Though It's About the Future: "We don't have music like that anymore."

I'm not too proud to admit that I'm enough of a geek to get goosebumps when the full-orchestral version of the Star Trek theme [flash required] plays on the stereo. (It could just be the appoggiatura.) "We don't have music like that anymore."

For all of its visions of weird life-forms, "Star Trek" was at heart a drama about human beings. So creator and executive producer Gene Roddenberry elected to depict their emotional states through time-honored and accessible means—with instruments and orchestras, not synthesizers, theremins or other trendy electronic gimmicks.

In the four-minute video below the late, aptly-named composer Alexander Courage describes how he put together the piece in one week and how it was taped in a single session. His solution to find an appropriate sound (the "swoosh") for the spaceship moving across the screen was especially inspired: