RSSThe legacy of Khan: Star Trek's first collision course with the mainstream
By Scott M. Fulton, III | Published May 7, 2009, 6:28 PM
My best friend Jeff saved me a copy, because he knew I'd not only want to see it but dissect it, the way a hungry crow goes after a freshly slammed armadillo in the middle of I-35. I was a Star Trek fan the way a New Yorker is a fan of John McEnroe or an Oklahoman is a fan of the Dallas Cowboys, loving to see them in the spotlight but always critiquing their style. Jeff was the assistant manager of a movie theater with four (four!) screens, so he got the advance promotional kit for Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, and Jeff saved me the first promo poster with stills from the movie. Between the premiere and my high school graduation, the premiere was -- at least at the time -- the more exciting event.
I can't think of Star Trek movies today without picturing the gang of us seated around the linoleum tables at Big Ed's, chomping down a heap of fresh-cut fries and taking apart the pictures from the promotional kit for clues. What was the meaning, for example, of Uhura's and Chekov's sweater collars being blue-gray, while Sulu's and Scotty's were mustard yellow?
If you're wondering, why bother with such trivia when we knew the answer (if there was one) was something arbitrary, consider this: Not only is Star Trek the first, and perhaps the only, franchise born of television to become elevated to the realm of global folklore, but it was never really born of the mind of one person. Gene Roddenberry was not to Star Trek what C. S. Forester was to Horatio Hornblower; Trek was and still is, in many respects, a public playground built on intellectual property seeded by Roddenberry but left to flourish. So unlike a franchise devised largely or solely by one person -- for instance, J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter -- there's a certain accountability to the public that Star Trek has, that's shared by no other collective work of fiction. It's the closest thing you'll ever see to open source that will ever emerge from a Hollywood studio.
The true Star Trek fan is someone who has an unusual personal investment in the story. So when someone dares to take the story further, the fans are folks who have an interest in the outcome, and who want to hold the writers and producers to their bargain. And for folks like us whose junior high and high school lives were, for most days, peculiarly unworthy of ever being chronicled in hardcover or on the big screen, Star Trek was not so much an escape as an endeavor in survival. It was the hope of something bolder, more worthy of our time and effort, than the institutionalized hopelessness that kept us chained to our seats while our teachers were on break, or wherever they had ventured off to.
It was also the ticket to everything bigger. My very first exercise in learning to program a computer was debugging an 80-column line-printer-driven Star Trek game that incorrectly scored the number of Klingons the player had killed. By the time The Wrath of Khan was first being advertised, most of my friends and I were collaborating on the production of a bigger and better Star Trek game that used artificial intelligence techniques I'd been learning. It was the beginning of the open source movement (which also meant we couldn't make a dime from our work without owing Paramount). I dove into college-level trigonometry long before graduation, in an effort to build a combat model for three-dimensional space.
As a young kid, Star Trek helped me feel not so alone, at a period of time when I was absolutely alone when a boy shouldn't be. So imagine my surprise when Trek II was first coming out. It wasn't playing at Jeff's theater -- it was two miles south, at the Quail Twin Cinema, theater #2. Number two was huge, it had the best sound system, it had two aisles, could hold a few thousand seats, and was adorned in the most other-worldly blue curtains. Had the screen fallen down, you might be able to play football on the thing.
The line for Trek II that June afternoon extended behind the theater, around the perimeter of the parking lot, into the lot of the nearby tire store, out along May Avenue, down two blocks, and into a residential neighborhood along 112th Street. A police cruiser was stationed along the street to keep order, remembering that when Star Wars premiered just a few years earlier, there were protesters ("God is the only force!"). There were enough teenagers there to fill my high school twice over.
My friends had staked out a prime position for us all, enabling me to take a walk down the admission line. There I'd find what seemed like several hundred of the same folks who used to make fun of my Star Trek fandom, who had been guilty of the unspeakable sin of confusing Trek with Wars ("Hey, Scott, you been on the Enterprise with Obi-Wan lately?"). I marched alongside them like Capt. Kirk reviewing the troops, and many of them knew exactly what I was thinking and how I felt. It was my victory march. It meant more than any diploma I had ever received.
Once inside Quail #2, Trek II was -- and is to this day -- the most fun I have ever spent in a movie theater without a date. There were thousands of us, guys like me and folks unlike me at all, openly speculating on the meaning of Uhura's and Chekov's blue-grey sweater collars. Rarely did fifteen seconds pass during the film without some audible form of mass audience reaction, including openly cheering for the stars names in the opening credits (the whistles for Kirstie Alley could have shattered glass). Guys who spat in my general direction during my cold, grey junior-high years were snarling at Khan, wincing when he put the scorpion-thing in Chekov's ear, hissing when he channeled Captain Ahab from Moby Dick. When Sulu's phaser shot took out the Reliant's torpedo launcher, the theater erupted in a deafening roar that made it impossible to hear the dialogue for minutes thereafter.
And several of them even shook my hand after it was done, or nodded in my general direction, or gave me some acknowledgement that we as a people had grown up at last, that we were all in the same league, and that letting your mind play on the public playground of science fiction was a real blast. It was our graduation day, in a very real sense.
In the US, folks will be seeing the latest Star Trek movie for the first time -- the 11th in the series -- tonight. And if you're wondering why it's more important than your average movie for many of us, it's because that's our story they're messing with, and they'd better mess with it right.
I agree that they better be messing with the story in a good way but I still have this feeling that they have messed with it in a bad way because of Pavel Chekov from my understanding of Trek history when he joined the crew in season 2 of TOS he was freah stright out of Starfleet Academy, and in the movie they have him there with Kirk and Spock & the rest in Starfleet Academy at the same time. Well I guess I'll find out more when I actually see the movie
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|Well they messed with it alright.........and its not good.
I wont go into details for spoiler reasons. Simply put the Star Trek as we ( hard core trekkies ) knew it is done. This movie takes 40+ years of story line and tosses out the fricken window. SHAME SHAME SHAME on the directors/producers. They had a chance, and a good one to for that matter to really pull it off and they spit on Genes grave as he rolled over in it. This movie stole the good Star Trek name and took 2 hrs to destroy 40+ years of story.
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|Just picked up season 1 on BD for my Trekkie wife. We are going to see the movie sometime net week.
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|I downloaded (for a sneak peek) the new star trek movie via utorrent, and half liked what I saw... In this film they destroy the planet "Vulcan" and that's not all the changes they make. This to me is totally wrong !!!
The cast were sensational, but even there Spock havng "feelings" for Uhuhra you have got to be joking !!!
As I said in one way I liked it ... in another way I hated it !!!
If they had of stuck to what should have been, I would have said that I was looking forward to hopefully a new series. But after the changes (not just Vulcan) I'm not really sure.
As for the ship itself they really didn't show that much, it was too fast paced for my liking. Although it went to great lenghts to introduce the main characters.
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|Awesome Movie and great article.
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|At first I thought, hey...what's a Star Trek article doing on a 'technology news' website? - then it kind of rolled around in my brain and I pretty much 'got it'.
Anyway, great article Mr. F.
I wasn't around when the initial series was released, but I did watch the movies....all of them, and consider myself a 'fan' of the themes, philosophies and an admirer of the technology of the series. And while I can't say that I'm a 'Trekkie', I utterly enjoy Star Trek. I love the new movie :), and while I wish I had an experience like hearing people erupt into deafening roars, I enjoyed my own times nonetheless.
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|Great article!
I completely agree, "that's OUR story they're messing with..."
If I had the poster and stills for this one, it would already be in the mail to you, because what are best friends for anyway?
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|in my opinion Roddenberry provided a medium in which age old philosophies that were written in varying languages and cultures, could be told and examined from a another perspective - the unique and fantastical future of star trek.
while sci fi's, like Babylon and others flourished with extra-ordinary affects and situations, they were shallow because they were simply based on the trials and tribulations of good and evil, cowboys and indians, muslims and christians, cat and mouse.
i salute gene Roddenberry and Desi-Lu for not only making something that was entertaining and intellectually fulfilling.
so for the young-ins that ask, "what are the common denominators for technology and imagination?".
tha answers are, "logic" and "philosophies".
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would be nice to see a flip phone designed like a communicator and a little knob on it to turn back and fourth which would scroll through the contacts list and of course, all the sound affects too.
i think one was made a fews years ago, but don't know what came of it.
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incidentally, although the new movie is projected to earn 100M, the movie will be basically "shallow", lots of graphics and shoot-um-up scenes.
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|I'm sorry but what the eff is this story doing being posted here? Just what the hell's this website coming too? Yes it's well written article for a change (I can actually understand Scott's writing!), and it's actually also interesting. But what the hell's it doing being posted here? Has Beta News now just become a blog for the staff writers to air their personal views? First it's Susan Boyle and then it's Star Trek - what next?! Shame on you. [tsk]
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|That was my first reaction, but they I thought, hey, to be this into technology, we've all got to be a little geeky, and the occasional bit of fun reminiscing can't hurt.
Heck, I'm sure wanting to recreate the thrill from Star Wars through video games was part of what drew many of today's tech leaders to computers, so some elements of culture do help shape our Tech world.
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|Fair question.
It's posted here because we have lives, interests, and motivations that drive who we are as technologists, but which go far beyond just Microsoft and Mozilla and Google and Facebook. I think it's sad when any kind of publication that addresses a large audience shuts itself into a basement and acts as a one-trick pony. To a great extent, I believe Betanews should not only be about what we do but who we are and what we believe. And while it's kind of ironic that Star Trek should be a topic that's "outside our box," I think as technologists and friends we all need to get out and breathe some air every once in a while.
Angela's piece on Susan Boyle was enlightening, enriching, and engaging. Not many things you can write about Google Gears, for example, can be held up to that standard.
-SF "Gotten a Life, Thank You Very Much" 3
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|Don't wrack your brain over the technological side to Star Trek and what was imagined that
has become a reality since Gene R. wrote the series as well as the humanitarian themes over the years.
Science or Science Fiction this site can handle both.
Edit-Spelling
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|Either you are utterly clueless about or are choosing to ignore Star Trek's contributions to technology throughout the years. Quite a few of the electronic devices that we take for granted and use on a daily basis made their debut in some form or another on an episode of Star Trek years before.
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|"because that's our story they're messing with, and they'd better mess with it right."
Amen to that. Good read. Thanks.
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|Nicely written Scott. Evocative yet concise.
Keep it up!
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|That's one of the nicest compliments I've ever received, thank you very much. _Concise!_ At long last!
-SF "Known to Be Incapable of Writing a 100-word Essay Even When Held at Gunpoint" 3
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|Wow, all fresh and new.
Everything must move on.
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|Wrath of Kahn is the first movie I remember watching in the Drive-in as a kid. I remember almost getting sick when the bugs crawled out of thier ears. :-( I also enjoyed watching TOS with my dad for many years. When TNG came out, I had trouble watching, as it didn't seem right. :-) Once I got over comparing the crew of TNG to the Crew of TOS, I was able to watch it. Now I have trouble watching TOS as it seems fake. :-) I would say my favorite series would have to be DS9, though I am sorry that Enterprise did not last.
I am really looking forward to seeing the movie, and hope that is will be good. I've had a little trouble watching the New Voyages online, as they actors don't seem quite right, but they are good.
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|I watched on TV in Australia the original series (and now have it on DVD) I am your original "trekkie" I suppose. I will be going to see it soon (I have been busy setting up the Win 7 RC). I hope it is true to the star trek universe otherwise us "originals" won't like it.
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|I hope that it remains true to the universe as well... but in the same vein as Battlestar Galactica, sometimes a re-imagining is very much needed (though at the time it didn't seem like it). Being such a huge fan of the original series, I was one of the angry mob shouting "blasphemy!" upon hearing of the new mini-series. Like so many others though, it quickly became one of my all-time favorite sci-fi series (right alongside Firefly).
Throughout the years, with the movies and TV series, there have indeed been some forgettable moments with Star Trek. Some series I felt were cut short in their prime and deserved a longer lifespan (Enterprise... I truly adored that series, but did not really appreciate it until after it had already been canceled). Some series ran much longer than I feel they should have (DS9 and Voyager, though each had their fair share of good points as well).
Heh, Voyager... I remember my first and only Star Trek convention was on the same day as the premier episode of Voyager later that night. Meeting Majel Barrett-Roddenberry and getting her autograph was a treat.
I have really high hopes for the success of this latest installment. I have been a huge fan of J.J. Abrams' work throughout the years, and I am confident that he would not have taken on such a task if he wasn't positive he could do it justice for the fans.
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|Fantastic article! I know exactly what you mean! I saw Trek II in the theater with my Dad as a very young boy, and sure, the parasite scene scared the crap out of me, but man was that fun! I remember having a similar experience with Star Trek VI as well (coincidentally also a Nicholas Meyer Trek film). When they finally destroyed the Bird of Prey the theater erupted. It is moments like that which can never replace the experience of seeing a film such as Star Trek in the theater on opening night!
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|Still the best of the Trek movies....
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