Trekkies with Disposable Income Pay Millions for Memories

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For the Trekkies among us:

The BBC reports that fans spent $7.1 million for Star Trek memorabilia in an auction at Christie’s this weekend. The auction house apparently underestimated Trekkies in estimating that a 78-inch-long miniature of the Starship Enterprise (used in the title sequences of Star Trek: The Next Generation) would go for around $30,000. Someone scooped up the plastic prop for a cool $576,000.

Other top sellers included $62,400 for a replica of Captain James T Kirk’s command chair from the bridge of the spaceship on the original series, and $144,000 for a costume belonging to the original series’ Dr McCoy.

For those who may not have nabbed any of the thousand items there is still a way to tap into the nostalgia. Some fans, distraught over the series coming to an end took matters into their own hands and started Star Trek: Hidden Frontier, an online series which has so far produced 46 episodes over seven seasons.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

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