On the anniversary of the most popular science fiction television franchise in history, it's fair to wonder how Star Trek achieved pride of place in popular culture. After all, in its original incarnation it was a three-year space opera whose third season was, to put it mildly, awful: its plots were typically either heavy-handed or heavily rewritten; it's said that you can still induce a coronary event in Harlan Ellison by proclaiming, "I loved ‘City onthe Edge of Forever.’"
Furthermore, the special-effects budget in the original show rarely rose above the use of bizarre salt shakers as props, and having cast members throw themselves out of their seats during battle scenes. Yet it resulted in one animated show, six movies involving the original cast, four spin-off television series (one of which generated its own theatrical releases), several different roleplaying games, a number of videogames, a plethora of comic books, God alone knows how many standard printed books, a variety of action figures and toys, a new movie that drew upon the original Characters That Did Not Suck, and even . . . Christmas tree ornaments! So the show clearly did something right.
I submit that what Star Trek got right was swagger. This is most obvious inWilliam Shatner's portrayal of Captain James T. Kirk (a character as innocent of subtlety as he was unconcerned that he might someday face scores of sexual-harassment lawsuits). But, really—they were all like that. Star Trek was a specifically American kind of show. Among the main cast members, Kirk and McCoy were explicitly American; Spock was Alien-American, representing our fine tradition of welcoming immigrants, while politely ignoring their strange immigrant ways. Scotty was . . . well, Scottish, which meant British. Which meant “honorary American.” Uhura and Sulu were utterly American members of minority groups, and posessed no first names, which was good—because they would have been given names like “Betty” or “Timmy.” And Pavel Chekov was the token Russian; he was added later on, in order to be genially mocked and patted on the head for being all grown-up and advanced enough to go out into space with the real explorers. In short, the UFP wasn't the United Nations: it was the U.S.A. (plus the rest of Earth), going out there and reorganizing the galaxy in accordance with good old American values.
If you're wondering then why this show acquired any cachet on the left side of the political spectrum, it's because alongside that traditional American attitude was some social commentary that was even less subtle than Kirk's character. The most infamous case in point was an episode known in Trek fandom as The Black and White Cookie Episode. That was the one wherein two members of an alien race—one colored black/white, the other white/black—used the Enterprise as the backdrop for their extended metaphor (special effects went all out for this one: they moved the cameras back and forth to represent their blasts of pure energy), right up to the inevitable denouement. Lefties eat that stuff up.
Weighty themes continued to either enrich or weigh down the various series, depending on how you looked at them: I will only note that the three best films among the first six movies (II, IV, & VI) all featured stories that avoided any “deeper meanings” like the plague. And when someone or other complained about how the new movie didn't contain any deeper meanings, lots of us breathed a sigh of relief.
Whether you like your kitchy Western-in-Space with a message or straight up, you might wait for a pause in a serious conversation today to commemorate that first sighting of theEnterprise in the known universe, when Star Trek premiered on NBC forty-four years ago today: once your colleagues fall silent, get ready to project, and then yell at the top of your lungs: “Khaaaaaaaaan!”
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