Star Trek: Omnibus

[Yw-slayer]

I think if they're 15 or 16 it should be fine. A bit younger than that, it's borderline. 11-12, no. But that's me.

[George]

I appreciate the advice. I should wait until the series is complete before buying DVDs anyway.

Here are some of the original series that I or the kids have chosen not to watch, for various reasons. I'm not trying to be a prude, but there are just some things I hope not to have to explain just yet. And some of these are just plain bad, if not inappropriate.

Maybe I'll do a greatest hits list the next time I have too much time to think about Star Trek.

"Mudd's Women"

Spoiler:

By far the better of the two Harry Mudd episodes, this one is about women being sold as wives for lonely miners on faraway planets and the drugs that keep the women looking younger and sexier than they really are. I thought the subject matter might be too mature when we first started watching TOS. This is an early first-season episode and I skipped over it in the Netflix menu without too much thought.

"The Enemy Within"

Spoiler:

This is the one in which Kirk is split into two by a transporter malfunction. The evil Kirk tries to...um..."bother" Yeoman Rand and she has to scratch his face enough to leave bloody gashes on his cheek to get him to leave her cabin. This is a good episode, but not for kids.

"Return Of The Archons"

Spoiler:

I haven't seen this one in many years but if I remember correctly, early in the episode we see a young lady come in the front door of a house after being "bothered" out in the street during Festival, which is a time of madness and lust out in the streets at night for young adults. The middle-aged and older folks stay inside, having had their turns when they were younger. If I remember correctly, the young woman's father tells her to go back out there because the night isn't over yet. That's just creepy.

"I, Mudd"

Spoiler:

I don't remember this one being inappropriate, but I do remember it being pretty awful after the first scene in which Norman takes over the Enterprise. The opening is very promising, but then it turns into a farce. This is just bad Star Trek and a good example of what happened when TV shows had to churn out one episode a week, every week, no matter what. "Got a script for this week? Any script? Doesn't matter if it's any good...we gotta start filming now!"

"Requiem For Methuselah"

Spoiler:

This is the episode with more than a few similarities to the movie "Forbidden Planet". Kirk so lustfully chases a young lady throughout the episode that it's downright embarrassing to watch, as I recall. I blame the writer and director, not the actors. It could have been a very good episode, but Kirk is so bad in it that they actually apologize for it in an episode of www.StarTrekContinues.com decades later. In an episode of STC, Kirk says to Spock, "Not my finest moment" or something similar in reference to this episode.

Our kids vetoed two episodes themselves:

"Patterns Of Force"

Spoiler:

The Enterprise visits a planet that has "somehow" developed a society patterned after Nazi Germany, complete with swastikas everywhere. I remember thinking this was an okay episode - not great, but not terrible either. My kids saw the swastikas in the Netflix preview picture and said nope, no Nazis. That's the world they're growing up in.

"The Gamesters of Triskelion"

Spoiler:

We got probably a third of the way into this episode before the kids decided it was about slavery. They didn't want to watch a show about slavery. Okay. On to the next one. For what it's worth, they didn't pick up on a similar theme in "Bread And Circuses". Star Trek trivia: one of the scantily-clad women in this episode apparently went on to star in "adult movies" later on.

Episodes I would skip if watching myself, but will probably end up watching this time around:

"Metamorphosis"

Spoiler:

My only complaint about this one is that it's slow and not much happens, but the kids need to know who Zefram Cochrane is. Come to think of it, we've already seen this one. I probably fell asleep. It's that dull.

"The Empath"

Spoiler:

I remember this one as being slow, boring, and just plain bad. It is probably my least favorite episode. There's almost no scenery for most of this episode - just black backgrounds everywhere. Perhaps that was done to give a certain look to the area where most of the story takes place - and it is effective in that way, but I see it as a part of the sad decline of the show and budget cutting in the third season. To be fair, some say this is a great episode with deep meaning. I disagree but can see how some might like this one.

"And The Children Shall Lead"

Spoiler:

We'll probably watch this one, just for a laugh at the late 1960s clothing and so forth, but this is universally held up as the Worst Of The Worst of Star Trek, and this goes back to books I bought in the 1970s that discussed such things in the same way people now dissect various episodes on the internet...not that I would ever participate in such silliness.

"Turnabout Intruder"

No spoiler for this one, in case anyone wants to check out the short videos below. This was the final episode of the original series, although apparently the cast didn't know that at the time. It's somewhat cringe-worthy from what I remember, but now I think it's essential viewing if only because the excellent web series Star Trek Continues picked up exactly where that episode ended and added a final scene that wasn't in the original.

[JoshInKC]

Yeah- looking back on the history of tv/movies/etc, its a little weird to see just how much writers leaned on "bothering" and attempted bothering as plot points and inciting incidents.

In other news, I saw this the other day and thought that the nerds in this thread might laugh:
The Door Noises Made Us Deaf: An Oral History of Star Trek

[George]

To your first point, yes, that's true. I just don't want to watch that kind of stuff with my son and daughter until they're older and can better understand it...or maybe not even then. I don't know.

The best (or perhaps worst) example I know of is this 1952 radio episode of Gunsmoke called "The Cabin". People might think that 1950s radio was pretty tame, but there were some very hard episodes of Gunsmoke that dealt with awful things. Sometimes they just came right out and said what it was, but sometimes they'd sort of dance around the subject and let the listener figure things out.

https://archive.org/details/podcast_..._1000125237826

I haven't heard this in quite some time, but as I recall...

Spoiler:

A blizzard rages across Kansas and two really bad men find shelter in a cabin. They kill the man who lives there and then the two men stay there for a couple days, perhaps, with the dead man's wife. Eventually Marshall Matt Dillon shows up, also seeking shelter from the storm...

Spoiler:

He figures out what has been going on. A fight ensues and Matt kills one of the men rather gruesomely with a...

Spoiler:

...pitchfork, even describing how he lifts the man off his feet on the tines!

Spoiler:

Then the woman, now a widow, decides to go to Hays City, sell her horses, buy some nice clothes, and...

Spoiler:

...set up a room in which to do business. She says it wouldn't be so hard "after this".

Now that's a tough story.

[George]

In other news, I saw this the other day and thought that the nerds in this thread might laugh:
The Door Noises Made Us Deaf: An Oral History of Star Trek

It took me more than a quick glance minutes to realize that page is just silliness!

At Gene’s insistence, I built the ship’s automatic sliding doors to be fully functional. The machinery really made that signature “whooshing” sound you hear on the show. We did have to mix it much quieter in post-production, though, because in reality, it sounded like Godzilla’s lung being punctured.

While scrolling down the page, that was the first thing I read that made me say, [Moe Howard voice]Waitaminute, you![/Moe Howard voice]

The real story is in this book, I think, in which someone - maybe Jefferies or Roddenberry - says they were often asked by people who installed real sliding doors how they got the doors on the Enterprise to whisk open and shut so quickly. The answer was they had stage hands on the other side of the wall yanking the doors open.



Wow. I've had this book for forty years. Thanks, Mom and Dad. Somewhere I have a Star Trek beach towel also.

[Crazed_Insanity]

I tend to prefer to be involved in my kid’s 1st contact with something new... watching something new together can be a great conversation starter. I’d rather my daughter talk about it with me and my wife rather than she experiences it alone or with her friends...

Of course, we all have different tolerance levels, maybe you should preview this show before watching with your kids...

Btw, your parents give you presents on Valentine’s Day?!?!? What lovely parents you have?!?!?

[George]

Well, yes, I guess they did back in 1980. The book mentions the first ST movie on the cover, so maybe it was strategically placed near the some store's checkout aisle because the movie was new then. My mother would have known I'd enjoy it. Cover price: $2.50.

It was a fun time to be a kid and a science fiction fan. There were Star Trek reruns on TV and Space: 1999 on PBS and Battlestar Galactica and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century and even The Incredible Hulk on network TV, plus Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and Star Trek: The Motion Picture all within a couple of years. And I had a friend my age next door who was into all this stuff plus comic books also. We'd borrow each other's books and talk about this stuff all the time.

[George]

The first season of Star Trek: Discovery is going to air on CBS broadcast television in the USA starting this Thursday evening, September 24.

https://www.startrek.com/news/star-t...-to-air-on-cbs

[Crazed_Insanity]

I wonder if it ends up having poor ratings, will they cancel season 2?

[George]

*rimshot*

Obviously they're promoting the new third season on their subscription channel, but I saw something that said there's also a lack of new shows due to Covid-19.

As for me, I can't wait to see the ship and uniforms and stuff that were ten years before the original series.

Velour! Zippers! Jackets for the landing party!

Old-style phaser pistols (watch out for overloads) and hand-wired communicators that look like Scotty himself soldered them together down in Engineering!



Groovy V-neck sweaters and turtlenecks!



A console TV in the captain's cabin!



And, most impressively, paper printouts on the bridge to get those urgent news dispatches from Starfleet Command!





Yeah. This is going to be great.