While I enjoy TOS, I think TNG was Star Trek at its peak. Initially the new show was an update, but once it found feet of its own - it turned into something much more important.

Looking forward to Part Two of this article, James!

I don't want to be off-topic. This is sort of on-topic; I'm not trying to rabbit trail this forum.

I was wondering if any of you older people (I'm 22) could enlighten me as to the fan reaction of Shatner's "Get a life" comment after it was given on SNL. I am a big trekkie, and having watched that clip, I totally understand the humor... I'm not offended and I even see his point. I've searched for essays online but can't find any record of fans discussing this; obviously it was before the internet.

But I've heard rumors of fans being offended and even calling Shatner arrogant for saying it?

Great article, James! I, too, am one of the "Old Guard" and your musings brought back many good memories for me. I enjoyed very much the YouTube clips you included. Thanks!

The majority of the fan community loves the skit. There were some hard-core Trekkies who were offended by it. Everyone I know/knew in the Trek world loved the skit.

Any of you ever seen actor/comedian Kevin Pollak do his impression of William Shatner as Captain Kirk? It's hilarious!

Check out a sample of him impression at the link below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hcIm9Emg ... re=related

Wow.... the Keepers of the Flame would be.... in their fifties and sixties now? Must be cool to have a grandparent who loves Star Trek.

I guess I was a hacker even before my age had two digits. I solved the problem of background noise in the audio tape by cobbling together an earphone-to-mic adapter that worked with my tape recorder and our 19" black-and-white "portable" TV, i.e., it had a handle on top that broke under the weight of the TV, as well as with my Panasonic ball-and-chain radio, which I still have and which still works almost 40 years later.

I didn't record too many TV shows, though. The TV injected a bunch of hum into the earphone audio that you couldn't really hear through the tinny earphones of the time, but was a real annoyance when playing the cassettes on anything better than a portable tape recorder.

ObTopic: As for my Trekkieness, I was only 7 when TOS went off the air. I caught up with those episodes in the early 1980s via reruns, concurrently with the pre-TNG movies.

I first saw Star Trek in 1985. I was 5 years old and my brother was 10, he wanted to see it. It was on around 2 or 3 in the morning here in Iowa. He set up the VCR and recorded it. I ended up seeing it too and hated it because it wasn't Transformers or some other Cartoon. As I got older, I learned to appreciate it a lot more. I went to see The Final Frontier with him in 1989 and even at that age I could tell it was pretty bad. I only liked the scenes when they were camping. For some reason I really liked seeing Shatner fall off a cliff. The next year, my brother said that the Doomsday Machine was the best episode when we sat down to watch and record it one summer afternoon. However, a news alert came up less than a minute in about the Persian Gulf War and we missed the first half hour of it. The two of us spent that half hour discussing how they should make OTA channels without news or weather or anything annoying on it. Ours would have just had Pittsburgh Pirates games, all the Simpsons episodes (I think 12 of them at the time) and Star Trek, but no Next Generation stuff.

Then in 1991, I went to see The Undiscovered Country with my brother and we both agreed it was pretty good. However, I really disliked the The Next Generation. I saw First Contact in the theater with some guys from high school and commented when they blew up the Borg Sphere "Oh, terrible movie but at least it was short.". Otherwise, TNG, I thought it was too clean and they didn't have enough red shirts dying like crazy. It just seemed like boring smart people in space. I never really got in to DS9 or Voyager when they came out. I tried to give Enterprise a shot when it went on TV, but I didn't last an entire season.

The funny thing is that even today, I still haven't seen all the original series of Star Trek or any of the spin off series either. I really liked some of the stuff they did with DS9, but don't much care for TNG, VOY or ENT. However, without Trek, I probably never would have become a fan of Babylon 5, Firefly and the new Battlestar Galactica, of which I've seen all the episodes of those three shows.

Ah, if only it were true that no one cared.

I started audio taping movies at the theater with SCROOGED in 1988. I think (and hope) that the tape still exists with my father's possessions. Prior to the film, you can hear the bizarrely placed trailer for the barely released horror turkey TWICE DEAD. There was a gentleman in the theater whose distinctive laugh can be heard throughout the movie, but he laughs as hard at the trailer for TWICE DEAD as he does at anything in SCROOGED (and he certainly wasn't alone). Ah, I wonder where he is now.

As James can probably understand, theatrical tapings quickly became an addiction and I did it as often as I could (although I wouldn't try it a second time until BILL & TED'S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE). Unfortunately, my victimless indiscretion hit a wall when I took my tape recorder to a screening of STAR TREK V at a barely attended "dollar theater" screening.

Easy with that tape flipping, kids, because you never know if one of the two obese women in the theater has an inflated sense of self-righteousness and will report your ass to the manager. I guess I had it coming for causing such a ruckus during their one dollar STAR TREK V experience. The manager, a mustachioed round man pounced on me during the screening, informing me that what I was doing was a crime punishable by a $10,000 fine.

The worst part about this was that it vindicated my mother's silly paranoia about what I was doing. She was sitting right next to me and I'm sure it gave her a kind of weird "I told you so" sort of thrill to see me get busted. Needless to say, the manager was a bit more docile AFTER the screening. He said that he understood that I was probably only doing it for my own use (he clearly underestimated the lucrative black market value of STAR TREK V audio bootlegs) and gave me back the tape and the recorder along with the suggestion that I buy the soundtrack.

That's a recording that I wish I had kept.

Needless to say I learned my lesson:

Henceforth, I would take two tape recorders to the theater and make sure to have my thumb ready over the "REC" button on Recorder A towards the end of the first hour (or 45 minutes, depending on the cassette) to ease it from clicking and I usually started Recorder B a minute or two early to catch overlap.

Fortunately, the digital dictaphone that I now take to concerts (the movie thing ended by 1993) has just under 3 hours of memory and it doesn't even click (and is easily smuggled if you know where to hide it on your anatomy).

Ah, progress!