Clinton, I'm afraid I second the quote from Harlan Ellison, repeated by Stephen King in Danse Macabre: "Unfortunately, Roddenberry can't write for stale owl poop".

Come on, the first series is a category of "God/superbeing exists, but is mad/dangerous", "computer is beaten by contradictions", "you can't trust a commie (sorry, Klingon/Romulan/anyone wearing heavy makeup)", "crew are trapped and must revert to basic survival skills", "monster can't be killed, but turns out just to want to make friends". And for being on a 5-year mission, they never seemed too bothered about the number of dead bodies they racked up. At that kind of rate, the ship'd be empty by the end of the first 6 months! :-)

And the scripts, acting and plotlines weren't really that good anyway. It's like all Brits rave about Doctor Who, but if you actually watch the reruns, you realise that they weren't really that good, it was just that you were like 10 or 15 at the time! ;-) And the TNG and further series only came out bcos the films 1 & 2 were successful (I won't say good ;-) - if they'd crashed and burned then I doubt we'd be talking about this today, except in the same way we'd talk about "I dream of Jeannie" or "Battlestar Galactica".

Like I remember the A-Team and Knight Rider as being fun, but I wouldn't say they were any good. (Although Airwolf _was_ pretty good, and like all good stuff it got canned after the second or third series. Ho hum. Maybe we can do a Star Trek on that and get a decent film or two...)

I will second you on the TNG movies though. Unfortunately the same is true of all the OS movies, except maybe for Wrath of Khan, and that only bcos they got Ricardo Montalban and some reasonable F/X.

Graham.