Yesterday marked the 40th Anniversary of the premier of the original Star Trek:
LOS ANGELES — Cue the iconic theme music: Forty years ago, on September 8, 1966, “Star Trek” lifted off into TV and cultural history. Over the subsequent decades, the sci-fi adventure series has amassed millions of fans and emerged as a relentless entertainment empire.
Stars William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy sat down recently with the Associated Press and recalled “The Man Trap,” the episode that would kick off the show’s three-year prime-time run.
“The first show that was on the air was a show with a creature that was a salt sucker,” recalled Nimoy. “It was somebody inside a weird-looking suit and it attacked humans because it needed the copper or the salt out of your body to survive or something like that.”
“That was the first one?” asked Shatner.
“Yes, that was the first one on the air,” Nimoy answered. “And it was because NBC decided that this series would be most successful if we had sort of a monster of the week to sell. What’s the monster this week? And so they put a monster show on the air the first episode, and I think it was a terrible mistake, because it was really not what we were about.”
To mark the anniversary, classic-TV network TV Land on Friday (8 p.m. EDT) will showcase four episodes from the original “Star Trek” series, including the premiere and the historic episode featuring TV’s first interracial kiss. “Star Trek” episodes will begin airing regularly on the channel on November 17. Episodes will also be available online at TVLand.com.
It’s first season, ratings and many reviews were somewhat lackluster, as was communication between the leading men. The second season, they agreed, was the show’s strongest.
This blast from the past got Nimoy reminiscing. “I first met Bill several years after `Star Trek’ went off the air,” he joked, inspiring Shatner to laugh.
“That’s a funny line,” Shatner injected. “We’re talking about `Star Trek’ 40 years and that’s the first time he said that.”
“We were too busy making the show to meet,” Nimoy continued.
Shatner: “He’d go into makeup early in the morning, and I’d arrive jauntily hours later, and then have to drag him _ by three hours in makeup, he was exhausted. Rest of the day, I’d have to drag him along.”
“He’d carry me the rest of the day,” Nimoy said, jokingly. “And I’d say to him, literally, `Who are you? What’s your name?”
“Literally,” Shatner said, completing the comic riff. “I had to introduce myself by the third year. This is Frick and Frack. We do this all the time.”
Compared to later versions of the Star Trek universe — especially The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine — as well as science fiction that has followed on television such as Stargate and Battlestar Galactica, The Original Series looks positively campy by comparison; but there is still something charming about the interaction between Kirk, Spock, and McCoy, that makes all of those ridiculous special effects seem just fine.
