Star Trek II, III, VI & Insurrection

I never got "into" TOS growing up, I've always been a hard-core TNG fan I think because I wasn't really appreciative of movies that had a lot of explosions.  But I finally saw some of the original movies last night and I have to say, I sorta get it now.  I mean, I always kinda liked Spock.  I had seen The Search For Spock on TV a time or two.  I also remember being dragged to an awful party some co-workers of my Dad and Stemother threw when I was little, and in the basement all the kids were playing and the Star Trek movie with the whales was on TV and it really sucked me in.  So anyway, I have been converted!  I now have a deeper fondness for the original cast and crew.  The films caught my attention more than the original series did. Here are a couple of points I'd like to touch on, regarding the films.

  One thing the Original has over TNG is that they show the casualties from battle maimed, in agony and dying.  They show young men burned almost beyond recognition, moaning in terrible pain.  The reason I feel this is important is because our country was not far removed from the vietnam conflict during which images of soldiers wounded, in pain and dying were saturating our collective conscience.  The realities of war were a whole lot more present for people in that era, and I can't help but assume that Roddenberry's experiences as a pilot in WWII contributed to such a portrayal of armed conflict.  I am thinking of a very evocative scene in which Kirk is in sick bay comforting a dying crewman in a room full of wounded soldiers.  It really felt like a mournful rendering of war-time events.  The kind of experience that really stays with people who found themselves in situations like that.

TNG on the other hand rarely shows crew members getting blown up or experiencing any prolonged suffering as a result of their injuries.  Sometimes whole planets worth of people are killed, but they don't show us any mass or individual suffering, its just a report read off of a screen.  Often when someone dies aboard the 1701-D they haven't got a mark on them.  Never have I seen more deaths due to a good hard bump on the head.  I think the pie chart showing 24th century fatality would look something like: