Space... the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship
"Enterprise." Its continuing mission: to explore strange new
worlds...
to seek out new life and new civilizations... to boldly
go where no one has
gone before...
The above blurb has been used to introduce the television
show
Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show's run has elapsed that of
it's predecessor, the original Star Trek. The original spawned six
movies and endless conventions, and both have given way to action
figures for children, national clubs, and other various
paraphernalia.
This is the chronicle to end all chronicles: the
full analysis and timeline
of one of the most popular television
programs in contemporary American
history.
Americans are fascinated with the possibility of intelligent life
somewhere else in the universe; this has been displayed in books
and
plays and movies too numerous to mention, not to mention the
accounts of
"everyday people" who say that they have encountered
aliens and unidentified
flying objects (UFOs). This fascination
became so great that in the late
1970s, President Carter decided
to launch an investigation within NASA (the
National Aeronautics
and Space Administration) to uncover the mystery of
UFOs and
intelligent life in the universe.
Science fiction plays upon
this obsession. The great science
fiction writers have sent our imaginations
into overload with
scores of stories to tell. The two most popular
futuristic science
fiction stories, Star Trek and Star Wars, both have
similar
characteristics. Both involve many different species of life (our
nearest equivalent would be "races"). The Ferengi, Vulcans,
humans,
Betazoids, Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, androids, and
Bjorans are in the
Star Trek series (which includes the original
television series, the six
movies, the NextGeneration television
series, and the television series Deep
Space Nine), while the Star
Wars movie trilogy includes humans, Wookies,
Jawas, Ewoks, droids,
Tusken Raiders, and a host of various other strange
and exotic
looking lifeforms. Each species has its own heritage, customs,
beliefs, and socioeconomic status. I am sure that each science
fiction
storyline has it's own unusual breed of lifeform, but this
paper will
examine only a particular science fiction storyline
which has mushroomed
into a cultural obsession. I choose not to
focus on the works of Ray
Bradbury and the like; I'm sure that
they are superb writers. (A fantastic
example is Bradbury's "A
Sound of Thunder," which is the probable
predecessor to all of
today's hype surrounding the film Jurassic Park and
the children's
character Barney the dinosaur.) However, I've never heard of
a Ray
Bradbury convention, or action figures based on characters he's
created.
Star Trek appeared in the right place at the right time. It was
the middle of the 1960s, an extremely vibrant decade which
primarily
transformed America from a quiet-yet-strong idealism
with do-or-die
patriotism to a wild and eccentric liberal age,
exhibiting imaginations let
loose from the taboos and inhibitions
of the era of World War II and the
1950s. The 1960s are difficult
to describe briefly; I'd do a better job in
another whole paper.
However, major contributing factors that made the 1960s
what they
were included Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, assassinations of
President Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King (among
others),
the music revolution (which was symbolized and brought to
a head at
Woodstock), the Vietnam war, and the space program. Not
to mention (to quote
Dave Barry) 42 hillion jillion other things.
But it was the space program
(which was President Kennedy's
dream), along with American curiosity of
UFOs, that gave Star Trek
a nearly guaranteed fan base.
Having completed
the Mercury 7 shift, NASA was in full gear with
the Gemini spaceproject when
Star Trek premiered on television
sets across the country. It told the tale
of a time (nobody knew
if it was the future, the present, or the past --
nobody knew
exactly when the stories took place in reference to our time
here
on Earth, because the time sequences were given in a
mysterious-sounding five-digit "stardate") in space with a
governing
body called Starfleet, and the vessel of focus was an
exploratory starship
named the Enterprise. The characters of the
show were the ship's main
personnel: Captain James Tiberius Kirk
and his crew.
All of the
signifiers that these characters displayed in the
original series have been
distorted to such a degree in certain
circles that sometimes they have
completely lost the original
characterization of the fictional person. An
illustration is that
of slashzines, which are pseudo-condescending fanzines
(which is a
magazine focused solely on a cultural obsession), which usually
includes fictional homoeroticism. The term "slashzines" comes from
the
way the stories are classified. For example, K/S (read: "Kirk
slash Spock")
stories deal with stories of Captain Kirk and Mr.
Spock engaging in
homosexual sex.
The original television series lasted for about three years,
then
fizzled out. Until the early 1980s. Star Trek: The Movie came out
at this time, right at the peak of the Star Wars fame (the second
movie
of the trilogy, The Empire Strikes Back, was released in
1980, and the final
film of the saga, The Return of the Jedi, came
out in 1983.) Any hint of
competition between these two
thrillingly entertaining science fiction
storylines would occur at
this juncture in time. The sequel to the movie,
Star Trek II: The
Wrath of Khan, enjoyed the same level of success that the
first
did, and throughout the next ten years following this film, the
Star Trek series would be reborn through the countless movies and
a
resurgence of the television series.
The 1980s also saw a rather unusual
phenomenon: the Trekkie
convention. "Trekkies"are people obsessed with the
show and all of
the paraphernalia associated with it. These people were the
true
and dedicated fan base; they watched every episode loyally,
memorized whole scripts and show trivia (including personal data
of the
characters which had to be fabricated by the writers
because of either
demand or excess creativity), bought action
figures and countless books on
the Starship Enterprise and the
crew (one book I recall seeing gave a
complete detail of
everything on the ship, from bathrooms to living quarters
to
engines to loading bays), and attended lectures and formed their
own
regional clubs (also called Starships).
Part of what makes Star Trek a
cultural obsession is its alluring,
almost mysterious quality. This quality
is inherent in one case,
because the base of the show and the storyline
covers a possible
solution to the contemporary American's wonder of the
great
beyond: is there other intelligent life in the universe? (A bumper
sticker parodies this as well: "Beam me up Scotty: there's no
intelligent life down here.") Also, some of the things that the
show's
actors do outside the show are of interest. William
Shatner, the actor who
played Kirk in the original series and all
of the movies, has been
stereotyped as the perennial bad actor,
overacting every one of his lines.
Many people can imitate and do
an impression of Kirk. Leonard Nimoy, the Mr.
Spock on the
original series and six films, turned to directing, and has
done
quite well; a recent notable achievement was Three Men and a Baby.
(On a brief sidenote, most of the actors on the original series
have
made brief cameo appearances either on Star Trek: The Next
Generation as
their original characters [an example is James
Doohan, who played Scotty,
the engineer] or in a similar context
in another show, such as the actress
who played Uhura, who
appeared as herself on Head of the Class, an ABC
situation
comedyset in a high school.) Patrick Stewart, who plays Captain
Jean-Luc Picard on The Next Generation series of the television
show,
was a Shakespearean actor before auditioning for the part. I
have seen him
play Claudius in Hamlet; he was extraordinarily
good. Brent Spiner, who
plays Audio Animatronic-like android
Lieutenant Commander Data on the newer
series, recently did a
musical album entitled "Old Yellow Eyes Is Back." The
title
parodies Frank Sinatra ("Old Blue Eyes") and the character Spiner
plays; he dons yellow contact lenses as part of his android
costume. One
of the songs on the album features his fellow
co-stars as backup singers. A
final note belongs to Wil Wheaton,
who plays Ensign Wesley Crusher (and son
to Dr. Crusher, the
ship's doctor) on The Next Generation. He had already
acquired
some semblance of fame as the lead in the flick Stand By Me.
However, Wesley has also been stereotyped as a whining child in a
teenager's body who sulks in his quarters whenever he doesn't get
what
he wants.
The show has been so popular and so stereotyped that the parodies
it has endured run into countless numbers. But most of the Star Trek
parodies we are familiar with are those on the accessible media:
radio
and television. The NBC late-night comedy show Saturday
Night Live has done
it at least twice; one with the late 1970s
cast (which had John Belushi at
the ship's helm), and another time
when William Shatner himself hosted the
program, where the ship
had turned into a restaurant of sorts. (I distinctly
remember Dana
Carvey playing some character out to get Kirk by listing
sanitary
problems with his restaurant. I can hear it now... "No
sneeze-guard on the salad bar!") Furthermore (possibly on the same
show,
because I don;t think he hosted the show more than once), a
skit about a
Star Trek convention was produced, and the convention
was especially lucky
because William Shatner, nearly considered a
god to these die-hard Trekkies,
wouldactually be speaking at the
convention. In his speech, he says that he
is sick and tired of
all this nonsense and tells all the Trekkies to "get a
life."
(Some say this skit is the origination of that particular phrase.)
He asks one Trekkie in particular, who looks like the
stereotypical nerd
and wears a T-shirt that says "I Grock Spock"
(and who knows what that
means), after guessing his age to be
about 30, if he had ever kissed a girl.
He shies away and looks
embarrassed. He does the same to others, lashing out
at their
eccentric fetish, screaming "I mean, it's just a TV show!" Then
some angry suit whispers something into his ear, and he returns to
the
podium, looking red in the face and apologizes to the crowd,
saying that was
what the evil Captain Kirk would have said, had he
been here today. He was
just pulling your collective leg, ha ha
ha, now live long and prosper, and
he'll see you on the bridge.
A funny song called "Star Trekkin'" was created
by a band called
The Firm (not to be confused with a rock band of the same
name).
The chorus was: "Star trekkin' across the universe, on the
Starship Enterprise, with old Captain Kirk... Star trekkin' across
the
universe, boldly going forward 'cause we can't find reverse."
The song
received heavy airplay on "The Dr. Demento Show," a radio
program which only
played really bizarre and funny tunes. All the
verses of the song were the
repetition of classic lines used in
the original series, such as:
There's [sic] Klingons on the starboard bound, Jim
You cannot change
the laws of physics, Jim
Scotty, beam me up!
It's life, Jim, but not as
we know it, Captain
It's worse than that -- he's dead, Jim!
The
above phrases are but a few in the vernacular of the show's
history. A few
others are "Onscreen" (which has been used in both
the original and The Next
Generation series),"Make it so" and
"Engage", used exclusively by Jean-Luc
Picard on the newer show,
and "Thank you, number one," also used exclusively
by Picard to
his right-hand man, William Riker.
The uses of computers
and networking have allowed many people
(including college students) access
to a wealth of information
about nearly anything -- a worldwide computer
library, if you will
-- and the possibility to hold conversations across the
globe. A
lot of information for this paper was retrieved from the computer
networks, and a minuscule fraction of it has newsgroups and
permanent
computer discussions which parody Star Trek in every
imaginable way. For
example, a computer news group system exists
on the network where one can
read postings by people across the
globe on numerous topics, ranging from
music to jokes to sports to
sex to television. There are (at last count)
over twelve hundred
groups. Nine del with Star Trek in one way or another.
Some of the
names of these groups include alt.startrek.creative,
rec.arts.startrek, rec.arts.startrek.fandom,
rec.arts.startrek.info,
rec.arts.startrek.reviews, and
rec.arts.startrek.tech. (The computer network
is in itself part of
what Star Trek is all about: the show has the ability
to
communicate nearly anything in its known universe in a matter of
seconds. Once I sent a piece of electronic mail [a.k.a. e-mail]to
a
student at the University of California at Berkeley; he said he
received it
in under five minutes. Sure beats the postal service,
and it even beats
Federal Express. And all UF students may have a
computer account free of
charge. But [and I know Ms. Glaros
dislikes it when I use this term, but it
is pertinent within the
context of this paper] I digress.)
Those who are
obsessed with the show and the image it projects
upon society sometimes like
to dress the part; this is the
marketability (and the subsequent financial
success) of the image.
The show does offer uniforms, insignia, posters,
hats, and other
paraphernalia to the public through mail order catalogs and
fanzines. My friend James (whose computer account name, by the
way, is
"Enterprise") has a lapel pin which is used on the show
for intraship
communication. He loyally wears it on the vest he
wears while working.
Many Star Trek discussions have sprung up in recent times
comparing Old
Generation characters to their Next Generation
counterparts, leading almost
to a shouting match between those who
hold the original series near and dear
to their hearts, and those
who have jumped on The Next Generation bandwagon
in recent years
(like myself). Comparisons between Kirk and Picard, Spock
and
Data, Scotty and LaForge, and Bones and Crusher are many and
varied.
An example of a main difference between different
characters in like
positions in different television series is
that of the desires of the
resident "brains": Mr. Spock and
Lieutenant Commander Data. Spock, being
half Vulcan, shuns
emotions and feelings, although his other half is human.
Spock is
caught between two forces. Data, on the other hand, is an android,
a computer which looks human, who wishes to become human (the
Pinocchio
theory). This comparison is blown wide open when Nimoy
makes a rare cameo
appearance on an episode of Star Trek: The Next
Generation, and he holds a
conversation with Data which covers the
above.
A final bit of
information about this cultural obsession involves
actual use of the showin
real life. In the movie Star Trek III:
The Search for Spock, the Klingon
language was partially invented
and used in the film. English subtitles were
used when Klingons
were conversing in their native tongue. A linguist
somewhere in
America got a hold of an idea, and began long talks with the
people behind the scenes of Star Trek: The Next Generation
concerning
the full invention and implementation of a real Klingon
language. The
Klingon language now does exist, and it holds the
odd distinction of being
the first artificial language created
solely from the field of
entertainment. Glossaries and
dictionaries are in print, and the language
consists of a lot of
guttural and groaning sounds, along with difficult
consonant
combinations that would cause any American to emit saliva in an
outward direction while attempting to talk in this truly original
language. The Klingon language has rules of grammar, spelling, and
the
alphabet looks more like an Oriental language than Cyrillic.
Therefore, the
true die-hard Trekkie can actually use something in
his quest for Star Trek
Nirvana.
To conclude this paper, I will prove that Star Trek is a cultural
obsession. Some of the information gathered for this paper came
from a
few friends with their few various thoughts, and the small
amount of
information I got from my computer account. However, the
bulk of information
came from my memory and personal experience.
And I don't even speak Klingon.