Classic TV Rewind · Episode 5
Live Long and Prosper
Season 3 finale, Star Trek. How a cancelled show came back: reruns, the first big convention, the space shuttle Enterprise, Nichelle Nichols and NASA, the movies and new series, the cast we remember, and why it lasted.
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Shannon January 1972. A hotel in New York City. A group of fans has organized a Star Trek convention. They're hoping a few hundred people might come.
Carol And thousands turn up.
Shannon For a show that had been cancelled almost three years before. Something strange was happening to Star Trek. It was getting more popular after it went off the air.
Carol Welcome to Classic TV Rewind, where we go back to the shows we grew up with, and find out what made them work.
Shannon This season, it's Star Trek. And this is our last episode of the season.
Carol Episode five. Live Long and Prosper.
Carol So, how does a cancelled show get more popular?
Shannon Reruns. After NBC cancelled it, the studio, which by then was Paramount, sold the episodes to local TV stations all over the country. And the stations ran them in the late afternoon and early evening, often every weekday.
Carol Right when kids got home from school.
Shannon Exactly. And that's when a whole new generation found it. Kids who'd been too young the first time, or who'd been in bed by ten o'clock on a Friday.
Carol That was me. After school, with a snack.
Shannon A lot of us. And the more people watched, the more it caught on. Star Trek became one of the most popular shows in reruns anywhere.
Carol And the fans started finding each other.
Shannon They did. Fan clubs, newsletters, fan magazines typed up at home. And then the conventions. That first big one in New York, in 1972, is often called the first real Star Trek convention. And it set the pattern for the fan conventions we have today.
Carol And now they're everywhere.
Shannon All over the world. People dressing up, meeting the actors, swapping stories. Star Trek fans invented a lot of what we now think of as fan culture.
Carol And they got a name.
Shannon Trekkies. Some prefer Trekkers. But either way, they kept the show alive.
Carol And then the fans did something even bigger.
Shannon In 1976, NASA was building its first space shuttle. A test vehicle. And it was going to be called Constitution.
Carol And the fans had another idea.
Shannon You guessed it. Another letter-writing campaign. Something like a hundred thousand letters, asking NASA to name it Enterprise. And it worked. The shuttle was named Enterprise.
Carol And the cast was there.
Shannon When the shuttle was rolled out for the first time, in September of 1976, Gene Roddenberry and much of the original cast were there to see it. And a band played the Star Trek theme.
Carol Oh, I'd have cried.
Shannon I think a few people did.
Carol And Nichelle Nichols had her own connection to NASA, didn't she?
Shannon A wonderful one. In the late seventies, NASA asked her to help recruit new astronauts. Especially women, and people of color, who'd never thought the space program was for them.
Carol And did it work?
Shannon It did. Thousands applied. And among the people who joined NASA in those years were Sally Ride, the first American woman in space, and Guion Bluford, the first African American in space.
Carol And she inspired someone else, too, didn't she?
Shannon Mae Jemison. Years later, she became the first African American woman in space. She grew up watching Uhura on Star Trek. And she's said that seeing her on the bridge helped her believe she could go.
Carol So Lieutenant Uhura really did help send people into space.
Shannon In more ways than one.
Carol And then, the movies.
Shannon In 1979, ten years after it was cancelled, Star Trek came back as a big movie. Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the original cast.
Carol And then Khan.
Shannon Oh, yes. In 1982, Star Trek Two: The Wrath of Khan, with Ricardo Montalbán back as the villain from Space Seed. A lot of fans think it's the best Star Trek movie ever made.
Carol And then the new shows.
Shannon In 1987, The Next Generation, with a whole new crew and Patrick Stewart as the captain. And after that, one series after another, right up to today. There's been a Star Trek of some kind on the air, or in theaters, for most of the last forty years.
Carol And the original cast?
Shannon They became family to the fans. They went to conventions for decades. Leonard Nimoy wrote books, and directed two of the movies. And Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols, and all the rest kept meeting fans for years.
Carol And we've lost many of them now.
Shannon We have. DeForest Kelley in 1999. James Doohan in 2005. Leonard Nimoy in 2015. Nichelle Nichols in 2022. And just this October, Walter Koenig, our Chekov, at ninety.
Carol What did Leonard Nimoy say, at the end?
Shannon Shortly before he died, he wrote a little message to his fans. He said that a life is like a garden, with perfect moments that can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. And he signed it the way he always did. L, L, A, P.
Carol Live long and prosper.
Shannon Live long and prosper.
Carol And William Shatner?
Shannon In 2021, at ninety years old, William Shatner actually went to space. A short flight, to the edge of space and back. At the time, that made him the oldest person ever to go. Captain Kirk finally made it.
Carol So, after five episodes. Why do you think Star Trek lasted?
Shannon Because it was hopeful. It came out in the sixties, in the middle of the Cold War, with so much going on at home. And it said, the future is going to be all right. People from every country, and every background, working together, exploring, and trying to do the right thing.
Carol And it had a great crew.
Shannon The best. A captain you'd follow anywhere, a Vulcan who taught us about logic and friendship, and a country doctor who always told it straight.
Carol And Lucy.
Shannon (laughs) Of course. Without her, none of it might have happened.
Carol So, for our last picks of the season. What's yours?
Shannon Mine is a movie this time. The Wrath of Khan. It's the best of the original cast on the big screen, and the ending gets me every time.
Carol And mine is a trip. If you're ever in New York, go and see the space shuttle Enterprise. It's at the Intrepid Museum, on an old aircraft carrier. And it's still named after a starship.
Shannon And our ratings, out of five tribbles. For the whole show this time.
Carol Five tribbles. Star Trek is one of the great ones.
Shannon Five from me too. Three seasons, seventy-nine episodes, and it's still going.
Carol That's Star Trek on Classic TV Rewind. A western in space, a studio run by the queen of comedy, a crew that showed us the future, and the fans who never let it go.
Shannon Thank you so much for spending this season with us. We'll be back with more of the shows we grew up with.
Carol Until then, live long and prosper.
Shannon That's Star Trek, on Classic TV Rewind.