Birthday Wishes For David Gerrold No Tribble At All

How better to celebrate David Gerrold’s birthday than by showing some love to the cute, cuddly, cooing and Klingon-hating creatures he introduced to the galaxy so many years ago? Really, it’ll be no Tribble at all. Tribbles made their debut in the TOS episode “The Trouble with Tribbles” and proved so popular that they returned in the TAS episode “More Tribbles, More Troubles,” as well as in Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, Star Trek Generations, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Star Trek: Enterprise, Star Trek (2009) and in several Trek books and video games. Of course, of those latter-day appearances, they enjoyed the most screen time on DS9, in the popular TOS-tribute episode “Trials and Tribble-ations,” which also featured a cameo appearance by Gerrold.

Hailing from Iota Geminorum IV, Tribbles are asexual, non-intelligent and ravenously hungry, not to mention born pregnant and able to reproduce at warp speed. And, of course, they’re fuzzy and round. In fact, Gerrold’s inspiration for the creatures – which he initially called Fuzzies – was a pink fuzzball keychain that belonged to a college girlfriend. Pretty much everyone on the TOS set caught Tribble fever, as they turned up for weeks on end in the most surprising places and, often, at amusingly inopportune times. Today, not surprisingly, the prop Tribbles from TOS and DS9 are valuable collectibles.

So, what was your favorite Tribble appearance?

Feel free to leave a birthday greeting for David Gerrold in the comments section below. And to read our two-part interview with Gerrold, click HERE and HERE.