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Star Trek Meme: Day 4
Jun. 8th, 2015 08:03 amDay 4 - What was the first episode/movie you watched?
I can't be a hundred percent certain due to all the rewatching later, but I think I did start at the beginning, i.e. the second TOS pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, as a child in the 1970s. At any rate, I do recall watching this as a child and not yet knowing the characters, so while the German Star Trek broadcast sometimes switched episode orders, it may very well have been the first ST episode I watched.
Otoh, I have two reliable first watch TOS episode memories, and not from my childhood in the 70s. This is because the German TOS broadcast left out one episode entirely - three guesses which one it was, and the first two don't count - and bowdlerized another in a retrospectively hilarious way, so that I saw the second one in its unbowlederized original form for the first time in 1990 in Munich, where my local rental video store had copies of the entire series in English, and the left out one I saw for the first time at a FedCon in Bonn in the mid 90s. The episodes in question: Amok Time was the bowlderized one. Star Trek was regarded as a show for the kids (which is probably why I started to watch it in the first place when I was one) and given an afternoon spot in the 70s, and our German television overlords regarded the whole Vulcan mating cycle thing as too much for the young 'uns. So in the German dubbed version, Spock doesn't undergo pon farr, he just catches face flu, has a really weird delirium dream about going home to Vulcan, almost marrying and killing Kirk, and thanks to McCoy's dedication wakes up cured. You can imagine that when in the 80s I started to read the occasional ST tie in novel and there was talk of pon farr, I was confused. Pon what? And why the references to T'Pring as a real person, when all that almost marriage and duel business had been a dream?
The episode which was never broadcast at all in the 1970s was, of course, Patterns of Force. After watching it at FedCon in the mid 90s, I decided German fandom hadn't missed much. ST did a couple of "they come across a planet just like Earth in historical era X" episodes, but this was by far the one with the dumbest explanation, because seriously, why anyone having even a bit of historical knowledge should want to reconstruct the Third Reich on a planetary level (or any other level), let alone a supposed Starfleet historian, is beyond me. (And no, "he did it for the organizational skills and thought he could avoid the genocide part" isn't any smarter.) (Starfleet employed historians seem to be a weird bunch, though, given the other one we meet is Marla McGivers who swoons over Khan because she longs for a time when men were men and did some war leading and conquering.) Oh, and then there's the scene where Spock gets tortured and does not utter a sound, because he's just that tough. Watching this in the 1990s, at an era where tv at last was allowing its heroes to feel physical pain when it was inflicted on them, this felt ridiculous. When the lights went on again after this episode was shown at FedCon, the audience had a collective "huh" and "okay, that was stupid" expression on their faces.
Back to Where no man had gone before - because Gary Mitchell had such a prominent position in it and was introduced as Kirk's best friend, I fully expected him to be cured, not killed, by the end of the episode, I remember that much. (This is something that only works when you're young enough to know nothng about ST via pop culture osmosis.) I was more surprised than upset when he died, but I was upset Elizabeth Dehner did. I thought since she didn't go evil with her powers, she could have stayed and learn to master them and do cool things next week. Alas, child!me had no idea the X-Men existed.
Oh, and the first ST movie I watched was Star Trek: The (Slow) Motion Picture. During the first beautiful shot of the Enterprise, I felt aglow in fannish fondness. Little did I know I had just spotted what two thirds of the movie would consist of...
( The other days )
I can't be a hundred percent certain due to all the rewatching later, but I think I did start at the beginning, i.e. the second TOS pilot, Where No Man Has Gone Before, as a child in the 1970s. At any rate, I do recall watching this as a child and not yet knowing the characters, so while the German Star Trek broadcast sometimes switched episode orders, it may very well have been the first ST episode I watched.
Otoh, I have two reliable first watch TOS episode memories, and not from my childhood in the 70s. This is because the German TOS broadcast left out one episode entirely - three guesses which one it was, and the first two don't count - and bowdlerized another in a retrospectively hilarious way, so that I saw the second one in its unbowlederized original form for the first time in 1990 in Munich, where my local rental video store had copies of the entire series in English, and the left out one I saw for the first time at a FedCon in Bonn in the mid 90s. The episodes in question: Amok Time was the bowlderized one. Star Trek was regarded as a show for the kids (which is probably why I started to watch it in the first place when I was one) and given an afternoon spot in the 70s, and our German television overlords regarded the whole Vulcan mating cycle thing as too much for the young 'uns. So in the German dubbed version, Spock doesn't undergo pon farr, he just catches face flu, has a really weird delirium dream about going home to Vulcan, almost marrying and killing Kirk, and thanks to McCoy's dedication wakes up cured. You can imagine that when in the 80s I started to read the occasional ST tie in novel and there was talk of pon farr, I was confused. Pon what? And why the references to T'Pring as a real person, when all that almost marriage and duel business had been a dream?
The episode which was never broadcast at all in the 1970s was, of course, Patterns of Force. After watching it at FedCon in the mid 90s, I decided German fandom hadn't missed much. ST did a couple of "they come across a planet just like Earth in historical era X" episodes, but this was by far the one with the dumbest explanation, because seriously, why anyone having even a bit of historical knowledge should want to reconstruct the Third Reich on a planetary level (or any other level), let alone a supposed Starfleet historian, is beyond me. (And no, "he did it for the organizational skills and thought he could avoid the genocide part" isn't any smarter.) (Starfleet employed historians seem to be a weird bunch, though, given the other one we meet is Marla McGivers who swoons over Khan because she longs for a time when men were men and did some war leading and conquering.) Oh, and then there's the scene where Spock gets tortured and does not utter a sound, because he's just that tough. Watching this in the 1990s, at an era where tv at last was allowing its heroes to feel physical pain when it was inflicted on them, this felt ridiculous. When the lights went on again after this episode was shown at FedCon, the audience had a collective "huh" and "okay, that was stupid" expression on their faces.
Back to Where no man had gone before - because Gary Mitchell had such a prominent position in it and was introduced as Kirk's best friend, I fully expected him to be cured, not killed, by the end of the episode, I remember that much. (This is something that only works when you're young enough to know nothng about ST via pop culture osmosis.) I was more surprised than upset when he died, but I was upset Elizabeth Dehner did. I thought since she didn't go evil with her powers, she could have stayed and learn to master them and do cool things next week. Alas, child!me had no idea the X-Men existed.
Oh, and the first ST movie I watched was Star Trek: The (Slow) Motion Picture. During the first beautiful shot of the Enterprise, I felt aglow in fannish fondness. Little did I know I had just spotted what two thirds of the movie would consist of...
( The other days )
