One of my earliest memories is of watching the “Operation: Annihilate!” episode of Star Trek–what people now call Star Trek the Original Series.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Next Up: The Next Generation
