Star Trek: The Original Series

"Jeffrey Hunter – Captain Christopher Pike ("The_Menagerie" & "The Cage")"

"Walter Koenig – Pavel Chekov"

"Majel Barrett – Nurse Christine Chapel/Ship Computer"

"Beam me up, Scotty. - James T. Kirk"

"Damn it, Jim! I'm a doctor not a... - Leonard McCoy"

"You're dead, Jim. - Leonard McCoy"

"She can't take much more of this, Captain. - Montgomery Scott"

"Millions of people who have never died before will be killed. - Spock"

"The original Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad. Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion. This was in the days before series characters were allowed to grow and change, before episodic television was allowed to have a through line. So it didn’t matter which episode you might be watching, from which year — the characters were exactly the same. As science fiction, the series was trapped in the 1930s — a throwback to spaceship adventure stories with little regard for science or deeper ideas. It was sci-fi as seen by Hollywood: all spectacle, no substance."

"One of the truths I've been telling lately is that Kirk and Spock are not lovers... they're not even boyfriends. They're just good friends. This has offended a whole subculture that is convinced they are... I was at a convention in Milwaukee a few weeks ago. This lady comes up to me with this stuff, and after a thirty minute discussion, I finally said, 'Stop! We're arguing over whether or not two fictitious characters are getting their hands in each others' pants.'"

"There was a sense of fun in the original series, and I think we wanted to try and create three characters as distinctive as Kirk-Spock-McCoy with Kai-Stan-Xev (plus a robot head). I watched the show quite a bit when I was younger, and enjoyed some of its campier moments, i.e. "The Squire of Gothos". I also liked the one with the weird head in the sky that turned out to be Clint Howard."

"Well, when I was nine years old, Star Trek came on, I looked at it and I went screaming through the house. 'Come here, mum, everybody, come quick, come quick, there's a black lady on television and she ain't no maid!'"

"The original Trek was never consistent; to modern eyes, its frequently ham-fisted writing, sexism, sluggish pacing, and lack of continuity between episodes can take some adjustments to accept. But at the show's peak, those flaws could never obscure the raw energy that drove the adventures of Kirk, Spock, and the rest of the crew of the Enterprise, nor the way that energy so often coalesced behind a fundamentally optimistic view of the universe."

"Again and again on the series, we see that communication is the solution to problems, and that understanding your enemy (if they even are an enemy) is the only way to resolve a dangerous situation. It's a concept that seems to belie every piece of Cold War doctrine foisted on the American public. The Red Menace was a danger so insidious, so malignant, that even trying to understand its beliefs and systems meant a form of surrender. This wasn't just a physical force, but a kind of philosophical brain snatcher whose tendrils, if left unchecked, would lay waste to the free world. That kind of paranoid faith in the untouchable—the assumption that some beliefs must be walled away in silence and fear—was something that Star Trek stood against in stark opposition."

"The show, released in the decade of the Vietnam War, American Civil Rights protests, the second wave of the feminist movement and the threat of nuclear war, dared to imagine what peace might look like."

"In Roddenberry's 23rd-century universe, mankind had conquered conflict and catapulted into space as a unified species – men, women, Chinese, Russians, Africans. And it seemed to work. Women weren't intergalactic secretaries, they were full officers. Communications officer Uhura, a woman and black, is fourth in command of the Enterprise."

"In a world preoccupied by the Space Race and the Cold War, the Enterprise looked into the future and saw the Russians as allies, not bushy-browed villains. Young ensign Pavel Chekov was loyal to the crew even as he displayed his love for Russia."

"Fifty years on, as racism, sexism and dying migrants make headlines, it's easy to see how radical Roddenberry’s ideas remain."

"One of the keys to Star Treks success is the fact that almost every aspect of the show is grounded one way or another in real-world concepts. Starfleet, the organization unifying humanity and aliens in the exploration of the galaxy, is one such concept and was undoubtedly influenced by Roddenberry's time as a pilot during World War II."

"I thought she (Uhura) was a glorified telephone operator in space."

"He (Martin Luther King Jr.) felt it was important that children of all races see an African American female appearing on television as an equal."

"A major area of conflict was Bill's concern that Spock was getting ahead of Kirk in terms of problem solving. Bill was worried that Kirk would seem unintelligent by contrast. And so lines of dialogue that had logically been Spock's soon became Kirk's."

"I was a sucker for Star Trek when I was a kid. They were always fun to watch. What made the show lasting was it wasn't actually about technology. It was about values and relationships. Which is why it didn't matter that the special effects were kind of cheesy and bad, right? They'd land on a planet and there are all these papier-mâché boulders. [Laughs.] But it didn't matter because it was really talking about a notion of a common humanity and a confidence in our ability to solve problems. A recent movie captured the same spirit—The Martian. Not because it had a hugely complicated plot, but because it showed a bunch of different people trying to solve a problem. And employing creativity and grit and hard work, and having confidence that if it’s out there, we can figure it out. That is what I love most about America and why it continues to attract people from all around the world for all of the challenges that we face, that spirit of "Oh, we can figure this out." And what I value most about science is this notion that we can figure this out. Well, we're gonna try this—if it doesn't work, we're gonna figure out why it didn't work and then we're gonna try something else. And we will revel in our mistakes, because that is gonna teach us how to ultimately crack the code on the thing that we're trying to solve. And if we ever lose that spirit, then we're gonna lose what is essential about America and what I think is essential about being human."

"Star Trek, like any good story, says that we're all complicated, and we've all got a little bit of Spock and a little bit of Kirk [laughs] and a little bit of Scotty, maybe some Klingon in us, right? But that is what I mean about figuring it out. Part of figuring it out is being able to work across barriers and differences. There's a certain faith in rationality, tempered by some humility. Which is true of the best art and true of the best science. The sense that we possess these incredible minds that we should use, and we're still just scratching the surface, but we shouldn’t get too cocky. We should remind ourselves that there's a lot of stuff we don't know."

"In a time when social divisions seemed unbridgeable and nuclear war appeared imminent, Star Trek offered a positive vision of the future where a united and peaceful humanity explored the stars on behalf of a Federation in which poverty, disease and violent conflict were mostly things of the past."

"Star Trek evoked this sense of technological insecurity when it introduced the Romulan Empire in the gripping "Balance of Terror." Unlike the expansionist Klingons, the Romulans are xenophobic and insular, destroying anyone who violates the Neutral Zone. Thus, the Romulan Empire resembled Mao's isolationist China, then in the grips of the Cultural Revolution — a closed society perceived as a potential threat that might at any moment pour across neighboring borders. The Romulan Neutral Zone also references the Demilitarized Zone separating the divided northern and southern halves of Korea and (at the time) Vietnam."

"In spirit, the original Star Trek was opposed to war and nuclear weapons. However, it could not help sketching a universe in which opposing alliances resorted to espionage, gunboat diplomacy and covert operations. That Cold War influence came across in a different way 25 years after the series debut in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, the last Star Trek movie featuring the full original crew. An exploding moon-based power station — shades of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster — leads to an economic and environmental crisis in the Klingon Empire."

"Bill [Shatner] was very upset when Leonard came on particularly strong at the beginning [of the series] because he said, "Am I not the Captain? How come [the writers] don't appreciate that?" It was a very natural reaction. I said to Shatner, "If we had an Eskimo as a second character, you could be sure the Eskimo would get the most delightful lines because of what he is." I advised him not to worry about Spock because all that reflected on Shatner, particularly if Shatner continued to treat Spock properly in the show. I suggested they should show each other a lot of friendship in the show and it would eventually right itself. And, indeed, it did eventually right itself."

"Star Trek offers an almost infinite number of exciting Science Fiction stories, thoroughly practical for television? How? Astronomers put it this way: Ff^2 (MgE) - C^1R1^1 x M = L/So Or to put it in simpler terms, by multiplying the 400,000,000,000 galaxies (star clusters) in the heavens by an estimation of average stars per galaxy (7,700,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), we have the approximate number of stars in the universe, as we understand it now. And so… …if only one in a billion of these stars is a "sun" with a planet...<br /[A]nd only one in a billion of these is of earth size and composition... [T]here would still be something near 2,800,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 worlds with a potential of oxygen-carbon life... [O]r...(by the most conservative estimates of chemical and organic probability), something like three million worlds with a chance of intelligent life and social evolution similar to our own."

"The time is somewhere in the future. It could be 1995 or maybe 2995."

"Star Trek was again a very inconsistent show which at times sparkled with true ingenuity and pure science fiction approaches. At other times it was more carnival-like, and very much more the creature of television than the creature of a legitimate literary form."

"Captain Kirk was captain of everybody'sfate. He was a dictator."

"What matters is not what they look like now, but what they looked to others at the time that they prevailed... There is only one spaceship that's earlier than [the original Enterprise], and that's the flying saucer from The Day the Earth Stood Still. So, what matters here is, what did [the Enterprise] look like at the time it came out (1966) compared with anything that had been imagined before? And when you consider that, that is the most astonishing machine that has ever graced the screen."

"The Enterprise was the first ever [spaceship represented in storytelling that was not designed to go from one place to another; [it was] only designed to explore. It was revolutionary in terms of what we would think space would, and should, be about."

"Since its official beginning in New York city in the summer of 1972 with the first fan-organized convention, Star Trek has become a genuine popular phenomenon. So great has been the enthusiasm generated by viewers of the original 1960s series that in fall 1986, twenty years after its first telecast, Star Trek was syndicated in 145 national markets and numerous foreign markets."

"It is not my intention here to recount the history of the series or of the fan phenomenon, as these have been fruitfull explored in a number of popular and scholarly sources. Rather, I want to devote more attention to what I believe to be one of the least discussed aspects of the Star Trek phenomenon-the relationship of the series to the Cold War subtext of the post-war science fiction genre, especially in the context of the show’s original broadcasts during the period of the greatest scalation of the Vietnam War, 1966-1969. The meaning or appeal of any widely popular and enduring classic such as Star Trek is not reducible to any single reading or interpretation However, if we are to understand Star Trek in historical context, its mediation of Cold War themes would seem to be an important underlying element of the series and one worthy of further investigation."

"William Shatner – Captain James T. Kirk"

"Leonard Nimoy – Commander Spock"

"DeForest Kelley – Doctor Leonard McCoy"

"James Doohan – Montgomery "Scotty" Scott"

"George Takei – Hikaru Sulu"

"Nichelle Nichols – Uhura"

"Infinite diversity in infinite combination."

"Four thousand throats may be cut in one night by a running man."