Star Trek Turns 60: Its Future Has Yet to Begin

Before Hollywood learned to call everything a “universe,” Star Trek had already invented modern fandom. In 1968, thousands of viewers flooded NBC with letters and helped secure the series a third season. Sixty years later, Paramount brought the anniversary video to Hall H at San Diego Comic-Con, before the successors to that mobilization: badges around their necks, Starfleet uniforms and very firm opinions about who the best captain is.

Meanwhile, the franchise was hardly gathering dust in a display case. On July 23, just two days before the panel, Paramount+ had sent Christopher Pike’s Enterprise back into space with the fourth season of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds. It is at this intersection of cult and catalog that the video celebrating sixty years of Star Trek arrives. Beneath the understandable showcase of its legacy, however, Paramount is attempting something more difficult: to prove that, buried beneath sixty years of intellectual property, the utopia of Star Trek is still breathing.

The official anniversary will fall on September 8, exactly sixty years after the original series made its debut on NBC.

From the First Enterprise to Today: The Real Alien Is Us

The montage begins with the series starring William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy, then moves through its subsequent television and cinematic incarnations: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, Enterprise, the feature films, Discovery, Picard, Strange New Worlds, Lower Decks, Prodigy and Starfleet Academy. It does not construct a ranking or separate the small screen from the big one. Instead, it presents Star Trek as a single journey in which each crew takes up the baton from the one before it.

The words of Captain Archer, played by Scott Bakula, define human beings as explorers driven to discover what lies beyond the horizon. Later, the voice of Sonequa Martin-Green brings those distant galaxies back to the question that has accompanied the saga from the beginning: what it means to be human.

The video was shown in Hall H before performers from different generations of the franchise. Alongside Rod Roddenberry were, among others, George Takei, Michael Dorn, Robert Picardo, Doug Jones and Michelle Hurd. The panel invoked the principle of “Infinite Diversity in Infinite Combinations”, while the stage gave tangible form to that continuity through actors, series and different eras.

Sixty Years Later, Star Trek’s Utopia Remains Unfinished

Every anniversary of a major intellectual property risks turning into an inventory.

The official program for the 60th anniversary also includes partnerships, products, events, a collaboration with LEGO, digital comics, a series for YouTube and even a cruise. Star Trek is an industrial enterprise before it is a collective memory, and Paramount has every interest in keeping it in orbit.

The video, however, chooses not to place the catalog at its center. Instead, it recovers the idea that is most difficult to preserve: the united future imagined by Gene Roddenberry. The anniversary slogan, “Space for Everybody,” emphasizes hope, exploration and inclusion. These values have also become part of promotional language, but they belong to the original structure of Star Trek, which in 1966 placed an international and multiracial crew on the bridge while the Cold War divided the planet.

Star Trek today uses the past to remind us of a future we have not yet reached: after sixty years, the video does not announce a new destination. It reminds us why the Enterprise set out in the first place.
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