I saw "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" as part of a birthday party for a kid named Mark, back in grade 6. He and his friend Tom approached me in the schoolyard to invite me. (Birthday parties were smaller back in those days - it was only the three of us.)
We went to McDonald's for dinner beforehand, where all of us got "Star Trek" happy meals. (I still remember one of the games on the side of the box "Can you spot the real McCoy?" in which you had to identify McCoy's face from among a bunch of similar faces.)
The film is known for being slow-moving, but I was fascinated by astronomy and space travel as a kid, and so it held my interest. I distinctly remember being awed by the lengthy docking sequence, which seemed more realistic than anything in Star Wars.
For some reason, I never saw Star Trek II (1982), III (1984), or IV (1986) in movie theatres. The next installment in the franchise that I actually saw in a theatre was Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (1989), which is not considered one of the best.
A couple of years later, I watched Star Trek II and III back to back on VHS during a field course. I rented Star Trek IV on my return, and started watching Star Trek: The Next Generation pretty regularly, thereafter, seeing all the remaining films in theatre.
I missed the J.J. Abrams reboots when they came out, but had a chance to catch them with my son at the beginning of the pandemic in 2020. I thought they were pretty good, but he prefers anime these days, and found them tedious.
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