From Khan to Kirk: New Jersey Marks 60 Years of Star Trek

Star Trek turns 60 on Sept. 8, and the official anniversary campaign has been built around a phrase that sounds especially appropriate once New Jersey’s calendar is placed in one list: “Space for Everybody.” Paramount’s yearlong celebration was announced as an invitation built around hope, exploration and participation rather than one single official way to commemorate the franchise. New Jersey appears to have taken that literally. There is no one statewide convention swallowing the anniversary. Instead, the celebration is distributed across multiplexes, restaurants, public libraries, a historic arts center and one of New Jersey’s major performing-arts theaters. Fans can watch restored movies with hundreds of strangers, eat dinner with a local STARFLEET chapter, hear the music played by an orchestra, watch Khan break into song, spend a free day doing trivia in a county library and, four months later, sit in the same room with the actor who made Captain Kirk one of television’s permanent cultural figures. Taken together, the events form something better than a single mega-convention. They show how a sixty-year-old franchise survives: not by remaining one thing, but by becoming useful to different kinds of fans in different kinds of rooms. The anniversary is already on New Jersey screens The first leg of New Jersey’s anniversary run is already underway. Paramount’s national theatrical celebration is pairing four restored Star Trek films with four episodes from The Original Series, with the television episodes making their theatrical debuts. The series opened Friday, Sept. 4 with Star Trek: The Motion Picture - The Director’s Edition paired with “The Changeling.” Today, Sept. 5, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan - The Director’s Cut is paired with “Space Seed.” Sept. 6 brings Star Trek III: The Search for Spock with “Amok Time,” and Sept. 7 pairs Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home with “The City on the Edge of Forever.” On Star Trek Day itself, Sept. 8, participating theaters can run the complete four-pair marathon. The national engagement is playing in more than 750 U.S. theaters, and published New Jersey listings span the state. Confirmed listings include AMC locations in Clifton, Paramus, Elizabeth, Rockaway, New Brunswick, Freehold and Eatontown; Cinemark locations in Hazlet and Somerdale; Reading Cinemas Manville with TITAN LUXE; Regal locations including Commerce Center in North Brunswick, Hadley Theatre in South Plainfield and Moorestown Mall; and Kerasotes ShowPlace 14 in Secaucus. Not every theater is carrying every presentation at the same time, so the practical advice is simple: check the exact theater and date before leaving home. The fan community has already turned the national program into a local gathering. This afternoon, the USS Justice chapter of STARFLEET is meeting at AMC Rockaway 16 for the 4 p.m. “Space Seed” and Wrath of Khan pairing, with an informal pre-movie meal planned nearby. It is a small detail, but an important one. A nationwide anniversary event becomes a New Jersey event the moment a local crew decides which row it is sitting in. Sept. 8: Star Trek Day becomes dinner in Riverdale The anniversary date itself moves from the auditorium to the dinner table. On Tuesday, Sept. 8 at 7 p.m., USS Justice and the Northern New Jersey Star Trek MeetUp will hold a 60th Anniversary Dinner at Flaming Grill & Buffet in Riverdale. The gathering asks members to RSVP so the group can give the restaurant a head count. There are larger official Star Trek Day activations happening around the world, but there is something particularly fitting about the New Jersey version being dinner. The franchise’s history was sustained for years by fan clubs, conventions, newsletters and people who kept meeting even when there was no new Star Trek on television. A restaurant table full of fans is not secondary to the anniversary. It is part of the mechanism that made an anniversary possible. Sept. 12: Princeton and Bound Brook offer two very different Trek rooms Saturday, Sept. 12 creates the first real planning problem of the New Jersey anniversary: two strong events overlap. Princeton Public Library will hold a Star Trek 60th Anniversary Celebration from 2 to 4 p.m. in its Community Room. The program begins with a screening of the original 1966 premiere episode, then moves into Star Trek trivia and a themed craft. It is deliberately all-ages and community-scale, the kind of library program where someone who has never been to a convention can walk in and understand immediately what is happening. At nearly the same time, Brook Arts Center in Bound Brook opens the doors at 1 p.m. for its special presentation of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, with the film scheduled for 3 p.m. Actor Steven Lance, who appeared in the 1979 film and was involved in early Star Trek convention culture before his screen appearance, is scheduled for a talk-back. Representatives from the Star Trek Challenger and Avenger chapters are also expected on site. The overlap is inconvenient for completists and useful for the larger story. Princeton is celebrating the television beginning. Brook is celebrating the moment Star Trek survived long enough to become cinema. Sixty years of history is large enough that New Jersey can put two different chapters in two different rooms on the same afternoon and still have both feel necessary. Sept. 13: Star Trek becomes a symphony Brook continues the following afternoon with Star Trek: A Symphonic Voyage at 3 p.m. The Brook Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Vacca, will perform music inspired by the franchise across its television and film history. The concert may be the cleanest demonstration of how far Star Trek has traveled from its original medium. The music has always been part of the architecture of the franchise, from the opening television fanfare to the sweeping film scores that taught audiences how large space was supposed to feel. On Sept. 13, the images become optional and the score gets the room to itself. Sept. 18–27: The Wrath of Khan gets a musical makeover Five days later, Brook finishes its three-part anniversary sequence by doing the least reverent thing possible to one of Star Trek’s most revered films. KHAN!!! The Musical opens Sept. 18 and runs for eight performances through Sept. 27. The New Jersey premiere of Brent Black and Alina Roth’s parody turns Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan into live musical comedy, complete with revenge, space battles, dancing Vulcans, oversized theatrical egos and mutant space chickens. That is not a detour from the anniversary. It may be evidence of the franchise’s health. A story has to become culturally sturdy before fans can lovingly dismantle it, sing through it and still expect everyone in the room to know exactly what is being parodied. Brook’s September run moves from preservation to orchestration to parody in the space of two weeks. There is also a wonderfully precise piece of New Jersey timing attached to opening day. On the morning KHAN!!! begins performances in Bound Brook, general tickets are scheduled to go on sale for January’s William Shatner event at State Theatre New Jersey. The parody opens at night; the real Captain Kirk goes on sale that morning. Sept. 26: Morris County Library turns into a Starfleet outpost The USS Justice celebration expands again on Saturday, Sept. 26, with a free public event at Morris County Library in Whippany from 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The group plans to screen three Original Series episodes - “The Man Trap,” “Space Seed” and “Balance of Terror” - alongside themed bingo, trivia, games, snacks, drinks, a photo booth and free Star Trek stickers. Uniforms, ship polos and Star Trek shirts are encouraged but not required. This may be the anniversary event that best matches the official “Space for Everybody” idea. There is no VIP tier, no major stage and no need to understand convention culture before arriving. It is a county library, a fan organization and six and a half hours of people choosing to spend a Saturday together because a television series from 1966 gave them a shared vocabulary for curiosity, optimism and occasionally very serious opinions about captains. Jan. 29, 2027: The captain gets the last word The New Jersey anniversary calendar currently has one major coda waiting on the other side of the holidays. On Friday, Jan. 29, 2027, State Theatre New Jersey in New Brunswick will screen Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and then bring William Shatner to the stage for stories from his career and audience questions. The program begins at 7:30 p.m. State Theatre has announced a Sept. 16 donor presale and a Sept. 18 general on-sale date, with optional VIP tiers offering a professional photo with Shatner and, at the premium level, a signed poster. By then New Jersey audiences will have seen Khan as a restored movie, heard the larger franchise through an orchestra, watched Khan turned into a musical joke and spent a library day revisiting the episode that introduced him. January puts the original film back on a major screen with the actor who played Kirk sitting in the building afterward. It is difficult to design a neater ending to the state’s anniversary arc. The statewide Trek calendar

Date | Event | Location
Sept. 4–8 | Nationwide 60th Anniversary film-and-episode series; full marathon Sept. 8 | Participating NJ theaters statewide
Sept. 5 | USS Justice: Space Seed + The Wrath of Khan group screening, 4 p.m. | AMC Rockaway 16, Rockaway
Sept. 8 | Star Trek Day — 60th Anniversary Dinner, 7 p.m. | Flaming Grill & Buffet, Riverdale
Sept. 12 | Star Trek 60th Anniversary Celebration, 2–4 p.m. | Princeton Public Library
Sept. 12 | Star Trek: The Motion Picture with Steven Lance; doors 1 p.m., film 3 p.m. | Brook Arts Center, Bound Brook
Sept. 13 | Star Trek: A Symphonic Voyage, 3 p.m. | Brook Arts Center, Bound Brook
Sept. 18–27 | KHAN!!! The Musical — New Jersey premiere | Brook Arts Center, Bound Brook
Sept. 26 | Free Star Trek 60th Anniversary Celebration, 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m. | Morris County Library, Whippany
Jan. 29, 2027 | William Shatner Live with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, 7:30 p.m. | State Theatre New Jersey, New Brunswick

One franchise, a lot of ways in The easiest way to misunderstand a sixtieth anniversary is to treat it as nostalgia management. Star Trek certainly has enough nostalgia to power several starships, but the New Jersey calendar is interesting because almost none of these events asks fans to celebrate in exactly the same way. One is a national restoration project. One is dinner. Two are library programs. One is orchestral. One is theatrical parody. One is a conversation with William Shatner after a film that many people in the audience will know almost line for line. That range is the actual anniversary story. Star Trek lasted because it became more than a show people used to watch. It became music, fan organization, community ritual, comedy, collecting, argument, family inheritance and a language for imagining what the future could look like if people managed to become slightly better than they are now. New Jersey’s celebrations do not need one convention center to make that visible. The state has built an anniversary out of many rooms instead. Over the next several weeks, there will be Vulcan salutes in multiplexes, a library craft table in Princeton, orchestral music in Bound Brook, fan uniforms in Whippany and Khan singing for reasons that probably should not survive close scientific examination. Then, in January, Kirk arrives in New Brunswick. For a franchise whose first words pointed toward the final frontier, the better anniversary question was never whether Star Trek could look backward for sixty years. It was whether there would still be somewhere new for the fans to go next. In New Jersey, at least, the answer is yes - and there are several addresses. Event Details

What | Star Trek 60th anniversary events across New Jersey
When | Sept. 4–26, 2026 (with Jan. 29, 2027 coda)
Where | Participating theaters statewide; Riverdale; Princeton; Bound Brook; Whippany; New Brunswick
Also | See statewide calendar for individual dates, venues and ticket details

SOURCE NOTES • StarTrek.com — Star Trek 60 / Space for Everybody
• StarTrek.com — 60th anniversary fan-centric celebrations
• Princeton Public Library — Star Trek 60th Anniversary Celebration
• Brook Arts Center — official site
• State Theatre New Jersey — William Shatner Live on Stage with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan