"Star Trek" is going back to school. The new Trek TV series "Starfleet Academy" is less about exploring the final frontier and more about educating the next generation of explorers, as a group of students from very different backgrounds make their way through the famous San Francisco educational establishment. But although it's taken the famous old franchise 60 years, 13 movies, 12 previous TV shows, and the dawn of the 32nd century to get here, the school is nearly as old as the franchise itself.
The Academy got its first mention in "Where No Man Has Gone Before", the second "Trek" pilot (but the third episode broadcast), when James T Kirk's old classmate, Gary Mitchell, recalled their college days. The Kobayashi Maru, the infamous no-win simulation used to test potential captains, also became a key theme in classic movie "The Wrath of Khan" (1982). But at the start of the 1990s, Starfleet Academy got remarkably close to headlining its own movie.
