I'm here from Florida because I love Star Trek. It's my favourite thing.
And I decided to come to Vegas as my vacation for the big convention.
I've been a Star Trek fan since I was 11 years old
and watched classic Trek on Sunday afternoons with my dad.
We came to Star Trek Experience,
and we entered a costume contest there and took second prize.
Live long and prosper.
I think Star Trek fans follow
the sort of humanist vision of Gene Roddenberry.
Roddenberry was a man that
believed in the positive nature of the human spirit, I think.
He believed that our civilisation would sooner or later
mature and come to embrace itself in all of its diversity.
He felt that we'd be one giant fraternity and sorority.
Everybody would come together.
And that spirit of camaraderie extended to the fans themselves.
So through the conventions, they were able to come together
and have that sort of feeling of kinship, and express those feelings together
as well as their love of the show itself.
My name is Diana Hoff.
I'm from Kuna, ldaho, which is a very, kind of, small little town, but I like it.
We came here because this is one of the biggest and nearest
that we've had in a very long time. This has been just wild.
There are so many people here. We've met people from all over the world.
Even in the airport, we were running into people who were coming here.
So it's really been a fantastic experience. We're just having a blast.
I call myself a living prop.
I'm there for people to take pictures with, share ideas with, talk with.
We're here to share the good times with people,
to give them a chance to, you know, have a feeling, a camaraderie
and be part of Star Trek.
I had a very enlightening moment the other day.
Originally, I had some pictures stolen from me,
and some other fans gave me some pictures to replace them,
which shows you, in Star Trek, there's a kindness of heart
that can't be matched hardly in everything else.
In New York, in 1971, I think I went to the second Star Trek convention.
There were about 2,000 people gathered in an auditorium there
to see "The Cage," you know, which had not been aired.
And Roddenberry, Gene Roddenberry,
ran the 16 mm projector for the audience.
The weekend before, I had made a little phaser prop,
and there were no toys available.
I felt like I was the only one in the world that had a phaser.
I showed up at this auditorium.
There were 2,000 people craning their heads just to see this little toy phaser.
I didn't want to risk it, but I decided I'd pass it to the guy next to me.
And I saw it go down the row, and then up the next row,
and then down the row, and then up the next row.
My phaser was just disappearing into the crowd. And about 20 minutes later,
sure enough, on the other side, my phaser came around right back to me.
I thought for sure it would have been stolen.
But that's the kind of crowd it was, they wouldn't have done that.
I really enjoy coming to conventions and communing with the other fans
and hearing their stories and how they got into it.
You see the same people at conventions.
You may not know their names, but you see the same faces.
And you form friendships, you know, not necessarily
that you'll go home and socialise with, but you form friendships that,
for conventions, you come back together again,
"How have you been?" "How are the kids?" "What's been going on?"
And for that particular weekend, you form some tight bonds.
I met Cathy-- It's really funny, we're both named Cathy,
hers with a C, mine with a K. We met back in high school.
And at the time, we both liked to write.
From there, you know, our paths went different ways for a few years.
And then there was, like, a 20-year gap,
and then we got back together, actually, just about five years ago,
and we've been coming to conventions.
We just realised that, "Oh, well, you like Star Trek too?"
And she goes, "Well, yeah."
So I go, "Well, let's start going to--"
You know, "I'm going to convention, do you wanna go?"
And she said, "Yeah."
We're helping to staff Michael Westmore's table.
And we were bringing up three of the heads for his table.
We brought up the Andorian and the batwing and the Suliban head.
It was really kind of funny.
At certain places, you'd have people look and take a second look.
You see this Suliban head staring out the window or--
And then there'd be other places that, you know, people just walked on by.
They were really jaded.
That was an experience. It was really fun.
Well, you know, we always like to take and show everybody,
the Star Trek fans, what it really looks like.
So we put together an exhibit, pull the heads off the walls
because back at the studio, they just kind of sit there gathering dust.
So it's fun to take them out, clean them up
and bring them and exhibit them
so they can see all of the work that's actually being done:
The paint jobs and the sculpting and the modelling.
I like to talk about that, too,
so then they can come back into the exhibit area
and actually coordinate with what they've heard and what they see.
Oh, look at that.
Look at that. Nice. Nice.
One of my ships is approaching your starboard docking port.
I'd like you to board it immediately.
You have five minutes.
If you don't comply, I have permission to destroy Enterprise.
Look at this guy. What a good guy, huh?
A face only a mother could love.
You mind if I sign your shoulder? It won't hurt.
Voila.
What's so interesting with the Star Trek fans
is they come from all walks of life.
You can be talking to a paperboy or you can be talking to an attorney,
and they both can be standing there in their uniforms they've put together.
It's a lot of fun to be able to get into the skin and place.
It's like being able to do Halloween on a very serious level.
They're getting inside the characters of Star Trek and really enjoying it.
And, of course, a convention like this allows them to all come together
and create this universal family.
Well, 27 years ago, both of us were 13,
and we both were subscribers
to Majel Roddenberry's Star Trek newsletter.
And we both signed up for the pen-pal list,
and that's how we initially started corresponding with each other.
We wrote probably at least once a week,
and sometimes more than once a week for years,
till we were out of high school and college,
and then decided we should meet in person, and did.
And then Eric decided to turn Star Trek into a career.
We thought it was funny because she lived in Baltimore and I lived in Oregon,
and we were, like, 3,000 miles apart.
So when we were old enough to actually travel on our own,
we met up in person in San Francisco.
So he started working on Next Generation
and was totally immersed in Star Trek
just about the time that I decided I had other things to do.
And then just about the time that he had enough Star Trek
and was getting totally over it because he worked on it for years,
I rediscovered Voyager
and now have dragged him to conventions for the past two years.
And the lnternet kind of helped rekindle our pen-pal-ship
after all these years, and it's been an amazing--
The technology has brought people back together again.
So it's kind of cool. We see each other now almost two or three times a year.
And for the first, like, five or six years that we knew each other,
- we never even met in person. - Yeah.
- So it's kind of funny. - It's a almost 30-year friendship.
I haven't been out to a lot of conventions. I'm a writer, see,
and I'm most comfortable being alone in a dark room with my computer.
But every once in a while, if I want to promote something,
Iike some special Star Trek Experience comes up,
I'll come out to a convention. And I'm astonished by one specific thing:
The fans of the shows that we love, the Star Trek shows,
they pay such meticulous attention to what writers do.
You don't get that on most television shows.
But if we make a mistake, we hear about it.
And I respect the fact that these are smart people
who want ambitious storytelling,
who don't settle for second-rate storytelling.
Michael Piller did a wonderful thing
when he opened up a script-submission policy.
And it gave so many writers a really good chance to break in,
not just to Star Trek but to the business.
And some of our most famous writers on Star Trek
came in through their spec scripts.
I wanted to promote writing, see,
and I wanted to be able to get the ideas from these people.
If we got a great idea, a great story or something we could actually use,
it made the whole program worthwhile.
Maybe only one out of 100, one out of 200,
but every once in a while, we found a great writer that way.
People like Ron Moore, Rene Echevarria,
they all came out of fandom, coming to the show
and writing a script and letting us discover genuine talent out there.
This was the first ever virtual Star Trek convention
where you can participate in a Star Trek convention
without ever leaving your home, wherever you were in the country.
And we could bring fans from all over the world to one place, at one time.
They could participate, they could chat,
they can see those precious moments of live events with the celebrities
that only happened that once. These are not recorded,
these are not sold on video and DVD afterward, these conventions,
and they happen in those moments. And it's great to be able
to bring those moments to people right when they happen.
So they're experiencing,
they're sharing that level of the experience together.
The virtual convention,
the idea of travelling in time or being together virtually,
it seems so symbionic with Star Trek, in general.
Fans even responded by saying that it was--
It just seems so in character.
Eugene Roddenberry even said
this is what his father would have envisioned,
and how it seems like the perfect extension
of what Star Trek really stands for and what it can mean.
Robert, do you take Suzanne to be your lawfully wedded wife?
I do.
And, Suzanne, do you take Robert to be your lawfully wedded husband?
I do.
I've always been a Star Trek fan.
I had heard that they were going to close The Experience,
and I didn't want to miss it.
So I went there, and as soon as I went down into Quark's,
I saw these two old-style Klingons there,
and this one really caught my eye.
And I thought, "Wow, what a nice-looking Klingon."
And I went over and started talking to him, and he was very nice.
We ended up talking all night, then I had to fly home that morning.
And I didn't say anything to him.
I was really shy and thought, "Somebody like him
would never go for someone like me," and he thought the same thing.
And I didn't come back for six months, and I didn't think he remembered me.
We ended up talking for a few hours, and I had to fly home that night.
And this happened four times over two years.
And I came to a convention last September.
I guess you could call that sort of our first dates.
And I forgot what we were talking about, but I suddenly blurted out
I had a crush on her, and it turns out she had a crush on me,
and from there, our friendship became a little more serious.
And we met several times since then, and things just got deeper and deeper.
And now we are now married at The Experience,
and this is our honeymoon here at the convention, and we love it.
- And with this ring, - And with this ring,
- because I love you, - because I love you,
- I marry you. - I marry you.
- I join my life with you, - I join my life with you,
- and all that I am, - and all that I am,
- all that I have, - and all that I have,
- and all of my love - and all my love
- I truly and freely give to you. - I truly and freely give to you.
We were walking down the hallway one day. It was, like, our second date,
and he was already sure that he was going to marry me
because he said just conversationally, you know,
"Well, if we ever got, like, really close and got married,
would you wanna get married on the bridge of starship Enterprise?"
And I was like, "Yes, that would be great."
I was just a little fearful that might come across a little too Star Trek-ish
because we're more science-fiction fan, so I thought,
"Well, she might think I'm a little too serious about science fiction."
So I thought, "Well, should I say or not say it?"
And I just decided, "Well, I'm not gonna know if I don't say anything."
Nearly tackled me in the hallway when I had mentioned it to her.
And I was just pleased that she was willing to go along with it.
Therefore, as captain of the bridge of the USS Enterprise,
I now pronounce you and present you as husband and wife.
Admiral, you may kiss your bride.
And everybody has just been so nice,
and people are walking up to us all the time and going,
"Oh, you're the Star Trek wedding couple. Congratulations."
Even today, out of our gown and uniform,
they're still going up to us going, "l remember, I saw you yesterday.
You're the wedding couple."
I didn't think that would happen.
I figured the next day no one would remember anything.
Nichelle Nichols and Robert Picardo
came up and shook our hands, and they're like,
"Many, many years of happiness to both of you."
And it was like, "Wow, Nichelle Nichols, Robert Picardo."
Ladies and gentlemen, arriving all the way from Vegas,
Mr and Mrs-- Or Admiral and Mrs Robert Hauglin.