“Space – the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starship Enterprise. Its five-year mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before.”
Unless you’ve been living on some other planet, you've heard those words.
They were first broadcast into the ether and our TV sets on this date, September 8th, back in 1966.
That’s when the original sci-fi TV series Star Trek first debuted on the NBC network.
Series star William Shatner, playing the starship's commander, Capt. James T. Kirk, said the words at the beginning of the opening credit sequence of the first episode and every one thereafter.
Following Shatner’s famed opening narration, the campy Star Trek theme music swells into full, space-operatic bloom.
NBC had the lack of foresight to cancel the show in it's third season. But it has gloriously lived on in re-runs, spin-off series and movies.
In the first spin-off TV series, Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987-1994), the ending of the famous opening was updated to make it gender-free.
The final phrase in that version, narrated by star Patrick Stewart, as Capt. Jean-Luc Picard, was "to boldly go where no person has gone before."
The change was controversial with some fans. But, as a big fan myself, I am in the camp that thinks it made sense given the un-sexist world the Next Gen series portrays.
In either version, the “boldly go” part was boldly memorable grammar.
And, in one form or another, things from the Star Trek universe are likely to be part of our language and culture for generations to come.
