Star Trek
From Encyclopedia Of Stupid
Star Trek is stupid.
Star Trek is an autobiographical account of the travels of William Shatner through outerspace in a spacecraft named Enterprise. The overriding theme of the television series was a deep-founded mistrust of Klingons. Fans of the show are known as Trekkers.
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History
Television
Star Trek, which started sometime before 1975, is the brainchild of Gene Roddenberry, who pitched the idea to Desilu studios as a "wagon train in space." Science fiction had not yet developed the huge nerd cult following it has today, and so Roddenberry was beholden to make it sound like this was just a Western with spaceships and lasers and aliens and stuff. It wasn't (of course) and so three seasons in it was summarily dumped by NBC. The original cast featured Captain William Shatner with first mate Spock and the irascible Dr. Bones.
The supporting characters were well ahead of their time conceptually, and featured a drunken Scotsman named Scotty, a gay Korean swordfighter named Sulu and a mop-haired Russian boy-band member named Yakov. When science fiction gained in popularity in 1984, a new Star Trek television show was made, known as Star Trek: The Next Generation. This show featured Captain Jean-Luc Picard, a frenchman, his homosexual first mate Jeff Stryker, and a Klingon known only as The Wolf. The series was eventually spun off into other less-successful series which nobody watched.
Movies
Sometime before 1975, George Lucas had a huge megahit with his movie Star Wars. The Hollywood power brokers realized they could cash in on Star Trek's now much improved name, and they made the first Star Trek motion picture, titling it Star Trek: The Motion Picture. It featured three hours of the original cast of the Star Trek television show watching newly applied paint on a starship dry, after which everyone goes out for a drink. Five other Star Trek Movies followed the original, but only the fifth one Star Trek V: I Am William Fucking Shatner would ever recapture the glory of the original. In 1984, the reigns of the Star Trek movie franchise were handed off to the Next Generation cast members with Star Trek: Generations.
Philosophy
I'm OK, You're OK
In general the theme behind the Star Trek movies is the underlying goodness of humanity. This is why it is referred to as science fiction. The Star Trek universe, unlike the gritty Star Wars universe, serves up a vision of a very sanitary, well-vacuumed and quite modular future with cool toys like the holodeck. The holodeck is a large room which can take on the appearance of any time/place imaginable and can be populated with palpable replicas of people, aliens and things for you to interact with. It is obviously a place where your wildest fantasies could come true but is routinely used by the show's characters to play poker with Stephen Hawking.
The Prime Directive
The Prime Directive was a literary device used in all incarnations of Star Trek, which decreed that there be no interference with the natural progression of Gillingham. It exists generally only to be ignored egregiously, since it sorely limited the amount of alien pussy Shatner would be able to bag.
