Monday 1 February 2021

Star Trek 55th anniversary logo

CBS have revealed a new 55th anniversary Star Trek logo, to mark the latest anniversary moment this year. The logo features a whole gaggle of TOS icons: The Enterprise, a Starfleet delta, the three uniform division colours, and the title text! 

Continue below to check out the first 55th anniversary merch you can find this on, and a look back at previous anniversary logos.

This is quite a busy assembly of elements I feel, so I rather like simplified monotone version that you can find so far just on the 55th anniversary travel tumbler:

All the other merch currently offered on the Star Trek Shop features the full colour version. You can so far get masculine or feminine cut T-shirts, a hoodie, blanket, or mug:







Fifty-five feels like a bit of a stretch to bother commemorating, but perhaps it can be justified as being part of what is now a five-yearly ongoing series of Star Trek stuff issued over the last several decades.

Of course the last one was a properly major event, the 50th anniversary. The logo treatment for that was, I feel, a bit more elegant, with the 50 embedded into the Starfleet delta. The full version below wasn't used too commonly on the many many commemorative products; more often at least the Enterprise element was dropped, and a lot of the time just the 50-delta was used.


And here's an example of one such product I missed back in 2016, but came across recently: The 50th anniversary Starfleet delta ceramic storage jar. A playful interpretation of the logo with a practical use!





Five years prior the 45th anniversary was fairly similar. I was surprised to discover there even was a 45th anniversary logo; I certainly don't recall much fanfare about it at the time, and merchandise using it seems to be almost non-existent; with it featuring many on promo for conventions that year.


The 40th anniversary, as a decade year, did have a lot more celebration, and many items released that year featured this fun retro-styled logo in a few different colours.


The 35th anniversary was simple, and again not that widely used:


The 30th anniversary used the narrow-delta-in-an-ellipse Star Trek logo that was dominant in the late 90s, and is one I'm rather fond of for it's elegance, and now nostalgia of that golden age of Trek. Curiously is kind of reminiscent of the new Starfleet badges of the 32nd century seen in Discovery!


The 25th anniversary got much more use than the other something-five year events for being a quarter-centenary. This logo could be found all over the place, not least on the imaginatively named Star Trek: 25th Anniversary video games.


A different logo also appeared with more limited usage, featuring the USS Enterprise, and mashing it up with the TNG font for Star Trek:


And finally there's the first real milestone anniversary, the 20th. There were several different logo used on merchandise for this moment in Trek history:




If you're interested in finding out about some of the merchandise and events that used these logos, Memory Alpha has a pretty good list.


1 comment:

Steve said...

This is a cool post, thanks! I too have a lot of nostalgia for the 30th one. I guess it doesn't count as a logo, but I liked the 40th-anniversary banner used on a lot of TOS novels in 2006.

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