'Star Trek' now an odyssey of the mind
| News Media Commentary | |
|---|---|
| Title: | 'Star Trek' now an odyssey of the mind |
| Commentator: | Daniel F. Goldman, for "The Evening Sun," a Baltimore, MD newspaper |
| Date(s): | March 25, 1973 |
| Venue: | |
| Fandom: | Star Trek: TOS |
| External Links: | |
| Click here for related articles on Fanlore. | |
'Star Trek' now an odyssey of the mind is a 1973 article by Daniel F. Goldman, for "The Evening Sun," a Baltimore, MD newspaper.
The subjects were Star Trek: TOS, the then-recent con in New York (the Star Trek Lives! convention), and the fan-created play One Cube or Two?.
The Article
An out-of-town businessman who happened to be staying at the Hotel Commodore in New York last month might well have suspected the bartender of slipping him some LSD with his martini.
The elevators, lobby and. meeting rooms were filled for three days with people sporting pointed ears, green skins and other aberrations sufficient to convince an unwary guest that he was on a bad trip.
Even those without exotic attire had in common a wild-eyed look of fanatical enthusiasm and a strange language full of incomprehensible allusions. "Which general order is the noninterference prime directive?" "What type of currency was used by the gamesters on Triskelion?" "Is the Vulcan command for 'stop!' spelled 'Kroykah!' or 'Troykah!'?" "What is Yeoman Rand's room number, and on what deck?" "What did Kirk use against the spores of Omicron Ceti III?" "Was it saving Sarek's life or patching up the Horta that led McCoy to believe he could cure a rainy day?"
No ordinary conventioneers, these were the "Trekkies," fans of television's "Star Trek" series. Though it has not been seen on network TV in almost five years, its band of devotees seems to be multiplying in numbers and enthusiasm at least as fast as the tribbles (which are, of course, those lovable furry little creatures that helped the Federation defend Sherman's Planet against the Klingons, and which also happen to be born pregnant).
The 5,000 or so Trekkies who gathered in New York were an amiable lot, though they did mob actor Leonard Nimoy (beloved "Mr. Spock," the unemotional pointed-eared science officer of the series), who finally escaped with a trenchcoat over his head', shuddering from a sudden confrontation with a 3-foot-high living reproduction of himself, evidently an enterprising young Trekkie out to win the costume competition.
These conventions have been held annually since the death of "Star Trek" as a network series- (It is shown in syndicated reruns in many cities, including Baltimore and Washington.) A cult has grown up around the show, and its members are not just teeny-boppers.
When NBC first threatened to cancel the show in its second season, hundreds of thousands of protests poured in, many from college professors and other seemingly unlikely fans. In the heady network days, when each episode was new, and the fan.1? had not yet memorized every line of every show, notices appeared on the philosophy department bulletin boards at Princeton, Harvard and Yale, urging everyone not to miss that night's episode, entitled "Plato's Stepchildren."
"Star Trek" was no ordinary TV sci-fi show, nothing at all like "Lost in Space" or "Tom Corbett, Space Cadet," shoot-'em up rocketship operas, variants on "Wagon Train" with warp drive. The show was praised for its relatively high degree of literacy, imaginative scripts and, of all things, its social conscience.
TV was determinedly noncontroversial in the mid-Sixties, but in those pre-"All in the Family" days, "Star Trek" was able to mount shows dealing with race relations, the dehumanization of society and even the Vietnam war, all safely set in the Twenty-Third Century, of course.
Today, Isaac Asimov and others of his stature can be seen attending the conventions, and an international string of clubs and organizations has grown up, not unlike the fraternal orders devoted to the Sherlock Holmes canon, endlessly quizzing each other on the most trivial details concerning the fictional characters they have become infatuated with.
Among those attending the February convention was a delegation from the University of Maryland Baltimore County, who had gone a bit further than most Trekkies. They had written a new "Star Trek" entertainment, incorporating all the familiar characters and adding elements of gentle spoof and musical satire.
Begun as a joke some eight months before, the project bloomed into a full-scale production, sanctioned by the university, with proceeds to be donated to the Retinitis Pigmentosa Foundation.
The three authors - Dorothea Rau, Joyce Rodey and Delia Schmidt - compiled the script from a series of scenes each had written. As a gag, they sent a copy to Gene Roddenberry, creator of the original "Star Trek" series. To their astonishment, Mr. Roddenberry liked the idea and Paramount Studios, which owns the rights to "Star Trek" copyrighted the script and gave the students permission to produce it.
A scene from the show was performed at the New York convention, and proved to be a hit. The girls were worried, however, that audiences less predisposed to adulation of anything remotely Trekkian might have a hard time catching the esoteric references and jokes. They needn't have worried.
Playing to packed houses at the college last Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights,"One Cube or Two" was a boffo smash, and the mock-up of the; bridge of the Enterprise, with Federation regalia and suitably inscrutable aliens, would have drawn nods of approval from the "Great Bird of the Galaxy," as the original "Star Trek" production crew dubbed Mr. Roddenberry.
The UMBC production and the large number of non-pointed-eared, non-green-skinned Baltimoreans who turned out for it are indicators of the interest in the show that survives. Nine "Star Trek" books have been published in the last several years, fan magazines have sprung up and a corporation had to be created to handle the requests from all over the world for old scripts, production stills, props or just information. A perfectly serious 400-page tome was published, tracing the development and impact of the show with an attention to detail worthy of a doctoral dissertation.
"Star Trek Lives!" is the cry, and such serious devotion to a long-defunct television series is unprecedented. Rumors are abroad that NBC may give in to mounting pressure and revive the show. Paramount pleads budget limitations, but someone suggested that the fans produce the show; and indeed, if every Trekkie sent in a dollar the show could be revived overnight.
The original cast and crew seem to like the idea, though no one is committing himself prematurely. "We still get together and talk about the show," says one of Mr. Roddenberry's erstwhile assistants, "and that's never happened with any other show I've worked on. There was a spirit there that lasts. And the public obviously wants it back."
Whether or not new "Star Trek" episodes are ever made, the fans will continue to argue over whether the colonists in "This Side of Paradise" (many episode titles were taken from Shakespeare; no comment from the estate of F. Scott Fitzgerald on this one, however) were flooded with Ber-thoyd rays or zenite rays. And debate will continue over the validity of Ensign Chekov's assertion that matter-anti-matter warp drive was actually invented by a "little old lady in Leningrad." (The character of Chekov was inserted in the show after the then-Soviet ambassador to the U.S. complained to Mr. Roddenberry that there would undoubtedly be some Russians in the crew of a starship from the "United Federation of Planets." Mr. Roddenberry agreed, and Chekov was born. The ambassador remained a fan.)
Whatever the future brings, all the Trekkies, the Isaac Asimovs as well as the Dorothea Raus, Joyce Rodeys and the Delia Schmidts, will maintain their loyalty to the Starship Enterprise, as it hurtles through the galaxy, fearlessly splitting both atoms and infinitives.. ("Its five year mission," intones the voice-over: "to seek out new life and new civilizations... to boldly go where no man has gone before") and not so incidentally soft-selling the message that humans are more important than machines even in the 23d century.