Live Long and Prosper: How Fans Made Star Trek a Cultural Phenomenon

Elizabeth Thomas

[right arrow] In April of 1964, Gene Roddenberry, former fighter pilot and Los Angeles police officer, embarked on a mission to capture the imaginations of television viewers. Ultimately, he did much more than that. He and a small band of creative souls harnessed the world's newest telecommunications medium to attract both the geek and non-geek, and brought millions of individuals together in a decades-long movement that has forever changed the meaning of 'fandom'.

In its infancy, Roddenberry's Star Trek was trapped in something of a time warp. Audiences at that time did not value the programming in sufficient numbers until after its cancellation. Its proper audience simply did not have time to find it before it was gone, but their need for it persisted. The need grew so strong that thousands of fans gathered together and fought for a TV series, and they did so long before the Internet or e-mail. They found one another. They met. They wrote millions of letters and they never stopped asking for new programming.

The genesis of Trek fandom

Clearly, Star Trek's five-year mission was never realized; the series was cancelled after three seasons. It actually was cancelled at the end of its second season, but according to the authors of Bantam Books' Star Trek Lives! (1975), intense pressure by fans convinced NBC executives to grant a one-year reprieve. Unfortunately, the ratings in that third season failed to climb and the show suffered its fate a year later, despite a renewed letter-writing campaign by avid fans.

Marketing personnel at the network complained to management that the series' cancellation was premature. New techniques for profiling demographics later demonstrated that Star Trek's audience had been highly profitable for its advertisers. While this revelation came too late to resume production, Star Trek was far from over.

The original series (1966-1969) did not simply fade away like so many other failed shows. Its loyal fans lobbied incessantly for repeats of the original 79 episodes. The magic number to make an 'off-network' series marketable to mainstream television channels always had been (and still is) 100 episodes – a milestone Star Trek never hit. Much later, 80 episodes of classic Trek aired in syndication when NBC finally responded to constant prodding by fans and agreed to syndicate the original series despite its paucity of episodes.

Like Tribbles, Trekkies multiply quickly

In 1972, after it had cancelled Star Trek, NBC admitted it had made a mistake. The confession can be attributed solely to the efforts of the show's fans – not its creator, the writers, cast members or Desilu studio executives. The fans never stopped writing letters to the network. They never stopped calling ... and calling.

It took just under three years to convince NBC to syndicate reruns of the original series (which continue to air today, more than 46 years after the original show debuted). In 1972, Paramount also began to negotiate seriously with Roddenberry for a new live-action revival of the series, although it was many years before Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST: TNG, 1987-1994) would air.

Meanwhile, jubilation had started to spread among the show's fans. With the reruns now airing in syndication, the show's fan culture took on a life of its own far removed from Roddenberry's own efforts to revive Star Trek. The fans had found each other. Fans like teenagers Phil Sneed and Cheri Daw, who got involved with Trek right up to the tips of their rubber Spock ears. In the span of just three months, the 16-year-old duo started the first 'fanzine', completed their own Star Trek novel, and started the first of many Star Trek fan clubs.

What was truly remarkable about these very young Star Trek fans was that they were not unique. Star Trek fans were not just teenagers. The younger fans were inextricably linked to tens of thousands of middle-aged housewives, married couples, labourers and professors. Sneed and Daw later founded Star Publishing, the first publishing company devoted entirely to Star Trek literature. In so doing they unleashed the creative forces of hundreds of fantasy writers who developed a multi-million dollar industry of Star Trek fiction.

Hundreds of Star Trek authors published with Star Publishing throughout the 1970s, while still more fans continued to build new relationships with Star Trek based on a later animated cartoon series and reruns of the original episodes. The momentum that had begun with a simple letter-writing campaign kept the series on the air for a third season in 1968, got it into syndication in 1971, and eventually would give it an entirely new life in films.

Publishing proliferates and prospers

Publishing was at the centre of the fan phenomenon that propelled Star Trek throughout the 1970s. The first licensed books and comics appeared during the series' second season. In many ways, the publishing industry sparked the fan revolution that later served as a lifeline for every avid Trekkie. It harnessed their interest in the show and its characters, and kept them alive even when there was no starship Enterprise making the leap to light speed.

In 1968, the first non-fiction book on the series appeared, The Making of the TV Series, Star Trek, by Stephen E. Poe (writing as Stephen E. Whitfield). The author was employed by model maker AMT, known then for its plastic kits for assembling miniature Star Trek space vessels, communicators and weapons. Enthralled with the series from the first airing, Poe negotiated a deal with Desilu Studios and Gene Roddenberry to write Star Trek's first authentic behind-the-scenes history. The first Star Trek novels also began to appear that year, published by Whitman Books. In 1970, Bantam Books published the first novel intended for adult audiences, Spock Must Die! written by well-known science fiction author James Blish. Blish also would adapt each episode of the original series for a twelve-volume collection of short stories published by Bantam.

Long before Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Robert Wise, 1979) ever hit the screen, Bantam Books fulfilled fans' needs for visual and narrative material. It fed them dozens of 'Fotonovels' (adaptations of...