Okay, it gets poked fun at a bit today -- but when Star Trek debuted forty years ago (!) tonight ... egads.
SF on TV to that time had been in a couple of forms: kiddy shows (Space Patrol), anthologies (Outer Limits, Twlight Zone -- but both had gone the way of all TV anthologies), and goofy dreck from Irwin Allen (Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea). Star Trek was something different -- SF that took itself seriously, that pulled in real SF writers, that considered human problems from the perspective of alien situations.
ST:TOS was hardly the perfect SF series of all time. From the perspective of today, it's melodramatic, crudely crafted, facile, and a host of other sins. But the same could be true of practically any other TV series from 1966-68.
There's a reason it still holds such influence, even today, forty years later.
I have two memories of ST:TOS during its original run. The first is an image of a huge plasma bolt hurtling toward the viewer's perspective -- probably one of the ones fired by the Romulans in Balance of Terror. And I also remember how upset I was one evening that I wasn't allowed to watch the show (bear in mind I was about Kitten's age then), and, when sent to bed, I locked the door in the hallway, so that when my parents retired for the evening, they found themselves locked out of the back of the house. (To add insult to injury, their tapping on the window could only wake up my brother, not me, who needed a chair and special coaching to get the door back unlocked.) Yes, I have always been a fanatical geek.
At any rate, my congratulations and appreciations to the creators and talent of the Original Star Trek. You really did take us someplace where no one had gone before -- and we've enjoyed the trip ever since.
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