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| That famous (and award-winning) Heineken poster... |
It’s almost impossible to imagine a
time before Star Trek had become a fixture in the popular
imagination. To describe it as ‘iconic’ doesn’t even begin to
approach the extent to which the franchise has become embedded in
popular culture. It’s tempting to speculate that its influence may
well endure until the 23rd century in which the original
series was set. If so, and assuming humanity has developed
interstellar space flight by that time, what’s the betting on there
being a real-life, functional starship Enterprise?
Growing up with the series (I was eight
years old when it debuted here in Britain), I was able to see how it
quickly became absorbed into other aspects of cultural life: by this I don’t
just mean comics, books and memorabilia, but other TV programmes.
Star Trek spoofs were beginning to appear by the early to mid 1970s
(The Two Ronnies were amongst the comedians who offered their own
take on the series) and by this time, jargon such as ‘Captain’s
log’ ‘energise’ and ‘dilithium crystals’ were becoming
familiar enough to lend themselves to comic sketch parody. The
Goodies included references to Star Trek in a space-themed episode
first shown in 1973, and there were many others as the
decade wore on.
At school, we were already starting to
form a slightly cynical attitude towards series tropes such as the
expendable red-shirted security men. Of course, you needed a colour
television to properly appreciate this, and we got our first in
November 1974. The first episode I saw in colour was the above
mentioned The Enemy Within, on
23rd
December of that year. Wow, Kirk’s tunic is green! The
planet sky is orange! Cool! But I was already familiar with the look
of Star Trek in colour from collecting the bubblegum cards a
few years previously.
Much later, the comedy band ‘The
Firm’ nailed many of the Star Trek tropes firmly on the head
with their single ‘Star Trekkin’. But in the playground, years
earlier, we’d already picked up on the likes of Scotty’s ‘I
canna change the laws of physics’ (first uttered in The Naked
Time, a mere seven episodes into the first series). And even
McCoy’s growled ‘he’s dead Jim’ (spoken just four times
across the series – although once would have been enough) was
well-known long before the Firm enshrined it in song.
One of my favourite contemporary
parodies came in the form of the Heineken poster at the top of this
blog, which I remember appearing towards the end of the 1970s. Spock,
of course, was ripe for parody (Ronnie Barker played him in the Two
Ronnies skit), with the ears providing an endless source of comic
inspiration. A playground joke of the era ran as follows:
Q: How many ears has Mr. Spock got?
A: Three: the left ear, the right ear,
and the final front ear.
By the time a TV series is generating
spoofs, jokes and Mad comic strips, you know it’s acquired
the status of a cultural phenomenon.
One might usefully ask what it was
about Star Trek that led to this spate of mickey-taking, and
at such an early stage in the history of the franchise (indeed, long
before it was ever thought of as a ‘franchise’). Popularity, of
course, is the most obvious answer: by the mid-70’s, in the UK if
not elsewhere, Star Trek and its iconography would have been
familiar even to people who didn’t make a habit of watching the
series. It’s through cross-cultural references like comic parodies
that a TV series, film or comic book character begins the slow
process of ‘bleeding through’ into the popular consciousness, and
such activities certainly helped cement Star Trek as something
of an ‘institution’. Star Trek offered many aspects of
both imagery and language that were grist to the mill of the seasoned
parodist: its signs, symbols and jargon were easily and effectively
subverted to comic effect (‘Captain’s log – still not flushed
away’) and its characters, embodied in the brilliant portrayals of
William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy and DeForest Kelley, soon began to
feel like universal archetypes.
Yet for all this, Star Trek may
not be the phenomenon it is today were it not for the intervention of
another milestone in popular culture: Star Wars. The original
series had been defunct for eight years when Star Wars
signalled the dawn of an new wave of interest in space opera, robots
and science-fiction in general: a wave that has continued unabated
into the present day.
Despite what we might think, there was
no great appetitie for science fiction on film or television during
the 1960s. The first wave of space movies had dawned in the 50s,
spawning the likes of Forbidden Planet (an admitted influence on Star
Trek), but by the mid-60s, spy fiction had become the dominant genre in popular
cinema, and only a maverick like Stanley Kubrick would risk his
reputation on a science-fiction subject. This was partly down to the
costs involved in realising science fiction effects and settings on
screen, but the film and television industry were, as ever, reactive
rather than pro-active, for the most part following trends instead of
setting them.
By the end of the 1960s,
science-fiction had established a small but dedicated audience, which
we can characterise as essentially male, white, middle class, middle
income: the kind of people who would pay to see a movie like Silent
Running, or Dark Star. These were the ‘hard core’ of the fanbase
for a series like Star Trek. But where Star Trek differed – certainly
in the UK – was in reaching out to a wider, popular audience,
arguably on a level proportionately much greater than it had achieved
in the USA. Not having that mainstream crossover appeal is probably
what killed Star Trek at home (although it continued to thrive in
syndication), whereas in Britain, the series was an almost permanent
fixture on BBC1 right through to the late 1980s, guaranteeing a huge
mass audience.
By contrast, ITV’s offerings in the
sci-fi department – which effectively boiled down to anything from
the Gerry Anderson stable – were hamstrung by haphazard,
uncoordinated screenings region by region, denying the likes of UFO
and Space:1999 the nationwide audience that Star Trek enjoyed.
It wasn’t until Star Wars that a mass
audience of this kind turned once again to science fiction, this time
on a global scale. And Star Trek, that had looked like a pioneer in
its early days, was now reduced to playing follow-my-leader as one by
one the major studios realised they needed to be bankrolling epic
science-fiction films. As an already established phenomeon, Star Trek
was ripe for resurrection: and so began the transition from mere
cultural phenomenon to global franchise.
As Mr. Spock might say: fascinating...
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