When SNL Made Star Trek Hip

With Star Trek: Picard generating a lot of enthusiasm this week it's a reminder the 50+ year franchise continues to flourish. But things easily could've went the other way. Airing for three seasons on NBC from 1966-69, the show was unceremoniously canceled due to low ratings. But a passionate fan base organized conventions and the show grew its audience after leaving the airwaves through syndication reruns. Star Trek officially resumed with the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979, launching a popular film franchise and several spin-off television shows. 

Saturday Night Live premiered in the fall of 1975 and instantly changed the landscape of television. The irreverent satire by the post-60s generation hit a cultural nerve. The first season is especially fascinating to watch as the show found its identity. An episode with Paul Simon was mostly music performance. Jim Henson presented a more adult oriented version of the Muppets each week and Albert Brooks contributed a short film for each episode. But the sketches became the centerpiece. Chevy Chase stood above the rest of the cast and by May of 1976 SNL was a pop culture phenomenon. 

Entitled "The Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" and written by Michael O'Donoghue the sketch ran a marathon 12 minutes. The date was May 29, 1976. A tour de force of performance and satire, it would poke fun at the acting style of Star Trek and ratings obsessed network executives. John Belushi portrayed Captain Kirk, nailing Shatner's speech cadence and physicality. Chase played Spock and Dan Aykroyd as McCoy.

The sketch begins with Enterprise being chased by a Chrysler Imperial. The ship starts to lose power and gets boarded by an NBC executive played by Eilliot Gould (a regular host in the early years). He there to announce the cancellation of Star Trek due to low ratings, although his kids love the show. Spock's attempts to apply the Vulcan nerve pinch and fails. As they begin to tear down the set the cast gives up and leaves. Kirk is told he has an offer from a margarine company and concludes the sketch by saying, "except for one television network, we have found intelligence everywhere in the galaxy."

Apparently the dress rehearsal went badly. Chase resented Belushi for being the central figure in the sketch (mirroring the Shatner/Nimoy rivalry). But the live performance went well and everyone was happy with it. As the years went by it was consistently ranked as one of the best sketches in SNL's history.

The sketch also hit the zeitgeist: people wanted more Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry and former cast members both praised SNL and it helped insure the franchise would continue. At the same it was one of Belushi's finest moments on the show - creating a breakthrough moment in pop culture.