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I'm rewatching Star Trek TOS, the original comfort tv, on Netflix. I haven't seen it for a few decades, but it holds up much better than I feared, like a fine aged cheddar.
*No commercials means that an episode isn't cut to pieces to fit them. There are scenes I don't remember ever seeing in syndication. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I was peeling potatoes for dinner during those scenes as a child--they were on repeat at 5 and 6 weekdays for years, so I'd've caught them in rotation eventually.
*It's also refreshing to watch them without my dad constantly adjusting the color, contrast and white balance of the tv while mom gave snarky feedback. Dad, being red/green colorblind, saw the primary color uniforms as his best chance to finally get the picture perfect. Mom, being a watercolorist, could not get him to understand that trying to get a ruddy William Shatner and an olive Leonard Nimoy to match was a fool's errand.
*Sadly, the inherent feminist issues of being produced in the sixties are not as horrible as some of the blatantly oblivious to truly malicious shit I've waded through since then. Sure there are minidress uniforms with matching spanky pants--but it's somehow innocent compared to the headless bikini asses used as establishing shots on Burn Notice, and playful compared to the vicious misogynist streak in something like Family Guy.
*I think I needed a distance of a few decades and a reboot recast to really appreciate Kirk/Spock. See, I was raised in fandom, to the point where I went to fan cons with my mom and grandma, and mom did illustrations for hardcopy zines (mom tended toward Chekov and portraiture in her work, but was quite varied in her reading taste). I had to get to a place where K/S didn't automatically bring to mind xeroxed illoes of seventies-hairy dudes tenderly embracing.
*Imagine, if you will, a nine year old feldman trying to get through a hotel banquet room doorway where two buzzed adults are flirting, both cosplaying, one with a nipple slippage that is painfully obvious from wee feldman's perspective. I don't have a point, I just needed to finally tell someone. I did eventually get through the doorway, and now know that the squiggly tension in my chest was only nervous laughter.
*My fic name feldman comes from here. I still have a copy of it and the sequel, and the fact that Mindy Glazer palpably shifted several gears in her writing between the two somehow laid bare to my wee self that learning to write is a process, a craft, and something I could do too. So here's the thing, for every nine year old me in 1981, there are tens of thousands of kids peeking into the guts of the art-machine now that fandom is online.
More art! More sexytimes! More myths! More nipples! More hysterical laughter!
*No commercials means that an episode isn't cut to pieces to fit them. There are scenes I don't remember ever seeing in syndication. And I'm pretty sure it wasn't because I was peeling potatoes for dinner during those scenes as a child--they were on repeat at 5 and 6 weekdays for years, so I'd've caught them in rotation eventually.
*It's also refreshing to watch them without my dad constantly adjusting the color, contrast and white balance of the tv while mom gave snarky feedback. Dad, being red/green colorblind, saw the primary color uniforms as his best chance to finally get the picture perfect. Mom, being a watercolorist, could not get him to understand that trying to get a ruddy William Shatner and an olive Leonard Nimoy to match was a fool's errand.
*Sadly, the inherent feminist issues of being produced in the sixties are not as horrible as some of the blatantly oblivious to truly malicious shit I've waded through since then. Sure there are minidress uniforms with matching spanky pants--but it's somehow innocent compared to the headless bikini asses used as establishing shots on Burn Notice, and playful compared to the vicious misogynist streak in something like Family Guy.
*I think I needed a distance of a few decades and a reboot recast to really appreciate Kirk/Spock. See, I was raised in fandom, to the point where I went to fan cons with my mom and grandma, and mom did illustrations for hardcopy zines (mom tended toward Chekov and portraiture in her work, but was quite varied in her reading taste). I had to get to a place where K/S didn't automatically bring to mind xeroxed illoes of seventies-hairy dudes tenderly embracing.
*Imagine, if you will, a nine year old feldman trying to get through a hotel banquet room doorway where two buzzed adults are flirting, both cosplaying, one with a nipple slippage that is painfully obvious from wee feldman's perspective. I don't have a point, I just needed to finally tell someone. I did eventually get through the doorway, and now know that the squiggly tension in my chest was only nervous laughter.
*My fic name feldman comes from here. I still have a copy of it and the sequel, and the fact that Mindy Glazer palpably shifted several gears in her writing between the two somehow laid bare to my wee self that learning to write is a process, a craft, and something I could do too. So here's the thing, for every nine year old me in 1981, there are tens of thousands of kids peeking into the guts of the art-machine now that fandom is online.
More art! More sexytimes! More myths! More nipples! More hysterical laughter!
