Star Trek: Trekking Onward

As a new generation takes command, the Star Trek phenomenon seems unstoppable

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According to Paramount TV research, Star Trek's regular weekly audience of more than 20 million includes more high-income, college-educated viewers (as well as more men) than the average TV show. Even at the better than 200 Trekkie conventions held each year, the clientele is more likely to be middle- ! aged couples with kids in tow than computer geeks sporting Vulcan ears. "In the early days, everyone had a shirt and a costume," says Mary Warren, who was selling Trek apparel at a recent convention in Tucson, Arizona. "Now you get all these normal people in here." Among the 2,000 who attended was Elaine Koste, who came with her husband David and five-year-old daughter Karessa. "I use Star Trek as a tool to educate my daughter," said Koste. "It's good for her to see the characters deal with other races and teach good values."

"People have not gotten a real sense of what Star Trek fandom is really all about," says Leonard Nimoy, who played Mr. Spock, the superrational, pointy- eared Vulcan on the original series. "I talk to people in various professions all the time who say, 'I went to college to study this or that because of Star Trek."' Jonathan Frakes, Commander Riker on The Next Generation, concurs: "If you go in looking for geeks and nerds, then yeah, you'll find some. But this is a show that doesn't insult the audience. It is intelligent, literate and filled with messages and morals -- and that's what most of the people who watch are interested in."

Star Trek has evolved over the years from the brash, sometimes campy original series, with its Day-Glo colors and dime-store special effects, to the more meditative, slickly produced Next Generation, to the relatively conventional action-flick pleasures of the feature films. In all its incarnations, however, Star Trek conveys Roddenberry's optimistic view of the future. Sinister forces and evil aliens might lurk behind every star cluster, but on the bridge of the Enterprise, people of various races, cultures and planets work in utopian harmony. Their adventures, in the early days, were often allegories for earthbound problems like race relations and Vietnam -- problems that were solved with reason. A key concept of the show, which began during the Vietnam War, was the Prime Directive. It stated that the Enterprise crew must not interfere with the normal course of development of any civilization they might encounter.

The comforting ethos of the series was expressed not merely in the amity of the crew -- who never fought amongst themselves except when one or another had been taken over by aliens, which seemed to happen about every third episode. Beyond that, the freewheeling way the starship broke the constraints of time and space was a testament to unlimited human possibilities. Hundreds of light- years could be traversed in minutes (just accelerate to "warp factor"); crew members could be transported from place to place in an instant ("Beam me up, Scotty"). Time travel was a particular Star Trek favorite; characters were often shuttling back and forth to the past, trying to rectify mistakes of history and avoid disasters of the future. Talk about power trips!

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