Beam up to Action and Adventure: The Library Salutes Star Trek Day
"Space. The Final Frontier. These are the Voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its Five Year Mission: To Explore Strange New Worlds, To Seek Out New Life and New Civilizations, To Boldly Go Where No Man Has Gone Before."
On Sept 8, 1966, actor William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk first spoke this iconic introduction to the one-hour television series Star Trek. Although Star Trek initially struggled to find an audience in its three-year run on NBC, the series would eventually boom into a media juggernaut with 12 television series, 13 feature films, and countless original books, comic books, video games, and assorted merchandise.
The original Star Trek was ahead of its time, depicting a racially diverse crew exploring the universe together in an era when television was dominated by police and Western shows. Star Trek Creator Gene Roddenberry(also known as the Great Bird of the Galaxy) envisioned a humanist future without economic strife and prejudice. Screenwriters would use the one-hour television format to address complex social issues, including the war in Vietnam in the episode "A Private Little War," racism in "Let That Be Your Last Battlefield," and the stigma of mental illness "Dagger of the Mind".
Science Fiction fans organized a massive letter-writing campaign to NBC to save Star Trek in 1968 when the network threatened to cancel the series. NBC would eventually cancel Star Trek in 1969 in the midst of a disappointing third season. But the show would find a second life in television syndication in the 1970s, and the fans would gather at Star Trek Conventions to meet the show’s actors and Roddenberry himself. The grassroots support of fans called Trekkers or Trekkkies would prompt Paramount Studios to bring the crew of the Starship Enterprise back in a feature film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. The success of this film would lead to five blockbuster sequels and eventually a second Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, in 1987, with a brand new crew and Starship Enterprise lead by Sir Patrick Stewart as Captain Jean-Luc Picard.
Star Trek would continue to grow with multiple spinoff series into the 1990s and beyond. Today, Paramount Studios has several new Star Trek Series to view on its streaming network, Paramount Plus, and September 8 is hailed by Trekkers worldwide as Star Trek Day.
For the die-hard Trekkies or just casual fans, here are this blogger's picks from the library catalog of the Best of Trek to enjoy today.
Live Long and Prosper!
