When I saw TMP the line of people was around the block at the large-screen (and only one screen) theatre where I saw it. It was like a dream come true - Star Trek was alive again. And, what now seems interminable, the scene where the new Enterprise was first viewed was a magical scene in the theatre.

My own faves:
1.) Wrath of Khan
2.) First Contact
3.) The Voyage Home
4.) The Undiscovered Country
5.) The Search for Spock

The rest, I can take or leave.

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

I remember everybody cheered when the Klingon ships first appeared on screen, and then when we saw the inside of the ship everyone went "huh? Are those guys with the ridges on their heads supposed to be Klingons?"

The first time I saw it in the theater the film broke just before Decker joined with V'ger, and when they fixed it we saw Kirk and co. running away, so we had no idea what had happened to Ilia or Decker.

Which reminds me that the first time I saw Return of the Jedi it was after having gone to three different theaters and finding them all sold out, and we finally got into a midnight showing. When the film finally began, they had threaded the film on the first reel in backwards, so we saw "Star Wars" backwards on the screen and the crawl started out backwards before they realized what had happened. We sat there with an angry crowd for ten or fifteen minutes while they fixed it (I assume they had to rewind the whole reel the correct way and re-thread it).

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

When I first saw "Attack of the Clones", the power blacked out just as Obi-Wan was in the middle of his big battle scene with Jango Fett. Had to wait two weeks to see how it ended.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Really? I remember my reaction as "Cool!" I never liked the TOS Klingon look...too human.

I believe this cannot be said often enough.
There is no, nor has there ever been a Star Trek V movie.

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"God bless thee, my son; I will give thee the greatest jewel I have ...
"The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of human empire, to the effecting of all things possible."Trying to make sense of computers, The Error Log.

And last night, I had to describe what was so bad about it to a friend, who wouldn't accept "but I've blocked my memories of it!" as an answer.

Remember, too, that I rather liked IV, though that may be influenced by the fact that it was a movie I saw with my family in the theatre, the only ST movie I ever saw in the theatre. I would've been perhaps ten, though it was released right around my birthday, so I can't be sure. (Almost exactly 21 years ago!) I've only seen I, II, III, and V the once, and possibly only VI as well. But I took the VHS copy of IV that Graham's mother was giving away.

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Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Some fans really didn't like the new look.
But after the Great Bird of the Galaxy explained that was how Klingons were always supposed to have looked, and after they appeared that way again in Star Trek III we all kind of grew used to it.
Until the Klingon forhead issue started getting much more convulted in later editions of the franchise, that is.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

Well, yeah, later on it did start to look like they had Heike Crabs clinging to their foreheads.

My take on them was that TMP wasn't really Star Trek.as much as it was a real go at a science fiction story It could have been nearly identical in any other setting. I've never seen the director's cut. I do remember it being long and tedious in many places. I also think is was much too close to the Original Episode with the N.O.M.A.D. probe.

II was good. Probably the best of the lot. It's been a while since I've seen it though, so there may be things that would bother me now, that didn't then.

III wasn't so good. It may not be as bad as I remember it, and I've only seen it a few times, but the bulk of what I do remember just wasn't that good.

IV was good again, though not as good as II. It was a quest of sorts. "We need this, but to get it we need this, but to get that we need this." It was light for the most part, and fun.

V I don't remember well at all, but I didn't recall it being very good. Mainly for cheese content.

VI I did like originally, but after having some time to look at it and pick it apart, there were a lot of really bad mistakes in it. Huge plot mistakes.

First contact was the only Next Gen movie. The rest were all just extended TV episodes. None of them had a story that really seemed to justify the screen time.

Shortly after ST VI, my GF at the time dragged to my first ever convention. George Takei was the guest and he's great. Every story he told was entertaining. Maybe not true, but a fun listen. He explained the history of the original 6 films. I might get some of this wrong, but this was the basics of what he said that day:

They did the first movie from an expanded version of the pilot for the Star Trek 2 TV series. It was planned to have Decker as the captain and not really include any of the original cast. It was turned into a movie that did pretty well, and the wheels started turning. It was never meant to be the first of a set. It was supposed to be the only one.

It did so well that a second film was called for. To make sure this was the last one, they killed Spock.

Too many people complained about that, so a third film was thrown together to get him back. To make sure this was the last one, they destroyed the Enterprise.

The fourth one was done to take advantage of the 20th anniversary and so it was done light and fun, to be more of a celebration after the previous 2. It was to be the last one.

I can't remember why they did the fifth one. It may have been to keep the ball rolling after the success of the 4th. It was planned as the final film. Again.

The sixth one was done because the fifth didn't have the right feel for a retirement of the cast. A big send-off on the 25th anniversary was more in order.

That's my 10 year old memory of an anecdote, so I make no claims to any of it being true.

One other thing he mentioned was that it would be nice to have a scene in a future film (this was before the Next Gen cast had done a film together) where an older Captain, or even Admiral Sulu, was teaching a young cadet Picard, with a full head of wavy hair, how to fence.

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A Nerd can figure out how long it will take the original Enterprise traveling at warp 6.5 to travel from Regulus to Antares.
A Geek will think he can use that to pick up a girl in a bar.
A Dork knows he can't pick up the girl with it, but will hang around for hours anyway, just in case she asks.
She might. You never know.

IIRC, Shatner and Nimoy had "I get what he gets" contracts. After letting Nimoy direct III and IV, they were contractually obligated to let Shatner direct one.

ETA: Now that I think about it, that probably just means they had to let Shatner direct once they decided to actually make another one - they may not have been obligated to produce another film just so he could direct.

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SeanF

"Ask to understand, but don't challenge unless you have the knowledge."--NEOWatcher

The contents of this post are ©2008 by SeanF and may not be copied or retransmitted in any form without the express written consent of SeanF

Re: Humanoids, the TOS excuse was summed up in one word: budget. The few nonhumanoid aliens they had (Horta, Melkotians, Excalbians, etc) looked like what they were, cheap rubber and paper-mache sculptures. It had to wait until TNG to come up with a decent in-story retcon... Oops, I mean reason for it. Ancient humanoids with weird and nonsensical motivations (turning other races into living memorials instead of, say, saving themselves). So in that universe, at least, panspermia was a fact.

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"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Illuminati's Razor-The most complicatedly evil answer is usually the most correct answer. - Fazor
"Every book is a children's book if the kid can read." - Mitch Hedberg
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Which is why I, for one, was so excited about the "new" Klingon look in TMP; it indicated Paramount was going to start spending some decent money on the franchise. Which turned out to be correct.

That almost all their other decisions regarding ST turned out to be idiotic is another subject.

Deciding to start a new series with new characters was not idiotic.
And TNG went from "often embarassing" to "pretty damn good" after two years, so they were doing something right in that time.

Where did Star Trek jump the shark? Somewhere between the end of TNG and before Voyager started up, I think.

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"You miss 100% of the shots you don't take" - Wayne Gretzky

QFT!

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"Call me old-fashioned, but I think fire is magic. And it scares me a lot."

--The State

I was referring to their decisions regarding the original cast movies.

I do think the first season of TNG was awful; after that I liked it; I even liked Nemesis, pretty much. I liked Voyager. Couldn't get into DS9 because---although I liked the Sisko character very much, as written--- Avery Brooks just can't act at all. Enterprise would have held my interest but for their total disregard for continuity, which completely ruined it for me.

I agree with all of that. It was tedious in places, and it was too close to NOMAD. On the other hand, it felt like a real science fiction story, with some neat ideas (for example, they effectively were using the nanotech concept several years before the term was coined). So, there are things I don't like in TMP, but on balance, I like it quite a bit.

My biggest complaint was that, right at the start, they had that big zinger with a planet exploding. Star Fleet's best didn't even notice it, but went to the wrong planet instead. They certainly could have come up with something better, or at least given some kind of excuse for their mistake. The first time I watched it, that set the tone of the movie for me. If you ignore that, it wasn't so bad.

I liked III. Admittedly, part of that was what they hinted about later movies: They introduced a new ship with new technology (the transwarp drive) and we got to see the Enterprise die while protecting its crew one last time. That suggested that later movies would involve them doing what they do best: Going somewhere new, with the new ship and new capabilities. Sort of a "next generation" with the original crew. Of course, nothing came of that.

I couldn't stand IV. There were far too many technical and plot holes, and it felt like another retread of old ideas. It was supposed to be funny, but given some of the inconsistencies with prior Trek, it felt more like a bad parody to me.

IV and V are my two least liked movies with the original cast.

Agreed, though I can watch VI, unlike the prior two.

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I would say with Voyager. TNG and DS9 both started out bad, but improved dramatically. Eventually, DS9 surpassed TNG in my opinion. Voyager started out bad, and whenever I checked in, it stayed bad.

Some people don't DS9 because the picture it presents looks a lot more like present day than most of Trek: There are nasty conflicts, the Federation isn't quite so perfect, it's disliked by some simply because the Fed is big and therefore automatically has a lot of influence, etc. But that's one of the reasons I liked DS9. It felt more "real."

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Disclaimer: Avatar is not an official NASA image and does not imply any specific interplanetary or interstellar capability.

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