More Weekend Blasting

Spock and Uhura from Deleted Elaan Scene, originally uploaded by birdofthegalaxy.

I haven't burned my farm down yet but I did watch some of the original Star Trek episodes this last weekend. I watched the first disc Netflix sent me and they are arranged in the order they were shown on TV, which is not the order they were produced.

I won't go into in-depth synopses - you can browse yourself silly at Memory Alpha, a mind-bogglingly complete Star Trek wiki.

So the first episode was The Man Trap. The things I noticed:

- When we first see Uhura, she hits on Spock! Which I don't blame her but she doesn't do much else .(Were Orci and Kurtzman inspired by this scene when they wrote the new movie? I think so).

- Not much plot but maybe it was setting a standard: shape-changing monster on the loose aboard the Enterprise, a couple of blue shirts and a yellow shirt die. No redshirts!

- I did want to hit Yeoman Rand over the head to see if bees would come out of her hairdo.

- We get the first "He's dead Jim". I'd bitch about McCoy's lack of CPR skills but that's been done to death.

- We see Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura, Sulu, and Rand. No Scotty here. Boo!

Charlie X Poor Captain Kirk has to play father figure to the galaxy's biggest space nebbish, an annoying 17 year old boy who was given super powers by an alien race so he could survive. After wishing the spoiled, confused puke death by fire in the end it was kind of sad.

- I still wanted to attack Rand's hairdo with a pair of pruning shears.

- Still no Mr. Scott.

- Shirtless Kirk in red tights (!!!) practicing an unnamed martial art.

- Oh! Spock smiles and plays his vulcan harp while Uhura sings. SRSLY.

- This is Gene Roddenberry's first "God is a Child" script, something he was famous for.

Where No Man Has Gone Before This episode was the first produced, and the second pilot. It featured 2 guest actors I actually recognized: Sally Kellerman and Gary Lockwood (who? He played Poole, the astronaut HAL kills in 2001. Stay out of space, dude!).

- No Uhura or McCoy. Sulu is here though.

- Mr. Scott! Yay! And he was so thin!

- Kirk gets in a fistfight and gets his shirt ripped for the first time.

- He also does his famous "roll on the ground and shoot the bad guy dead" maneuver in the same scene.

- Spock's eyebrows are insane. He fortunately gets them trimmed for future episodes.

So I'm enjoying my trek (ha!) down memory lane. I'm watching the remastered editions so the special effects are way better than I remember them. Fortunately whoever produced the remasters didn't go whole hog so the new effects aren't jarring within context of the old budget-strapped series. It's fun to see everyone so young again, doing the things I remember, but it's also sad because James Doohan and DeForest Kelley are no longer with us. I'm looking forward to my next set of discs so expect some more updates soonish.