Quote Originally Posted by KillianHawkeye View Post
In the 80s, you could easily find some TV channel playing reruns of Star Trek in syndication. That's how I watched it as a kid.
You are 100% right, and Star Trek was shown consistently on one of my local TV channels since 1969, so a lot of people knew about Star Trek. The problem, however, was that there was no "on demand", so we had to watch whatever episode was showing at whatever time slot the station wanted, which was usually midnight. There were some die-hard Star Trek fans who knew a lot about the show, but I was not that into it, so there were a lot of episodes I didn't see. On top of that, there was no internet to fact check or discuss issues, so I had only passing familiarity with the show. That's why we knew about the parallel universe and evil Spock had facial hair, but not enough to know Mr Sulu had a big scar instead. If I had known that, I absolutely would have had assassins with big scars on their faces!

BTW, growing up in the 80s I found that D&D players were more into LoTR and other fantasy novels than into science fiction, but that might have just been my experience. The people who liked sci-fi gravitated more to Traveller or BattleTech.