The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek

Overall it had a lot of ground to cover so kudos there. I did not care for the short takes and goofy approach - whoever decided to take that tack I think a bit over used.

One thing that I noticed after the last episode was besides mentioning the music themes was the lack of the music scoring in general - specifically TOS incidental music - name any show you can recall the music during the episodes (maybe outside of Mission Impossible) that you can, years later, recall the music... Klingon theme, Doomsday/Immunity Syndrome theme, 'spore' music, etc.

Other than that not addressed, it was a decent show. Gates did good job narrating.

And yes Enterprise theme stunk - made me not want to watch.

The Star Trek franchise does a celebratory 11-episode documentary series on itself. As with this type of shows, one has to be weary about personal slants of its creators. Of course, Gene is long gone and nobody has to tip-toe around his drug use. Nobody is deliberately trashing the man, ok except for one guy. They do walk that line of celebrating the show while not hiding its warts. This is very much for its fans. There is some fun information. Quite frankly, I remember the Desilu logo but I didn't know about Lucy fighting for the show. I do have a question or two which the show fails to answer. That's fair enough. This has good info and has some fun.

It's obvious that the interviewees spoke at some length, but the editors appear to think that the audience has no attention span. So their responses and recollections are clipped to show clips from the various shows. Much is left on the virtual cutting room floor.

Gates McFadden is a great narrator, though.

Star Trek deserves a Ken Burns style documentary, not this.

I can't say that I'm happy with my assessment and I'm sure most others won't be as well, but the pace and editing of this first episode are so bad that I'm having trouble finishing it and may not watch the other three I've recorded.

In Philadelphia, there is the Franklin Institute, a center for science, scientific history, science demonstrations, and industrial scientific testing. It's quite a place and I've gone there since I was very young. It's been a while since I visited, but the last time I was there, drinking in the exhibits around me, I watched as schoolchildren too immature to understand what they were seeing absolutely raced from exhibit to exhibit trying to find the button to push to make the display do something. They would rush up to it, frantically hammer away at whatever initiated the demo, and hunted to see what would happen. If it moved, lit up, make a sound or whatever, they watched for five seconds. If pushing the button didn't result in an INSTANT payoff...two seconds, then on to the next exhibit. Nobody stopped to look, wonder, read, or try to understand what was happening.

I am sure that the editor of this series was one of those kids.

Hyper-fast cuts, contributors flashed on the screen for so short a time that you can see what they look like, what their name is, or what they are saying, pick any two, cut-ins of scenes from shows that might well be funny but go by so quickly that they are blips...this bears all the hallmarks of someone too young to know how to edit for an audience who is seeing the material for the first time, not someone who has been spending hours with each scene. It's an absolute mess. No attention span whatsoever. No depth of examination. No desire to discover, just to get to the next bullet point.

I'm going to boldly go back to the TV now. I think there may be 15 painful minutes left of the fist episode. There are other "history of Star Trek" films and videos that are not frenetic and juvenile that tell the same story.

Harlan Ellison; story of how unhappy he was with the rewrite of, "City on the Edge of Forever" is mentioned. I can only imagine how irate he' d be if he was around to see this mess.

I had to come to IMDb to determine the proper order of the episodes.

This is basically a longer version of William Shatner's great movie, "Chaos on the Bridge"

I was aware of the fact that Gene Roddenberry had been relegated to practically a fan of his own show after his failed interference with The Motion Picture and The Wrath of Khan.

And I never knew that Gene had a substance-abuse problem, it makes me relate to him a lot more, I know how terrible that can be.

This is a man who single-handedly created one of the largest television franchises ever, and then he was kicked out of it, and cheated out of his well earned royalty monies.

And he has a remarkable success story in how he clawed his way back not only his well deserved royalties but also to being in charge of Star Trek the Next Generation, through the machinations of Leonard Maislish, as told in the episode "Queue for Q". As despicable as the man appeared to be, he is responsible for one thing that we can all be thankful for: he brought John De Lancie in to play Q.

But what was good for Gene Roddenberry was not good for Star Trek the Next Generation, and we get to hear all about that in this series.

Gene personally wrote "The Cage", "The Menagerie", "The Omega Glory", some of the best episodes of the original series. And it even appears as if the original series when renewed for its third season at 10 o'clock Friday night, Lost a lot when Gene stepped down as Producer... so we can't really completely blame the horrible Friday night death slot, but also the fact that the show's main driving force was no longer involved in making the show.

But in this series, we learn about Gene's inability to write a movie script of any worth. Granted, he was a brilliant television producer and television writer. But he wrote script after script for proposed movies, and also the proposed "phase 2" television show which never happened, all miserable failures.

I could not understand how such a brilliant man could fail in this way.

But he made a big comeback for TNG, he was given back all, er, most of the authority that he lost. But he never really wrote any more episodes for television or elsewhere other than half of "Encounter at Farpoint", stepping on DC Fontana's toes in the process.

I was glad that they interviewed Diana Muldaur for this. I always thought that she had deliberately played Dr. Pulaski as if she were a female Doctor McCoy, and I always thought she was brilliant in that role. But I find it sad that she did not like working on the show, especially after adding so much to it.

Every television show has its dark spots, Trek has had its share.

It just goes to show that the cast and crew of this franchise are human beings, nothing more.

This is a brilliant and brutally honest series, expanding upon William Shatner's revelations from "Chaos on the Bridge".

But if you are watching this on Prime, come back to IMDb to find out the proper order of the episodes because they choked the duck, totally mixing up the order of the episodes so that the narrative makes no sense. I actually had to stop playback and come here to find out what was missing.