60 years later, 'Star Trek' continues to 'live long and prosper

NPR(Boise Public Radio ^ | 09/08/2026 | Mandalit del Barco

[Kid Shelleen]

60 years ago, NBC aired the first episode of Star Trek, a television show that became a pop culture phenomenon. The original series starred William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk, who led his diverse crew of humans and at least one alien, on adventures in space.

"Space: The Final Frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise," Kirk says, narrating in the title sequence of each episode. "Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life, and new civilizations. To boldly go where no one has gone before."

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TOPICS: TV/Movies
KEYWORDS:

[mairdie]

Sort of a fan here

Star Trek - City of New Orleans - Willie Nelson
https://youtu.be/vD99I0Vvv-c

Star Trek - Space Hero - Leslie Fish
https://youtu.be/0L840SmOjZc

Star Trek - Born Again Trek - Julia Ecklar
https://youtu.be/vARV4JXK3R0

Star Trek - Long Way to Go - Phil Collins
https://youtu.be/SP0839nBIYE

Star Trek - Brothers in Arms - Dire Straits
https://youtu.be/pe9kDUtX0vk

Star Trek - No Man’s Land - Bob Seger
https://youtu.be/Re3iJcAKi9c

Star Trek - Small Town - John Mellancamp
https://youtu.be/khR6-FLOlf4

Star Trek - Slipsliding Away - Simon and Garfunkel
https://youtu.be/LzMpgv9nAm0

Star Trek - The Rose - Bette Midler - Yeoman Rand
https://youtu.be/N6Ld9jqcLRk

Star Trek - Loves Been Hard on Me - Juice Newton
https://youtu.be/j137_i98mLk

Star Trek - Leader of the Band - Dan Fogelberg
https://youtu.be/-cdWjfpXTuk

Star Trek - Proud to be a Soldier - Tom Lehrer
https://youtu.be/2UuGXSNSdy4

Star Trek - Gambler - Kenny Rogers
https://youtu.be/xxb3y1mlHyY

Star Trek - American Pie - Don McLean
https://youtu.be/s33W6g1lqMs

Star Trek - New Math - Tom Lehrer
https://youtu.be/pgE0HQtxpTc

[Excellence]

Who would replace Anton Yelchin?

[Sirius Lee]

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-aAYUBOqfRM&pp=ugUEEgJlbg%3D%3D&ra=m

[BobL]

“Yes, I caught that too. Bit of slimy wokeism from NPR.”

I remember being unable to wait for the New Star Trek. Then I heard that re-word, I was through with it and the captain guy was gay anyway.

[03A3]

Never cared much for Star Trek or Star Wars, but just finished watching The Expanse on Prime, which is the best sorted show about space ever. Definitely worth a watch.

[Arkady]

Yvonne Craig was the luscious actress who played both Batgirl and the green alien who danced for Kirk.

[Da Coyote]

Note how NPR managed to shove “diversity” into the first paragraph, and to quote Shatner’s intro...changed to “..where no one has gone before”.

And of course, the remaining paragraphs centered around race.

Thankfully, these clowns had no input into the original, or it would have been as dead as Superwoman.

Gene Roddenberry knew how to say the same things - but in a manner that was actually intellectual, not in the manner of NPR.

[dfwgator]

“Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=52o1d7XPni0

[sit-rep]

lol... cracked me up when the computer didnt recognize his speech!! Classic scene!!

[Danie_2023]

“”“Spock, are you out of your Vulcan mind?”””

***

My favorite all-time episode was the one where Spock actually fell in love.....

S1.E78 - All Our Yesterdays....

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Fc0irneMHU

[Dr. Franklin]

Even in the 23rd century, women still liked to wear short skirts and revealing uniforms.

Both of the Star Trek pilot episodes had women in long pants. You know it might get cold in space, and without gravity the girls skirts might float up and distract all of the crew men! Grace Lee Whitney requested the uniform change. She was a dance and wanted to show off her legs. She was originally cast as the second in command, or in charge of the ship's female crew members. She had Kirk were to have a subtle attraction that they couldn't act out for the good of the mission. That's how it was sold to the networks. Ultimately, Roddenberry demoted her, likely because she rebuffed his aggressive advances, and managed to get his future wife, Majel Barrett, into the cast, and he also had a side relationship with Nichelle Nichols, who was a divorced mother. (Watching the show in reruns, people miss that Whitney only appeared in the first part of the first season.) Roddenberry's decision to terminate Whitney and Rand's character likely doomed the show since it then lacked a compelling story line for women, and led to the silliness of Kirk's serial affairs with alien women who might not even have human female genitalia. The show could have had a much longer run with Whitney playing Rand. She was beautiful. She went from Star Trek to a few appearances playing a Tutette on Batman.






Sorry if the images are too big, but resizing them is a PITA.

[beef]

ST might be having a long life, but it is not aging well.

[wny]

she even looked good green!

[Mr Rogers]

Those 3 movies sucked donkey dicks. Why? The Critical Drinker gives some reasons:

Why Modern Movies Suck - They’re Written By Children
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQ92cggLMx8&list=PLFz_00sC7mo7Zu5GSSj9hqJ8G3faYyhLK&index=2

Star Trek: Into Darkness is a Terrible Movie
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xiicw42ti5A

“suck all three of them and don’t even get me started on discovery. this sucked to varying degrees and for various reasons but without exception they’re all utterly mindless dull creatively bankrupt disasters that have almost nothing to do with the original franchise beyond the title and character names they worked so hard to sponge off.

And the crown jewel in this shit-covered monument to mediocrity has to be star trek into darkness why because it takes the very best and most revered movie of the entire Star Trek franchise bends it over a table and has its way with it to such a horrific degree that the original needed to be booked into a fancy London clinic from major reconstructive surgery”

[DannyTN]

[redangus]

I never got into ‘Truck Stop 9’. Star Trek needed space travel, not hanging out a galactic coffee shop while your space craft was serviced during your trip across the universe.

[sit-rep]

you know what they say about opinions right??

you can pick movies apart all you want... it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. all movies in this era have a large percentage of woke and cheap effects. its a given.

There ARE NO people, actors, money lenders, producers etc. who want to take the time and the money to make something that is believable in the Sci Fi realm. I’ll take what I can get!

[John Milner]

I was a big fan back in the early 70s watching afternoon/after-school reruns at 5:00 on the local ABC affiliate.

We decided to revisit TOS and streamed them about a year ago.

Still entertaining, but the ‘advanced’ technology is quite a bit “Off” with the perspective of 60 more years.

Two big things... Every thing is push button or slide lever controlled. The lack of touch screens is something that makes it not work well today. Of course they didn’t know about the development of touch screens.

The other more hilarious thing is, evidently the technology of seat belts was lost somewhere over the centuries. Watching the crew go ricocheting around the bridge when being attacked seems needlessly dramatic. A few dozen seatbelts would have saved lots of bumps and bruised.

[Opinionated Blowhard]

Sadly, Star Trek is on its deathbed. There is one series in production with no plans for anything else. There was just a show with puppets that was part of the “cannon” of the show. Star Trek seemed to be in competition with Star Wars and Dr. Who for which writers and show runners / directors could destroy a beloved, money-printing franchise with PC / Woke storylines more quickly.

[beef]

Well, at least there were no obese, gender confused characters going to Starfleet Academy. And ethnic diversity was portrayed in such a way as to leave you optimistic about such a future.

But yes, time marches on and it did not take 60 years for the tech to look outdated. In 1974, I went to a screening of the original pilot. When they showed the electro-mechanical digital countdown display rolling over to zero, a chuckle swept through the crowd. By that time, LED displays were coming on the scene.