Parenting & Family Quote by Majel Barrett

There is a wonderfully unglamorous candor in Barrett’s phrasing: “take over” lands with the swagger of power, then immediately gets sanded down into the workaday reality of “children’s merchandising.” It’s the sound of a performer stepping behind the curtain of fandom and into the machinery that monetizes it. Not a starry-eyed ode to art, but a pragmatic inventory of where leverage actually lives: licensing, product lines, the kid-market pipeline.

The subtext is control without pretense. “I’m going to be dealing in” treats merchandising like a trade, not a betrayal. For a genre franchise like Star Trek, that matters. The show didn’t just build audiences; it built consumers, and the 1970s-80s ecosystem of conventions, collectibles, and tie-ins turned sci-fi devotion into an industry. Barrett’s sentence quietly acknowledges that the future wasn’t only on screen; it was on lunchboxes, comics racks, and whatever could be stamped with a recognizable logo.

Then comes the kicker: “just setting it up and having somebody run it.” That’s not laziness; it’s executive thinking. She’s describing a familiar entertainment play: create the structure, secure the rights, delegate the day-to-day. Coming from an actress, it also reads like a small act of defiance against the expectation that performers stay decorative. Barrett is positioning herself as an architect of the franchise’s afterlife, not merely one of its faces.