How Star Trek became a global enterprise

How popular is Star Trek?

As a multimedia, pop-culture phenomenon, it's in the rarefied company of mega-franchises like Superman, James Bond and Star Wars. There have been 716 episodes of Star Trek's various TV incarnations, along with 10 feature-length movies that have grossed some £800m. Merchandising, including home videos, action figures, computer games, toy laser guns, and other interstellar bric-a-brac, has pulled in another £2.6bn, and somewhere on Earth, a Star Trek book is sold every six seconds. Star Trek has also spawned an entire language, Klingon, and more websites than the US government, while many of the series' catchphrases - "Resistance is futile" and "Live long and prosper", for example - have joined the popular idiom.

Why the enduring fascination?

Star Trek's simple but thought-provoking premise has proved to be irresistible. In virtually every Star Trek format, a crew of humans and aliens sets off in a giant spaceship to explore strange new worlds and advance the frontiers of knowledge, while getting in and out of trouble. Devotees say the flexible structure offers a convenient vehicle for delving into such universal themes as war, prejudice, power and love. It's also a lot of fun, with state-of-the-art special effects used to create a galaxy in which Earthlings, having invented such useful tools as teleporting and warp drive, interact with the cybernetic Borg, telepathic Betazoids, and countless other exotic species.

Who likes this stuff?

Forty-year-old nerds who still live with their parents, for a start. But beyond them, the ranks of Trekkies (or "Trekkers", as many prefer to be called) include the Dalai Lama, New York Times publisher Arthur O Sulzberger Jr, Bill Gates, and King Abdullah of Jordan, who made a guest appearance on a segment of Star Trek: Voyager. People who love Star Trek, says Washington Post writer Frank Ahrens, are "perhaps the oddest, smartest, and most intense" on the planet. The most devoted of them are compelled to decorate their homes in Star Trek motifs, dress up in exact replicas of Starfleet uniforms, attempt to reconcile inconsistencies between episodes, and assimilate hoards of trivia questions, eg: "What is the Vulcan time of mating called?" (Pon farr is the answer.)

Was Star Trek always this big?

Hardly. The original series, which ran from 1966 to 1969 on NBC, was a money-loser that never attracted a large audience. While some critics liked it, many didn't; Variety magazine called it a "dreary mess of confusion". The show was cancelled after 79 episodes, forcing the creator, Gene Roddenberry (a former bomber pilot and motorcycle cop) to make ends meet by selling Star Trek scripts, film clips and other memorabilia. William Shatner, who played the heroic Captain James T Kirk, was reduced to living out of a camper van and appearing in B-movies like Kingdom of the Spiders.

So what turned it around?

Re-runs and fans. Syndicated in the early 1970s, Star Trek gradually accumulated a devoted following on local American TV channels.