Out Of The Past, Into The Future: Sixty Years Of Star Trek

As you may have spotted from the odd blog post, this week marks the 60th anniversary of the first broadcast episode of Star Trek. It was on September 8 1968, to be exact. 

I am not now,  nor have I ever been, a Star Trek fan but I like bits and pieces of the franchise well enough. It's one of those IPs that seems to be able to reinvent itself endlessly without entirely diluting the brand, a good trick if you can pull it off. 

In recent years I very much enjoyed both The Lower Decks and Prodigy,  neither of which is what you'd call Core Trek but both of which I've watched all the way through, not something I can say about most of the shows. And there are a lot of TV shows and movies set in the Star Trek universe. Two dozen of them according to IMDB. 

Of those two dozen, here are the ones I've seen at least an episode of, together with my comments on what, if anything, I can remember about them.

 Star Trek - Now often referred to as Start Trek Original Series or STOS.  

This is the one whose anniversary we're celebrating. There were three seasons and seventy-nine episodes and I'd guess I've seen most of them. Out of order and sporadically, to be sure, but most of them. 

The show didn't get an airing in the UK until 1969 and I would be guessing if I said I saw it on it's first UK run. I mean, I might have...

I do remember I was still at school because I can recall watching it on a weekday evening in the house where I grew up. I also have a vague memory of making a bit of an effort to be in when it was on, meaning I must have been quite keen to see it. It was be there or miss out in those days, where TV was concerned, of course.

I think I must have done most of my watching in the 1970s or 1980s, when they were being regularly, if incoherently, re-shown. The show must have had some cache at the time because it was on BBC1 in a close to prime-time slot. I saw it again in the mid-80s, by when it had shifted to BBC2, suggesting it was regarded by the schedulers as a niche interest by then. 

I used to watch it fairly often, at first, as an adolescent, fairly avidly and later, as a twenty-something, somewhat ironically. One thing I very definitely do remember was that by the time I was old enough to care about my image, it would have been very uncool to admit to watching Star Trek, even - or perhaps especially - when talking to other Sci-Fi fans. Trek, in common with almost any TV show or movie, was considered "not real science fiction" by pretty much every SF fan I ever met, an attitude that persisted well into the 90s. I think The X-Files might have been the watershed moment for acceptance into the canon.

I mostly thought of the original series as a sort of sitcom. It certainly had a lot of jokes. When it wasn't being funny, it was mostly soap opera and melodrama. It went into the same bucket as the Waltons and Dallas for me, which is actually a compliment. I've watched the entirety of the Waltons twice, from start to finish, and Dallas was a must-see on a Wednesday night for a few years.

I'd happily watch any random episode of original Trek right now, so that's a recommendation. It was always a fun show and it hasn't aged that badly, mainly because it never seemed to be anchored to any specific real-world timeframe in the first place.

Star Trek: The Animated Series - I have only the vaguest memory of this being on TV. Looking it up, it was part of the BBC1 Saturday morning schedule in the mid-70s. I was in my mid to late teens then and at that sensitive stage when you don't want to be thought of as a kid any more so I probably wasn't watching a lot of Saturday morning TV. (I got heavily back into it as a student, naturally, and after that Saturday mornings were all about the shows from the early 80s right into the mid-90s.). 

I think I must have caught the odd episode but I remember nothing about it at all. I wouldn't be adverse to catching a few episodes on YouTube to see what I missed.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture - I saw this at the cinema on release, which suggests I must have been pretty keen but in fact I made a point of going to see every big, new SF or comic-book movie back then. They all seemed like events. Some of them even were.

Not this one, though. I remember it being very dull, an opinion I've heard and seen shared many times since. I think I might have watched it again on TV at some point. Wouldn't want to watch it again.

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - I think I also saw this at the cinema but I'm not sure. I definitely watched it on TV. I quite enjoyed it but it was very hammy. I remember Shatner screaming "Khan!" and  Nimoy under-selling his death scene and that's about it. I don't think it has the best reputation among the movies these days but I could be wrong.

Star Trek III: The Search for Spock - I saw this on television at least once. I can just about recall some of the plot. Okay, no I can't.

Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home - Watched on TV, twice. Kirk and Spock as hippies. Hard to forget. 

Except that apparently I made that up. I went looking for a clip and it turns out they didn't go to Haight-Ashbury at all. It appears to be set in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Here they are, enjoying some of the typical punk music of the time and discussing contemporary literature of the day.

I could have sworn they were hippies. I mean, they talk to whales...

Star Trek: The Next Generation - This was a minor disappointment for me and I suspect may have marked the moment when I went from being a mild fan of the franchise to a mild skeptic. I remember being moderately excited about the prospect of a new Trek series and I watched it from the start, when it was first broadcast on BBC2 in 1990. 

I made it all the way through Season One and into Season 2 but it suffered from one of the worst faults any show can have; it was dull. I remember it starting out quite well but quickly bogging down in what felt like a lot of talking and very little action. 

If there's one thing you can say for original Trek it's that it was rarely boring. Something was always happening, usually involving the cast staggering from one side of the set to the other or some crucial part of the Enterprise being on the verge of exploding. In TNG, everything on the ship was tediously stable, including most of the cast. 

I remember Worf, the Klingon who looks like Lon Chaney as the Wolfman, Data, the anaemic android and Geordi LaForge, with the cool shades. I think there was a female doctor and her son. 

Actually, I know there was. I can even remember their names - Beverley and Wesley Crusher, the latter played by Will Wheaton, who has a recurring part as "that guy who used to be the annoying kid from Star Trek" in the Big Bang Theory. And of course there was Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard, the Kojak of the spaceways.

In fact, if I look at the cast list on IMDB, which I only just did to make sure I wasn't getting any of this wrong, I can remember a full fifty percent of the characters named as the "Top Cast". I guess I was more into it than I remember. I wouldn't mind watching it again. I might not find it so slow now, at my advance age.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine - I watched a few episodes of this when it was first shown in the UK on a channel you didn't have to pay to watch. It started out on Sky in 1993 but began showing on BBC2 a couple of years later. I remember next to nothing about it, probably because by the mid-90s I was barely watching any TV at all. I remember Sisko, Bashir and Quark though, so I must have seen enough for them to stick in my memory. I'd give it another go but I'd have to be very short of other entertainment options to do it. 

Star Trek: Lower Decks -  My favorite Trek show by a wide margin. In a review here, I described it as "smart, funny, intelligent, well-observed" and "a great animated show in its own right". I would happily re-watch it. I'm just sorry they stopped making it.

Star Trek: Prodigy - Reviewing this one, in a post where I reassuringly said much the same things about my relationship with the franchise as I've said here today, I called Prodigy "fast, funny, exciting and very coherently plotted." Once again, I'd be pleased to see it again and I regret it's early demise.

That's nine shows and movies out of twenty-four. Everything I didn't mention, I haven't seen or at least can't remember seeing. Although as I keep saying, I don't consider myself to be any kind of Star Trek fan, I think it's plain I do have a considerable amount of time for the franchise. I'd be quite interested in watching pretty much any of the fifteen shows or movies missing from this list and I'd for sure watch - or re-watch - any of them in preference to anything connected to Star Wars or Lord of the Rings. 

The defining feature of Star Trek over the sixty years it's been around has been accessibility. It's just an easy franchise to get into and enjoy. It has a lot of characters who could just as easily be in an office or hospital-based sitcom or drama. The fact that they're in space doesn't always seem to have a lot to do with anything. Compare that to most other big SF and Fantasy franchises and they seem a lot more sciency and fantastical, which is quite ironic given Trekkies have long been synonymous with the geekiest extremes of geek culture.

Even now, sixty years on, I bet more people who have no interest at all in Sci-Fi could recognize Kirk and Spock than could put a name to Han Solo or Obi Wan Kenobi. What's more, I'd also bet the Star Wars characters with the highest recognition factor among non-SF fans would be Darth Vader and Yoda - effectively a monster and a cartoon animal.

The crew of the Enterprise are all immediately recognizable as regular people, the kind you might know from work or around the neighborhood where you live. I think, as much as anything, it was that level of familiarity that allowed NBC to get away with broadcasting an unreconstructed science fiction show for three seasons back in the 1960s. 

And look what they started!