An auction of items used in the production of the Star Trek series for generations is a good reason for uploading an article I wrote at the request of the editors of a special project for the 40th anniversary of Star Trek on the starbase972 website
Avi Blizovsky, editor of the knowledge site
Shaf Ben Tzur, the ISF website reports that 40 years and a month ago (September 8.9.1966, XNUMX) an episode of the original series of "Star Trek" was broadcast for the first time.
Contrary to the trend in TV series today - the first episode that aired was not the pilot (The Cage) or the second pilot (Where No Man Has Gone Before) but another episode called The Man Trap (why? Like that...) which according to its production number - seems to have been the episode The sixth in number. The second pilot was broadcast about two weeks later, while the first pilot (which was about 70 minutes long) was included in the double episode The Menagerie in the form of a recording from the past...
For your information, the episodes on the official website are arranged according to the order of production, but in the DVD cases they are presented in chronological order (according to the date of the stars - Stardate). Let's hope that the first 40 years of "Star Trek" are just a prelude to another 40 years of innovation, optimism and faith in humanity (and when we reach 80 years we'll think about what's next...)
Meanwhile, it was announced this week that a miniature model of the Enterprise ship, from the Star Trek series, was sold at an auction for $576,000 (Saturday, 7.10.06). The model appeared in the episode "Encounter at Farpoint" in 1987 and was later used in other episodes as well as in the movie "Star Trek Generations".
Over 1,000 items from the CBS Paramount Television Studios archive were sold at auction, with fans of the show breaking a record and paying a total of $7.1 million for the items, including studio furniture, Vulcan ears and more. Dr. McCoy's spacesuit from the Enterprise, which he wore in the episode "The Tholian Web" sold for $144,000.
And now for my article
Sometime in 1979 (certainly because in the recording I heard years later I told host Moshe Mored that I was 17 and a half years old) I called the mythological radio program "Brash Ahad" on the IDF airwaves with great fury and I was furious with Maariv's literary critic, Haim Nagid, who wrote a review of Robert's book Heinlein "Time for the Stars". The same governor described in detail the events of Captain Kirk, the pointed-eared Spock and others who did not exist and were not created in connection with that book, since one writer would not steal a world composed by another writer or playwright and use it, it was just a mistake on the part of the translator of the title. The honorable reviewer read only the title of the book and then wrote something based on the series he saw on TV. Perhaps he was confused because at the same time several books based on the episodes of the series were published, and some of them are still on my bookshelf, which I arranged not long ago before starting work on my second book.
The universe that was created back in the sixties, with its Klingons and spaceships (primarily the Enterprise) was perhaps the most dominant of the science fiction worlds that influenced us in those years. The episode where the crew of the Enterprise went back in time to save something in the race to the moon and in the process they hijacked a plane pilot who was chasing them was a classic episode depicting the problem of time travel. We were all waiting for Friday at three o'clock to see in black and white how the people of the spaceship solve problems, while they jump in space (Bim Who Up Scotty?).
And not just time travel. In one of the episodes of the series "Requiem for Methuselah", they meet a man who lived for thousands of years and who during the years was King Solomon, Leonardo da Vinci, Johannes Brahms.
In my opinion, this series is also "guilty" of shaping the genre for the years that followed. And perhaps to this day its influence is evident, when I translate here and there news about new gadgets, the manufacturers explain that they are doing this or that action that was predicted in one of the episodes of the first "Star Trek" series. The success of the series, and the sequels that followed, may have been due to the fact that its protagonists were human. Even the aliens in it were allegories of humans. The future is also in the coming of the present - in the case of the first series of the Cold War period, while in the subsequent series of the nineties we already see cooperation between superpowers against a common enemy (Russia and the United States against Islam?).
Today it may seem simple - you can take series on DVD, or even download them from the Internet and burn them. Today you can play interactive computer games. So we depended on the first channel and the book publishers, such as the "Star Trek" book series published by the Erez library of Zamora Beitan-Moden (before the re-evaluations of Moden separately and Kinneret-Zamora-Beitan-Dvir-from notebooks for literature and more together). Instead of computer games, I remember that here and there there were board games or four-of-a-kind games, and the topic of souvenirs was not yet that developed, at least in Israel. But the TV series and the books allowed me to escape to other worlds from the difficult situation of childhood in a neighborhood of Haifa that was left behind, while everyone around me moved to better neighborhoods.
Science fiction for me is basically a childhood memory. As a child in Haifa of the post-moon landing era, the subject of space was always a live topic. At the traditional flower exhibition in Haifa, 1972 or something around that, I remember that one of the attractions was a moonstone. I borrowed many books from the Haifa Workers' Council library in the building next to my house, and I also bought many books used at the bookstore on Halutz St., corner of Shapira (unfortunately I forgot the name of the owner of the store) and of course most of them were science fiction books. To this day, I remember the book called, I think, "Journey to Space", by someone named Glazer, which described a boy who was abducted by a spaceship in the Land of Israel before the establishment of the state. In the spaceship were humans like us, except that they left Earth thousands of years ago and established colonies on many planets throughout the galaxy and now their research expedition is back to examine the state of the mother planet. The boy grows up in the meantime and when the promise to return him is not fulfilled, he kidnaps together with his friends that he made on the planet he arrived at, a flying saucer of the type from which he was abducted. He returned to Earth, if my memory serves me correctly, after about twenty years, and was surprised to hear that a Jewish state had been established. If anyone has access to the book I would love to read it again. If anyone has access to the copyright holders I would be happy to publish it in parts of the knowledge site.
Another interesting book, which for some reason I don't remember the name of, that I read around 1975 (because I remember taking it to the library in middle school) but of course again it is an older book and according to the plot you will also understand why, it dealt with a privately organized flight (a million dollars per seat, reminds me of something ?) to the planet Venus, and a meeting with Indians who were moved there hundreds of years earlier and preserved their culture. And of course I devoured all the Captain Juno books.
In retrospect, it seems to me that all these books came from the same reservoir of ideas that the developers of "Star Trek" drew from - an imaginary world, which provides us with useful insights into our real world.
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