Today marks 60 years since the official premiere of Star Trek, the cult classic television programme about an, at the time, unusually diverse cast of folks exploring space in the not-so-distant future.
Since then, the franchise has seen an additional 11 television series, four miniseries, 14 movies, and an uncountable quantity of spin-off media. Something in the Star Trek canon has been in production for virtually the entirety of those six decades.
I’ve banged on a lot about being a furry on this website. The furry fandom has easily been the most influential community in my personal and professional life, and I owe them a lot.
But it’s also no competition that Star Trek comes second. It’s a franchise that I love, and though I only really interact with the peripheries of the fandom, I am very much a Trekkie.
I make a point of not being a toxic fan. I like The Next Generation and I like Discovery, I like Enterprise and I even like Section 31 to some small degree. “In the Pale Moonlight” is an amazing episode and “Sub Rosa” is… an interesting episode.
I very much subscribe to the idea of Star Trek as a place, a phrase coined by The Greatest Generation’s Adam Pranica that establishes the Star Trek universe as a setting where a sitcom, a courtroom drama, a western shoot-out, and a preschool cartoon can all coexist. The belief that the universe is large enough for all of them, and not every version of Trek has to be for you.
Anyway, anyway, thank you Star Trek for being so great at so much. I look forward to many more years of philosophising about the nature of being, solving differences with diplomacy and mutual understanding, and watching fictional characters be incredibly competent in the face of unearthly adversity.
Happy birthday.