“Get a life, will you people?” William Shatner sneered at a crowded convention hall on an iconic sketch on Saturday Night Live. As we see Star Trek hit its golden anniversary, it’s remarkable to look back on the legacy of a television series that bucked the odds, survived for only seventy-nine episodes, yet spawned an entire industry. No television series has made more money at the box office. Without the Star Trek conventions of the 70s, would we have DragonCon today?
And think of the jobs the little show that could generated. Entire industries formed around devices that were merely plastic props, created to simplify needs of scripts. And WHAT scripts. Particularly in the early running, Star Trek’s adventures were penned by giants of the science fiction world, Jerry Sohl, Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, and George Clayton Johnson. Let’s not forget “Psycho” scribe Robert Bloch, who contributed three episodes to the show.
I’ll forever remember discovering the program myself, on WHP-TV in Harrisburg, PA. It was the mid 70s, and thanks to the forward thinking of a programmer in Philadelphia, (the late lamented WKBS) Star Trek had discovered its stride, stripped to five days a week in syndication, the most popular dramatic series ever syndicated, second only to I Love Lucy in popularity. The episode I saw was one of Bloch’s, “What Are Little Girls Made Of?” It was a tale about mankind losing his humanity to the mechanical trappings of its own creation. Kind of like we are now with our iPhones and Facebook, no? I was instantly captivated by William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and a guest cast that included the late great Ted Cassidy as the hulking android Ruk. I soon made an appointment with the Enterprise every weekday afternoon at 4:30.
Dad caught me one afternoon watching an episode entitled “Miri,” which used Andy Taylor’s Mayberry, albeit in urban decay, as a backdrop. Confused, Dad asked me where they parked the ship. I’m not sure, but that may have inspired my very first eye roll. He used to like to kid me about Trek, but Mom told me one night that she caught HIM watching the two-part episode “The Menagerie,” my personal favorite, and noting that he was very impressed.
She was too. My mother was very cautious about the television that my sister and I were watching. The Wild Wild West and Mission: Impossible were forbidden, but she was okay with Star Trek, and by the way, so were the OTHER moms in the neighborhood. It didn’t take more than a cursory glance to see that Trek was intelligent, exciting, but FAR less violent than its contemporary TV cousins.
The stories are rampant of kids who grew up watching Captain Kirk and his crew and being inspired to be doctors like McCoy, or engineers like Scotty. Those kids grew to adulthood and brought into existence iPhones, floppy disk computers, and more recently, even diagnostic beds and tricorders are becoming reality. In fact, Spock’s library computer on the bridge ALREADY looks hopelessly dated next to the information libraries that we can access, without floppy disks or cartridges.
I loved the action-adventure component to Star Trek, but what entranced me right away was the acting, particularly that of everyone’s favorite Vulcan, Leonard Nimoy. I understood early on that these were actors playing roles, and telling terrific stories. And I found myself captivated by what Nimoy would do with a raised eyebrow, an irritated glance … emotions that were supposedly absent in Vulcans. Gene Roddenberry initially approached Martin Landau to play Spock, but Landau told him he couldn’t “play wooden.” Ironically, it was Nimoy who would go on to replace Landau on “Mission: Impossible,” mostly so that he could keep his office space at Desilu. It wasn't long before I was hungrily searching for Nimoy's other projects, so that I could see him perform and work other roles. I had the privilege of meeting him at a convention in Wilkes-Barre in the mid 80s. It's a wonderful thing when your personal hero lives up to and exceeds all your expectations. Such a man was Leonard Nimoy.
For years we have been told that Star Trek was a ratings disaster during its abbreviated network run. But in Marc Cushman's outstanding These Are the Voyages book series, he publishes the weekly Nielsen ratings, and we discover that Trek regularly won its time slot week in and week out, or placing a close second, even during repeat season. NBC canceled the series to cash out, and fed us the Nielsen fable to cover up the REAL reason, which was that creator/producer Gene Roddenberry was such a headache to the brass. To the network's horror, the program would go on to make a small fortune in syndication, launch four spin-offs (with number five arriving next year), and to date thirteen big-budget motion pictures. Needless to say, its replacement on the network, Bracken's World, didn't do that.
The tales of Star Trek are intricately woven into the fabric of our lives now. It is to us today what Homer's Odyssey was to the ancient Greeks ... fairy tales that everyone knows and to which they can relate. Even non-fans chuckle when Jim Carrey invokes the “Amok Time” fight music in his movie “The Cable Guy.”
But Star Trek's greatest attribute isn't its sterling casts and generally stellar writing. The true lead performer for this franchise is optimism. Star Trek dares to postulate that we will survive and thrive as a race into the 23rd and 24th centuries, shedding our prejudices and foibles as our ancestors cast off theirs. We will work in harmony with those who used to be our enemies, i.e. Russians and Klingons. So happy golden anniversary, Star Trek. I can’t imagine our world without you. And I’m so grateful that I’ll never have to.
