Totemic Artefacts: Playmates Star Trek: The Next Generation Part 1 – Wave 1 and the Bridge Crew
Alan Moore teaches us that reality begins with fiction. “The idea of a god is a god”. But fiction can not just be written, it also must be read. And when we read things, according to Shoshana Felman, we are not uncovering hidden meaning, but generating truth. And the truth that we generate will be different for each person, for each person is different themselves. My truth will not necessarily be your truth, and yours will not necessarily be mine.
If this project has taught me one thing, its this: Reinforcing my conscious intellectualization of the reading process by forcing me to undergo it at an intimate and primal level so that I may attempt to convey what I’ve seen to all of you. It’s a shamanic process; travel inside and out (because they’re the same thing) and try and share the experience through art for the benefit of others. It’s no great arcane secret-I’ve always helped that by my doing it, it would demonstrate that you could do it too.
When we talk about a work of art having a transformative effect on us and leaving a lasting impact on our lives, what we’re really talking about is the experiential meaning the work evoked in us, not the physical work itself. The material artefact is important, obviously, but that meaning only manifests when creators and audiences both react to it, and any meaning inherent to the text itself by necessity undergoes a process of translation. I can say Star Trek: The Next Generation has been a huge influence on my life for decades, but I’m only ever going to fixate on specific things about it that resonate with me personally: My positionality and perspective define what I take out of it and how I react to it.
And then what happens when ideas, characters and themes migrate? They travel, and are shaped and reformed by their travels just like the rest of us.
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| The Wave 1 line. |
The second line of Star Trek: The Next Generation toys and action figures debuted in the fall of 1992. Playmates Toys received the license this time, after the failure of Galoob’s earlier stab at adapting the show to the 3 1/4 inch plastic scale. Marketed, of course, as part of Star Trek’s 25th Anniversary (indeed, the only part of the two-year celebration apart from The Star Lost and The Return of Okona officially and specifically dedicated to Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: The Next Generation alone), Playmates’ auspicious first wave featured the toyetic likenesses of Captain Picard, Counselor Troi, Lieutenant Commander Data, Lieutenant Worf, Commander Riker, Lieutenant Commander Geordi La Forge, a Borg, a Ferengi, a Romulan and Gowron.
As fans we sometimes talk a lot about “our” Star Trek (or whatever your pop culture mythology of choice might be), or at least those of us who were exposed to the show sporadically on initial run broadcast TV do.…