Essential viewing for all Star Trek fans, 1997’s Trekkies documentary — the genesis for a legion of fandom-focused films which followed — has been lovingly restored on Blu-ray for its silver anniversary.

The documentary was previously released on VHS, as a long-out-of-print DVD, or for purchase on limited streaming services, but for its 25th anniversary Shout! Factory has thankfully restored the documentary for the next generation of fans with a new 4K scan of the film’s original 16mm footage.

The film is a snapshot of the franchise’s fandom during during the apex of Star Trek‘s cultural impact: the Next Gen cast was commanding movie theaters while Deep Space Nine and Voyager were keeping Trek strong through weekly television broadcasts, all during a period where Star Trek conventions were scheduled nearly every weekend somewhere in North America.

It’s during this period that Denise Crosby (Tasha Yar of Star Trek: The Next Generation) and director Roger Nygard hit the convention circuit to meet fans, interview the stars, and did their best to learn about and understand the appeal of the Star Trek fandom in the days  long before social media, group chats, or podcasts — when regional conventions, radio shows, and local Star Trek fan clubs took center stage.

I adore Trekkies — at least, I adore it today — but when I first watched shortly after its release, I instantly hated the film for what I thought were its cheap shots at fans, putting the most extreme examples on the big screen for the world to point and laugh at. “I’m a Star Trek fan,” I’d tell people, “but I’m not that kind of fan! Conventions, dressing up in costumes? You’ll never see me doing that.”

But as the decades have passed, what I’ve learned is that the only person who had reason to be embarrassed for that stance… was me.

I am now a proud convention goer, and I dress up in my Starfleet best any chance I can get — well, maybe not for jury duty — but revisiting Trekkies over the years has been a big part of my evolution from never-no-way-not-me to the comfortable Trek fan I am today.

The stars of this documentary are not the various Star Trek leads interviewed along the way — which include dearly-departed actors like Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, and Jimmy Doohan — but instead, the stars are the fans themselves.

Each of the Trek actors share stories about how fandom has touched them over the years, and why they ultimately came to see it as important.

Let’s face it, though; Trekkies still divides fans when it comes into the conversation. Some viewers might see embarrassing people doing embarrassing things — like one fan who consistently wears full Starfleet regalia to her day job, another who’s taken his workplace into Trek merchandise overdrive, or an awkward teenager stressing out over imperfections in his homemade uniform — but I see people who love what they love, and don’t care what other people think of them.

It’s the powerful lesson of Trekkies: there’s joy in community and in doing the things that you love. Barbara Adams doesn’t care what you think about her decision to wear a Star Trek, costume to the nationally-covered Whitewater jury interviews; she did it because she loves Star Trek, and believed that sharing the values of the United Federation of Planets compelled her to be loud and proud about her fandom.

We should never be ashamed of the things that we love, and if we want to find ways to express that — through writing, costume, convention attendance, collecting — more power to all of us as fans. To me, Trekkies is very clear about that.

Trekkies is also a time capsule to an era we can never return to. Yes, there are more Star Trek shows in production today than there were in 1997, so this is not some yearning for a Golden Age of Star Trek that has never come again (because it has!).

Instead, it’s a yearning for a very specific kind of age gone by: one of 1990s-era convention hallway carpets, of the early era of the Internet, and ways of connecting fans through fanzines, radio, and in-person meetings (gasp!) rendered nearly obsolete by Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, and a hundred other ways to digitally connect with like-minded fans.

I was a little too young (and a bit too British) to have ever experienced the vivacity of the 1990s American convention scene, and the way that fandom thrived before everyone had a phone in their pocket. But Trekkies lets me visit that world for a time, to see how fans lived, and what they cared about. (Remember when we all thought Playmates Star Trek figures would be worth something some day, as long as we never opened the packaging?)

The 4K upgrade for the movie is a welcome one — the picture is crisper, and the additional clarity of detail is welcome given the heavy grain, particularly during the convention sequences. This is still a documentary, though, and likely one with a rather limited budget even for 1997 — so don’t expect the new presentation to turn Trekkies into a cinematic masterpiece.

In addition to the movie, the new release also has a featurette entitled A Trek Back, in which Denise Crosby and Roger Nygard reflect on the process of making the movie and how it all came together — including their guerrilla interview process during a few mid-1990s conventions, and the string-and-duct-tape way they cobbled together crew and equipment to film the thing in the first place.

It’s a nice inclusion if you’re a fan of the film, but I can’t help but be a little disappointed that there wasn’t any kind of “Where are they now?” follow-up to the original documentary subjects. I know some of the fans featured in the movie have since passed away, but I hope they had happy and fulfilling lives — and I hope wherever the other stars of the film are right now, they are doing well.

If you were one of the fans featured in Trekkies, and you’re reading this 25 years later, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for teaching me how to embrace my inner Star Trek fan, my authentic self. It’s a gift that I will be forever grateful for.

The Trekkies 25th Anniversary Edition Blu-ray is available now.