Finally got around to watch the entire three seasons of the original Star Trek show from 1966 to 1969 (I have just seen random episodes before). If you like Star Trek, it is well worth watching. It gives you a lot of back story for the Star Trek universe and the full extent of Roddenberry’s utopic vision of the future. I have to note that I do not much care for his utopic future in many ways, and tend to agree with Ira Behr (Deep Space Nine) on this.
Regardless, this 1960s Sci-Fi show is unique in many ways. There was no elaborate make-up, the alien costumes, if any, were laughable by today’s standard. The stories however are very entertaining. We are not loaded with the techno-babble of the newer shows, nor do we have all the boring filler episodes. This is hands on action with beautiful women and classic evil villains. We find planets with Nazis and Chicago gangsters, planets with aliens who keep humans in zoos, and pretty much every old scary aliens-are-evil imaginative story you can, well, imagine.
The set designs reflect what was considered modern at the time (I assume, I was born in the 70s myself). The high-tech panels and controls are covered with flickering lights and switches, and the computer voice is similar to what we remember from the Amiga 500. Of course, computers were not something everyone had much everyday knowledge of, so they tend to be portrayed as big gray boxes with flickering lights. Even the evil AI villain we run into in one of the episodes. Of course we must not forget the costumes. The men are dressed in a pajamas and the women in miniskirts. We also have the classic, yellow for command and red for crew colours which were swapped in the Next generation series. Most episodes have a red-shirt death, they seem to be very expendable.
All in all, the original Star Trek show is well worth watching both for the stories and for the classical Sci-Fi look, and not to mention for the legendary original actors like leonard Nimoy, William Shatner, James Doohan, Walter Koenig and the rest.
IMDB Link: Star Trek
