Live long and prosper, y'all

This month is galactic: the 50th anniversary of Star Trek.

The show took off Sept. 8, 1966, on a mission to boldly go in search of new life and new civilizations. And where better to look than Arkansas?

Arkansans don't have to leave the home planet to fly with ship's officers Uhura, Spock and Sulu this month and October. Events soon to come will bring Star Trek to the home state:

• Nichelle Nichols, Star Trek's communications officer Uhura, will be among guests at Spa-Con, Sept. 23-25 in Hot Springs.

Nichols' appearance Sept. 24 will make Star Trek "a very large part of the convention," Spa-Con spokesman Bill Solleder says. "She will come in for a meet-and-greet and a question-and-answer luncheon," as well as being available for photos.

Spa-Con will be a return to Arkansas hailing frequencies for Nichols, who also took part in the River City Comic Expo in Little Rock in June.

Billed as "Arkansas' newest comic convention," Spa-Con got its name from Uhura's fellow starship officer, Mr. Spock, Solleder says. The event was going to be called Spock Con from the internet meme, "Keep Calm and Spock On."

From "Spock On," came "Spa-Con."

• Leonard Nimoy's portrayal of the Vulcan science officer is the subject of a new documentary, For the Love of Spock, that will be shown during the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, Oct. 7-16.

The late actor's son, Adam, made the movie that is tag-lined, "When your father's an icon, things can get highly illogical."

Adam Nimoy will speak about the film's production in a Skype webcam interview after the screening on Oct. 8. He grew up like many other boys with make-believe Spock ears, but young Adam wore his on the bridge of the starship Enterprise.

Even after all that has been documented about Star Trek, he says in the film's production notes, he found "so much more to explore" about the logical, pointy-eared alien who defined his father's career.

Thanks to Skype, "we say we're going to beam him up from London," film festival director Courtney Pledger says. The filmmaker will be attending a Star Trek convention in England.

"It's a really good film," she says -- a "gotta have it" from the first she heard of it. The story began as a collaboration between father and son, finished by Adam Nimoy after his father's death in 2015.

Expanding from the creation of Spock to the actor's home life, "it's a Star Trek fan's trip to heaven," Pledger says.

• George Takei, Star Trek's helmsman Sulu, will speak Oct. 27 at Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.

Takei's connections to Arkansas go back to his childhood in the Rohwer Relocation Center near McGehee in the state's southeast corner.

The government forced thousands of Japanese-Americans from the West Coast to camps in Arkansas and other states during World War II -- Takei's family among them. He recalls the experience in his autobiography, To the Stars (1994), and in last year's Broadway musical, Allegiance.

"One of the ironies of life is that I have mostly fond memories," he told the Democrat-Gazette for a story about Rohwer in 2000. "I remember the barbed-wire fence and the guard towers. But those were of no more interest to me as a child than a chain-link fence around a school."

Even so, "a camp is like jail," he said, and "I knew only bad people go to jail, so there must be something bad about being Japanese."

The government feared Japanese saboteurs, but the war ended with never a documented incident of sabotage or spying for the enemy by a Japanese-American.

In 2012, Takei narrated "A Survivor From Warsaw" with the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra and River City Men's Chorus in Little Rock.

The visit took him back to Rohwer with a documentary film crew. He spoke at the Clinton Presidential Center, and talked with students at Little Rock's Central High School.

In 2014, he appeared along with a screening of his autobiographical To Be Takei at the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival, where he received an Arkansas Traveler Award.

The state award appoints its recipient as an "Ambassador of Good Will From Arkansas" to "wherever," or in Takei's case -- to the final frontier.

PAST WARP SPEED,

THERE'S AARP SPEED

Lyndon Johnson was president in September 1966. Sgt. Barry Sadler had topped the year's song charts with "Ballad of the Green Berets." NASA launched Gemini 11, a three-day manned space mission.

The World Science Fiction Convention in Cleveland honored Los Angeles cop-turned-TV-writer Gene Roddenberry. He brought for show-and-tell the first two episodes of his new series, Star Trek.

Westerns were still big on TV in 1966, and the NBC network had bought Star Trek on Roddenberry's pitch that it would be like "Wagon Train to the stars," a space Western. But wagon trains quit rolling at the water's edge of the Pacific Coast. Star Trek wobbled and was canceled after three seasons, but it kept going. Fan support and TV syndication fueled the engines better than dilithium crystals.

Star Trek: Discovery will be the seventh Star Trek series, coming in January to CBS All Access video streaming. This summer's Star Trek Beyond is the 13th Star Trek movie.

The show's golden anniversary comes with more extras than Tribbles -- books, commemorative magazines from TV Guide and Entertainment Weekly, bobble heads, even dog toys. But Arkansas has been aboard the Star Trek rocket ride since way back, especially in 1996.

That year, Little Rock's 30th anniversary Star Trek convention was attended by none other than Capt. James T. Kirk himself, actor William Shatner. "Listeners hung on his every word," the newspaper reported, "laughing, clapping."

Also in Little Rock, Whitewater trial juror Barbara Adams made national news by showing up for duty in a Star Trek uniform to promote "Star Trek ideals."

TEMPORAL ANOMALY

In 50 years and countless adventures, Star Trek's space voyagers have time-traveled from the future back to ancient Rome and Depression era New York.

"Many such journeys are possible," the Guardian of Forever promises in the 1967 episode, "City on the Edge of Forever." And here we go, back to witness more incidents of Star Trek landings in Arkansas:

• The original series' Capt. Kirk is famously from Iowa. The tiny, real-life town of Riverside, Iowa, claims to be the birthplace of the fictional character, played by Shatner.

But the actor knows his way around Arkansas as well as space. He performed his one-man show, Shatner's World: We Just Live in It, at Walton Arts Center in Fayetteville in 2014.

In 2005, he narrated the oratorio, Exodus, as performed by the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra in Little Rock. Shatner stepped in when his Star Trek co-star, Nimoy, beamed out of the project.

The symphony's music director at the time, David Itkin, said he had qualms about Shatner as Nimoy's replacement. Itkin's oratorio was based on the second book of the Bible, the story of Moses. He worried that Shatner's involvement would lead the audience to expect "some sort of weird biblical Star Trek connection."

But it turned out that Shatner "was clearly the best choice," Itkin told the newspaper. "He showed real, genuine interest in the project."

• The late Canadian actor James Doohan was a Star Trek convention favorite for his character of starship engineer Montgomery "Scotty" Scott. Doohan was in Little Rock for a Trek fest in 1996.

Scotty could have done worse than retire to Arkansas. In fact, he did exactly that -- worse. In the Star Trek story line, he was en route to a retirement colony in space when his ship crashed. He survived thanks to taking cover in the "buffer pattern" of a transporter beam, and emerged from the original series to appear in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

Capt. Jean-Luc Picard sent Scotty on his way in a loaned space shuttle -- maybe to that lakefront cabin in Arkansas, where he should have been headed in the first place.

BEAM ME IN, SCOTTY

Sometimes, Star Trek comes to Arkansas. And sometimes, Arkansas fits into Star Trek:

• Chief medical officer Leonard "Bones" McCoy's gruff Southern accent came from actor DeForest Kelly's upbringing in Georgia, practically next door to Arkansas.

Kelly is the only star-billed cast member of the original series who did not leave behind an autobiography -- one that might have detailed where the doctor received his medical training. The University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences?

Before Star Trek, Kelly played Southern-talking cowboys and gunfighters in a passel of TV Western series (Gunsmoke, Bat Masterson) and movies, notably in the role of Morgan Earp in 1957's Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.

Morgan's big brother Wyatt, in real life, skipped bail on a charge of horse stealing in Fort Smith, 1871.

• Charles "Trip" Tucker is chief engineer in the subsequent series, Star Trek: Enterprise, 2001-05. Actor Connor Trinneer gave the character a Southern drawl, attributed to Tucker's grandparents being from Arkansas (or Missouri, but nah -- Arkansas).

Tucker died heroically in the series' last episode -- a sad day to come in the state's far future.

LIVE LONG AND PROSPER

Space goes on forever -- not so with space explorers. But one place to find Star Trek any night in Arkansas is to look overhead.

Star Trek creator Roddenberry died in 1991. A year later, the space shuttle Columbia carried some of his cremated ashes into space on a round-trip flight.

In 1997, a representative gram of Roddenberry's ashes was flown into orbit by a private company Celestis Inc.

The satellite stayed in orbit five years, according to the space undertaker. But Celestis satellites have estimated life spans of anywhere from "five weeks to several hundred years," and who knows? Or the better question: Who really wants to know?

A satellite that falls out of orbit incinerates in the atmosphere. It looks like a shooting star in the night sky, and any shooting star could be a wave from somebody up there.

The next time a light streaks the sky, it couldn't hurt to wave back a thanks from Arkansas for these 50 years of Star Trek.

CAPTAIN'S LOG

• More information about Spa-Con is available at spa-con.org, or by calling (501) 321-2027.

• More information about the Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival is available at hsdfi.org, or (501) 538-0452.

• More information about the University of Central Arkansas' season of talks and performances at Donald W. Reynolds Performance Hall is available at uca.edu/reynolds, or (501) 450-3265.

Style on 09/04/2016