Hitting A New Low: For Star Trek Day 2024, Paramount Cops -- And Cheaps -- Out
This year’s “celebration” was an epic fail
Okay, this is a new low — even by Paramount standards.
It’s almost like they’re not willing even to go through the motions for Star Trek and its fandom.
Paramount absolutely failed at Star Trek Day this year — which is particularly ignominious given that it was studio itself that formally established September 8 as “Star Trek Day” and elevated it to as much of an “official holiday” in fandom as is possible.
September 8, of course, marks the first time Star Trek — the original series — aired on television in 1966.
And for a number of years since it inaugurated the first “Star Trek Day” in 2019, Paramount really seemed to go all out.
The studio would hold a fairly impressive, awards-style gala at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, Calif., which was live-streamed to fans around the world.
These events would bring out a constellation of Star Trek celebrities — actors and behind-the-scenes creatives — for discussions, orchestral presentations of the theme music from each of the series, and even a red-carpet.
I fondly remember excitedly covering Star Trek Day 2022 for this newsletter as breaking news.
Celebrating Star Trek Day 2022
The original Star Trek series lit up the NBC primetime schedule Thursday night, September 8, 1966.
Things, of course, took a turn last year as Star Trek Day fell during the big Hollywood labor strike which cut the potential for actors and other creatives from getting involved.
As a result, Paramount understandably scaled back.
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This year, the strike long has been settled and Star Trek Day 2024 should have returned the festivities to maximum warp.
And, if you thought that after canceling series like Star Trek: Discovery and Star Trek: Lower Decks, that Paramount’s executives might have wanted to use a big Star Trek Day observance to rekindle the excitement of fandom in the studio’s oldest and most dependable franchise — especially ahead of the impending sale of the company to new ownership — well, you’d be as wrong as a Ferengi trying to sell a hungry Klingon expired gagh.
Paramount’s “celebration” this year — such as it was — was pathetic.
It basically amounted to encouraging community volunteerism among fans and making the pilot episodes of the various series free to viewers on a temporary basis.
Don’t get me wrong: I fully support such volunteerism and absolutely believe that it should have been part of Star Trek Day all along.
It’s clearly very much in the best spirit of Star Trek.
The right answer would have been for Paramount to have promoted global volunteerism in addition to all the other Star Trek Day festivities that we fans have come to expect.
But what Paramount did, instead, was promote volunteerism instead of any real celebrations for fans to enjoy.
It was a nothing but a corporate cop-out thinly veiled behind a veneer of virtue.
Some fans might say that this failure was due to the huge financial mess that Paramount currently finds itself in.
And that is undoubtedly true.
However, it remains a $30 billion company.
And you don’t see any of its executives exactly handing back any of their lucrative compensation, do you?
Even if Paramount this year couldn’t have afforded its usual Star Trek Day venue at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, they could have arranged space for free on its own lot in Hollywood and still put on a reasonable facsimile of what we’ve come to expect for our sole “national holiday” within fandom.
We fans are, after all — in the cold capitalism of it all — Paramount’s paying customers. We fund its Paramount Plus streaming service with our monthly subscription fees.
It would have been nice for someone at Paramount to have recognized that fact, rather than what they actually gave us Sunday: just another slap in the face.
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