©1967 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.(LOS ANGELES) — Fifty years ago today, a TV show boldly went where no program had gone before, launching a franchise that has endured for generations.
The original Star Trek series, created by Gene Roddenberry, premiered on September 8, 1966, on NBC. Set somewhere around the year 2260, it followed the crew of the Starship Enterprise: William Shatner’s Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy’s Mr. Spock, George Takei’s Sulu, DeForest Kelley’s Dr. “Bones” McCoy, Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura, James Doohan’s Scotty, and, starting in the second season,Walter Koenig’s Chekov.
The show was canceled after three seasons due to poor ratings, but became a huge hit in syndication. It later spawned books, games, comics, an animated series, and six movies with the original cast, beginning with 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture and continuing with classic sequels like The Wrath of Khan and The Search for Spock.
Over the past three decades, additional Star Trek TV series aired, including The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and the upcoming CBS All Access digital series Star Trek: Discovery, premiering in January.
The Star Trek franchise also continued on the big screen, starting with the 1994 film Generations, which merged the cast of TV’s The Next Generation with some of the original series cast members. Subsequent films included First Contact. In 2009, J.J. Abrams rebooted the franchise; the third film in that new series, Star Trek Beyond, was released this year.
Reflecting on Star Trek‘s legacy this summer at San Diego Comic-Con, Shatner called it “such a remarkable thing to be connected with,” adding, “[I]n this 50 years, this mere television show and its various iterations have expanded to affect a great deal of our culture far beyond anything we know.”
It’s certainly affected Adam Nimoy, the son of Leonard Nimoy, who passed away last year.
“I was excited as a young boy could be that my dad was going to be co-starring on a new, cool, out-of-this-world, out-of-this-universe TV series about a starship that went from planet to planet,” he told ABC. “I was so excited about that, and the fact is…that excitement has never left me.”
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