“WE’VE BEEN THROUGH DEATH … AND LIFE TOGETHER.”
The seeds of Star Trek’s rebirth were actually planted while the original series was still in production, fighting for its very existence. NBC may not have recognized it right away, but the show had most definitely struck a chord with viewers, who developed a passionate interest in Star Trek very early in its run.
It was that early fervor that would ultimately spawn the first fanzines devoted to a television series—mimeographed amateur fan-created magazines filled with illustrations, short stories, analysis, and interviews. Later, the record-breaking success of the show in syndication would inspire a plethora of merchandise and full-fledged Star Trek conventions, as well as the hope that the Enterprise would someday fly again, a dream that would eventually be realized with the release of 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
Without the fans keeping Star Trek alive in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, it’s very unlikely it would have ever survived into the twenty-first century.
DAVID GERROLD (author, The World of Star Trek)
In retrospect, I would have to say that Star Trek was overrated; that its survival, the phenomenon, is based more on what we imagine than what’s really there. This is true about all television. Television is imitation movies, so what we do in television is hint at and suggest what we really can’t show, because people don’t want it in their living room. So you go back and look at the original Star Trek, and there’s about a dozen episodes that are quite good as either television or science fiction. Not much more than that.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, the Star Trek Log series)
It’s fairly obvious that Star Trek represented, more than anything else, a sensible future. A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up. It was the idea we go out into space and even if we meet hostile aliens, we can manage to get along; and everyone on the Enterprise gets along. The whole tribal issue of humanity has disappeared, and we have a sensible world. Just that we go forward and the world isn’t destroyed by climate change or some other environmental disaster, and we’re not fighting each other. That’s the message of all hopeful science fiction. I believe that’s what the fans latched on to.
DAVID GERROLD
The strength of the show is the format and the characters, not the episodes. Because the characters and the format suggest a possibility, and it is the possibilities that Star Trek suggests that I think are responsible for the phenomenon of the TV series. We would go to Star Trek conventions—and this would be about 1972—and people would say, “Why is Star Trek so popular?” I’d say, “I think it’s because Star Trek represents a world that works for everyone; that we could solve problems. It represented an opportunity to say that the human race is going to outlive its troubles and survive and succeed, and truly will learn to live together.” This was in the middle of the Vietnam War, race riots, famine, and Watergate, and here’s Star Trek saying, “No sweat, we’ll be okay.” That’s real valuable. When I started saying that to other people, and I said it in my book The World of Star Trek, which was published in 1973, other people started picking up on it and repeating it.
I did an analysis in The World of Star Trek that said that there are really three worlds of Star Trek. There’s the show itself, what gets transmitted; behind the scenes; and the fans.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG (author, Star Trek Lives!)
Fanfic has been the main artistic outlet for writer-type people since the dawn of time. However, the fanzine was invented by science-fiction fandom circa the commercialization of the spirit duplicator … purple ink on a gel. Science-fiction fanzines did not usually publish fan-written fiction. One simply did not infringe copyright by writing in another person’s professionally published universe except for short humor. And fan-written original fiction was just too awful and nobody wanted it. So fanzines were discussions and reviews, personal life events, news of forthcoming books, etc.
DEVRA LANGSHAM (editor, Spockanalia)
A lot of the time they were letterzines—you wrote to someone about something and they wrote back—or there were con reports. You know, “I went to this con and I saw Isaac Asimov and it was neat.” Or there were book reviews, but there wasn’t fiction. There were three or four professional magazines that were buying fiction at the time. If your story is good enough to be published, why haven’t you submitted it to one of them? So nobody had thought of publishing fiction. I don’t know if people wrote stories related to other shows and other books. It didn’t occur to me that I should look for a fanzine with fiction in it, not that I think there were any. And if there were, there was no Internet, so it was a question of people finding each other.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Devra Langsham in New York did the first fanzine, Spockanalia, as a one-shot with the attitude, “Let’s just publish these Star Trek stories in a fanzine.” There were only a few stories, but there were too many people who wanted them to distribute this by carbon copy (the usual method was carbon paper before Xerox). Meanwhile, Ruth Berman called for stories for a fanzine she named T-Negative. I’m not sure, but I think the first ones were mimeo and only later when circulation broke five hundred or a thousand did they go offset press. It’s all circulation size versus production cost and storage space in someone’s basement.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
My friend Sherna Comerford and I talked about Star Trek stories a lot. Then we met someone at a science-fiction convention in Newark and she said, “Here, you should talk to this lady; she’s got a magazine she’s published with book reviews and letters, and she’s written a couple of articles on Star Trek saying things like, ‘Hey, isn’t this neat: you can tell the service these people are in by the color of their shirts.’” Which, of course, we didn’t know, because we didn’t have a color TV. She put us in touch with Ruth Berman, a longtime science-fiction fan who had written a story and may have printed up a few copies for her friends. Then we met [writer] Eleanor Arnason and Kathy Bushman, who was an artist, and it just kind of went from there.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Note the Vulcan connection of each fanzine title. It was Spock that woke up female science-fiction fans and produced a torrent of stories. Then the Kirk fans and everybody else wrote stories about their favorite characters. Zines proliferated and differentiated, re-creating genres from scratch.
One such “re-creation” of fan fiction was so-called Kirk/Spock (or K/S fiction, also known as slash fiction), which brought the relationship between the two characters from close friends to something far more … intimate.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Gene Roddenberry explained it this way. When he created the bridge crew, he created the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triumvirate from fragments of his own mind. He could identify with each character, they were components of his own creative view of the world. So when Trekkers studied the TV series, they saw Kirk and Spock as a unit. As one entity, as needing to “get together,” as two poles of a magnet, because GR created them to be two halves of a whole.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
Spockanalia was introduced in 1967 while the show was in its infancy. We were really careful and didn’t want to look like fools, so we said, “Don’t introduce things that aren’t on the show—if it’s in an episode, that’s great, but don’t suddenly decide that Kirk has golden nipples or anything like that.” We were writing and publishing this zine as though Star Trek is the real world, so we’re not going to publish articles on “I got to go on the set and I saw the actors,” because that was already being published by other people.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Human nature being what it is, sexuality is the expression of that “get together” and “irresistible attraction.” The soul mate hypothesis runs deep in romance literature. Many of the women drawn to Star Trek fandom, who wrote fanfic, were not science-fiction readers or fans nearly as much as they were romance readers and fans. The other factions of Star Trek’s female fandom were scientists, often working in science labs. Many others were librarians and teachers whose education and professions include sociology as a science. Given that Kirk and Spock belong together—“well, then … maybe … uh, no, but…”—one fan wrote a story where that hypothesis was brought to the fore, played with, and suggested. That story circulated on carbon copies, then got printed—today we’d say it “went viral”—and all of a sudden people everywhere were arguing the hypothesis by writing stories.
Simultaneously, the gay community was in the process of coming out of the closet, so while many Trek stories were fem-lib based, others were gay-lib based. My thesis is that popular fiction follows and reflects social trends but does not cause them. Popular fiction can and does help people who are not part of a particular social trend to understand the people who are part of that social trend.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
When Spockanalia was published, that was the year that the World Science Fiction Convention was held in Manhattan. We printed up our magazine and walked around the convention holding a picture of the front cover so people would see it was Star Trek. And either they said, “Blech, that stupid show” or they said, “Whoooooooa!” We developed what is commonly known as “unsold fanzine shoulder,” which is the way you get after you’ve been carrying ten magazines around. After that, we got a table, but this was the very first time and we just walked around and held it out to people.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
As far as fans connected to established science-fiction fandom were concerned, character distortions as the show went on were no problem. That’s what fanfic is for. You just fix it yourself. People generally liked the show because it was real science fiction or hated it because it was television and pretty much distorted or ignored the real-science ingredients. But they watched every episode, memorized them or recorded the soundtrack on sound recorders before video recorders, and discussed every error and development with vast differences of opinion.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE (authors, Star Trek Concordance)
By the time Star Trek fandom emerged as a force to be reckoned with, the quick-print shops were common and offset prices were down so everyone could afford them. One of the first things science-fiction fans noticed was that Star Trek fans began turning out beautifully reproduced fanzines all over the place. This rubbed some of the science-fiction old-timers the wrong way, as they remembered all too well the frustration of trying to produce a letter-perfect fanzine using outdated methods of reproduction.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
There are two types of science-fiction fans: “fandom is a way of life” folks and “fandom is just a goddamned hobby” folks. Star Trek added another division: those who follow canon and those who embroider it with their own original material, and thus write “alternate universe” stories. My Star Trek fanfic series Kraith is “alternate universe” and was published first in T-Negative. I wrote a nonfiction article for Spockanalia, the fanzine that held strictly to canon.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Star Trek fans also thought they should make a profit off their endeavors. As one of the all-hallowed and totally illogical early ideas of science-fiction fandom, the unspoken “rule” that it was immoral to make a profit off fellow fans is probably one of the most stupid. Star Trek fans, without any of this “tradition” behind them, hit fandom broadside with expensive fanzines and conventions that were openly designed to make money for someone.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
Fandom was composed of readers—other media just didn’t connect. Thus at conventions, “Trekkies” were socially shunned, and eventually Trek items were prohibited from being on the program schedule. The year Kraith was nominated for a Hugo, the anti-Trek movement in fandom reached vitriolic levels.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Science-fiction fandom, established since the 1940s, viewed the sudden invasion of Star Trek fans with alarm. Until the popularity of the show, most fans discovered SF via books and magazines. This was long before Internet communication, so fans joined fandom as individuals or small groups. This made it easier to absorb the “WOWEE! More people like me!” enthusiasm of newcomers, as SF fandom seldom got rocked by the gentle intrusion. SF fans had muddled along nicely until Star Trek burst on the scene. Then everyone got a rude awakening to modern times.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
We coined a new vocabulary. Trekkies were gaga media fans, celebrity groupies who couldn’t tell the difference between an actor and a character; people who didn’t read books—maybe a Trek novel, but not real books—and didn’t even know who Hal Clement was. We, however, were Trekkers, not Trekkies. We understood actor and character difference, and knew all the differences between real science and Trek science, the gap of which has closed recently, and criticized Trek for literary flaws while admiring it for incorporating Shakespeare and many classics just as science-fiction novels do.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
The World Science Fiction Convention was held on Labor Day weekend in 1967, about two weeks before Star Trek’s second season debut, “Amok Time.” There was a benefit auction to bring a Japanese science-fiction fan named Takumi Shibano to the United States for a visit and tour. We were head of the auction committee and had asked Gene to donate some Star Trek memorabilia to include in the auction. Those items made the auction the biggest draw at the convention outside of the Hugo Awards. We packed the room. The needed five thousand dollars was raised in two and a half hours. That auction also became a galvanizing moment in Star Trek history. It was when Star Trek fandom first came together and became a force in and of itself. People who met each other at the convention went off and started producing fanzines and formed clubs.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer Star Trek)
We had Paramount pretty well convinced that fanzines are the lifeblood of the movement, and they always have been. I said, “The day we start sending cops in to arrest a junior-high-school student because he’s using Star Trek on a mimeographed thing he circulates to fifty friends, that’s the day I walk out of the studio.”
A primary reason that many of the show’s fans supported the letter-writing campaign to save Star Trek for a third season was that they were cognizant of the fact that without enough episodes, the show would quite simply disappear forever. The elusive goal of syndication—a situation where independent stations would air reruns of a network show—would never materialize, and Star Trek would be little more than a minor footnote in television history.
But they weren’t the only ones who recognized the significance of Star Trek. Richard Block, vice president and general manager of Kaiser Broadcasting Corp., a company that owned and operated broadcast television and radio stations in the United States from 1958 to 1977, saw the potential of the series early on and presciently secured the syndication rights during the show’s third season. This unsung hero in Trek lore may truly be the man who saved Star Trek.
RICHARD BLOCK (vice president, general manager, Kaiser Broadcasting Corp.)
At that time we were developing independent stations, and UHF was viewed negatively, with the preference being VHF, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that, at the time, there wasn’t much cable. The FCC limit in terms of owning stations at the time was seven, and we owned six.
Back then network affiliates couldn’t air reruns. It was outrageous that the government was involved like that and telling people what they could air from seven to eight p.m. at night, but the thought was to develop more diversity and more producers. Of course, this was to our advantage, because the network affiliates in the top fifty markets were struggling. That’s tantamount to 80 percent of television households.
So we bought a lot of syndicated programming, and Bob Newgard, who was VP and sales manager of worldwide television at Paramount, knew that I had an interest in Star Trek, but he kept telling me that the company wanted to quit doing the show. It cost too much money, Gene Roddenberry was tough to deal with, and so on. I do have to say that Gene was great with me. I taught at Stanford at the time and I’d invite Gene to talk to the kids. One time he couldn’t do it, and one of my students asked, “Could I design costumes?” He was working on a new episode. I asked him and he said, “Yes, tell her to design them and come down and watch it being shot.” I thought that was pretty amazing.
Anyway, NBC was kind of doddering over the whole thing and stopped production after seventy-nine episodes.
I kept pushing Bob, saying, “I want to buy Star Trek,” and he would say, “We don’t even know if we’re going to syndicate it.” I still pushed, and eventually we scribbled the deal out on a napkin or menu for us to play the show in Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. From there he went back to Paramount and said, “Why don’t we launch it?” There was also interest from San Francisco’s KTVU and, afterward, WPIX in New York entered the situation.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
I believe Philly was the first city to broadcast Trek reruns as early as 1969. I was barely a year old when that happened, so I don’t remember which station it was on. But when I started watching Trek in 1974, I was six years old. The episode that popped my Trek cherry was “Mirror Mirror,” and I was instantly hooked! Interesting how that was the episode that did it, since it was such an atypical episode (it was set in the evil universe most of the time).
But of course Trek made a huge impact on my life, because A) it was on five nights a week, B) it was on early enough so I could watch it before my bedtime, and C) I caught it while they were running it in its production order (not the broadcast order)—and I was watching so many classic episodes from the first half of the second season (“Amok Time,” “Doomsday Machine,” “Metamorphosis”), when Star Trek really hit its stride.
Also worth mentioning is that they showed Trek complete and uncut! No edits were made, so I saw all fifty minutes of each and every episode! I didn’t realize that Trek was edited for syndication until a few years later, when I was visiting relatives in New York and caught a few edited Treks on Channel 11.
RICHARD BLOCK
Star Trek did great on independent stations at eleven o’clock at night, because it ran against the news. The news skews old, and Star Trek got younger viewers. I remember the guy from the Cleveland station was really angry at me—as angry as you can be with your boss—saying, “Why are you cramming that down our throat?” But that’s how it started. Then we ran it from six to seven and killed CBS News in Philadelphia.
We had to run the show five nights a week. The network could do one night a week, but we didn’t have the circulation to get that to work. Stripping, as far as we were concerned from a marketing standpoint, was the only way to go so that people would know six o’clock to seven o’clock was the time for Star Trek.
We were so successful with Star Trek, and many other independent stations started airing the show the same way.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN (visual-effects supervisor, Star Trek: The Motion Picture—Director’s Edition)
When I was a kid, the first Star Trek I saw was a 1973 animated show. That first episode, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” with the creepy alien message and the strange bug-like ship with the exploded pods, was creepy as hell and scared me to death. And that is what drew me to it, because I wanted to know why. I watched the whole show and then I started watching the live-action show on WPIX. It seemed funny to watch the opening titles and hear different music, because I was used to the Saturday-morning show. But of course immediately I started loving the live-action show and started tape-recording them off of TV.
BRYAN FULLER (executive producer, Hannibal)
My first discovery of Star Trek came when I was very small. I wasn’t in school yet and I wasn’t old enough to go to church. So I would be left alone sometimes with my older brother when everybody went out to church. I remember one time he had built a Klingon battleship and had rigged it with lights. He turned off all the lights in the house and he was flying it around. I was, like, “What is this ship? What does it belong to?” So my first exposure to Star Trek was through a Klingon battle cruiser.
It was probably the mid seventies that I was exposed to the animated series and rerun after rerun of the original show. I was always dazzled by the brightness of the world that we were transported to, and as I got older I really started appreciating the level of the storytelling. I was old enough to know that there were adventures that they were having in space with aliens. That was very exciting in a way that westerns were a little dusty for me. It took science fiction for me to appreciate western storytelling.
ANDRE BORMANIS (science consultant, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
I was too young to really comprehend it, but when I was in high school in the seventies, I began watching the reruns in syndication and I became fairly addicted, as my mother would say.
RICHARD BLOCK
Our success with Star Trek legitimatized the stations. Initially we were dismissed; the feeling was that UHF was for kids’ programming. There was also a feeling that airing Star Trek five nights a week—because there were only seventy-nine episodes—would wear it out quickly. That didn’t happen.
In 1966, AMT/Aurora released a model kit of the Enterprise, which would be the first of several such kits, including the “Galileo Seven” shuttlecraft. The deal came about originally when AMT agreed to build a miniature model of the starship, as well as a full-size shuttlecraft mock-up that could be used for filming in exchange for the license to sell the model.
The following year saw the start of Western Publishing’s Gold Key comic-book series; Bantam’s twelve-volume series of episode adaptations by James Blish, beginning in January 1967 (which culminated with the 1970 original, Spock Must Die!); Bjo and John Trimble’s creation (with the help of Gene Roddenberry) of Lincoln Enterprises, a mail-order business that was part of Roddenberry’s Norway Productions and sold episodic film clips from the cutting-room floor mounted as slides, copies of the show’s scripts, and other forms of merchandise. (Today that company still exists in the form of Roddenberry.com.) And September 1968 marked the publication date of Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry’s seminal The Making of Star Trek, the first-ever behind-the-scenes account on the making of a television series.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Merchandising was a very big part of our concern. It’s become a big business since those early days, when we used to send out five-by-seven black-and-whites of the stars in the days when Lincoln [Enterprises] slowly got into it. I don’t have a great deal of control over it, except the control of the fact that they kind of feel like they have to listen to me, because I might get mad and say nasty things to people. I’ve tried to use that without being an ass about it as best I can. I’ve said to them a number of times that whatever we do, we must see that the fans get a square deal for their money. I would not stand for putting out toys, as they did once, with box labels of Mr. Spock killing some monster with a zap gun, because it happened to look ugly.
LEN WEIN (writer, Star Trek Gold Key Comics)
I started writing for Gold Key on a regular basis early in my career, doing stories for the various anthology books like Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and Grimm’s Ghost Stories, and quickly graduated to series books like Mod Wheels and Microbots.
I had been annoyed for a while by the inaccuracies and flat-out mistakes I was seeing in the Star Trek book, so one day I mustered up my courage; went to see my editor, the wonderful Wally Green, and said, “Your Star Trek comic is a mess. I don’t think your writer has ever even watched an episode of the series.” Wally replied, “Probably not.” I said, “Well, you know, I’ve watched every episode of the series so far. I know it front to back. Maybe you should let me take a crack at it.” Wally mused for a moment, then said, “Y’know, maybe I should.” And that’s how I got the gig.
First thing I did when I got the book was to send a letter to the brilliant Alberto Gioletti, who was drawing the book, to bring him up to speed on what had to be fixed in the art. First, those long tubes at the rear of the Enterprise were not rocket engines; they were impulse engines, so there should not be fiery exhaust coming from the engines. Second, our heroes did not carry backpacks. They transported down to the planets they visited and had anything they needed transported down to them.
The first Star Trek novel was a hardcover novel for kids, Mission To Horatius, by Mack Reynolds, a popular pulp sci-fi author of the time. While fans at the time loved it, the producers were less sanguine.“Mack Reynolds’ novelization of Star Trek is not technically in bad taste,” noted producer John Meredyth Lucas in a memo in November of 1967, “but it is extremely dull and badly written.”
Even at the time, Lucas was deeply concerned about violations of Trek canon including the fact that “the Romulans have nothing to do with the Organian Peace Treaty.” He was even more concerned, however, with the fact that Sulu is described as “a bland faced, small Oriental; to Uhura as a Negress and compounds this by having her break into a spiritual chant. We run a totally integrated crew and it would seem we should avoid these particular stereotypes for a juvenile market.”
More successful were the James Blish episodic adaptations, which also had their fair share of inaccuracies, however.
JEFF AYERS (author, Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion)
The short-story adaptations by James Blish were extremely popular. The editor at Bantam, the publisher that owned the Trek license at that time, was Frederik Pohl, and while nobody can remember how Blish was asked to write the stories, he had the dubious task of writing the stories based on the scripts sent to him by the studio. That’s why you see all of the various discrepancies and attempts to write logical explanations for some of the wilder stuff. His wife, Judith Lawrence, ended up helping him with the later books, and when he passed away, she finished the series. Blish wrote almost all of the stories without actually seeing the episodes first.
The first novel, Spock Must Die!, came about due to Pohl asking Blish to write one. According to Judy, James was fascinated by Spock’s character, and wanted to delve deeper into his psyche. Fans were clamoring for more and more stories at this point, so Pohl arranged for the two anthologies, Star Trek: New Voyages and its sequel almost two years later. More novels followed, but Pohl admitted he didn’t pay much attention to Star Trek.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Lincoln Enterprises was very innovative and unprecedented for the time, especially in Hollywood. We didn’t help build Lincoln Enterprises; we built it entirely from the ground up. I know that revisionist history says that LE sprang full-blown from Gene’s brow, and that several others had a great deal to do with setting the business up, but the realities are that not one person ever had the mail-order experience that we Trimbles had. We’d run several small but successful mail-order companies. We talked GR into the idea, and put LE together entirely on our own. We eventually hired a fan to help sort mail, and found out later she was claiming that she’d originated LE and we were actually working for her! She was fired later by Gene.
Once we had a going concern, Majel wanted to run the business, which was Gene’s idea all along. So we were fired on trumped-up charges. This broke our hearts, because we saw it as a long-term business that would benefit Gene and us, too. But then, nobody in Hollywood has ever been accused of gratitude, have they? Oh well!
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
The Making of Star Trek was actually a great book, and that’s where I learned a great deal about how my father and the other people on the production staff would contact JPL and Caltech. And I think one story that’s in there is simply about the phaser, where my father sort of said, “We need a weapon.” The response was, “Well, right now we’re working on lasers.” My father said, “So what’s the next step?” And it was the phasing laser, which is where the phaser came from. So the believability was a very important part. In fact, in the show bible, the writing document for the original series, there’s a whole paragraph on believability, where my father talks about how important it is to make things believable.
BRANNON BRAGA (executive producer, cocreator, Star Trek: Enterprise)
That may be the most groundbreaking behind-the-scenes book ever written.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (executive producer, Family Guy)
I became a TV writer because of that book. Before that book, I didn’t even know the job existed. Like, you’re watching television and you don’t stop to think about the fact that somebody wrote every word that’s coming out of Hawkeye Pierce’s mouth, and it’s not just Kirk—it’s somebody sitting down and writing. That book opened my mind. “Oh my God, this is a job … I can do this as a job.”
MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
It led me to the decision that this was what I wanted to do, because I realized that people could actually do this for a living. I had a dog-eared copy, and it was actually a really good book. I look at it every once in a while; it was really detailed with memos and was very sophisticated. It was The Making of Star Trek and The Making of 2001, the Kubrick movie, which was a great favorite. Also The Jaws Log, which I devoured as well.
PETER GOULD (cocreator, executive producer, Better Call Saul)
It was the first behind-the-scenes book that I ever read, and I just consumed it. I didn’t just want to watch Star Trek, I wanted to be involved in the production of Star Trek. So that’s something that was always fascinating to me, and it certainly was one of the things that sparked my interest in television.
ANDRE BORMANIS
I was in high school and some friends of mine and I discovered the book The Making of Star Trek. It was like my bible, you know? I just thought it was the coolest thing, because I knew nothing about making a TV show. Nobody did if you didn’t work in the business back then. I found it fascinating. The set layouts, the tech memos, the development of the characters, the story ideas, the production schedule, the budgets, and so on. I just thought, “Wow, this is the coolest thing ever.”
Aside from the comic books themselves published by Gold Key (and later Marvel, DC, and IDW), there were also two distinct eras of Star Trek comic strips that ran in newspapers in the United States and across the Atlantic. There was a weekly U.K. strip that ran from January 1969 to December 1973. The second ran a decade later in the United States as a daily newspaper strip, from December 1979 to December 1983, following the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
RICH HANDLEY (Star Trek comics historian)
Concurrent with the Gold Key series, British readers were treated to weekly Star Trek comic strips that were not reproduced for American audiences. In 1969, six months prior to the TV series airing in the United Kingdom, the strips debuted in the pages of Joe 90: Top Secret, a British comic magazine featuring serialized strips based on Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation puppet TV series and other adventure titles. Joe 90 lasted for thirty-four issues, with Star Trek featured throughout as a two-page spread.
Joe 90 merged with another British comic magazine called TV21, and Trek became TV21’s most popular title, expanding from two pages per issue to three—despite the TV show’s cancelation that same year. Another title change took place in 1971, following TV21 issue 105, when the comic merged with yet another magazine, Valiant, to become Valiant and TV21. Star Trek survived the merger, inhabiting the center two-page spread for another 118 issues until being dropped in 1973 (though Valiant continued publication for another three years, sans Trek). In total, the British Trek strips ran for five years, which is amazing when you consider that the TV show hadn’t even aired in Britain when the strips began.
Ten years later, U.S. fans received their own Star Trek comic strips. Distributed by the L.A. Times Syndicate, the daily newspaper strip chronicled the Enterprise’s post–The Motion Picture adventures and depicted a new five-year mission. The syndicate retained the immensely talented Thomas Warkentin as the inaugural writer and artist. The series was well received—at least, by the small handful of readers who even knew it existed, since most newspapers unfortunately declined to run it.
The British strips are actually pretty well drawn, sometimes beautifully so, even though they are wildly inaccurate. The American strips, on the other hand, are mostly well written, though the artwork ranges from excellent to … well, something a good deal less than excellent. The British strips ran almost entirely in color, while the American series was in black-and-white for all but the Sunday strips, which were in color.
As with the early Gold Key comics, the writers and artists for the Joe 90 and TV21 iterations had little knowledge of the TV series, and thus based their scripts and artwork on whatever limited reference materials they were provided by Paramount. As a result, the Enterprise’s interiors look nothing like those on the TV show, the uniform colors are frequently wrong, the weaponry and spaceships look like something out of Lost in Space or pulp sci-fi novel covers, the Klingons and Romulans look nothing at all like Klingons or Romulans, and the cast—including Spock—constantly utter melodramatic and space-y phrases like “G-g-great suffering galaxies!” Also, adherence to the TV show’s concepts is practically nonexistent, with Kirk (called “Captain Kurt” in early issues) and company acting and speaking wildly out of character. Some of the tales are actually pretty engaging, featuring stunning artwork that helps to make up for most of the plots being B-movie clichés. If nothing else, there’s a great MST3K enjoyment one can take from making fun of them.
The U.S. strips, however, are a different story. Warkentin was not only an immensely talented writer and artist, but also clearly a Star Trek fan. He brought back Harry Mudd, introduced McCoy’s ex-wife, created Klingon characters with great depth, and showcased a number of aliens and concepts from the TV show as well as from The Motion Picture and even The Animated Series. His successors, writer Sharman DiVono and artist Ron Harris, continued this trend, contributing a Kzinti story cowritten by Kzinti creator Larry Niven, introducing Admiral Nogura’s grandson, and crafting a wonderful adventure about a hive-mind machine species called the Omnimind that predated the Borg by half a decade.
The series’ final writer and illustrator, Gerry Conway and Dick Kulpa, also turned in a number of solid tales, particularly one in which Kirk and McCoy resign from Starfleet to become privateers, and another in which the Enterprise crew enters a parallel universe in which Star Trek is just a twentieth-century TV show. The U.S. strips are a gem, both in terms of writing and artwork, and anyone who hasn’t read them is missing out on some genuinely good Star Trek.
The perfect storm of events in the world of Star Trek continued in its third season, when, on March 1, 1969 (just a couple of weeks before the show would all but finish its network run; the final show, “Turnabout Intruder” wouldn’t air until June 3 because of an earlier preemption due to the death of President Eisenhower), the first “convention” devoted to the show was held at the Newark, New Jersey, Public Library. Hosted by Sherna Comerford and Devra Langsham, there were reportedly three hundred people in attendance (consider the notion of three hundred people descending on a library at once), and programming included a fan discussion on the Star Trek phenomenon, a slide show featuring images of the Enterprise sets and some of the aliens showcased on the show, Star Trek–inspired folk singing, and a talk by author Hal Clement on Star Trek and science. It all concluded with a skit by Sherna Comerford called “Spock Shock.”
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)
I wanted to go, but my mother didn’t want me to, although I did send one or two things over there. Here’s the problem I have with it, though: people call it the first Star Trek convention, but it wasn’t a convention. It was an afternoon at the library. It was a very nice afternoon, which had some local publicity. There were a couple of panels of Star Trek fans and it had a display of some items Sherna borrowed.
DEVRA LANGSHAM (organizer of early Star Trek conventions)
That was just a little group of us in Newark, because my friend Sherna lived there and we were able to get the library auditorium. We went, talked about Star Trek, and showed some pictures. The library people thought we were crazy. “This is a TV show.… You’re having a meeting to talk about a TV show?” There was a bit of that. Of course the hotel didn’t care as long as we paid the bills.
The hotel she references is the former Statler Hilton, currently the Hotel Pennsylvania, located across the street from New York City’s Penn Station. From January 21 to 23, 1972, it was the site where the first actual Star Trek convention—pulled together by a group of fans known as the Committee—was held, featuring such guest speakers as Gene Roddenberry, Majel Barrett, Dorothy Fontana, David Gerrold, and Isaac Asimov. It was the first of what would eventually be thousands of Star Trek conventions to be held all over the world throughout the next several decades.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
The resurgence of Star Trek actually started with myself and a friend of mine, Devra Langsham. She was a children’s librarian, and we both had a pretty vast collection of thirty-five-millimeter Star Trek slides, which were stuff off the cutting-room floor. She used to put together slide shows for the library that she worked in; it was something she would do for the kids. While we had a large overlap, we each had a good selection of slides that the other didn’t have. So we were looking at the slides, and she had a couple of narratives that were fan-written that she was putting to them. After doing this for seven hours, you get a little loopy.
We were both members of the Lunarians, which was a fiction society, and they ran Lunacon, a fan-based science-fiction convention, once a year. I turned to her and said something like, “We ought to have a science-fiction convention for Star Trek,” and she replied, “Yeah, we can get five hundred of our closest friends”—which was just the kind of thing she used to say.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
Following a Lunacon, Elyse had come over to my house to help me with a slide project, and one of us said, “Wouldn’t it be nice if we had a convention that was only for Star Trek people?” and three days later she called me and said, “We’ve got a hotel—the Statler Hilton—and a printer.” It was sort of, like, “What?” The printer, of course, would be for flyers. We had other people that we asked to help us, like setting up an art show. The whole thing was modeled very much on the standard science-fiction convention with panels and art shows and costume presentations.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Our original idea wasn’t a Star Trek convention, but a science-fiction convention with a major emphasis on Star Trek. We also had science-fiction panels, mostly on Sunday because the emphasis was on Star Trek.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
How did the concept of this convention “go viral” before Twitter and Facebook? It was Joan Winston, mostly. She worked in television management of contracts in New York and knew everyone in the media. And she could handle the media folks while not wasting their time. So she got the word out, and the fans who couldn’t get to New York read about what happened and wanted to make their own—which they did.
Understand, the core groups here were mostly people who had run science-fiction conventions, so they knew how to put together a small event. It’s a whole profession, founding a small business, and then shutting down that small business and paying all the bills. Takes lawyers, accountants, logistics managers … in other words, it takes fans.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We talked to people and said, “We’d love to have your artwork exhibited,” and we had a dealers room which Phil Seuling ran. Nobody was worried at that point about whether Paramount had licensed them or not. They were fan-made things and Joan, through her contacts with the networks, invited the guests to come, and they came even though we didn’t pay them anything.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
One of the major differences in the conventions—and this is relevant—is that science-fiction fandom never advertised. Nobody ever put an ad out or flyer, except at other conventions. The only way you heard about conventions was through word-of-mouth. The World Science Fiction Convention that was held immediately prior to the first Star Trek convention had about a thousand to fifteen hundred people attending, which is a nice number.
We, on the other hand, did publicize it. We didn’t take an ad in the paper or anything, but we did call the networks, and we had two camera crews down there. ABC and CBS came down. NBC claimed they had too much news to cover to spare the crew. The long and short of it is that those networks, at least in local coverage, had stories about it. Not only did we get science-fiction fans who are Star Trek fans, but the public became aware of this event and they showed up.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We had people that we knew in the New York community help us, and Joan Winston, who worked at one of the networks as a secretary, got in touch with NASA and got us an exhibit, including a real space suit.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Joanie at the time knew everybody. She contacted NASA and asked if we could get some sort of exhibit, because this was 1972 and the space program was still going strong. They said yes and that the exhibit would be arriving in seven cartons to the hotel. Unfortunately, those cartons were actually crates. They fit into the freight elevator with about half an inch to spare. There was a mock-up of a space capsule and, among other things, a mannequin in a space suit, which she assumed was also a mock-up.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
That space suit was real, which over the course of the convention someone stole the arm off of. That was just dreadful.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Joanie apologized to someone at NASA, and that’s when we learned that it was real. We were mortified that it actually happened—there was a rope around it, but no glass barrier at that point. She had told them about the fun we had getting the crates in and out of the freight elevator, and they actually apologized to us.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
By the time we arrived ahead of the convention, we had between eight hundred and nine hundred preregistered people. We thought that was great; usually your preregistration doubled for the convention itself.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
We thought maybe fifteen hundred or sixteen hundred people would show up altogether. We had two thousand badges and two thousand program books. Apparently, as we discovered, when you advertise, you get more people. We ended up with about thirty-five hundred people showing up. Not all at once, thank goodness.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
We ran out of everything. We ran out of name tags, we ran out of program books, we ran out of trivia contest sheets. I was printing them in my house on a mimeograph, and you don’t realize how long it takes to print two thousand things.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
We had the facility from eight a.m. Friday morning, but the convention didn’t start at eight a.m.—it started at two p.m. However, the hotel posted it in the lobby as eight a.m., which we didn’t realize because most of us came in Thursday night and stayed over. We weren’t in the lobby, and we were on the top floor of the Statler Hilton, where the convention was held. By ten a.m. we had no choice but to open registration, because the dealers were still setting up. It was a crazy day. It was a Friday, Saturday, and Sunday convention. By Sunday you were pretty much just letting people in, because there was no point. You’re going to charge them for coming in for two or three hours on a Sunday afternoon?
We had gotten a number of episodes of the show in thirty-five millimeter from Paramount, which were loaned to us for the duration of the convention. We had gotten waivers from the Screen Actors Guild that we didn’t have to pay royalties as long as nobody made any money on it. So what we had to do there was allow people to come in and watch the episodes without paying for membership into the convention. The films were run Friday and Saturday night and they were free. It was posted down in the lobby that if you wanted to come and watch it, you could.
We had a dinner on Saturday night for the Committee and our guests, and among them was Majel Barrett. The hallway was pretty quiet because everybody was in the main ballroom watching, I think, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” We were outside the ballroom, and you could hear virtually the entire audience quoting the lines along with the screen. She was astonished, because this was 1972 and the show had gone off the air in 1969. It was in reruns, but that was about it. They didn’t really appreciate how much of a loyal fan following they still had.
HOWARD WEINSTEIN (author; writer, Star Trek: The Animated Series)
When the first Star Trek convention happened in 1972, I was in college. I was a freshman at the University of Connecticut. Our winter-break vacation didn’t coincide with a lot of other schools, so most of my friends had gone back to college when the convention took place. I was still home, and I said, “Dammit, I’m not missing this Star Trek convention, I’m going to go by myself if I have to—there may not be another one.”
I went on Sunday, but they had run out of badges. I didn’t get a badge. I did get to see the big speakers, like Isaac Asimov and Gene and Majel. And I wandered through the dealers room, which was not big enough for the crowd. It was really wall-to-wall humanity. There was a relatively small ballroom area and a relatively small cordoned-off dealers area. It was packed. There was really no room to move without bumping somebody with your elbows. But it was great fun and just an amazing experience for everyone who was there. I feel really lucky that I went to the first convention.
ADAM MALIN (cofounder, Creation Entertainment)
I went to that 1972 show and it was amazing. Seeing Gene Roddenberry at that show was just unbelievable, and I remember sitting in the Penn Top Room, the eighteenth floor of the Statler Hilton. The room was packed with fans watching the classic blooper reels. I just could not believe it—I mean, to this day I think they were hysterical, but to see them then, in 1972, and to be surrounded by Star Trek fans was so amazing.
I realized that there was a Star Trek fan community just like there was for comic-book fans. I slowly began to realize that fandom was a growing, living thing. My peers in grade school and junior high school and high school, particularly the girls, really looked upon me as very dweebish for my interest in the genre. I was so excited about it and drawing pictures all the time and talking about monsters and aliens, and really quite a few of them saw me as eccentric and socially backward for my love of that.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
What separated Star Trek fans from other TV fans is that we really wanted to watch those things over and over. You would always rewatch the episodes, looking for more details and trying to fill in the blanks of this world they created, and that’s what led to people wearing costumes and really just participating.
It’s similar to Sherlock Holmes fans who do the same. Michael Chabon wrote a great essay about this, that popular fiction does this thing where it creates this world, and it doesn’t fill in the blanks, and that means that the fans want to. And that leads to, like when we were kids, self-published stories in fanzines or, today, Web sites. We wanted to participate. And there was some way in which Star Trek really was the first television show to do that.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
These people were just happy to be there, which was true of science-fiction fans in general. People at the time who were real science-fiction fans, and who were aware of science fiction, but even people who weren’t, a lot of them were kind of outsiders to the mainstream. Most people were reading romance novels, most teenagers were reading about rock and all this other stuff. How many wanted to read about a speculative future? You don’t get that.
People who were interested in it were kind of outsiders, myself included. I always had a book in my hand. Still do. At that Star Trek convention, there was an acceptance of people, taking them at face value without dismissing them. It was a different frame of mind. That’s why that first convention had no trouble. Despite the number of people that were there, we didn’t have any fights. We didn’t have the kind of problems that would normally be associated in an overcrowding bunch of people.
The crowds would only get larger. In 1973, the Committee would move the convention to the Commodore, a much larger New York hotel, and invited guests James Doohan and George Takei, with Leonard Nimoy making a surprise appearance, much to the thrill of the sixty-two hundred attendees.
DAVID LANGHAUS (Star Trek fan)
I remember being really annoyed that Star Trek was canceled, despite sending letters to NBC each season, telling them how much I loved the show and my friends felt the same way. One of my friends told me there was going to be a Star Trek convention at the Commodore Hotel in NYC and did I want to go. I immediately said yes and got really excited. He said there would be some of the actors, but didn’t know which. It seemed fun and interesting to get all the fans together and find out what it would be like. Not many people knew what to expect. Naturally my folks felt I was wasting my time and money to go spend time with fans of a canceled TV show. Boy, were they wrong! It was very exciting from the moment we got there. A lot of the fans were wearing homemade uniforms, both Star Trek and sci-fi in general. I was sorry I was only in the period-traditional outfit of jeans and T-shirt.
What initially excited me was all the pictures, movies, and TV clips being shown. We now take four thousand cable channels and the Internet for granted.
In 1974, the party moved to the Americana Hotel, with the crowd swelling to over fifteen thousand, with an additional six thousand reportedly being turned away. The 1975 convention, back at the Commodore, limited registration to six thousand, which was the case in 1976 as well. Also in 1975, one of the Committee members, Al Schuster, splintered off and launched his own competing convention, which was also successful.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
The fact that the conventions grew bigger and bigger was shocking. We had about fifteen people working on the Committee, of whom only five actually did most of the work. That’s the way that goes—we had help from a friend who had access to a real computer, so we were able to computerize our mailing list long before anybody besides big companies ever dreamed of that, and we sent out a progress report, which is what the Worldcons do, saying, “Hey, look at this. We’ve invited this person to come, and he says he’s going to come.” We didn’t say how much we had to pay him. The first convention was such a success, in terms of reaching people, that when we started to do the second one, we got a lot of people coming back. So it was like you had three weeks off and then you started all over again for the following year’s convention.
DAVID LANGHAUS
The important thing for me was Gene Roddenberry said how happy he was to see us and how this may help to bring the show back. At the time, I felt he was just saying what we wanted to hear, but it was still great. Later, I went to the art auction and then the room where they sold fan memorabilia. I remember being unhappy that I couldn’t buy all the things I wanted, but I was able to get an original Enterprise engineering manual, a bust of Spock, and a Star Trek T-shirt, which I still have. The highlight of the convention was the original pilot and very first Star Trek blooper reel. Over the weekend, I had lots of discussions with other fans about how excited we were and how glad we were that we came. I was so excited to see Bill Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, James Doohan, and Nichelle Nichols in person. I remember in the later conventions how excited we all were when told about the animated Star Trek show and, later, the first movie.
But Star Trek conventions were not limited to New York at the time, with Bjo and John Trimble running Equicon in Los Angeles, which went from a sci-fi, fantasy, and film convention in 1971 to a Trek convention in 1973. Conventions would, of course, start spreading to other states as well and, later, other countries.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
It started with a conversation at San Diego Comic-Con and continued at the 1972 Westercon (the West Coast Science Fantasy Convention). “Gee, wouldn’t it be nifty to have a large Star Trek con in California like the guys throw in New York?” So the idea grew into a reality with author William Tuning forming a committee, including us, to run the first Equicon in 1973. The name came from the time of the year, the vernal equinox (Easter weekend), hence, Equicon.
The first con was so large the fire marshal closed down registration. The local newspapers wrote up the convention as having “ten thousand screaming Trekkies”; the fire marshal said we had eight thousand people, about three thousand more than the hotel could handle.
The Equicons were a huge success for the attendees; in those early years, most of the Star Trek stars were not “audience-shy,” nor did they charge large fees as they did in later years. Most of them attended an Equicon or two. There were also many activities to keep everyone busy. The first Equicon gave two thousand dollars to the Sophia Salvin school for handicapped children, helping to start the tradition of Star Trek fans supporting worthy causes.
SUSAN SACKETT (assistant to Gene Roddenberry)
They were fan-run. Bjo always had an interest in fandom, so she had been to many of them and then she decided to run this thing which was called Equicon. I was put on the public-relations committee, and I had to contact a number of people. Then I was there at the reception table when people checked in for their talks. It was all done by volunteers; no one got paid. They barely managed to cover expenses. I was at the table when Gene arrived, and I looked up, and he had the blooper reel with him, and I said, “Follow me,” although I had no idea where it had to go. When I applied for a job with him, he did not remember that encounter at all, which was probably a good thing or I might not have gotten the job.
GERALD ISENBERG (producer, Star Trek: Planet of the Titans)
The conventions were really bizarre. I went to one with Gene and his wife, and I brought my kid with me, and I had become a judge for the costume contest. So we had Scotty on one side and I don’t remember who was on the other side, and this girl comes up with this weird costume and she was right in front of my face. She lifts up her skirt and flashes her crotch at me. My mouth dropped open and I turned to Scotty and I said, “Did you see that?” And he said that it happens all the time.
Like its East Coast counterpart, Equicon ran until 1976 and drew many thousands of fans who gathered to celebrate the show and listen to cast and crew speak. And although other conventions would spring up to replace them, it wouldn’t be long before these conventions would move away from being fan-run to being for-profit, licensed by Paramount to organizations such as Creation Entertainment, whose long association with Star Trek continues to this day.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
Things reached a point where we had to stop. First of all, it got expensive to mount these conventions, because they were big, which meant that we needed a major venue of some kind, usually at a hotel because people wanted to come in and stay for the weekend. We were there when nobody else was. The people on the show, the actors in particular, had a soft spot for us, because if it wasn’t for us there wouldn’t have been the other conventions for them to go to. And we did pay the guests toward the end, but nothing like the money they were getting from other conventions.
DEVRA LANGSHAM
The attitude from the guests about getting paid changed fairly quickly. They would say, “I’m giving you my time where I could be off someplace else getting paid.” We were distressed by this, but it’s quite true: there’s only so much time an actor has and this is his livelihood. He has to earn money while he can. Of course, some people were more difficult to deal with than others, but we managed.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Equicons were true fan-run conventions, not a commercial enterprise, so in spite of what some cynics say, we never made any profit. With luck, we made just enough from one convention to organize another Equicon for next year. We still meet fans who fondly remember those cons, some of whom met their spouses there, many of whom made film-industry contacts that led to entertainment-world careers.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
The conventions were not about being a business, though there were some people who thought it could be a business. There were certainly enough people attending, but things were becoming prohibitively expensive. But the bottom line is that—Al Schuster notwithstanding—no one who worked on the Committee ever did it for money. I figured out in the last year that if I’d gotten paid, I would have been paid the rate of about ten cents an hour for the time I put in. After five years, when we split up what was left, it came down to about eleven hundred dollars a person, because the money we brought in went right back into the convention. We clearly didn’t do it for the money.
DAVID GERROLD
I knew it was time for me to stop going to conventions when I showed up at one and there were thirty people selling Tribbles. You say to them, “You don’t have the right,” and they’d say, “Fuck you, you made enough money off Star Trek. Now it’s my turn.” This was the shift. In ’72 or ’73, you’d meet the fans, and they were grateful for the opportunity to meet the people who worked on Star Trek. By ’75 or ’76, the attitude was “We own Star Trek now. The studio doesn’t care. We do.”
The impact of these early conventions on the history of Star Trek cannot be underestimated, primarily because it united fans around the country, serving notice to the world that the series and its fans weren’t going anywhere; that this was no flash in the pan.
Playing key roles in uniting the fandom were Jacqueline Lichtenberg, who created the Star Trek Welcommittee (which would eventually lead her along with Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston to write the 1975 book Star Trek Lives!); and David Gerrold’s 1973 nonfiction book The World of Star Trek.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
I grew up in a professional news-business family. I learned to spot a news story before sixth grade. When I first heard Devra Langsham’s call for stories for the Spockanalia one-shot, I identified the news story that Trek had become. But newspapers just weren’t covering it. News magazines? Nope. Radio? Nope. TV news? No way. “What’s the matter with these people?” Well, if they wouldn’t, I would.
So I set out to write a short article and tried to peddle it to my local newspaper and put out a few letters. There were more zines and subscribers and readers and contributors than I thought, and the number kept growing as I tried to count them. There were people I actually didn’t know personally. Wow. That’s news!
So I put out a questionnaire and asked all the zine publishers to publish it. That’s how fandom worked before Twitter and Facebook. That’s when I realized that this was a book, not a newspaper article. To get all the zines, I put out a round-robin letter and asked each zine publisher to sign it with name and address and to pass it on to another zine publisher. Eventually, there were hundreds of zine publishers on my list when it got back to me. Trying to be sure that everyone knew everyone, I published the Directory of Fanzines. But I still needed the same information for a nonfiction book. In the end I got back enough questionnaires to fill a thirty-gallon garbage can, where I stored them for years until I had to throw them away.
It took five years to write that book. It took taking on two coauthors to get the job done. Once I had the contract, I went sort of white-faced as I realized the sheer volume of incoming mail, all wanting that Directory of Fanzines. So at a Trek con in New York, I called a meeting in my room and appointed one of the volunteers to head a Star Trek Welcommittee to introduce people to each other the way that the National Fantasy Fan Federation Welcommittee had welcomed me to science-fiction fandom when I was in seventh grade. I put a POB number in the back of Star Trek Lives! as the direct contact to the Star Trek Welcommittee, and the hundreds of volunteers answering thousands of pieces of mail kept the Directory of Fanzines current for decades. The Welcommittee grew as Star Trek Lives! went through eight printings and attracted new people into what was the prototype organized structure.
DAVID GERROLD
The first convention had been the only hint that something was happening. Then they were going to do one in ’73, which I went to, and six thousand people showed up. The following month in Los Angeles, people showed up there, too. That was the first real hint that this thing was not dead. But the studio said, “Three thousand people is no big thing.” You really needed to demonstrate a continuing phenomenon, which had not been demonstrated at that time. So my book was out there, and here were all these fans who did not know that other fans existed. But every fan who got the book got a list of fan clubs and things like that, and every fan found out about other fans. We kept the fan club and convention list updated, so that by the time the conventions started to peter out, we noticed that an incredible network of fans had been created. I don’t take credit for all of it, but I claim credit for triggering a large part of it, because I also helped the other conventions build up their lists. Once the process was initiated, it became a chain reaction, and toward the end of ’74 or ’75, we began to notice that the phenomenon had developed into something really big.
If attending a Star Trek convention and trolling the dealers room for Star Trek swag was not enough, fans could walk down East 53rd Street in New York to The Federation Trading Post, managed by Ron Barlow and Doug Drexler. A press release announced the New York store (once located at 210 East 53rd Street in Manhattan, now a towering office building): “The Federation Trading Post, the only retail store ever devoted to a television series, will open its New York branch … [It] will feature over three hundred different items from the highly popular science-fiction series Star Trek. In addition to the large assortment of unusual Star Trek posters, buttons, bumper stickers, magazines, books, model kits, etc., the avid Star Trek fan can lay claim to his own personal ‘Tribble,’ don a pair of pointed Vulcan (Spock) ears, dress up in an authentic Starfleet uniform complete with hand phaser, or just absorb the ‘sounds of Star Trek’ from the unique sound system running constantly.”
Ron Barlow related to All About Star Trek Fan Clubs magazine at the time, “Everyone that comes into the store realizes that the store is not just set up to make money, but it’s set up to encourage fandom. It’s set up to give them whatever hope they have in the show. We have a bulletin board which is a public-access board for any Star Trek fan to use. From time to time, we put up newspaper clippings, information that we’ve come up with for them to read. It saves us the time of explaining it, and all of the personnel working at the store are hard-core Star Trek fans, so if we don’t have the information, chances are very few people would.”
DOUG DREXLER (CG supervisor, Defiance)
Ron Barlow and I were huge Star Trek geeks, and I had a big collection of stuff. We used to print our own slides, which came from our personal collections. We started a museum in the back room and we put all kinds of props back there. We found a couple of guys in New Jersey who had a six-foot Klingon ship they made that was beautiful. We had a model of the bridge.
The thing is that for the first month and a half there was no business; it was dead. And we were getting worried. The local merchants were laughing at us, and I’m not kidding. There was one day when I was walking back to the place, and one of the merchants made a snide remark and giggled. I got in his face. I can’t believe I did that, because I’m not that kind of guy. “It’s Star Trek. You’re not just insulting me, you’re insulting Star Trek!” We managed to save enough money so that we could buy a thirty-second commercial on WPIX during Star Trek or Outer Limits. It was a thirty-second slide of Spock and us proclaiming, “It’s the only Star Trek store in the galaxy,” blah, blah, blah. That ran on TV and the next day there was a line around the block, and it stayed there for months and months. We would let in two people and let out two people.
When there would be a convention, we would take fanzines on consignment—we had a wall of fanzines. We had posters printed and slides made. The uniforms on Saturday Night Live that John Belushi and the others wore in a skit, those were from us. We became the center of Star Trek in New York. If someone had DeForest Kelley on a show, they would send over a PA and say, “We need props,” and we would loan them to them. But we’d get to go and meet these people.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN (conceptual artist)
None of the other kids in school knew about Star Trek or talked about it, so I thought I was the only one who liked it. Then when I found out about The Federation Trading Post in New York in 1976 or early ’77, my dad took me there one time saying, “There’s a place I think I should take you to that I think you might like.” I went in there and my head exploded. It was a store that was only Star Trek, and I’d never seen anything like that. I’d seen a couple of action figures in the Two Guys store when Mego put out the Star Trek action figures, and I had all of those, of course. But this was a whole world, and everyone in the store loved Star Trek. It was just an amazing thing to realize I wasn’t alone; there was this thing that I thought was all mine that I found out a lot of people loved. It’s a wonderful day when you learn that you’re a part of something bigger.
DOUG DREXLER
There was one night I’ll never forget. It was one of those steamy, rainy nights in New York and I ran out to get a cup of coffee. When I came back, my glasses were fogged over and I couldn’t see anything. My friend Mitch was working behind the counter and says, “Doug, you should come over here, there’s someone that I think you should meet.” I walk over and I’m looking into somebody’s chest. I look up through my foggy glasses—and it’s Gene Roddenberry. He had heard about the store and wanted to come by and see it. He was really nice. He said, “The important thing is that you guys are doing a good job. You take care of everybody and you’re treating it well.” He was happy about the store.
The success of The Federation Trading Post led Doug Drexler—along with Allan Asherman and Geoffrey Mandel—to Paradise Press to produce The Star Trek Giant Poster Book, a magazine that totaled eight pages and featured articles on various Star Trek–related subjects. When unfolded, the magazine would become a 34-inch by 22.5-inch poster.
Additional merchandise that helped play a significant role in keeping the show alive in the minds of the public were action figures from the Mego Corporation; a series of eight Power Records albums featuring scripted audio adventures (and accompanying comic books) that served as a perfect entry point for children and featured new Star Trek stories to delight older fans; the publication of Susan Sackett’s 1977 book Letters to Star Trek, which is an intriguing look at the kind of exchanges taking place between fans and Gene Roddenberry; Bantam’s official publication of Bjo Trimble’s previously self-published Star Trek Concordance with its iconic episode cover wheel; the creation of one of the most famous sci-fi media magazines ever, Starlog; and the Columbia Records LP Inside Star Trek, featuring Gene Roddenberry and several cast members, which was the brainchild of Ed Naha, at the time the A&R rep on Bruce Springesteen’s classic Born to Run album, who would later go on to write The Science Fictionary as well as numerous films and television shows.
MARTIN ABRAMS (president, Mego Corporation)
We had been in the superhero business; we had done all of Marvel and DC. The next thing that became available was Planet of the Apes, so we took that license. From there it was real easy to roll into Star Trek, because we already had the top three key brands in the male action line. Paramount was the next target and they were doing Star Trek, although, interestingly enough, they didn’t have an internal licensing department. They used an outside agent [The Licensing Corporation of America]. Back then the companies with their own licensing department were Disney and Universal, and Universal’s was very, very tiny.
When we got the Star Trek license, we started with the basic characters like Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scotty, and Uhura, and a couple of aliens. We had such success with Star Trek that we expanded the action figure line to include different aliens, then there were playsets; a Star Trek calculator that looked like the pads they had on the show. We even had walkie-talkies that were modeled on the communicators.
DOUG DREXLER
We spoke to Paradise Press and said to them, “Look, we know everything about the show. We’ve got slides, we’ve got photos, we can write articles.” And they gave us the poster book.
Some of the articles are actually, I think, considered classic. I did one called “The Smithsonian Report,” for which I went to the Air and Space Museum and they let me in before they opened. They gave me a ladder and I went up and laid hands on the Enterprise model. I took pictures. I met Fred Durant, who was the head of the museum, and he was a real nice guy. And when I was in his office, Michael Collins walked in. And I was, like, “Oh my God! Michael Collins!” He was my favorite astronaut. It was just so amazing to meet him. But you know, we did some really good stuff in that poster magazine that people still refer to.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
I had done a bunch of short radio scripts for an educational radio station out of Oregon on American history. They did eighty or ninety of them with sound effects and everything, but they were quite short. Under ten minutes. That was my only opportunity to do dialogue that would be spoken as opposed to read. And when Power Records came along, I essentially got the chance to write short Star Trek movies. That’s what they were. I feel very comfortable that those could have been filmed, whether for television or anything else. Now that’s a project for some fans—get the film rights to these ancient records and make short Star Trek episodes. I did seven episodes that were spread out over a number of albums. There hadn’t been a Star Trek movie at this point, and I wrote them as filmable Star Trek.
RUSS HEATH (artist, Star Trek Power Records)
It came from Dick Giordano, Neal Adams’s partner at Continuity Studios. He had the [illustration] job but couldn’t do all of them, so I did two issues. I put [comic-book artist and Man-Thing creator] Gray Morrow’s face as one of the crewmembers, in the background as a joke. I didn’t like the show. It was just a job. I wasn’t interested in any outer space stuff until Star Wars.
SUSAN SACKETT
It was 1974 and I was working with some mailbags from Lincoln Enterprises in Gene’s living room, and one of the friends of the Roddenberrys who was there said these letters were so interesting that somebody should put them together in a book. At the time, they weren’t saving the letters, just taking the orders and throwing the rest out. So I started saving the letters. Most were fan mail or high-level professionals who had written to Gene. I asked for permission to reprint them. Almost everyone agreed except for Carl Sagan. That book sold eighty-five thousand copies in the first year and then it went out of print.
KERRY O’QUINN (copublisher, Starlog magazine)
When we started Starlog in 1976, it was kind of an in-between period. Star Trek was only in reruns and it was before Star Wars, Close Encounters, or any of those things.
The way that Starlog came about is that we used to package magazines for other publishers on whatever subject they wanted to do. A publisher came to us and said, “We want one on Star Trek,” which was great. We put together what was essentially the first issue of Starlog, with a complete episode guide and all of that. It was completely on Star Trek. We gave that to the publisher and a few weeks later he comes back and says, “We’ve discovered that Paramount owns the rights to Star Trek and they won’t let us publish this because it would need to be a licensed product and we can’t afford to do a magazine just on Star Trek. So we can’t pay you and we have to give you back all of these materials.”
They did, but it was such good stuff, so I said, “Instead of doing a magazine on just Star Trek, let’s do a magazine that I’ve always wanted to do on science fiction, and we’ll just use this material for a few issues. But we’ll do it about the whole world of science fiction.” That’s how Starlog was born.
RONALD D. MOORE (supervising producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
In the pre-Internet era, and being from a little town in central California, I didn’t have access to any of the stuff that was going on with Star Trek, so I had no idea what was happening out there in fandom. My knowledge of Trek in the seventies was fairly limited to Starlog magazine. I would always go to the drugstore and buy the latest issue, and that’s where I realized there were Star Trek conventions. I remember the first issue of Starlog I saw. I was at the drugstore with my mom or something, and it was on the stand. On the cover they had this cartoon of the actors hanging from a chandelier, and inside I read this article about Star Trek conventions, which I’d never heard of and didn’t know existed until that point. It was just this TV show that I loved, that I didn’t even know anyone else liked but me. Then I read there were these conventions and these people out there who did love the show, and that the actors went. Starlog made me realize that there was this world of fandom.
KERRY O’QUINN
The first issue sold better than anyone except me expected, so the distributor let us go from quarterly to bimonthly, and then when Star Wars came out and made the cover of Time magazine and became the biggest thing in Hollywood, we went monthly. Suddenly science fiction was the hot item and just as suddenly we were the voice of science fiction.
ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)
I’ve read a few articles concerning the Inside Star Trek record, in which it was opined that this was Paramount’s way of pumping up demand for a reconstituted Trek TV show. Nope. They gave us no cooperation. We couldn’t even get a damned still or slide of the Enterprise for the cover. I should point out that Paramount Studios at the time was not enthused about anything Star Trek creatively. They didn’t get it. Never did. As a result, Gene wasn’t allowed to produce too much at the studio and basically bolstered his livelihood via his speaking engagements.
The finished album was released and promoted in college markets. The album served as a way to connect with Trek fans that were wondering what was going on with the show. Was it possible to bring it back to the small screen? Could Trek make it to the big screen? The album was recorded before the age of the Internet, where facts and rumors are now dispensed every ten seconds. Back in the seventies you had print, radio, and conventions to disseminate news, and that was tough sledding. There were no Hollywood backstage TV shows giving you scoops, either. The record was an attempt to give voice to the world of Star Trek, and that voice, of course, was Gene’s.
The album was pretty much what it was intended to be. It was always sort of a “loose” project in that it was like herding cats trying to schedule recording sessions and the like. At the time, Gene was a hot commodity on the lecture circuit. He did a lot of colleges. We figured we’d record a couple of his presentations and then he’d write “sketches” with various cast members to be recorded in an actual studio on the West Coast, and we’d get a nice ebb and flow going through the two angles.
The origins of this record came about when Crawdaddy! magazine approached me about writing an article celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Star Trek TV series. So I began the dreaded freelance writer task of tracking down various publicists in order to contact the folks I wanted to interview. Gene Roddenberry, of course, was the big kahuna. Susan Sackett scheduled a hookup between Gene and me while Gene was attending a convention in New York. I met a very haggard Gene at his hotel room one morning. The previous night, when he and Majel were attending a convention function, a robber had broken into the room and ransacked the place, telling their son’s nanny that he’d come for the jewels. Of course, there were no jewels. Gene had been up most of the night dealing with the police, jittery nerves, the whole nine yards. The first thing we did after we hit the lobby was hit the hotel bar, which was closed. A couple of rabid Trek fans made a real stink about Gene not getting served, he being the Great Bird of the Galaxy and all, and soon we were quietly drinking and philosophizing about life in the post-Nixon era. We hit it off.
We did the interview in a few meetings and the article made the cover of the magazine. At some point, Susan suggested that we do a spoken-word album for Columbia. I was all for it.
RONALD D. MOORE
I played that record over and over again. What was amazing about it was hearing Gene’s voice directly. I think it was the only time I’d heard his voice—I’d never seen him on TV or heard him on the radio. It was the only time you heard Roddenberry speaking, and speaking at length. Unless you went to one of the conventions, you didn’t have that opportunity, so it was fascinating to me. I remember him talking about his childhood; I think he said something about there being cardboard boxes he used as spaceships and he had a sickly childhood, as I recall. It was a very inspiring kind of talk, talking about the potential of humanity. I remember him saying something about people and sex objects and how he enjoyed being a sex object.
ED NAHA
The lecture material on the album was taken directly from Gene’s prepared script. It varied a bit from school to school, but it was pretty much a set routine. It offered a lot of insight into Star Trek, but also of Gene and his creative process. The interviews he conducted were scripted … or started out that way. Susan Sackett contacted the actors and their representatives, and we booked time at a recording studio in Los Angeles. Mark Lenard was a total pro, reprising the role of Spock’s father, Sarek, on the album. He never strayed from character and gave a great performance. DeForest Kelley and Gene tweaked their script during rehearsal. Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury riffed a lot more, with Gene gently nudging them back on topic.
Bill Shatner was, God bless him, Bill Shatner. He showed up over an hour late in tennis whites, straight off the courts. Mind you, this left Gene and me as well as the sound engineer, staring at the ceilings while the budget meter was ticking for studio rental. Bill sat down and the first thing he did was toss the script. He wanted to talk about something else. I think dolphins or something. Gene had this great, smiling face he put on when things were going south. But Gene also had this teacher-authoritarian aspect to him that he used to slowly get things back on topic. It was a hoot.
In terms of the content, Columbia Records couldn’t have cared less about what was on it. My immediate boss had been left out of the loop initially and viewed the project as “Naha’s Folly.” We could’ve had the entire cast of Star Trek farting the Russian saber dance and he would’ve shrugged.
The power of the expanding Star Trek audience as a vocal movement became even more evident in 1976, when America’s first space shuttle was the subject of a passionate letter-writing campaign that would result in the vessel—accompanied by a NASA ceremony that saw Roddenberry unite with most of the cast—being christened with the name Enterprise.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
The project to get the space shuttle named Enterprise actually got started with two men in Washington, DC, and when they could not carry it, it got dropped on us Trimbles. We got a phone call asking if we could use our large mailing list to get the word out that the very first space shuttle should be named Enterprise. We were hesitant, because a mail-in campaign takes a lot of time and hassles, not to mention a great deal of printing and postage. But the idea seemed sound: the naming could generate thousands of letters to President Ford showing public support for our space program.
We gathered together many Star Trek fans and members of the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society to put the mailing together by hand. We could not afford a mailing house, and we have never found one willing to donate its time, machinery, and people for such a project. Local fans helped to pay for this mailing, but the Trimbles paid for the bulk of it. The papers were folded, envelopes stuffed, and labels affixed, all by hand. The fans brought their own munchies, which accounted for more than one tortilla chip in, or a greasy thumbprint on, some envelopes.
We received every-other-day phone calls from Washington, DC, to tell us how the campaign seemed to be going. Then the day came for the president to hold a news conference on the shuttle and its future, and, only minutes before the conference, the world heard that President Ford had decided to name the shuttle Enterprise! NASA officials were stunned; the reporters had a field day about the “crazy Trekkies.”
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
It took a million letters to convince NBC to renew Star Trek for a third season, but it only took four hundred thousand to get the President of the United States to override NASA. What does that tell you about NBC? Star Trek was not there, but the conventions were, and science-fiction or Star Trek fans were absolutely determined that the first reusable spaceship this country—this world—ever saw was going to be named Enterprise. We won! The downside was that it turned out the second shuttle, named Columbia, was the one NASA picked that actually went into space.
JACQUELINE LICHTENBERG
That was the main argument, that this particular shuttle would never fly. It was a test vehicle, so we should go for one of the reusable ones to be named Enterprise. But that “energy” I keep talking about burst forth, and a huge explosion of sentiment carried the day. What we had been scorned for—the idea of going into space—was now a reality. We had been proven right. We can go into the stars, and the Enterprise’s successors will lead us there.
ED NAHA
The last project I worked on at Columbia was getting all the necessary clearances and publishing rights for the songs on the Voyager record that was shot into space. I worked with Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan. This was quite a challenge in that record companies were loath to have their “product” mixed with another label’s “product.” It didn’t matter that it was being shot into space and wouldn’t receive any Earthly radio time. Rules were rules and lawyers loved rules.
While this was going on, William Shatner rode to my rescue. He’d been impressed by my work on Inside Star Trek. He called and asked me if I’d publicize his new double album, William Shatner Live. The gig would last the summer. Bingo! I had rent money. I have to confess, I love Shatner. He’s the most affable über-ego I’ve ever worked with. Being with him is almost like being included in an ongoing piece of performance art.
In between all of this, the resurrection of Star Trek in terms of a new production had already taken its initial baby steps, the first having occurred during the 1972 New York convention.
JON POVILL (associate producer, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
Gene had a big part in the conventions early on. Not just in terms of going and speaking there, but they were marketing ploys for him and Majel and Lincoln. It was all fostered to keep it alive and to take advantage, at least to some extent, of the syndication. So he was, I think, part and parcel of developing the phenomenon. He was terrific at marketing. He knew how to work his fans; he knew how to work that part of it. I would be very interested to see if he were in his forties now and had the Internet to work with and social media to work with … Jesus. I have a feeling he would be a monster. There was always the ego, but in terms of what he could do with a Facebook page, drumming up fandom to respond to things … I suspect he would have a huge empire. I think he would have been able to parlay Star Trek into a zillion other things, even starting a Web series or whatever. He would have been able to generate a whole lot more. Sort of in the way that Majel did with Andromeda and some of the other things from Roddenberry ideas, but to a much higher degree.
ELYSE ROSENSTEIN
When the convention first came up and Gene Roddenberry was given an invitation, apparently Oscar Katz had to encourage him to attend. They had been trying to set up a situation where Gene could talk to NBC about possibly bringing back Star Trek. On the one hand, if Gene was in New York it would be good to do that, but on the other he didn’t want to seem too anxious.
The long and short of it was that Oscar encouraged Gene to come, because it would give him a reason to be in New York that wasn’t directly associated with a meeting with NBC. So there was this going on in the background; it didn’t have anything to do with our creating our convention or putting it together, but it had to do with some of the people who came. It did give Gene that opportunity. And the publicity generated reached California, where it really kind of lit a fire that maybe had been smoldering in the background. It was kind of saying, “You don’t think anything is there, but look at what happened when the fans were given an opportunity.” It showed there was a market out there and that people wanted more. In September 1973 we got it with the animated Star Trek series.