The sheer number of fans, and the high percentage of both women and young people among them, rubbed many older, maler sci-fi buffs the wrong way. Who were these people showing up at their club meetings, at their conventions? Why were they so excited? Had they ever even read a book? They nicknamed Star Trek fans Trekkies—after groupies. The comparison to contemporary music’s young, female, and so also hysterically obsessed fans was meant to be unflattering.

Joan Winston, who, with Jacqueline Lichtenberg, helped organize the 1972 Statler convention and co-authored Star Trek Lives, a 1975 book documenting the phenomenon of Star Trek fandom, elaborates on this in Trekkies 2: “I would always say to people, ‘Trekkies are kids who run down the aisle screaming ‘Spock!’ I’m a Trekker. I walk down the aisle.’”

The brute force of fan enthusiasm (and, to be sure, the financial success of the first Star Wars) resurrected the franchise. The movies, of which there are now thirteen, began in 1979. The Next Generation (TNG) premiered in 1987, and until 2005, when Enterprise (ENT) was cancelled, there was always at least one Star Trek show on television, if not two. For some fans who, between TOS’s premiere in 1966 and TNG’s 21 years later, studied the original 79 episodes like a holy text, there would be only one Star Trek. But for many others, the eighties and nineties were Star Trek’s high water mark. Critically acclaimed and financially successful, Star Trek was genuinely popular.

“In the early nineties, we were doing 120 conventions a year.” It’s Friday afternoon in Vegas and two lackadaisic, suited men—Gary Berman and Adam Malin—sit on the mainstage of the “Leonard Nimoy Theater” (the Rio’s biggest ballroom) for a “Special Panel with the Co-Owners of Creation Entertainment!” Malin and Berman founded the company, which puts on fan conventions, as young comic book fans in 1971. They got in on the Star Trek market in the 1980s, and have been licensed as the official Star Trek convention since 1991. The 50th anniversary convention in Las Vegas, potentially the largest Star Trek convention ever, is a Creation event. But the nineties was their heyday. “We were doing like four or five shows a week,” Malin says. They look, after so many years in the business, more like loan sharks than sci-fi fans.

“People weren’t doing it for profit,” Mark Altman says of Star Trek’s early conventions. “They were doing it for love.”

“I was there for that first Star Trek convention in ’72,” Edward Gross adds. Both he and Mark coauthored the exhaustive two-volume oral history of the franchise, The Fifty Year Mission. “What struck me about it and subsequent cons through the mid-1970s is that there was a ‘hand-made’ feel to them. I remember sitting in large rooms where episodes were projected on the screen, and the audience said the lines along with the actors. It was a pre-Rocky Horror experience.”

Starting in the 1980s, Creation began to offer special guests substantial amounts of money to appear at their for-profit events rather than at fan-run functions. In the early years, says Mark, the actors “would show up at the conventions because they were just so flattered people cared about the show.” But, according to the Trimbles—who ran their own local convention, Equicon, in the 1970s—Creation deliberately scheduled their star-studded events on the same dates as long-running fan conventions, effectively driving them out of existence.

“It’s much more commercial now,” Mark continues, referring to the practice of tiered seating as well as paid autograph and photograph sessions. It’s a business model Creation pioneered. Pricing for the 50th anniversary convention ranged from $50, for a single day of admission early in the week, to $879, for the “Gold Weekend Admission Package,” which they describe in Trumpian hyperbole as “THE VERY BEST MOST UPSCALE WAY TO ATTEND THE ENTIRE CONVENTION.”