40 Years of Trekkin'

(Star Trek premiered on Sept. 8 1966, the first of 79 50-minute episodes and the beginning of a franchise dynasty)

I will be honest and say that I don't recall when I first saw an episode of Star Trek. Even at the age of 6, which I was when the show premiered, I certainly would have wanted to see it. But it came on late at night and was perhaps across from something else someone else wanted to see (only 3 channels, and already viewing conflicts existed). I suppose my older brother would have wanted to see it and had some say. But decades of reruns have blurred the memory of the first viewings. I likely saw it early in the run, but cannot say with certainty.

But even at that age I was mad - mad, I tell you! - for anything remotely science-fictional. And once I saw the show I was hooked. It wasn't just the aliens, the bright colors, the exotic planets - it was the forwardness of it, "the human adventure just beginning". Star Trek assumed that people would not only be around in a couple of centuries, but they would all be getting along fairly well and sampling what the big brawling galaxy had to offer, a view of the future which held for me great appeal.

And it is a testimony to the power of the show's influence over 4 decades, that I cannot readily separate memories around the show from one another. It seems that it has always been a part of my life. So memories of shaping a phaser out of wood (clock gears provided the controls) nudge up against attending the opening night of the first movie (disappointing), and playground re-enactments of scenes from the night before coexist with memories of going over to a high-school friend's house late on Saturday to catch a ST rerun before heading out to see a midnight movie. Star Trek is at once for me an innocent and a jaded experience.

Yet it still has power, and pull, and a warm familiarity. I have to admit that when I sampled the DVD release of TOS Trek I got excited about it all over again. (Even though the packaging design for those releases was foully clumsy...) There were the shows in all their original glory, bright and untrimmed. (Nothing worse for a ST fan, who knows every line, to see a copy which has been relentlessly shortened to make room for yet another commercial - "Wait, what about the bit where Bones says...?") And because of the advances in TV technology, the shows look better than when they originally aired, bright and crisp.

(Almost too good, in fact - even without hi-def TV, one can see many little details and flaws: thumbprints on control panels, dirt on the floor, lint on uniforms, the nicks at the bottom edge of set pieces... Only Spock's ears always look good, even in close-up. And the new clarity of the DVDs removes from us any lingering ability to suspend disbelief that the stuntman is actually William Shatner. When we first saw a fight scene go from close-up to long shot, it was "who is that guy in the gold tunic who just got into the fight"? - the difference was so obvious. This jarring change of personnel has led to a new drinking game, "Kirk/NotKirk": watch a fight scene, and every time it jumps to NotKirk you take a shot...)

I've never considered myself a 'Trekkie', one of those extreme fans who strongly embrace the show and are easily parodized for their carrying the trappings of it. Sure, I know the plot of every show and the titles of most. And I read all of the James Blish versions of the stories as they came out in books. And I watched the animated series, caught the show on reruns, attended the movies and tried on every new iteration of the series as they appeared. And I went to my first Star Trek convention when I was 16 and bought photos and stuff and peed in the next urinal to Walter Koenig and Oh Shit maybe I am a Trekkie after all.

This is a staggering realization, if you think of Trekkies only as those people whom Shatner zinged in the famous SNL "Get a Life!" skit - nerds who focus on the show as an escape from the world they feel ill-at-ease in. But of course that is just an exaggeration, extreme examples of the subculture. Sure, they exist - but so do extreme sports fans who paint themselves with their team's colors and do outrageous things at games. Star Trek fans reside along a broad continuum of involvement with the show, that continuum as broad as the whole culture itself.

And I have to maintain that the culture as a whole is influenced by Star Trek, or at least the ideals which Star Trek showcased. What Roddenberry pitched as "Wagon Train, to the Stars" also carried his visions of a better future, the adventure opening us up to infection by the dreams. In Roddenberry's future, color or heritage or even species doesn't matter. Sex still matters - some of the male/female interactions seem incredibly dated now. But just having a woman in the chain of command was quite a leap in those days, and Roddenberry kept pushing at those boundaries. And in the framework of science fiction, he discussed social problems which were taboo in any other genre of the time. (Admittedly, sometimes clumsily - the "black/white" aliens still make me wince, even with Frank Gorshin classing up the joint.)

Star Trek also got people of the time thinking about the possibilities represented by the technological change which was coming fast and furious. In the midst of newly-arising concerns about pollution and environmental degradation, ST showed people a clean shiny future - an attractive alternative to strive for. (I'm of two minds about this - one can also point to ST as supporting the belief in the "technofix" which sometimes gets in the way of effective present-day action; people think "why should I worry about recycling, when technology will come along to fix everything we have messed up?" But that is a measure of Star Trek's influence too.) And ST envisioned a world inherently without want or poverty, and without the strife which arises from need - an attractive dream when the increasingly-televised world was shown as being a place of vast inequalities.

For me, one of the most impressive aspects of Trekdom is that it was not an accident - Roddenberry knew exactly what he was doing, what effect he wanted to have. The show's success may have surprised others, but not Gene - he set out to tell stories about better people in a better future, and he figured other people would enjoy that prospect as well. The continuing popularity of the Star Trek universe has proven him right.