by Edward Gross
And that, as they say, should have been that.
Only it wasn’t.
Star Trek lived thanks to the fledgling business of television syndication, which introduced the show to an entirely new audience that had missed it the first time around. Many of those viewers—young and affluent—watched the sacred seventy-nine classic episodes over and over again, eventually passing them on to their children.
In 1973, Filmation produced two seasons of an Emmy Award–winning animated series based on the show for NBC. Unlike other kidvid of its time, it included the involvement of the series’ original creators and cast and dealt with surprisingly adult and heady themes for a Saturday-morning cartoon series.
But ultimately Star Trek, its blockbuster movie series, and the myriad spin-offs it later inspired—including its highly rated successor series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which blasted off in 1987—have had a seismic cultural impact that extends and endures far beyond their television airings. Not only did the series inspire fervent fan conventions that continue to flourish decades after its original airing, but the show itself inspired numerous fans to become doctors, engineers, inventors, and showrunners. Its influence can be seen in the most cutting-edge of today’s technological gadgets, ranging from mobile phones to tablet computers and virtual reality.
The series also was one of the first to feature a multicultural and multiracial cast, and whose fans range from such legendary figures as Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama, Tom Hanks to Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie to Eddie Murphy, and Bill Gates to Steve Jobs.
In addition, the series lexicon of Treknology is well known and often invoked in contemporary journalism, whether it be “beam me up, Scotty,” “warp speed,” or “resistance is futile.”
Today, Star Trek continues to live long and prosper after five decades of boldly going. Some are obsessed by it, others perplexed. For decades, critics and fans have attempted to dissect the unique alchemy that has ensured the franchise’s ongoing popularity as well as understand the man who created it, Gene Roddenberry. Here are a few more reasons why it still endures.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
“Trek” means walking, voyaging. And the name Star Trek really means voyaging from star to star. I knew it was the right title because when I first mentioned it to the network executives, they said, “We don’t like it.”
IRA STEVEN BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The theory I’ve always heard says that when the western died, science fiction filled the gap. We could not dream in the past anymore, so we started to dream in the future.
THOMAS DOHERTY (professor of American studies, Brandeis University)
The Frederick Jackson Turner notions of what defines Americans is the frontier; it’s not our Puritan past, but how the frontier is always rehabilitating and nurturing and reestablishing the American traits of individualism and freedom. It’s the frontier which makes us Americans, and we have to have initiative and inventiveness and youth and strength and canniness to survive on the frontier—and also we also have to kill the Indians. “Space, the final frontier” is really manifest destiny.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (consulting producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
Star Trek wasn’t a big hit in the sixties when it came out, but it hit in the seventies when there was this malaise and lack of trust in government and you had this iconic American hero at the center of it, and he’s surrounded by an international group. It really spoke to America as this great thing. For the British, James Bond is sort of patriotic. The British are still at the center of the world, even though historically they’re not. There’s a way in which Star Trek is the same thing for America.
THOMAS DOHERTY
The show is sort of both modest enough to respect the indigenous aliens of off-worlds, but at the same time, we know in the end we have to show them how to do things and our values are better. It has the arrogance of American exceptionalism, even though we say we have the noninterference prime directive, but basically we’re going into these places and showing them “how to live right,” which is very American, too.
JONATHAN LARSEN (executive producer, MSNBC)
The image we have of Star Trek’s politics changes with our own politics. It can be tricky trying to divine the political ideology of Trek’s creators and writers from the plotlines and story resolutions and the tics and arcs of individual characters. Yes, “James Tiberius Kirk” reads an awful lot like an analogue of “John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
MICHAEL PILLER (executive producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
The early Star Trek original recipe was a very Kennedy-esque sort of mission to save the universe. Let’s get these guys out there and show them what democracy is and educate … and if they don’t do it the way we want to, we’ll hit a few and line them up and get them the way we want them.
JONATHAN LARSEN
Kennedy saw the exploration of space as an obligation, not necessarily in pursuit of a goal, but because he recognized space exploration as the inevitable next step if our society was to remain forward-looking and forward-moving. Similarly, Kennedy had little interest in looking back, in honoring old grudges and historical enmity.
BRANNON BRAGA (executive producer, cocreator, Star Trek: Enterprise)
There was something ineffable running through them all, which was Gene Roddenberry’s philosophy. And whether or not people were aware of Star Trek’s appeal because it presented a utopian future, what I think was critical to its appeal is that it’s a universe where everyone has a place. No matter how weird or perhaps even disabled you are, even if you’re blind, you have a role, and that’s attracted a lot of people.
JONATHAN LARSEN
Consider how jaw-droppingly radical and likely unacceptable the resolution of “The Devil in the Dark” would be today. The rock-like monster slaughters miners relentlessly. What is its punishment? A business deal. A contract to work with those miners it did not kill. There is no retribution. There is no vengeance. Moreover, denying the emotional need for retribution is portrayed not as weakness, but as manly maturity. It’s virtually impossible to imagine mainstream fiction in the post-Reagan, let alone post–9/11, era forswearing a violently punitive ending to a story such as this. But that was what mature, realistic, clearheaded, albeit idealized, government looked like back then. Mature leadership meant becoming the generation that finally severed the self-regenerating legacies of violence.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
It’s based on the idea of IDIC, which was one of the backbones of the original series. It’s the philosophy that’s always really kind of resonated with me. I did not grow up watching Star Trek. I liked Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard. It wasn’t until later in life, through the fans, that I got a different perspective of what Star Trek was, and then I went back and I’d start to get it. We all know the term “IDIC,” which means “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It’s the idea that it’s universal acceptance.
JONATHAN LARSEN
The same astonishing quality of mercy, or maturity, drives “Balance of Terror.” Kirk admonishes a crewman whose descendants were killed by Romulans that it was “their war … not yours.” Try to imagine a modern epic with the kind of in-the-moment self-reflection we see in “Arena.” “We could be in the wrong.” What political leader would ever dare utter publicly the words “that is something best decided by diplomats”? It’s an acknowledgment of and respect for nuance and expertise—and a rejection of essentialism and exceptionalism—that’s virtually unimaginable today.
BRYAN FULLER (coproducer, Star Trek: Voyager)
The Munsters and Star Trek were the shows I would watch when I got home from school. They both had a lot to do with creatures and also being inclusive worlds, in a way. Because the Munster family was very much an inclusive world. They allowed any kind of freak flag to fly. And we learned that in Star Trek there is an entire universe out there o
f different varieties of people—and all of them are okay. It was an early lesson in inclusivity. I was living in a household where my dad didn’t want me to watch The Jeffersons because it had black people in it. It was that level of small-town seventies suburban racism.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
Star Trek was at its finest when it was a morality play. It took decades for me to draw the correlation between “This Side of Paradise” and the Summer of Love. But of course, even as a kid, I knew that “Mudd’s Women” was about space hookers.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
I think that the multiculturalism was great because of the time; you had an African-American, an Asian, and this fake Russian on the bridge of the Enterprise.
ROD RODDENBERRY
There was a great quote that D. C. Fontana said about Nichelle Nichols and having a black officer on the bridge and what my father said to that. Apparently, he would get letters from the TV stations in the South saying they won’t show Star Trek because there is a black officer, and he’d say, “Fuck off, then.”
CHRIS PRATT (actor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World)
It had all kinds of different races and various male and female characters from different alien races all around in power, in relationships with each other at a time when that wasn’t cool, you know? It was very progressive.
JONATHAN LARSEN
It’s interesting that no matter how sophisticated or advanced we imagine some work of fiction to be, the years almost always seem to reveal some element that was awkwardly, embarrassingly backward. Many early cartoons had their moments of racism—in both the depiction of people of color and the lack thereof. And Star Trek had its moments in that regard, too.
But its worst, most well-documented flaw can be found embodied in the output of the wardrobe department, courtesy of Mr. Roddenberry: the skirts. Maybe the creators of Star Trek believed that a true portrayal of an utterly gender-equal, let alone non-ageist, future would not fly on commercial television in the 1960s and so did as much as they could—giving women, albeit short in years and hemlines, “real” jobs and occasionally real authority. One would hope this was the case, given that the creators themselves were not all men.
Either way, the extent of gender equality that Star Trek did muster paved the way for public acceptance, not just of future female Federation captains … but actual, real-life female astronauts, too. As in so many other regards, even when it came to elements of our politics and our culture, in imagining our future, Star Trek made it possible.
SCOTT MANTZ
I will never forget in “Turnabout Intruder” when Kirk goes, “It’s better to be dead than to be alone in the body of a woman.” That makes the episode so dated, but there are others that are the absolute opposite. In “Metamorphosis,” Commissioner Hedford is going to stop a war. Commissioner Hedford is a woman. An attractive woman.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
There are plenty of roles for women in Star Trek; doctors, lawyers … and they all seem to have been somehow involved with Kirk. But at least they had their own careers.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Star Trek will always work as long as you have imagination. We have never had anyone in Trek who wasn’t into growth. During my first Trek, for instance, I didn’t pay any attention to women.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
His attitude toward women on Trek were miniskirted, big-boobed sex objects—toys for guys. He cleaned up that act gradually only because people pointed it out to him. He was a funny guy. At least, I find him funny.
ROD RODDENBERRY
First of all, he loved women. I love women. Women are the most beautiful creatures on the planet. And so that came out very clearly in all the Star Treks, but I think he was also of the belief that by women wearing short skirts and a woman choosing to do that, then she was empowering herself. Use your beauty, use your mind, use everything you have.
GENE RODDENBERRY
In the years I have grown into something of a strong feminist. I was the product of a Southern family background. My parents never spoke of any race with contempt. They encouraged me to try strange ideas and philosophies.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)
Working with Gene Roddenberry, very often it was a lot of fun. He had great intellect. This was someone who came from a very poor background and made himself what he was.
FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)
I went to Cal State Northridge and the paper was the Daily Sundial and I walked in as a freshman and they started giving me stories to write. A lot of my stories were for the entertainment section. And one day I said I’d like to interview Gene Roddenberry and so I called his office and arranged an interview. I went over to Paramount in early 1967 and I’m sitting outside Gene’s office with the secretary. I hear this noise like a jackhammer and I seriously realized it was my heart pounding. It was a combination of nerves and excitement. When I went in and did the interview, the main thing he told me, which probably shouldn’t have been that big a revelation, was that the only purpose of TV was to sell toothpaste.
ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)
The Star Trek approach to life is all-inclusive and positive. When the TV show first was aired, the politics of America was anything but. It was a time of war, protests, race riots, and brutality—but also a time when a counterculture was emerging. The original show was sort of an intellectual and emotional refuge for people who believed in positive change. And cleavage.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I used to speak at colleges a lot because it was what kept me alive and paid the mortgage in the days when Star Trek was considered a gigantic failure. I have met some of these people. I remember one night someone called me over and said, “Can you possibly talk to this man?” And here was a fellow with some kind of nerve disorder who had an electronic box. He couldn’t speak, and by hitting the box he could make halfway intelligible sounds. He could only make grunting-like noises.
And finally I began to understand what he was saying, and he was asking me why I did a certain thing in a certain show, and why I had invented somebody who had something of his disorder. I said to him, “Someday when we become wise, we won’t look at those things. We will look at communication and knowledge, etc.” And I saw his hand rise up with great determination and he said loudly and clearly, “Yes!” Those are the high moments in my life.
LEONARD NIMOY
One of the large questions we have been asked time and time again is what is giving this thing its longevity? Why does it continue to survive, to touch people, to intrigue? I think one of the major reasons is that the whole structure of Trek is a moral one—it’s a moral society that people are attracted to. It really is a meritocracy.
If you do well, you advance. If you are good at what you do, you can have the job. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are, what your origins are, your color or race. None of that matters. We need to get jobs done here, and if we have someone who can do the job, they have the job. Audiences recognize that. There’s a rightness about that. There’s a correctness, not a political correctness, about a meritocracy where performance is valued, where the reality of the truth is recognized and valued. Where things are right because they are right, because we need them to be right.
We had our flaws. We had certain political flaws, a certain kind of righteousness, to a degree that come from the humans that were making these shows. But given that, there is still a moral structure within Star Trek that makes sense.
MARIE JACQUEMETTON (story editor, Star Trek: Enterprise)
The fact that it was conceivable that man could go to another planet or even moonwalk was incredible. I had a scrapbook, like all kids from my generation do, of every astronaut and what they were doing. To our kids, James Cameron is what space is; Alien and Battlestar Galactica. It’s almost like a movie, it’s not even a real thing. They would not think of becoming an astronaut and going into space.
It’s not even part of their concept of what the future is. Everything’s turned into the Internet. It’s all about being famous for a second and how can I get noticed. There’s no awareness of what’s out there beyond our little bubble. And when we were kids I think what was so exciting about Star Trek was the “what if” possibilities.
HANS BEIMLER (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The best definition of science fiction I’d heard is this, that in 1900, at the turn of the century, pretty much anybody could tell you that the car was going to revolutionize the transportation industry. That’s not science fiction. But if you could predict in 1903 that it was going to change the sex lives of Americans by all the fucking that was going to be happening in the backseats of cars, that’s science fiction. In the sixties, the new technology was CB radios and being able to talk to people on the other side of the world. But my mother would say to me, “Yeah, but they don’t have anything to say to each other.” So it didn’t really matter.
RONALD D. MOORE (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
I discovered Trek because I was into the Apollo space program as a kid. I had seen the original moon landing and I was really taken with the space program, and that led me to Star Trek. Lost in Space was the first space show that I fell in love with, and then I started seeing Star Trek and that became the show for me. It was on five days a week at four in the afternoon, and after I got home from school I could watch Star Trek every day. I saw it as where NASA was going someday and where we could all go someday. I read it as a prophetic show, that this was what was going to happen. I remember thinking, “When are we going to have one world government and start building starships?”
DEAN DEVLIN (writer, producer, Independence Day, Stargate)