In the last blog, I wrote about Thomas More’s Utopia and the more general area of utopian fiction and it occurs to me that this week’s topic, Gene Roddenberry’s seminal TV series Star Trek, itself falls squarely into the genre of utopian fiction, albeit a far future one in which humanity, having conquered the stars, has also conquered those quaint old divisions that characterised 1960s America. The Enterprise’s crew of star sailors includes a Russian, a Japanese and a black woman and no-one bats an eyelid because it’s the 23rd century and the Cold War, Hiroshima, and racial segregation are all markers of a distant past.
Star Trek first debuted in the US on 8th September 1966 but here in the UK it wasn’t until 12th July 1969 (just eight days before the Apollo 11 mission to the moon) that this soon-to-be-huge pop-culture phenomenon began airing on BBC One. It must have been a few years later when it came upon my radar because I have no memory of a black-and-white version and it wasn’t until about 1974 that we got a colour telly. But boy, how they capitalised on that new colour medium: bright gold, blue and red tunics abounded aboard the USS Enterprise, whilst the numerous planets they beamed down to, and aliens they encountered, were also captured in glorious technicolour.
The concepts were mind-blowingly imaginative, the sound effects reassuringly futuristic (the background computer chatter on the bridge, the sound of a communicator flipping open, the swoosh of the automatic doors, the firing pf phasers, the mechanisms of the transporter in full beam), and the sets were…well, limited by the period shall we say, but full marks for imagination.
The Enterprise, as everyone knows, was a space exploration starship on a mission to “explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilisations; to boldly go where no man has gone before”. Led by the Captain James T Kirk, First Officer Spock and Chief Medical Officer Leonard “Bones” McCoy, the crew also included lieutenants Sulu and Uhura, ensign Chekov and of course, on the engineering deck and responsible for all things engineering (including beaming, shields, di-lithium crystals, and giving her as much as he dare), was Montgomery “Scotty” Scott.
It spawned an immensely successful franchise, of course, with something like eleven spin-off TV series and numerous feature films, but it’s the original series that will always be the true Star Trek to me. Their weekly missions had me rapt from the moment Kirk kicked off each episode with an excerpt from his Captain’s Log, and below, for the sake of nostalgia, are the opening and closing credits of this iconic TV series.
