Star Trek has been going
where no television show has gone before for half a century.
The
original series lasted only three seasons, from 1966 to 1969, but the program
gained new life in syndication during the 1970s. Instead of withering away, the
sci-fi phenomenon grew in popularity after its cancellation, spawning fan
clubs, fan fiction, conventions, a cartoon, merchandise (make that tons of merchandise), parodies, TV and
movie sequels and prequels, and much more, including Star Trek Beyond, which debuted in theaters July 22.
Set
in an optimistic future where humans have largely outgrown hunger, racism, and war
with one another, Star
Trek
was
created by humanist Eugene “Gene” Wesley Roddenberry, a.k.a. “The Great Bird of
the Galaxy.” He developed the show as “Wagon Train to the stars,” drawing
inspiration from the Western TV series Wagon
Train
(1957-1965), the space opera TV series Rocky
Jones, Space Ranger (1954), and the cinema classic Forbidden Planet (1956), along with such serials as Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939).
Literary
works influenced Roddenberry as well, including the writings of A.E. van Vogt (The Voyage of the Space Beagle), Eric Frank
Russell (the epic voyage of the Marathon),
and C.S. Forester (the Horatio Hornblower novels).
Roddenberry,
who died Oct. 24, 1991, at the age of 70, began his career in Hollywood during
the 1950s. While holding down a “real job” as an LAPD officer, he wrote scripts
under the name of “Robert Wesley” for such shows as Highway Patrol and Have
Gun Will Travel
.
Roddenberry’s
ambitions went beyond freelancing, so he developed a World War II adventure
series called APO 293, but couldn’t
get the networks interested. He had better luck with his next series, a Marine Corps
drama called The Lieutenant, which
NBC picked up in 1963. Unfortunately, The
Lieutenant, which featured Nichelle “Uhura” Nichols in its first episode,
only ran one season.
In
1964, Roddenberry filmed the pilot for Star
Trek,
with Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Christopher Pike and Leonard Nimoy as Science
Officer Spock. It was called “The Cage.” NBC executives deemed the program “too
cerebral” for mainstream audiences, but in a rare move, the network, seeing
potential in the concept, let Roddenberry film a second pilot (which they
approved, of course), this time with William Shatner in the lead role of Captain
James T. Kirk.
The
episode, which also introduced chief engineer Lt. Commander Scott (James
Doohan) and Lt. Sulu (George Takei), was called “Where No Man Has Gone Before.”
The title refers to Shatner’s famous voiceover introducing it and subsequent
episodes: “Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship
Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out
new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
The
first season of Star Trek, which
debuted Sept. 8, 1966, also saw the addition of: Dr. Leonard “Bones” McCoy
(DeForest Kelley), who was third-billed behind Shatner and Nimoy; Yeoman Janice
Rand (Grace Lee Whitney), who left midway through the first season; Christine
Chapel (Majel Barrett, Roddenberry’s wife), head nurse and assistant to McCoy;
and Lt. Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols), the first African-American female to
hold a prominent, non-stereotypical role in an American television series.
Walter Koenig joined the cast as Ensign Pavel Chekov in the second season.
During
its original run, Star
Trek was
nominated for Emmy Awards (13 nominations, 0 wins), and it had a fiercely loyal
cult following, but it was a relatively expensive show to produce, and its
ratings were only mediocre. Late in 1967, NBC was rumored to be cancelling the
show after just two seasons. However, in March of 1968, after receiving more
than 100,000 letters supporting the show (a campaign promoted by super fan Bjo
Trimble), NBC announced that they were renewing it for a third season.
Trek expert Paul Cortez, an IT
service manager at a Department of Energy research facility, understands the
passion that would prompt tens of thousands of fans to save what is “just” a TV
show.
“Star Trek examined certain progressive
and cultural issues,” he said. “The symbolism was not lost on the
counter-cultural mindset of many young people at the time who probably saw the
show as speaking in support of many of the same ideals they espoused. For that
reason, these first Baby Boomer fans were the ones who set out to make sure
that Star Trek should never be
forgotten, and they passed that enthusiasm on to younger fans of my generation
and beyond.”
In
addition to its social relevance, Cortez appreciates the exploratory nature of Star Trek.
“I
think the show never lost sight of showing people the wondrous possibilities of
exploration,” he said. “That exploring means you will possibly find things that
are dangerous but also things that are wonderful as well, and that the bad must
be accepted along with the good to give the act of exploration any kind of
meaning.”
Cortez
began watching the show in 1976 when he was in first grade.
“It
was on in late-afternoon syndication on a local station, but of course I had no
idea what syndication or reruns were at the time,” he said. “It was all brand
new to me. I watched it pretty much every day after school. I was mesmerized by
the bright colors of the characters' uniforms. The fact that the show was about
people who explored outer space was the most amazing thing ever, yet it seemed
to me to be the most natural thing that people would want to explore space.”
Citing
his favorite episode, Cortez bypassed such oft-cited classics as “The City on
the Edge of Forever,” “The Trouble With Tribbles,” and “Mirror, Mirror” in
favor of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield,” a heavy-handed but sincere
allegory for racial discrimination. In that third-season episode, which starred
Frank Gorshin, a humanoid alien whose face is black on the left side and white
on the right hates the guy whose face coloring is the opposite.
“‘Let
That Be Your Last Battlefield’ makes an open-and-shut case for the
pointlessness and potential risks of sustaining racial prejudice as part of a
society,” he said. “As an adult fan I've always felt that Star Trek was at its best when it had a strong, positive social
message, and this message was one of the show’s best.”
Cortez’s
favorite character, Spock, is a more obvious, more mainstream choice than his
favorite episode, but his reason for liking the green-blooded Vulcan is highly
personal in nature.
“By
the age of 8 my parents had divorced, and I had relocated to another city, so I
was going through a lot of emotional turmoil,” he said. “I would watch Star
Trek and
see Mr. Spock as an example of how I didn't have to let sadness and grief dominate
my mind if I chose not to. I also had a lot of emotionally volatile people on
both sides of my extended family, but Mr. Spock showed me that it was possible
and worthwhile to live a life with emotional restraint, as well as in pursuit
of knowledge as an end in itself. It's no exaggeration to say that Mr. Spock
was highly instrumental in putting my life on a better course than it would
have gone on had I not had his example to follow.”
On
a lighter note, Cortez shared a story about his father and Dr. McCoy. When he
was 7 years old, Cortez got a piece of glass stuck in his foot while swimming
at the lake, prompting him to exit the water “screaming and hysterically
limping around.”
“My
dad tried to hold me still so he could remove the glass, but I kept nervously
pulling my foot away from him,” he said. “Finally he looked at me and said,
‘Calm down, didn’t you know I used to be Dr. McCoy on Star Trek?’ As I was inclined to believe anything my dad told me at
this age, I immediately relaxed and let him pull the glass out of my foot and
get a bandage on it. That’s how much Star
Trek meant to me—I trusted Dr. McCoy more than my own father!”
From
a collecting standpoint, Cortez has “always been enamored with the different
types of spaceships, both those belonging to Starfleet and the different alien
races,” so a lot of his memorabilia is “centered around representations of
these ships ranging in scale from small vinyl-molded figures up through
full-sized model kits.”
Cortez
also has “quite a few” of the various Star
Trek-themed tactical and role-playing games published in the 1980s, but his
favorite item is an original Star Trek
bridge playset, which Mego released in 1974.
“This
bridge playset is basically a ‘Barbie Malibu Dream House’ for Trekkies,’ and I
say that unashamedly,” he said, laughing. “I enjoy it because it directly
connects me to that period of my childhood when I first discovered Star Trek.”
Devoted
Star Trek fan Mike Mahnich, owner of
Versus Gameplay Arcade in Plano, Texas, was born during the late 1960s, but he
didn’t discover the show until the 1979 premiere of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. His first memory of watching the TV
series was in 1982 during summer break.
“To
the best of my recollection, Star
Trek
didn’t run in syndication in the Dallas/Fort Worth area at that time,” he said.
“However, my brother and I would stay with my grandparents in Illinois for a
few weeks each summer, and a local station was showing reruns in syndication.
One of the episodes included ‘Space Seed’ as a tie-in with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. I had no idea that the movie had a
‘prequel’ episode on the original series, so I started watching other episodes
to see what else I had missed.”
Mahnich’s
favorite character is Captain Kirk because of Shatner’s delivery and the
captain’s strength of character. His favorite episode at the moment is “Who
Mourns for Adonais?” in which the crew of the Enterprise encounters the Greek
sun god Apollo.
“All
seven of the main cast are featured in this episode,” Mahnich said. “Also, I
always thought the idea of a giant hand in space holding the Enterprise was
awesome!”
Mahnich
collects Star Trek books, toys,
“unusual licensed items” (he seems especially proud of his Enterprise pizza
cutter), and Christmas ornaments, but one ornament in particular has remained
elusive.
“I
have a boxed collection of every Star Trek ornament put out by Hallmark, except
one,” he said. “In 2009, Hallmark had a booth at Comic-Con in San Diego
featuring an exclusive run of Lt. Uhura ornaments. It was a variation of a 2007
release featuring Uhura in her common red uniform, but the Comic-Con edition
has her dressed in yellow. Because she only wore yellow in one episode, ‘The
Corbomite Maneuver,’ and the run was limited to 450 ornaments, it is now hard
to find at a reasonable price. I have yet to see one in person.”
Mahnich’s
favorite Star Trek item is an early
U.S.S. Enterprise technical manual, though it has “plummeted in value” since he
got it years ago.
“Back
then there was no Internet, and fans would publish their own material,” he
said. “The tech manual I have, which was given to me by a great friend and
fellow fan, is obviously printed on a dot-matrix printer, which only makes it
cooler to me. It was probably sold at an early Star Trek convention.”
Mahnich
enjoys all of the various “Star Trek” series, including The Next Generation, which he watched with his parents while he was
in high school, and Voyager, which
he’s watching now on Netflix with his wife and kids.
A
self-described Trekkie/Trekker (“doesn’t matter which,” he says), Mahnich
believes The Original Series lives on
50 years later because of its “bold stories and well-defined characters,” along
with its positive outlook on the future.
“Star Trek really was ahead of its time
regarding diversity and dealing with social issues on TV,” Mahnich added. “So
much of what it has to say is still relevant, and since it teaches using the
metaphor of space adventures, it continues to gently influence its viewers,
even if they are not aware of it.”
was
created by humanist Eugene “Gene” Wesley Roddenberry, a.k.a. “The Great Bird of
the Galaxy.” He developed the show as “Wagon Train to the stars,” drawing
inspiration from the Western TV series 
(1957-1965), the space opera TV series Rocky
Jones, Space Ranger (1954), and the cinema classic Forbidden Planet (1956), along with such serials as Flash Gordon (1936) and Buck Rogers (1939).
. 
