Sixty years is an awfully long time to boldly go anywhere, but Star Trek at 60 somehow felt less like the end of a journey than another milestone along the way.
When Star Trek premiered on September 8, 1966, there was no way William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley or even creator Gene Roddenberry could have known what had just begun. This was a television series about the crew of the USS Enterprise exploring space. It lasted three seasons.
That should have been the end of the story.
Instead, six decades later, the Star Trek legacy had become something considerably bigger than one television show. There had been movies, multiple generations of television series, new Enterprises, new captains and entirely new groups of fans.
And somehow, through all of those changes, Kirk, Spock and the original crew were never very far away.
Star Trek at 60: How Three Seasons Became Something Much Bigger
The strange thing about the Star Trek story was that its longevity never seemed guaranteed.
The original series ended in 1969 after only three seasons, but the audience did not disappear with it. Reruns helped new viewers discover the Enterprise, conventions brought fans together and Star Trek slowly became much bigger in popular culture than its original television run suggested it ever would.
Looking back at Star Trek at 60, that survival may have been one of the most remarkable parts of the entire story. The show had stopped producing new episodes, but the people watching it refused to let it disappear.
And this was where we had been pretty fortunate ourselves.
We had been doing this long enough, without aging some of us too much here, to have had the opportunity over the years to speak with many of the people who helped make Star Trek what it became. That included William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, George Takei, Nichelle Nichols, members of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and people from the generations that followed.
We were doing our jobs. We were covering the television shows and movies, asking the questions and getting the interviews.
But somewhere in the back of our minds, we were still fans.
After all, these were Kirk, Spock, Sulu and Uhura. These were some of the people who had been part of a television series that somehow grew into something none of them could possibly have imagined when it began.
Over the years, we had spoken with Shatner numerous times, and during one of those conversations, the man who became Captain James T. Kirk offered his own fascinating explanation for why Star Trek simply refused to go away.
That perspective was also part of what made Star Trek at 60 so interesting to revisit. Shatner’s answer went considerably deeper than television ratings, movies or nostalgia.
It was an interesting answer because Shatner was talking about more than fandom.
He was talking about our need to wonder.
Star Trek had always asked enormous questions. What was out there? Were we alone? What would humanity become? How would we respond when we encountered something we did not understand?
Sometimes those questions involved spaceships, aliens and unexplored planets.
Sometimes they were really questions about us.
That became especially clear as the characters themselves grew older. The films with the original crew, and later Star Trek: Picard, dealt with aging, friendship, regret, loss and mortality. These were the same things people faced in ordinary life, only Star Trek was exploring them in a universe where stories began with a stardate and the Enterprise could travel among the stars.
Maybe that was part of the secret too. For all of the technology, strange worlds and possibilities of the future, Star Trek never stopped being about people.
Eventually, Hollywood noticed just how much life remained in Star Trek.
The original crew found a second life at the movies
The original crew made the leap to the big screen with Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, beginning a movie run that gave Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest of the Enterprise crew an entirely new life.
Not every movie connected with audiences in quite the same way. Star Trek: The Motion Picture developed its admirers but proved divisive, and Star Trek V: The Final Frontier would become another much debated entry.
Then there were movies such as Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, which helped show just how much affection remained for these characters.
And really, who could have predicted where that journey would lead?
A television series that had been canceled after three seasons eventually gave us Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, a movie that decades later remained one of the most beloved sequels in science fiction and one of the defining chapters in the entire Star Trek story.
What made it even more remarkable was where that story came from.
Khan was not a brand-new villain created for the movie. Ricardo Montalbán had first played Khan Noonien Singh all the way back in the 1967 Star Trek episode “Space Seed.” Fifteen years later, the filmmakers reached back into the history of the original series, brought Montalbán back and turned a character from one television episode into the centerpiece of one of the franchise’s greatest movies.
Today, audiences are used to franchises reaching into their past and bringing back characters and storylines from years earlier. In 1982, that kind of storytelling felt considerably more unusual. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan showed just how much history Star Trek had already created and how much could still be done with it.
Part of what made Star Trek at 60 so extraordinary was realizing just how far those characters had traveled. What had once looked like a television show that simply did not survive had instead created characters, stories and a universe audiences were nowhere near ready to leave behind.
The remarkable part was that Star Trek did not have to stop when the original crew’s journey did.
It found another way forward.
A new generation carried the legacy forward
When Star Trek: The Next Generation arrived in 1987, it faced a challenge that seems easy to underestimate now.
This was Star Trek without Kirk commanding the Enterprise.
There was a new captain in Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard. There was a new crew, a new Enterprise and a story set decades beyond the adventures audiences already knew.
Trying to recreate Kirk and Spock would have been the easy choice.
Star Trek: The Next Generation did something much smarter.
It became its own show.
Picard was not Kirk. Brent Spiner’s Data was not Spock. The new Enterprise crew developed its own relationships, conflicts and identity while still existing inside the universe Roddenberry had created.
At the same time, the series never acted as though the past did not matter.
The original Star Trek remained part of its history. Characters and ideas could cross generations. Leonard Nimoy returned as Spock. James Doohan returned as Scotty. DeForest Kelley even appeared in the series premiere.
The past was respected without preventing the franchise from moving ahead.
And once Star Trek: The Next Generation succeeded, the possibilities became much larger.
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine could tell a very different kind of story. Star Trek: Voyager could strand a crew far from home. Star Trek: Enterprise could travel backward and explore an earlier chapter of the mythology.
That ability to reinvent itself was a huge part of why Star Trek at 60 had so much history to celebrate.
Years later, Star Trek would reinvent itself again for another generation of television viewers.
Different captains. Different crews. Different approaches.
Still Star Trek.
Even when Star Trek was rebooted for the big screen with a younger Kirk, Spock and Enterprise crew, the filmmakers still found a way to honor everything that had come before.
Leonard Nimoy himself returned as the original Spock, creating a direct connection between the new movies and the Star Trek generations that had preceded them.
For those of us who had watched the original series during its first run or in reruns, followed Kirk and Spock into the theaters and stayed with the franchise through the decades, seeing Nimoy there was more than a cameo.
It felt like an acknowledgment.
The faces could change. The timeline could change. A new generation could discover Kirk, Spock and the Enterprise in its own way.
But the original journey still mattered.
From the Enterprise to NASA
The impact of Star Trek did not remain confined to television and movie screens.
Perhaps one of the greatest examples of its cultural influence came from NASA.
In the 1970s, Star Trek fans mounted a letter-writing campaign after NASA initially planned to name its first Space Shuttle orbiter Constitution. The fans wanted another name: Enterprise.
They got it.
When NASA’s first shuttle orbiter was publicly unveiled in 1976, Enterprise was written across its side. Gene Roddenberry and members of the Star Trek cast were there to see it.
The Enterprise never traveled into space and instead was used for atmospheric testing, but that almost made the story more remarkable. A television series that had been canceled after three seasons had inspired fans strongly enough that the name of its fictional starship wound up on an actual NASA spacecraft.
By the time we looked back at Star Trek at 60, the Enterprise story offered a pretty remarkable reminder of just how far the influence of those original three seasons had reached.
If anyone needed evidence that Star Trek had become something more than a television show, there it was.
Star Trek at 60: the journey continued
Perhaps that was why the franchise had been able to change so many times without completely losing what made it Star Trek.
The Enterprise changed.
The captains changed.
Television changed.
The audience changed.
But the curiosity remained.
And for many of us, there was something else that never really changed.
Yes, we loved Star Trek: The Next Generation. We loved Picard and Data and the crew that proved Star Trek could belong to another generation. We followed the captains, crews and series that came afterward and watched this universe grow far beyond anything those first viewers in 1966 could have imagined.
But when many of us heard the words Star Trek, the first images that still came to mind were Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov aboard that original Enterprise.
That alone said something remarkable about the impact of those three seasons.
Characters from a television series that ended in 1969 did not merely survive. They became cultural icons. They returned for movies. One villain from a single episode came back 15 years later and helped produce Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The Enterprise name found its way onto a NASA shuttle. Another Enterprise eventually carried Picard and an entirely new crew into one of television’s most successful science fiction series. Decades later, when Hollywood introduced yet another Kirk and Spock, Leonard Nimoy was there to connect the new journey to the one that had started it all.
And the journey kept going.
Who could possibly have imagined all of that in 1966?
Looking back at Star Trek at 60, perhaps that was ultimately the point. Sixty years after William Shatner’s Kirk first sat in the captain’s chair, people were still watching Star Trek, discussing it, attending conventions and wondering what might be waiting beyond the next star.
Shatner believed there was something almost mythological behind that connection.
After 60 years, it was difficult to argue with the results.
Star Trek had spent six decades asking people to imagine what was out there.
Apparently, we still wanted to know.
The original Star Trek series, the movies featuring Kirk and the original Enterprise crew, Star Trek: The Next Generation, the films featuring Picard and his crew, Star Trek: Picard and the many Star Trek series that followed are available to stream on Paramount+.
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