By Savas Abadsidis
I had the pleasure of being one of the first New Yorkers to attend a screening of the new Star Trek movie, the eleventh film in the series and a reboot of the entire franchise.
I thought it was dope.
My mom actually got me into Star Trek at an early age, long before I knew anything about creator Gene Rodenberry’s utopian vision of the future, a “wagon train to the stars” as he put it, Rodenberry “took the old trope of a multi-ethnic military unit and spliced it into the most optimistic science-fiction scenario imaginable.
It was upbeat, not dystopian or cautionary—180 degrees from paranoid scenarios about nuclear Armageddon and cosmic doom, which percolated through the ’50s and came to a high boil in the early ’60s.”
At the tender age of four I loved the spaceships, the aliens (one of the first episodes I remember was Kirk fighting a Gorn, an intelligent reptilian alien species on the episode Arena on what I now recognize as the Paramount back lot). And I always loved Spock.
I thought it was cool that my mom liked this show too, and always thought she was a sci-fi fan, not knowing that she (who had recently emigrated from Poland) had a crush on William Shatner, also not realizing I was watching a show now eight years into syndication (the original series had run from 1966 to 1969) and that she had become bedazzled with this series as a teenager in Communist Poland. It was one of the few shows they got probably because of the inclusion of the character of Russian Lt. Pavel Chekhov; one of many Star Trek firsts for a TV series, which also included the first interracial kiss between Shatner’s Captain Kirk and Nichelle Nichol’s Lt. Uhura.
Star Trek would mean very different things to me at various points in my life and as I learned more about the creation of the series and the trials and tribulations that it went through over the years. It might be of interest on this Beltane weekend to know for example that early on NBC executives objected to the inclusion of Spock, whose Pan-like ears and raised eyebrows they deemed Satanic and inappropriate for a TV show.