[ExI] original star trek!

[spike]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org 
> [mailto:extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org] On Behalf Of 
> Damien Broderick
> Sent: Sunday, February 24, 2008 12:08 PM
> To: ExI chat list
> Subject: Re: [ExI] original star trek!
> 
> At 11:34 AM 2/24/2008 -0800, PJ wrote after Spike:
> 
> > > Unbelievable!  All the original Star Trek episodes!  Free!
> > >
> > > http://www.cbs.com/classics/star_trek/video/video.php
> >
> >Too bad they screwed with the frames, making it jerky like bad 
> >stop-motion animation,
> 
> Isn't that how it looked all along? I watch the damned reruns 
> on Saturday midnite cable, aghast at the sluggishness, the 
> drawn out laborious e x p l a n a t i o n s , the 
> heavy-handed eye-brow lifted wry ripostes, the gruesome stagy 
> fight scenes... It was the available technology, sure, but 
> two smooth glowing minutes with SG ATLANTIS (however 
> clunky/bogus in its own terms as sf) makes a bloke realize 
> how much the media have improved in 40 years.
> 
> Damien Broderick

Ja, that was my take too.  The sets were cheesy, the costume budget was
approximately twelve dollars per season, the actors either rookies or
sit-com rejects, even most of the plots were at least slightly cobby.  But
look what they were able to do with it.  Shows what one can do with a little
imagination and even less money.  We loved that show.  

One must also compare to other sci-fi of the day, which was even more grim.
But it wasn't just sci-fi; all of the shows available on TV in those days
was somewhere between bad and terrible by today's standards.  Of course
there were only three stations then, and (mercifully) we could only
consistently get one of them (CBS).  Star Trek was a bolt from the blue.
When that one showed up, we knew it was special, the logical follow-on from
the previous singular good show, the Twilight Zone.

spike