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Star Trek is a pop culture phenomenon that has had huge significance for fans of science fiction and space. When a humanistic science fiction television program called Star Trek premiered in the 1960s, no one imagined the impact it would go on to have.
The series was created by author and former Air Force pilot, Gene Roddenberry. Despite being canceled after only three seasons, The Original Series—as it was eventually known—would go on to have an unheard-of cultural impact.
The original ensemble of the show came together for six feature films as a result of the show's popularity in syndication during the 1970s. Four offshoot TV shows were later created as a result of the popularity of the film franchise.
The first season of the popular series followed the spaceship USS Enterprise (NCC-1701). Read on to know when the historical series first aired for viewers on television.
Star Trek aired for the first time in September 1966
The world was very different back in the 1960s and a television series exploring deep space and life out there was only a wild imagination. It was around such a time that viewers were left amazed by the introduction of Captain Kirk (played by William Shatner) and Mr. Spock (played by Leonard Nimoy). The world witnessed the USS Enterprise for the first time ever on September 8, 1966, with the premiere of the television series Star Trek on NBC.
Actor William Shatner had the following to say during the opening of the popular show:
"Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before."
The first episode of the series was named The Man Trap. It was actually the sixth episode to be filmed for the series. The official summary of the first episode of the series reads:
"After landing on planet M-113, the Enterprise is stalked by a creature which can assume the shape and form of anyone it chooses, and which kills by removing the entire salt content of its victims' bodies."
The series went on to run for three years (1966 to 1969) and had a total of 79 episodes. As mentioned earlier, this is dubbed the Original Series and many later installments followed subsequently.
The Original Series established two important tenets of the Star Trek philosophy: The main cast of the show is incredibly diverse, reflecting the utopian future in which racial, gender, and national differences have all but disappeared. The show also leverages the perspective of other cultures to make commentary on current events.
So, even while racism may no longer exist among humans, it still exists among the half-black, half-white aliens who inhabit the planet Cheron. This enabled the series to imagine a better world while still making observations about the harsher realities of our actual one.
Many fans still consider the original Star Trek television series to be the most iconic, and everyone who has watched the rebooted Trek movies is familiar with its characters. The show created ripples when it was first released and broke a lot of barriers, especially in an era where there was still a lot of prejudice in existence. The series is a stalwart in its own right and even went on to inspire another popular franchise, known as Star Wars.
