It is officially Star Trek Day. 57 years ago on September 8, 1966, Star Trek was born with the premiere of the original series on NBC. The franchise lives on with multiple television programs, feature films and much more. Today Paramount celebrates the franchise with a pre-recorded special.
Star Trek Day special
The 22-minute program (filmed before the SAG-AFTRA strike) is hosted by Lower Decks voice actor Jerry O’Connell. Here is the official description:
A salute to the franchise, the special program will include segments that look back at memorable moments over the past 57 years; commemorate 50 years of Star Trek animation; pay tribute to Star Trek: Discovery, ahead of its final season; provide an exclusive sneak-peek clip from the upcoming fourth season of Star Trek: Lower Decks; and commemorate many other moments that highlight Star Trek’s legacy.
Watch it…
The Star Trek Day special will be available to watch for free globally on StarTrek.com/Day, YouTube (Paramount+ and STAR TREK official pages), Twitch (ParamountPlus), and Facebook (@StarTrekOnPPlus and @StarTrek). In the U.S., the special will be available to stream on Paramount+, Pluto TV (Paramount+ Picks, STAR TREK, More STAR TREK and Pluto TV Sci-Fi channels) and Mixable and will air on select local CBS affiliates, Comedy Central, Paramount Network, Pop TV, Fave TV and Smithsonian.com.
More coming on Star Trek Day…
Later today the first animated Very Short Treks animated short will debut on startrek.com and YouTube. There will also be a companion digital comic for this celebration of Trek animation.
Tonight the first two episodes of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds will air on CBS at 8 pm (ET/PT).
Finally, fans can use the code STARTREKDAY for 25 percent off site-wide at shop.StarTrek.com, which includes curated “Star Trek Day” and Star Trek: The Animated Series collections.
Keep up with news for the Star Trek Universe at TrekMovie.com.
Making zero mention of PRODIGY is just silly and lame- especially with the thematic focus on animation, and the line “there’s a Star Trek for everyone…”
Not just silly, but completely insulting to the fans, the cast, and the production crew.
This is bizarre to me too. Do they have to ignore it for some kind of legal reason? Some kind of quiet period before they sell it to another streamer? Other Trek shows have been cancelled; TOS and Enterprise. But they don’t pretend they don’t exist….
I’m not sure what you’re expecting – Prodigy has not been ‘cancelled’; Prodigy has been written off and disowned as a bad investment by Paramount. Unless/until someone decides to pick it up, it’s gone. Why would they spend any money or time promoting it, when they’ve washed their hands of it?
It’s just a 20 minute ad, not a documentary. People are putting too much thought into it.
The line about “a Star Trek for everyone” made it feel to me as if they had filmed a segment about Prodigy before P+ made the decision to can it, and then clumsily edited all references to Prodigy out of the special so as not to tell people to watch a show that’s not currently available… which is probably exactly what happened.
The show is canceled. Get over it.
This is literally the most ridiculous comment imaginable coming from a Star Trek fan. I’m certainly glad that they didn’t think that way about the Original Series.
I’m a fan but also a realist. It’s jut a cartoon aimed at kids that failed.
The weird thing is that it is not cancelled. There are 20 more episodes in production, and possibly more beyond that, even though there is zero indication of where people can see them.
I’m not sure what you don’t understand – Paramount dropped the series, and unless/until someone else ponies up cash to take it over, none of what has been ‘completed’ matters. So far, no one has come waving cash around eagerly to take Prodigy over. Whatever you think of its quality, it clearly did not meet Paramount’s goals of profitability, and expanding the Trek brand. In fact, it failed so badly, they wiped it from existence and wrote it off rather than merely ‘cancelling’ it.
You are incorrect. Both Paramount and the creators of the show have said so.
LOL 😅
It was canceled. The rest of the episodes will probably be dumped on some cheap ad supported streaming channel.
The creators of the show and Paramount have said that the show isn’t cancelled. Probably functionally it has as you state, but that is not the official outcome yet.
Yeah, and because at this point at least for me, that is the only watchable Trek show going.
Imagine. Imagine if they revealed Star Trek “4” is going to start production. Or if they revealed we’re going to get a series that has 26 episodes in it…
Don’t ask for miracles
I’d be super happy with 22 at this point.
They do mention the Starfleet Academy series and the Michelle Yeoh Section 31 movie.
Happy Birthday to Star Trek. God bless everyone who made Star Trek what it became.
I am the biggest Star Trek fan in the world and will be for the rest of my life, but I miss Star Trek too, I have not watched a TV show or movie worthy of the name now for the best part of 20 years.
I know it will return in all its former glory one day and the bad place it is currently in cannot last for ever.
Here is to the next 57 years.
LLAP to all Trek fans past present & future
THE HUMAN ADVENTURE IS JUST BEGINNING!!!!
The one and only genuinely funny moment was when the drag queen gives some random passer-by the Vulcan salute and asks what series it was from, and the passer-by responds, “The Big Bang Theory.”
I know that segment was just suppose to be fun and light hearted, but it was actually a bit depressing to me. Out of all the people she talked to, half of them couldn’t name a single character or alien from a show that is nearly 60 years old and has more content than any other sci fi franchise out there.
She asked a group to name one captain and one of them said Captain Joe. And this doesn’t surprise me of course, most of my own family can’t name a single character, alien or show either. My own mother couldn’t remember Shatner played Captain Kirk but oddly remembers him as TJ Hooker lol. I just wish they did something completely different instead and went where they filmed people at the convention for the earlier segment just made a trivia game with with some of them competing against each other and just showed that. That would’ve been more fun and less depressing than interviewing people on the street who can’t tell you a single thing about this franchise besides vague one word answers.
Eh… it’s hard to make a funny bit out of hardcore fans talking about the Tomed Incident or something. Sometimes you just stick to the formula for a reason.
At least she was hot Tiger.😉
In fairness if somebody stopped me in the street and asked me about any popular reality show or sports team, I would likely have no idea about them.
Man the comments section to this special is a disaster lol. Everyone (rightfully so) is complaining about Prodigy’s total omission from the special as if it never happened. Did Kirk or Janeway go back in time and somehow got this show erased? Or maybe it was the Temporal Wars, yeah, let’s just chalk everything up to that. It’s so bizarre as if someone is afraid they are going to get sued for admitting it was even made. The special is nothing more than a glorified ad for Paramount+ to stream Star Trek, but they can at least mention it for both the people who made it and its devoted fans.
Speaking of another weird omission, why were the movies (once again) completely left out too???? Doesn’t Paramount own all of those as well? Aren’t they all on P+ right now? It’s even stranger because the trailer they made to market Star Trek day actually had clips from all the movies too (and a first btw). But in the special, Jerry O’Connell quickly mentions the 13 films but then not a single reference or frame shown after that. Again, why? Supposedly, they are still trying to get another Kelvin movie or a movie of any kind off the ground before Star Trek hits its 70th birthday, but they can’t be bothered to remind people they are just as much a part of the franchise as all the shows are? How quickly your once big shiny movie franchise has fallen to the way side I guess.
Sorry to sound so negative lol, but if you’re airing a special that is supposedly celebrating Star Trek on it’s birthday, then it should celebrate all Star Trek, period. Not just the stuff they want people to stream.
Anyway, the special was OK overall, but certainly nothing to write home about.
I agree 100%. It is more glaring to omit content than to include it. Paramount seems to be run by immature, thin-skinned, bean-counters that have no idea what Star Trek really means. Remember the ad campaign last year “the Enterprise has landed?” Not only tone-deaf, but so obvious that they just don’t get it.
To be fair, their hands were tied by the strike this year. This is probably the best we were ever going to get.
The show was about trek tv shows not movies.
O’Connell should host Ready Room.
I would love that.
Why? Wil Wheaton is doing a fine job with it.
Speaking of the Ready Room, is there going to be an episode this week? If not, does anyone know when it will return?
My guess is that there won’t be any Ready Room episodes until the strikes are over.
Sliding Room
I feel a little cheated. No new announcements, barely a sneak peak at Disco S5 (the synopsis of “they unravel a mystery that takes them to the far corners of the galaxy” threw me – that’s every season!), and no mention of Prodigy. The way they talked about Picard like the whole thing was S3 was also funny.
I get some of what I just listed couldn’t be avoided. But if you don’t have anything new maybe don’t make a 22 minute video?
Considering the two strikes, I am surprised we got this pre-recorded special. It was never going to be what we got last year or the year before.
The omission of Prodigy is, however, insulting. I’m sure there’s some stupid legal reasoning behind it, but it’s still insulting.
There are two labor actions in progress. There’s nothing to announce.
check variety’s top 57 ST episodes
Best of Both Worlds #12?
Who is the special made for? I thought the whole thing was really cringe. As a fan since 1970, there was nothing in it that appealed to me and I can’t see how it would’ve been enticing to people who didn’t know Tprek to want to take a dive in. As I asked, who is this made for?
Apparently, not you. Not every Trek is going to appeal to anyone, but tolerance – one of the core tenets of Star Trek since its creation – should allow us to be accepting of that.
Please I don’t need a lecture in IDIC. I legit want to know what the thinking behind this was. As the poster below said, it’s an advertorial. And yes! Kudos to Jerry!
I think it was likely made for millennials and younger for whom Discovery and after are their primary experience of Star Trek.
This “special” started to autoplay as a long-form ad during another video I was watching on YouTube. It’s basically an advertorial. Funny stuff. Jerry is great despite this being a mess.
Unless they announce an HD remaster of DS9 this day means nothing. I swear to god if I was a billionaire the first thing id do is give paramount the money, just give it to them, to do a total HD remaster of DS9. All the billionaires in the world and not one of them is a DS9 fan? Sure cancer needs curing and god damn it. DS9 looks like shit on my 65 inch OLED.
It continues to feel bizarre that the highest-profile science fiction tv franchise of all time has two entire series trapped in SD. I can’t imagine there not eventually being something, even if it’s a beefier version of the Stargate SG1 bluray AI upscale down the line when that technology improves. Something as huge as the Dominion War can’t forever be relegated to vague rectangular squares of color floating around.
I won’t lie, I came to DS9 late in life. I wasn’t a huge trek fan. Had seen some TNG as a kid, some of the movies. But I was a Star Wars guy. I went to watch DS9 on Netflix a couple times after it was recommended to me by a friend & the SD quality was so poor I couldn’t do it. Then during the pandemic I decided screw it, life’s too short. DS9 made me a Trek fan. It was one of the great TV experiences I’ve had & sometimes I wish I could watch it all again as a first timer. Afterwards I binged TNG which in HD was like night & day compared to DS9. Then the Original Series. Voyager didn’t really do it for me and I could barely get by the hilariously dated(even when it was made) Enterprise opening titles. My god what were they thinking? TNG, DS9 and Voyager had epic, beautiful, majestic themes. Now we are doing what sounds like a Rob Stewart 1980s song? But I digress…
When I watched the DS9 documentary with the HD footage my jaw was on the floor. Wow. It looked fantastic. I need that in my eyeballs. It was almost an unfair tease. But I think the SD is keeping the show from growing new fans. It almost did with me.
Why am I thinking about the Make-a-Wish Foundation? And I also have a 65″ OLED
Amaturish
Also amateurish!
I was a bit disappointed that the Lower Decks sneak peek was for an episode that already aired. They could have showed us a clip from next week. A Discovery trailer or clip would also have been nice. And they could have at least mentioned Prodigy.
What’s the dude from Sliders doing here? Star Trek, Sliders crossover?
He is a voice cast member of Lower Decks.
Oh okay, but I still want a Star Trek, Sliders crossover😁
That would be a logical crossover. Trek has crossed over with multiple other franchises in the comics – Planet of the Apes, X-Men, Doctor Who. If you can get a successful Sliders comic going, maybe you could match them up that way.
Interestingly enough, there was talk about a Doctor Who, Star Trek Enterprise crossover episode when Russell T. Davies was working on the Doctor Who reboot.
Transformers
Jerry did say 10 spin off series. Near the end there is a list of 10 ST series. When you take out the original that leaves 9 so Prodigy was counted as a spin off series but not mentioned. Discovery may have kicked off the new round of ST related series but it is the only ST series I didn’t watch all the way through. I gave up on it at the end of season 2 when the ship went in to the future. I haven’t watched another episode of that series since.
Cool story
Take my word with Discovery… you’re not missing much. I wish I stopped at season 2 as well.
I have watched 2 seasons of Lower Decks and never once realized Jerry O’Connel is voicing Ransom. He is such a fun guy usually and is put in such roles (like in Crossing Jordan or Kangaroo Jack) so his voice never clicked for me as familiar as the stuck-up action hero guy cliche Ransom.
They should put his name in the credits to help people know he’s there…
I finally got around to watching this. What a waste of a half hour. The worst segment, I thought, was the Jackie Cox one; not because she didn’t give it her all (I’d never heard of her and thought she was pretty damn funny), but because the entire premise seemed to be, “Almost nobody knows anything about Star Trek beyond a few mild basics, and plenty don’t even know that, so let’s go out and prove how cringey, oops, hahaha, I mean how awesome this entire franchise is.”
I don’t know why Star Trek is so embarrassed by itself.