See Spock Run
PODHORETZ, JOHN
See Spock Run Why Star Trek lives long and prospers. BY JOHN PODHORETZ Has there ever been an American subculture as benign as that shared by the fans of the 1960s television series Star Trek?...
...The teasing culminated in 1987 in a memorable Saturday Night Live skit in which Star Trek's star, William Shatner, berated his fans, "Get a life, will you, people...
...Star Trek conventions, which now occur every weekend of every year, offer a social life and a reason to travel for such contented eccentrics as Dennis Bourguignon, a Florida dentist who has turned his office into a replica of the show's starship, the Enterprise (his patients like it because it takes their minds off the drilling...
...Perhaps Star Trek's most notorious fan is Barbara Adams, the juror in one of the Whitewater trials who insisted on showing up every day in her Star Trek uniform because, as she explains in Trekkies, she considers herself an officer of the United Federation of Planets and thus has a responsibility to perform "community service" in dress blues (she was eventually booted off the jury...
...And yet for twenty-five years now, they have been the objects of merciless sport because they have a passion for an indifferently acted and cheesy old TV show...
...Now they and Shatner (as well as the other performers on the show who have simultaneously been immortalized and trapped by their roles) have become the subjects of two modest but delightfully inventive movies...
...And why the people who remain so dedicated to it for reasons that surpasseth all reason deserve a break...
...in tribute to them...
...They loved the sketch, and Shatner later published a book called Get a Life...
...The show promoted an idealistic vision of the United States as an exporter of democracy and freedom at a time when the idea was so derided that it could only be expressed in the context of a television program set four centuries in the future...
...Obviously, Trekkies aren't the only ones doing the watching and the buying here...
...Since 1979, Paramount has made nine Star Trek movies with a combined worldwide gross of more than $1 billion...
...But they had nothing like its cultural impact, because they were consumed by Hollywood's obsessive multi-culturalism and pacifism...
...The Star Trek conventions became such a phenomenon in the 1970s that they helped bring the moribund show back to life...
...And when challenged, they fought—fought the Soviet-like Kling-ons and the Chinese-like Romulans when they sought to impose totalitarianism on the galaxy...
...Star Trek has lived long and prospered because it has been saying something to Americans for thirty years now that they have desperately wanted to hear...
...The online bookseller Amazon.com lists more than a thousand Star Trek titles...
...John Podhoretz is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD and a columnist for the New York Post...
...The Star Trek television programs of the 1980s and 1990s—The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager— were far more sophisticated in writing, acting, and presentation than the original series...
...But it turns out that the Trekkies have a sense of humor...
...In Galaxy Quest, the funniest American movie in current release, the bickering cast of a long-canceled science-fiction show (led by Tim Allen, who does a hilarious riff on Shatner) are transported into space by aliens who don't know they're actors and need help against an intergalactic menace...
...It's true that they were supposed to hew to a doctrine called the "prime directive," which prohibited interfering with the internal workings of those civilizations...
...Roger Nygard's Trekkies is a nimble journey into inner space—the world of Star Trek fandom, which began in 1972 with a convention in New York whose organizers expected three hundred attendees but found themselves in a near-riot when more than three thousand showed up...
...There have been three spin-off TV series, each of which has produced many more episodes than its originator...
...Its members don't hurt anybody, they don't make a mess, and they pay their taxes...
...The other is an unexpectedly touching documentary called Trekkies that has just come out on video...
...But, of course, they couldn't help interfering, because our ideas were just so good...
...Star Trek offered Americans a vision of a robust and self-confident nation just when they needed it most, and that's why the people have such fond feelings for the show even now...
...One is a big-budget adventure comedy called Galaxy Quest that was released to little fanfare six weeks ago as Hollywood was spewing an enormous number of Oscar-contending films into the marketplace...
...On the original series, the captain and crew of the Enterprise were apostles of 1960s-style liberal internationalism, on a five-year mission to export American democratic principles to "new civilizations" that needed them...
Vol. 5 • February 2000 • No. 21
