A lot of credit goes to the self-described “healthy disrespect” of director and co-writer Nicholas Meyer, who confessed that he’d never seen an episode of Star Trek, and managed to humanise the Enterprise crew a little more with irreverent character notes – from now on, they weren’t just wooden mouthpieces for whatever ethical position was under dispute.

Something of a franchise hero, Meyer would return to write Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) and to write and direct another of the best installments, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country (1991). It’s often been said that the even-numbered Trek films are the keepers: those are Meyer’s, at least up until First Contact (1996).

What you might call the second wave of Trek-mania coincided, quite handily, with fallow years in Lucas’s universe, at least creatively speaking. After the mildly disappointing Return of the Jedi (1983) and a few spin-off adventures on TV for Droids and Ewoks, Lucas claimed to have no desire to expand the universe further, at least until the mid-1990s. There was no real commercial imperative: he’d already built his empire, and the explosion of the home video market in the 1980s could hardly have been better timed to keep it all ticking over. There’s a whole planet somewhere used as an off-world trash compactor for worn, torn and depleted VHS tapes of the original trilogy. Is that a sandstorm on Tatooine, or do you just need to adjust your tracking?

By this point, Star Trek had found its way back to the small screen again, where many would argue it more properly belongs, meaning that this now-insatiable worldwide demographic no longer had to wait two or three years between movie instalments, but had the overlapping pleasures of not one (The Next Generation, 1987-94), not two (Deep Space Nine, 1993-99), not three (Voyager, 1995-2001) but four (Enterprise, 2001-5) TV series to roam around in.