I just finally finished watching all 98 episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise from beginning to end. It’s taken me a couple of months, but I wanted to have all the background information I would need for my Star Trek Adventures roleplaying campaign, which takes place between the end of the Original Series and the beginning of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. I started by watching the Original Series, then the animated series, and then Enterprise. My mission is finally over.
Now, don’t come at me with Discovery and Strange New Worlds. Those shows are fine, but let’s be honest. They’re reboots. Re-imaginations. Whatever you want to call them. They cannot possibly be canonical for the continuity in which Star Trek The Original Series exists. As far as I’m concerned, they’re another timeline like the Kelvin timeline from the movies and I’m okay with that. I wouldn’t even mind if they redid the Original Series episodes in their own style. Anyway, back to Enterprise.
The first two seasons, I thought, started out pretty strong. They went out there and explored. The humans had a sense of wonder that even their Vulcan science officer found attractive. T’Pol would be on the bridge explaining that a phenomenon had already been catalogued by Vulcan scientists who found it unremarkable, and the Enterprise crew would discover something new and amazing about it because they weren’t jaded. Occasionally, these closer examinations would reveal a mystery that had to be solved. Really good Star Trek, if you ask me. Technology developed, strategies and tactics evolved, and it felt pretty natural.
Where it got completely cringey, however, was in their exploitation of the actors’ bodies. The lame decontamination gel scenes simply weren’t necessary, with them rubbing decon gel over each other’s hard-to-reach spots while in their underwear. T’Pol’s skin tight outfits and revealing satin night garments, which we saw often, were, if you’ll excuse the expression, illogical. Was there precedent for this, with Deanna Troi and Seven of Nine on their respective shows? Of course. But it didn’t make it right.
At the end of season two, however, the Enterprise went completely off the rails. Clearly inspired by the events of 9/11, a new race called the Xindi attacked Earth with a weapon of mass destruction that killed seven million people in Florida, including Trip Tucker’s sister. They spent the entire next season seeking revenge and looking for a new weapon that the Xindi were going to use to annihilate Earth. Gone was the entire premise of Starfleet as explorers, and we watched Captain Archer become a ruthless commander, crossing many moral lines that he never would have in the first two seasons. I still remember when I stopped watching the show when it first aired, after the 19th episode of the season (“Damage”), when Archer ordered his crew to steal the warp coil from the Illyrians, stranding them three years from their home. I remember just thinking, who are these awful people? So, this time around, I finished the season, and was gratified to see them dealing with the aftermath of these decisions in season four, after a bizarre time-traveling World War II two-parter. I half expected Archer to wake up in the German camp, saying, “Oh boy.”
The fourth and final season, though, I have to say, was a slog. Even if the third season was filled with horrible behavior, at least they had a clear mission to accomplish. The fourth season felt like they were using leftover scripts from Star Trek The Next Generation. Enterprise was no longer exploring. They were ferrying people around, policing augments, the result of genetic engineering, running supposed transporter experiments, and just hanging around known space. It really wasn’t much Star Trek at all. It was totally TNG, which I suppose made that awful finale appropriate, with guest stars from that show.
I would have liked to have seen what they had in mind for a season five, but given the decline in quality of stories in season four, it seems like they were just running out of antimatter there at the end.
It seems unbelievable to me that it was 50 years ago that I received my first superhero action figure. But for Christmas 1972, my Grandma Blowers (rhymes with flowers) gave me the Mego Superman figure. I had wanted Batman, my favorite character, but I was thrilled, nonetheless, to open up the Man of Steel.
Someone else’s Mego Superman. I opened mine!
I don’t even remember what else I got that year for Christmas because it didn’t matter. This was by far my favorite toy. Superman flew all over the house, lifted many heavy things and saved people from disasters.
My stepfather didn’t appreciate the gift like I did. He was opposed to boys playing with dolls and he made sure to let me know it whenever he could. He was a professional emasculator in that way. He had already stopped me from playing with my GI Joe months before. Poor Joe languished in the bottom of the toybox, where my brother and sister had access to him. But when I was anywhere near my grandmother, he didn’t dare say anything to me because he wanted to stay on her good side. Superman prevailed!
Over the years, grandparents on both sides added to my brother’s and my Mego collections. My brother got Spider-Man, while I got Star Trek’s Captain Kirk in 1973. My brother got Spock the next year, so we had cooperative play in two different genres. I always wanted the rest of the Star Trek crew and the coveted USS Enterprise playset, but I knew that was unlikely so long as I lived in my stepfather’s house. We had to be satisfied playing at our father’s and grandparents’ houses, or even at school. Well, as an adult, I have rectified that.
The original Mego Star Trek figures and the USS Enterprise playset
When I was in third grade, Mrs. Burkholder was the best teacher of all time. On nice days we had recess outside, but when it rained, our indoor play consisted mostly of playing with action figures. Most of the boys had GI Joes, but by this time, my younger siblings had taken care of my Joe. His clothes were nowhere to be found. But, without my stepfather’s knowledge, I brought Superman to school. Sure, he was only eight inches tall compared to the GI Joe’s 12-inch height, but that just meant that he was Superboy instead of Superman, and I was just fine with that. I learned to read because of Superboy, after all.
The only other Mego figure I ever got was the Shazam! (Captain Marvel) figure, which I got in 1978. I was 13, which you might think was too old to be playing with such toys. But this was an important time in my recovery from the years of abuse I wrote about here. My dad and my grandparents gave me the time to catch up on the imaginative play that I had missed, and I will be forever grateful to them for that. I had enjoyed the Shazam! TV show and remembered seeing a house ad for a battle between Superman and Captain Marvel. Since none of Superman’s powered villains were made by Mego, I wanted someone about as powerful for him to fight. In my Solution Squad story “The Case of the Eight-Inch Action Figures,” I wrote a scene where young Radical remembered that battle.
Radical remembers!
A few years back, I even had a Mego Radical figure customized. Talk about a thrill!
Package art by me!
Over the years, Mego has had the licenses for so many properties, it was like the predecessor of Funko, which makes its Pops for just about everything there is in pop culture land. And now that they’re back in business, they’re even releasing a line of 50th anniversary figures, which I’ll be sure to get. They’ll probably never leave their boxes, but I have vintage ones for that!
My 50-year-old vintage Superman in a custom diorama by Mike Sutter
One of my earliest memories is of watching the “Operation: Annihilate!” episode of Star Trek–what people now call Star Trek the Original Series.
“Operation Annihilate”
Since it was broadcast on April 13, 1967, I was only two and a half years old. The show was very appealing to a young child such as myself because there were lots of garish colors, both in the uniforms and the sets. I remember my mother babysitting for a pair of twins named Matt and Mark, and they had shirts with traffic lights on their left breasts. I used to call them their Star Trek shirts. I had one with a bear on the left breast, but the shirt was black so it didn’t qualify.
In the 1970s, Star Trek made a big comeback in syndication. Daily reruns allowed those of us in Mrs. Burkholder’s third grade class to discover Star Trek’s imaginative adventure and to recreate it in pretend play. We used to take the cardboard backs of our notebooks and draw phasers and communicators on them. Then we would cut them out with scissors and use them as props on the playground at recess. We were even more excited when the cartoon began that fall, as if it had given us license to create our own Star Trek adventures. We loved the fights, the ray guns, and the action of Star Trek. We didn’t get that the point of science fiction was to create allegory and parables from which to learn, but the show gave us plenty of excitement nonetheless. Using typical third grade logic, when it came time to select roles for the characters, I got to play Captain Kirk, by virtue of being named Jim.
The main cast of Star Trek (animated)
My brother and I, on one of our trips to our grandparents’ house, received matching Mego action figures of Kirk and Spock, and together we had many adventures on distant planets. I don’t know how many times we re-enacted “Amok Time,” but it counted in the hundreds.
Mego Capt. Kirk
We also got one of the first trade paperbacks when we found the Enterprise Logs in a bookstore. The trade reprinted the old Gold Key Star Trek series. We read that thing dog-eared.
Star Trek The Enterprise Logs Volume 2
or Christmas in 1976, Jeff and I got matching phaser pistols from our father. They were the coolest toys for the time. When you pressed the trigger, it made a chirping sound, which was more like a communicator than a phaser, but we didn’t care. The phasers were also projectors that, using a cutout that you slid over the lens, projected a picture of a ship on the wall. I remember they took a nine-volt battery in the handles for the sound, and two double A’s in the back for the light. My dad probably regretted getting us noise-making toys for Christmas, but the phaser remains one of my favorite toys of childhood. When I moved in with him a month later, Star Trek was still in reruns and I was lucky enough to find a book from the library, called The Making of Star Trek, by Stephen Whitfield. My dog ate the cover of the paperback so we had to buy the book, but I sure didn’t regret it. I was able to check off all the episodes of Star Trek that I had yet to see. We only had a black and white TV, but it didn’t matter. I knew what color everybody wore! In my spare time, I created my own starship based on some of the production drawings in the book. I crewed the ship with superheroes, so that made for some interesting daydreams, to be sure. It wasn’t until later that I started to get the deeper meaning behind the show, but that time would come. And that understanding only reinforced my love for this show.
The Remco chirping phaser
Even though from ninth grade through the end of high school, I became an insufferable jock, I still found ways to incorporate my nerdity into my everyday life. When I had to give a demonstrative speech with visual support, I chose to use my The Making of Star Trek book to demonstrate for the class, where everything was on the starship Enterprise. But perhaps more informatively for the masses, I was able to define what people in the credits of movies and TV show actually do, from the director, down to the best boy (senior electrician, second to the gaffer). The book had provided insights that I had never known, and neither had my classmates. Scored an A for that.
The Making of Star Trek
When 1979’s Star Trek The Motion Picture was released just after my 15th birthday, everyone in my whole family went to the movies, a rare event. Even my grandmother went to see it. What a thrill it was! People have often called it “the motionless picture” but I found it, if you’ll forgive the term, fascinating. I absolutely loved the slow, lumbering exterior shots of the Enterprise model. I saw it three times in the theater, and yes. I bought the Happy Meals.
Star Trek Happy Meals
In 1982, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan silenced all the critics of the first movie. This one was special to me, as I was 17, and had saved enough money to treat my dad and my brother to a showing on Father’s Day and felt like a grown up driving them there.
During my freshman year of college, in the early spring of 1984, we showed Star Trek II as part of the Student Entertainment Committee’s series of films. I wasn’t actually part of the committee; I was doing my college work-study as a projectionist, so I got to see it multiple times that weekend and enter the trivia contest, which I won. The question was, who said, “Take it easy lad; everyone’s entitled to their own opinion.” But the kicker was, “In which episode?” I got both questions right, and won a model of the refit Enterprise.
By the time Star Trek III rolled out, it was the summer after my freshman year in college. I took my college girlfriend to see it one weekend when I was in Kalamazoo visiting her.
Star Trek IV came out at the beginning of my senior year in college, in November 1986. Are you starting to see the pattern here? I literally grew up with Star Trek. The model used for the Enterprise was still being built on the day I was born, and by the time I graduated from college, it was still going strong, with the original characters perhaps reaching the height of their popularity. It was at this time that I discovered the FASA Star Trek Roleplaying Game. I started my gaming life during freshman year, and didn’t really have time to devote to a long campaign, but during some long summer nights in my junior year, we managed to find the time to make some trouble in the Original Series era.
