Cultural influence of Star Trek
The science fiction multimedia franchise of Star Trek since its original debut in 1966 has been one of the most successful television series in science fiction television history and has been considered by many to have had a large influence in popular culture as a result.[1][2][3]
The original series, which aired in the late 1960s, has since spawned nine successor series and thirteen movies as of August 2020, merchandise, and a multibillion-dollar industry collectively known as the Star Trek franchise. The franchise is owned by CBS Television Studios, which now owns television properties previously held by Paramount Pictures, the studio that produced Star Trek for many decades. CBS Paramount continues to hold DVD rights to the television series, and the rights to produce feature films.
Two films, Galaxy Quest (1999) and Free Enterprise (1999), and a television series, The Orville, have been inspired by the cultural influence of Star Trek.
Star Trek: The Original Series[]
The fact is, never in the history of any entertainment medium has there ever been a story, an idea, a situation, a set of characters, or a theme that has approached the magnitude or impact of Star Trek.
— A Vision of the Future (1998)[4]
Gene Roddenberry sold Star Trek in 1964 to NBC as a classic adventure drama, calling it a "Wagon Train to the Stars". But Roddenberry wanted to tell more sophisticated stories, using futuristic situations as analogies for current problems on Earth and showing how they could be rectified through humanism and optimism. The series' writers frequently addressed moral and social issues such as slavery, warfare, and discrimination. The opening line "to boldly go where no man has gone before" is almost verbatim from a U.S. White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in October 1957.
A major inspiration for Star Trek was the science fiction film Forbidden Planet (1956), whose influence is especially apparent in the pilot episode "The Cage".[5][6] Previous sophisticated science fiction television series included anthology series such as The Twilight Zone and the British Quatermass serials, but Star Trek was the first American science fiction series with a continuing cast that was aimed at adults, telling modern morality tales with complex narratives.
Earlier British science fiction series with marionettes[7] and soap operas[8] had interracial casting, but this was the first American live-action series to do this. At a time when there were few non-white or foreign roles in American television dramas, Roddenberry created a multi-ethnic crew for the Enterprise, including an African woman (Uhura), a Scotsman (Montgomery Scott), an Asian man (Hikaru Sulu), and—most notably[original research?]—an alien, the half-Vulcan Spock. In the second season, reflecting the contemporaneous Cold War, Roddenberry added a Russian crew member, Pavel Chekov (played by Walter Koenig). The original series is also credited with American television's first interracial kiss, between a white man and an African-American woman, although this had happened earlier in a British medical soap opera, Emergency – Ward 10.[9] Also, the spy series I Spy featured a scripted, unedited interracial kiss between Robert Culp (white) and France Nuyen (Vietnamese) in the episode "The Tiger"; a kiss that would not gain the controversy or attention as the Star Trek kiss did.
Star Trek's contributions to television history include giving women jobs of respect, most notably through the casting of Nichelle Nichols, a black actress, as Uhura, the ship's communications officer. Black actresses at that time on television were almost always cast as servants. In fact, Whoopi Goldberg recalled that the first time she saw Uhura, she excitedly told her mother: "Mama, there's a black woman on television and she ain't no maid!" In an interview, Nichelle Nichols, who played the black female communications officer, said that the day after she told Roddenberry she planned to leave the show, she was at a fund-raiser at the NAACP and was told there was a big fan who wanted to meet her. Nichols said,
I thought it was a Trekkie, and so I said, 'Sure.' I looked across the room, and there was Dr. Martin Luther King walking towards me with this big grin on his face. He reached out to me and said, 'Yes, Ms. Nichols, I am your greatest fan.' He said that Star Trek was the only show that he, and his wife Coretta, would allow their three little children to stay up and watch. [She told King about her plans to leave the series.] I never got to tell him why, because he said, 'You can't. You're part of history.'
When she told Roddenberry what King had said, he cried.[10]
The Original Series has later received some criticism for its portrayal of women, particularly its visual aesthetics. Women's crew uniforms, which consisted of miniskirts, high heeled boots, and heavy makeup, have been pointed-to as degrading to women for highlighting their frequent role as sexual objects. Researchers have pointed out that this was not necessarily the way the wardrobe, or the overall femininity of female characters in the series, was viewed by contemporary female viewers. Cited are the concerns of women of the time period with the perceived upsetting of traditional gender roles for women of the future, with the women of the show's feminine behavior acting to reaffirm that women's sexuality and traditional femininity would not be lost. This fear was manifested by the media's criticisms of Valentina Tereshkova, the first female astronaut to go to space, as masculine and "mannish".[11] The uniform's usage of the miniskirt was also considered progressive by some at the time, as the miniskirt, at that time, was a symbol of the modern woman's economic and sexual independence.[11]
Computer engineer and entrepreneur Steve Wozniak credited watching Star Trek and attending Star Trek conventions while in his youth as a source of inspiration for him co-founding Apple Inc. in 1976, which would later become the world's largest information technology company by revenue and the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer.[12]
The series gained multiple Emmy Award nominations during its run, but never won. Despite a restricted budget, the series' special effects were superior to contemporary television series, its stories were often written by prominent science fiction authors (though often re-written by the series' regular writers),[13] and many of its production values—such as costuming and set design—were of high caliber for the series' low budget. Some of the production staff of The Outer Limits worked on Star Trek and often made creative re-use of props from the earlier series.[6]
During its network run from 1966 to 1969, TOS ratings were mediocre. A letter-writing campaign by fans, unprecedented in size, contributed to NBC's decision to renew the series for a third season, but the network put the series in a disadvantageous timeslot, and TOS was finally canceled after its third season.
Cancellation and aftermath[]
After its cancellation, through reruns Star Trek became more popular and reached a much wider audience than when it had originally aired.[14] Known as "trekkies" or "trekkers", the series' fans formed clubs and organized conventions. In 1976, following another fan-organized letter-writing campaign, NASA named its first space shuttle orbiter, Enterprise (OV-101), after the fictional starship.[15]
After the series, Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura, used her public standing to speak for women and people of colour and against their exclusion from the human space program of the United States. NASA reacted by asking her to find people for its future Space Shuttle program. Nichols proceeded and successfully brought the first people of colour and women into the US space program, working in this role for NASA from the late 1970s until the late 1980s.[16][17]
Film reception[]
In the mid-1970s, encouraged by the burgeoning fanbase for the series, Roddenberry sought to start a second television series (Star Trek: Phase II); this abortive attempt morphed into Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979. The movie did sufficiently well at the box office, grossing more than $80 million in the United States and $139 million worldwide,[18] to spawn several more movies during the 1980s. In 1987, Roddenberry created a second television series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG), which was set aboard the fifth starship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701-D) more than seventy years after events in the earlier series and related movies. Unlike TOS—which often reflected a bold, interventionist American philosophy—TNG had a less aggressive and more socially liberal message. Unlike its progenitor, this series entered syndicated, rather than a nationwide network, from the beginning, and was sold to individual local television stations. It became the number one syndicated television, lasting seven seasons, spawned two sequels, a prequel, four movies, and a vast marketing franchise.
Star Trek and its spin-offs have proved highly popular in television repeats, shown repeatedly on television stations in the United States and throughout the world. The Star Trek franchise is similarly prolific. Only Star Wars has had as significant an influence as a science fiction and popular culture phenomenon. According to Forbes magazine:[19]
- the five live-action Star Trek series have garnered 31 Emmy Awards and 140 nominations. At least nine specials have been produced
- the first eleven movies cumulatively grossed US$2.145 billion at the box office: the most successful movie was Star Trek (2009) grossing $385 million worldwide and after a combined nine nominations for four films, it was the first Star Trek film to win an Academy Award. Having been nominated in four categories, it received the award for Best Make-up[20]
- at least 120 compact discs and 40 video games contain "Star Trek" in their titles; the CDs are mostly soundtracks and audiobooks but also Klingon language instruction
- about 70 million books are in print
- the franchise entails a merchandising business with a total lifetime gross of about $4 billion from companies including the Mego Corporation, Playmates Toys, Hallmark Cards and Hasbro
- resorts include rides and attractions at Paramount-owned amusement parks as well as Star Trek: The Experience formerly at the Las Vegas Hilton
Even-odd popularity[]
Fans commonly considered the films to follow a "curse" that even-numbered films were better than the odd-numbered installments.[21][22] This is partially borne out by review aggregator statistics. For example, prior to the release of the 13th film the odd-numbered entries averaged 57% on the review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes while the even-numbered entries averaged 79%.[23] However, this perceived difference in quality is not reflected in box-office performance with the odd and even numbered entries having a virtually identical attendance in the United States and Canada on average.[24]
The tenth film, Star Trek: Nemesis, was considered the even film that defied the curse.[21][25][26] Its failure and the subsequent success of Star Trek (2009) were considered to have broken the trend.[27][28] The curse has been mentioned often in popular culture. One of the best known examples[29][30] occurred in a 1999 episode of the Channel 4 sitcom Spaced, where it was referenced by Tim Bisley, played by Simon Pegg; Pegg, quite conscious of the irony,[31] played Scotty in the eleventh and subsequent films.
Fandom[]
Star Trek conventions have been popular, but are waning[citation needed] and are now often meshed with conventions of other genres. Fans coined the terms "Trekkies" and "Trekkers" to describe themselves, and produce an abundance of material like fanzines with fiction, art and songs.
The series cultural influence goes far beyond its longevity and profitability. An entire subculture grew up around the series and, anecdotally, there are indications that Star Trek has influenced many people's lives. Many scientists and engineers claim that their professional and life choices were influenced by Star Trek.[32] An article in Columbia asserted that the starship captains of the Star Trek franchise are consistently among the best father figures on television, inspiring real fathers to embrace their responsibilities and act with "selfless authority".[33][full citation needed] The inventor of the first non-vehicular cell phone, Martin Cooper, states he was motivated to develop it from watching Star Trek.[34] Others have also been inspired by Star Trek when designing new technology, such as Dr. Peter Jansen, who invented a functional tricorder,[35] and several computer scientists at the University of Illinois, who have created a prototypical version of Star Trek's famous Holodeck.[36]
Some fans were drawn to a franchise that stood out for being unusually hopeful about the future, compared with most other works of science fiction.[37][38] Rolling Stone credited its appeal to "sunny assurances": "Optimism. Respect for diversity. Faith that reason shall triumph over ignorance. Confidence that our destructive emotions can be mastered without denying us the benefits of more saintly ones like loyalty and love."[39] Rejecting mainstream cynicism, the franchise presented the future Earth as a peaceful, egalitarian planet.[40] The original series presented a utopian future for humanity, to the point that conflict and allegory often had to be inserted through encounters with less "enlightened" nonhuman races that stood in, from the series' perspective, as didactic proxies for disfavored aspects of 20th-century culture.[41]
Well-known phrases like "Beam me up, Scotty", "Resistance is futile" (from the Borg), and Treknobabble have also managed to enter the English vernacular. Beyond this, "Trekkie" is the only fan label listed in the Oxford English Dictionary, and words from the series including Klingon have also been added to that dictionary.
Klingon has actually spawned a life of its own, going on to garner its own grammar and vocabulary[42] and dedicated speakers from across the globe.[43]
A broad consensus amongst fans is that the Star Trek franchise became formulaic and mediocre in the 1990s on account of over-exploitation of the franchise by Paramount and production of multiple spin-offs and movies, though fans do not necessarily agree as to when this began (some adult viewers of TOS felt it also could be formulaic and repetitive[13]). The release in May 2009 of Star Trek, a reboot involving characters from the original series and set in an alternate timeline, was developed with the partial hope to resurrect the franchise.[44][45]
Jeff Jensen of Entertainment Weekly, in reviewing the new film states that the Star Trek franchise had "devolved into a near-irrelevant cultural joke, likely to inspire giggles and unprintable curses from even its most ardent supporters."[46] Leonard Nimoy wondered in 2003 whether or not the franchise "had run its course".[47] Director J. J. Abrams said, "People [may not] even understand what Star Trek means anymore," and joked that a parody like Galaxy Quest which "mocks the paradigm" made the task of producing a credible Star Trek film that much more challenging.[48] Even on set, Abrams felt nervous "with all these tattooed faces and pointy ears, bizarre weaponry and Romulan linguists, with dialogue about 'Neutral Zones' and 'Starfleet'".[49] In covering the relaunch film, Jensen remarked the series' optimistic nature ran counter to an increasingly cynical culture, and that the film had been delayed from December 2008 to May 2009 to "rehab" the series' image.[46]
Upon release, the film was a major critical and box office success, sparking comments by fans and critics that the franchise has a bright renewed future.[citation needed]
Star Trek is the only media franchise that's clearly referenced in the Unicode emoji standard. The