Yes, it was pretentious, sterile, and overblown, but it did rejuvenate the franchise, re-introduced us to the Klingons (love their theme music), and the warp effect was awesome.
Star Trek: The Motion Picture came out thirty years ago, Dec 7 1979.
I was 11. I had tape-recorded nearly every episode of the series (and I mean audio tape-cassettes), and had practically memorized the dialog. When I found out our local Washington D.C. station had trimmed about a minute and a half from each episode to make more room for commercials, and that the nearby Baltimore stations had usually trimmed a different clip, oh boy… to see an extra bit of exposition, or comic dialogue, or a new corner of the Enterprise, that was fantastic.
I made a model of the Enterprise and a Klingon warship, and hung them up on strings and just looked at them through the wrong end of a pair of binoculars (which provided a wide-angle view that made the models look huge).
Friday night I got home after midnight because I had stayed at the office marking a last set of papers. My 7yo daughter woke up when I came home, so I went in to kiss her goodnight.
“Daddy’s not going to mark a single paper this weekend,” I told her.
She reached up in the dark to hug me, and whispered in my ear, “Can we cuddle under a blanket and watch the Star Trek movie this weekend?”
I was in Sto’vo’kor.
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