My first thoughts after hearing that Leonard Nimoy had died weren’t so much of Spock, Star Trek, television or filmmaking. They were of conventions.
Most of the original cast of “Trek” has been meeting their fans in convention centers for more than 40 years now. It was hard to believe that the man who breathed life into Mr. Spock, the show’s most popular character by far, would no longer be strolling those big halls in front of hundreds of rapt trekkers.
Star Trek cons and comic-cons were where Nimoy leapt off the screen and stood before us in flesh and blood. We could see the man behind the half-human, half-Vulcan first officer of the Starship Enterprise. Seeing Nimoy without a Vulcan’s pointy ears showed us who he really was while also bringing Spock to life. As Spock said in “Amok Time,” that episode where he fights Capt. Kirk to thunderous music, “It is not logical, but it is often true.”
Nimoy himself described the conventions that he and the original Trek cast had been doing since the early 1970s as “a love fest” in a 2010 Toronto Sun interview.
“I call these kind of experiences a victory lap,” he continued. “It’s like having a family meeting—a family reunion.”
This afinity was shared by those who worked with him in the events industry.
“It was astonishing to watch a legend such as himself impact every person the same way, with awe and reverence, and genuine respect,” convention director Jim Demonakos says, recalling Nimoy’s appearance at Seattle’s Emerald City Comicon in 2010. “Every single person loved him. Period.”
Jason Bogath, director of programming for Emerald City Comicon, concurs.
“You could always feel a little bit of electricity in the air as he approached,” he remembers.
These conventions where fans often dressed as their favorite characters—many of them dressed as Spock—have now become an inseparable part of the convention industry itself. Creation Entertainment, which began producing Star Trek cons in 1971, still produces several Trek cons a year, along with Twilight and Walking Dead gatherings. The San Diego Comic-Con, which Nimoy had appeared at several times, is now an entertainment media phenomenon where movie studios roll out their upcoming blockbusters.
I saw Nimoy live, in-person twice; once at a county fairgrounds outside of San Francisco in the early 1990s, and again at Star Trek Las Vegas in 2010. Both times, Nimoy was joined onstage by William Shatner, and the pair bickered and bantered playfully in a kind of Starfleet version of The Odd Couple.
The second time I saw them, Patrick Stewart made a surprise appearance. The electricity was definitely there with all three of those icons onstage. Even though the event was completely contrived, all cynicism I may have had just melted away in that moment.
Nimoy made his last Star Trek Convention appearance in Illinois in October 2011. When he announced his imminent retirement from the convention circuit a year earlier, he also said he wouldn’t be appearing in the sequel to director J.J. Abrams’ 2009 Star Trek reboot, but he still made a cameo in Star Trek Into Darkness anyway, so there was always hope we’d get to see him again.
At that final convention, Nimoy summed up his life and career.
“My parents came from Russia,” he said during his opening remarks. “They came to the United States as immigrants. They were aliens. They landed in Boston. They became citizens. I was born in Boston a citizen. I went to Hollywood and I became an alien.”
“A strange, circular experience,” he reflected.
Leonard Nimoy died Feb. 27, 2015, at age 83 from end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Though he lived long and prospered, he will be missed by convention-goers the world over.
Bob Calhoun is the author of Shattering Conventions: Commerce, Cosplay and Conflict on the Expo Floor (Obscuria Press, 2013). You can follow him on Twitter at @bob_calhoun or visit http://shatteringconventions.com.
