BEAMING INTO CALGARY
STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION CAST REUNITES FOR COMIC EXPO
It was the coup that rocked the Trekkie universe last January when the Calgary Comic and Entertainment Expo announced the key original cast of TV’S Star Trek: The Next Generation will be reuniting at the 2012 Expo for the first time in an official event.
This reunion — at a special Calgary Expo show dubbed TNG EXPOSED, Saturday at the Stampede Corral — will mark the 25th anniversary of the hit series’ TV debut.
Nine of the series’ stars, including Patrick Stewart, Brent Spiner, Jonathan Frakes and Wil Wheaton will be in at- tendance.
Immediately, fan excitement exploded on the Internet and legions of hardcore Trekkies from as far away as Europe and Australia started planning their pilgrimage to the Calgary Expo, Friday through Sunday at the BMO Centre.
As over-the-top as the hype seems though, it’s not so surprising for those familiar with the extreme passion of the Trekkies. The Star Trek franchise has been more than just a series of merchandise-spawning TV shows and movies since it was introduced more than four decades ago. Rather, it’s become a pop-culture force unto itself — almost like a religion for some — with its massive effect still reverberating today.
Brent Spiner, who played the sentient android Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, admits he was only a casual fan of the original 1960s Star Trek series when he joined the franchise in 1987. For him, at first, the role was a money gig.
The show “was already pre-sold for a year and I thought, ‘Great, I can pay off my bills and move on to the next thing,’ ” Spiner says. “It was much to my surprise when we came back again and again for seven seasons.”
But being a central figure in the Trek saga has brought him a true appreciation of the franchise’s impact.
“I feel good about it,” he says. “I feel better all the time, frankly, the longer it goes on. The more incarnations there are, the more I like having been a part of it. . . . There are 400 and some odd episodes and 11 movies now. It’s the biggest thing that ever happened in showbiz in America and I don’t think there’s anything that compares to it.
“It’s been a quintessential part of the American tapestry . . . for almost 50 years, and when you get to 50 years, you’ve got to take it seriously at some point.”
Kandrix Foong, founder of the Calgary Expo, is well acquainted with the power of Star Trek’s draw. Tapping into the Trek mythos helped transform his Expo from a relatively small event — it attracted about 3,400 fans in its 2006 inaugural year — to the jug- gernaut that it is now with more than 35,000 expected to attend the three-day festivities.
Foong feels the Expo truly graduated to the major leagues in 2010, the year he secured Leonard Nimoy, Trek’s iconic Mr. Spock, as a special guest. He followed that up by bringing in William Shatner, the original Capt. Kirk, last year.
The only way he could possibly top that, Foong surmised, was by organizing a reunion of the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast on the show’s 25th anniversary.
Foong knew his chances of pulling off such a coup were slim at best. Other comic and sci-fi conventions had tried to organize a reunion, including the official and preeminent Star Trek Convention in Las Vegas.
Hoping to make the reunion dream a reality, Foong focused on securing Next Generation’s central star, Stewart, who played Capt. Jean-luc Picard. When Stewart signed on, the other cast members were quickly enticed, Foong says.
While it was obviously the original Star Trek series that started the phenomenon, Foong said he believes that Next Generation was a pioneering show in its own right. Not only did it add a new and vital chapter to the Trek mythology, but it also blazed a bold new trail for the science-fiction genre on television.
“It was a facilitator of things to come,” Foong says. “They were one of the first TV shows to really use computers for the special effects and that set the foundation for a multitude of things. . . . After Next Generation, people said, ‘You know, science fiction is a vi- able genre. People are interested in watching.’ Then you started getting shows like Stargate and The X-files and Fringe.”
Catherine Pooley, tourism coordinator for the Alberta town of Vulcan and its famous Trek Station, has seen first-hand the enormous effect the show has had on people’s lives.
Her town, which shares the name of Spock’s home planet, has shrewdly turned itself into a Star Trek-themed tourist spot, complete with its own Spock Days celebrations (held from June 8 to 10 this year). Festivities for the upcoming event will include a parade (wherein everybody dresses as their favourite Trek characters), a masquerade ball and a Q&A session with a number of actors who have appeared on one or more of the Trek shows over the years. This year’s big catch is Walter Koenig who played Pavel Chekov in the original series.
“Some people have decided on their whole direction in life because of Star Trek,” Pooley says. “They’ll come in the doors of the Trek Station and tell us that because of the show they entered into their chosen careers, be it engineering or science or medicine. . . . I would wager that Star Trek was one of the first shows that was that influential.”
Pooley has seen Trekkies from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, Germany and Belgium visit the Trek Station and Spock Days.
“They’ll come and say this was on their bucket list,” she says. Such fans are almost making a religious-style pilgrimage, Pooley believes, so deeply has Trekdom touched their lives.
So what is it about Star Trek — which began humbly enough as a simple bit of sci-fi escapism — that it wound up launching this unstoppable franchise with a worldwide cult of devoted Trekkies?
“It’s the principals of the story that make it so timeless,” Pooley says. “It’s about hope and equality. . . . That’s the secret ingredient in the original series that has been carried over into all the incarnations.”
TV’S first interracial kiss was seen on Star Trek, between Shatner’s Capt. Kirk and Nichelle Nichols’ Uhura, she says. As well, she notes, the USS Enterprise was a multicultural crew, including a black woman, a Japanese man and a Russian in an era marked by civil unrest, racial intolerance and the Cold War.
“The show was saying that all these things were possible, when no one had believed it before,” Pooley says. “Kudos to Gene Roddenberry (producer and Star Trek creator), because he seemed to know what people needed at that time.
“Star Trek was almost a form of entertainment medicine.”