Author: Laurel L. Russwurm

I was an original Trekkie; as a small child I remember being properly amazed when my older brother explained just how enormous the USS Enterprise was when watching the original run of Star Trek.

The Canadian Trekkie’s Association was born in the EDSS high school library.

My friends and I would meet in the same corner and talk about Trek and science fiction.  After I submitted our group name to The Welcommittee, an International Trek fan listing the CTA was added to the international list of Star Trek fan clubs.  Suddenly we became more than just a handful of friends sharing an interest, we started getting mail from Canadian Trekkies because we were the Canadian Trekkies Association.  Bear in mind, these were the prehistoric days before the existence of email!

As this was Canada, the letters came from all across our massive geography, mostly from isolated fans, largely kids, but no matter what age, these were people who had no one else with whom to discus the incredible ideas they were encountering through Star Trek and other science fiction.  This may sound strange today, but back then science fiction was not considered at all cool.  It was certainly not mainstream.

Remember back in the 1970′s, Star Trek was a legendary tv series (that didn’t need to be qualified with “TOS” because there was only one Star Trek), and it had been cancelled when I was 10.  The idea fueling Star Trek fandom back then was to encourage a rebirth of the series.  Who knew it would work?

Suddenly awash with more than 100 Canadian Trekkie penpals, we decided we needed to do something special.  That something was my first foray into self publishing: the Canadian Trekkies Association fanzine, Canektion.

We moved our meetings into the high school art room after school.  The other CTA founder’s father conveniently owned a printery.  (Again, this was prehistory, long before anyone had even thought of desk top publishing.  Back then personal computers were still the stuff of science fiction, not reality.)  So we set to work and started putting together our publication. My artist brother happened to have a piece of original art he’d created for a job that had fallen through, and so he donated it to our project, and it became the cover art for our very first issue.

We published two issues, incorporating art and text submitted by our Canadian Trekkies, but in the end it proved to be too cumbersome a job for two young women pursuing two very different lives.  We tried to scale it back to a more manageable newsletter, but even that was more than we could reasonably manage.  All in all, it was a wonderful experience, and my first serious foray into self publishing.  (Fortunately selfpub is much easier these days.)

Star Trek showed me there were jobs to be had in the tv and movie business (I had no idea this wasn’t something generally considered doable in Canada). So while my friend & CTA co-founder Susan moved our west to achieve her farming dreams, I went to college to learn how to make movies.

I studied Media Arts at Sheridan College.  In my first year, one of my classmates, Greg Dawe, decided to create a feature length sync sound super 8 science fiction epic, “Star Trek: The Movie,” in large part as answer to the dreadful first feature film, “Star Trek: the Motion Picture.”

I played the communications officer on the student production of “Star Trek: The Movie,” but it seems there were no more women regulars on our Enterprise bridge in 1979 than there had been in 1966, certainly none above the rank of Lieurenant.  [My friend Lee ought to have been the Captain.]

A good bit of this epic movie was filmed on the life size reproduction USS Enterprise bridge (which I believe had been originally built for the 1976 Star Trek Convention).  In 1978 it lived upstairs at the now defunct “Mr. Gameways Ark” in downtown Toronto.  I am not sure how he managed it, but somehow Greg convinced the Sheridan College technical theatre department to build him the the navigation console (where Sulu and Chekov sat) which had not been part of the Star Trek set installation until then.   That was the price our student film maker paid for use of this amazing set.

Unfortunately the film was never finished, but I have to say, as the CTA co-founder, the experience of playing the communications officer on what was effectively the original series set was something sublime.

A ridiculous number of my fellow Sheridan College students went on to carve careers in the media business… ridiculous because the program had actually been intended for experimental filmmakers, documentarians… hobbyists, really.  Before us, making a living wasn’t an expected outcome of the program.  We didn’t know that going in; and when we did know, we refused to accept it.

Image Credit:
Star Trek: The Movie Photos taken by my classmate, David Moffatt ~ used with permission;
Thanks Dave!