Trekkie
A Trekkie or Trekker is a fan of the Star Trek franchise, or of specific television series or films within that franchise. The show developed a following shortly after it premiered, with the first fanzine premiering in 1967. The first fan convention took place the year the original series ended.
The degree of Trekkies' devotion has produced conflicted feelings among the cast and crew of the show. Creator Gene Roddenberry initially encouraged the fan participation, but over the years became concerned that some fans treated the show with a quasi-religious zeal as though it were "scripture." While some stars have been vocally critical of the franchise's most devoted fans, others including Sir Patrick Stewart have defended Trekkies.
There has been some disagreement within the fandom as to the distinction between the terms "Trekker" and "Trekkie." Some characterize Trekkers are "more serious" in comparison to the "bubble-headed" Trekkies, while others have chosen the term Trekker to convey that they are "a rational fan." Leonard Nimoy advocated for the use of "Trekker" over "Trekkie". Overall, the term "Trekkie" is more commonly used.
History
Many early Trekkies were also fans of The Man from U.N.C.L.E., another show with science fiction elements and a devoted audience. The first Star Trek fanzine, Spockanalia, appeared in September 1967, including the first published fan fiction based on the show. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who was aware of and encouraged such activities, a year later estimated that 10,000 wrote or read fanzines. The mainstream science fiction magazine If published a poem about the Star Trek character Spock, accompanying a Virgil Finlay portrait of the character.Perhaps the first large gathering of fans occurred in April 1967. When actor Leonard Nimoy appeared as Spock as grand marshal of the Medford Pear Blossom Festival parade in Oregon, he hoped to sign hundreds of autographs but thousands of people appeared; after being rescued by police, "I made sure never to appear publicly again in Vulcan guise", the actor wrote. Another was in January 1968, when more than 200 Caltech students marched to NBC's Burbank, California studio to support Star Trek renewal.
The first fan convention devoted to the show occurred on 1 March 1969 at the Newark Public Library. Organized by a librarian who was one of the creators of Spockanalia, the "Star Trek Con" did not have celebrity guests but did have "slide shows of 'Trek' aliens, skits and a fan panel to discuss 'The Star Trek Phenomenon.'" Some fans were so devoted that they complained to a Canadian TV station when it preempted an episode in July 1969 for coverage of Apollo 11.
However, the Trekkie phenomenon did not come to the attention of the general public until after the show was cancelled in 1969 and reruns entered syndication. The first widely publicized fan convention occurred in January 1972 at the Statler Hilton Hotel in New York, featuring Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, and two tons of NASA memorabilia. The organizers expected 500 attendees at the "First International Star Trek Convention" but more than 3,000 came; attendees later described it as "packed" and like "a rush-hour subway train". By then more than 100 fanzines about the show existed, its reruns were syndicated to 125 American TV stations and 60 other countries, and news reports on the convention caused other fans, who had believed themselves to be alone, to organize.
Some actors, such as Nichelle Nichols, were unaware of the size of the show's fandom until the conventions, but major and minor cast members began attending them around the United States. The conventions became so popular that the media cited Beatlemania and Trudeaumania as examples to describe the emerging "cultural phenomenon". 6,000 attended the 1973 New York convention and 15,000 attended in 1974, much larger figures than at older events like the 4,500 at the 32nd Worldcon in 1974. William Shatner compared the 10,000 people who attended a 1975 convention at the Americana Hotel to the largest crowd he had hosted previously, 5,000 people in Central Park. By then the demand from Trekkies was large enough that rival convention organizers began to sue each other. The first UK convention was held in 1974 and featured special guests George Takei and James Doohan. After this, there was an official British convention yearly.
Because Star Trek was set in the future the show did not become dated, and by counterprogramming during the late afternoon or early evening when other stations showed television news it attracted a young audience. The reruns' great popularity—greater than when Star Trek originally aired in prime time—caused Paramount to receive thousands of letters each week demanding the show's return and promising that it would be profitable.
The entire cast reunited for the first time at an August 1975 Chicago convention that 16,000 attended. "Star Trek" Lives!, an early history and exploration of Trekkie culture published that year, was the first mass-market book to introduce fan fiction and other aspects of fandom to a wide audience. By 1976 there were more than 250 Star Trek clubs, and at least three rival groups organized 25 conventions that attracted thousands to each. While discussing that year whether to name the first Space Shuttle Enterprise, James M. Cannon, Gerald R. Ford's domestic policy advisor, described Trekkies as "one of the most dedicated constituencies in the country". "Unprecedented" crowds visited a 1992 Star Trek exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum, and in 1994, when Star Trek reruns still aired in 94% of the United States, over 400,000 attended 130 conventions. By the late 1990s an estimated two million people in the United States, or about 5% of 35 million weekly Star Trek watchers, were what one author described as "hard-core fans".
The Trek fandom was notably fast to use the World Wide Web. The Guardians Damien Walter joked that "the 50% of the early world wide web that wasn't porn was made up of Star Trek: The Next Generation fansites".
Characteristics
Stereotypes
In 1975, a journalist described Trekkies as "smelling of assembly-line junk food, hugely consumed; the look is of people who consume it, habitually and at length; overfed and undernourished, eruptive of skin and flaccid of form, from the merely soft to the grotesquely obese". He noted their fixation on one subject:In December 1986, Shatner hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live. In one skit, he played himself as a guest at a Star Trek convention, where the audience focuses on trivial information about the show and Shatner's personal life. The annoyed actor advises them to "get a life". "For crying out loud," Shatner continues, "it's just a TV show!" He asks one Trekkie whether he has "ever kissed a girl". The embarrassed fans ask if, instead of the TV shows, they should focus on the Star Trek films instead. The angry Shatner leaves but because of his contract must return, and tells the Trekkies that they saw a "recreation of the evil Captain Kirk from episode 27, 'The Enemy Within.'"
Although many Star Trek fans found the sketch to be insulting it accurately portrayed Shatner's feelings about Trekkies, which the actor had previously discussed in interviews. Noting that he had worked for years as an actor, Shatner said in 1975 "I can't explain" Trekkies' devotion; "my experience gives me no answer. I can't put it down to anything but an incredible phenomenon". He had met overenthusiastic fans as early as March 1968, when a group attempted to rip Shatner's clothes off as the actor left 30 Rockefeller Plaza. Shatner was slower than others to begin attending conventions, and stopped attending for more than a decade during the 1970s and 1980s. In what Shatner described as one of "so many instances over the years" of fan excess, police captured a man with a gun at a German event before he could find the actor.
The Saturday Night Live segment mentioned many such common stereotypes about Trekkies, including their willingness to buy any Star Trek-related merchandise, obsessive study of trivial details of the show, and inability to have conventional social interactions with others or distinguish between fantasy and reality. Brent Spiner found that some could not accept that the actor who played Data was human, Nimoy warned a journalist to perform the Vulcan salute correctly because "'Star Trek' fans can be scary. If you don't get this right you're going to hear about it", and Roddenberry stated
A Newsweek cover article in December 1986 also cited many such stereotypes, depicting Star Trek fans as overweight and socially maladjusted "kooks" and "crazies". The sketch and articles are representative of many media depictions of Trekkies, with fascination with Star Trek a common metaphor for useless, "fetishistic" obsession with a topic; fans thus often hide their devotion to avoid social stigma. Such depictions have helped popularize a view of devoted fans, not just of Star Trek, as potential fanatics. Reinforced by the well-known acts of violence by John Hinckley Jr. and Mark David Chapman, the sinister, obsessed "fan in the attic" has become a stock character in works such as the films The Fan and Misery, and the television series Black Mirror.
Defenders
objected when an interviewer described Trekkies as "weird", calling it a "silly thing to say". He added, "How many do you know personally? You couldn't be more wrong."Isaac Asimov said of them, "Trekkies are intelligent, interested, involved people with whom it is a pleasure to be, in any numbers. Why else would they have been involved in Star Trek, an intelligent, interested, and involved show?"
In 1998, the fan studies scholar Henry Jenkins published the journal article "Star Trek Rerun, Reread, Rewritten," in which he defended the behavior of Star Trek fans from an academic angle, arguing that they were "'poachers' of textual meanings who appropriate popular texts and reread them in a fashion that serves different interests." Jenkins' subsequent monograph Textual Poachers, which was written "to participate in the process of redefining the public identity of fandom", also discussed Star Trek fans.