How Star Trek became a global enterprise

How popular is Star Trek?

As a multimedia, pop-culture phenomenon, it's in the rarefied company of mega-franchises like Superman, James Bond and Star Wars. There have been 716 episodes of Star Trek's various TV incarnations, along with 10 feature-length movies that have grossed some £800m. Merchandising, including home videos, action figures, computer games, toy laser guns, and other interstellar bric-a-brac, has pulled in another £2.6bn, and somewhere on Earth, a Star Trek book is sold every six seconds. Star Trek has also spawned an entire language, Klingon, and more websites than the US government, while many of the series' catchphrases - "Resistance is futile" and "Live long and prosper", for example - have joined the popular idiom.

Why the enduring fascination?

Star Trek's simple but thought-provoking premise has proved to be irresistible. In virtually every Star Trek format, a crew of humans and aliens sets off in a giant spaceship to explore strange new worlds and advance the frontiers of knowledge, while getting in and out of trouble. Devotees say the flexible structure offers a convenient vehicle for delving into such universal themes as war, prejudice, power and love. It's also a lot of fun, with state-of-the-art special effects used to create a galaxy in which Earthlings, having invented such useful tools as teleporting and warp drive, interact with the cybernetic Borg, telepathic Betazoids, and countless other exotic species.

Who likes this stuff?

Forty-year-old nerds who still live with their parents, for a start. But beyond them, the ranks of Trekkies (or "Trekkers", as many prefer to be called) include the Dalai Lama, New York Times publisher Arthur O Sulzberger Jr, Bill Gates, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who made a guest appearance on a segment of Star Trek: Voyager. People who love Star Trek, says Washington Post writer Frank Ahrens, are "perhaps the oddest, smartest, and most intense" on the planet. The most devoted of them are compelled to decorate their homes in Star Trek motifs, dress up in exact replicas of Starfleet uniforms, attempt to reconcile inconsistencies between episodes, and assimilate hoards of trivia questions, eg: "What is the Vulcan time of mating called?" (Pon farr is the answer.)

Was Star Trek always this big?

Hardly. The original series, which ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC, was a money-loser that never attracted a large audience. While some critics liked it, many didn't; Variety magazine called it a "dreary mess of confusion". The show was cancelled after 79 episodes, forcing the creator, Gene Roddenberry (a former bomber pilot and motorcycle cop) to make ends meet by selling Star Trek scripts, film clips and other memorabilia. William Shatner, who played the heroic Captain James T Kirk, was reduced to living out of a camper van and appearing in B-movies like Kingdom of the Spiders.

So what turned it around?
 
Re-runs and fans. Syndicated in the early 1970s, Star Trek gradually accumulated a devoted following on local American TV channels. "Thank God college kids discovered the show," Roddenberry once said. By January 1972, the fans were motivated enough to organise the first Star Trek convention in New York, complete with panel discussions, a costume show and appearances by the cast. Conventions grew throughout the decade and in 1977 the explosive success of Star Wars helped revive the series. In 1979 Star Trek: The Motion Picture was released to mediocre reviews (some called it Star Trek: The Motion Sickness), but the critical and box-office success of its sequel, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982), assured the future of the franchise. Four television series followed, and new Star Trek episodes were made continually from 1987 to 2005. With this year's film, a prequel to the original show, the saga has come full circle.

Is Star Trek good science fiction?

Many purists don't think so. Detractors criticise, among other things, its wooden storytelling, clunky moralising and implausible use of time travel. Even those who have worked on the show have got sick of it. David Gerrold, one of 55 writers on the original series, wrote in 1996: "Star Trek is the McDonald's of science fiction; it's fast-food storytelling. Every problem is like every other problem. They all get solved in an hour. Nobody ever gets hurt, and nobody needs to care. You give up an hour of your time, and you don’t really have to get involved. It's all plastic."

So why hasn't the series faded?

Once you get past the cheesy dialogue and dodgy acting, Star Trek offers an immensely comforting view of the universe to come: after war, disease and other scourges have been conquered by benevolent science, humankind will unite and go forth to carry its collective destiny into the final frontier of space. Conceived during the Cold War, culture wars and racial antagonism of the 1960s, the series has always portrayed an unlikely, civilised future, in which all races and creeds will get along on the deck of the USS Enterprise. Star Trek showed American television's first inter-racial kiss, for instance, in 1968, when its cast included Africans, Chinese, Russians, Americans and half-aliens (Spock) all working together. And then, of course, there are the gadgets. ·