Star Trek on Tour

We had Monday off from work, and decided to go down to Long Beach and check out the touring exhibit called “Star Trek: The Tour.” If you’re not familiar with this enterprise you can check out the web page about it if you’d like. Basically, it’s a very large collection of props, costumes and other memorabilia related to the five television series and ten movies that collectively make up the “Star Trek” franchise, along with a number of interactive and multi-media displays. Throw in a couple of flight simulator rides (depicting rides on the “shuttlecraft” spacecraft) and some very good set designs (including the bridge sets from both the Original series and the Next Generation series, several other “locations” aboard the fictional ships, and so on) and you’ve got the general idea.

It’s somewhere between the displays and exhibits you would find at a large Star Trek convention and the attractions you might find at a theme park – part WorldCon and part Universal Studios, if you will. As a member of the movie-going public, and specifically one who had just shelled out $30 a ticket to see this extravaganza, I was left with somewhat mixed feelings. On the one hand, they did an excellent job with the material; I’ve been through a large number of museum-grade exhibits that were not as well designed or executed. The chance to sit on the bridge of the Enterprise ™ and the Enterprise-D ™ is a kick, and the mock-up of a corridor aboard the later ship was very well done; you could almost believe you were there. They also had a short “interactive” video clip (representing a few minutes aboard a ship in the Star Trek universe) that was worth waiting in line to experience.

On the downside, the Tour facility does very little beyond feeding the nostalgia of the hardcore Trek fans. Gene Roddenberry’s vision included a whole galaxy of worlds, races, and cultures, not to mention a whole fleet of ships of different types, space stations, cities, artifacts, and so on; this exhibit provides an up-close look at a lot of the props and costumes, but it doesn’t really include any information you could not have picked up watching the movies and television episodes. And I don’t mean pouring over them frame-by-frame on your DVD player; I’m a fairly casual fan (a “Trekkist” in fan-speak, as opposed to the dedicated “Trekkers” and the fanatical “Trekkies”) and there was nothing in the collection I couldn’t have identified (and probably explained the significance of) if called upon to do so.

Upon reflection, the whole experience made me realize just how much untapped potential this concept really has. There is very little doubt that you could produce an entire theme park around the Star Trek franchise, much like the Harry Potter theme park under construction at the Universal complex in Orlando. The potential for rides, walk-through attractions, shows, video screenings, concerts, and interactive activities is huge, and if you include the period piece features and alternate realities offered by the Holodeck ™ in the later series, there’s really no limit to what you could do. Of course, you’d have to find an audience willing to shell out the requisite dollars for the experience. I’m not saying that this is the point of the current Tour project; I’m just saying that if somebody somewhere ISN’T watching Star Trek: The Tour carefully, with an eye to developing a permanent theme operation somewhere, I’m going to be very, VERY disappointed…