Does anyone else here own the blu-ray sets of Star Trek ?   I have all three seasons.  The sets have all three seasons with original and new special effects. It’s amazing how they can make an old show look better with modern technology. The sets are of very good quality with excellent picture and sound and there are many bonus features. I remember that it was a huge improvement over VHS and the restoration was much better than DVD. And now the blu-rays are much less expensive than when I bought them. If you like the series the sets are well worth the money.  🙂

I have been rewatching the original series and it is a very nostalgic experience. It is my favorite of all of the series. I believe it is the best and the most original, although some people believe The Next Generation is the best. Still, the original series is the show that started the rest of Star Trek, and none of the other series could have been made without it. I would recommend the Blu-ray edition of the three seasons as the best to watch since it contains all of the episodes of the complete series. I have watched the original series so many times, but I never tire of seeing the episodes. I remember seeing many of the episodes when they were first shown. Does anyone else here remember watching the show when it was on television in the 1960’s? Most of today’s viewers probably first saw it in syndication since it became more popular in reruns than when it was first shown on the network.

The Heroes & Icons channel has "all Star Trek" 6 nights a week - each broadcast series airs in episode order. The original series episodes are the remastered versions, and I also enjoy watching them. This house is full of Star Trek nerds - I remember the time we sat around at about 2 am and tried to recall each episode by title and plot; we only missed a few.

I remember watching it when it originally aired, although I'm not sure I saw that many episodes. Only a few stick out in my memory, and in 2 cases ("The Apple" and "The Way to Eden") that's arguably because they weren't very good episodes. (As infamous as the "space hippie" episode is, in my opinion the equivalent Lost in Space episode "The Promised Planet" is worse). Another I remember is "Wink of an Eye" (which I also remember watching in syndication during a partial solar eclipse in the early 1970s).

@stargazer 

I think I began watching Star Trek at age twelve when the reruns of the first season began, and one of the first episodes I saw was “Miri” .  I don’t think I missed any of the other 79 episodes except for “The Cloud Minders”, which probably wasn’t shown on my local channel.  We watched Lost in Space too, but we always thought Star Trek was better.  The campiness of Lost in Space was a little embarrassing, but Star Trek had great stories which made it more enjoyable. Come to think of it, I kind of wish I had watched Star Trek from the first broadcast in 1966. And least I was able to see all three seasons when it was shown in syndication. 🙂

Did you ever imagine that Star Trek could be real?  They showed space ships which were capable of interplanetary travel taking place in the 1990’s in the episode “Space Seed”.  It couldn’t have happened in today’s world, but the creators of the series thought about it in the 1960’s.  The series is wonderfully dated, and it seems more like something from the past each time I watch it. The original series is one of my favorite antique science fiction shows, a gem from another time like Outer Limits and Twilight Zone.  🙂

I just wondered how good the new Star Trek series Strange New Worlds is.  I have heard people talk about it but I haven’t seen much of it except for a few minutes while visiting friends at their home. Perhaps it is like the Abrams movies, which I thought were okay but nothing great. But then again some sequels of Star Trek are underrated such as Enterprise, which was a another prequel as this series is apparently supposed to be. Enterprise was a decent series with fine acting by Scott Bakula and the others and it had a realistic appearance without excessive technology.  I have always thought that a prequel should be like something that came before the other series so maybe the new technology should be kept to minimum so it won’t look too modern.

I am now watching the animated series again.  I like the stories better than the animation, and that made the series better than one might think.  I wonder how the series would have looked with different artists making the animation, Perhaps it would have looked not so much like a Saturday morning cartoon.  The depth of the stories made it seem like it belonged somewhere else than the Saturday morning cartoon fare. Unfortunately, the series lasted for only twenty two episodes.  🙁

@Narnian78 From what I understand, the company that made Star Trek: TAS was notorious for making animation as cheaply as humanly possible... and as much nostalgia as I have for that series, it really shows. But I do appreciate that they took advantage of it being animated to tell some stories they never would have had the budget for in live action.

We had both TOS and TAS on VHS when we were kids, but unfortunately, some of the tapes broke very early on. One of the casualties was the TAS episode Yesteryear. Which is too bad, because now that I've seen it on DVD, it's probably my favorite episode in the series!

Speaking of Star Trek: TAS, though, I found this video a couple of months ago that gave me a good laugh. Someone took a scene from Star Trek: TNG and animated it in the style of TAS. I'll say no more to avoid giving anything away, but I'll just say that the person who made this clearly has seen TAS and knows it very well.  

@rya 

The animation does have a kind of endearing quality about it even though it was so cheaply done. I don’t see how the creators of the show had much choice about the matter given the resources and budget they had. As far as I know there hasn’t been any attempt to redo the 22 episodes with modern animation so I guess people would just rather leave them as they are. It’s fine with me since the cartoon has some nostalgic appeal.  🙂

That video is hilarious, @rya.

I agree that "Yesteryear" is one of the best animated episodes. I enjoyed seeing them revisit the Guardian of Forever - which was a great plot device to set up the original "City on the Edge of Forever" episode but was a little like uncorking a bottle with a genie in it - such a powerful device could be used over and over again to try to change the past. (Side note: the Guardian also figures in the A.C. Crispin novel Yesterday's Son which I also enjoyed).

I've been watching The Next Generation episodes as they cycle through on the H&I broadcast network. The Trek fans I know universally agree that the third season of that show is when it really became good - and watching the episodes this time I've been impressed with the marked improvement between the end of season 2 and season 3. it's not just a little better; it's amazingly better.

@stargazer 

I think “Yesteryear” was the last episode of the animated Star Trek, and it certainly was one of the best.  It is too bad that the money had run out and no more episodes would be made.  If more episodes like that had been created perhaps the series could have continued for at least another season. For many years after that the Star Trek books provided new stories, some of which never made it to the screen.

Star Trek: The New Voyages is some of the best fan fiction that I have read based on the original series.  There are later stories based on The Next Generation and the other series, but I think that mostly the early books were more true to the spirit of the original show. I would also encourage reading the books about Mr. Spock by Diane Duane (e.g. Spock’s World and Vulcan’s Forge) since they are excellent novels by a very skilled author. I read somewhere that even Leonard Nimoy had high regard for them.  They were published many years after the original series and movies, but they are easily just as good as some of the best scripts by the writers of the 79 TV episodes.

I've read The New Voyages and some of the other books and agree entirely with your observations.

I rewatched Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan this past weekend and was impressed again with just how good it is. Some of the effects may be dated (it is 40 years old, after all) but it's still really enjoyable. I think it, along with First Contact, are my favorite Trek movies (incidentally, both include quotations and references to Moby Dick, a book I've tried to read but not completed).

It’s so much fun to read old Star Trek books from the 1970’s such as Star Trek Lives! by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston. The book tells of how there were plans for the series to return. And with all of the series and movies, the show came back many times. But sadly enough, many of the people who were involved in the original series are now gone. I also look forward to reading some of the early Star Trek novels which I haven’t read before, some of which were published decades ago. 🙂

The Star Trek Files Magazine is a lot of fun reading from the 1980’s. I am enjoying some old copies that I recently purchased on eBay.  The magazine, which is based on the original Star Trek of the 1960’s, is really interesting for background on the characters and stories of the 79 episodes.  The issues are more like paperback books than magazines.  The copies are long out of print, but it is quite easy and not too expensive to find and purchase most of them. They are well worth reading especially if you are an original series fan.  🙂