There’s a ‘Where to start’ FAQ linked in the sidebar wiki for this community. I recommend going there and taking a look.
The best place to start largely depends on your personal preferences in terms of whether shows need to be action packed, have long term serialization vs episodic, and tolerances for 60s or 80s/90s trends in special effects, technobabble, Shakespearean acting styles.
I’m an older person who has been watching since TOS was in first run, and saw the original Star Wars as a teen. Alien 1 too. All to say, I saw all of it as it came out. We were just so glad in the late 70s that someone was making sci-fi movies that weren’t post-Armageddon dreary.
Trek has held my interest more intently, but I read more than my share of the SW ‘legends’ books as they came out. I can see a wide range of offerings in both franchises, appealing to different audiences and tastes.
It rather boggles me that there are folks who have tried one but not the other. It’s like someone who is a DC or Marvel fan and has never checked out the other. You may not find anything to like, but the potential of finding another universe of stories that interest you is more than worth the risk.
A word of caution. Just about Star Trek every fan thinks that the show they first watched or their favourite show is the best place to start. They’ll argue passionately that you’ll do best starting where they did. Ignore all of it. You’re you.
Read the ‘where to start?’, check out ‘Memory Alpha’ or Wikipedia for the basic description of the main series, pick one that appeals and try the pilot. Be also cautioned that many of the shows take a while to find their groove. Checking out a ‘best of’ list for early seasons is ok if you’re not the of a completist temperament. Hope you find the Trek that’s best for you.
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.
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.
I’m convinced that many people don’t appreciate DS9 until their 30s.
Cool that the 90s shows each seem to appeal to different demographics even though they were all in theory designed for mass audiences ( unlike in the current streaming era).
The problem seems to be that a lot of younger fans that get into Voyager & TNG, just cringe at DS9 or find it boring. Once they’ve had that experience they’re hard to convince to give it a fresh shot when they’re older.
The big temporal shift took place when TNG’s premiere ‘Encounter at Farpoint’ was written to place WW3 and first contact into the mid-late 21st century.
TOS was very specific in saying that the Eugenics War was a precursor to WW3.
Roddenberry wanted to ensure that the franchise’s optimistic future was always a future possibility for viewers. So he insisted that TNG reset the date of WW3.
At the time TNG appeared, there were die-hard gatekeeping TOS fans that argued that this time shift broke canon and meant TNG was in a different universe despite McCoy’s appearance in the premiere.
SNW just confirms the physics of temporal slippage in the Prime timeline as the consequence of all the various intertemporal incursions over the history of the franchise.
The OP’s point is that there were old fans gatekeeping and downtalking ‘NuTrek’ pretty much since fan organizations took out full page newspaper ads in the US trying to stop TAS from being aired.
I was going to Star Trek cons in 1990. No matter how objectively great season 3 of TNG was, many TOS diehards were still campaigning against it.
Longstanding TOS fans could still be pretty toxic at that point to new TNG fans in person too. The guests at cons were still largely TOS cast. It was hard even to get a TNG t-shirt then.
Fast forward to 1993 and TNG cosplay was everywhere, the guests and panels were TNG and DS9 was the exciting new thing.
It’s 70s Saturday morning animation in the trendy hot pink, orange, lime green and purple of the psychedelic era.
It’s got a lot of episodes written by TOS writers that got reworked from live action, but also some very out there original stuff. Roddenberry really pushed the writers to take advantage of the animated medium.
It’s trippy and worth your time. A couple of episodes, including Yesteryear, are S-tier.
It was popular. Don’t let those brigading against the mere idea of a musical distort the facts.
Some of the review sites like IMDb and Rotten Tomatoes ended up with average scores in the 7/70% range merely because of the large number of 1/10 votes.
If you check out the vote distribution, it was a small but very vocal minority who opposed the episode on principle, who created the impression that it wasn’t well received by the fandom.
Personally, I’m not a huge fan of American musicals, but I enjoyed and have certainly included it in my rewatches already.
I’m continually positively surprised how many memes here kick off more serious discussion and speculation about the shows. It’s one of the things that sucked me in.
I’m not convinced that I will ever quite have the right sense of humour to have my own original memes take off here, but you guys make me want to stretch beyond my comfort zone.
The origin of starfleet combat training. (startrek.website)
Nerds of equal standing. (lemmy.world)
Klingon Jazz (lemmy.world)
Two of everything
deleted_by_author
Identifying Cat (izzydata.xyz)
Yep, it’s cat....
— Mrs. McMurray
https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/96f8fb28-21cc-4256-a7fc-15241834e266.jpeg
Starfleet may have a security problem (startrek.website)
Kirk always knows how to find his perfect lighting. (startrek.website)
DSC Season 5, LD Season 5, SNW Season 3.... GIVE IT TO ME NOW (startrek.website)
Crystals good, fungus bad (i.imgur.com)
Cope (lemmy.world)
Just once I’d like a post where everyone is chill and positive about stuff instead of focusing on negative...
Too Many Mudds (lemmy.world)
(Now with fewer spelling errors)
This may be the dumbest thing I've made yet. Sorry, Risa. (startrek.website)
We doing Canada Trek now? (i.imgur.com)
Friends don't let friends try. . . (startrek.website)
While all TAS episodes had some kind of moral lesson, S1 E10 was an outright criticism of substance use....
🎵 You can slash, you can stab. Having the time of your life ♪ (pixelfed.social)
Thank you, Lucy! (startrek.website)
Admit it there are some bangers. (lemmy.world)
...sorry (startrek.website)
Gonna make a cleaner version of this in a couple minutes. Love meme but this thing fell into the air fryer accidentally....
No one has ever known we were among you... until now. (startrek.website)
What kind of weird really engages and trends with Trek fans? (startrek.website)
My contribution to the fediverse’ #MakeYourOwnMoopsyMonth challenge....