Star Trek (The Original Series)

[Fading Fast]

Yeah, the characters in TNG seemed very sterile. The original cast had amazing, almost magical chemistry; While Picard made for an interesting character, I never felt any chemistry between the cast in general, and I HATED Data.
Also, watch the old and new series on Netflix back to back. Despite being some 20 years older, the video quality of TOS way outshines TNG, which almost looks as if it was shot on video rather than on film.

While I respect some things about TNG - overall it never sang to me, never reached me at an emotional level that made me care much for the characters or stories. Worf was probably my favorite as watching him adjust to another culture - question the values he started with, analyze the ones he wasn't familiar with and making thought-out decisions about when to modify / change his values or not - was intellectually interesting. But in general, and having watched some episodes recently, I just don't find myself caring about the characters or the stories now or when it first aired.

And, yes, I think it must have been filmed - like most '80s TV shows - on toilet paper as the picture quality has severely deteriorated. The same thing has happened to "Miami Vice," to the point that it is unenjoyable to even watch the show for its kitsch value as it is so hazy. Clearly, whatever they were using in the '50s and '60s to film TV on has held up much, much better (cue Lizzie for explanation ).

 

[Doctor Strange]

Actually, I'll drop in on this:

The original series was shot on 35mm film by seasoned pros who began in films before moving to TV. It was shot on slow, fine-grain stock. The effects were also shot on film, and composited with optical printing. Release prints for both NBC and later syndication were on 35mm and 16mm film.

TNG was shot on 35mm film, but being nearly the first direct-syndication show and it being the late eighties, it was distributed on videotape, not film. So all the effects work compositing was done in video, not on film. And let's face it, the cinematographers shooting the on-set portions of the show didn't have the original series staff's skill with lighting, plus they were using later faster/softer film stock and hewing to a less dramatic, inherently "flat lighting" approach.

Hence the recent HDTV and Blu-Ray releases of Star Trek look fabulous: there's tons of resolution and detail in those old film elements. (We won't discuss the replacement of all the effects work in the last set of releases to make the show seem "cooler" for modern tastes; to me, this is a shameful bastardization, a Greedo-didn't-shoot-first situation that doesn't honor the original effects technicians, who literally killed themselves to invent new effects and worked endless overtime to get episodes ready to air back in the days of much longer, far-less-reruns seasons. And besides, those old effects, as weak as some of them look now, were the ones I fell in love with as a kid!)

But TNG, being limited by the video resolution of the original release materials - and with most of the effects footage not even having been shot at high resolution - looks much worse. Allegedly they've cleaned them up for the Blu-Rays, but the cropped-and-blown-up version running on BBC America looks very, very soft in HD.

 

[Fading Fast]

Doctor Strange - thank you for an awesomely detailed explanation.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I rarely got to see DS9 -- in my market the station kept moving its time slot. Everything I've heard about it makes me think I missed something special. However, TNG was much more the "Wagon Train to the Stars" that Roddenberry had envisioned, with much more complex and ambiguous stories (especially after Roddenberry passed away) than TOS was usually able to do. It had the courage to give us the occasional unhappy (but dramatically satisfying) ending, which TOS usually didn't (exception: "City on the Edge of Forever"). And TNG painted on a bigger canvas: new alien races like the Cardassians, imaginative stories such as Data going to court to determine whether he had the right not to be disassembled, creepy tales, utter alien horror such as the first encounter with the Borg, alternate time lines, exploration of language, and more.

Yeah, TNG had clunkers, just as any TV show does. But their gold was gold.

 

[p51]

Another thing about Next Generation that I got sick of was what they now refer to as "technobabble". Scotty would sometimes mention the specifics of what needed to be done, but generally, he grabbed some tools you didn't know what they were, and went to work. He rarely ever explained how he did the stuff he did and you didn't need that info anyway.
Like a commander of a Naval vessel in combat, a captain won't care about the technical details. Just get me wrap speed now or that Kilingon cruiser's gonna kill us all!
Even Patrick Stewart was quoted several times stating that if he were Picard, he'd have told people to just ratchet down the details...

And, yes, I think it must have been filmed - like most '80s TV shows - on toilet paper as the picture quality has severely deteriorated. The same thing has happened to "Miami Vice," to the point that it is unenjoyable to even watch the show for its kitsch value as it is so hazy.

I always assumed the 'look' of Miami Vice was attributed to the extremely humid climate (even by Southern standards) for the time of year they'd film the show. I never even thought about it being due to bad film stock.

 

[Benzadmiral]

Technology and budget aside, it's important to remember that Star Trek's special effects were created under the severe time constraints of producing a weekly television series. They had a defined schedule they had to stick to, so every week they had to stop at some point and move on to the next effects sequence. The effects are rather flawed by today's standards, but they were groundbreaking for 1960s television.

Of course. It's not fair, as some do, to compare ST:TOS's effects to the stuff we can do today. Instead, compare it to even earlier SF shows such as "Captain Video" and the like, which I've never seen but can imagine. ST:TOS gave us effects that we could believe in, along with a ship and a future that seemed as though it would really work. Remember the little intercom voices you'd hear on the bridge in the earliest episodes? And Kirk running the crew through drills? Things like that really made the Enterprise seem like a working vessel, with many people aboard who had many different kinds of jobs.

 

[Zombie_61]

...Hence the recent HDTV and Blu-Ray releases of Star Trek look fabulous: there's tons of resolution and detail in those old film elements. (We won't discuss the replacement of all the effects work in the last set of releases to make the show seem "cooler" for modern tastes; to me, this is a shameful bastardization, a Greedo-didn't-shoot-first situation that doesn't honor the original effects technicians, who literally killed themselves to invent new effects and worked endless overtime to get episodes ready to air back in the days of much longer, far-less-reruns seasons. And besides, those old effects, as weak as some of them look now, were the ones I fell in love with as a kid!)...

I understand why The Suits at CBS and Paramount felt this was necessary--High Definition broadcasting would make the flaws in the original effects shots even more noticeable. What bothered me the most was that the people who created the new/replacement effects didn't stick to their originally publicized mission statement. When it was first announced that the episodes were being remastered they went out of their way to reassure the fans that they were going to faithfully re-create the original effects shots. But, like George Lucas and his not-so-Special Editions of the Star Wars movies, they couldn't resist the temptation to "improve" the original effects shots, and the end result in some scenes was an Enterprise that zoomed around in space like a feather in a high wind. Regardless of Star Trek's magical methods of propulsion a ship of that size would still have a great deal of mass, and the people who created the new effects sequences threw physics out the window in favor of what they obviously thought were more "dynamic" effects sequences. The new scenes might look better to the video game generation(s), but they didn't improve the stories told in the episodes in any way and the changes they made were, in my opinion, completely unnecessary and a waste of resources.

 

[p51]

Regardless of Star Trek's magical methods of propulsion a ship of that size would still have a great deal of mass, and the people who created the new effects sequences threw physics out the window in favor of what they obviously thought were more "dynamic" effects sequences.

You see that pretty much everywhere now. Having seen more than a few in real life, I can't standing watching helicopters and A-10s (not to mention prop-driven planes) zooming around at Mach 1 and cornering in a way no aircraft ever did.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Another thing worth noting is that the color palette for TOS was specifically designed to sell color television sets -- NBC went to full color the previous season, and all of its shows from this era had the same aggressively colorful look. Thus the bright, primary colors and the lighting, set, costume design, and makeup intended to accentuate them for the characteristics of a mid-sixties-vintage RCA color TV. These characteristics look *very* exaggerated when you see an original film print projected, or even when shown on a modern TV -- in particular, the makeup on the men is much ruddier than it was intended to appear when broadcast. But if you ever get a chance to view an Original Series DVD shown on a restored round-tube color TV, you'll see that it actually looks much more natural.

 

[Zombie_61]

Another thing worth noting is that the color palette for TOS was specifically designed to sell color television sets -- NBC went to full color the previous season, and all of its shows from this era had the same aggressively colorful look. Thus the bright, primary colors and the lighting, set, costume design, and makeup intended to accentuate them for the characteristics of a mid-sixties-vintage RCA color TV...

This also presented a problem for Star Trek while the show was still in development. Gene Roddenberry hadn't fully thought out the main characters yet, but for whatever reason had the notion that Spock was Martian. As such, they had planned to make his flesh tone red until someone mentioned the fact that much of their potential viewing audience would still be watching the show on black and white televisions, on which Spock's face and hands would appear to be black. After a few brainstorming sessions, the fictional Vulcan species was created and Spock's flesh tone became the now-familiar yellowish-greenish-Caucasian color (a.k.a. RCMA Color Process Foundation LN-1).

 

[Edward]

Next Generation was the "old v/s new Star Wars" debate among fans in the 80s. I thought the next generation ones had characters that never seemed as 'real' as the old show's characters were. The old show had people who sweated, fought, got ticked off at each other, cried and lost their cool from time to time. The next generation had none of that. Everyone stood like they were in a pass and review, were all workaholics who never left their duty stations and had a level of self-denial for fun that would have impressed the Amish. I never bought into any of them as real people.

I watched the original series on repeats in the 70s, 80s, and into the 90s. We never had subscription television (I'm still not a fan, though we're now dabbling with Netflix at home and enjoying it) in the house, so I didn't see TNG until it hit the BBC in the early-mid 90s. I iked it a lot. Often there was a clumsiness in some of the character development (I'm not a huge fan of the hugging / sharing / learning school of television), but on the flipside it did for me present a welcome alternative to Kirk's chest-beating "Me show mercy from position of dominance!" worldview. I think, on balance, I might well be of the Sheldon Cooper school of Trek thought - "Picard over Kirk, but Classic Trek over Next Generation."

The main thing I remember of the Trek Wars was the utter, tedious pretension of those who insisted on calling themselves "Trekkers", mocked anyone who wanted to dress up, and such. Hipster-Trekkies.

The one and only way in which TNG sunk to Lucas levels was Wesley Crusher, the Jar Jar Binks of Starfleet.

Also, as a friend once put it during a conversation about The Next Generation, "They're on a ship exploring deep space, but they all want to be actors and musicians and play make-believe on a holodeck???" lol

Made far more sense to me. In the context of their universe, where space travel is commonplace, to have them show raw enthusiasm at all times for space would be like having Sean Connery in Red October play his role like a Captain Nemo fanboy whose never been in a sub before.

One thing TNG really got was the idea of them having proper downtime while onboard the Enterprise. Kirk's crew occasionally hung out in Ten Forward, but they mostly did their job and slept. Never even had clothes of their own, uniforms aside!

"Deep Space Nine" had all the grit and realistic personality types that TNG lacked. All of the characters were flawed or damaged in some way, and often made bad decisions with real consequences. The series was also far more realistic in its treatment of war than any of the other Trek series. I don't just consider it by far the best of any of the ST series, I consider it, in any genre, the best TV series of the '90s.

This not meant as a criticism, but I think it was also part of a more general trend towards darker sci-fi at the time. TNG carried on the bright and shiny, still largely positive view of the future. By the eslry midnineties, you had show like Babylon 5 competing with Trek stuff. I think that inevitably had an influence.

While I don't disagree in principle, I have just never warmed to DS9. I missed a lot of it during the original airing because it coincided with my kids being infants/toddlers, and since it had such detailed plot arcs, dropping in on an occasional episode was unsatisfying. I have tried watching large chunks of it again many times since, but alas, it still mostly leaves me cold. This doesn't mean that I don't agree that it did some great things (e.g., the brilliantly done "Beyond The Farthest Star"), and Lizzie's totally right in her assessment... but it will never be a personal favorite. Not for me.

That was definitely another thing that changed. While there was certainly continuity, prior to DS9 Trek had always been a show where you could dip in and out. Even in TNG a two-parter was a rare thing indeed. Again, I think this was a growing trend in genre TV at the time: even the X-Files underwent a dramatic shift from 'monster of the week' to a very detailed, ongonig narrative across a whole series. It does require more conscious engagement to get into it in that regard - I've not watched oher shows in the past becxause I just couldn't keep up with them regularly enough. That is changing now, of course, as I can see most things at my own speed via disk or online, but back then it definitely killed a show.

Yeah, the characters in TNG seemed very sterile. The original cast had amazing, almost magical chemistry; While Picard made for an interesting character, I never felt any chemistry between the cast in general, and I HATED Data.
Also, watch the old and new series on Netflix back to back. Despite being some 20 years older, the video quality of TOS way outshines TNG, which almost looks as if it was shot on video rather than on film.

I saw the original much later on. I'm sure i first saw it about 1978 or 79, though really it was the 80s and into the 90s that I seriously watched it. That being the case, it was always a retro-futurist thing, in effect, for me. Maybe that's why it doesn't look dated to my eyes.... Early TNG, while I still enjoy it, does look very dated, very 1980s. I suppose it's a combination of things. Partly that I lived through that era and so there's a personal context for the very 80s look of it all, but also I think because they no longer had such a limited budget; they could use all the toys, so they did. Same way certain visual effects in the Matrix now look really dated because they are so much a product of their era. Here I remember seeing a 1950s illustration of a Space Pirate in the far future, climbing a space ladder with a slide ruler between his teeth....

 

[p51]

Here I remember seeing a 1950s illustration of a Space Pirate in the far future, climbing a space ladder with a slide ruler between his teeth....

Sci-fi is always a product of the times its created in. I've never understood sci-fi that takes place ridiculously in the future. For example, the Dune books take place about 9000 years in the future or so, right? That'd be like someone in the Neolithic era trying to describe what life today would be like. There's no context for it, even if you got it right.
Funny how sci-fi before real space travel was happening read like swashbuckler or wild west stories for the most part. Mars factored so strongly in sci-fi then as that's all people could imagine. Again, context.

And that, boys and girls, is why I don't believe people who say they've seen space aliens. If you go back in time, the 'sightings' of people were limited to their imaginations. If, for example, there were people seeing, "Grey alien" types in the 1800s, I might pay attention. But they didn't. And those sighting vary from culture to culture. Look into it, you'll find that sightings are very much focused on the culture and the time, which anyone familiar with logic would have to agree simply doesn't make any sense if your premise is that aliens are visiting here with any frequency.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The one and only way in which TNG sunk to Lucas levels was Wesley Crusher, the Jar Jar Binks of Starfleet.
.

No science fiction character ever annoyed me more consistently. Not even the loathsome Adric of early-eighties Doctor Who -- he at least had the good sense to get himself killed off.

 

[Benzadmiral]

I'll agree Wesley was generally annoying, and usually seemed like a limp addendum to whatever story he was in. But the episode "Final Mission," Wesley's last appearance as a regular, in which he and Picard are stranded on a desert world, was quite good -- a defining moment for the character.

 

[p51]

No science fiction character ever annoyed me more consistently. Not even the loathsome Adric of early-eighties Doctor Who -- he at least had the good sense to get himself killed off.

Oh come on, Turlough was way more annoying than Adric was! I kept hoping the Black Guardian would off him and get that over with. The 5th Doctor routinely looked annoyed at him.
Peri was pretty annoying, too (but just about everything in the Colin Baker era was).