Skip to main content

Digital Trends may earn a commission when you buy through links on our site. Why trust us?

Look back on 50 years of Star Trek in Paramount’s anniversary trailer

star trek 50th anniversary video 1 970x647 c
NBC
With the Star Trek franchise celebrating its 50th anniversary this week, Paramount Pictures is paying tribute to the sci-fi saga with a new video that celebrates the big-screen history of the franchise.

Titled “Celebrating 50 years of Star Trek … and Beyond” the video features a montage of scenes culled from each of the Star Trek movies, from the (somewhat forgettable) 1979 original film, Star Trek: The Motion Picture, on through the “Next Generation” era, and all the way to this year’s Star Trek Beyond, featuring the new cast and rebooted “Kelvin” timeline.

Recommended Videos

The video was posted on Facebook’s official Star Trek page, and offers a nice mix of iconic moments and imagery that put the spotlight on the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise over the years in all of the ship’s various iterations, and that reminds fans of how much things have changed — and how much they’ve remained the same from those early days.

The first episode of Star Trek aired September 8, 1966, making yesterday the official 50th anniversary of the television show’s premiere. The series went on to spawn 13 feature-length films, as well as six spinoff series (including a short-lived animated series). The sixth of those series, Star Trek: Discovery, will premiere in 2017.

To date, the 13 films in the Star Trek franchise have collectively earned nearly $1.4 billion in U.S. theaters and $1.7 billion worldwide.The most recent film, Star Trek Beyond, has earned $155.4 million domestically and $294 million worldwide so far. A 14th film — the fourth film in the rebooted timeline — was confirmed by the studio to be in development.

Rick Marshall
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
The Acolyte’s first trailer embraces the Dark Side of Star Wars
Amandla Stenberg in The Acolyte.

Since the launch of Disney+ in 2019, there have been four live-action Star Wars series, including The Mandalorian and Andor. But the one thing that each of those shows had in common was that they followed the hero of the story. This summer, The Acolyte is flipping the switch on that by putting the spotlight on Mae (Amandla Stenberg), a former Padawan in the Jedi Order who seems to have quite a grudge against her onetime masters. That may be why Mae is attacking and apparently killing Jedi with knives in the first trailer for The Acolyte.

The Acolyte | Official Trailer | Disney+

Read more
7 best Star Trek parodies, ranked
A space crew stand on a planet in The Black Mirror's USS Callister episode.

For more than 50 years, Star Trek has been an institution, especially among the nerds of America. The original Star Trek series has spawned various movies and additional shows in the years since it aired, and those shows have been met with various levels of acclaim and criticism.

Alongside all of these more faithful series, though, there have also been a number of parodies of Star Trek, its tropes, and the world it's set in. We've gathered seven of the very best of those parodies for this list, which range from TV episodes to entire movies.
7. Star Trek: Lower Decks
Star Trek: Lower Decks First Look

Read more
10 best episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, ranked
The Enterprise NX-01 departs drydock on Star Trek: Enterprise

Every Star Trek series is someone’s favorite (Star Trek: The Animated Series stans, we see you), but when it comes to the 18-year Golden Age of Trek between 1987 and 2005, the prequel series Enterprise is easily the least beloved. Airing on UPN for an abbreviated four-season run, Enterprise was meant to shake things up after three consecutive series set in the late 24th century.
Imagined as a sort of origin story for Star Trek in the style of The Right Stuff, creators Rick Berman and Brannon Braga wanted to capture the danger and excitement of United Earth’s early interstellar space program, even planning to spend the entire first season on Earth preparing for the launch of Starfleet’s very first Starship Enterprise. The network, however, had other ideas, insisting that Berman and Braga not meddle with the consistently successful Star Trek formula. Thus, despite taking place two centuries earlier, Enterprise became, essentially, “more Voyager,” which in turn had been “more Next Generation,” a once-great sci-fi procedural that was nearly a decade past its peak.
That’s not to say that the series didn’t improve throughout its four-season run. After two years of struggling to justify the show’s very existence, Berman and Braga swung for the fences with a radically different third season that reinvented Enterprise (now renamed Star Trek: Enterprise) as a grim and gritty serialized drama unpacking the aftermath of a 9/11-scale attack on Earth. While immediately more compelling, the revamp failed to boost the show’s sagging ratings, and it was reworked yet again the following year, and leaned further into the “prequel to Star Trek” angle under new showrunner Manny Coto. This, many fans will argue, is where Enterprise finally found its legs, but it was too little and too late to prevent its cancellation. Still, each iteration of the troubled spinoff had its highlights and our list of the 10 strongest Enterprise episodes is spread fairly evenly throughout the run of the show.
Warning: This article contains spoilers for each listed episode.

10. Babel One/United/The Aenar (season 4, episodes 12, 13, & 14)

Read more