Those two words contain a large part of my life.  Star Trek has always been there.  I’m old enough to remember watching the original 1973/74 Animated Series when it was NEW on Saturday mornings.  I’m told by family legend that I’ve seen the original series when it was new – from a playpen when my late father would watch it and have me with him.  As much as I am known as a Doctor Who fan, Star Trek has always been there.  I’ve seen all of it – all of the 11 television series that have aired to date (with a 12th on the way).

So some time back when I finished my Doctor Who marathon, I was talking with my daughter about it, and she suggested I do Star Trek next.  When I said which one, she said “all of them”, so after some thought, I decided to do it, but it’s not just the original Star Trek, I was going to do all of them – but with other things in-between series.  As I wrote this midway through September 2024, I got through all of the original Star Trek Series, but then I carried on into the Animated Series, but I didn’t stop there.  I also tackled the 11 episodes of the fan series “Star Trek Continues“.  STC isn’t canon, but man is it well done.  Vic Mignogna and crew perfectly captured the vibe of the original Trek series.

Tomorrow I’m starting on Star Trek: TNG, but I didn’t want to move past the original Star Trek without dropping a word about it.  When I was young, all we had was the original Star Trek.  In the 70’s we didn’t have the internet, or DVD’s or Blu-Rays – or heck, even VHS tapes.  If we wanted to watch Star Trek we had to tune in at 6PM on some UHF channel and watch it in reruns.  Which my brother and I did a lot. There are only 79 episodes, so you could plow through them all pretty quickly on reruns when it was on every night.  My brother and I would audio record episodes off TV, as this was way before the era of the VCR, so we’d “listen to them” over and over in addition to watching the reruns.   We did that so much that back when TOS was the only Trek out there, I could watch the start of an episode, and tell you what it was with in the first 10 seconds, even if that was nothing more than a group of stars.  I knew original Star Trek.  A LOT.  Far too much, I think.   My brother wasn’t as obsessed as I was over the decades, but he watched it with me, so has a strong draw to it too.  Perhaps this family connection is part of what makes it work for me in some regard. I mean look at this picture – it’s my brother and I from some date in the 70’s “playing Star Trek” in the back yard.

Now as I said, I don’t remember watching the original series when it was new, but in the late 70’s they tried to bring it back and it failed (hello Phase II).  But in 1979, the first movie came out, and I was 14 at the time.   My mom took me to the theater to see Star Trek: The Motion Picture on the big screen.  At the time it was the peak of Star Trek for me.  Much has been said about the movie, but to this 14 year old, its was heaven seeing it on the big screen like that since Star Trek prior to that was basically a small TV at home (pretty much black and white for quite awhile if memory is correct).  The original movie was re-released into theatres on 22 May 2022, and I went back to see it.  It was quite surreal to be seeing that again in movie theatres for the first time since very early in 1980.  It was mostly sparsely attended at the theatre I went to, so I was able to snap a couple of  contraband photos of the event while I was there.  The photo below is one I took of that.

As the decade went on there were five more movies with the original series cast (and one beyond that with some cameos).  I was there on opening night for all of them – in fact of the overall 13 Star Trek movies there have been between 1979 and 2016 I was there for opening night of all of them except the original in 79.  The Undiscovered Country was the last hurrah for the original series, and it “ended” that crew.  The next movie had Kirk, Checkov, & Scotty appear, but it was a small cameo for the latter two.  Kirk had a larger slice of the screen, but that was really Next Generation’s movie – Kirk was a side character.   There was the three most recent JJ Abrams era Star Trek movies which are Kirk, Spock, and the TOS characters, but it was a complete reboot, so I’m not counting them.  I liked them, but it wasn’t the original series, so I’m not covering the Kelvinverse here.

After that, TOS characters turned up on screen a few times in other incarnations of Star Trek.  The characters were mentioned, and sometimes shown as screen captures (including a shot of Kirk & Spock from the Animated series in Star Trek Lower Decks), but I’m referring to actual newly filmed footage with the TOS era actors.

• DeForest Kelley made a cameo in the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Encounter at Farpoint) as aged (137 years) Admiral Leonard McCoy.
• James Doohan had a large role in a Season 6’s Star Trek TNG episode, “Relics” as Montgomery Scott.
• Leonard Nimoy made a large appearance in the STTNG two parter “Unification” as Spock that had gone on an undercover mission on the Romulan home world.
• George Takei appeared as Captain Sulu with Grace Lee Whitney’s Rand in the Star Trek Voyager episode Flashback, along with Michael Ansara’s Kang.
• James Doohan & Walter Koenig (along with William Shatner) appeared in Star Trek: Generations.
• Walter Koenig had a voice over role in the finale of Star Trek: Picard as President of Earth Anton Chekov, both a cool TOS cameo, and a nice way to honor the late Anton Yelchin, who played Pavel Checkov in the three JJ Abrams Star Trek movies.
• Three separate Klingons from the TOS era appeared as their own characters in the Deep Space Nine episode “Blood Oath“.  Those were John Colicos’ Kor, Michael Ansara’s Kang, and William Campbell’s Koloth.  Kor appeared in two other Deep Space Nine episodes.
• Mark Lenard made two appearances in Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes as Sarek (Sarek & Unification Part 1).  He also appeared in the first movie as the unnamed Klingon Commander.
• The entire TOS cast appeared in the Deep Space Nine episode “Trials and Tribbleations“, but that was just old footage that the DS9 cast had been edited into, it wasn’t new.  However, one actor from the original did return to film new footage from the Deep Space Nine side of that. That was Charlie Brill, who played Arne Darvin in the 1966 TOS original and the 1996 DS9 episode.

The original crew is a foundational piece of entertainment for me.  As I ran through the 80 episodes in the marathon, I re-discovered a few episodes that had fallen by the wayside in my mind.  The bad ones were still bad, but I stand by the statement that Season 3 of original Star Trek isn’t just bad.  There’s a lot to like there, but the really bad ones DO come from that series.   So many memories came back of time with my brother or some other random memory.

I thank Gene Roddenberry for creating this crew, brought to the screen by the cast – all loved by me.   But an extra special moment has to be mentioned for Lucille Ball.  If it wasn’t for her, we wouldn’t have ANY Star Trek – it was down to her as to whether to make it or not, and she wanted to.  Had she said no, we never would have had any incarnation of Star Trek.

You can read the index for my Star Trek Marathon here, which also includes links to the reviews I did for the first six movies starring the original series cast.  It’s all great stuff.  Even Final Frontier.  But maybe not “And the Children Shall Lead”.  ;)