On September 8, 1966, NBC aired the first episode of Star Trek. Nobody watching had a name for the thing they were watching yet. Sixty years later, Paramount and CBS are marking the anniversary with more than 750 U.S. theatrical screenings of the four Nimoy-era films paired with Original Series episodes, a Star Trek Lates evening at London's Science Museum with a Guinness World Records Vulcan-salute attempt, a Delta badge worn on the ISS by ESA astronaut Sophie Adenot, and a Franchise of the Year award at the Broadcasting+Cable Hall of Fame ceremony in New York on September 29.
All of that is the show being celebrated for what it became.
We want to write about what it was designed to do.
The show was a color TV commercial
Star Trek looked the way it looked for a specific commercial reason. NBC's parent company was RCA, which manufactured color television sets and color cameras, and the show was made deliberately colorful to move that hardware. The uniforms were primary. The set walls were saturated. The alien makeup was green and gold and blue because a green face on a black-and-white set is a grey face, and a grey face doesn't sell a Zenith upgrade to your nieghbor.
The pitch worked. Color TV households in the United States jumped from 5.22 million on January 1, 1966 to 9.51 million on January 1, 1967, an 82% increase during Star Trek's first season. A December 7, 1966 memo from producer Herbert Solow, held in the UCLA archives, noted that after three months on air Star Trek was the highest-rated color series in its Thursday 8:30–9:30 PM slot, beating My Three Sons, Bewitched, and the CBS Thursday Night Movie. TV usage in color households that season was measured 22% higher than in black-and-white households. Once the console arrived, the family sat in front of it longer.
That's the part the anniversary coverage doesn't reach, and the part we spend our days looking at.
What a 1966 home movie actually shows
We hold thousands of American home reels from 1965 to 1970, the exact window when the color set moved from a rich uncle's house into ordinary living rooms. Almost none of them point the Bell & Howell at the TV. That's not what people filmed. They filmed each other. But the TV is in the frame, and once you've handled enough of these reels you start reading the set the way an archaeologist reads a postherd.
Here is what dating a 1966 living room from an 8mm reel actually involves. You look at the console cabinet: walnut veneer, four legs splayed slightly, cloth speaker grille the width of the whole unit. You look at whether there's a UHF dial as well as VHF. You look at the size of the rabbit ears and whether they've been augmented with tinfoil. You look at what's on top of the set: doilies, a lamp, a framed portrait, a small ceramic animal. You look at the carpet. High-pile shag in gold or avocado is a strong late-'60s tell. You look at the TV trays. You look at whether the kids are sprawled on the floor in front of the set or sitting properly on the couch, because floor-sprawl in front of a TV is a habit that arrives with the set becoming a piece of furniture the family is comfortable ignoring while it runs.
The best single frame we have of what Star Trek was engineered for isn't a Star Trek frame at all. It's in our reels from Hoboken, New Jersey at Christmas 1966: a man in a suit on a couch, holding a book and a remote control, watching a vintage television set with a decorated tree beside him. That's the household RCA drew on a napkin. That's the sale.
The living room, reel by reel
A few more, because the specifics are the whole point.
A family gathered in a Temple City, California living room in 1966: a woman in a yellow floral dress holding a baby wrapped in white, another woman in a leopard-print top standing nearby. The reel is dated by the wardrobe, the film stock, the room, and, if you slow the transfer down, the console in the corner.
A family in New Jersey in 1966, the room warm and busy, a woman in a white blouse and purple skirt, a man in purple, an older woman in a floral dress. The camera moves the way a a person moves who has never operated a camera before. This is what half our archive looks like. It is also, incidentally, exactly what Nielsen was counting when it reported that color households watched 22% more television.
Athens, Ohio in 1966: a woman on a patterned sofa, a man holding a young child in pajamas, a small dog on the floor near the couch. There is a television in the room. We are not going to tell you what the family was watching that Thursday. We don't know. What we do know is that this is the demographic (young parents, small kids, a dog, an Ohio living room) that NBC and RCA were spending money to reach.
And then the winter of 1966, the second season now on the air, the color-set base doubling: two women hugging next to a Christmas tree in Hoboken, one in a red sweater and plaid skirt, one in a yellow sweater. The camera pans off them and, in the wider shot, there is a console TV against the wall. You cannot see what's on it. You can see that it's on.
Why this matters to an archive
Most of what gets said about Star Trek on an anniversary is about the writing, the cast, the utopian politics, the toys. All of that is real. But there is a materialist reading of the same story that documentary editors sometimes want and can't easily source. The show was a piece of consumer electronics marketing, and the marketing succeeded, and the household it succeeded inside is only visible now in amateur film that nobody thought to save.
Studios saved the show. Nobody saved the room. The room is in shoeboxes in attics, and about 162,000 reels of it have made it as far as our shelves.
When we wet-gate scan a reel from 1966, the color response of the Kodachrome is what pops first. The yellows and the reds go somewhere the eye wasn't expecting after the muted footage of the '50s. The reel doesn't know it's echoing the palette of a TV show that was engineered to advertise the machine sitting in the corner of the same shot. But it is. Thats what makes 1966 home movies feel like a matched set with the show.
Sixty years later
The Star Trek 60th anniversary week is going to belong, correctly, to the fans in the Science Museum doing the Vulcan salute and to the astronaut on the ISS wearing the Delta. Good. That's the show being loved for what it grew into.
We'll be at the bench, scanning a reel from Clarkdale, Arizona in 1966. A woman in a yellow floral sleeveless top by a brick fireplace, children in period clothing, the light dim, the film grainy. No television visible in this one. Just the room that a TV was about to arrive in, or had just arrived in, filmed by someone whose grandchildren now have the reel and don't own a projector.
If you want to see what the color set was really selling, it was that room.