Written by Jon Williams
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.
Those now-familiar
words were first heard on September 8, 1956, when the very first episode of the
original Star Trek television show
made its debut. In the fifty years since, Star Trek has become a true
touchstone, with phrases like “live long and prosper” and “beam me up, Scotty”
making their way into the cultural lexicon. The show made stars of its primary
cast members (William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, George Takei,
Nichelle Nichols, James Doohan, and Walter Koenig), and has spawned numerous
spinoffs, a movie franchise (including a reboot), and much more.
It seems
hard to believe now, but that
first
Star Trek show ran for just three
seasons, as it didn’t become a true hit until it was syndicated and shown in
reruns. At that point, the original 79 episodes just weren’t quite enough, so,
in 1973, the show was revived for an
animated
series that brought back all the original actors to voice their roles.
Although it was also short-lived (spanning 22 episodes), it was well-received,
even winning a Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Children’s Series.
As the
animated series wound down, Star Trek was at something of a crossroads. There
was a demand for more, but it was unclear exactly what form it would take.
Plans went into motion for a new television series, to be titled
Phase II, but numerous problems eventually
forced those plans to be scrapped. Instead, encouraged by the success that
science fiction films were finding at the box office,
Star Trek producers instead revived earlier plans to bring the
Enterprise crew to the big screen. Those efforts paid off with 1979’s
Star
Trek: The Motion Picture, again reuniting all the original cast members
in their familiar roles.
The success
of that movie spawned a franchise that would run for five more films featuring
the beloved original cast. They were:
The
Wrath of Khan (1982),
The
Search for Spock (1984),
The
Voyage Home (1986),
The
Final Frontier (1989), and
The
Undiscovered Country (1991). It was with this last movie that Captain
Kirk’s iconic line of “where no
man
has gone before” was updated to “where no
one
has gone before,” eliminating the gender-biased and (in a galaxy filled with
aliens) species-biased language in keeping with the franchise’s ideals of
equality.
That was
when Captain Kirk first spoke those words, but it was not the first time Star
Trek fans had heard them that way. In September of 1987,
Star
Trek: The Next Generation premiered on television, set 100 years after
the adventures of the original series and bringing a new cast (Patrick Stewart,
Jonathan Frakes, Brent Spiner, Gates McFadden, LeVar Burton, Michael Dorn,
Marina Sirtis, Denise Crosby, and Wil Wheaton) to the bridge of the Enterprise.
Highly popular, this series ran for seven seasons and made its own eventual
jump to the big screen. 1994’s
Generations
bridged the gap, starring the entire
Next
Generation cast and featuring several members of the original cast as well,
in a story that saw Patrick Stewart’s Captain Picard team up with William
Shatner’s Captain Kirk. The Next Generation cast then stayed in theaters for
three more movies on their own:
First
Contact (1996),
Insurrection
(1998), and
Nemesis
(2002).
The final
season of
The Next Generation aired
in 1994, but that was far from the end of Star Trek on television. Before it
ended, in 1993,
Star
Trek: Deep Space Nine featured an ensemble cast as the crew of a space
station in a contested region. Then, beginning in 1995, came
Star
Trek: Voyager, which followed a new ship and crew helmed by Kate
Mulgrew’s Captain Janeway, trying to make their way home to Earth after being
stranded on the other side of the galaxy. Like
The Next Generation, both of these series ran for seven seasons. In
2001, after
Voyager’s conclusion,
Star
Trek: Enterprise made its debut, starring Scott Bakula as the captain
of the very first Federation starship to be named Enterprise, in a prequel to
everything that had some before.
And of
course there is the new movie series. In 2009, after a 7-year absence from
theaters following
Nemesis,
Star Trek returned to the big screen in
a
reboot
from J.J. Abrams starring a new cast (Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, Karl Urban,
John Cho, Zoe Saldana, Simon Pegg, and the late Anton Yelchin) in the roles of
the original crew, with Leonard Nimoy appearing as an older Spock in a nod to
the alternate timelines the different casts now occupy. That was followed up in
2013 with
Star
Trek Into Darkness, and earlier this year with
Star
Trek Beyond.
All of this,
and still
Star Trek fans have plenty
to look forward to. In addition to a fourth film with the new cast, there is
also a new TV series in the works. Slated to debut in January,
Star Trek: Discovery will detail the
adventures of a new ship and crew in the ten years previous to the events of
the original series. And of course, the TV series and movies are just a part of
what the
Star Trek franchise has to
offer. SmartBrowse on our website for music scores and audiobooks, and you can
also direct patrons to hoopla digital for
Star Trek comics, audiobooks, and other
novelties. Also, keep an eye out for a special
Star Trek 50th anniversary flyer along with our September catalog
mailing.