I was a kid (7-9) when the original series came out. Like
Rowan & Martin's Laugh In it was one of the few programs my mother let me stay up to watch. She felt that the episodes were something of an education in tolerance and cooperation between disparate cultures: little morality plays.
In hindsight, the first (black and white) season of
Lost In Space was better SciFi, but on balance it was a good show and one of the first cult faves that were continued to be produced despite generally low ratings based on strong viewer loyalty.
The Next Generation completely passed me by when it was current, because I didn't buy my first television until 1988 when I was in my late 20s (and then primarily to watch rented videos on: I haven't been a fan of broadcast TV since my early teens). And since the big-budget, special effects mega movie interpretations of
Star Trek were precisely the kind of cinematic spectacles I always disdained I've missed those as well without regret.
But in 1989, newly-single and (momentarily) a cable subscriber, I had a regular date with reruns of
TNG on early Saturday evenings after work and before dinner and socializing, and acquainted myself with Captain Picard and his crew enough to appreciate how much more refined and subtle the concept had evolved.
It wasn't until 2005 that I finally saw
Deep Space Nine and
Voyager reruns on Spike on free afternoons. The former left me cold, but the latter really intrigued me and, I gotta admit, hooked me totally (I think Chakotay had something to do with it

).
It was only my appreciation for
Voyager that got me at all interested in watching
Enterprise reruns on the SciFi channel, and even then it was intermittent, hit-or-miss. Bakula's never done a thing for me, but
Connor Trineer definitely rang a couple of my bells. In general, I felt the series was too ambitious in story arcs (without a continual investment of time and a strict following of the episodes in sequential order, it was baffling), and severely hamstrung by the limits of the gizmos available to the characters of the (presumed) 22nd century. It lacks both the gee-whizz toys and compelling interpersonal relationships that made
Voyager so intriguing to me.
Stylistically, the first, original series was the only one in any way appealing to me. The esthetics of
TNG are about as eye-catching as the speculatively-built suburban office-park developments they so resemble (all beige, mauve and sea-foam green), and
Voyager has all the visual appeal of a rented Corolla (a symphony of grays from dove to anthracite).
Enterprise, in keeping the tech down to a minimum, has the claustrophobic feeling of being on a submarine, not a starship, and everything looks like it's got five coats of glossy oil-based paint like a battleship fighting the Battle of Midway. And don't even get me started on those astronaut jump-suits.
This new
Star Trek movie revives the original series' mod style of miniskirts, go-go boots and big hair (though that's not seen in the clip linked above). From my perspective, that is more important than exploding planets and warp-drive distortions. If the characters are real and interesting and the actors have some chemistry together, it should be hugely successful.