Trekkies Gone Wild?

A few nights ago as I was catching up on Grey's Anatomy on streaming video, I found myself subject to repeated interruptions of the show by trailers for J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie, which is coming out on May 8, 2009. Because, I suppose, the word-of-Internet hype that's been surrounding this movie for the past year isn't quite enough.

I've been a Trekkie ever since I was six years old and tearfully begged my parents to get a cable subscription so I could see the show's syndicated reruns (they readily capitulated, poor saps). I can probably tell you the plot of every episode of the original Star Trek series (TOS), and most of the episodes in S (TNG). I'm not quite up to speed with the other Star Trek spin-offs, such as Voyager, Deep Space Nine, or Enterprise simply because my work life caught up with me and made watching favorite t.v. shows difficult if not impossible. And every Trekkie remembers collecting the merch -- the Star Trek games, Star Trek books, Star Trek t-shirts, and Star Trek action figures (I used to keep a little Borg on top of my computer at work).

Safe to say, yup, I'm still a fan.

Yet I watched the trailers for the new Star Trek movie with the kind of distant interest sociologists might apply to mating baboons. When Star Trek: The Motion Picture, starring the show's original cast, came out in 1979, the one theater in my two-horse town was more congested than an unemployment office in Detroit. Then came the TOS movie sequels -- The Wrath of Khan, The Search for Spock, The Journey Home, etc. I enjoyed these films, but something about them left me with a vague sense of anomie. Compared to the series, the films were too .... too what?

Sometimes I have a difficult time understanding my own lack of interest in movies that should logically appeal to my sensibilities. The new Star Trek movie is not a continuation of the original series, but rather, takes fans back to the early years of James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock, and Leonard "Bones" McCoy at Star Fleet Academy, when their friendships were forged. Okay, sounds cool. Ardent fans have often wondered about this particular phase of their favorite characters' lives, and so have I, so what's my big problem?

Now that I've tossed it around a little, I think I can wrap my mind around my lack of enthusiasm. The appeal of the original series was its blatant campiness. William Shatner's over-the-top acting. A script that required Captain Kirk to mate with every green-skinned, pink-haired female alien -- or at least kiss them into swoony-eyed supplication. Cheaply-made sets and flimsy props that required use of fake fur, papier-mâché, and several thousand rolls of tinfoil. Good lord, the original series was simply delicious in its badness. The challenge of watching the original series was that it required the viewer to disregard all the show's cheesy plot devices and horrible, cornball humor and instead to envision the type of futuristic society that creator Gene Roddenberry had in mind from the show's inception: Egalitarian and imbued with optimism, Amen.

Just from what I've seen of the new Star Trek trailer -- super-slick special effects, good make-up, and decent acting -- I don't think that I'm quite geeky enough to truly enjoy it. See, I still yearn for the days when aliens were made of carpet remnants, rock monsters of painted Styrofoam, and the caves of distant planets were rife with smoke machines. I'll still go see J.J. Abrams' new Star Trek movie, of course. I'm not a total curmudgeon. I'll wait till the lines of ticket holders shorten and I know I can find a seat that doesn't require the use of a tilted neck brace. I'll probably become a little nostalgic when the character of Bones is introduced, because DeForest Kelley, the actor in the original series, has since passed away. And I'll be able to say, "The new Star Trek movie? Yeah, of course I've seen it."

That's what a devoted Trekkie does.