Butt-Head: Fire those retro rockets, shoot the fruit-on torpedoes, and like uhh, make us go that way. (Butt-Head looks up at an imaginary Counselor Troi, standing next to him) Uh, excuse me? I order you to undress and show me your thingies.
Beavis (walking into frame): But Captain! That violates intergalactic law! ...or, or something. Hehehe...
Butt-Head: Number One, I order you to take a number two.
Beavis (saluting): Aye-aye, captain!
Butt-Head: Uhh, hehe, this is cool.
Beavis (walking into frame): But Captain! That violates intergalactic law! ...or, or something. Hehehe...
Butt-Head: Number One, I order you to take a number two.
Beavis (saluting): Aye-aye, captain!
Butt-Head: Uhh, hehe, this is cool.
...Actually, they have. Several times.
When writers of sitcoms, whether they are animated or live action, are creating an episode that will contain elements of Science Fiction and/or the culture that follows it, they will try to show that they are just like us by cramming in references to every known science fiction television show and movie, especially Star Trek (particularly Star Trek: The Original Series, the first and best-known part of the franchise). When dealing with a parody of Star Trek, the elements most commonly found are:
- People in Rubber Suits, Rubber-Forehead Aliens or Human Aliens make up the majority of the extraterrestrial populace; these are usually male characters.
- A Green-Skinned Space Babe, to add some sexual diversity.
- Technobabble
- The Bridge, a room controlling all the crucial aspects of the ship, with the Captain sitting in a great sofa in the middle and the other people in work stations around him.
- An obviously doomed (usually literal) Red Shirt who will always die
- A pointy-eared, emotionless, alien who warns about the situation being "illogical".
- An extremely hammy captain who can only act on impulse and speak in long, drawn-out sentences.
- Very, Very, very bad visual effects.
- An uplifting musical intro, followed by the Captain's Log.
- A very surly, pessimistic medical officer, typically in his mid-forties or early fifties.
- A morbidly obese Scotsman with a sometimes incomprehensibly thick accent.
- A Teleporter Accident with hilarious results.
- A Proud Warrior Race with prominent brow ridges.
- A Villain Named Khan with a vendetta against the Captain.
Compare May the Farce Be with You, which is the same thing, but with Star Wars.
A subtrope of Stock Parodies.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime And Manga
- In the anime adapatation of I Couldn't Become a Hero, So I Reluctantly Decided to Get a Job, there is a perverted old man character (a very handsy perv) that is a blatant expy of Picard. He's even bald and wears a red shirt. At the end of the anime, when the main characters set off to rescue Fino, the old man picks them up in his ride: a dragon pulling a shameless rip of the Enterprise 1701 (pre-refit). It was hilariously mis-labeled as the Enterprise-D
Audio Plays
- The Big Finish Doctor Who audio drama "Bang-Bang-A-Boom!" is a rare parody of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with the main location being the space station Dark Space 8.
Comedy
- Bobby Pickett and Peter Fererra's Star Drek loads not only parody but also Medium Awareness:
Capt. Jerk: Into the elevator, Mr. Schlock. Let's beam down to the planet's surface so I can find an alien to fall in love with before the program's over.
Schlock: You usually do.
Capt. Jerk: (chuckles) Ain't I somethin'? - The Frantics perform every episode of Star Trek in five minutes.
note
Comic Books
- Brazilian comic Monica's Gang did one for the 2009 movie, Star Treko◊ - it helps the character playing Kirk is known in English as Jim(my Five).
- Mickey Mouse Comic Universe: Mickey Mouse italian magazine has a multiple story-arc parody of Star Trek named "Star-Top" ("topo" in the Italian word for mouse) starring characters from the Mouse universe.
- The Fandom Rivalry between Star Trek and Doctor Who came up again in the Titan crossover event Doctor Who: The Lost Dimension, in which the alternate-universe Ogron Confederation of Planets in the Fourth Doctor special have ship designs and uniforms that look suspiciously similar to the Federation in Star Trek: The Original Series, but turn out to be violent imperialists under a humanitarian mask. The Doctor describes them as "plain thuggery hiding behind rules and regulations to justify itself".
Films — Live-Action
- Galaxy Quest, an Affectionate Parody of everything Trek that borders on Take That! and Deconstructive Parody.
- The Scott Baio comedy film Zapped! (1982) had a short Star Trek: The Original Series parody while the main character Barney uses his powers to make his model spaceship fly around his bedroom. Ironically, the saucer section of the model ship looks a lot like a backwards Millenium Falcon.
Literature
- The Doctor Who Eighth Doctor Adventures novel The Blue Angel, by Paul Magrs, includes an extended parody of Star Trek: The Original Series involving the Federation starship Nepotist. It should be noted that the two franchises have a long history of Fandom Rivalry.
- Willful Child by Steven Erikson, who is better known for his sprawling fantasy epic. Turns out, he also is a life long Star Trek: The Original Series fan, and Willful Child is an affectionate parody of the same, which ticks off pretty much all the points. Towards the end, the book even parodies the "Where no one has gone before" thing by the ship approaching the border of the known universe, crossing it and thus approaching it again after it's moved, and again, and again... Until Captain Hadrian Sawback tells the navigation officer to cut it out already.
- The Star Wreck novel series by Leah Rewolinski are based around a rivalry between the two starship Endocrines, which are somehow around at the same time. Later books added space station Geek Space Nine.
Live-Action TV
- The Big Bang Theory
- In "The Codpiece Topology" Sheldon attends a Renaissance fair as Spock exploring a planet based on Earth in the 1600s.
- Sheldon and Leonard occasionally play three-dimensional chess.
- The gang dress as the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation in "The Bakersfield Expedition". They are on their way to the Bakersfield Comic-Con when they decide to stop over at Kirk's Rock, and are stranded when their car is stolen.
- In "The Transporter Malfunction", Sheldon dreams that a Mr. Spock action figure (voiced by Leonard Nimoy) asks him to play with it. Later, Sheldon has another dream in which he and the action figure are on another planet, wherein Sheldon is attacked by a Gorn.
- Black Mirror: "U.S.S. Callister" is about Robert Daly, who made a mod of his fictional game Infinity based on the suspiciously familiar Space Fleet franchise, with him putting on a Kirk-esque persona in-game and the crew wearing blue, yellow and red uniforms. Unfortunately, Daly quickly proves himself to be no Kirk...
- El Chapulín Colorado is full of reference to kaiju and tokusatsu movies and shows, especially Ultraman, also has some sci-fi episodes with aliens, robots and astronauts.
- Community, aside from having a semi-regular parody of Doctor Who, also has a number of Star Trek shout-outs. Pierce dressed as Captain Kirk for the second Halloween Episodenote , and Troy and Abed's Dreamatorium is basically a low-tech Holosuite. Troy is also known to be a long-standing admirer of LeVar Burton, albeit more for Reading Rainbow.
- The earliest known televised parody of Star Trek was on the December 4, 1967, episode of The Carol Burnett Show, in which Leonard Nimoy appeared as Mr. Spock in a sketch (during the show's original run). The premise of the sketch was that Burnett was playing a woman married to the Invisible Man, and had given birth to an invisible baby. When the druggist arrives with an experimental formula to make the baby visible, the Invisible Man insists that it be tested on him first, and goes offstage to drink it. When he announces it works and comes back onstage, he turns out to be Mr. Spock! (The Invisible Man was voiced by series regular Harvey Korman, so Nimoy's cameo is wordless.) The sketch was hard to find for many years because it was from the infrequently-syndicated early years of the show, but it can now be found online right here. One of the many revivals of the show did another, more conventional parody in 1990-91.
- The Doom Patrol (2019) episode "Nostalgia Patrol" has the heroes trapped inside Rita Farr's movies. One of these is a sci-fi flick and blatant Star Trek send-up titled Spartacus 452, which Cliff funnily enough confuses with the actual Star Trek.
- Saturday Night Live famously parodied Star Trek in its first season (1976), in the celebrated "Last Voyage of the Starship Enterprise" sketch, where NBC executives come on the ship and announce that the show has been canceled, with all the actors (except for William Shatner as Captain Kirk) leaving. John Belushi played William Shatner (as Captain Kirk), Chevy Chase played Leonard Nimoy (as Mr. Spock), and Dan Aykroyd played DeForest Kelley (as Dr. McCoy). This sketch was so popular it might have even had an influence on the revival of the franchise just a couple of years later. It is also somewhat notorious for casting production designer Akira Yoshimura as George Takei (Sulu), a role he has reprised in every original series parody the show has done ever since, as well as a TNG Sketch.
- In addition to the "Get a Life!" sketch the episode is well known for, the William Shatner episode of SNL also features a straight Star Trek parody (Star Trek V: The Restaurant Enterprise) with Shatner as Kirk, Kevin Nealon as Spock, Phil Hartman as McCoy, and Dana Carvey as Khan (who tries to get the restaurant shut down by a health inspector). Features a nice subversion of a classic Trek trope:
Kirk: *indicating a choking customer* Dr. McCoy, this man needs medical attention!
McCoy: Dammit, Jim, I'm a doctor, not a— oh, sure! *proceeds to administer the Heimlich* - Patrick Stewart hosted an episode in 1994 that featured a sketch called "Love Boat: The Next Generation" (not to be confused with the show that was actually called that on UPN about five years later). Stewart reprised the role of Picard/Captain Stubing, and featured Chris Farley as Riker, Tim Meadows as Geordi/Isaac, Rob Schneider as Data and Julia Sweeney as Troi. The "Princessprise" was literally the Love Boat mounted on the leading edge of the saucer section. The "A" plot involved a Ferengi who had been dumped by Charo trying to win her back on Valentine's Day (which he does with a well timed red alert). The "B" plot was Data trying to understand the emotion of love (he later presents Picard with a chocolate-covered human heart in an attempt to do Valentine's Day properly)
- The Chris Pine episode in 2017 naturally featured a Trek parody sketch... but in a nod to SNL's own legacy, he played not his Kirk but William Shatner's Kirk from TOS, proving once and for all that he could do the famous "Kirk voice" he famously eschewed in his movies.
- In addition to the "Get a Life!" sketch the episode is well known for, the William Shatner episode of SNL also features a straight Star Trek parody (Star Trek V: The Restaurant Enterprise) with Shatner as Kirk, Kevin Nealon as Spock, Phil Hartman as McCoy, and Dana Carvey as Khan (who tries to get the restaurant shut down by a health inspector). Features a nice subversion of a classic Trek trope:
- The Two Ronnies parodied Star Trek in this 1973 sketch. Corbett played Kirk and Barker played Spock.
- In Living Color! had a Star Trek parody sketch called "The Wrath of Farrakhan", with Jim Carrey as Kirk and David Alan Grier as Spock.
- Scottish comedy sketch series Chewin' the Fat featured a uniquely Scottish twist in this sketch which, while incomprehensible to non-Scots (and hilarious to Scots), introduced the concept of “Set phasers tae malky” thereby invoking Violent Taysider too.
- The first "mini-myths" episode of MythBusters featured a myth from the Original Series episode "Arena", where Kirk improvised a cannon from raw materials found around the area. There were several points where they parodied elements of the series, generally at Tory's expense—Tory's communicator never got reception, and Tory also got "teleported" without some of his clothes at one point.
Tory: Gosh dang it! That's the third time this week!
Grant: He needs to get a new service provider. - The "Pigs in Space" segments on The Muppet Show are mainly generic Space Opera parodies, but elements of Star Trek are present, including the name of the spaceship (Swinetrek) and the theme music. The Muppets Tonight update, "Deep Dish Nine, The Next Generation of Pigs In Space" is more overt in referencing Star Trek.
- On at least one occasion, Red Dwarf has emphasised that the Red Dwarf is not the Enterprise and different rules apply. Kryten makes a speech about friendship and duty and responsibility which would not have been out of place as an Aesop on the bridge of the Enterprise, only for an impatient Lister to cut across him with
Don't give me any of that Star Trek crap, Kryten!
- The character of ship's android Kryten is played, very deliberately, as a parody of Data in "Next Generation". This was so marked that Patrick Stewart himself, on a visit home to Britain and tuning into what he thought from the newspaper TV listings was a straight space-based sci-fi, honestly thought he was watching a cheap knock-off of his own TV show. Until he realised the truth and started laughing at the gags.
- Similarly, Sesame Street had "Spaceship Surprise", in which a spacefaring crew crash land on a series of planets themed around multi-consonant sounds ("sh", "ch", and "tr"). It got a very brief revival in the form of a single "Spaceship Surprise: The Next Generation" sketch where a new crew (modeled after Picard, Worf, Data, and Crusher) lands on Planet H. Perhaps in keeping with the source material's tendency towards cheap special effects, the spaceship is an obviously-flat cutout (as is the train they encounter on Planet "TR"), something that would normally be beneath the show's standards.
- Season 5 of Breaking Bad has this hilarious scene where Badger and Skinny Pete are discussing Star Trek, which includes Badger's idea for an episode featuring a pie eating contest.
- An episode of The Suite Life on Deck takes place in a Star Trek-style future. Complete with a Lampshaded Redshirt death in space.
- Bonus points for the casting of George Takei in the segment as London's great-great-great, etc., grandson.
- The Wonder Years had a parody of the original series (specifically riffing on the episode "Spock's Brain") where Kevin and three other boys dressed as Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and Scotty deal with girls that manipulate them with their wrist controls, as the narrator's way of explaining that he didn't understand girls.
- CSI had an episode ("A Space Oddity") where the Body of the Week belonged to a director who tried to create a Darker and Edgier reboot (think of the 2000s version of Battlestar Galactica) of a science-fiction TV series from the 60s called Astro Quest.
- Stargate SG-1: In the episode "200", numerous other shows (mainly sci-fi) are spoofed when the SGC hires someone to produce the Show Within a Show "Wormhole X-Treme !" to maintain plausible deniability for the Stargate Program. One of the pitches he makes is for a blatant Star Trek rip-off (featuring the main actors in an Imagine Spot) that his audience complains is mostly Techno Babble.
- Doctor Who has two Star Trek parodies in series 6. "A Christmas Carol" features the spaceship Thrasymachus with a Starfleet-style bridge, complete with a black man wearing robotic eyewear. "Let's Kill Hitler" features another Starfleet-style bridge in the Teselecta.
- Subverted by The Orville. It was originally marketed as a straightforward spoof of the Star Trek-style of Space Opera, but while there's some humor here and there, it's more of a Dramedy homage. It channels Star Trek: The Next Generation with Isaac being Data (a robot), Bortus and Alara Kitan being Worf (strong aliens with strict cultures), John LaMarr being Geordi La Forge (a black man promoted to chief engineer), and Claire Finn being Beverly Crusher (the ship's doctor and a single mother). Additionally, the Environmental Simulator is the Holodeck in everything but name.
- One case on Night Court is between two groups of Trekkies. It ends with one group beaming out of the courtroom.
- The Imaginatively Titled Punt and Dennis Show ended every episode with a skit parodying a nineties TV show. One was Star Trek: The Next Generation, with the main joke being that all the planets looked like the same area of parkland.
Magazines
- What is likely the first-ever parody of Star Trek, imaginatively titled "Star Blecch", was published in the December, 1967, issue of MAD Magazine. A joke used in that issue (Spock saying "He could not believe his ears"), was actually re-used in the show itself (in the episode "The Trouble With Tribbles").
- MAD continued doing parodies of all 6 original cast movies, the Star Trek musical, and sequel series.
- Cracked also did a parody of Star Trek: Generations.
Music
- The Firm's novelty song "Star Trekkin", which reached number one in the British singles chart.
- Nanowar of Steel: The lead-in track to their song "Uranus" is a spoof of Star Trek's opening narration titled "Bum Voyage", which opens with the lines "Space... between the cheeks" and pretty much goes downhill from there.
Radio
- The BBC sketch comedy show Star Terk (sic) would, as its name suggests, open each week with a sketch parodying Star Trek.
- I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again had a Star Trek parody skit in Season 9 Episode 3 (November 1973) starring Tim Brooke-Taylor as the unfortunately camp James T. Kink, John Cleese as an even more unfortunate Japanese Ranguage Mr Sulu, Bill Oddie as "our Scottish engineer, Scott — Scotty for short — from Scotland", and Graeme Garden as Spock, with a lengthy parody of the Fascinating Eyebrow (yes, on radio). It then descends into chaos when Cleese decides he wants to be Mr Spock, and gets increasingly Off the Rails from there.
Video Games
- Space Quest usually throws a handful of Star Trek jokes into a game, but Space Quest Five sent up nearly every Trope in the classic show's playbook.
Web Original
- Stone Trek combines Star Trek with The Flintstones, and features the adventures of Capt Kirkstone, Mr Sprock, and Dr Rockcoy on the wooden Starship Magnatize (BCC-1701).
- To Boldly Flee involves many reviewers from Channel Awesome traveling aboard the USS Exit Strategy and takes plot elements from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock.
- FreedomToons: After Donald Trump announced the establishment of a space force as an official new branch of the U.S. military, there's "Trump Trek", parodying the original Star Trek, with Trump himself as Kirk, Mike Pence as Spock, Kim Jong-Un as Sulu, and SJWs as the Klingons.
Western Animation
- Adventures in Odyssey In Star Quest, the eponymous Show Within a Show is clearly a riff on Star Trek: The Original Series. It concerns a captain surnamed Quirk, who travels through space in the starship Synergize with a stoic scientist and a Scottish engineer. The show even copies Classic Trek's low-budget special effects.
- Futurama is loaded with references to Star Trek, from the obscure to the well-known, to the point it is the Trope Codifier and Trope Namer. For example, the sliding door technology that was commonly used in ships in the Star Trek Universe had been adapted for everyday use in the Futurama one, although it doesn't always quite work.
- Another example comes from the episode "Where No Fan Has Gone Before". In that episode, the fanbase for Star Trek had grown into a full-blown religion, getting to the point where Germany recreated the planet of the Nazis. In the end, all the episodes and movies, along with all mention of the phrase "Star Trek", were banned to a distant planet.
- Recurring character Captain Zapp Brannigan has been described by David X Cohen as "half Captain Kirk, half actual William Shatner." The character makes several references to Captain Kirk, including a Captain's Log (just him dictating his experiences to his second in command Kif).
- On an early episode of Family Guy Peter became obsessed with watching television, to the point it interfered with any chance of Meg getting her driver's license and caused the destruction of Quahog's television satellite. One of the shows Peter was watching was an extremely watered-down version of Star Trek. It came as a neat bit of foreshadowing too, when in that same episode William Shatner tried to convince Peter to watch television again after Peter had experienced a life-changing event.
- In the episode "Road To Rupert" Stewie's teddy bear is accidentally sold at a yard sale, prompting him and Brian to go retrieve it. At one point Stewie thinks that his bear is dead and imagines his funeral being similar to that of Spock's at the end of The Wrath of Khan, complete with Stewie and Brian playing "Amazing Freaking Grace" on the bagpipes.
- Animaniacs has an episode parodying Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan.
- The Tiny Toon Adventures episode "Duck Trek" features Plucky as Captain Kirk and Furrball (in his only speaking role) as Dr. McCoy.
- Littlest Pet Shop (1995) and Littlest Pet Shop (2012) have both done Trek parodies.
- One episode of The Chipmunks at the Movies parodied the Star Trek movies.
- The VeggieTales short "The Gourds Must Be Crazy", which introduces Jimmy and Jerry the Gourd twins, and Scooter the Scottish carrot.
- The Garfield and Friends episode "Swine Trek".
- This trope is abused to hell and back in The High Fructose Adventures of Annoying Orange, particularly whenever the main cast travels between planets. Their uniforms have a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Star Trek: The Next Generation 's Starfleet insignia on their uniforms, which also share the same color scheme. Squash inexplicably gains a hairstyle that makes him look like Spock. And, to top it all off, they travel in a spaceship that is basically a souped-up U.S.S. Enterprise (NCC-1701 model).
- Eek! The Cat episode "Star TrEek," complete with a Green-Skinned Space Babe and Red Shirt bashing.
- In Codename: Kids Next Door, Numbah Two's little brother Tommy is stuck in a giant bathtub in "Operation: D.U.C.K.Y." There he then finds himself with the crew of a ship that are expies of characters from Star Trek: The Original Series. The episode "Operation: S.A.T.U.R.N." is a blatant parody/interpretation of The Motion Picture. (A couple of other episodes have Sector V using a spaceship called the S.T.A.R.W.R.E.C.K., while made out of their standard 2X4 tech, heavily resembles the Enterprise.)
- In the Trapped in TV Land episode of Kim Possible, the main heroine finds herself in a show like Star Trek. She even lampshades how she in a red shirt.
- The episode "Star Check Unconventional" of Dexter's Laboratory, which focuses on Dexter and his group of friends attending a convention of the universe's Show Within a Show parody, "Star Check". It even opens with a one-and-a-half-minute fantasy sequence of the titular character and his friends in full expy roles of the characters from the original series.
- ReBoot often had many references to Star Trek, but the episode "Where No Sprite Has Gone Before" really took the cake. Written by original Star Trek writer D.C. Fontana and mixing in superheroes, several characters were patterned after original series characters: Rob Cursor for Kirk, Pixel for Spock, Gigagirl for McCoy, and Booty for Scotty. Also featured several lines and allusions to other Trek lore, such as "AndrAIa's log" or "the next generation."
- Duckman's penultimate episode was "Where No Duckman Has Gone Before." Main characters made up the Enterprise crew (except for Mambo, who Duckman calls "Sulu"), as they faced off against Khan Chicken. References were made to everything from Red Shirts to Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. James Doohan and Marina Sirtis also did voice work for the episode, and Leonard Nimoy appeared As Himself in a live-action segment.
- The Simpsons had a parody of the Star Trek movies in the form of Star Trek XII: So Very Tired, which features the original cast as elderly men and women.
- Space Heroes, a recurring Show Within a Show on the 2012 version of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, is a parody of Star Trek: The Animated Series.
- The Johnny Bravo episode "Galaxy Boy" includes a parody of the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Savage Curtain" that involves Johnny being mistaken for the Enterprise Crew expies' Captain Kirk counterpart and having to combat an alien warworld who looks and sounds like Carl (and is implied to be Carl's ancestor). As well as Bridge Bunnies for Johnny to drool over.
- The DuckTales (1987) episode "Where No Duck Has Gone Before" features the boys and Launchpad being launched into space with an actor who plays The Captain on a show that is a thinly disguised parody of Star Trek: The Original Series.
- The episode "Ain't NASA-Sarily So" of The Real Ghostbusters has lots of references to Star Trek, including the obvious association between Egon and Spock and the fact that they both share the same Catchphrase.
- Care Bears (1980s) had Star Trek parody episodes with the bears aboard a spaceship called the "S.S Friendship".
- Beavis And Butthead spoof Star Trek pretty much directly with Butthead in the Kirk role:
Butthead: Number One, go do a number two!
- The Owl House has Cosmic Frontier, a Zeerust book series written in the 1990s that Luz's parents were both fans of (though her mother tries to hide it in the present day). It's also a rare example of a Deep Space Nine parody, with a brief snippet of the theme playing and characters called Captain Avery and Chief Engineer O'Bailey.
- The Magic School Bus: In the episode "Out of This World," the bus turns into the Enterprise, Ms. Frizzle has a "teacher's ledger" (parody of the captain's log), and Liz is dressed like Mr. Spock. There's some Star Wars mixed in as well, with Ms. Frizzle sporting Princess Leia's hairstyle.
- Seven Little Monsters: The episode "Doctor, Doctor" begins with the seven monsters imagining that they're in a Star Trek pastiche, with One playing the part of Captain James T. Kirk in addition to Three and Four respectively channeling Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy and Montgomery "Scotty" Scott.
