Photos from the Vault

Star Trek Fan Club Meeting 1978

Star Trek and Star Wars fan club meeting, 1978. Telegram-Tribune Photo by Thom Halls

The pitch to studio executives was a “Wagon Train to the Stars.”
No, no, no, NO, not Hollywood stars, stay with me.
Cue the music, Ba Ba BA – Ba BA BA BA BA
“Space, the final frontier…”
It’s a hit baby, I smell franchise.
Uh, not quite.
Though it would eventually produce more hours of science fiction programming than any other, the Star Trek project struggled at the beginning.
The show did not fit neatly with the other shows produced by Desilu Productions. The company was formed by Desi Arnaz and his one time wife, Lucille Ball and produced Lucy’s shows as well as “Mission Impossible” and “The Untouchables”.
NBC Network executives were indifferent to the 1964 pilot. Back then networks had enough money to commission a movie, called a pilot, to see if they wanted to pick up a show.
The network did fork over enough money to produce an unprecedented second pilot. Characters were reworked and recast and this time the show was picked up.
The first series episode aired Sept 8, 1966.
The show struggled to find an audience. The cast was interracial, inter-species and intergalactic. Setting the show in the future allowed the audience to imagine that folks on Earth could get past their petty differences with each other and turn their photon torpedoes on a more deserving target, say the Romulans.
The distance in time and space allowed the show to address troubling issues of the era. Race relations, mutually assured destruction, doomsday weapons, understanding other cultures were all story lines, while leaving William Shatner enough time to rip his shirt and hit on space babes.
The show had an underlying set of rules that guided writers. There was the explicit “Prime Directive” and the unwritten rule that guys in the red uniforms die in an opening sequence.
The people that hate the show pick on Shatner’s acting or the formula joke to ease the tension just before the credits roll.
Others can’t stand the early cheesy special effects or humanistic tone.
Those who fell in love with the show loved the characters,  obsess about the rules and enjoy that a show can ask big existential questions within a comfortable framework.
People love it or hate it but it moved the genre into new territory. Compare it to the campy 1965 offering “Lost in Space” or earlier “Buck Rogers” serials.
Trek was an expensive show to produce. The makeup, costuming, set and special effects required would have been a hard for a movie, this was weekly television.
One story I read about was the director who was frustrated when his plant wrangler brought in ordinary plants to populate an exotic planet set. He yanked the shrub out of the pot and dropped it back in upside down, roots dangling in the air. He said words to the effect of “This is what I am looking for.”
A fan driven letter writing campaign kept the show from being canceled after two seasons but three seasons later it was over after 80 episodes.
The fan base grew in syndication.

I remember shopping at Sears with my dad and a wall of television screens showing a lizard-man stalking Captian Kirk across the rocks. I remember thinking, the plastic reptile head and glitter eyes were not real, yet still being oddly terrified by it.

The show spawned a legion of fans and now bloggers with specific concerns.
Actual current topics from the IMDB message board.

“I have a question about Kirk’s Uniforms.”
“At what point does the Prime Directive come in?”
“Why do the Klingons in this movie look so different from the Klingons from the original series?”
“What’s the best way to get your girlfriend into Star Trek?”

The answer to the last question is: “Have her marry the creator, Gene Roddenberry.”
His wife Majel Barrett-Roddenberry participated in every production including the 1964 pilot, until her death in 2008. Among other characters she played the pilot’s first officer “Number One”, “Nurse Christine Chapel” and the voice of the computer.

Oh, I think he meant, “How do I get my girlfriend to like Star Trek?”
Can’t help you with that buddy. My wife says “Auugggg keep going!” every time the clicker lands on an old episode. One message board trekkie offers operant conditioning advice by giving back-rubs to his sweetie while watching an episode. I suspect I would develop thumbs the size of hams taking this route.

Another trekkie laments that it has been seven long lonely years.

George Lucas proved that a science fiction movie could look great and make a pile of money with his 1977 film Star Wars.

Fans of Star Trek took hope, wrote letters, organized festivals. The show grew its audience with incessant syndicated reruns who grew tired of the same 80 stories and the final frontier was entered again. The franchise, grounded for a decade,  took flight in 1979 with a motion picture. Later movies and television series would follow.

I could not find the article to go with these images labeled “Star Trek Fan Club” from February 8, 1978 by Thom Halls. A few Star Wars fans were allowed in. Apparently the article ran on a different Star Date than it was shot.

Beam me up Scotty.