re: #325 Jack Burton

THe TOS movies were great (of course I’m not counting ST:V because that was an abonimation).

TMP was a big screen version of what happened in many TOS episodes. Dealing with an out of control machine/anomaly/natural phenomena. It’s only flaw was being inaccessible to non-trekkies.

TWOK-SFS-TVH was “The Trilogy” and covered all of the bases that good TOS stories did (super villain, klingons, anomaly), and had the bonus of being accessible to non-trekkies.

The Undiscovered Country, a few flaws aside, was an excellent send off for the crew and old Enterprise.

Then TNG movies came and ruined everything.

If ST:TMP felt like a extended ST:TOS TV episode, that’s because it was; the script that became TMP started life as a pilot episode for a new ST series in the mid-70s called Star Trek: Phase II. That was going to be the flagship program for what would have been, at that time, a fourth broadcast TV network that Paramount was looking at starting up; plans for the Paramount Network fell through at the time (it would be almost 20 years before Paramount’s plan came to fruition with UPN, anchored with ST: Voyager), but Michael Eisner (then head of Paramount) liked the story enough to make it a movie and the rest is history.