Observations, rants, and musings by Joe Siegler.

Star Trek Marathon

Overall Star Trek:

After my first two marathons, I wondered what I’d do next.  Towards the end of my original one (Doctor Who), my daughter suggested Star Trek. When I said which one (as there’s about a dozen different series now), she said “all of them”.  I considered that, but after 880+ episodes of Doctor Who I wanted a break.  Then I started thinking about it, I thought “Why not?”  I’ve liked Star Trek far longer than Doctor Who – and goes back to me being one year old.

So on 6 May 2024 I will embark on a marathon viewing of Star Trek.  I’ll be doing all of the series, but not in a row.  I’ll put other smaller things in-between for a palate cleanser, but I do intend on doing all the Star Trek series over time – God willing.

Star Trek: The Original Series:

The first episode of Star Trek aired 8 Sep 1966, and I was about 1.5 years old at that point.  Family legend has me watching original Star Trek when it aired the first time.  The story goes that Star Trek night was the night my mom would go out with her girlfriends and Dad would stick me in the playpen and watch Star Trek & Wild Wild West. I of course have no memory of this, but I’ve heard the story so many times over the years, I don’t want to know if it was a lie.  Besides, my father is no longer with us, and he’d be the only one who would REALLY know anyway.

I of course watched the hell out of this in reruns in the 70’s, as it was on ALL THE TIME.  It was the only Star Trek there was (unless you count the next iteration – the animated series).  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.  I’m on the right.

Over the years, I’ve owned original Star Trek on a ton of various formats.  Multiple VHS releases in the day, on to DVD, Blu-Ray, digital, and of course the season DVD sets, and then eventually the remastered Blu-Ray stuff.   In 2006 Paramount commissioned a full remastering of the original episodes, with updated HD video, and new special effects.  All the episodes were rebuilt from the ground up.  Now I know the originals like the back of my hand, but for this project, I’ll be using the remastered stuff, because honestly – it’s a lot better in most places.   There’s very few places where this falls down, and I’ll probably reference the original stuff in places, but I’ve grown to prefer the new stuff, despite growing up with the original effects.

As I’ve done with the other marathons, I’ll be doing an episode a day, and tweeting about them, collating the stuff into an individual page for each episode.  Those will be indexed here.

On 16 Sep 2024, I started on Star Trek: The Next Generation.  Before I did that, I wrote a short summary of the original series era of Star Trek.  You can read that here.

Movies

After Star Trek was taken off the air in 1969, there was the animated series in 1973-1974 (which I covered elsewhere).  A couple of years after that, there was an attempt to bring live action Star Trek back in the mid 70’s under the name “Star Trek: Phase II“.  That never launched in that format, but ended up morphing into Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which launched a series of movies spanning several incarnations of Star Trek.

However, the first six moves were “original cast” movies and I wanted to list them here, since they’re connected to the original series for obvious reasons.  The seventh movie had three TOS characters in it, but was effectively cameos – I’ll cover just the first six here.  They are:

Season 3

… and then we get to Season 3.  It has the reputation of being awful.  That’s not entirely true.  While there are some major stinkers in season 3, there’s some awesome stuff too. I’ve noticed on this rewatch there are some very different directorial choices (camera angles and lighting) that we never saw before.  That probably has a lot to do with the regular directors to this point quitting over the fact the show’s budget was radically slashed, and new people had new ideas.  Behind the scenes, Gene Roddenberry was (mostly) out, the producers have changed to someone new, and the budget was slashed.  The show was kind of on borrowed time, and it shows in some places.  In terms of the credits, it went back to having just the episode name on the title card, and the text was changed from yellow to blue for some reason.

Season 2

Several things changed in Season 2 of Star Trek.  First, we got the character of Pavel Chekov as a Russian navigator.  The title sequence was changed to include DeForest Kelly with Shatner & Nimoy.  Additionally the title card now had the writer’s name with the episode title (although some with a large credit list had a separate screen).

Season 1

Season one of Star Trek (later called Star Trek: TOS, for “The Original Series”) comprised 29 episodes, running from 8 Sep 1966 through 13 Apr 1967.  Most fans tend to consider the original series the best, but like every series, there’s great and bad in all of them – but this does have some spectacular episodes.

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