15-18 The Standing Ovation That Launched Star Trek

About this episode

Last week, The Trek Files followed Gene Roddenberry to the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland, where he hoped to convince a skeptical audience of serious science-fiction fans that his new television series was worthy of their attention. This week, Glen E. Swanson, author of Inspired Enterprise, returns to examine what happened next. Our document is a December 1966 letter from science-fiction fan Mike Deckinger, who tells Desilu that he was among more than 1,000 people who watched Roddenberry preview Star Trek at Tricon and witnessed the audience give him a standing ovation. By then, Star Trek had been on the air for three months, and Deckinger was already urging the studio to protect a series he believed was offering television something different: mature stories, intelligent ideas, and contributions from established science-fiction writers. His brief letter gives us a valuable eyewitness account of a moment that Roddenberry himself would recount for years to come. Glen and Larry then trace the ripples from that weekend through Roddenberry's excited telegrams back to Hollywood, a special award from the convention that Gene kept on his office wall for decades, an