And to celebrate, I thought I'd share this gem of a tribute from Star Trek's 40th anniversary, ten years ago. If you've never seen this before I highly recommend giving it a watch.

(I originally posted the very low quality original, but there's since been an updated version which is much more watchable.)

Happy birthday, Trek!

5475977 Yeah it's amazing to me sometimes that it's been around that long. Here's hoping for another 50 years because that would be a true long lasting legacy.

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Fun fact: in 47 more years, it'll be the year of First Contact!

5476219 Oh gripe. I might actually be alive still then. Well now I somehow feel older than ever.

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I only had the chance to watch a handful of episodes of mostly TNG when it ran on tv when I was a kid. But for the past year I've been watching through the entire franchise from the start (and yes, it's taken me a whole year of semi-focused watching), so I can be prepared for the new series next year.

It has been a revelatory experience. Nobody really talks about Star Trek as anything other than a sci-fi adventure series, space exploration entertainment. But when I watched TOS and TNG especially, I felt more than anything else that I was back at the University, only in space. This was my education in the Humanities decorated with aliens and space ships, and the genre dressing always took a back seat for the real show, which was never about science and was never about space, but was always about looking at the here and now and asking "Who are we? What does it mean to be human?"

Sadly it was only after Leonard Nimoy died that I finally got to see and understand why Spock is such a beloved figure.

I'm currently halfway through Voyager. I am not sure I want to go on to Enterprise when the time comes, though, considering how I have never heard anything good about it

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I got introduced to Star Trek one night when a friend gave me a call and said I had to watch this "new show": It was Star Trek and the episode was "The Man Trap". The show wasn't new, it had been cancelled the a year or two earlier, but was now in syndication.

Star Trek was a staple of our local UHF station in the 1970s. It was on seven nights a week, with two episodes on Saturday, and I think I hardly missed one through all of middle and high school. Best of all, my first fan moment arrived in the late 70s with James Doohan.

After much nagging, my dad drove me and my brother to a local university where Doohan was going to speak. He spent a bunch of time answering questions and then showed the Star Trek blooper reels on 16mm film. This may sound pathetic, but that was the first time I'd ever seen any Star Trek in color: We didn't get a color set until late 79. Following the blooper reel, I think they showed an episode, but I do not recall which one.

Finally, some non-Trek film Doohan was in was shown, while he signed autographs in the theatre lobby. He sat at a long folding table, and the line was not long. I waited perhaps ten minutes to have him autograph my copy of the "Technical Manual," which I sold for $10 at a yard sale in the early 80s. So stupid.

Ultimately the night turned into a disaster: On the way over, we'd hit a pot hole and clipped some line that had to do with the transmission fluid. The car was immobile, and we didn't get a tow until after midnight. The tow truck driver took us to the train, and we got the last one of the night with some pretty scary passengers.

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Here's to another fifty!

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Speak for yourself, Sir,

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This; so much this. It's literally impossible to describe exactly what Star Trek is to people who haven't experienced it. TOS and TNG, which had the benefit of Roddenberry's mind and direct guidance, are something... completely incomparable to any other form of fiction and storytelling that has ever existed. There are many great classic sci-fi authors... Asimov, Bradbury, Vonnegut; the list goes on... but almost to a one, they chose to teach lessons in humanity through their writing by penning warnings of dystopian futures, or cautionary tales of mankind's unchecked growth or hubris.

But Roddenberry was different. He took those same lessons, those same morals, and presented them to us in a future that was filled with hope. Instead of showing us how we might fail, he taught us how we might succeed. Where others sought to teach though demonstration of the consequences of immorality, he strove to teach by showing us the benefits of its opposite.

He caught a lot of flak for this over his lifetime, many of his contemporaries thought that he was out of touch; that his characters were unrealistic and (ironically) weren't 'human' enough to be relatable to everyday audiences, but as you (Daedalus) yourself pointed out, the very focus of nearly every story was to force the audience to question what it meant to be 'human;' to re-evaluate ourselves in such a way that we could then learn and grow, and maybe one day become the type of people that Roddenberry idealized.

There's a scene in a very early episode of TNG that I know for a fact Roddenberry wrote into the script himself that I believe was an attempt to temporarily use the characters as a mouthpiece. Normally something to be frowned upon, he did it so subtly that anyone watching the episode would have no idea without the further context of his experiences dealing with critics of his work, and Patrick Stewart's performance resonates so strongly that I still get chills and tear up sometimes when I watch this scene, some twenty-nine years after I first saw it:

This was Roddenberry's goal; the message strewn throughout all his work. He wanted to see mankind rise above its own limitations through the act of self-discovery; through the realization that the road to being a better person begins with exactly that: being a better person. It's part of the reason I think FiM resonated with so many people the same way the Star Trek did; on some level it speaks to the same standard of what it means to be a decent human being.

Or it could have just been the cute ponies,

Now, since that was WAY to much seriousness for me for the night, let me end this post with something every Trekkie should see at one point or another,

5476769 Yeah the funny thing about plans is they never quite work out. Still I love that line, it's classic Riker all of the way.

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Wow, that's dedication! I've never heard of anyone going to such lengths. :)

I personally didn't care for Enterprise, but I wouldn't write it off because I know some people who love it (RainbowDoubleDash, for one). If you are planning to watch the upcoming Star Trek: Discovery, you might want to watch it as it will precede that series chronologically.

You may also like to check out SFDebris, a reviewer who has been reviewing Trek since the early days of the web. He now does video reviews, and they're very funny and insightful (I learn a lot about the background and decisions behind episodes from him).

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There are definite similarities between Star Trek and MLP. Both have a philosophical side to them. They are made to be entertaining, yes, but also to explore ideas and to teach us something. While Star Trek asks "what does it mean to be human?", MLP asks "what does it mean to be a friend?", and they actually approach these questions in similar ways.

Plus they both share basically the same character played by John De Lancie, who appears in Star Trek to challenge the crew to prove what's so great about being human anyway, and who appears in MLP to challenge the crew to prove what's so great about friendship.

Patrick Stewart's performance resonates so strongly that I still get chills and tear up sometimes when I watch this scene, some twenty-nine years after I first saw it

I love the Shakespeare bits in Star Trek. I'm very fond of this youtube film analyst who does a lot of Shakespeare videos, and in particular the one he did about Star Trek and the Klingon Hamlet: