Today marks 40 years since the first Star Trek episode aired on TV. The SciFi channel is celebrating by showing loads of the classic episodes and films all this week, which is absolutely great fun to have on during the day. Of course, the rights to the other Trek series seem to be with Sky One at the moment, which just plagues the schedules with endless Enterprise and Voyager repeats. It's about time they showed some DS9, if you ask me. Still, it's annoying that on an anniversary like this, Sky One couldn't be bothered to do anything even remotely special to celebrate. Star Trek has been a great influence over the years, and a source of great amusement to many sci fi genre enthusiasts. Personally, I'm really looking forward to the next Trek movie - JJ Abrams should make an interesting job of it. And I'm sure there'll be more Star Trek series to come in the future at some point, but they definitely need to take a break for now. There were some good episodes in Enterprise, but far too many awful episodes.
I've been going through a bit of classic sci fi TV nostalgia recently, in the quest to find something suitable to have on the telly while Nathan is awake. I'm really not keen on any of the stuff that gets pushed out at children these days, so going back to classic stuff like original series Star Trek and working my way through my Gerry Anderson collection makes a welcome reprieve from the overly colourful glove puppets that plague CBeebies. Thing is, being a mother does spoil a few of those classic moments, since I'm quietly evaluating this stuff for anything that could affect Nathan. Mainly, I don't want him to grow up thinking that women are objects of desire who wear skimpy clothing (though I have to admit to loving those old Kirk + alien female moments), and I definitely don't want him thinking that smoking is acceptable (ok, so Thunderbirds aired when it was all rather fab, but it's a shame it's in there at all).
Speaking of Thunderbirds, though, it was excellent to read a mini-interview with Gerry Anderson in SFX magazine recently. Gerry's recent revamp of Captain Scarlet using CG animation was a triumph, and though it was difficult to watch (ITV really messed up the scheduling and split episodes around their awful saturday morning TV show so I couldn't use Sky+), the show retained the same themes of excitement, friendship and mystery - I've put the DVDs on my Amazon wish list since I'm not going to be able to afford to purchase such things for a while. Anyway, back to the point, apparently one of the things he's considering doing next is a computer animated version of Thunderbirds - now that would be absolutely fantastic! While it's a shame that it's been so long now that some of the old voice talents have passed away, David Graham (voice of Brains, Parker, Gordon, and many more) is still around, and I believe Shane Rimmer (voice of Scott Tracy) is too (I was most pleased when I spotted him in the recent Batman Begins film!), so that's a great start... I'm keeping my fingers crossed!