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Famous and Influential Fans
Star Trek fans have endured decades of ridicule and abuse. The image of the socially awkward, obsessive-compulsive, possibly delusional “Trekkie” became fixed in the public mind, even among many who loved Star Trek. Millions of viewers flocked to blockbuster movies like Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986), and made Star Trek and its sequel series the most profitable syndicated TV franchise of all time. Yet somehow, many in the audience failed to count themselves as fans, in part because the series’ most ardent devotees had become stigmatized, an easy punch line for stand-up comics and snarky critics. Even William Shatner famously exhorted fans to “get a life” in a 1986 Saturday Night Live skit. “Move out of your parents’ basements … and grow the hell up!”
There’s no denying that extremists exist, and have always existed, in the community of Trek fandom. These are the people who tried to rip Shatner’s clothes off during a 1968 public appearance, the ones who creator-producer Gene Roddenberry said “scare the hell out of me” in a 1976 interview with the Associated Press. Despite the stereotype, however, most Star Trek fans have always led perfectly normal lives. Rather than hanging out in Mom’s basement, many have been inspired by the program to take action—volunteering with food banks or literacy programs, or lobbying for progressive political causes—and to pursue their own dreams. They have become scientists, engineers, physicians, actors, writers, directors, titans of industry, even president of the United States. Not bad for a bunch of dweebs.
Tom Hanks
Two-time Oscar-winning actor Tom Hanks frequently has professed his admiration for Star Trek. He was ten years old when the program premiered, and the series helped foster a childhood aspiration to join the space program. That didn’t work out, but he played astronaut Jim Lovell in the 1995 film Apollo 13, coproduced the HBO miniseries From Earth to the Moon (1998) about the Apollo program, and coproduced, cowrote, and narrated the IMAX documentary Magnificent Desolation: Walking on the Moon 3D (2005). Hanks was offered the role of Zefram Cochrane in the motion picture Star Trek: First Contact (1996) but had to decline because he was working on his directorial debut, That Thing You Do! (also 1996). Instead, James Cromwell played Cochrane in First Contact. Hanks also expressed interest in making a cameo appearance in J. J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek film. According to Patrick Stewart, Hanks boasts that he can name every episode of The Next Generation.
Ben Stiller
Actor-writer-director Ben Stiller, who attended his first Star Trek convention at age eleven, works Trek inside jokes into nearly all his films. In his 2001 movie Zoolander, Stiller named the villain “Mugatu” in tribute to the Mugato, the horn-headed white gorilla creature seen in “A Private Little War.” The 1996 comedy The Cable Guy, directed by Stiller, used composer Gerald Fried’s “Ritual/Ancient Battle” suite (written for Captain Kirk’s clash with Spock during “Amok Time” and reused frequently in later episodes) to score the climactic fight between Steven Kovacs (Matthew Broderick) and his demented cable television installer (Jim Carrey). Stiller also gave William Shatner a cameo in his 2004 film Dodgeball. Even the name of Stiller’s production company, Red Hour Films, is a Star Trek reference. The Red Hour is the time when denizens of planet Beta III run amok in the episode “The Return of the Archons.”
Whoopi Goldberg
Whoopi Goldberg (born Caryn Elaine Johnson in 1955 in New York City) was eleven years old when Star Trek debuted. She was inspired to pursue a career in acting by Nichelle Nichols’s portrayal of Lieutenant Uhura. By the time Star Trek: The Next Generation premiered in 1987, Goldberg had established herself as a popular stand-up comedian and had proven her dramatic skills with an Oscar-nominated appearance in director Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple (1985). She also won a Golden Globe and an NAACP Image Award for her work in that film. Then, at the pinnacle of her career, Goldberg approached creator-producer Gene Roddenberry and asked to join the cast of Next Gen. Roddenberry, once he realized Goldberg was serious, created the recurring character of Guinan especially for her. The actress appeared in twenty-nine episodes scattered throughout the show’s final six seasons and had cameos in the Star Trek feature films Generations (1994) and Nemesis (2002). According to Nichelle Nichols’s autobiography, Beyond Uhura, Goldberg was irked when she realized that her girlhood idol would not appear in Generations. “Where the hell is Nichelle?” complained Goldberg, who hoped that Uhura and Guinan would share a scene together.
Other Actors and Entertainers
Jason Alexander, of Seinfeld fame, is a self-identified “Trekkie” who guest starred (in alien makeup, no less) in the 1999 Voyager episode “Think Tank.” He also appeared, wearing Spock ears and a “Beam Me Up” T-Shirt, in country singer Brad Paisley’s 2007 music video “On-Line,” which also featured William Shatner. Kelsey Grammer, star of Cheers and Frasier, is a diehard Trek fan who spoke Klingon in the Frasier episode “Star Mitzvah” (2002). Grammer guest starred in the 1992 Next Generation episode “Cause and Effect”; Patrick Stewart and Brent Spiner returned the favor by making guest appearances on Frasier. Actor Robin Williams, who became a household name playing an extraterrestrial on Mork & Mindy (1978–82), visited the set of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. He was offered the role of time-traveling con man Berlinghoff Rasmussen in the Next Gen episode “A Matter of Time” (1991) but had to decline due to conflicts with the shooting schedule of Hook (1991). Instead, the role went to Matt Frewer, best remembered as TV’s “Max Headroom.”
Actor Christian Slater, who had a cameo in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991), is another Trek devotee. So is Academy Award-winning actress Mira Sorvino, whose father, Paul Sorvino, played Worf’s foster brother in the Next Gen episode “Homeward” (1994). Actress Angelina Jolie told The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart that she had an adolescent crush on Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock.
Writer-producer Seth MacFarlane often peppers episodes of his popular animated shows (Family Guy, American Dad) with Star Trek references and inside jokes. He also appeared in the Star Trek: Enterprise episodes “The Forgotten” (2004) and “Affliction” (2005). Writer-producer David A. Goodman, who worked with MacFarlane on Family Guy, also penned an episode-length Trek parody for Futurama (“Where No Fan Has Gone Before’) and wrote four teleplays for Star Trek: Enterprise. Director Bryan Singer, who helmed The Usual Suspects (1995) and the first two X-Men movies, is another avowed Trek fan who made a cameo in Star Trek: Nemesis.
Drummer Mick Fleetwood, a founding member of the rock group Fleetwood Mac, is another confessed “Trekkie”; he had a cameo in the Next Generation episode “Manhunt” (1989). Guitarist Tom Morello, formerly of alt-rock band Rage Against the Machine, appeared in the Star Trek: Voyager episode “Good Shepherd” (2000). Country music superstar Brad Paisley asked William Shatner to appear in his 2007 music video “On-Line” and performed on Shatner’s 2004 album Has Been. When one of Paisley’s fans won a contest to spend a day with the singer in Las Vegas, Paisley took the lucky winner to Star Trek: The Experience at the Las Vegas Hilton. Singer-songwriter Jimmy Buffett included allusions to Star Trek in the lyrics of several songs. Even the Chairman of the Board himself, Frank Sinatra, was a fan. Reportedly, he watched The Next Generation religiously. As a tribute, Brent Spiner recorded an album titled Ol’ Yellow Eyes Is Back, comprised of standards popularized by Sinatra.
Martin Cooper, Inventor of the Cell Phone
Martin Cooper, while an employee of Motorola in 1973, led the team that developed the first functional cordless cellular phone—a twenty-eight-ounce unit nicknamed “the brick.” His first call was to AT&T’s Bell Labs, where engineers were simultaneously working to create a similar device. Cooper phoned to inform them they had lost the race. Cooper admits that the now-ubiquitous cell phone was inspired by the flip-top communicators used on Star Trek. In the 2006 Discovery Channel documentary How William Shatner Changed the World, Cooper says of the communicator: “That was not a fantasy to us. … That was an objective.”
NASA Scientists
A photo taken on October 19, 1967 (the night before the broadcast debut of “The Doomsday Machine”) shows a control room full of technicians from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena wearing “Spock ears” as they monitor the Mariner 5 probe’s flyby of Venus. The space agency has been a hotbed of Trek fandom ever since. The original prototype space shuttle was named Enterprise in honor of the Starfleet flagship.
Tom Hanks may never have become an astronaut, but many other fans of the show did. Some of those were recruited by Lieutenant Uhura herself, Nichelle Nichols, who became an advocate for the space program in the 1970s and led an effort to attract minority candidates for the astronaut corps. Among the many trainees recruited by Nichols were Sally Ride, the first American woman in space; Guy Bluford and Fred Gregory, two of the first African American astronauts; and three crew members killed in the Challenger disaster of 1986.
Also, NASA scientists have often used Star Trek lingo and metaphors to explain their work. For example, in July 2011, NASA announced plans for an ambitious new mission to send astronauts to explore an asteroid within fifteen years, a project with daunting technical and logistical challenges. Scientists aren’t sure yet how this will be done. Since asteroids have minimal gravity, you can’t walk on one without floating away. NASA is exploring the use of jetpacks and tethers, or even nets and harpoons, to allow explorers to float near the surface of the asteroid while attached to a tiny, shuttle pod–like ship that would launch from a larger spacecraft. The same technology could be used to divert an asteroid on a collision course with Earth. “This is the big step. This is out into the universe, away from Earth’s gravity completely,” Kent Joosten, of the Human Exploration Team at Johnson Space Center in Houston, told the Associated Press in a July 23, 2011, interview. “This is really where you are doing the Star Trek kind of thing.” Indeed, two classic Trek episodes—“Paradise Syndrome” and “For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky”—have plots that hinge on preventing an asteroid from colliding with a populated planet.
IBM Computer Programmers
Telecommunication and space exploration are hardly the only fields where innovators have been influenced by Star Trek. Entire books have been written about scientific breakthroughs inspired by the show. But at least one more advance deserves mention: IBM’s development of a voice-activated, interactive computer, nicknamed Watson, to compete on the TV quiz show Jeopardy! in February 2011. In a two-episode challenge, Watson mopped up the floor with the show’s two highest-earning human champions, racking up $77,147 to Ken Jennings’s $24,000 and Brad Rutter’s $21,600. Jeopardy! awarded the winner a $1 million prize, which IBM donated to charity. In subsequent interviews, IBM programmers compared Watson to the Enterprise computer, voiced by Majel Barrett. In an interview available on the company’s website, IBM researcher David Ferrucci stated flatly that “the computer on Star Trek” is an appropriate comparison for Watson:
A powerful and fluent conversational agent, like the Star Trek computer, is a driving vision for this work. … When you think about the Star Trek series, Captain Picard or Captain Kirk just speaking to the computer and the computer immediately has a sense of what’s the context, what is he asking me about, what are my follow-up questions, how to behave as an information-seeking tool that helps this person get at what they need rapidly through a natural language dialogue in their terms.
The world’s most famous living scientist, author of A Brief History of Time and other books that have helped laypeople better understand the mind-boggling realms of physics and cosmology, is also a Star Trek fan. Stephen Hawking played himself (or, rather, a holodeck recreation of himself) in the 1993 Next Generation adventure “Descent.” In this installment, Commander Data plays cards with Hawking, Albert Einstein, and Sir Isaac Newton. Hawking has the distinction of being the only person to appear as himself on Star Trek. During the shoot, he asked to visit the Enterprise engine room set. Nodding at the warp drive engine, the wheelchair-bound Hawking reportedly quipped, “I am working on that.” Hawking also penned the foreword to physicist Lawrence M. Krauss’s book The Physics of Star Trek. In this foreword, Hawking wrote that “Science fiction like Star Trek is not only good fun but it also serves a serious purpose, that of expanding the human imagination.”
Randy Pausch
Professor Randy Pausch, a computer scientist diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, delivered a lecture titled “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” to his students at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh September 18, 2007. His upbeat speech was videotaped and soon became a YouTube sensation. Pausch suddenly found himself in demand for interviews and speaking engagements, including an appearance before Congress to appeal for pancreatic cancer research and a guest spot on Oprah. He expanded his well-loved speech into a short book, The Last Lecture, which became a posthumous bestseller in October 2008. All this attention helped Pausch achieve a childhood dream of his own: joining Starfleet. In interviews, the professor sometimes mentioned his long-standing admiration for Star Trek. According to a May 8, 2009, New York Times story, director J. J. Abrams was inspired by Pausch’s message and e-mailed the professor about appearing in the 2009 Star Trek movie: “I just wanted to put the invitation out there—that if you had any desire to be in the film … it would be my honor and pleasure.” Pausch is glimpsed briefly in the picture’s opening scene, playing a bridge officer on the Starship Kelvin. He has one line (“Captain, we have visual”). Sadly, Pausch died July 25, 2008, before The Last Lecture reached bookshelves or Abrams’s Star Trek made it to theaters.
Sir Richard Branson
Sir Richard Branson, the British billionaire owner of hundreds of businesses, including Virgin Records, Virgin Atlantic Airways, and Virgin Galactic (the first space tourism company), is a confessed Star Trek devotee. The names of Virgin Galactic’s first two spacecraft are a dead giveaway: VSS Enterprise and VSS Voyager.
Political Leaders
In 2008, Barack Obama became the 44th president of the United States—and the first Trekker in Chief.
U.S. President Barack Obama’s affection for Star Trek also is well known. He ran J. J. Abrams’s 2009 Star Trek film at the White House and later gave interviewer Jon Meacham from Newsweek a capsule review (thumbs up). “You know, Star Trek was ahead of its time,” Obama said of the classic series in the May 15, 2009, interview. “The storylines were always evocative, you know. There was a little commentary and a little pop philosophy for a 10-year-old to absorb.” Obama also flashed Meacham the Vulcan salute. The president’s affection for Star Trek has inspired ribbing from humorists, especially the irreverent staff of Internet news parody site the Onion.
But Obama is hardly the only Star Trek fan among the world’s political elite. Others include:
• King Abdullah II of Jordan, who appeared as an extra in the 1996 Voyager episode “Investigations.”
• Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper.
• Former secretary of state Colin Powell, who visited the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation during his tenure as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
• Former vice president of the U.S. and Nobel Peace Prize winner Al Gore, who often skipped class to watch Star Trek reruns (according to his former Harvard College roommate, actor Tommy Lee Jones).
• And President Ronald Reagan, who screened Star Trek III: The Search for Spock at the White House in 1984 and later gave interviewers a capsule review (thumbs down). In 1991, then ex-president Reagan visited the set of Star Trek: The Next Generation during the filming of the episode “Redemption.” He reportedly quipped that he liked the Klingons because “they remind me of Congress.”