Aw, man… I just read over at Wil Wheaton’s blog that Star Trek: The Experience, the museum/ride/restaurant/gift shop/ultimate geek mecca in Las Vegas, will be closing down at the end of summer, September 1.

This news isn’t a big surprise — Trek is slowly but surely receding into the pop-cultural distance, even as J.J. Abrams’ reboot movie approaches, and the time The Girlfriend and I went to The Experience a couple of years ago, we basically had the place to ourselves — but it’s still rather sad. It was a fun place for casual fans of the various Trek incarnations, and a wonderful bit of wish fulfillment for the more hardcore types such as myself. The simulated transporter effect, the bridge and corridors of the Enterprise-D, and of course, Quark’s Bar all looked and felt about as close to the “real” thing as you can get short of stepping through the TV screen a la Woody Allen in Purple Rose of Cairo. And of course the authentic props and costumes on display in the museum made my collecting lobes itch something fierce.

Then there were the memorable drinks one could get with one’s dinner: I had a nice mellow tranya, but my darling Anne just had to try the wicked-sounding Warp Core Breach. The menu describes this thing thusly:

“Red Alert! Order this drink and prepare to separate your saucer section! Sensors indicate Bacardi Lemon, Bacardi Light, Bacardi Spice, Bacardi 151, Razzmatazz and So Be power drink. We add pure ice crystals from the planet Exo III. You’ll need more than one officer to handle this situation.”

The entry at Memory Alpha is a bit more revealing: “Designed to be consumed by two or more people, it consists of 10 ounces of flavored rums, Razzmatazz, and fruit juices.”

Well, Anne is no fool — she may have graduated from the Marion Ravenwood School of Competitive Imbibing, but she’s still only human — so she ordered a half-size Breach. It still arrived in a container that more resembled a fish bowl than a glass. After finishing half the thing, she was sufficiently out of phase with this universe that she didn’t even mind when a careless waitress dumped about five ounces of ketchup all over her light-colored t-shirt. She just marched over the gift shop and bought herself a new t-shirt. Then she proceeded to hit on the Klingon greeter hanging around the museum area.
Speaking of the Klingon, I have to say that the actors who worked the place were simply fantastic. They wore authentic, high-quality make-up that stood up to close scrutiny (the low lighting probably helped!) and they never broke character, not even when confronted with a drunken Earth woman and her geeky man. I had a Ferengi attempt to buy Anne from me, and I spent a good six or seven minutes arguing with the Klingon guy over whether Admiral James Tiberius Kirk was a noble explorer or a vicious war criminal. Ah, good times…

Wil has a really nice anecdote relating to Star Trek: The Experience if you’d like to, as they said at the end of so many TV shows in the ’80s, Read More About It™ (beware: he cusses, including the dreaded F-word). There’s no word yet about what’s going to happen to the sets and all the artifacts; my guess is that they’ll be trucked back to LA and interred in a warehouse until such time as Paramount decides to auction them off, like that big lot that went to Christie’s a while back. At least I hope that’s what happens. That’s a better fate than going into a dumpster somewhere, like so much of Hollywood history has over the years…