TNG

A newly uploaded YouTube clip shows two Entertainment Tonight segments from July 1987 where they visit the set of TNG during the shooting of the pilot.

Exactly 20 years ago today Paramount sent out print, TV and radio spots promoting their new Star Trek The Next Generation series, premiering in September 1987. Take a look at this promo video included on the 1987 VHS release of Star Trek IV (the 1986 hit movie that helped convince Paramount to bring Trek back to TV).

The current issue of TV Guide has an interesting Trek item in their regular ‘Hotlist: Best of the Web’ sidebar. It announces that Star Trek The Next Generation is now available to view online for free at VEOH.com That is big news as TNG is the only Trek series not available online (plus TOS, DS9, VOY and ENT episodes all cost $1.99 at XBox Live, Amazon UnBox and Apple iTunes). But once you visit the channel TV Guide lists it quickly becomes clear that this is not a new offering from CBS (who have an official VEOH channel), but rather pirated episodes being uploaded by a Norwegian teenage girl named Monica (aka ‘Meopic90’ pictured right). In addition to the channel owner clue, each episode is branded with the name and url of an unauthorized torrent site…oops.

As part of our 20th Anniversary celebration of Star Trek The Next Generation, here are clips from LeVar Burton’s Reading Rainbow visiting the TNG set during the first season.

Last weekend Patrick Stewart dropped by ITV’s Parkinson  to talk about life back in the UK. TNG’s Picard stated that his return was permanent and that by the time he was offered the opportunity to return to the English stage had had grown "bitterly homesick." Although he did not mention Star Trek specifically, he did seem to be derisive of his time working in Hollywood. When I went to do all this exciting and thrilling work in Hollywood, and remunerative work too, and sunshine and palm trees and all of that, it was fun but there was a substance that was lacking in it. Because what I’m doing now is all that I wanted to do and I increasingly began to feel panicked.

During 2007 we will peridically post retrospective interviews, features and found clips to celebrate TNG’s 20th birthday. Here is a BBC interview with Patrick Stewart from a few years ago (edited to just the Trek bits). He talks about how he got the job, the choice of Picard’s accent, fandom and the film Trekkies.

Patrick Stewart seems to be continuing to distance himself from Star Trek and Jean Luc Picard. In an interview with The Stage, the veteran actor talks about the life changing event in 1986 when he choose to  do Star Trek: The Next Generation instead of taking a role in "Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf" on the London stage.    I was a different actor after that — doing that kind of play, and finally being able to make truth of an emotional commitment to a role like that in such a small, exposing theatre, with the support of three magnificent actors [Billie Whitelaw, Saskia Reeves and Matthew Marsh], made all the difference to me. The calamity that then happened to me was that I was offered Star Trek: The Next Generation. […]It did change many, many things, and I’m immensely grateful for that. I have worked hard not in any sense to feel they were wasted years —though time is a factor in all of this, and I now have a lot of catching up to do. I feel that acutely — not that there have been lost opportunities, but that there are things I might have done and I’ve got to do a lot of them quickly now.