The Center Seat: 55 Years of Star Trek

The Star Trek franchise does a celebratory 11-episode documentary series on itself. As with this type of shows, one has to be weary about personal slants of its creators. Of course, Gene is long gone and nobody has to tip-toe around his drug use. Nobody is deliberately trashing the man, ok except for one guy. They do walk that line of celebrating the show while not hiding its warts. This is very much for its fans. There is some fun information. Quite frankly, I remember the Desilu logo but I didn't know about Lucy fighting for the show. I do have a question or two which the show fails to answer. That's fair enough. This has good info and has some fun.

Overall it had a lot of ground to cover so kudos there. I did not care for the short takes and goofy approach - whoever decided to take that tack I think a bit over used.

One thing that I noticed after the last episode was besides mentioning the music themes was the lack of the music scoring in general - specifically TOS incidental music - name any show you can recall the music during the episodes (maybe outside of Mission Impossible) that you can, years later, recall the music... Klingon theme, Doomsday/Immunity Syndrome theme, 'spore' music, etc.

Other than that not addressed, it was a decent show. Gates did good job narrating.

And yes Enterprise theme stunk - made me not want to watch.

This is a well constructed and presented series in the style of the tous that made us and so it is a good watch.

However like all documentaries it is very one sided in it's view. The best example of this is them talking about the Plagiarism of Babylon 5. Fair play addressing this but they dismissed it as the only similarity was they were on space stations when this was legally proven to be a rip off and knowing both series the stolen material is hard to miss.

Good watch, just don't take it by it's word.

Loved this Star Trek 55 anniversary documentary! I am not sure how I missed this when it was first released, but I am happy I found this recently. It is a lovely summary of 55 years of Trek with new tidbits of info I never had heard before. I am so glad to add this to my Star Trek DVD collection. I like the layout starting with the beginnings and then covering each show. I hope they do something similar in the future when the 60th anniversary rolls around. There have been new shows since thiw doc was made. Specifically ST Strange New Worlds comes to mind. And I felt that Gates did a great job narrating.

There's a great documentary about the history of Star Trek to be made but this ain't it. There are some good interviewees -- writers, producers, cast members, and others actually involved with the show -- but there's just as much or more useless stuff from people who just sound like superfans reciting history which should have instead been in the narration. If these people actually do have real expertise/in-depth knowledge, it's not made plain by their onscreen identifications. One is billed as "professor of sociology". So what? Does he teach a Trek class? Has he written a book? Why is he being interviewed instead of some other professor? If you want me to care what he has to say, how about telling me his actual credentials on the subject matter? Another is said to be a "writer and producer". Writer of what? Producer of what? Those who actually worked on Trek shows are identified as such, so who is this guy and why should I care about his opinions?

As for the actual narration, instead of an informative voice we get Gates McFadden doing her best to sound like she's saying interesting things--and regularly being forced to repeat herself because this is designed with ad breaks in mind--often in an inappropriately silly/jokey way. Her disembodied voice sometimes literally "interacts" with the interviewees, which I found to be a distractingly awful stylistic choice.

Worst of all is what's onscreen when it's not interviews or snippets from the shows/movies themselves. Every time D. C. Fontana is mentioned, they trot out the exact same picture -- a weird glamour shot from when she was very young. Roddenberry is represented by three, maybe four, repeatedly recycled photos. They endlessly reuse two photos of Robert Wise but only one of him actually on set of The Motion Picture. At some point, it becomes embarrassing how little effort the producers of this spent researching archival materials. And there's also absolutely moronic cutaway inserts of things like film being placed into a can, pointless stock footage and, in one particularly cringeworthy moment somebody's disembodied hands pounding on a table because an interviewee is telling a story which ends that way. Much of these--particularly the stock footgae--get repeated many times as well. These are the choices of people who have no business making documentaries and/or greedy Paramount executives who want to promote the cash-cow they've been milking for gazillions of dollars in the cheapest way possible, with no actual respect for the people who produced it for them.