Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/26/the-man-who-saved-star-trek-has-died.html
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My favorite footnote to the story of the saving of Star Trek is that the first episode of Season 3, the phoenix-like revival of the show, was “Spock’s Brain”, widely regarded as the very worst episode of TOS. I can only imagine what those fans, who’d worked so hard to bring the show back, thought as they were watching it.
“Brain and brain! What is brain?”
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Ah, but who did they come to when they needed someone to write said poems?
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Also, Lucille Ball produced the two pilot episodes through her studio, allowing it to go into production.
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So that’s where the Bajorans came from!
Interesting you mention Time Tunnel, since that star was also Vic Fontane in DS9. Probably not an accident.
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So Star Trek as we know it today has to thank Lucille Ball, fans like John Trimble, and maybe even Martin Luther King, Jr. (for convincing Nichelle Nichols to stay on TOS). You know, it strikes me that maybe the nerds have always been at the leading edge of pop culture. We just haven’t always known who they were.
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Some of the very earliest films were based on books written by sci-fi nerds:
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We may or may not have been, but the geeks undeniably won the contest to define pop culture. Not that you’d know it from that certain subset of bitter middle-aged white male nerds who still wallow in their high school memories (sometimes imagined) of being persecuted outsiders.
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I bet Homer had regular walk-on cameos for stage productions of The Iliad and The Odyssey like he was Stan Lee.
And of course Gilgamesh was just the original hero of the MCU (Mesopotamian Cuneiformian Universe).
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They’re just mad that Star Trek’s gone all woke now, you know with their Black Mary Sue captain, and the little queer family… that kind of diversity just doesn’t make sense in the future!!! /s
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I knew about Bjo, but not about John.
Peace and Long Life.
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Most renaissance and Baroque painters did
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It still amazes me that Star Trek TOS was so huge in syndication that you could buy Trek toys like action figures and “Colorforms” in the mid-70’s, years after the show had ended.
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When I read the headline, I thought for a moment and said, “John Trimble must have died.” His wife Bjo was more well-known, having authored one of the essential Trek books of early fandom, “The Star Trek Concordance.” But the Trimble team’s efforts, not only for getting us the syndication-securing third season, but also the less well-known letter-writing campaign between the first and second seasons, is the stuff of superfan legend. Rest well, John.
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Well, you know, they never had politics in the old stories! 
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They were elegant toys for a more civilized age.
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And certainly none of that woke nonsense like racial equality…
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Star Trek has never shied away from holding a mirror up to society.
Of course citizens of the planet Cheron probably hate mirrors since their reflections look like people of a hated and inferior race.
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And because nerds are intersectional, the Society for Creative Anachronism has also bid vale to Master John ap Griffin
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