It’s so bizarre to read this in the present, knowing how incredible TNG was, but I get it - the original crew WAS Star Trek to them.
The dedicated fans revived this series in syndication, well after it had gone off the air in 1969, and felt attached to the characters that they had obsessed over between then and the 1980s. Like modern fans, they thought that departure from what they knew would ruin it.
I wish I could go back in time and tell them that TNG is going to rock.
I mean that I wish I could tell all the people who were worried back then that everything was going to work out great, not that they’re all gone and dead now - lost to the sands of time, from the forgotten age of the 1980s…