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Comment by justsomehnguy | Hacker News Reader

> Star Trek really doesn't seem to be as big as it used to be.

Hint: it was never big outside of the USA. If anything, Internet and the Hollywood reboots is the way most people outside of the USA learnt about it.

Also try to find Europe in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_influence_of_Star_Tre...

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Are you sure?

I'm Italian and we had Star Trek (all the films, all the shows, many of the books), and apparently the Star Trek Italian Club[0] was funded in 1982. I think Spock and Kirk were quite familiar to most people, and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.

[0] https://stic.it/

> , and for sure as a nerd in the '00s everybody understood the joke of showing Bill Gates as a Borg on Slashdot.

Everybody, Gates and Slashdot in one sentence.

There is a reason it was called the slashdot effect, because it was the biggest source of traffic for many sites it linked.

sigh

Yes, a bunch of nerds (10k?, 20k?) worldwide forced someone's PC used as a server to crash. Their views surely represent the views of a country with ~~50M population, right?

Very big in Germany imo. I came back from school and always watched back to back TNG and MacGyver. TNG and DS9 were big and aired nationally. My father grew up with Kirk & Spock and most people who were children in that generation and had access to a TV know the show, because there was not much else on TV. He's not a nerd at all :)

That’s just not true.

Both TOS and TNG aired in various European countries.

I was never a big Star Trek fan, but here in Sweden growing up I watched episodes of The Next Generation, Voyager, and Deep Space Nine when they happened to be on. There definitely always seemed to be some Star Trek series running in a decent TV slot and everyone seemed aware of it - even if its popularity was eclipsed by that of Star Wars.

From friends and family in Belgium it seems it was somewhat bigger there.

There's a Swedish Star Trek-themed band that has been continually active since 1988 and are popular enough that they still do festivals in Sweden, Germany and other European countries every year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S.P.O.C.K

Adding to the comments: Not an American, but like others here watched TNG every day after school, and TOS before that. Many other people my age did, for example my wife.

BTW, we have watched with our sons all of TNG and DS9 for the last 3 years, and our eldest is now deeply familiar with Star Trek as a result. Very few of his peers are familiar with it, though.

It was aired even in Bangladesh (a tiny country in Asia), and I just fell in love with TNG, and the line: "Space the final frontier ..."

> Hint: it was never big outside of the USA.

Really? I must have grown up in an alternative universe. Star Trek TOS and TNG were aired on our local TV station in the 80s and 90s, IIRC even in the afternoon. I would be extremely surprised if I'd meet a 30+ person who grew up here (European country) and didn't know Star Trek.

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