Also, it was Niven himself, writing on the official Star Trek website, who put forward the view that Caitians and Kzinti are cousins, with the Caitians having settled on their planet Cait, and adopting a more scientific and technologically oriented culture.
In TAS, Lt. M’Ress was the Caitian second communications officer.
While he was a Shakespearean actor at Stratford in Canada, and in fact was Christopher Plummer’s understudy before taking on leading roles himself, Shatner’s US career kicked off in the 1950s in film noir. He was considered a quite serious actor.
Bezos was particularly jerky about it when its established fact that Shatner was one of the celebrity calls that astronauts asked to have in the early days of the space station when communication was more limited.
So this actor, who was an inspiration for astronauts, had been asked to talk to them during their missions and hear their perspectives for morale benefits. But when he finally has his own experience, Bezos assumed no one wanted to hear it. Just tone deaf and uninformed.
Star Trek was considered big budget television in the 1960s. It was early peak broadcast television made to show off colour technology.
Roddenberry modeled and pitched the original pilot (The Cage) on MGM’s movie Forbidden Planet, which was the most expensive science fiction movie to date when it was made in the mid 50s.
TNG and all the 90s shows finessed their way around the date of the Eugenics War.
The writers at the time (e.g., Moore & Braga) would rationalize in response to fan questions that the Eugenics War was going on but we just weren’t aware. Or something. But they assiduously avoided dealing with the issue onscreen despite trying to write around other inconsistencies like Klingon foreheads.
So, it was left to SNW’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow to spell it all out, including moving Khan’s birth back by decades. It’s worth putting a priority on seeing that episode just for that clarity.
Encounter at Farpoint probably isn’t the place to start.
We tend to assume our kids will get into it the same way we did, but different generations respond differently.
Our kids are fans, but they like the franchise on their own terms. We started them with the TAS DVD set, after priming them with Odd Squad. They loved it.
When they hit school age, I tried them on a curated set of TNG episodes. Didn’t really stick, but Voyager they adored. By high school they’d tried most of it but would only watch the occasional episode of DS9 or Enterprise. They watched the early seasons of Discovery with enthusiasm even though I had to fast forward through some scenes.
In high school, their interest fell off as they explored other fandoms, but they’ve come back to it on their own terms. And their favourite shows at the moment aren’t ones that I would ever have predicted.
Wow, definitely different school learning protocol here.
Our kids were fussing at me to close my tabs as I go by the time they hit middle school, and when they were younger we had a ‘clear tabs automatically on closing’ set up in their browsers.