Star Trek: Bah Humbug

Congrats to Star Trek on its big anniversary this month. Here’s to 40 more years!

-…If it can get there. “The conventions are still being held, funny ears and all,” reports a March story on Fox News. “[But] attendance has been noticeably down. ‘Trekdom has scaled back to its very core,’ said ’superfan’ Gabriel C. Koerner.”

-That “core” has major boundary issues — hardly news, of course, but I do like this summary of the mindset from an About.com article: “Fans don’t want to fix the show. They want to own the show.” Yeah, that.

-Still, Trek is in the second edition of Roget’s Super Thesaurus, (Writer’s Digest Books, 1998):

“Nerd. n. Sl.: Dork, goofball, geek, jerk, dweeb, goober, goon, nebbish, schlepper, wimp, trekkie.”

-And it’s still making news in the culture at large. “A surprising number of child sex abusers appear to be Trekkies,” reported Macleans magazine in 2005. In Toronto, “investigators have been through so many dwellings packed with sci-fi books, DVDs, toys and collectibles like Klingon swords and sashes that it’s become a dark squadroom joke. ‘We always say there are two types of pedophiles: Star Trek and Star Wars,” says Det. Ian Lamond, the unit’s second-in-command. ‘But it’s mostly Star Trek.’”

9/11/06 Update: For more on the so-called Trek/pedophile connection, see my post here.

-Such is its power that it’s managed to turn the usually irascible commenters at Jump the Shark into tail-wagging bitches. This actually makes me really mad. I went over there looking for biting witticisms and instead I got a bunch of self-described “hard-core Trekkers” defending the episodes with the singing space hippies and Spock’s brain. Wimps.

technorati tags: star+trek, sci-fi, fandom, fandumb

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