Star Trek’s Slow Start
“Captain's log, stardate 1513.1. Our position, orbiting planet M-113. Onboard the Enterprise, Mr. Spock, temporarily in command. On the planet, the ruins of an ancient and long dead civilization. Ship’s surgeon McCoy and myself are now beaming down to the planet’s surface.” With these words, a new television series made its debut 40 earth years ago this week. It was a flop.
The show featured the crew of the Starship Enterprise, whose mission was “to explore strange new worlds.” It was canceled after three seasons. Yet despite that failure, Star Trek was destined to go where no television series had gone before. It would become one of the most far-reaching of all entertainment franchises and evolve into an ever-present cultural landmark.
Early television had seen a few science fiction series, including Captain Video and Space Rangers, but the genre didn’t seem well suited to the small screen. Production costs were high, and the stories were often weird. Studios liked simple, inexpensive sets; viewers liked familiarity.
Gene Roddenberry, a journeyman television writer who had worked on Westerns like Have Gun, Will Travel, conceived Star Trek as a way to overcome these limits. It would be “Wagon Train to the stars,” he declared. Weekly plots drawn from all over the galaxy would play out mainly within the confines of the Enterprise, so the sets could be used over and over. The stories would revolve around a regular cast, Capt. James T. Kirk and the rest of the ship’s crew. Still, the show would be expensive, and Roddenberry was lucky to sell the concept to Lucille Ball’s Desilu studio, which induced NBC to broadcast it.
Star Trek appealed to a loyal but limited audience. Most TV viewers in the 1960s weren’t impressed by hokey scenery, ray guns, and cornball deep-space melodrama. So after two money-losing seasons, NBC decided to cancel the show. However, a fan letter-writing campaign, orchestrated by Roddenberry himself, won a stay of execution for another year. The series went off the air in 1969, two months before the Apollo XI astronauts landed on the moon.
The look of the original series, which became a template for later Star Trekincarnations, melded Roddenberry’s imagination with the realities of limited budgets. The fanciful costumes were derived from the pulp sci-fi magazines he had enjoyed as a youth. The transporter unit, which gave birth to the catchphrase “Beam me up, Scotty,” was a practical solution to a production problem. To show the Enterpriselanding on a different planet in each episode would be far too costly; the transporter allowed the characters to visit planets while the ship remained in orbit.
Just getting to those far-flung worlds was a conceptual challenge. The show’s writers, who often included seasoned science fiction authors, came up with the notion of the “warp drive” engine, which could power the ship through a space warp and thereby travel faster than the speed of light. A “universal translator” conveniently allowed the crew to communicate with alien races in English.
In the 1970s television became an expanding universe, as proliferating cable channels fueled demand for programming, and Star Trek began to appear regularly in reruns. As Spock said in one of the early episodes, “Random chance seems to have operated in our favor.” “In plain, non-Vulcan English,” Doctor McCoy explained, “we've been lucky.”
Lucky indeed. In syndication the series acquired a swelling cohort of fans. Roddenberry took the concept to Hollywood in 1979, creating the first of a string of feature films. With the success of the movies, television executives pushed for a new series. Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in 1987 and proved the adaptability of the concept. A new set of cast members won new fans, with the Shakespearean actor Patrick Stewart’s restrained and formal Captain Jean-Luc Picard filling Kirk’s role. That series enjoyed a successful seven-year run.
Four more television series, ten movies, and countless novels, comic books, websites, and Ph.D. dissertations have turned Star Trek into a universe in itself. The edifice was built on a fan base of legendary devotion. For 40 years fans have charted every plot development, catalogued the hundreds of planets visited by starships, and studied the science and speculation that made up the Star Trek technical world. They meet regularly in local clubs and international conventions. They attend camps to become fluent in the Klingon language.
The show’s influence has been ubiquitous. NASA scientists named the first space shuttle Enterprise following yet another letter-writing campaign by fans. When Mae Jemison became the first African-American woman to fly in space in 1992, she cited as a role model Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer in the original Star Trek. Martin Cooper, Motorola’s chief engineer, was impressed by the flip-open personal communicators used on Star Trek long before the design was incorporated in cellular telephones.
The reason for the success of any entertainment venture can be hard to pin down. Some critics scoffed at William Shatner’s vein-popping overacting as Captain Kirk, and studio honchos were nervous about the satanic look of his Vulcan sidekick, the highly logical Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy). Yet the pair endure as two of the most distinctive and memorable characters in all of television.
The human drama of Star Trek was a big part of its appeal, but Roddenberry’s optimistic vision of the future also contributed to the series’ enduring popularity. In his twenty-third century, mankind has left behind tribal hatreds to unite in a “Federation” of planets. This was an inviting idea at a time when dystopia was the norm in science fiction and advancing technology seemed to be doing little to free the world of war and discord. The Enterprise ventured forth not to conquer but to explore. Its crew came in peace and used phasers to kill only in extremis.
Many fans have also responded to the overt tolerance that reigned aboard the Enterprise. Though multiethnic casting is common today, 1960s television was an almost exclusively white medium. “Leave any bigotry in your quarters, mister,” Captain Kirk tells a crew member. “There’s no room for it on the bridge.” Roddenberry fought with censors to include the first interracial kiss ever shown on television, between Kirk and Uhura, who was played by Nichelle Nichols. And Star Trek broke ground in gender equality, culminating in the series Voyager, which featured a female ship captain.
In the spring of 2005, the final Star Trek television series went off the air, marking the first time since the Reagan administration that an original version of the program hadn’t been on. The most recent movie, Star Trek: Nemesis, was a box-office bust in 2002. Manned space flight has lost much of its promise. Tolerance is sneered at as “political correctness.” Is this the end of the trek?
Don’t count on it. The movie Star Trek XI is on the planning boards, and the rumor mills have the actor Matt Damon reprising the role of Captain Kirk. As Kirk himself once said, “Some people think the future means the end of history. They’re wrong. We haven’t run out of history quite yet.”