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Common Sense 10-25
Boldly going where not enough TV goes
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These days it seems you are either a Star Trek, aka Trekkie or Trekker, or a Star Wars fan – don’t ask what they call themselves as I am the former not the latter. Maybe it’s a reflection of our red/blue mentality. I don’t know. In my opinion, Star Trek was superior in almost every fashion.
When Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Star Trek, sold it to the Deslilu Studio in 1964 – bought by Paramount in 1967 - he pitched it as a “Wagon Train to the Stars” as westerns were in fashion.
Watching TOS (The Original Series) in first-run then reruns, it was easy to see how Roddenberry pulled the wool over on producers. 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 show’s 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 US White House booklet on space produced after the Sputnik flight in 1957. This wasn’t lost on the many fans who brought the series back to life after a three-year run originally.
Star Wars – which was released May 25, 1977 – was in my opinion the real wagon train to the stars with blasters that never hit anything and a cowboy character of Han Solo commanding the Millennium Falcon.
I think that disproves the Theory of Evolution, as if it were true there would be more people with big heads and mind control, not more Liam Neeson films.
As Trek progressed to STNG (Star Trek the Next Generation) we see a world that has gone from a greedy money-grubbing society that almost annihilated itself with war to working together on behalf of humanity and everyone even had healthcare, albeit in TOS the red-shirt security guys better have had good life insurance.
My favorite character was Spock. Leonard Nimoy’s Vulcan character was supposedly devoid of emotion and logic based, however he wasn’t actually without emotion just able to control it. Spock reminded me of the Zen Buddhist approach to life actually.
Star Trek’s contributions to TV 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 TV were almost always cast as servants.
While I once had higher hopes for humanity, I tend to run a bit more misanthropic these days. It looks like our future is more Star Wars or even the darker 1982 Blade Runner scenario. Our future seems to hold more Arnold Schwarzenegger (Terminator) than William Shatner (Captain Kirk) in store for us and that’s a shame.
Star Trek inspired me in many ways from my interest in technology with computer disks, portable scanning devices including medical advances that would actually come into being years later to the comradery of teamwork and friendship.
Now I think of the bumper sticker, “Beam me up Scotty, there’s no intelligent life here.”

Contact Steve Warner at news@smithvillereview.com