3 reasons why Star Trek: Enterprise got a bad rap early on
By Chad Porto
No Star Trek
This may seem like an odd thing but Star Trek: Enterprise wasn’t actually known as “Star Trek: Enterprise”. Instead, it was known as just “Enterprise”. A move that undoubtedly caused many to be confused and wonder what this show was all about.
After all, Star Trek had largely the same shape and design of its series for years. Each show, The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager all started off with the iconic color/black jumpsuits. Each show featured the divisional color on the shoulders, followed by a streamlined black jumper.
They were literally all uniformed. So when Enterprise came out, it wasn’t just lacking the name “Star Trek”, it was lacking a look that had been around for nearly 15 years.
So when fans saw the show and saw the images or trailers, there was no reason for casual fans to think this was “Star Trek”. Sure, the NX-01 looked enough like the Enterprise fans knew to think it could be a ship in the same vein but it also looked different enough to make fans think that what they were watching wasn’t Star Trek.
Plus, Star Trek wasn’t known for getting major names to be the face of their franchise. All of the previous other actors were made by Star Trek, while Scott Bakula was already a huge name. All these things made it really hard to sell that the show was Star Trek to the uninformed.
Not having “Star Trek” in the title for the first two seasons undoubtedly hurt its marketing appeal.