Since no one else has, I'll start a thread :)

Star Trek premiered on my birthday, Sep 8th, 1966. I was 7 years old and I DO remember it. In fact I watched all three (well 2.5) seasons of it on an original B&W TV, we didn't have color yet cause that was for rich folk. When they moved it to the 10 pm timeslot it was the only show I was allowed to stay up for. Yes sir, I am an ORIGINAL Trekker, not trekkie!! That was a derogatory term from the people who didn't get Trek :)

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I'm really here, but I'm not here, really.

25.807 - The square root of all evil.

My earliest memories of Star Trek is watching it in reruns on our local UHF 20 station, because my mom liked it (and TNG was soon to air and she was watching that too). I'm pretty sure this was either late grade school or early high school, 'cause I went to at least one CreationCon for Trek during high school.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

I was four years old when it premiered, and as best I can recall was more interested in Batman and My Three Sons at the time. I'm afraid it took about 6 or 7 more years before I discovered Trek -- but by the time I was in 8th grade I was already a big fan.

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

I don't have time to comment right now, I'm just posting to re-flag the article now that I've moved it to the appropriate forum.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

I'm old enough to remember when there was only one Trek - two, if you count the animated series (we called them "cartoons" back then ;) ), which I loved and still do. And then the original movies came out during my middle and high school years... TNG was a fixture of college, and DS9 after, etc etc.

I don't remember how old I was when I first encountered Star Trek, but it was young enough that I spent at least a year thinking that it and Star Wars were supposed to be in the same setting, and spent a good bit of time trying to figure out how on Earth that could possibly work. Since I think it was the first Star Trek movie that finally sorted that out for me, that dates the matter to sometime before 1980, so I would've been quite young indeed.

What I do remember is how and when I used to watch the show. In the early 1980s, when I was in elementary school, reruns of the original Star Trek ran on weekday afternoons on WVII (Channel 7—get it?), the ABC station in Bangor. I don't remember exactly what time slot it was in, but it was on after the cartoons on the cable station from Chicago (WGN, back when the cable channel was still a national feed for the local one), so probably 5 o'clock. Basically, I'd come home from school (which got out at 3:15) and watch the cartoons on Channel 9, unless they were pre-empted by a Cubs game (the Cubs played home games exclusively in daylight back then, as Wrigley Field didn't get lights until 1988), then switch to Channel 7 for Star Trek, and that was my TV sorted for the day.

Wow. Lot of parentheticals in that paragraph. Anyway, onward. I also recall clearly where I watched it: in my parents' bedroom, because they had a color set in there and my own was black-and-white, and for some reason I didn't like to watch it in the living room. Mind you, it was an ancient color set, a Philco-Ford, the kind that had COLOR and TINT knobs and needed them, because the colors would go spontaneously out of whack on a regular basis. I didn't realize for years that the engineering crewmen's uniform shirts weren't dark brown.

(As an aside, I've since learned that the Philco-Ford branding dates that TV to around 1966, so it could be argued that I was thus experiencing the show as those who watched it when it first aired experienced it. :)

I have often thought that one of the keys to the original Star Trek's enduring appeal among children is that the costumes are easy and inexpensive to approximate. If you were canny enough about it, even at an age where you weren't buying your own clothes on solo expeditions, you could put together a passable Starfleet officer's uniform without your parents realizing what you were up to, which is why I had that mustard-colored velour shirt in grade school...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.

>which is why I had that mustard-colored velour shirt in grade school...

Heh. You're not the only one.

-- Bob
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My race is pacifist and does not believe in war. We kill only out of personal spite.

>>which is why I had that mustard-colored velour shirt in grade school...
>
>Heh. You're not the only one.
>
>-- Bob
Yep, I even managed to get school pictures in it :)

As the good ol'days!

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

>I don't remember how old I was when I first encountered Star
>Trek, but it was young enough that I spent at least a year
>thinking that it and Star Wars were supposed to be in the same
>setting, and spent a good bit of time trying to figure out how on
>Earth that could possibly work.

I'm like eight years younger than you, give or take, so my first exposure to Trek involved a time period when TOS was in regular syndicated reruns in various places, but TNG was airing new episodes at the same time.

So there was a two-year time period where I thought that Kirk and Picard were the same person at different times in their lives, named "Captain Kirk Picard."

It made perfect sense to a nine-year-old.

-Merc
Keep Rat

My mother introduced me to Star Trek in re-runs and books.
Star Trek novels were the first books that I read as a kid. I had trouble with reading and could get into anything; it was frustrating. But because I had the basics from the TV Show, I was able to enjoy the books and it developed into a love of reading.

I too started on a B&W tv until my grandpa bought us a color TV with a sonic remote.

And through Star Trek, I got to meet Nichelle Nichols at a con, I had even joined my local starfleet fan club. Good times.

It was definitely one of the foundation series that has influenced my life.

"When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth." - Sherlock Holmes

I was born during the 1st season, 1 day after Space Seed aired. My first memories of Star Trek was watching it early Sunday mornings on WTCG-17 here in Atlanta when I was 5 or so, when it was only rerun in dead time slots on UHF stations. As an aside, WTCG soon afterwards changed it's callsign to WTBS and y'all know the rest. I remember watching Star Trek the Animated Series first run on NBC. Then I started checking out the paperback Star Trek Logs from the library as they came out. Doesn't seem like it's been 50 years, but there you go.

Michael

Michael C. Fortner
"Maxim 37: There is no such thing as "overkill".
There is only "open fire" and "I need to reload".

>Then I
>started checking out the paperback Star Trek Logs from the library as
>they came out.

Oh, hey, I remember checking those out from my elementary school's library to read.

--- Philip

	Philip J. Moyer Contributing Writer, Editor and Artist (and Moderator) -- Eyrie Productions, Unlimited CEO of MTS, High Poobah Of Artwork, and High Priest Of the Church Of Aerianne -- Magnetic Terrapin Studios "Insert Pithy Comment Here" Fandoms -- Fanart -- Fan Meta Discussions

Those books were my own first encounter with Star Trek, when I was in secondary school and they had most of them in the library.

I was born in '80, so mine stories don't go back quite as far as some of you, but I got into Trek very early, I remember watching it in my mothers lap (she was a big Trek fan). I loved *everyone*, including (maybe especially) the Enterprise herself.

I never had any confusion over where it stood in relation to other shows or franchises, that I can recall (or recall stories about - the same cant be said for my personal belief that I may or may not have been The Dukes of Hazzard. Apparently it was the only name I would give when I got lost in a supermarket or the mall one day in the early 80s)

I got into the novels around age eleven or so, when I discovered such things *existed*, and for quite a while I was reading one, sometimes two a day - I was a somewhat voracious consumer of media of all types.

We didn't have a channel that could get TNG when it premiered, I don't think, but we soon did. I think we may have actually got cable *solely* for TNG; everything else was just a bonus.

We definitely had it for DS9. I remember my mom recording the new episodes for me while I went on ski trips every Friday for a few months with my school. (we have a ski slope relatively nearby, because I live in southern BC, smack in a mountain valley)

I remember watching Voyager as it aired, and....honestly being pretty okay with it, a few hiccups notwithstanding.

Enterprise just made me angry.

I was....kinda confused and bored by The Motion Picture. LOVED Wrath of Khan. Search for Spock was great, but seeing the Enterprise die was like watching Optimus Prime die; it was a red hot poker through my SOUL.

I was enraptured by everything about Voyage Home, since I was old enough to follow what production news made it out into the few magazines I read then....I'm pretty sure it got some sort of writeup in at least one of the gaming magazines of the time; Nintendo Power, GamePro, Electronic Gaming Monthly...

My only recollections about Star Trek V at the time were 'naked fan dance Uhura' and 'Scotty banging his head on the bulkhead is hilarious'....

I'm pretty sure I REMEMBER Star Wars first, but Star Trek has always been SUCH a part of my life, it has always been by far the more interesting of the 'star' franchises (as least until Stargate SG-1, but you just can't argue with McGyver O'Neill. I was a HUGE McGyver fan back in the day, too)

Also, even the worst Trek is better than Phantom Menace. Yes, even Theshold.

Star Trek was well past its original run when I came to encounter it and it was a family staple for a while along with other notable series. At some point i acquired a paperback explaining the history of the show as well as how most of the 'tech' was developed which included the original designs for the enterprise and the three iterations it went through before they settled on the final model.

i do hope this isnt a terrible offense but this article came across my fb feed and i thought it might be of some interest and this might probably be the best place to post it.

http://www.telegram.com/news/20160917/wpi-prof-recalls-work-on-star-trek-next-generation