Space- the final frontier. These are the voyages of the Starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: the explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldy go where no man has gone before."
Basic Premise
Star Trek was produced for the US NBC network by Desilu studios, since merged into Paramount Pictures. The series ran for three seasons, from 1966 to 1969. The last show went to air a few weeks before Neil Armstrong landed on the moon. The series was never terribly popular while on air in the US, but it soon became a cult hit when repeated endlessly on local stations across the US and around the world. Star Trek followed the lives of the Captain and crew of an interstellar spaceship, the U.S.S. Enterprise, on a mission of discovery and exploration in our galaxy. The ship used faster-than-light 'warp' drive to move through space with ease, and teams from the ship would 'beam down' to planets or other objects of interest through the use of molecular transporter technology, which dematerialized then rematerialized atoms in their correct form. Following their late success, Star Trek was resurrected as a Saturday morning animated show in 1973, with 22 half-hour episodes produced. A new TV series, planned to anchor a new Paramount TV network in the late 1970s, was abandoned when Paramount failed to go through with their network plan (they did, eventually - Star Trek: Voyager anchors the new United Paramount Network, launched in 1995). Instead, Paramount decided to make a new movie, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was a blockbuster cinematic smash in 1979, but was widely derided as being slow and boring. This failed to deter Paramount and the increasingly geriatric original stars, as they donned wigs and false teeth to make five more movies into the early 1990s. Star Trek: Generations was the first movie with the cast of The Next Generation, but included Capt. Kirk, Chekov, and Scotty. The success of the movies convinced Paramount a new Star Trek TV series could be popular, and so Star Trek: The Next Generation was born in 1987. Two more series followed.