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It’s a great time to be Star Trek fan

The final frontier has never been more accessible to viewers
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Leonard Nimoy, William Shatner and James Doohan from the original Star Trek series. The show premièred 50 years ago as one of the new fall shows on NBC's 1966-1967 schedule.

Devin Faraci is hard-pressed to remember a time when he wasn’t a Star Trek fan.

Before he could traverse the uncharted territory of his living room on foot, his mom put him in a walker with wheels and he’d scoot around the house during reruns of the 1960s original TV show.

“I would just zoom back and forth in front of the TV with the Enterprise and the opening credits of the show,” says the editor of the site Birth.Movies.Death.com “I was sort of born into it.”

Ever since Star Trek’s première on NBC 50 years ago, rabid devotees around the world have not only gobbled up every TV incarnation, movie, book, game and comic, they’ve held conventions to unite in their shared love for all things Kirk, Spock and otherwise — even before that was cool.

There were boom times and lean years over the past five decades. But with Star Trek Beyond in theatres this summer, and a new Trek series due in January on CBS’s All Access streaming service — plus reruns and movies available on Netflix, Hulu and elsewhere — the final frontier is looking up again for Trek nation.

“This is really the coolest time in a really long time to be a Star Trek fan, and I think most fans agree,” says Jordan Hoffman, film critic for The Guardian and host of Engage: The Official Star Trek Podcast. “There’s always a couple of people who want to be dissenters — some people hate the films and there’ll probably be some people who’ll hate the show, because that’s how life is — but I think it’s a good thing.”

Hoffman, 41, went from casual Trek guy to obsessive when he saw Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in 1986.

“If you like Lord of the Rings and you want to read more, there’s three Lord of the Rings books,” Hoffman says. “By the end of the summer you’ll have read everything J.R.R. Tolkien’s done. With Star Trek, you could really go on forever.”

Loyal and vocal fandoms are plentiful in pop culture, from Star Wars lovers to Game of Thrones acolytes to Doctor Who enthusiasts. Not only did the Trek faithful predate them, but Faraci calls Trekkies “the single most important fandom in the history of the world.”

He’s not kidding.

“People who work in NASA and important tech labs tend to be Star Trek fans,” he says. “As much as everyone loves Star Wars, that stuff’s fantasy. Star Trek comes with the idea that (technological advancement) is possible, and it has influenced so many people to try to bring these things to life that humanity has actually moved forward because of it.”

Trevor Roth, chief operating officer of Roddenberry Entertainment, founded by Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, admits that early fans even helped save the original series.

“There’s a legacy of fans being a tremendously important part of Star Trek,” he says. “When Star Trek was about to be cancelled (during its second season), Bjo Trimble and her husband, John, led this letter-writing campaign that kept it on the air for another year. That’s an amazing feat.”

The cult following blossomed in 1972 with the first Star Trek convention. TrekMovie.com editor-in-chief Kayla Iacovino’s first experience in 2005 marked her introduction to the community.

The typical attendee of the annual Las Vegas convention is “not your stereotypical jobless slob who lives in his parents’ basement,” she says. “They’re doctors, engineers, scientists, teachers, truck drivers, real people. And often they were inspired to live their life a certain way because of Star Trek.”

So what makes a Star Trek fan different from others? “They’re genuinely nice people,” says Hoffman, more mellow, friendly and welcoming than your average Comic-Con-goer.

And they often reflect the progressive ideals of the original series, which put an early premium on diversity, Faraci says. “It’s really hard to be a racist and a Star Trek fan. The show consistently tells you that you’re wrong.”

For 30 years, Trekkers defined a nerdy fandom, leading star William Shatner to mock them — and by extension, himself — in a 1986 Saturday Night Live skit in which Captain Kirk tells convention-goers, “Get a life, will you, people? For crying out loud, it’s just a TV show.”

It inspired Shatner to make a documentary — Get a Life! — to discover why people were coming to these conventions. “I had this huge discovery. It was mythological,” the actor says. “It wasn’t just [that] they were coming to see each other, which was the conclusion I came to in a book. Science fiction is mythology, it’s religion, and people are coming to these events indulging in the ritual.”

And folks revel in that indulgence. At conventions and events, Hoffman sees fans dressed as Klingons; a woman posing as a wormhole; people who wore sheets with sparkles to play Starfleet members mid-transport; and once, a cosplayer of a character who appeared in one episode for all of 18 seconds.

Faraci understands all too well. One of his treasures is a signed picture of Janice Rand, a minor character played by Grace Lee Whitney in the first season of the original series, and he got a Starfleet tattoo live on stage while introducing a 30th anniversary screening of Star Trek II: Wrath of Khan four years ago.

He later showed his ink to Khan director Nicholas Meyer: “I’ve never seen anybody look at me with greater disgust than Nick Meyer did. It was like a perfect Star Trek fan moment — he was like: ‘OK, that’s just too much.’ ”

Of all the obsessions to have, Hoffman figures Star Trek is a pretty benign one.

“It’s a great pastime,” he says. “I don’t follow sports, I don’t give a [crap] if the Mets win, but I really like to think about the Romulans. It’s much more interesting to me.”