So, a very interesting topic is in danger of being derailed with Star Trek drek. I figured we could move that here, out of the way. This is how we got from groking yourself to the demise of Star Trek.
You do know there's a perfectly serviceable Star Trek thread in A&E, right? The only reason I decided to post here is because notifications keep popping up in my email from people who have replied to the OP.
Timsup2nothin said:
LOL...okay, Stranger in a Strange Land is on the library of congress list of "books that shaped America," was the first SF title to appear on the NYT best seller list, is the number one selling title by one of the early giants of the genre, and has been described as a 300+ page exploration of the word 'grok,' ...but of course
in the world according to @Valka D'Ur all of that is too obscure and it was freakin' Star Trek fans noticing that it rhymed with Spock that really brought grok into recognition as a word. The irony being that Spock, by his nature, would never grok anything
Stop putting words on my keyboard I never typed, okay?
If you have to be snide toward me - and it's become a habit you appear to find extremely difficult to break, not that you're remotely trying - at least get things
right.
What I actually said was this:
Valka D'Ur said:
It became part of the science fiction community's vocabulary in the 1960s, particularly when Star Trek came along (Stranger in a Strange Land predates Star Trek by 5 years). When Star Trek fandom became a thing, there were buttons and bumper stickers with the slogan "I Grok Spock"...
The word "grok" was all over college and university campuses years before Star Trek. As with
Dune (by Frank Herbert) some weird water-cult stuff went on among some more impressionable fans. But the science fiction community in the early '60s was a hell of a lot more niche than it became later. Science fiction fandom has been around since the 1920s, the first convention was in the '30s, but it took a TV show's fandom to really show the public that it wasn't just children watching TV or reading superhero comics and college kids reading pulp magazines who liked science fiction. It was people from all walks of life, all age groups, all socioeconomic groups.
The fact that some ST fans got into the "I grok Spock" thing is just one facet of Star Trek fandom. It brought the concept of "grokking" to the attention of people who might otherwise never have read Heinlein's book. Not all science fiction fans become fans in the same way, or are introduced to its various concepts in the same way. The first generation of SF fans were introduced to it via print works, usually in the form of pulp magazines or comics. Movies and TV came later, and the 1960s is when the "New Wave" of SF publishing happened - novels and anthologies were becoming more popular and authors and publishers were willing to push more boundaries in terms of sex and social commentary.
If it took Star Trek fandom to introduce some of the fans to Heinlein's work via a silly "I grok Spock" bumper sticker, I don't see that as a bad thing.
I don't remember which Heinlein novel I read first - it was probably either
Space Cadet,
Farmer in the Sky, or maybe
Citizen of the Galaxy.
Stranger in a Strange Land came later. It would have been in late 1975 or early 1976 that I got into Heinlein - along with Clarke, Asimov, and many other older authors - as a result of watching Star Trek and thinking "this science fiction stuff is pretty interesting."
Star Trek didn't get cancelled so much for lack of ratings as for Roddenberry being a wad of a sort that network executive of the time did not have much experience with. His incessant demands for creative control far beyond what the network felt like he merited got Star Trek shoved into a horrible time slot where, no surprise, the ratings fell off enough to justify cancelling it altogether.
Some of his demands, in retrospect, were social justice ahead of its time but they caused a lot of problems for the network. There were a number of affiliates that refused to air the show because of the idea that the future wouldn't have segregated star ships...and the black on the bridge was a woman no less. I admire the guy for sticking to his guns on it, but rubbing the networks nose in it with Kirk kissing Uhura overplayed his hand.
And of course the actors had nothing to do with it...
Shatner deliberately tanked every take they did in which he was supposed to
not kiss Nichelle Nichols. Time was running out to get that scene finished, so they ended up having to use the one where the two actually did kiss.
Other stuff didn't have the justification of being "the right thing to do," it was just ego blowing wildly across sound stages and back lots. He treated scheduling like he was Cecil B DeMille rather than a relative unknown with a not terribly successful TV show and made enemies across the spectrum.
If you're referring to his protests over the Friday at 10 pm time slot, what would you expect him to do, just not say anything at all?
As much of a Star Trek fan as I am... I never really got that into TOS. It was just too campy and corny. I love the TOS movies, but the show was just too low budget. I've learned to like some of it in retrospect, but I can remember as a kid thinking "ugh, Star Trek TV show"... all that changed when TNG came out though.
I can see why some network execs might have found it too niche.
A high budget is no guarantee of a good show or movie. There are a lot of shows and movies that cost an insane number of millions to make, but they're still crap.
Modern audiences are incredibly spoiled. It's like people who only think 2005 and later Doctor Who is worth watching, or people who stick their noses in the air over black and white shows and movies.
It's not the special effects that are important. It's the story and characters.
Gene Roddenberry was a first class asshat by every account I've read. He had a friend write the theme song of the show, then he secretly wrote lyrics to go along with it so that he would get half the royalties as a songwriter despite the lyrics never being used or even intended to be used. A lot of what was wrong with the first couple-three seasons of TNG was his meddling with the show. All of the stupid Luxwana Troy episodes were just so his wife could be a star (she was the actress for that character in addition to the voice actress for the computers in TNG, Voyager and DS:9 until she died).
I did not know that his asshattery got the original show cancelled though.
But yeah I don't really enjoy TOS. I've actually seen a couple of episodes of the animated series and it's not half bad, or at least what I've seen isn't terrible.
Majel Barrett had an acting career pre-Star Trek! I don't condone any of the sleazy things Roddenberry did, either professionally or personally (ie. hiding assets and cooking the books in order to deprive his first wife of her rightful share of the profits Roddenberry received), but you can hardly blame Majel Barrett for everything he did.
You also can't blame her for that utterly crappy writing she was saddled with on the show. Thank goodness the movies let Nurse Chapel grow up.
As for Lwaxana Troi, she's eye-rollingly hammy in most of her appearances. But there were a few that were actually not bad, notably the episode with David Ogden Stiers and the DS9 episode where she and Odo were trapped in the turbolift.
By the Third season they had pretty much sidelined Gene 'cause the studio wanted the show to be more "Mainstream" or something, they made the hippie episode in an attempt to capture the young audience and make it more appealing to pop culture of the time....
"The Way to Eden" was originally entitled "Joanna" and was supposed to feature McCoy's daughter. Instead, Joanna became Irina, Chekov's ex-girlfriend. It's a shame this episode was rewritten so drastically.
Three years isn't a bad run, though.
And it "made it" in spawning the numerous movies and reboots.
Agreed. Star Trek had a profound effect on some people's lives. Among other things, Nichelle Nichols once worked for NASA as a recruiter for the shuttle program. Some of the people who became astronauts did so because of her.
Oh man, I hated those episodes so much.. Whenever that lady showed her stupid mug I'd just sigh.. It was a new TNG episode so I was of course going to watch it, but I knew that it was going to suck. I didn't understand why the hell they would ever put that lady on the show, and even create episodes that revolve around her..... .. Years later I found out who she was and it all made sense. She was a LOT better as the computer. i.e. actually good
Episodes revolving around Alexander were almost as bad, but not quite. He wasn't nearly as annoying as Lxwanna, but the Alexander episodes were just so.. stupid.
I tried watching a couple TOS episodes and they were all pretty bad. Not to take anything away from them, I'm sure they were good for their time, but the acting seemed subpar, and everything else was obviously not as good as what we're used to today. The fight scenes were just ridiculous. I guess they couldn't afford to hire a guy that says: "No that's not how people fight at all, that looks stupid".
I became a Star Trek fan during the TNG run. I grabbed my imagination. Then years later Voyager came along and crushed it
What is it,
exactly, that makes people hate Voyager so much? It can't just be that Robert Beltran's portrayal of Chakotay is sleep-inducingly boring and a walking cliché for a Heinz-57 mix of half the aboriginal groups who ever walked North and South America.
Don't forget "Beam me up, Scottie", which was apparently never even said on screen. (So I'm curious why it's so popular of a saying)
Kinda like "play it again, Sam"?
The closest line was actually, "Scotty, beam me up."
Ultimately, it's one of the least important controversies. What matters is that whoever wants to be beamed up is beamed up. Actually, the only transporter issue that's bugged me for the past 42 years is how 7 people could beam up at the same time at the end of "City on the Edge of Forever."
This pretty much supports my opening statement. Even though it was somewhat...lacking...as far as access to the kind of special effects that make a space show workable they produced so many cultural icons that there was no commercial or financial reason to cancel it, other than controversies Roddenberry created...and even those could have been balanced into the bottom line if he hadn't alienated the network so badly in the process.
Aside to the Lwaxana Troy haters...Roddenberry's wife not only played her, and the computer voice throughout...before she married him she was also Nurse Chapel in the original series as well as the unnamed "Number One" on Captain Pike's Enterprise in the original pilot that got remade into "The Cage." Roddenberry is sometimes given credit for writing in a female first officer, but this was another place he made no friends with the network since they couldn't get behind the female first officer as an avante guard for feminism in light of him casting an unknown and untalented actress for the part just because he was having an affair with her at the time.
They didn't have a problem with a female First Officer. They did have a problem with the actress being Roddenberry's mistress. Funny how social mores change over the decades. There were some hard feelings about Jeri Ryan being involved with one of the Voyager producers, but she didn't lose her part over it.
Of course the feminism part of the issue over Number One in the first pilot was pretty much nullified with the sexist dialogue where Pike says he can't get used to women being on the bridge. But Majel Barrett didn't do a bad job playing Number One, and she wasn't bad as
Doctor Chapel, either.
Some times I get hung up on words. (Ok, all the time I get hung up on words.) You clearly know the history about how it came to get cancelled so relatively early in its run. I'm not disputing any of that. I just think there ways in which, even so, the series can be regarded as having "made it." Even the early cancellation isn't all bad when you take a holistic view of its success as a series--always leave 'em wantin' more. There's sometimes a mystique about shows that get cancelled early; we imagine on their behalf how good those lost years could have been. But we know plenty of cases where shows run long beyond when they should have, and it's not to their ultimate benefit in our retrospective total assessment of their success. Maybe three seasons was the exact right length of time for it to run to generate the affection is holds in the minds of its later fans.
I hated Troy, too, for whatever it might be worth, and not even just the bad acting, but the whole idea. It just felt like once per episode they gave her a feeling line--"No, it's not hostile; it's frightened"--that was either obvious already and so contributed nothing to the resolution of the plot, or that was simply the resolution of the plot: "Ah, it's frightened; well, then, we'll do this and everything will be all right." Too thin a concept.
Are you talking about Lwaxana or Deanna? I couldn't stand Deanna Troi. There's absolutely nothing compelling about her character whatsoever.
Sounds like the Horta episode in the first season of TOS.
What does the Horta have to do with anything?
But the best line from the original trilogy (not the one that has caught on in popular culture) is just two words long. Let's see what kind of fan you are by seeing whether you can identify it.
"I know."
I saw
The Empire Strikes Back in the theatre, in its original run. Even then it annoyed me how so many people in the audience didn't understand that this line wasn't Han Solo being an egotistical smartass - that he was being honest and serious and
genuine.
TOS didn't have enough Yeoman Rand.
Yeah, it did. More than enough. That "Captain, look at my legs" bit in "Miri" was awful. Her "acting" in the Voyager episode was atrocious.
That said, Grace Lee Whitney didn't deserve what happened to her.
..
You're mixing scifis.
