Slow impossible to get away from fight sequences

 

I got this craving to watch a marathon of the original Star Trek episodes. They used to have them on Sci-Fi channel (and on channel twelve before the Sci-Fi channel came into being), but since I moved to Seattle, I never bothered to wire the outside world into my tv console. I'll I get is a big blue screen unless I turn on the VCR or the DVD player. Which is what I see right now. A big blue screen that followed the conclusion of the first season of Happy Days.

Yesterday, I priced ‘em out (the complete Star Trek collective) on Amazon. I can get all three seasons for a little less than two hundred dollars. I’m going to start pinching my pennies tomorrow.

I miss being a kid and watching the reruns in the after school hours on TV when my folks used to have a set. It was black-n-white with two knobs. The antenna towered thirty feet in the front yard. Ten, twelve, and sometimes-fuzzy six were the only channels that came into focus. Twelve was good for me. I’ve never liked ten and six or PBS and CBS. But twelve excited my imagination with “beam me up’s, phasers on stun, or fly her apart.” (I was in the fifth grade when dad, tired of me watching it all the time, picked up the set and threw it out the back door smashing it on to the ground. Though dramatic dad's action got me out of the house, listening to radio dramas gifted to me by his sister, and eventually reading books, which is something my nieces and nephews, sister and brother-in-law don't seem to know how to do).

....Oh...No...I can't get away...Help...

I’ve been scouring used shops for episodes. Yesterday I found: A Piece of the Action, Mirror-Mirror, Metamorphosis, Mudd’s Women, and the Enemy Within. The episodes I really want to see are these: City on the Edge of Forever, Naked Time, Space Seed, Miri, Shore Leave, Tomorrow is Yesterday, A Taste of Armageddon, the Alternative Factor, the Doomsday machine, Patterns of Force, the Enterprise Incident, Let that be Your Last Battlefield, All Our Yesterdays, For the World is Hollow and I have Touched the Sky, Spock’s Brain, Assignment Earth, and the Arena.

I especially want to see the Arena. This is the episode where Captain Kirk and that guy in the green rubber lizard suit were transported to a deserted planet by a superior intelligence to duke it out to the death. The fighting is classic. Slow. And comical. Kirk eventually wins by making black powder and fashioning a cannon out of bamboo.


It even came with three different alien landscapes



To this date, I have not seen any piece of fiction on TV or movies that can even compare to the original Star Trek. I wonder how much of it has to due with the way in which it captured my attention when I was a boy playing with the action figures spinning them around in the transporter room adjacent to the bridge. Finding a new alien landscapes each day in the back bathroom on the farm. (I always wanted a tricorder and the communicator walkie-talkies). I Spent those hours with my people, locking out the realities of the world I didn’t want to face like mowing the lawn, or making the bed, or milking the goats, or mucking out stalls, or splitting and stacking firewood, or tending to my mother sick with a bad back, or waiting for my father to come home from the mill (the family business) after a fourteen hour workday.



I had this set up