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Maybe people in this forum can help me:
I've got an 8 year old boy I'd like to introduce to Star Trek. I specifically want:
So my questions are:
For my part I got into trek around 9 or 10, the gateway drug was re-runs of the original series that one of our local stations would play along-side Lost In Space, Twilight Zone and a few others. Regarding specific episodes, A Piece of the Action, The Corbomite Maneuver, and Trouble With Tribbles all stick in my mind. From there I got into the TOS crew movies, practically wearing out our copy of Wrath of Kahn on VHS.
Additionally my grandad had a whole shelving unit full of old paperbacks in his study/man-cave that included a bunch of the Star Trek expanded universe books as well as a lot classic sci-fi. Stuff like Doc Smith's Lensmen books, Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom stories, and a bunch of Heinlein and Bradbury's early stuff. Grandad would let me check books out like a library and between those two vectors I was well and truly hooked.
I've tried to infect with my own kids with the Star Trek bug but it hasn't taken. That said over the last year or two, my eldest and a couple of their friends (all middle-school aged) have gotten really into Stargate, and it's clear from talking to them and watching them play that Stargate is to them what Trek was to me when I was their age, which is probably worth a post in itself.
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Introducing children to pop culture that you liked as a kid but is too old to be popular among kids today is usually a bad idea, regardless of whether you think it introduces him to any useful ideas. If you really think that old pop culture would benefit your kid, it would be a bad assumption to think that old pop culture that you liked is the best choice for that purpose. You should do research on 1960s-1990s shows and pick the ones with the best balance of merit and entertainment, not pick the ones that excited kid-you. It may turn out you should be showing your kid Gunsmoke instead of Star Trek: TOS.
If the kid is a scifi geek, or is clamoring to look at your TOS blu-rays or otherwise showing obvious interest, of course that doesn't apply.
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I started watching Star Trek at 8-9, so if your son is interested I don't see any reason to wait. As far as specific recommendations of what to watch, these are things I remember enjoying as a kid:
And here are some that I think a kid might enjoy or display some of the virtues you mentioned:
Mostly these are fun, swashbuckling episodes but there are obviously some thinkier ones in there as well. I do think that even the more serious episodes will be fun if he's enjoying Trek, but maybe don't start him on those.
I didn't list any DS9 or Voyager not because I don't like them, but I think DS9 isn't quite what you're looking for here (as much as I love it). It tends to be darker and more serialized, not the fairly standalone and unambiguously heroic stories I get the sense you're looking for. And I just don't know Voyager well enough to recommend any episodes.
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That might be about right. My oldest started around then, and is still the biggest Star Trek fan among my kids. I thought TNG would be the smoothest introduction (and I may have been right - we've watched a bit of TOS and my daughters find Kirk annoying), but especially when he was around 10, my son thought that TNG was often too boring and sometimes (well, just the Borg episodes, as of Locutus) too scary to be enjoyable. But even my youngest daughter was picking Star Trek episodes for her turn at "movie night" back when she was only 8.
We started with but skipped the vast majority of season 1 TNG (just skipping ahead to the best episodes), and honestly the exact watch list wasn't a big deal. Trek of that generation was mostly written to be episodic, with background knowledge helpful for adding nuance but with the most important exposition slipped (or sometimes crammed...) into each individual script. Occasionally an episode will be a 2-parter and you can't possibly skip the first part, occasionally an episode will be a "sequel" to a story like Moriarty or Picard's Flute (but of course in those cases you wouldn't want to skip the first part), but in general each episode stands alone well.
If you want to challenge yourself with some tricky choices, then you move on to Babylon 5. Also kind of a slow start in season 1, but in its case even the slower episodes more often than not packed in some characterization or backstory or foreshadowing or outright arcplot development that makes the later episodes much more enjoyable. We skipped the pilot and maybe half of the first season there, because I didn't want to waste too much of my kids' time if they decided they still didn't like the good parts of the show, and in hindsight (they all liked it) we skipped too much.
Could I talk you into the 1950s and late 1940s? That was mostly a previous generation of scientists, but 8 is a great age for most of the Heinlein juveniles.
Whoa... I didn't know about the Heinlein juveniles. Thanks!
Seconding the recommendation of Heinlein's Juveniles, Star Beast and Farmer in the Sky are both excellent reads for a kid of that age.
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"The Golden Age of Science Fiction is twelve."
If you want something to tide him over until he is older, try Space Cases. It's basically Voyager for kids.
What's wrong with publication order? "The Cage", TOS, TAS, the first six movies, TNG, DS9, VOY, Generations, First Contact, Insurrection, Nemesis, Galaxy Quest, done.
That said, the first full episode of Star Trek I ever saw was "Blink of an Eye", which a Trekkie teacher of mine put on when I was in 10th grade; I fucking loved it, though I later learned it is basically just a remake of Dragon's Egg by Robert L. Forward. It helps that, much like an episode of Wagon Train, "Blink of an Eye" is actually the planet's story, with the crew of Voyager serving primarily as viewpoint characters; this means you do not need to know anything about them, or the wider setting.
Outside of missing ENT which I quite enjoy, I don't think this would have worked for me. I came back to it later and I love it all now, but when I was a pre-teen/teen in the 90s, there was reruns of all of the Star Trek show playing all the time on TV, and TOS, TNG and DS9 never had much interest for me. TOS because it looked stupid: the action is robotic and looked stupid, and the plots basically all felt like they boiled down to sufficiently advanced aliens act like gods, until Kirk says "nope" and somehow he'd end up clumsily wrestling with a goofy looking alien somewhere along the way. I know it hit different for kids in the 60s and 70s, but you'd need a kid with a specific interest in "retro" shows to enjoy TOS on its own now, which I would guess isn't too common unless you live in a bunker and have deprived them of modern media. TNG and DS9 didn't interest me because it seemed like non stop politics and relied on too much built up lore that I didn't care about.
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Only that this is like watching two hours of tv everyday for a year. That's way more tv than is appropriate for a kid.
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"The Cage" was not published first! Part of it was filmed first, but it was broadcast much later!
And it's also not such a good place to begin.
I should have said production order, not publication order.
I am a firm believer that TOS should start with "The Cage" followed by "Where No Man Has Gone Before", rather than "The Man Trap" followed by "Charlie X".
Have to agree "Where No Man Has Gone Before" is a better opener. But "The Cage" isn't; it's less polished and about a completely different crew.
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I mean, shit, I was watching Star Trek as early as 8 years old on my lonesome. If they're into science fiction and have any sort of attention span, it's going to be hard to keep them away from that stuff.
Cut them loose with some of the more fun stuff in seasons 2 through 7 and see what happens. It'll build some foundations for them to appreciate the deeper stuff when they get older.
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13ish is fine, but a sharp younger kid might like it earlier.
I have three suggestions for starting points.
As you suggested, Wrath of Khan is a good one to start with. the TOS movies, from two onwards (the first one might confuse as to why these characters coming out of retirement is a big deal), are detached enough from the series that they won't feel like you're missing half the plot if you just watch them on their own. They have enough action to keep a child's attention. The action is modern enough that it doesn't look goofy the way the action from the 60's does.
For my second suggestion, I'll go very much against the grain and suggest maybe the most divisive series as a starting point: Voyager. It is "my Trek" in the sense it's the one that introduced me properly to the series, and I posit it's a good starting point, because its concept inherently reduces the requirement of knowing the lore that was built up on, without discarding it wholesale either. Yes, it's "lesser" in that it's not as good an example of the virtues you would hope the show would demonstrate to the kids, but those virtues are still there. Janeway is not the greatest role model, but in most episodes she's a decent one. Sometimes she does a cheeky little war crime, but what Starfleet captain hasn't?
The Animated Series might also be a good starting point, especially if you want to start him earlier than 13. It's simpler, introduces to the universe, and while it hasn't aged all that well, I think it probably aged better than TOS has visually. Or maybe I just forgave it because I had different expectations of cartoons back then.
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Appropriate age is going to depend a lot on maturity and attention span, but certainly I'd think no later than 13. I'd probably skip TOS entirely to begin with and start with the TNG pilot. Then skip to Measure of a Man, then some more plums from seasons 3-7, and the finale. If it takes, he'll fill in the rest of the episodes on his own volition and want more.
I'm pretty sure this is the worst episode possible as an intro. It's got lots of great philosophical nuggets to chew on, but there's no reason to identify with why Picard/Riker are so troubled by disassembling a "mere machine" if you haven't actually built a relationship with Data yet by watching him struggle to learn to be human. Without understanding that background, the JAG and cybernetics professor are "obviously right" and the whole episode is boring.
My problem is that all of the recommendations on trek sites I've seen are like this: they are geared towards the "best episodes for experienced fans" rather than "the best episodes for introducing the series".
I think both the pilot and the episode itself does enough to bring that background. You could, I guess, watch Skin of Evil after the pilot to cement data's personality and account for the disappearance of Yar, or Elementary, Dear Data to show his more whimsical side (which also sets up the clever Moriarty episode later). The good thing about TNG generally though is that it was conceived and written as an almost 100% episodic show, so while episodes can benefit from familiarity with the characters and the world lore, it is generally not necessary. That's one reason it was very popular in syndication.
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