"The 3rd Man Theme", Guy Lombardo And His Royal Canadians - Decca 24839

This week's theme: Guy Lombardo

Guy Lombardo
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guy_Lombardo

No wait, I mean Startrek

I see that today is the 50th anniversary of the debut of the television show
Startrek (original series).

So I thought I'd share a few thoughts about that.

Looking back at WWI, which is only twice as far back as Startrek, we see
that technological innovations were very important, machine guns,
submarines, airplanes, etc., in the war.

This was even more true in WWII, with radar, proximity fuses, primitive
computers and especially rockets and the A-bomb.

Post war thought was that it was our superior technologies that won the war
(if you don't count the contribution made by 8.7 million dead Russians on
the eastern front).

In 1957 when the Russians put up their "Sputnik" satellite, which was
basically a beach ball with a beeper in it, it signaled that we were behind
technologically.
http://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/

It showed they had a rocket that could reach us - presumably with an A-bomb
in it if they wanted - and created a sense of panic in the U.S. As a result
substantial resources were plowed into math and science education to try to
catch up.

My Dad was an engineer at what is today UNISYS (over the years ERA / Univac
/ Remington Rand / Sperry) and pushed us kids into high tech anyway.

The sixties were an interesting time to be a geeky nerdy science kid. It
wasn't as popular to be as it is today, but there was a lot of tech going on
especially in connection with the space race with the Russians.

Startrek fit right into that mind set. Technology was "good"-nology and
would fix all our problems and make for a brighter, happier tomorrow.

It saw past our petty nationalistic tribalism to a United Earth where people
would instead turn their efforts toward good things like space exploration.

I started watching the show on about the second or third episode, the one
with Spock's parents. I was amazed at the special effects in the opening
scene of the hanger deck with the cardboard shuttle craft in it and was
hooked for life.

I mostly watched the shows over and over in reruns in the 1970s and yes, I
have every episode pretty well memorized.

I remember when I was in college in the 1970s at the UofM hanging out with
some friends at Coffman Union, when one of them said, "hey, look at this",
Startrek was on one of the color TVs there. None of us had ever seen it in
color before and were surprised that the uniforms were different colors
based on what they did. We'd never seen that before.

My personal favorite episode is the one with the M-5 computer. This computer
guy comes out and installs a computer to completely automate the Enterprise.
It of course goes horribly wrong, a common theme in "computer" shows back
then, and they struggle to disable it. As a software developer I could
relate to going out and installing new equipment at a customer site - and
having everything go horribly wrong. At the end McCoy says he has the guy in
sick bay "restrained and heavily sedated" - ya, I've had days like that - I
can relate :-)

Startrek was definitely influential on or at least consistent with my life.
So happy anniversary Startrek. Beam me up, Scotty!


Trek trivia:
Their catch phrase "To boldly go where no man has gone before" is improper 
English.
It's a split infinitive, it should be "To go boldly where no man has gone 
before".
Of course that doesn't have the same punch :-)


Stay Jazzed!
--Tom Swezey
--