I was eleven when Star Trek premiered. I’d seen the previews all summer, I was salivating in anticipation. Just from those minute or so clips it looked just so cool!
We watched the first episode—Man Trap—and disaster struck.
See, I was a somewhat “sensitive” child. I hate horror. I was prone at an earlier age to nightmares. I recall a couple of times waking up screaming. Of course, I’d been like four or five. It had been years. But my mother was adamant about keeping me away from anything that would curse my nights and ruin their sleep. She was skeptical that this—this—Star Trek Thing—wasn’t just another monster show. I remember trying to persuade her that, no, it’s about spaceships and other planets. No monsters.
Well. What was the thing in Man Trap other than a classic scary monster?
I missed half the first season because of that shaggy critter.
We lived downstairs from my grandparents and I took to sneaking up there to watch it. They had an ancient ANCIENT television, in a pale maple cabinet and a very low-res gun painting the picture on an old tube, so the picture was anything but sharp.
Even so, there was something about it that just took hold.
It is difficult sometimes to explain what Star Trek meant to someone like me that year. It was amazing. It was miraculous. It was where we wanted to go.
Somehow, Roddenberry and his writers had constructed a thing that had life beyond the edge of the television tube. We knew the Federation had length, breadth, and depth. It had substance. It was a place. Not like anything else on tv at the time that could even begin to call itself science fiction, this was a universe and we knew it would welcome us in if we could just–just—kind of—maybe—slip in there, past the electrons, and sort of step through.
Of course, it did what written SF had been doing for a long time. The difference was the medium. I never knew anyone else growing up who was remotely interested in reading the books and magazines I did. Everyone watched television and more than a few watched Star Trek.
It embedded and evoked an idea of the world and life that extended beyond the ordinary in a way that far exceeded its primitive SFX and pasteboard sets and often mediocre scripting. It wasn’t the individual episodes that mattered, it was the proposed future portrayed.
We didn’t have any of that stuff. Today we have a lot of it.
I saw the entire first run eventually, all in brilliant black-n-white. We didn’t have a color tv till the latter part of the Seventies.
It didn’t matter. I could close my eyes and see all the colors.
My dad, who had a problem with obsession, didn’t like my growing dedication to the show. “Split your head open with an axe and a bunch of starships would fly out of it,” he would say, as if that were a bad thing.
Well, it wasn’t school work.
But today I’m a published science fiction writer, and I didn’t learn how to do that in school.
More, though, in some way the optimism and vision of Star Trek became part of my general make-up. I think I’m a better human being because of it.
It was just so fucking wonderful.
Happy Anniversary.
