Star Trek’s 50th Star Date Anniversary
‘Star Trek’ 50th anniversary set celebrates iconic show, films
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The TV series "Star Trek," starred Leonard Nimoy as Spock (from left), William Shatner as Captain Kirk, DeForest Kelley as Doctor McCoy and James Doohan as Scotty. (AP Photo/,File)
To paraphrase one of the most memorable lines in television history: Captain’s Log — Stardate Sept. 8, 2016.
The date marks the 50th anniversary of the premiere of the original “Star Trek” television series on a Thursday night in 1966. The series, created by Gene Roddenberry, ran for three seasons, and followed the futuristic sci-fi exploits of the starship Enterprise and its seasoned crew. The show would immortalize the characters of Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Scotty, Lt. Uhura, Mr. Chekov and Mr. Sulu.
Part TV western, part intergalactic “Gulliver’s Travels,” park Greek mythology (with plenty of Hollywood camp and sci-fi special effects sprinkled in for good measure), the show starred William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, Walter Koenig and Montgomery Scott as that aforementioned crew, whose five-year mission, well, you know the rest. Though the original series was cancelled, syndication helped make it one of the most popular, revered and groundbreaking in TV history.
To celebrate the TV series milestone, CBS and Paramount Home Entertainment have today released “Star Trek 50th Anniversary TV and Movie Collection,” a commemorative Blu-ray box set featuring the entire original series, the subsequent TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” “Star Trek: Voyager” and “Enterprise,” and “The Animated Series.” Also included are the five original “Star Trek” feature films: “Star Trek” (1979), “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (1982), “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock”(1984), “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home:” (1986), “Star Trek V: The Final Frontier” (1989) and “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country” (1991). Also included are more than 20 hours of bonus features, an exclusive documentary, and special collectible “surprises.”
One of the most popular episodes from the original series, remains season two’s “The Trouble with Tribbles,” which aired on Dec. 29, 1967. Tribbles, those cuddly, furry creatures (who would turn out to be well, not so nice) were the brainchild of then 19-year-old college student David Gerrold, who freelanced TV show story outlines to Hollywood studios. Gerrold would go on to author more than 50 books, and more than a dozen TV episodes for series including “Star Trek Animated” “The Twilight Zone,” “Logan’s Run” and “Babyon 5,” among others.
The idea of Tribbles (the core of one of the most darkly comedic storylines of the entire TV series),came from a most unlikely source, Gerrold said. “I was tired of scary aliens,” Gerrold said during a recent phone conversation. “So I thought what if we create aliens who were cute and we didn’t know how dangerous they were until it was too late? Like the rabbits in Australia! Some Englishman thought Australia needed bunnies. So they brought them to the continent [in the 18th century]. There were no natural predators of bunnies in Australia and to this day they have a bunny population problem. I thought well this is a funny premise, let’s see what we can do with this. [Producer/writer] Gene Coon and [writer/story editor] Dorothy Fontana coached me [during the production process], but I had brought in a near-perfect story structure for TV [so rewrites were minimal].”
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http://chicago.suntimes.com/entertainment/star-trek-50th-anniversary-set-celebrates-iconic-show-films/
Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner in a 1968 Star Trek publicity photo
September 8, 2016 marks the 50th anniversary of the first season of Star Trek, the NBC science-fiction series produced by Gene Roddenberry. After 79 hour-long episodes, its lackluster ratings led the network to cancel the show at the end of its third season. Yet as early as the 1967 World Science Fiction Convention, “trekkies” with pointy Spock ears were in evidence. Something was up that was beyond the reasoning of network execs, who were clearly not the guys who dared “to boldly go where no man had gone before.”
In syndication, Star Trek became the foundation of a pop cultural phenomenon. Now known among the cognoscenti as Star Trek: The Original Series, the show gave birth to a franchise that shows no sign of diminishing. This summer saw the release of the 13th feature film, and a new TV serial is in the works, the seventh if you count the animated spin-off. Novelizations, fan fiction (including imagined homosexual romances between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock), conventions, Klingon language studies… there is whole subculture of “Trekkers,” as many preferred to be called. The show became a cultural juggernaut, not unlike a berserker planet-killer gobbling up everything in its way (“The Doomsday Machine,” season 2 episode 6).
The original series’ Cold War morality and its vision of a utopian future are the main draws for fans.
How did a short-lived TV show live long and prosper, spawning such a passionate following? Robert V. Kozinets examines this cultural behemoth as “one of the great consumption phenomena of our time.” He notes that billions have been made from the licensed merchandise alone, but he is most interested in the ethnographic implications of such powerful mass media imagery and the deeply personal stake fans have in it. The original Star Trek‘s Cold War-forged morality and its vision of a utopian future, in which all of Earth’s cultures unite to peacefully explore the universe, are the main draws for the fans Kozinets surveyed. Devoted fans, that is: some compare their investment in the canon as being akin to a religion. The Star Trek culture serves as a “powerful utopian refuge” for those who have sacralized the Star Trek universe, distancing its ideals from “its superficial status as a commercial product.”
Because even though the franchise is a commercial product designed to capture consumer dollars, fans nonetheless use this cultural produce for their own “articulations of morality and community.” Kozinets describes Star Trek productions as both “important marketing acts but also essential components of the meanings and practices that structures consumption practices on a cultural and subcultural level.” The potential contradictions here are finessed, Kozinets says, by “the need to distance consumption from commercialism and link it to a moral community.” Strange new worlds, indeed, and perhaps a way fans survive an alien “entertainment economy” by getting a piece of the their own action (“A Piece of The Action,” season 2 episode 17).
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http://daily.jstor.org/star-trek/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Couldn't resist changing the quote.
M'Ress, oh yass!
Especially since DS
takes place in the same time. So, we could go both places. We could follow Worf around.
Even for trips to Mars.
It's hard to imagine any technical solutions beyond Star Trek style anti-radiation medicines that magically repair damaged cells, or crazy strong magnetic fields generated around heavy nuclear powered spacecraft, spacecraft similar to military submarines but with huge radiator fins.
Sure, let's fling something like this into space:
Boost it into orbit with hydrogen bombs. Niven and Pournelle wrote about the launch of such a craft, "God was knocking, and he wanted in bad."
Nope, not gonna happen. And as our machines of exploration become more capable we have even fewer good reasons to put humans in space.
Realistically the only people seriously exploring space will be our intellectual progeny, mechanically and/or biologically engineered artificial intelligences. Maybe they'll invite us along for a ride someday, like dogs ride in our own automobiles, but only after they've constructed the required infrastructure to keep fragile beings such as ordinary humans alive.
The International Space Station is spared some very heavy radiation thanks to Earth's magnetic field. Beyond lower earth orbits, moon bases, mars bases, and long distance space travel become extremely problematic. Mars is not the relatively benign environment depicted in "The Martian," nor is interplanetary space.
The Apollo astronauts suffered significant damage from radiation, and mice exposed to similar radiation levels for periods of months do not recover from severe damage to their vascular systems.
Shielding human space travelers from radiation is an interesting materials science problem that has not been solved. Aluminum, for example, interacts with high energy particles in ways that can make the radiation more damaging to biological organisms inside a spacecraft or habitat.
Looking at the larger picture, my explanation for the Fermi Paradox is quite simple. Faster-than-light travel, or even travel at a substantial fraction of light speed, is impossible in this universe. Technological species such as ourselves simply fail to thrive or else they retreat into robust impenetrable universes of their own making. By the time a species is exploring nearby star systems the vehicles of exploration are indistinguishable from dust or they are composed of some "dark matter" we can't yet sense. And beyond that level of sophistication, beings capable of exploring the galaxy, we simply can't know. The universe is very big, and humanity is very small. There are severe physical constraints upon human perception, even when large numbers of us happen to be in a cooperative mood.
At the end of the day, we humans just are not that special. This planet has seen many innovative species come and go. We humans may be short-timers, a flash in the pan. I don't see that as a reason to despair, I see that as a reason to look out for one another, to love our neighbors. Each of us is here on earth by some absurd fortune, or misfortune, and nobody is here for long.
Nevertheless I can easily imagine a humanoid robot with some sort of artificial intelligence bouncing around on the surface of mars and relaying it's experiences back to earth in ways humans can easily identify with. So what, no actual human goes to mars, but what's the difference? Not many people have been to the moon either.
