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

Rick Marshall
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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.

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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.

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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.

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Rick Marshall
Rick Marshall
Former Digital Trends Contributor
A veteran journalist with more than two decades of experience covering local and national news, arts and entertainment, and…
The 10 best Star Trek: The Original Series episodes, ranked
Captain Kirk, upset, buried waist-deep in Tribbles.

It’s hard to imagine today, but back in the late 1960s, the original Star Trek was not considered a hit. The ambitious science fiction series was constantly on the brink of cancellation and was cut short only three years into its planned five-season run.
However, it’s important to put Trek’s apparent failure into historical context as, given that most markets in the U.S. had only three television channels to choose from, even a low-rated show like Star Trek was being watched by about 20% of everyone watching television on a Thursday night, or roughly 10 million households. This year’s season of HBO’s Succession was viewed by roughly 8 million households a week, which makes it a hit by today's standards. Star Trek’s audience only grew once it went into reruns in the early 1970s, and by the time Star Trek: The Motion Picture hit theaters in 1979, it was a genuine cultural phenomenon. Today, the Star Trek franchise is considered one of the crown jewels of the Paramount library.
Though arguably outshined by its most prosperous spinoff, Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: The Original Series holds up remarkably well for a vision of our future imagined nearly 60 years in our past. It’s a space adventure series that tackles social or political issues from what was, at the time, a daring and progressive perspective informed by the contemporary civil rights movement, sexual revolution, and backlash against the Vietnam War. Conveying these values through fanciful science fiction didn’t only allow its writers to get away with a lot of subversive messages, it also delivered them in a way that remains fun to watch decades later — fun enough that fans are willing to forgive when its ideas, or its special effects, crumble under modern scrutiny.
These 10 episodes, however, unquestionably stand the test of time, and thanks to the continuity-light nature of mid-20th century television, any one of them could be your first Star Trek episode. (Be aware, however, that the order in which classic Trek episodes are listed varies depending on the source. For our purposes, we’re using the numbering from streaming service Paramount+.)

10. Mirror, Mirror (season 2, episode 4)

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The Interstellar crew lands on a shallow ocean planet.

Just a few years after rebranding CBS All Access into Paramount+, the streamer has become one of the largest in the country, now holding over 60 million subscribers. With tons of original programming, a large collection of Paramount movies, and even an option to bundle in Showtime, the streaming service has lots to love.

It should also come as no surprise that Paramount+ has tons of excellent sci-fi movies since the streamer is probably best known for its massive collection of Star Trek shows and movies, including tons of originals. If you're looking for some great sci-fi movies to watch this summer, here are five you definitely need to check out.
Interstellar (2014)

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The 10 best Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episodes, ranked
Captain Sisko brandishes a phaser rifle outdoors in the DS9 episode "Rocks and Shoals"

For decades, Deep Space Nine was “that other Star Trek show.” It debuted in 1992, during the run of Star Trek: The Next Generation, the first Trek series to achieve mainstream popularity. DS9 overlapped in first-run syndication with TNG until 1994, and then with Voyager — which ran on primetime network television — from 1995 to 2001. Throughout its seven-year run, Deep Space Nine was never a top priority for studio Paramount or franchise executive producer Rick Berman. While this was a source of frustration for the cast and crew, the studio’s neglect also allowed them to take greater creative risks.
Under showrunner Ira Steven Behr, DS9 gleefully subverted the Star Trek formula, pulling open the cracks in the franchise’s futuristic utopia and refusing to be bound by the episodic nature of weekly television. DS9’s serialized stories and long character arcs may have made it harder to keep up with when it first aired, but it’s perfect for the modern binge-streaming model, which has introduced it to a whole new generation of fans. Thirty years after its debut, Deep Space Nine is finally receiving the respect it always deserved.
Selecting just ten episodes of DS9 to showcase is a challenge, as many of its most compelling stories are spread out across multiple episodes. Some of the episodes below are totally standalone stories, some are standout chapters in multi-part arcs that can be appreciated on their own, and some are two-parters that we simply couldn’t separate and had to list as a single entry. We hope you don’t mind us bending the rules just a bit — after all, that’s part of what made DS9 great to begin with.

10. In Purgatory’s Shadow/By Inferno’s Light (season 5, episodes 14 and 15)

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