The Greatest Show in the Universe

"I'VE BEEN TOLD by people in the space administration," says science fiction writer Gene Roddenberry, "that if Star Trek had still been on the air at the time, NASA would not have had a cut in its budget."

Few producers of television shows can make such boasts with any accuracy, but as creator and producer of Star Trek, Roddenberry is well aware of the power of his show. Before cancellation by NBC in 1969, the show received unprecedented critical acclaim including an Emmy, an International Hugo Award and the Image Award from the N A A C P. When NBC announced cancellation of Star Trek, over a million letters poured in demanding that show be kept.

Even though Star Trek is now shown only in reruns, it is more popular than ever. "When we threatened to drop the show, we received two bomb threats," said a beleaguered employee at WPIX, the station that airs Star Trek reruns in New York. "The reaction to the show is absolutely wild." Three thousand miles away, an official at KCOP in Los Angeles said, "When the program is on schedule and we pre-empt it for a special, that's really when the fans come out of the woodwork. We receive maybe several hundred letters a week."

Recently, when The Detroit Free Press took a poll on whether Star Trek should be brought back, it drew over 6000 responses--second only to the busing issue--with fully 83 per cent of the respondants in favor of returning the show. The show has plenty of fans in New England, and Star Trek is one of the most popular offerings of Boston station WKBG.

The reaction is the same in the 100 U.S. cities and 55 foreign countries in which Star Trek reruns are shown. TV viewers from Argentina to Zambia have seen Captain Kirk and his crew, and in Germany and England the show is among the most popular aired. Dubbed in Spanish, Portugese, French, German and Japanese, it is hard to believe that anyone within range of a television set hasn't seen at least one episode of Star Trek.

Set in the 23rd Century, Star Trek revolves around the adventures of the Starship Enterprise and its interplanetal, international, interracial crew. There's the Waspish Captain Kirk, played in a father-like manner by William Shatner; communications expert Uhura portrayed by the black and beautiful Nichele Nichols; Sulu, the oriental helmsman played by Walter Koenig; Dr. McCoy, the pacifist, depicted by DeForest Kelley; and of course the one and only Mr. Spock, half-Vulcan and half-human, portrayed by Leonard Nimoy. The crew becomes involved in a variety of intriguing tales, all of which make some comment on today's society. The shows deal with everything from sex to war, from racism to religion.

THERE ARE almost as many reasons for Star Trek's continued popularity as there are fans of the show. Some people are attracted to Star Trek because of its sophisticated use of technology. Roddenberry had the help of several Ph.Ds, including scientists from the Rand Corporation, who acted as technical consultants for the show. "Each episode cost $185,000," explained Roddenberry, "and all of the special effects people in the business think that for the money we spent we were tops in the field."

Most of the special effects center around the Starship Enterprise, itself a marvel. Nine hundred and forty feet long, the Enterprise carries a crew of 430 in perfect comfort. Quarters are spacious and luxuriously appointed, and turbo elevators that operate both vertically and horizontally provide speedy transportation from one part of the Starship to another.

In order to travel around the universe, the Enterprise must move at speeds faster than light. Since this is impossible physically, the Enterprise must "warp" space. The Enterprise's engines use matter and anti-matter for propulsion, the annihilation of dual matter creating the fantastic power required to "warp" space and exceed the speed of light.

Large "phasers" (a takeoff on laser) protect the ship from outside attack, and each crew member carries a smaller phaser for self-defense purposes. Other features of the ship include a space transporter that disassembles the atoms of a person on board ship and reassembles them at the desired location in a process called "beaming."

Communication is no problem between the international crew and the galaxy of beings in the Universe because each crew member carries an automatic language converter.

Such meticulous attention to detail has endeared Star Trek to college students. Describing some of the mail he receives from them, William Shatner (Capt. Kirk) said, "We get letters which analyze matter and anti-matter. Then they proceed to give us mathematical formulae that I can't understand." Student interest in the show ran so high at Emerson College that last year the school gave a series of seminars on Star Trek.

Still others find the show compelling because of its optimistic view of the future. In the Star Trek world war is abolished on earth, and all of mankind is united in keeping peace in the universe. As one fan explained, "it gave you hope for the future."

Whatever the reason for their attraction to the show, Star Trek fans, or "Trekies" as they call themselves, are a devoted lot. In between watching Star Trek reruns they keep themselves busy collecting Star Trek magazines, books, bumper stickers, wall posters, pendants, spacecraft models and assorted memorabilia from the show. Most of the items are sold by Roddenberry's firm, Star Trek Enterprises, but the 24 or so Star Trek magazines, or "fanzines," are put out by the fans themselves.

One of the most ambitious products by a fan is the 84-page Star Trek Concordance, an index that includes not only plot summaries of the Star Trek episodes, but also definitions and references to every character, planet and term in the series. Co-authored by Bjo Trimble, the 39 year old housewife-artist who organized the "Save Star Trek" letter-writing campaign, the book has sold one thousand copies at five dollars each.

More successful has been Bantam Books' series of Star Trek novels that has about 3.4 million copies in print. Based on scripts from the show, six books have already been published and another is scheduled to go to press soon. The most popular book on the series, "The Making of Star Trek," describes many of the problems in creating the show. In its ninth printing, the book has sold 438,000 copies.

TRADE IN Star Trek memorabilia is brisk, and even the Smithsonian Institute has gotten into the game, securing a copy of the pilot show and several props. For the noninstitutional collector-investor, film clips are highly popular and those showing the usually stoic Mr. Spock smiling are worth their weight in Martian gold. (Publicity photos are also popular, but some of the more ambitious fans photograph the show for themselves while it's on their television screens. Another big seller is sound recordings of the show, and Trekies have been known to memorize entire scripts. Most popular, however, are the properties from the show.) "I'd love to have one of the uniforms, but I can't afford it," lamented one fan. "Leonard Nimoy's shirt went for $200."

Not surprisingly, Star Trek fans have organized into clubs all across the country. The largest, STAR (Star Trek Association for Revival), started only last year but already has a membership of over 4000. "The majority of our members are under twenty-five," said Jan Donaldson, a member of the group, "but a lot of our members are doctors, lawyers and professors."

Besides meeting through clubs, Star Trek fans come together at mammoth Star Trek conventions. At a Star Trek convention in New York last year the sponsors expected 800 Trekies but after 3000 showed up they stopped counting. This weekend the city of Santa Barbara, Calif, is bracing itself for the onslaught of 10,000 Star Trek aficionados.

Conventions are devoted to discussion groups and lectures as well as to showings of Star Trek clips and episodes. Trading among fans takes place at the Trading Post area, named after a section of the Enterprise, and participants often dress as characters from the series.

All of this has great marketing appeal, and it was only a matter of time before the stations that own rerun rights to the show began to cash in on it. For example, the Kaiser Broadcasting chain, which owns rights to the show in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and Detroit, gave its own Star Trek conventions as part of its fall promotion campaign for the show. In addition, the chain is taking heed of fan complaints and suggestions: it owns the series unedited and in the same order as NBC did. (A common complaint is that callous station managers have butchered the reruns by editing or cutting vital parts in order to squeeze in more commercials.)

With so much interest in the show and with all of its marketing possibilities it is hard to believe that NBC cancelled the show, yet it did. A collection of charges and counter charges surrounds the network's decision to axe Star Trek. "When you're working in television," said NBC Vice President Stanley Robertson, "you've got to realize that some shows are going to make it and some aren't. Star Trek was never a hard core success in the ratings, and we would have been justified in cutting the show after the first season."

Trekies, however, see the situation differently. "The advertising types at NBC," said Bjo Trimble, "are afraid of anything that doesn't fit into a formula. The show scared them. They said it couldn't last, and they had to kill it to prove it couldn't last."

Fans maintain that the constant juggling of the show's time slot was the reason it failed to gain good ratings.

NBC denies this charge. "We kept switching it to save the show," Robertson said. 'NBC is not in the business of not being successful. We all liked Star Trek and we wanted to see if the show could do better in a different time slot."

But besides network and rating problems, Star Trek also had internal troubles. Throughout the first season Roddenberry kept firm control of the show, but talk of cancellation prompted him to take more of a background role during the second season. "I told them I would continue to produce it only if we could get a reasonable time slot," he said. "But I couldn't budge them, and I had no choice but to live up to my promise."

After Roddenberry left, Fred Frieburger, whose previous television experience consisted mainly of the short-lived Ironhorse series, was called in to run the show. Two separate sources say that Frieburger's first contact with Star Trek was when network executives locked him into a screening room and made him watch eight or nine hours of the program. "Most of Frieburger's scripts were due to nepotism, favors he owed people. Some of that stuff was so bad it made me ashamed to be a fan," says Bjo Trimble who followed the switch closely. "It literally killed the show."

NONETHELESS, SOON after NBC cancelled Star Trek it was picked up by the local stations where it began to build an even larger audience. This audience has grown to such an extent that people in the industry are now talking about reviving the show. Foremost among the lobbyists for the return of Star Trek is Roddenberry. "I feel sure something will happen," he said with an air of confidence. "We've talked about a lot of things. Maybe a feature length movie, maybe a movie for television, and maybe a television series."

But talks with NBC have already come to a screeching halt because the network wants Roddenberry to do a pilot episode for the series. "Hell, I've got 78 in the can, and I'm not going to do a seventy-ninth," Roddenberry said. "Having made 78 it's not reasonable to ask me to make the investment necessary to do a seventy-ninth."

Robertson and the people at NBC in the meantime are playing things cool, and attempting to maintain an air of disinterestedness. "We've discussed possibilities," Robertson said, "but NBC has no financial or contractual arrangement for the return of Star Trek."

The people at Paramount are more enthusiastic. "The chances of bringing it back as a television series are pretty remote, but a movie is a definite possibility," said Robert Newgard, vice-president of network and syndication sales at Paramount. "The problem is that we don't know if people who watch Star Trek on TV are willing to go to the movies to see it." It appears, however, that Paramount has not made any hard decisions yet.

In the meantime, Star Trek fans seem fairly content watching reruns. Even if Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise must visit the same planets over and over again, the Trekies demand that the show go on. Says Kaiser Broadcasting executive Barry Thurston, "This program will never die. It's a classic."

At a Star Trek convention in New York last year the sponsors expected 800 Trekies, but after 3000 showed up they stopped counting. This weekend the city of Santa Barbara is bracing itself for the onslaught of 10,000 Star Trek aficionados.