I am getting back to the basics -- the Star Trek basics, that is -- by re-investing myself in The Original Series (TOS) and that most fascinating of periods, the 10-year period that stretches from the cancellation of TOS in 1969 to the release of The Motion Picture (TMP) in 1979.
I started by reading the book by Herb Solow and Robert Justman, followed that with the Stephen Whitfield book, The Making of Star Trek, and now Star Trek Lives, by Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak and Joan Winston.
To accompany that reading, I have been scouring the internet (mostly Youtube) for video materials related to that era. It's amazing what is now available: I have found footage from the first several Star Trek conventions in the early 1970s, promotional/bonus material from early Star Trek videos of TMP and numerous television interviews with members of the TOS cast and production team from the 1970s.
I have also started watching the episodes again on Netflix (I have them all on DVD but it is just easier to watch them through the streaming service), beginning with the original pilot, "The Cage".
The books I have read before and, of course, I have watched the episodes numerous times over the past fifty years. But the online videos that are now available are, to be frank, remarkable.
I hope to get back to blogging in a serious way about this "research" but I wanted to post an initial comment now, in light of recent events in the United States (including the Trump inspired attempted coup in Washington that happened the day before I write this) and the worrisome directions we have seen the most recent iterations of the Star Trek Franchise take in the past several years.
What I find most remarkable about TOS and the decade that followed it is the focus on diversity and inclusion that permeates the episodes (even if it now seems rather clumsy fifty years later on), the literature that studied Star Trek and its increasing fandom, and the consciousness of its fans, its followers and its cast and crew during that decade.
It is clear that what engendered the explosion of love for and commitment to Star Trek in the 1970s was that focus -- as best encapsulated in the IDIC (Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations) philosophy that Spock introduces in later episodes of the series.
Star Trek thrived because it put forth the basic principle that, if humankind is to survive into the 23rd Century, it would have to set aside its focus on minor differences in race, religion, gender identity, religion, sexuality, physical and mental "ability", and celebrate those differences, work together to meet the challenges to come, celebrate IDIC. And because it implied, by the very existence of a Federation in the 23rd Century with humans at its centre, that humankind could and would succeed in that seemingly impossible, but absolutely necessary, exercise.
My online research has so far focused, at least in so far as tracking down 1970s era interviews, on William Shatner. Over the decades, we seem to have focused on some of Shatner's less attractive attributes, permitting ourselves to be convinced that he was something of a ham as an actor, that he was jealous of his co-stars and greedy for the spotlight, that he has become pompous and self-absorbed, but the Shatner we see in those 1970s-era interviews is none of those things.
He is intelligent, funny, charming and thoughtful. He clearly takes his craft seriously and, remarkably, he displays a deep understanding of the impact Star Trek had on its growing fan base and on society itself. He talks about feminism, about racial inclusion, about questions of sexuality and gender, intelligently and thoughtfully. He talks to those fans in respectful and in many instances loving ways.
I am writing all this because Shatner's "presence" in these interviews surprised me. Like so many other people, I had learned over the years to take Leonard Nimoy seriously and to see Shatner as something less. So when I watched interview after interview where Shatner shatters that image, I was completely taken aback and a bit ashamed.
But I also gained a significant amount of respect both for Shatner and for the depth to which he (and his castmates and the TOS creative team) understood and respected IDIC principles upon which TOS was based and that were so cherished by the growing fandom, assuring the rebirth and survival of Star Trek as a cultural phenomenon.
I think we, as a society, need TOS' commitment to IDIC principles more now than we did even in the late 1960s and 1970s. I think we need a vision of hope for the future of the human race that is founded on the understanding that, if we are to survive and thrive, we must do so together, by celebrating difference rather than letting it divide and defeat us.
Recent Star Trek series, like Picard and Discovery, have strayed much too far from these original principles, have instead implied that the differences that divide us today will continue into the future, exacerbated perhaps by the introduction of the vast array of non-human lifeforms we can expect to encounter.
