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Trekkie Fever '87: Star Trek Comes of Age
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12910 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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5 / 1987 |
1,975 Words |
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Douglas C. Moore
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It was just twenty-one years ago - September 8, 1966, to be exact - that television viewers first heard the now-immortal words: "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 civilization, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
Having learned to boldly split infinitives the way scientists split atoms, the producers of a brand-new television series, Star Trek, opened a new era in science fiction and gave birth to an entertainment phenomenon unparalleled in adulation and analytical devotion by fans soon to be known as "Trekkies" and "Trekkers." They exhibited a fanatic reverence for anything and everything connected with Star Trek and its characters, which still enjoy what one wag has called a "skin-deep but worldwide appeal."
Roddenberry's Brainchild
The series was the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, a former airplane pilot and Los Angeles policeman. He wrote his first script in the early 1960s about the intergalactic goodwill missions of a crew on a spaceship commissioned by the "United Federation of Planets" sometime in the twenty-third century. He submitted his idea to numerous studios, and finally NBC agreed to do a pilot show. It was filmed in 1964 but was never aired. The pilot, entitled Cage, was "too cerebral for TV audiences" said network officials, but a new episode sample was nevertheless requested. The second effort, filmed in 1965 and titled Where No Man Has Gone, was accepted. It contained all the creative elements and cast that were to contribute to Star Trek's enduring popularity, and NBC gave the go-ahead for the series. The rest, as they say, is history.
The starship's five-year mission ultimately was cut short, lasting just under three years. The seventy-eight episodes that were broadcast ran during the autumn-spring seasons beginning 1966, 1967, and 1968, with the last-gasp episode being aired June 3, 1969. NBC, it seems, had never been overly enchanted with the series. In fact, the network had planned to cancel it at the end of the first season in 1967. When the news leaked out, thousands of unanticipated fans launched a letter-writing campaign begging the network to reconsider. NBC was baffled but intrigued, to say nothing of surprised, and they ordered a second season of Star Trek. Still not satisfied with the ratings at the end of its second season, NBC again planned to cancel, and again an avalanche of Trekkie mail prevailed, and the third season followed. For some reason, perhaps because of the allegorical current-events statements in these artfully veiled morality plays, there was an intensely devoted core audience - a silent-but-powerful minority - even though the series had not caught on with the broader audience. Not yet, that is!
Even the fans admit that the third season's episodes were beginning to creak. This time NBC's decision prevailed, and the series bit the dust. Was Roddenberry's dream finished? Were the fans frustrated? Not that one could notice.
The Trekkies organized themselves in greater numbers, and regional Star Trek conventions sprang up, some attracting as many as ten thousand of the faithful. They traded pictures, swapped stories, rehashed and analyzed each episode, and dissected each
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