‘I Can’t Explain This’: Inside the 1974 ‘Star Trek’ Fan Phenomenon That Baffled Shatner
Why William Shatner called the loyal 'Trekkies' an 'incredible phenomenon' only five years after the show
By early 1974, Star Trek had been off the air for five years, canceled quietly by NBC after three seasons and seemingly destined to live out its afterlife in reruns. What no one at the network—or in Hollywood more broadly—had anticipated was what would happen next. As the series cycled endlessly through local television schedules, something unprecedented began to take shape: an audience that refused to let the show fade away.
That growing phenomenon became impossible to ignore just days before William Shatner appeared on Geraldo Rivera’s Good Night America. A massive Star Trek convention in New York had drawn an estimated 10,000 attendees—children, adults, and longtime fans who packed ballrooms, hallways, and event spaces to celebrate a show that technically no longer existed. Costumes, memorabilia, and an intensity of devotion rarely seen outside sports or religion filled the hotel. For television in the early 1970s, it was something close to unheard of.
Rivera opened the segment by framing what viewers were seeing as a new kind of cultural moment. Ratings traditionally determined a show’s fate, he explained, but Star Trek had broken the rules. When NBC canceled it after two moderately successful seasons, fans responded not with resignation but with outrage—deluging the network with letters and forcing a temporary reprieve. Now, years later, that same loyalty had only intensified. “Since it’s gone off the air and into reruns,” Rivera said, “the number of Trekkies has soared and a fantastic cult has developed around the show.”
The growing phenomenon
When Shatner joined Rivera onstage, the scale of that devotion was still something he was struggling to process. Asked how long the show had been off the air, he replied simply, “I think it’s been off five years.” But when Rivera pressed him about the meaning of a convention drawing 10,000 people—and a packed audience watching him live—Shatner was candid about his confusion.
“I have worked all my life as an actor, spent years and years in the business, and I can’t explain this,” he said. “My experience gives me no answer. I can’t put it down to anything but an incredible phenomenon.”
What struck him most was not the costumes or the spectacle, but the intelligence and memory of the fans themselves. “There are, you may not believe this, a group of intelligent people down there who are all dressed up in some aspect of one of the characters that appeared on a series that has been defunct for five years—no longer shooting. It’s been played again and again and again. I meet people who come up and tell me lines that I’ve said. By now, I’ve forgotten the plot lines. I’ll watch a Star Trek now and wonder how it’s going to come out.”
Shatner described facing crowds larger than any he’d encountered before—larger even than outdoor variety shows he’d played earlier in his career. “I faced 10,000 people in a room—10,000 people—and I had no prepared material at all the night before I went on,” he admitted. The imbalance between actor and audience was striking. “What can I tell these people who know the scripts and the characters and the inner motivations far more than I ever did when it was fresh?”
His solution, he explained, was to strip away the mythology that had begun to surround the series. “I thought, the only thing they don’t know that I know is some of the little things—how I felt about a particular incident, or my view on a certain thing. So, I decided I’d cut through all the malarkey and all the falderal that unfortunately surrounds that show because so many people are making so much money out of the merchandising.”
‘Star Trek’ bloopers
The interview also touched on the growing underground circulation of Star Trek blooper reels—footage never intended for public viewing. “We thought it was just for us,” Shatner said, before recounting how fans across the country had already seen the material. “The blooper reel has been pirated all over the place. People are selling it, making a fortune of money on it, and I don’t know where it’s happened or how it got out.”
When Rivera raised the inevitable question—if Star Trek could fill a ballroom with 10,000 fans, why couldn’t it come back?—Shatner was notably cautious. “That’s the question in my mind. I haven’t solved it,” he said. He worried openly about the danger of comparison, about trying to resurrect something that had already achieved legendary status in memory. “People look back and say, ‘God, that’s what it was like.’ Well, it was everyday television back then… I think we could suffer by comparison if we weren’t careful.”
Looking back on the series itself, however, Shatner made clear that Star Trek occupied a rare place in his career. “An actor works many times on two bases,” he explained. “One is that he works out of love and passion because the thing he’s working on really satisfies a great many needs… money and publicity and billing mean nothing. Star Trek was in that first category. You meet very few of those in a lifetime.”
Doubting the future of ‘Trek’
What makes the Good Night America interview so remarkable in hindsight is not what Shatner knew—but what he didn’t. This was still years before Star Trek: The Motion Picture would finally receive a green light, before false starts like The God Thing and Planet of the Titans and before the ambitious but unrealized Phase II television series. In 1974, there was no roadmap, no franchise plan—only a stunned actor, a bewildered industry and a growing legion of fans who had already decided the voyage wasn’t over.
Conversation
All comments are subject to our Community Guidelines. Woman's World does not endorse the opinions and views shared by our readers in our comment sections. Our comments section is a place where readers can engage in healthy, productive, lively, and respectful discussions. Offensive language, hate speech, personal attacks, and/or defamatory statements are not permitted. Advertising or spam is also prohibited.
