I didnt have anyone to guide me in my late-90’s pre-teen years. It was only with Jessie Gender’s reccomendation that I dipped my toe in to lower decks, and then friends i met told me about DS9 being “the queer one”, which got me hooked.
Dont get me wrong, I’d seen TNG episodes growing up…unfortunately the connection/click just didnt get made. (I circled back, dont worry)
Now for the heresy: From my perspective, the newer stuff, which folks so often gripe “change the format too much” or whichever (I wont even humor the bad-faith bigots complaints about how they cant slur people for intrinsic traits just for existing) – I enjoy Strange New Worlds and Discovery a lot. They address something that Star Trek didnt (when I was young and media illiterate and taken in my bang-boom-Halo-style-scifi: i could suspend my disbelief. The costumes in TNG and even DS9 had taken me out of it before i ever got into it. No shade to designers…i see now the wonderful theatre they were making room for…and hey, Im a queer-anarchist so making things more easily digestable is the opposite of what i dig…but maybe consider that someone super enthused about a newer show may well be on their own path to a new appreciation for the older series <3
TNG is the definitive Star Trek for me. I don’t think DS9 or Voyager would have existed had TNG not been a success. They also appear to be in the same universe, all three had similar aesthetics and had crossover between them. TOS always felt a bit dated to me in the 90s, most of the stuff after didn’t really catch my interest.
I had a conversation with my dad about newtrek and for him “the new series” was Enterprise. I mean it was for me too until discovery aired a few years ago
TOS is Star Trek in my mind, even though TNG competes with it for my favorite. The adventures of Kirk/Spock & crew are the core of Star Trek, and it feels like everything since is an encore because of how incredibly beloved it was.
I am getting towards the end of a ds9 rewatch (one episode before bed most nights) and I’m getting so happy to get to a voyager rewatch! It’s months away but still. (Not that I don’t like ds9, particularly the latter half.)
In the 90s it felt like we may be working towards that idealism, aftwards…not so much. Plus after mid 2000s/2010 everything wanted to be gritty which doesn’t work for Star Trek. That said I haven’t watched any series since Enterprise(on my list just not up there), but the recent movies felt less like Star Trek than the TNG ones.
Watch Lower Decks and Strange New Worlds! Lower Decks is a little Rick and Morty-ish in the first season but it’s still good. This is coming from someone who really doesn’t like DISCO or Picard.
For whatever reason, I read your comment as if you were referring to the Tim Burton movies, and I still thought it was weird to refer to them as the “classics”.
People don’t have fun with super heroes like this now. It’s all dark and gritty. Imagine a campy, tongue-in-cheek Fantastic Four movie that they didn’t have to worry about tying in to the rest of the MCU. How awesome would that be?
I feel like I didn’t remember it was a movie, but remember the show as a kid. And it was way before my time, but my brother and I still liked watching it, it was just so silly.
Kim (Garret Wang) was 26. Kes (Jennifer Lien) was 20. Paris (Robert Duncan McNeil) was 30, rounding out the youngest 3 main cast members. The Doctor and Chakotay were the oldest, both at 41.
TNG had Will Wheaton at 15, Denise Crosby (Tasha) at 29, and LeVar Burton at 30. And Stewart (49), Spinner (38), and McFadden (38) as the oldest.
George Takei was the baby of TOS at 29, followed by Koenig (Chekov) at 30 (when he joined a year later, so same age as Takei), and Nichols (Uhura) at 33. Doohan (Scotty) and Kelley (Bones) were both 46 and Shatner and Nimoy both 35. They all lived through WWII (and both Scotty and Bones served, Scotty took some friendly fire on D-day while Bones did training movies for the air force).
DS9 set some new extremes, with Lofton (little Sisko) at 14, Siddig (Bashir) 27, and Farrel (Jadzia) 29. On the other end, Auberjonois (Odo) was 52, followed by Brooks (big Sisko) 44, and Shimerman (Quark) 43.
Enterprise had Park (Hoshi) at 23, Blalock 26, and Montgomery (Travis) 30. Bakula (Archer) was 46, Billingsley (Phlox) 41, and Keating (Reed) 39.
Those are all main cast members, there have been other supporting actors both older and younger than those listed.
I was also curious and it was interesting getting a better idea of how old they all were, considering when I first watched them all, they were pretty much all “adults” to me because anything from like 20 to 65 was just one category lol.
Uh, Voyager aired in 1995 so if you’re 30 now, you would be 1 year old when it aired. Would have been 2 years old when Janeway and Paris had lizard sex. Timothée “Paul Wonka” Chalamet wasn’t even born when Voyager premiered.
When Seska was betraying the crew, Square released Final Fantasy 7.
Voyager encountered the Borg and met Seven about when Baby Hit Me One More Time was released.
When Janeway finally got Voyager home, Drake was starting his career on DeGrassi.
I was watching a Tom Baker / 4th Doctor episode where someone refers to the Prime Minister as “she.” Naturally I assumed that they were referring to Thatcher. Turns out that the episode was made before Thatcher took office, and the writers were being wild and futuristic by making the leader a woman.
Yeah I was TV-watching age at that time and something I’ve watched as new when I was under 10 does is something I might describe as “old”, depending on context.
I haven’t even hit 30 yet and it’s weird to hear Voyager called old. I grew up watching TNG and sometimes TOS with my mom. It was one of the few good parts of my childhood. It took me forever just to stop referring to Voyager and Enterprise as “the new stuff.”
33 here, but honestly, TNG, VOY, and DS9 are definitely older Trek. They were the second gen, but still all felt like a close iteration from TOS. It was when I saw Enterprise that I went all…
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