Dr Who’s shoestring budget made Star Trek look positively lavish. I remember watching a Tom Baker episode that starts on the bridge of a starship landing on a planet, and those aluminum water bottles popular in the '70s were scattered all around. What they could have been used for other than storing liquids, I don’t know. But they sure looked high-tech! :rolleyes:
Ah, yes. SIGG bottles. State of the Art back in the day.
Watching ST: Enterprise, I was struck by how even though everything was kind of big and clunky, it still looked more advanced than anything on TOS. Then I saw the episode where they encounter the *Defiant *in the parallel universe.
Holy crap! All of a sudden, I was stepping into a 1960s bachelor’s pad in Playboy! :eek:
I actually have no issue with those things. That was part of being a 1960’s show and certainly gives it charm. (The same with Dr. Who, which I love.) Even the sexist Kirk checking out his yeoman’s ass is charming to me in an anachronistic way. (Although as an aside: my millennial son and daughter are absolutely repulsed by the behaviour of the Kirk and the men in general, to the point where they walked out of the room and refuse to watch it at all now. Times change…)
For me, the things that make it near unwatchable now are the glaring plot holes, completely inappropriate humour, and as Colibri mentions the wildly inconsistent character interactions. They’re buddies one show and complete dicks to each other the next - WTF?
My recollection was they were basically supportive friends through it all, but that’s wrong. Their relationship varied as the plot required it. They were often antagonistic to each other, openly questioning each other’s judgement, making snide remarks etc. My younger self never noticed these things at all, now they truly do make me cringe.
Related question - One of the things I read about often with modern TV show is the concept of a “show-runner”. It seems their job is to ensure the stories, characters, plots etc are logical and consistent from show to show.
I assume that role didn’t exist in the 1960’s, and that’s why these errors exist in Star Trek? Or maybe it was Roddenberry’s job and he was just shitty at it?
The cheesy foam costume monsters, terrible-even-for-the-day effects, reused props and music scores, hammy acting, copious continuity errors, and often incomprehensible plotting were all a part of the charm that was utterly lost on the “New Who” series. My favorite were the alien seed pods that produced killer mannequins which trundled across London more slowly than you could push a Rover 3500 in need of its monthly engine rebuild. Despite this, the British Army could somehow neither manage to shoot them or outstumble them and were overrun in scene after scene which must have had a similar casualty toll to The Great War and explains why aliens would repeatedly invade England (and occasionally Scotland) rather than The US, USSR, France, or China. No wonder defeating the navy of a third rate South American country was viewed as such a great success by the UK public.
Anyway, I forgot my point but do recall the local PBS station in the middle of a find drive recruited a guy to hawk “Disappearing TARDIS” coffee mugs presumably on the basis of a striking resemblance to William Shatner in both appearance and manner, the latter particularly enhanced by his open contempt for all things science fiction. I have never enjoyed a pledge drive so much either previously or since.
Stranger
The concept of an explicit role as showrunner is a modern innovation, largely to ensure that serialized shows like The Sopranos struck a consistent tone and followed their series-long plot arcs through production, but it’s really just kind of an executive producer who is heavily involved in the creative aspects of production, and particularly in writing, set direction, costuming, and casting (vice the normal production aspects of maintaining budget and ensuring that actors don’t embarrass the production with their offscreen antics).
With the original series there as pretty much no effort at any kind of continuity and many of the plots were about as blatantly allegorical as The Twilight Zone, and Roddenberry seemed to spend about as much time trying to figure out how to circumvent network censors and get as many sexual references on screen as he did paying attention to the creative process, so just be thankful that Spock’s ears pointed the same direction week after week. The Next Generation improved on that after the first couple of series because producers started realizing how obsessive [DEL]Questarians[/DEL]Trekkies were about paying attention to minor details, and it probably didn’t hurt how many people on the production and writing staff were Trek fans themselves.
Stranger
Millennials, ew! :mad:
Nimoy is on record as saying Roddenberry’s involvement in the third season was “nonexistent.” Which is understandable, since it was apparent both Paramount and NBC were out to kill the show. Why bother subjecting yourself to all that stress when you know it’s all for naught?
You guys are nuts. On rewatch TOS is better than ever. Especially the earliest episodes.
Hey! I love Trek! My coffee cup has pointed ears!
~VOW
The first season isn’t so bad. When you get to the third season is when it really gets excruciating.
Which is why nitpicky hard SF which is written by authors who do things like… I don’t know… math is easier to write tense plots for: The author knows the rules and so do you. They’re never going to give you crap like “forgetting” the thing which saved their characters last time, they’re never going to let you down by making it impossible to predict what the props are capable of, they’re never going to run around the plot by just fixing it and desert you without a satisfying resolution. It can be “magic” as far as the laws of physics are concerned, but it must be consistent magic for the audience to anticipate the results of using it, and anticipation is the origin of tension.
Lack of continuity was pretty standard back then. Gerrold mentioning the Organian Peace Treaty was revolutionary. And from my reading, Roddenberry (and others) spent a lot of time revising scripts so they didn’t violate the universe - like ahem drug runners on the Enterprise.
Plus no VCRs, so once a show was run it was gone. When we watched the full run of Danger Man a few years ago, we often commented “we’ve seen that set before.”
Standard character interaction in pulps. Think of Ham and Monk in the Doc Savage series.
Try watching ***Perry Mason ***and Twilight Zone sometime. CBS must have really been stingy with their production money, since sets were used over and over again without the slightest effort to vary them. This jumps out at you when you strip the episodes instead of watching them once a week.
The Twilight Zone was made on such a tiny budget that it forced Serling, Charles Beaumont, et al, to write stories in such a way that eschewed almost all complicated special effects. This, and the often shadowy black & white photography actually gave the series a unique, noir-ish feel that The Outer Limits and episodic science fiction then and now lack, and makes it feel timeless in a way that the revival series do not. That they occasionally reuse sets makes it feel a bit like a stage production, which is fine because Rod Serling was never trying to make a realist drama; the allegorical and ironic elements were front and center. Some of the best episodes took place in a single set, and often in a single room.
The Twilight Zone, at its best, is and will remain one of the best television shows ever made.
Stranger
I don’t know. Professionalism? Loyalty to the crew and actors who might never get a job again and will rely on this show’s quality to get another gig? Those that busted their asses to make you look good making the show in first place so that you had generational money for you and your family for half a century and counting? You know Gene, trying for once to not make it all about you?
Stuff like that perhaps?
You’re right
There was a set in The Wild Wild West that had the same set in almost every episode. I think they did a marvelous job in decorating it differently in every episode, so much so that I didn’t notice it until a couple of years ago when my sister pointed it out! But it’s a ballroom, western bar and hotel, castle, government building, underground lair, what have you. But it must be in 90% of the shows!
What bothers me most about The Changeling and I know it’s silly geek stuff but Nomads energy blots had the power of 90 photon torpedoes, 90!!! The Enterprise survives four hits, 360 photon torpedoes worth, 360!! Come on, in The Ultimate Computer a Starship was totally disabled after being hit three times by “full phasers” from the Enterprise.
Side note: this episode has one of the highest red shirts casualties, Nomad zaps four of them.
Yeah, the idea of long-term continuity across a whole show was pretty much unknown anywhere in television in those days. That’s why Rob and Laura Petrie were living in one house in the flashback episode where Laura gave birth, and in a completely different house in the flashback episode where they brought the baby home from the hospital. That’s why The Odd Couple gave two different accounts of how Oscar and Felix first met. Three, if you count the first season’s opening narration that called them “childhood friends.” That’s why shows would regularly cast the same actor in many different roles, with no concern that the audience might wonder why the guy who was a policeman last month is a cab driver today, and will be a business executive two weeks from now.
If you’d suggested to a TV producer in the 60s that someone ought to be keeping track of all these minor details, they would have thought you were crazy.