Thanks, Star Trek.

Thanks, Star Trek.

Sep 11

So Friday was the 40th anniversary of the premiere of Star Trek on NBC.

At this stage in my life, Trek is something I bitch about way more than I probably should. After all, like many a nerd, Trek was a gateway drug into genre entertainment, a formative experience of my childhood and adolescence. I’ll probably always perk up when I hear the opening strains of any Trek theme.

Except Voyager. And DEFINITELY not Enterprise. That shit sucks.

See? With the bitching.

But I do owe Trek quite a lot, and so, I take a brief moment today to give a belated thanks…

Thanks for putting me in countless hotel ballrooms in cities across this fair nation to hear C-list actors talk about on-set hijinks that happened a decade before I was born.

Thanks for weekend marathons on WPWR-TV, channel 50, which were dutifully recorded on videotape and archived for posterity…or until the magnetic signal fades.

Thanks for the wicked awesome “danger” theme music from the original series. You know the one. That “Dah-da-DA-DA-DA, da-da-DA, da-da-DA” thing. Awesome.

Thanks for Jonathan Frakes once pointing to me and asking, “He’s the asshole here, right? Am I the asshole? It’s him, right?”

Thanks for the college girlfriend who could barely be bothered to sit through “The City on the Edge of Forever,” one of many reasons I dumped her ass, and thus have a wonderful wife today who doesn’t watch Star Trek either. But at least she’s not BORING.

Thanks for killing Spock. And for bringing him back to life. And for the whales. Not so much for V’Ger, and NO thanks for Lawrence Luckinbill in a bed sheet feeling my pain.

Thanks for teaching me about American history–the Great Depression, prohibition-era New York, the old west, and especially Abraham Lincoln. Charming negress, indeed.

Thanks for the time I transcribed the opening scene of “Spock’s Brain,” assigned all the dialogue to characters from TNG, and then attempted to hand the “script” to Peter David, thinking he’d just roar in appreciation for my hilarity. Instead, I think he threw it away. Smart move.

Thanks for Shatner.

Thanks for opening at least one tiny mind to infinite diversity in infinite combinations, existing far away from the zits on my teenage face and the self-disgust engraved onto my young adult brain, a final frontier of possibilities beyond the now that I’m still exploring every day.

In other words, thanks for making me a geek. A proud, happy geek.