I’m not often one for the “Wow, that makes me feel old” line of thinking. I like to think that I’m pretty realistic about the passage of time. But…good lord, how can it be that we’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of the series premiere of Laverne and Shirley?!
I haven’t watched L&S at all since it first aired, but it was still iconic as hell. It was huge in its first few seasons, and I remember it being one of those shows we kids would talk about at school the morning after it aired. There was a kid in my kindergarten class, as I recall, who absolutely adored Fonzie on Happy Days, and I remember (vaguely!) talking about those two weirdos on L&S, the ones whose names my mother could never quite remember. “Who are those guys again?” I’d ask, and Mom would say, “Squiggy and somebody.”
I honestly don’t have a whole hell of a lot to say about Laverne and Shirley. It turns out that what I remember most about the show is its opening titles sequence, which would only be in use for the first half of the show’s run; for the back half of the show, when the entire cast all uprooted to go live in Burbank, the whole “flavor” changed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m wrong here, but I suspect that this was L&S‘s version of the shark-jumping that happened on that other show.
Anyway, here’s that iconic opening:
And how iconic was this opening? Almost ten years after L&S ended, the movie Wayne’s World would come up with a convoluted reason to send its main characters on a brief road trip from Chicago to Milwaukee, which resulted in this:
Mad About You is a sitcom that aired in the 1990s for seven seasons. It was about the day-to-day life of a young couple in New York City, Paul and Jamie Buchman, played by Paul Reiser* and Helen Hunt. The show tended to be very down-to-earth in its concerns, almost mundane; in a way, Mad About You was better at being a “show about nothing” than Seinfeld was. We loved Mad About You when it first aired. The Girlfriend (now The Wife) discovered it before I did, but it quickly became a bonding thing for us during the ten or so months after I graduated college that we were doing a long-distance thing. Mad About You, at its best, had a lot of wonderful things to say about love and marriage…and I’ll have done there, as I want to write a longer piece about the show and What It Meant To Me, probably for the upcoming newsletter relaunch.
So, instead of a music selection, here’s a comedic sequence from Mad About You. This is from the show’s second season, when it really hit its stride; its best seasons were probably its second and third. To understand what’s happening here, all you need know is that Paul Buchman is a documentary filmmaker by trade who often finds himself doing film work he finds “beneath” himself (but he grits his teeth and does it because he knows he has to eat). Here he’s been working on a film called A Day At the Zoo. The rest of this should be easy to understand. This scene never comes out and says what’s on “the tape”, but we know, don’t we? And the comedic timing here is just amazing. Reiser and Hunt had the kind of chemistry together that many actors playing parts of fictional partnerships dream of achieving.
(Oh, and this scene ends at the episode’s first commercial break. The complications pile up after this.)
* By the way, what was up with sitcoms in the 90s featuring standup comedians in the lead playing dudes with the same first name as themselves? In Mad About You Paul Reiser plays Paul Buchman. In Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld plays…another version of Jerry Seinfeld. Jonathan Silverman starred in The Single Guy, as Jonathan Eliot.
It’s quite a jolt when you’re watching a marathon of The Office and you catch the last three episodes and then it goes right back to Season One, Episode One.
Another observation: I’ve no idea how people deal with commercials on teevee. Lord, commercials suck.
Today is the 58th anniversary of Star Trek‘s first appearance on teevee. On this date in 1966, an episode called “The Man Trap” of a new science-fiction show aired, and I guess that at the time this seemed like just another airing of some new show. New shows arrive every year, most of which are completely forgotten eventually…but somehow that particular new show made enough of an impact that it lives on as a huge franchise, over half a century later. Most of the people involved with making that very first episode are gone now…but their memory endures through the legacy of this great show. This is a post that I wrote on my old blog for the occasion of Star Trek‘s fiftieth anniversary, and it seems that I am now posting it on a yearly basis. Happy birthday, Star Trek!
And you people, you’re all astronauts on…some kind of star trek?
–Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact
Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s…amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)
Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.
It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.”
–James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever”
Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.
Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)
I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.
MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?
SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows.
–”The City on the Edge of Forever”
As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)
I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.
I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.
Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go…but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.
I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.
Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail.
–Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.
If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.
–Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.
The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)
CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain?
KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right…and straight on ‘til morning.
—Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager…which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.
But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like “The Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “A Piece of the Action,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Tapestry,” “The Visitor”? Who knows…but I look forward to finding out.
Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.
They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities – the potential for knowledge and advancement – is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.
–James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”
Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.
First of all, a bit of administrativia: the post immediately below this one was supposed to run yesterday and I screwed up the publishing. Oops.
Now: not music, but a scene from a teevee show today: the closing scene from “The Unnatural” from The X-Files, an episode David Duchovny wrote and directed, in which his Agent Fox Mulder visits an elderly former FBI agent named Arthur Dales about a curious incident in Agent Dales’s past. It turns out that this Arthur Dales was actually the brother of the former FBI agent Arthur Dales, though both were named Arthur. Anyway, this Dales was a cop in Roswell, NM in the late 1940s, and was assigned to protect a black baseball player named Josh Exley. Of course, Exley turned out to be an alien who loved baseball, and a very strange period story emerges, in which the show’s decades-long alien conspiracy intersects the world of baseball. Honestly, it’s one of the show’s very best episodes.
One thing that makes it great is that the present-day Arthur Dales was played by the great character actor M. Emmet Walsh, who just died this week after decades of appearing in seemingly everything. Walsh was an outstanding actor, and he will be missed.
I couldn’t find the actual scenes of Walsh and Duchovny talking in the episode, so I’ll just share this scene, which concludes the episode as Mulder and Scully take a break from all their alien-chasing and conspiracy-pursuing to bond–pretty romantically, too–over a bit of batting practice. The song heard throughout the scene actually weaves through the entire episode; it turns out that the alien ballplayer in 1947 also had a great singing voice.
I don’t remember the numbers in play, but the game was not a runaway; Ben actually needed to be right on Final Jeopardy to win…or at least not wager so much that he’d lose on a wrong answer. The Final Jeopardy clue was this (paraphrased), in the category “Shakespeare Characters”:
“The names of these two lovers are taken from Latin words meaning ‘blessed’.”
Now, first off: I came up with the right answer, because isn’t that the most important thing about Jeopardy, anyway? For you, as a viewer, to feel as smart as, if not smarter, than the people on the teevee who know all this weird random stuff? Why yes! But still: the two challengers both answered “Romeo and Juliet”, and both of those answers were wrong, so both of them lost money. Again, the numbers aren’t important, but at least one of them still had some money left after their wager.
Ben, however, got the right characters: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. But wait! He spelled them Beatrice and Benedict, which was enough for the judges to rule him incorrect. His wager was big enough to drop him into second place, and off the show (until he comes back for the Tournament of Champions, so all isn’t lost for Ben).
Well, tonight it happened again! Only this time, they let the misspelling stand. I don’t recall the Final Jeopardy clue, but the answer as “Antony and Cleopatra”. One of the contestants spelled it Anthony and Cleopatra, though. There’s no ‘H’ there: He’s Mark Antony, not Mark Anthony. Ken Jennings actually said something like, “There’s no H in there, but we’ll give it to you anyway.”
WHAT???!!!
Why did spelling count for Ben back in May but not for some other guy tonight? Now, the answer didn’t end up mattering this time: he still came in second, so the game would not have been decided had his answer been correct or incorrect, but back then I was told that the rules are the rules! Spelling counts in Final Jeopardy! One imagines Mr. Goodman from The Big Lebowski:
This is one of my favorite little scenes from Friends. I’ve always loved this little exchange, and in tribute to it, I have ever since referred to all spiders as “Phil”. (In this case I now assume that Phil can be a genderless name: Philip, Philomena, Philopina, you get the drift.)
Actor Matthew Perry died yesterday–that’s him in the clip–after apparently having drowned in his own hot tub.
I expect that there will eventually be more sordid details about his passing, considering his long struggles with addiction and other medical issues. But that doesn’t matter now. Perry did a lot of good work, primarily comedic, most notably on Friends. That particular show was a favorite of mine during its run, and I still love a great deal of it, even if much of it hasn’t aged very well; right now, Friends is kind-of in that middle area where it hasn’t aged enough for its problematic aspects to be seen as being “of its time”, but I do think that it earned its claims to be a classic sitcom. Friends did manage to capture something of the 90s zeitgeist for young people in that era. The people who were on it were my age group, or slightly above it (I’m 52; Perry was 54). But Friends wasn’t just that; it was usually written with wit and crisp attention to character and structure. Friends has never quite gotten its due for its writing, in my opinion. The show really excelled at things like setting up a big episode-ending punchline in the first minutes, and also at having big moments come as complete surprises while still being entirely consistent with the characters. Yes, Friends probably endured a season or two longer than it should have, but its drop-off toward its end wasn’t that bad.
Perry played Chandler Bing on Friends. Chandler was the neurotic jokester of the group who always seemed to have a quip ready at hand. The Friends producers made a lot of hay out of this, but they were also aware enough to know that sometimes that guy (there’s one in every group!) will make jokes that don’t quite land, that fall awkwardly, and that ultimately mask a certain level of weird insecurity. A low-level subplot that unfolded over the series’s run was Chandler’s growth and maturity, as he progressed from the smart-mouthed and insecure jokester to being one of the first members of the group to settle into a stable, long-term relationship (with Monica, another of the show’s regulars). As Friends ended, the group was transitioning as Chandler and Monica started a family and decided it was time to move to the suburbs.
Perry anchored Chandler Bing nearly perfectly, giving him a voice that was so distinctive that to this day people remember certain of Chandler’s phrasings and verbal tics. However, when I saw Perry in other projects, I realized that he had a good deal more range even than Chandler Bing afforded him.
Perry turned up on The West Wing as Friends ended. His character there, a lawyer newly hired for the White House Counsel’s office who happens to be a Republican, was an interesting addition…but sadly he came along right when Aaron Sorkin was exiting the show, which meant that Perry didn’t get to do much with Sorkin’s signature style, and he showed up a few times on a recurring basis. I’ve always found it perplexing that Aaron Sorkin left The West Wing after he added talent like Lily Tomlin and Matthew Perry to his roster. It was all a money thing, from what I remember, but sheesh–I’m not a rich writer, but if I was one, I think I might find my way to taking a pay cut to write for Tomlin and Perry.
Sorkin got another shot later on, though, at least with Perry: he was one of the leads on Sorkin’s backstage-at-a-teevee-show show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I watched every episode of Studio 60 with anticipation at first for a good show, and then with the anticipation one feels as one approaches the scene of a car wreck on the thruway. Studio 60 had…issues. Gigantic issues. The show was one of the most highly hyped new shows of its season, and then it winded up getting axed after that singular first year, for many reasons. But none of those reasons was Matthew Perry, who again anchored the show as the head-writer for a late-night live comedy show, Matt Albie. Studio 60 provided yet another data point in my long belief that Aaron Sorkin may be a good writer on individual projects (though not so great as many believe), but he’s simply not a very good show-runner for long-term television. The focus on Studio 60 was all wrong, and the best material came not when he focused on the struggles and the love lives of the Big Main Characters, but when he instead looked at the lower-level workers in television, the underappreciated people, the ones who aren’t household names: the writers.
As Studio 60 begins, Matt Albie (Perry) and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) are hired to take over and restore to prominence a long-suffering SNL-esque live comedy show. One big issue is that the writers’ room for this show is a big collection of hacks, overseen by two guys who hate Matt and Danny with a passion. These conflicts simmer in the background of Studio 60‘s one season, and at one point Matt hires two new writers, who have collectively about eight minutes of comedy writing experience, for the room. Shortly thereafter, the two guys who hate Matt and Danny quit, and they take all the other writers with them–leaving only the two deeply green newbies as the only writers Matt has left. In desperation, Matt brings in another comedy writer just to mentor these two into a level of competence. This, as it unfolds, is one of my favorite things that happened in the entire run of Studio 60. This video stitches together the entire storyline–it’s less than five minutes during one episode, and excuse the quality, this is where someone aimed their phone at their teevee–and while Perry doesn’t play a huge role in it, he still anchors it as the straight-man to the comedy that is unfolding two floors below his big office.
I’ve seen Matthew Perry in other things over the years–not a lot, but enough–and I think he always was somehow the “grounding” force in his projects, the guy who seemed like a real guy in the middle of whatever other weirdness was going on around him. Going back to Friends, someone had to be there to react to the weirdness of Phoebe, the goofball shit that always surrounded Joey, and the straight-up embodiment of “What are you doing?!” that was Ross.
I don’t want to speculate much about the facts of Perry’s death or the degree to which his personal demons may have played a role. I just want to point out the quality of his work over the years, and that he’ll be missed.
Today is the 57th anniversary of Star Trek‘s first appearance on teevee. On this date in 1966, an episode called “The Man Trap” of a new science-fiction show aired, and I guess that at the time this seemed like just another airing of some new show. New shows arrive every year, most of which are completely forgotten eventually…but somehow that particular new show made enough of an impact that it lives on as a huge franchise, over half a century later. Most of the people involved with making that very first episode are gone now…but their memory endures through the legacy of this great show. This is a post that I wrote on my old blog for the occasion of Star Trek‘s fiftieth anniversary, and it seems that I am now posting it on a yearly basis. Happy birthday, Star Trek!
And you people, you’re all astronauts on…some kind of star trek?
–Zefram Cochrane, Star Trek First Contact
Wow. Star Trek made its official US debut fifty years ago today. That’s…amazing. (The show aired for the first time anywhere on September 6, 1966, in Canada.)
Star Trek came and went and was already in syndication when I was born, but my sister loved it, so I quite literally do not remember a time when Star Trek wasn’t a thing. One of my earliest teevee memories is, in fact, the brief bit at the end of the episode “Friday’s Child”, when Dr. McCoy is saying “Oochie woochie coochie coo” to a newborn baby, to Spock’s great confusion.
It’s often taken as an article of faith in the geek universe that one is either a Star Wars fan or a Star Trek fan, and I can kind of see why. It’s a Yankees-Red Sox kind of thing, I suppose. Or Bears-Packers. But for me, it’s complicated. I have to be honest: push me to answer, hold a gun to my head, and I will almost certainly choose Star Wars. But the margin of victory is not large, and in truth, there’s no way I’m the writer I am now without both of them.
“Let me help.” A hundred years or so from now, I believe, a famous novelist will write a classic using that theme. He’ll recommend those three words even over “I love you.”
–James T. Kirk, “The City on the Edge of Forever”
Star Trek shaped my view, in a lot of ways, of what the future can and should be. It should be a time when humans are not afraid to explore the universe and, in fact, do so with enthusiasm. It should be a time when the diversity of humanity should be celebrated and not resisted. It should be a time when beautiful ships fly the stars, instead of rusting dingy hulks. It should be a time of wonderful cities, not dystopic nightmares. It should not be a time of universal peace without conflict, because that’s almost certainly impossible, but it should be a time when we approach conflict from a much more mature standpoint than we do now.
Of course, when I was a kid, Star Trek was none of that. It was just a show about nifty adventures in space, a way for me to scratch that particular itch in the years between releases of Star Wars movies. It didn’t ever occur to me back then that I was supposed to like one over the other; they were different things, and I liked ‘em both. If Star Wars hit me like a bolt from the blue, Star Trek was the thing that was there, day in and day out. Star Trek was what was on during the afternoon hours after school. I’d get home and watch it and thrill to the adventures of Captain Kirk and crew on the black-and-white teevee set I had in my room. This was before the Internet, obviously, and I didn’t have any access to an episode guide, so the only way to learn the episodes was to watch and watch and rewatch them as they came. I got pretty good at recognizing the episodes by sight, usually within seconds. (Often I had to wait until the first shot after the obligatory opening shot of the Enterprise.)
I don’t know if the station had some kind of plan for airing the episodes in any particular order, but I recall that you could go upwards of a year without seeing “Mirror, Mirror” or “The Trouble with Tribbles”, but other episodes – “The Return of the Archons”, “Errand of Mercy” – would show up more frequently. A certain “This one again?!” factor crept in at times, especially with some of the crappier episodes. (I can live the rest of my life to a rich old age and never watch “The Alternative Factor” again.) But the great episodes? Those live on forever. I still laugh at “The Trouble with Tribbles”, and I live for a moment when someone near me uses the phrase “storage compartments”, so I can respond as Kirk does: “STORAGE compartments? STORAGE compartments?!” And I still feel that sense of doom slowly unfolding as “The City on the Edge of Forever” spins its tale, toward the awful moment when, in order to fix history after it has been changed, James Kirk must stand and watch as a 20th century woman with whom he has fallen in love is killed.
MCCOY: You deliberately stopped me, Jim! I could have saved her. Do you know what you just did?
SPOCK: He knows, Doctor. He knows.
–”The City on the Edge of Forever”
As a kid, I attended two Star Trek conventions with my older sister – or at least, one Trek convention and one general sci-fi convention. At the latter, “The Trouble with Tribbles” was aired, followed by 2001: A Space Odyssey. Those were fun. George Takei was the guest of honor at the first one, in 1977 or 1978. I was in first grade at the time. I remember Takei wearing a gleaming white suit. (Peter Mayhew was guest at the next one.)
I eventually lost track of daily Star Trek reruns by the mid-1980s, but also by this point, the movies were a thing. I remember being terribly excited for The Motion Picture, and even though I didn’t quite understand all of the plot, I have never – not once – disliked that often-maligned film. I recall being mildly disappointed that the Enterprise never fires its phasers once in that film, and in fact it only dispatches a single photon torpedo, and that’s at an errant asteroid that’s about to collide with the Great Bird. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I think The Motion Picture is the first real science fiction story I saw on the big screen that wasn’t about a galactic war or some other action-based adventure. I wasn’t thinking in those terms, but yes, the movie primed that particular pump.
I liked all of the movies that came, and I saw every one in the theater over the next decade. This was an odd time for Trek, when a movie every couple of years was all there was. Sure, every once in a while there would be a tidbit in Starlog (the late, great SF fandom magazine) about how somebody somewhere wanted to make a new Trek teevee series, but it never amounted to much until we learned that we were finally getting The Next Generation. This was for several reasons, not the least of which was that Paramount wanted to keep making money off Trek but the original cast was starting to show its age.
Through the 1980s, as Star Wars seemed to fade away, Trek was still there, churning out a movie every couple of years and then a new teevee show. That’s what Trek always was for me. It didn’t fuel my imagination in quite the same way that Star Wars has always moved me at a very basic level of storytelling taste, but Trek has always been around. Always, always there. In fact, it was always there to such an extent that in the late 1990s, I started letting Trek go…but I’m getting ahead. During this time I read a number of Trek novels, and there was a fanzine called Trek that would annually publish a paperback book filled with its best articles. These I read with zeal, and I’ve lately started regathering them all via eBay. Maybe this winter I’ll spend some time reliving some fine old fan writing.
I loved The Next Generation, and watching it religiously formed a tradition in college among my mates and I. TNG aired reruns every weeknight, and the new episodes ran every Sunday night after the 10:00 news. That station even went so far, as TNG’s popularity grew, of including a very brief astronomy segment in its 10:00 Sunday newscast – “Tonight you can see Mars in the eastern sky!”, that sort of thing – complete with an Enterprise fly-by animation. And then, in our senior year, the next show, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, arrived. That premiere was an event, and I still think that premiere was an amazing episode.
Never trust ale from a god-fearing people, or a Starfleet Commander that has one of your relatives in jail.
–Quark, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
It took a little while for TNG to really get going, but once the writers had the chemistry down, the show was more than ready to carry on the Trek tradition, with many a fine and thought-provoking story, about love and loss and what it means to be human even as we take to the stars.
If you can’t take a little bloody nose, maybe you ought to go back home and crawl under your bed. It’s not safe out here. It’s wondrous, with treasures to satiate desires both subtle and gross. But it’s not for the timid.
–Q, Star Trek: The Next Generation
And still the movies came. The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock, which I saw with school friends. The Voyage Home, with its goofy and infectious joy. Even the much-maligned (and mostly deservedly so) The Final Frontier had its charms for me. That poor movie may have failed, but I really give it credit for trying to be about something.
The Undiscovered Country came along in 1991, when TNG had hit its stride. We saw it in the theater the night it opened, which happened to be the same night as our annual Christmas concert performance at a big church in Cedar Falls, IA. We did the concert, quickly changed clothes, and bolted down the street to catch the show. I loved that movie, and in fact, to this day Star Trek VI is my favorite Trek film. I remember a lump in my throat at the closing scene, which boiled down to just the classic crew onscreen (minus Sulu, who finally got his promotion to Captain and got to fly away on his own ship, the Excelsior), followed by the animated signatures of the original cast. Their time was done. (Although, in classic Trek and science fiction fashion, not quite.)
CHEKOV: Course heading, Captain?
KIRK: (smiles) Second star to the right…and straight on ‘til morning.
—Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
College ended and the real world began, and there was still Star Trek, even as Star Wars started making rumblings again. The TNG crew graduated to movies, and DS9 soared in quality. Another series began, Voyager…which is when I started to lose a bit of energy with respect to Trek. For one thing, I had a lot of other interests by this time, but for another, it was pretty clear as Voyager got going that the creative folks behind Trek were starting to lose steam. I stopped watching Voyager about the fourth season, and the next series? Well, to this day, I have never watched a single episode of Enterprise.
But now Trek is coming back. Three new movies, with varying degrees of success. A new series on the way, reimagined to seasons of thirteen episodes each. The Trek continues. (I haven’t seen Star Trek Beyond yet. It came and went from the theaters too quickly this summer, and it came out during our busiest time of the summer as well, so I simply was never able to squeeze it in. Beyond and Nemesis are, to date, the only Trek films I did not see in the theaters.) Will Trek eventually reach similar heights again? Are there more stories in the offing to match tales like “The Devil in the Dark,” “The Doomsday Machine,” “A Piece of the Action,” “The Best of Both Worlds,” “Yesterday’s Enterprise,” “Tapestry,” “The Visitor”? Who knows…but I look forward to finding out.
Star Trek is, was, and has been many things. It will continue to be many things, too. I don’t know that I’ll ever have the same old investment in it that I did in the late 70s and through the 80s. I don’t know that I’ll ever feel that same enthusiasm for Star Wars either, so the two tentpoles of my science fiction life have that much in common, don’t they? But I’ll always owe a debt to Star Trek. It shone a bright light on a future that doesn’t have to be awful, and it showed beautiful space ships. It put a new light on the idea of space adventure, and it showed a military organization that was devoted truly to peace. Star Trek did time travel better than just about anybody else. Star Trek gave us amazing characters, and it let those characters do amazing things.
They used to say if man could fly, he’d have wings, but he did fly. He discovered he had to. Do you wish that the first Apollo mission hadn’t reached the moon, or that we hadn’t gone on to Mars and then to the nearest star? That’s like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sewed your patients up with catgut like your great-great-great-great grandfather used to. I’m in command. I could order this, but I’m not because Doctor McCoy is right in pointing out the enormous danger potential in any contact with life and intelligence as fantastically advanced as this, but I must point out that the possibilities – the potential for knowledge and advancement – is equally great. Risk! Risk is our business. That’s what this starship is all about. That’s why we’re aboard her.
–James T. Kirk, “Return to Tomorrow”
Star Trek is fifty. Amazing. Long live Star Trek.
Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Her ongoing mission: to explore strange, new worlds; to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no one has gone before.
I don’t have much in depth to say about some of these, so I’ll limit myself to two sentences each!
:: Happiness for Beginners: This cheerful and utterly unsurprising rom-com, which unfolds on a hiking trip, is worth watching for some STUNNING nature shots. Keep the PAUSE button at the ready.
:: Always Be My Maybe: This, on the other hand, is a cheerful but actually occasionally surprising rom-com, featuring Randall Park and Ali Wong as Asian-American friends from youth who wander in and out of a relationship over the years. It has some big laughs, lots of heart, and a terrific cast.
:: Bridesmaids: I’ve no idea why, but I expected this to be a kind-of female-cast version of The Hangover. It isn’t, and that’s not a problem because it’s really good and Kristen Wiig is always a delight.
:: The Laundromat: I was completely flummoxed by this very strange film. I honestly don’t think I could assess it without a rewatch.
:: Bullet Train: This movie is so flat-out gonzo weird that I loved it. Imagine Pulp Fiction, on speed, on a bullet train in Asia.
:: How Do You Know: If you want a rom-com you won’t remember the next day, here you go. And that’s too bad, because the cast is fantastic.
There you go! More to come after we’ve watched some more stuff! Lately we’ve been plowing through Never Have I Ever…, which we’re loving and which we’re almost done with, as well as old episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen. And of course, MasterChef, which remains as full of shit as ever. The third season of Only Murders in the Building is unfolding as I write this, and four episodes in, this go-round is more uneven than the last two, though it does seem like in the last two episodes the mystery is starting to lock in, after quite a bit of backstage filler material. But the cast and the production is still perfect and I’d watch this trio of leads if they just recited old Presidential speeches, and not the good speeches, either. We’re talking Chester Arthur here.
