This was a reply in Google+ to a comment, which encouraged people not to go to watch any new Star Trek movies.
Well, unfortunately, the first 'Trek movie I saw in a cinema, was Into Darkness
.
• My first physical Trek item was a keychain I got from my sister in 1995, who returned from a student trip to Florida. I loved the keychain, but after years of use, the appended Trek Star pendant was unable to hold itself onto the keychain, and is now lost somewhere. I still have the keychain part.
• My first 'Trek DVD is "Star Trek: Nemesis" (a present from a close relative).
• I bought my first and only Trek toy just a couple of years ago, and it was a small JJ-Enterprise by Hot Wheels.
I'm 34, and so late with all that fan stuff, though I've been a Trek fan since I first saw "Q Who?" on Finnish tv at a classmate's house.
And when I was a kid, I first heard of Star Trek in a hospital from an older kid (a teenager). It was the second or fourth time I was in a hospital, because I had had an ear infection (again). I still remember how he drew the outline of Enterprise-D, and said that people lived there and stuff. It was truly fascinating.
I can't exactly remember which year it was, but Estonia had not yet regained independence, and Finnish tv was officially verboten, but change was in the air already.
Not all people could see Finnish commercial tv channel MTV3 (launched in 1986), because their sets didn't have the "Finnish block" or "the Finnish antenna" (probably PAL support), but those that could see, salivated at all the yoghurt ads, and cried the most bitter tears for not having all that yummy goodness :9
Whilst we had the deficit. And there were block-long queues for sugar, for milk, for butter, for meat (any kind), for oranges (rare!),
for tangerines (
only during holidays),
for bananas (the
nomenklatura and the wives of Soviet officers could have a lot of everything from special shops meant for the
nomenklatura, but bananas were on occasion sold to families with lots of children),
for cotton (important for the ladies),
for ciggies, for vodka, and for almost everything else.
Basically, anywhere you saw a queue, you joined it and then information about what people were standing in the queue for, was eventually passed down the grapevine. Like in that children's game of "Telephone" (-: