Sci-Fi Talk: Why do you love Star Trek?
Star Trek Love Is Passionate & Fans Have Different Reasons For The Romance
Star Trek equals love. Yes, this kind of passionate devotion is simply undeniably raw and even romantic. Honestly, I must submit to you here and now, is it such an unusual or even a bizarre observation? We all know there are tons of other truly crazy pastimes. I’m looking at you, rabid Romanian coin collectors from the Bronze Age.
Gene Roddenberry’s planet hopping starship of our far flung imagination has been warping around the galaxy for over 50 years. The original NBC TV series from the 1960’s became hit feature films, spawned novels, comic books and continued adventures on video game consoles and in computer games for decades now.
Where or when does it all finally end? Perhaps, in the end, it doesn’t have to have a grand, epic finale.
Of course, many of us love our pets, our dogs, cats, fish and everything pet identifiable (and some not) in between. We all pledge different reasons for our animal love affairs. The same can be said about our global star trekking phenomenon.
The Tech
High tech trek definitely defines one of the fascinating allures of this sci-fi vehicle.
We live in a mobile, laptop, iPad and wifi powered world. Face it - we live in times highly reminiscent of the fictional days of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. We speak to computers and they answer or even argue back. We call up information in seconds and project video on enormous video screens. Ever conduct a zoom call projected on a 54 inch monitor? It may not be Kirk or Picard talking to an alien ambassador on the Enterprise bridge viewscreen, but it certainly gets darn close.
Our phasers are tasers. Our communicators are smartphones. They never leave our sides. Our tricorders, well we’re still waiting for them, but we do use tablets which resemble TNG’s era PADD - Personal Access Display Device. A fully working transporter alone entices fans and fuels our divine daydreams of finally never having to be in a traffic jam ever again. Replicator tech - Picard’s sparkly magic version of the 3D printer - inspire our visions of calling up and creating any item in Earth’s history in a few short seconds.
The People
Star Trek, if nothing else, is about incredible people caught up in equally incredible situations.
William Shatner as Captain Kirk still holds the gold pressed latinum standard as the kind of space ace leader most of us would love to follow. Patrick Stewart as Jean-Luc Picard and Avery Brooks as Ben Sisko certainly follow-up strongly, and Kate Mulgrew’s Captain Kathryn Janeway gives us hope for ever getting lost in space.
And who would not want a friend like the cerebral Mister Spock. Sure, his confident intellect can be annoying, but his calm, logical counsel is worth more than watching a month of Dr. Phil shows. Whomever you’d like more to be your Starfleet commanding officer, one thing’s clear: These characters continue to attract us and inspire our optimistic projections of our future, decades after their debut.
The Sci-Fi
Time Travel? Soylent Green? Galactic Barriers? Robot Revolts? Ancient Aliens? Sci-fi themes thrill us aplenty. They all fall snugly under the wide ranging and speculative banner of science fiction.
Some fans, even the most loyal hardcore ones, consider Star Trek space opera or space fantasy. I’d say that although some elements of fantasy are there, the arguably operatic Trek is still rooted firmly in serious science fiction.
The various shows tackle time travel, alternate dimensions, artificial intelligence, genetic manipulation and so on. And they do so seriously and with an unwavering intellectualism. Since characters aren’t killed off as much as say in other dramatic shows - DS9 is an exception - the stakes may not be as strong as in other sci-fi vehicles, but the presentation and handling remains just as strong as any other pure sci-fi entity.
The Valentine To Sci-Fi
Gene Roddenberry assembled his ace Starfleet exploratory team to seek out new life and new civilizations, but nobody creates in a creative vacuum. Even the Great Bird Of The Galaxy had more than a few role models to emulate.
Roddenberry drew his inspiration on everything from Captain Horatio Hornblower, The Twilight Zone, Tales Of Tomorrow, and perhaps most visually recognizable, the legendary film Forbidden Planet, starring Leslie Nielsen, Walter Pidgeon, Anne Francis and most notably of all, Robby The Robot. Robby serves as kind of a great-grandfather to Data or the Holographic Doc on Voyager. He’s a high tech device, yet brims with authentic emotion and even cuddliness.
Star Trek soars now for decades around the globe as the most intellectual, dramatic and fun space based franchise of them all. It may not be perfect, and though the Borg would probably love to assimilate it for its sheer knowledgebase, decade after decade it renews, reinvents and revives itself as a dependable storytelling canvas more diverse and involved than nearly anything else Hollywood has ever produced.