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Star Trek attraction in Vegas beams out
Show's owner, hotel can't agree on lease
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Published: August 30, 2008
LAS VEGAS
After 10 years at the final frontier, Star Trek: The Experience is going where no Las Vegas Strip attraction wants to go.
With a decommissioning ceremony -- as befits any great vessel -- the exhibit and its replica of the starship Enterprise will be shut down Monday.
Thousands of Trekkies are beaming up from across the United Federation of Planets, er, the United States and around the world one last time, according to exhibit spokesman Chad Boutte.
Employees dressed as aliens discuss the minutiae of their worlds' mythologies with visitors who learn, in typically circular Trekkie logic, that the exhibit is a "time station" for transporting researchers and equipment between the 21st and 24th centuries.
For $49.99, fans can enjoy two virtual rides and the Museum of the Future, with costumes, "phasers" and Mr. Spock's coffin. More than 3 million people have come through since the Experience opened in 1998.
In the end, the frontier that the USS Enterprise could not breach was earthly: The attraction's owner, Cedar Fair Entertainment Co., and the Las Vegas Hilton, its landlord, could not agree on a new lease. They worked as a typical landlord and retail tenant, with Cedar Fair keeping all revenue from the attraction, said a hotel spokesman, Ira David Sternberg.
Trekkies are incensed. They have scrawled reminiscences about the exhibit on the walls inside, and they are calling Cedar Fair and the hotel to complain. An online rumor that the space that the exhibit occupies will become a theater for pop star Michael Jackson is unfounded, Sternberg said. He said that nothing has been decided.
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