Reflections on Star Trek at 60

Sixty years ago yesterday, on September 6, 1966 for those of you who cannot do calendar math, the first episode of Star Trek aired. Star Trek – The Original Series I was about one and a half at the time, so missed the premier. But that was probably okay. In addition to being too young to appreciate the series, the state of television at the time was… somewhat primitive. I mean, check out this little toy television that sat in our family room opposite the couch until I was maybe four years old. I think it was made out of LEGO bricks or Lincoln Logs. 60s television technology That picture, taken with one of the ubiquitous Kodak Instamatic 100 series cameras that were literally everywhere at the time (my first half dozen cameras were Instamatics that I scrounged out of junk drawers or from boxes in various garages or barns) that used the 126 film cartridge system that was basically squared off 35mm, was probably snapped in early/mid 1967 based on objects in the frame and my size. I was tall for my age. That is maybe a 13 inch diagonal screen… a BLACK AND WHITE screen, because we didn’t get a color television in our house until 1970… in a wooden console that my father would occasionally have to take apart to remove a burned out tube. At the time every grocery store had a kiosk that included a tube tester and replacement tubes for sale, so you could take the likely suspect down to the store, test it, then buy the replacement. That happened maybe twice when I was a kid, but I remember doing tagging along with my dad as we drove over to the Manor Market, in the same strip mall as Billy Wilson’s Liquors, which he told me was owned by the former 49ers wide receiver, though I have no way to verify that at this time. But he made sure to buy beer there during the football season. Anyway, the point was that at the time the television viewing experience in our house was not optimal. Sitting here in 2026 with a 46″ LCD TV in our family room, which feels kind of small, the idea of sitting across the room watching a tiny black and white screen feels little better than watching radio. Somehow we managed… and the low quality of the viewing options is probably why I spent so much time outside playing. The screen had yet to attain the power to hold me. However, color TV was the coming thing and, in part because it was filmed in color when a lot of shows were still black and white… why bother with color when most of your audience doesn’t have a color TV… Star Trek lived on after its cancellation at the end of its third season in syndication. And that is where I saw Star Trek. It was never a show that I watched in prime time at a weekly release cadence. It was always something that was on almost daily… or even multiple times a day as Santa Clara Valley had its own TV stations while also being able to get the San Francisco and Oakland stations via the antenna that jutted up from our roof, the same way one was present on nearly every single house in the valley, a situation that at one point attracted a plague of six foot metal munching mice… though I might not be remembering that entirely accurately. Six foot metal munching mice in action on roof tops Being in syndication and being rather unlike anything else on the air, it proved to be a reliable draw. More than reliable. A whole ecosystem grew up around this cancelled show that makes the Firefly revivalist seem like a few random weirdos… which kind of fits. The show wasn’t bad, but it dying before it could jump the shark is what keeps it alive. It died young so we never got to see fat Mal go full lost cause on us. There were conventions and books about the series and novels set in the Trek universe… I read so many bad Trek novels, many of which seemed to be vehicles to get Spock to show emotion… and video games and board games and that great FASA role playing game and paraphernalia. It was everywhere. Star Trek in vt52… first computer game I ever played We would “play” Star Trek at recess… an early “spot the nerds” moment… taking over the baseball diamond at the back corner of the field with the pitcher’s mount being the captain’s chair and home plate being the navigation station, with the backstop itself representing the view screen at the front of the bridge. We would parrot things we had seen on the show, assemble away teams that clearly had no interest in the prime directive as every adventure ended up in some sort of shoot out. Eventually Paramount realized they were sitting on a gold mine and started winding up the machine. We got an animated series, all of which is canon. Then a motion picture, about which I have written. (I wrote posts about all the movies back in 2022.) Then a few more movies came out, enough to establish the “even numbers good, odd numbers bad” pattern of quality. Finally, another series arrived. Then another. Then another. And some more movies, of which Galaxy Quest was no doubt the best. Then some more video games, of which maybe three were any good. (Original Starfleet Command is my pick. Can I get that on GoG.com?) And then even more movies, but in an alternate timeline where somehow Chris Pine was William Shatner and lens flare was the primary means of communicating that it was the future. And yes, if you’re reading this you probably know all of that. Star Trek, like the race of men in Middle-earth, is ubiquitous yet always failing to live up to its potential. But it persists. There are new shows. There will probably be new movies. I would not bet against the whole thing getting another cinematic reboot in my lifetime. There is no IP that Hollywood won’t milk dry. Still, nothing in my heart feels quite like the original series and that time during the 70s when people would devour any crumb around the series, where we all saw the same blooper reels at every convention, and when you could spot your fellow Trekkies by doing the “live long and prosper” sign with your hand. If they had developed the muscles to do the sign without the need to arrange their fingers with their other hand, they were in the club. As I noted in my post about the bicentennial back in July, it was a time of tumult and people were looking for things that would give them hope about the future. Of course, this reverie has made me feel nostalgic for the “good old days” and I will probably propose to my wife that our next viewing festival should be an attempt to watch the original series… in order of release. In syndication there was an almost RNG aspect to what you might see on any given day. I have no idea how they play out as they originally aired. We’ll see if that comes to pass. Maybe I will even write about it. Related: Jan 2023 – Reflecting on Star Trek as a Film Series Feb 2015 – The Influence of Star Trek May 2013 – The First Computer Game I Ever Played