Well I grew up with it, so that influences my opinion of course. I happen to prefer "the original series" (ST:TOS) TV show, which has a lot of great, classic science fiction with a WW2 kind of feel in terms of the ship and crew. A taste of the old America but with a 1960's influence - the ship is integrated in terms of race and gender, it was quite a progressive show for the time. Some of the stories address social concerns of the time - racism, overpopulation, nuclear war, the hippie quest to "return to the Garden" and so on. A lot of great science fiction writers contributed scripts.
The animated series of course contained the world famous character Chuft-Captain.
It had three seasons although it was cancelled partway through Season 3. There is a lot of advanced technology, but there are also rules - for example you can't use the transporters when the shields are up. These rules create some interesting and believable dilemmas. This series had the original crew - Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock, Dr. "Bones" McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura etc.
So if you wanted to have my experience with the show you would watch the three seasons of Star Trek, and then at least some of the movies. The best movies are the one above (Star Trek II), Star Trek IV, and Star Trek VI. I enjoy Star Trek III as well, has some great scenes. Star Trek The Motion Picture (I) is pretty slow going and flawed. It has some cool stuff but on the whole, it's rare to find anyone who likes it. Star Trek V is dreck, its only virtue is that I knew the woman who played the Romulan ambassador and she flirted with me. This was when I lived in Los Angeles, a year or two before the movie came out.
There was a gap between the old TV show going off the air, in 1969 or 1970, and the late 1980's Star Trek: The Next Generation which was a TV show set decades after the original with an entirely new cast with Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. His excellent acting anchors the show, which has other memorable characters of which the most notable is Brent Spiner's Data, an android. This ran for 7 seasons I think. I haven't seen all of it but have seen a chunk of it.
It is more realistic in many ways for the far future - there is a lot more tapping on panels and programming computers rather than flipping mechanical switches and messing with wires - but often this hurts its charm IMO. Nothing is more boring than watching someone type on a keyboard as the action sequence. It also suffers from employing a lot of technobabble to solve problems in a way the first show did not. It uses early generation computer graphics for the ships and it shows. I think the ship is ugly compared to the original.
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Matter of taste, of course. But I prefer the top one. The other ships from the original series were also quite iconic, like the Klingon D-7 battlecruiser.
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The ship in Next Generation does not feel like a WW2 military vessel at all, in fact there are civilians, the families of the crew members, running around on the ship including children. I found this incongruous with going to unknown parts of space and into dangerous situations. But younger people often find it appeals to their sensibilities more because it has a more modern culture (not anymore I suppose, but at the time it was a big departure from the WW2 feel). There is more emphasis on negotiations and less on fistfights and Kirk charming alien women. It is less dramatic and more realistic - the captain does not beam down in person in every landing party, he tends to stay on the ship and send an away team, which makes more sense, but ultimately Picard is a less riveting person than Kirk to watch under pressure.
This show had a spinoff show, Deep Space Nine, which I did not like, but many people do. It also had a number of movies. Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis. First Contact is an excellent movie by any standard, and is better if you have seen the Borg episodes of the TV show - like Star Trek II continued a story from the original show, First Contact continues a story from Next Generation. The Borg were a new villain race for the show and probably its best new addition to the setting, and the movie takes advantage of the larger budget and newer graphics to show an epic battle the TV show could not. The other movies were alright, although Insurrection, which tried to deal with the subject of terrorism, was forgettable. Generations actually has both Kirk and Picard in it, with the original actors for both, and is notable that way.
There are other TV series besides Deep Space Nine, like Voyager. I am not really familiar with these shows, having seen only small samples of them. The list is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...evision_series
I think people are going to vary in their tastes depending on what they saw first and how close it was in time to when they watched it (did it feel anachronistic or not). One person's corny is another person's classic. Personally I feel the later shows got a little too touchy-feely for a space adventure, and the aliens became so similar to the humans that, other than their rubber masks, they were indistinguishable - they have the same personality types and quirks, to the point where you wonder why they are aliens at all, they just seem like human cultures and individuals, and often recognizable ones. Usually there are no good guys or bad guys, just moral relativism and morally ambiguous conflicts. Some people like this, I see it in modern games even now, but I feel it sucks the flavor out of what should be an exotic setting and makes the aliens generic - they may look different but they really aren't. They went a little too hard on the "deep down we're all the same" thing for my taste.
The original series makes it clear we are very much not all the same, even other good guys like Vulcans are entirely different than humans. Some of the stuff set on Vulcan in both the show and the movies is absolutely riveting because of its alien-ness.
Still there is some good stuff in there. The Borg are unapologetically sinister and this is where the new stuff shines brightest - there is a moral bright line and you know which team you are on. The Q character is genuinely funny. Data's development as an android seeking to understand humans and be like them is perhaps the best long running arc of the show and continues into the movies.
I don't know enough about the other series to really comment on them, except to say none of them grabbed me enough to make me seek them out. I heard Deep Space Nine, whose first season I watched and disliked, gets a lot better once the "Dominion War" breaks out, and I sought out some of those eps to watch on TV, but it still was no TOS. I have watched the Original Series again and still find it awesome. The version floating around right now has been digitally touched up with some new graphics put in, which add to the visuals. It still retains that magnificent model though that makes the Enterprise so memorable compared to the CGI ships in the later shows.
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The original series movies also use models and as you can see from that clip above, they look great. The original Enterprise has graceful lines and curves and is widely considered the coolest imaginary ship design ever made by many people. This was a ship designed by people who lived through WW2 and appreciated the lines of the aircraft of that era, you can tell.
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The animated series of course contained the world famous character Chuft-Captain.
It had three seasons although it was cancelled partway through Season 3. There is a lot of advanced technology, but there are also rules - for example you can't use the transporters when the shields are up. These rules create some interesting and believable dilemmas. This series had the original crew - Captain Kirk, First Officer Spock, Dr. "Bones" McCoy, Scotty, Sulu, Chekhov, Uhura etc.
So if you wanted to have my experience with the show you would watch the three seasons of Star Trek, and then at least some of the movies. The best movies are the one above (Star Trek II), Star Trek IV, and Star Trek VI. I enjoy Star Trek III as well, has some great scenes. Star Trek The Motion Picture (I) is pretty slow going and flawed. It has some cool stuff but on the whole, it's rare to find anyone who likes it. Star Trek V is dreck, its only virtue is that I knew the woman who played the Romulan ambassador and she flirted with me. This was when I lived in Los Angeles, a year or two before the movie came out.
There was a gap between the old TV show going off the air, in 1969 or 1970, and the late 1980's Star Trek: The Next Generation which was a TV show set decades after the original with an entirely new cast with Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard. His excellent acting anchors the show, which has other memorable characters of which the most notable is Brent Spiner's Data, an android. This ran for 7 seasons I think. I haven't seen all of it but have seen a chunk of it.
It is more realistic in many ways for the far future - there is a lot more tapping on panels and programming computers rather than flipping mechanical switches and messing with wires - but often this hurts its charm IMO. Nothing is more boring than watching someone type on a keyboard as the action sequence. It also suffers from employing a lot of technobabble to solve problems in a way the first show did not. It uses early generation computer graphics for the ships and it shows. I think the ship is ugly compared to the original.
Matter of taste, of course. But I prefer the top one. The other ships from the original series were also quite iconic, like the Klingon D-7 battlecruiser.
β
β
The ship in Next Generation does not feel like a WW2 military vessel at all, in fact there are civilians, the families of the crew members, running around on the ship including children. I found this incongruous with going to unknown parts of space and into dangerous situations. But younger people often find it appeals to their sensibilities more because it has a more modern culture (not anymore I suppose, but at the time it was a big departure from the WW2 feel). There is more emphasis on negotiations and less on fistfights and Kirk charming alien women. It is less dramatic and more realistic - the captain does not beam down in person in every landing party, he tends to stay on the ship and send an away team, which makes more sense, but ultimately Picard is a less riveting person than Kirk to watch under pressure.
This show had a spinoff show, Deep Space Nine, which I did not like, but many people do. It also had a number of movies. Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: First Contact, Star Trek: Insurrection, and Star Trek: Nemesis. First Contact is an excellent movie by any standard, and is better if you have seen the Borg episodes of the TV show - like Star Trek II continued a story from the original show, First Contact continues a story from Next Generation. The Borg were a new villain race for the show and probably its best new addition to the setting, and the movie takes advantage of the larger budget and newer graphics to show an epic battle the TV show could not. The other movies were alright, although Insurrection, which tried to deal with the subject of terrorism, was forgettable. Generations actually has both Kirk and Picard in it, with the original actors for both, and is notable that way.
There are other TV series besides Deep Space Nine, like Voyager. I am not really familiar with these shows, having seen only small samples of them. The list is here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...evision_series
I think people are going to vary in their tastes depending on what they saw first and how close it was in time to when they watched it (did it feel anachronistic or not). One person's corny is another person's classic. Personally I feel the later shows got a little too touchy-feely for a space adventure, and the aliens became so similar to the humans that, other than their rubber masks, they were indistinguishable - they have the same personality types and quirks, to the point where you wonder why they are aliens at all, they just seem like human cultures and individuals, and often recognizable ones. Usually there are no good guys or bad guys, just moral relativism and morally ambiguous conflicts. Some people like this, I see it in modern games even now, but I feel it sucks the flavor out of what should be an exotic setting and makes the aliens generic - they may look different but they really aren't. They went a little too hard on the "deep down we're all the same" thing for my taste.
The original series makes it clear we are very much not all the same, even other good guys like Vulcans are entirely different than humans. Some of the stuff set on Vulcan in both the show and the movies is absolutely riveting because of its alien-ness.
Still there is some good stuff in there. The Borg are unapologetically sinister and this is where the new stuff shines brightest - there is a moral bright line and you know which team you are on. The Q character is genuinely funny. Data's development as an android seeking to understand humans and be like them is perhaps the best long running arc of the show and continues into the movies.
I don't know enough about the other series to really comment on them, except to say none of them grabbed me enough to make me seek them out. I heard Deep Space Nine, whose first season I watched and disliked, gets a lot better once the "Dominion War" breaks out, and I sought out some of those eps to watch on TV, but it still was no TOS. I have watched the Original Series again and still find it awesome. The version floating around right now has been digitally touched up with some new graphics put in, which add to the visuals. It still retains that magnificent model though that makes the Enterprise so memorable compared to the CGI ships in the later shows.
The original series movies also use models and as you can see from that clip above, they look great. The original Enterprise has graceful lines and curves and is widely considered the coolest imaginary ship design ever made by many people. This was a ship designed by people who lived through WW2 and appreciated the lines of the aircraft of that era, you can tell.
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