Star Trek: The Original Series - Fanlore

Star Trek: The Original Series

Name: Star Trek
Abbreviation(s):
Creator: Gene Roddenberry
Date(s): 1966-1969 (original series); 1973 (the animated series); 1979 (Star Trek: The Motion Picture); 1982 (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan); 1984 (Star Trek III: The Search for Spock); 1986 (Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home); 1989 (Star Trek V: The Final Frontier); 1991 (Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
Medium: Television series, movie series
Country of Origin: United States
External Links: IMDB (TV series), TV.com (TV series), TV.com (animated series), Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country
Subpages for Star Trek: The Original Series:

Fanzines · James Kirk · Kirk-Spock · Kirk/Spock · Slash Zines · Spock · Spock/Uhura · Uhura


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Star Trek debuted in 1966, billed by its creator Gene Roddenberry as "a Wagon Train to the stars". Considered ground-breaking for its era, Star Trek showed a multinational, multiracial cast crewing the U.S.S. Enterprise, a starship devoted to exploration. The series was saved from cancellation by fan effort after its second season, but was then cancelled after the third season.

Despite this, Star Trek not only survived, later in the form of an animated series, but soon gave rise to major motion pictures. A second series debuted in 1987, named Star Trek: The Next Generation. In order to differentiate, the original 1960s series became known as Star Trek: The Original Series, frequently abbreviated ST:TOS, or simply TOS by fans. For an overview of the whole franchise, see the Star Trek page.

letter from Harlan Ellison, a fandom-call-to-action (1966)
letter from Harlan Ellison, a fandom-call-to-action (1966)
fandom-call-to-action by John and Bjo Trimble (1968)
fandom-call-to-action by John and Bjo Trimble (1968)

Contents

Show Synopsis

The U.S.S. Enterprise, under the command of James Kirk, is on a five-year mission of exploration in deep space: 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'. Her crew often faces new phenomena, cultures, and planets, both of the friendly and unfriendly variety.

There are seven major characters, although only three were ever listed in the main title credits of the show: Captain Kirk, his executive officer Spock, Doctor McCoy, Chief Engineer Montgomery Scott, Lieutenant Uhura, Helmsman Sulu, and Ensign Chekov. Other recurring characters include Nurse Chapel (played by Majel Barrett), Yeoman Rand, and various admirals. Spock's parents, Sarek and Amanda, are also popular characters; they appear in only one TOS episode, but return in the movies and tie-in novels.

The Movies based on TOS

  • The Motion Picture (sometimes called the Motionless Picture)
  • The Wrath of Khan
  • The Search for Spock
  • The Voyage Home
  • The Final Frontier (often called the worst of them)
  • The Undiscovered Country
  • Generations (cross-over with the Next Generation)

Fandom

Star Trek: The Original Series has a very active fanbase that was born nearly the moment the show debuted and still flourishes more than forty years later. Fans have not only kept this series alive after it was nearly canceled after its second season, but also kept it going through many years where there was no new material through their production of fanworks, their organization of conventions and their devotion to their fandom.

A current trend as viewed on Fanfiction.net, as well as through other sites, is that ST:TOS is being discovered by a number of people from countries outside of the United States where it originated. Many new fans coming into the fandom have found it through the internet, international syndication or by accessibility to buying the DVDs and other media through large media-selling websites.

Another potential attractor to the fandom is the new movie, which prompts curiosity about the series it's acting as a reboot of.

Brief History of Star Trek fandom

There is a wealth of information about Star Trek fandom, maybe too much! The first media fanzine was Spockanalia, which started publishing while the show was still on the air. The first Trek media con [1] was in 1972 (they'd hoped 500 people would come -- they had to turn people away after the first 3,000). Committee member Joan Winston gave a detailed account of that first guest convention in Star Trek Lives!.[2] The first media fan con (i.e., run by fans, for fans, with no guest stars) was August Party, in August 1975, chaired by Rich Kolker. The following year, the American Midwest's first media fan con was held: SeKWester*Con (pronounced "sequester con") in Kalamazoo, Michigan.[3] (Go figure.) At the second SeKWester*Con, the Fan Q awards were started to recognize Quality in Star Trek fan fiction, filks and art. (At some point, they started being given to K/S content as well. Year?) As of 1981, awards have been given out at MediaWest*Con.[4]

Like the idea of zines, and conventions, the Star Trek Welcommittee (which lasted from 1972 until the web finally made it unecessary) was based on existing science fiction fandom. In this case, the National Fantasy Fan Federation (N3F) Welcommittee. [5]

As of 2008, there are still Trek guest cons and fan cons held every year. When Joan Winston died, her obit showed up in the New York Times as the Trek Superfan.[1] Star Trek fandom is still going strong.

As mentioned above, the first media fanzine was Spockanalia, which started publishing while the show was still on the air, as did ST-Phile; they both sent copies to the production staff and actors. By issue four of Spockanalia, the first story of a woman who beds Spock had appeared. The story is double-ly famous for being the first one to use double slash marks // to enclose telepathic dialogue. In Boldly Writing, Verba says:

Years later, Jean Lorrah, in her first solo professional novel, also used such marks to distinguish spoken dialogue from telepathic dialogue. When I asked her why she used this indicator without explanation, saying that readers of her books who were not also fanzine readers might not understand this, she replied it was a commonly-known indicator, and that she thought no explanation was necessary.[3]

Timeline of Star Trek fandom

cover of 1968 con program [1]
cover of 1968 con program [1]
cover of April 1975 issue
cover of April 1975 issue

1967:

1972:

  • First fan run Star Trek con, with actor guests, is held in NYC in Febuary at the Statler Hilton Hotel.

1975:

  • First fan-only (No actor guests) ST con: August Party, chaired by Rich Kolker. The con runs annually until 1979, once more in 1981 and a final edition is held in 1985.
  • Star Trek Lives! is published; its chapter on fanfiction introduces the idea of fan fiction to huge numbers of fans who'd never heard of it before, piquing interest and spreading the activity.

1976:

  • February, TrekCon in Kansas City, attended by William Shatner, DeForest Kelley, and Nichelle Nichols.
  • April 10-11 First midwest fan-only (No actor guests) ST con is held: SekWesterCon.

1977:

1978:

  • The lettercols of some of the leading zines were filled with dire predictions. "Fandom is dying, everybody is gafiating; Star Wars fandom is taking over."
  • The K&S vs K/S debate was prominent. Fans began complaining about the debate itself.

1979:

1980:

  • Mos'EastlyCon held in New York, May 23-26. First Fan Q given to a Star Wars story.
  • Increasing numbers of fandoms start showing up in zines, leading to increasing numbers of crossover stories.
  • Forum (later Datazine)and Universal Translator adzines start publishing.
  • "Mary Sue: A Short Compendium," a discussion of the Mary Sue story, published in Archive #5.
  • Zines increasingly xeroxed, rather than offset printed.
  • One Way Mirror by Barbara Wenk, the best Mary Sue ST novel ever, published.
  • Roberta Rogow brought out the Trexindex Second Supplement.
  • Forum #12 started the tradition of identifying fanzines by a code telling what the contents were. "ST" meant a (non-K/S) Star Trek fanzine, "K/S" for K/S, "SW" meant a Star Wars fanzine, etc.

1981:

  • MediaWestCon I held in Lansing, MI, Memorial Day weekend. As of 2009, the con is still ongoing.
  • A rumor that Spock would be killed in the 2nd ST movie led to an ad being placed in the Hollywood Reporter highlighting the tremendous financial losses to Paramount should Spock be killed in the new Star Trek movie. The ad resulted in a front page story in the Wall Street Journal on October 9, 1981."[7]
  • Mindy Glazer publishes Tales of Feldman, which goes into an almost immediate 2nd printing.
  • Ruth Berman, editor of T-Negative, published zine of all of her fiction collected, called And Starry Skies.

1982:

1983:

  • The Star Trek Welcommittee received 817 letters in '83.
  • MediaWestCon III was fully a MM con: There were some Trek panels, but those were few in number. Most panels were generic or devoted to other "media" fandoms. This year the Fan Qs were divided into the interest categories Star Trek, Star Wars, Starsky and Hutch, Doctor Who, and Other.
  • The continual rumors and Hollywood gossip about Star Trek III drove some fans to ask for spoiler warnings, for the first time known in fandom.
  • DeForest Kelley was asked at a con if he read fanzines and replied, "Some of them I do. It's impossible to read them all.... There's some very good writing, you know. Some of the stories are better than the stories we did in the series."

1984:

  • Jean Lorrah put The Star Trek Welcommittee's mailing address in her Star Trek tie-in novel, The Vulcan Academy Murders. STW received 1155 letters from fans in 1984.
  • Roberta Rogow put out Trexindex Third Supplement, listing 126 new zines. In her introduction, she said, "Three years ago, after contemplating the Second Supplement of this Trexindex, I decided not to do another one. The Star Trek Phenomenon was wearing thin, I thought. The Old Guard was moving to other things. The people who had started writing for Star Trek fanzines were now doing Star Wars, or 'going pro,' or just GAFIATING—leaving fandom forever. But...STAR TREK LIVES!"
  • The Star Trek Welcommittee meeting at Worldcon drew 200+ people.
  • Star Trek III released.

1985:

1986:

  • Camille Bacon-Smith article titled "Spock Among the Women," comes out in the New York Times Book Review on November 16, 1986. Article explained what Star Trek fanzines were, but didn't give contact informtion.
  • ST:TNG was announced. Gene Roddenberry stated, "Eventually Picard and Riker will have a closer relationship than Kirk and Spock."[10]

1995:

Fanzines

For a list of TOS fanzines see: Star Trek: The Original Series/Fanzines and Star Trek: The Original Series/Slash Zines

Star Trek fandom and K/S online

In 1982 net.startrek [11] was created as one of the first 20 or so newsgroups. As part of the Great Usenet Renaming, it became rec.arts.startrek in 1986. In 1990, alt.startrek.creative appeared. Soon after, alt.tv.star-trek.tos started, and almost from the start, the k/s-ers and gen fans pushed back and forth. One prominent k/s fan got tired of the same arguments being used against k/s over and over, and created the K/S Retort sometime after 1990.[12]

The main archive for fanfiction posted to Alt.startrek.creative, Alt.startrek.creative.all-ages, and Alt.startrek.creative.erotica.moderated (ASCEM) was established in 1991 and has been continuously maintained since then. Better Living Through TrekStories is an archive for the mailing list of the same name, as well as archiving stories posted to other Trek mailing lists, fanfiction.net and LiveJournal. It was initially called Better Living Through Treksmut.

Other Archives

External Links

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 New York Times: Joan Winston, ‘Trek’ Superfan, Dies at 77
  2. ↑ Memory-Alpha Star Trek Wiki: Star Trek conventions
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Boldly Writing: A Trekker Fan and Zine History, 1967 - 1987
  4. ↑ List of Fan Q Winners each year, archived on WayBack Machine March 06, 2007
  5. ↑ Wikipedia.org:Star Trek Welcommittee
  6. ↑ In August, Michelle Arvizu noted that Star Trek fan artists were getting high prices—even in the hundreds of dollars—from the sale of their original illustrations to Star Trek fanzine stories at conventions. Michelle's reaction was that it seemed to her "unfair and frankly quite discouraging that a good fan artist can make excellent money for his efforts and an equally good fan writer who sweats just as hard and long over a story gets nothing."Verba, Joan. Boldly Writing. F T L Pubns, March 26, 2003, pg 45
  7. ↑ Verba, Joan. Boldly Writing. F T L Pubns, March 26, 2003, pg 56
  8. ↑ Verba, Joan. Boldly Writing. F T L Pubns, March 26, 2003, pg 58
  9. ↑ For the love of...
  10. ↑ Verba, Joan. Boldly Writing. F T L Pubns, March 26, 2003, pg 76
  11. ↑ The first post to this newsgroup was posted August 1982, net.startrek, about this group, Google Groups, (Accessed October 10, 2008).
  12. ↑ K/S Retort
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