instead of trying to conquer them or exploit them. This is during a period post WWII and Korea where the US is spinning up the war machine yet again in Vietnam. A time when racial integration and race riots are fresh on the mind, Communism is a powerful foe, and the Japanese still a distrusted race. A show where we are presented with a future that depicts what is possible if we look beyond our physical and racial differences and preconceptions. Sure it was clumsy, sure it was still pretty sexist and maybe a little racist at times, but goddamn was it progressive. We’re talking about a time in television history where My Three Sons, Green Acres, and Bewitched were about as heady and philosophical as it got.
i’m so sorry i’m old
can we still be friends
I’m forty-six, about to turn forty-seven. My brother who is also on here turned thirty-seven last month.
When I first started lurking on tumblr, there seemed to be a lot of people who appeared to be in their…
Yeah, Kat, calling me “Gilligan” is fine, as that’s how everyone mispronounces my last name anyway.
Also, I have no connection to the pseudonymous “Gilligan Newton-John” who runs my-retrospace.blogspot.com
i’m so sorry i’m old
can we still be friends
I’m forty-six, about to turn forty-seven. My brother who is also on here turned thirty-seven last month.
When I first started lurking on tumblr, there seemed to be a lot of people who appeared to be in their thirties. In my experience, they tend to tend more toward the retro nostalgia people and the pulp art and fiction and burlesque people and afficionadoes of psychotronic cinema.
Because of my interests in comics and Doctor Who, I do have a few (very few) young people following my tumblr. Because of that, I do try to keep my main tumblr clean.
people who won’t watch star trek because it’s “old”
people who won’t watch anything because it’s “old”
I blame the profusion of 24/7 children’s cable networks, myself. In the old days before infomercials, specialty channels and cable exclusivity for reruns and the multichannel universe, over-the-air stations would fill their non-network hours with a smorgasbord of programming, a mixture of old movies, off-network reruns, stuff to appeal to kids in the early morning and afterschool hours.
While the channels of distribution may have been limited, OTA non-network time wasn’t limited to umpteen zillion clones of Jerry Springer or the People’s Court.
As a kid, you watched the shows that were on and that the grown-ups watched… and the grown-ups watched many of the same shows you watched. Everything might not have been to your taste, but you discovered that even old stuff was entertaining or could have items of interest.
Incredible conceit.
Ocean View Amusement Park, Norfolk VA, destroyed in 1979 for a TV movie starring Mike Connors and Martin Landau.
(Source: televandalist)
I am having enormus difficulty getting into Star Trek TOS any suggestions?
- episodes to avoid not to avoid?
- I would suggest avoiding the following:
- Plato's Stepchildren
- And the Children Shall Lead
- Spock's Brain
- Whom Gods Destroy
- The Alternative Factor
- Castspaw
- Mudd's Women
- I would seek out:
- The Naked Time
- Balance of Terror
- The Conscience of the King
- The Menagerie parts one and two
- Shore Leave
- Tomorrow is Yesterday
- A Taste of Armageddon
- Space Seed
- This Side of Paradise
- Errand of Mercy
- Devil in the Dark
- City on the Edge of Forever
- Operation: Annihilate
- Amok Time
- The Doomsday Machine
- Mirror, Mirror
- Journey to Babel
- The Trouble With Tribbles
- Obsession
- The Immunity Syndrome
- The Deadly Years
- The Ultimate Computer
- The Paradise Syndrome
- The Enterprise Incident
- The Tholian Web
- The Day of the Dove
