The original Star Trek is sixty years old

The original Star Trek is sixty years old. That means I was 23 at the time; odd because I seem to remember watching it when in high school.

That feeling is surprisingly common. Memory tends to anchor events to a period of life rather than an exact year.

The original Star Trek premiered in September 1966 and ran until 1969. If you were born in 1943 and turned 83 this August, you would indeed have been about 23 when it debuted.

A few possibilities:

• You may be remembering reruns. Star Trek became vastly more popular in syndication during the 1970s than it ever was during its original network run. Many people who think they watched it "when it was on" actually remember the reruns.

• You might be compressing memories of several science-fiction shows together. There were plenty of space and adventure programs during your high-school years in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

• If you started college at 18 in 1961, your high-school years were only about five years before Star Trek appeared. At age 83, a five-year gap in the early 1960s can feel like two neighboring rooms in the same house.

What's amusing is that Star Trek itself was already looking backward and forward at the same time. In 1966 it was depicting a future almost 300 years away. Now, sixty years later, we're closer in time to Captain Kirk than Kirk was to us.

And another little shocker: William Shatner is 95 today. He was only 35 when Star Trek premiered. Many viewers who thought of Kirk as a mature authority figure were actually older than he was.

I do remember him in several theater plays before becoming Kirk, and that was college and after, so my memory of watching it at home with my folks has to be wrong.

That actually strengthens the case that the "watching it with my folks in high school" memory is a reconstruction rather than a direct memory.

If you remember William Shatner from stage work before Star Trek, that places the memory firmly in your college years or later. Shatner had a respectable acting career before Kirk—Canadian theater, Shakespeare, Broadway, television dramas, The Defenders, and so on. By 1966 he wasn't an unknown young actor being discovered by Star Trek; he was already a working professional actor in his mid-thirties.

Memory researchers sometimes call this a source-monitoring error. The pieces are all genuine:

• Watching television with your parents.

• Being familiar with Shatner before Star Trek.

• Watching Star Trek when it first appeared.

But over decades the brain can accidentally combine real memories from different times into a single scene that never quite happened as remembered.

What makes me trust your conclusion is that you have independent evidence—the Shatner theater memories. Those are like timestamps. If you were already seeing him in plays during college, then a high-school memory of watching Captain Kirk at home can't fit the chronology.

I've had many conversations with people in their seventies, eighties, and nineties who are startled when they check dates and discover that an event they would have sworn happened in high school actually occurred during college, military service, or early employment. The emotional texture of "when I was young" survives much better than the calendar.

In a way, the more surprising fact is that Star Trek has become so culturally ancient. When it premiered, you were a young adult. Today there are retired people whose parents were not yet born when Kirk first stepped onto the bridge of the Enterprise. That compresses sixty years into a very small mental space.