ON THE CUTTING EDGE: Take The Conn
Like CompuServe Classic, the original “Star Trek” TV series has its die-hard fans (in a perhaps unsurprising number of cases, they’re one and the same). The New York Times profiles several Trekkies who love the show so much, they painstakingly built themselves replicas of Captain Kirk’s chair:
[Scott] Veazie, 27, was not yet born when that show first went on the air in the 1960s; even his parents were only teenagers. During his childhood, there were “Star Trek” spinoffs on TV with more sophisticated special effects than the original, and a more contemporary sensibility, and there were also movies featuring the old show’s actors aboard updated versions of the Enterprise. But Mr. Veazie, who watched endless reruns of the original series with his mother in the 1980s, was never drawn to those later incarnations.
“The original show was the first one I saw,” he said. “It was so idealistic. A lot of us kids wanted to be Captain Kirk - and part of that was the chair.”
Mr. Veazie, a manager at Underwriters Laboratories, built the chair himself last year, and has been gratified to find, since installing it in the living room in May, that “when someone comes in, it’s the first thing they comment on.”
Serious Trekkies have long fashioned copies of their favorite costumes and props, and, back in the ’70s and ’80s, a few even put together homemade knockoffs of the captain’s chair, using reference materials like the “Starfleet Technical Manual” and “U.S.S. Enterprise Bridge Blueprints.” …
The current wave of interest seems to have started after the original chair was auctioned for $305,000 in 2002 and subsequently displayed at the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.
Editorial Notes:
Star Trek fans are at odds over whether they should be called “Trekkies” or “Trekkers.” The Stiletto herself prefers the former.
For Trekkies who are all thumbs, SkyMall sells a prefab version that swivels and has controls that light up and authentic sound effects for $2,717.01, plus $400 for shipping.
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