Star Trek 50th anniversary: Why Star Trek has lived long and prospered for half a century

Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi saga has boldly gone where few cultural phenomena have gone before
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Emma Powell8 September 2016
The Weekender

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Five decades ago, audiences got their first look at the voyages of the starship Enterprise, as Captain Kirk and Mr Spock made their debut on NBC.

Gene Roddenberry’s sci-fi saga Star Trek has endured for 50 years, undergoing a variety of reinventions and extensions to become both a cult phenomenon and an iconic, ubiquitous part of pop culture.

The original 1966 series, with a cast including William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, showed humanity in an enticing future: space travel has been cracked, and endless species and planets are out there, just waiting to be discovered.

The three series followed the USS Enterprise on its five year discovery mission with an eclectic crew representing a broad spectrum of humanity: from a cocky American, to a half-Vulcan pointy-eared alien, an Asian physicist, an African-American translator, and a Russian ensign.

Despite its flimsy sets, the series was ambitious in its depiction of space travel – but more importantly was traditional ideas-based science fiction, not shying away from the big questions. What is humanity’s place in the universe? And how much should we meddle with other cultures?

The show's popularity grew over several years thanks to TV repeats which introduced Kirk and co's adventures to new generations - while the 1977 success of Star Wars on the big screen prompted Trek's move to the cinema with Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

That wasn't the only change the franchise had taken on - 1973 brought a selection of animated episodes following the original crew.

But the biggest leap forward for Star Trek was perhaps its first major spin-off: 1987's Next Generation.

Set 100 years after the original series, Next Gen brought its own iconic characters - from Patrick Stewart's Captain Jean-Luc Picard, to William Riker and Klingon crew member Worf.

It was the first of many rejuvenations that meant Star Trek always moved with the times - it swapped space exploration for a static outpost with 1993's Deep Space Nine, while 1995's Voyager brought the series' first female lead in captain Kathryn Janeway.

If the later spin-offs, including 2001's less-celebrated Star Trek: Enterprise, never reached the cultural dominance of the early series, JJ Abrams' 2009 cinematic reboot bolstered Roddenberry's sci-fi concepts with rollicking action that catapulted the franchise back into the mainstream.

It's not just these changes that have kept Star Trek fresh for so long - it's also the things that haven't changed.

There's comfort in Roddenberry's optimistic vision of "infinite diversity in infinite combinations", a future that features bad guys, but also largely sees humanity pull together and venture off into something bigger for greater knowledge and understanding.

Thanks to the Internet, Star Trek has never been more accessible to new audiences - every single episode has been added to Netflix's catalogue, while the forthcoming new TV series Star Trek: Discovery will also be beamed up on the streaming service when it debuts in January 2017.

It's an indication, if anything, that Star Trek will continue to live long and prosper - perhaps for another five decades.

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