How did a show that nearly didn’t get approved for production, that was cancelled once before it was finally shut down and that only lasted three seasons become the most popular TV franchise in history?

TOS featured pioneering roles for an African-American actress and a Japanese-American actor, and included a Russian character at a time when the U.S. was in a constant state of near-war with the U.S.S.R.  There was even a bi-racial character on board—although the “races” he represented were Vulcan and human.

“Leave any bigotry in your quarters,” Kirk says in The Balance of Terror. “There’s no room for it on the bridge.”

Did Roddenberry’s vision—equality, addressing social issues—make a difference in the series’ success? It’s hard to separate those subjects from the stories themselves, but if you talk to enough fans, you find them frequently mentioning the evergreen subjects that were tackled.

The “vision” also helped create a new kind of a civilized expeditionary force, with enlightened rules of engagement: use force when necessary, but do not intervene in other cultures — per the Prime Directive — and, whenever you can, resolve things peacefully. 

Jeff Greenwald, author of Future Perfect: How STAR TREK Conquered Planet Earth, told tvland.com that TOS’s enduring legend is due, in part, to the fact that it “came at the beginning of an age  — the age of information, the age of space flight, the age of technology” — and so helped to define it.

In short, TOS came at the time when the future began.  The future is now here, with cell phones that look suspiciously like Kirk’s communicator, microcomputers, space travel and even recent glimpses of an actual invisibility cloaking device.

But right now, traveling at the speed of light, far beyond this century’s cynicism, the original broadcast transmission of the original STAR TREK has reached the nearest stars.