nerd out Dixie style with the Starfleetin' Trekalicious

[davemerrill]

I wrote a big post on my AFF blog about Dixie Trek, which was the Trek convention in Atlanta that I went to because it was a convention and as a 16 year old kid I HAD TO GO TO CONVENTIONS. And later as a 20 year old annoying young adult I went there to post insulting flyers. And now it's years later and "Dixie Trek" is a joke on Big Bang Theory.





I'm not a Star Trek fan, so me being at the show at all was testament to how desperate I was for any kind of nerd activity in 1985. Looking forward to hearing from the organizers who will no doubt set me straight on the many errors of fact I've made in the piece, but you know what, if they're so smart, why didn't THEY write the piece? Huh? Because they're too busy shoving chocolate cake onto their foreheads and pretending to be Klingons, or wishing they were perfect automatons without emotions like Data, or wishing they could still fit into their Starfleet uniform. That's why.

Comments

[davemerrill.livejournal.com]

One of the organizers works on classic American SF TV programming at Dragoncon. I don't know if any of the Dixie Trek crew is involved with the "Treklanta" convention which has recently started. That show seems to be mostly run by the local Starfleet chapter "USS Republic", which got going right around the time Dixie Trek ran out of steam.... strange timing.

I don't know what pulled Dixie-Trek's plug - maybe guests started charging more. Maybe they couldn't get Trek guests. In one of the links, one of the organizers talks about getting a lot of guests via their Paramount contact, Richard Arnold, the "official Trek archivist" who lost his Trek job right after Roddenberry died, and who broke off contact with Dixie Trek once Dixie Trek quit having him out every year as a paid guest.

Without the celebrities there wasn't much to get fans to Dixie Trek, I guess. It was always a spot on the calendar for us, something to use to promote the anime club or to hit a room party at, never a vital part of our year. Between the party con MOC (early spring) and AFF (summer) and the ascendant Dragoncon (Labor Day), Dixie Trek found itself without a lot of room to maneuver - all three of those shows had guest lists and interest areas that overlapped each other.

Nobody was doing a fall show, which is why we put Phenomicon and later AWA in the fall.

I was on AFF staff and knew everybody fairly well by 1988, and there was a little overlap between Dixie Trek and AFF staff, but I didn't really know the people running things at that show.

Pertwee died in Connecticut in 1996, so it wasn't a Dixie Trek, whatever it was. Patrick Troughton died at MOC II which was held in Columbus GA. If you haven't read the AFF blog post on MOC it's worth a read, and there are some interesting comments from readers, some of whom are very sympathetic towards MOCs con chair.

I don't know if there was a Star Trek club in Atlanta before 1980 or not. Certainly there was organized SF fandom, a few DSCs, some general club activity. 1980 was a little before my time