The first major Star Trek convention took place in New York over the weekend of January 21–23, 1972. The “Committee,” the group of fans who’d organized it, expected about five hundred people to attend the Statler Hilton Hotel. Attendees would pay $2.50 to see Gene Roddenberry, Isaac Asimov, Majel Barrett, Hal Clement, and D.C. Fontana. There was a dealers’ room, where Star Trek merchandise would be sold, and NASA sent a large display of replica real-life spacecraft. The most avid group of Star Trek fans in the country had underestimated the appeal of the show. Over the weekend there were around 3,300 paying guests, and the dealers’ room was stripped as if by locusts within a few hours. On the last day, the organizers had to give up charging admission. Over four thousand people attended.
Paramount knew about the convention—they’d hired out thirteen episodes of the series to be shown in the screening room—but they were clearly caught out by the success of the event. Four thousand people was an impressive number to gather in one place, and clearly indicated that Star Trek had a following, but ultimately it told the studio nothing about whether there was a mass audience hungry for more. For them, the measures of success were the column inches in the newspapers, and that it justified a front cover story in Variety. There was something there.
The next year, a second event was held in New York, at a far bigger venue, and James Doohan and George Takei were the official star guests. Seven thousand tickets were sold. Leonard Nimoy happened to be in town and popped by, to find himself mobbed. By this point, there had been conventions almost as large on the West Coast. The next few years saw similar events around the country. With the biggest conventions offering four-figure appearance fees, James Doohan bought a recreational vehicle and made more money touring the convention circuit than he ever had playing Scotty on television.
Attending the 1972 New York convention, where he addressed 1,500 fans in a room with a fire safety limit of 500, was no road-to-Damascus moment for Roddenberry. By now, he knew that Star Trek was thriving in syndication. He and Majel were aware there was a vibrant Star Trek fandom because they ran Lincoln Enterprises, and because he continued to receive a huge volume of fan mail. He was realistic—no show had ever been revived. Paramount had told him again and again that the show had lost money. On a purely practical note, they had disposed of most of the costumes, props and sets from the original run, and replacing them would be prohibitively expensive. Roddenberry was cautious in his message to fans, and hoped that the attention Star Trek was getting would persuade television executives that if Gene Roddenberry had created one hit show, he could create plenty more.
After a weekend basking in the adulation of Star Trek fans, Roddenberry called in on various television executives, then returned home to Beverly Hills. In 1972, with no work on the horizon, he was running low on money. He successfully appealed to have his alimony payments cut (and, once again, failed to persuade his ex-wife that his rights to Star Trek were worth $1,000). Inside Star Trek reports:
He even needed to sell his sailboat. But he couldn’t; there were no buyers. James Doohan, however, felt that Roddenberry wasn’t going about the sales process correctly and volunteered to sell the boat, as his friend’s agent, in return for a sales commission of ten percent. Roddenberry jumped at the offer. Doohan ran ads in several papers and soon found a buyer for $19,000. Roddenberry was elated, took the deal, and when reminded of the ten percent sales commission, wrote out a cheque to Doohan for $1,900. But Roddenberry cautioned “Listen, Jimmy. Hold onto the cheque for a while, Okay?”1
With every bridge to working in cinema burned, Roddenberry had rediscovered his love of working in television. Or, as he phrased it to journalist Richard Skull in a November 1972 interview:
“When Star Trek went off, I was so irritated with television I stayed completely away from it for four years. My creative juices must have stored up during that time. When I decided to come back, I had four ideas at once . . . Obviously, I can’t do four shows at once. Oh, I suppose I could try, but there’d be a tombstone with the inscription: ‘He tried to do four TV series at the same time.’ So I’m doing two and putting the other two aside for the time being.”2
The two series he started work on were Genesis II and The Questor Tapes. Pilot episodes for both were filmed and both came tantalizingly close to being picked up for a full series. It’s telling, though, that this November 1972 newspaper interview with Roddenberry, ostensibly about his new TV projects, bore the headline “Creator of Star Trek comes back to TV.” Eleven months after the New York convention, Star Trek now had the reputation of “the show that wouldn’t die.” Asked whether it would be revived, Roddenberry told Skull: “My own feeling is not to go back into television. I’d like to have a series of Star Trek feature films in the theaters, like Planet of the Apes has done. The statistics show there’s a ready made audience of at least three million who would go to a Star Trek feature.”3 His thinking seems clear enough: he wanted to make movies and Paramount wanted to bring back Star Trek—so they’d have to put him in charge of the movie version.
And it really could have been as easy as that. Just weeks later, early in 1973, Herb Solow took Roddenberry to meet Frank Yablans, president of Paramount, and they pitched an idea for a Star Trek movie. The story, “The Cattlemen,” was an old idea—it had appeared as one of the suggested plots for Star Trek episodes in the original pitch document, back in 1964, as “A Question of Cannibalism”: a colony planet that relied on selling meat discovered the alien cattle were intelligent, but they were reluctant to give up their lucrative trade—with Kirk and Spock going on to learn that it was part of the creatures’ life cycle to be eaten, as it allowed them to lay their eggs in whatever ate them, converting their hosts into aliens.
Solow was skeptical, and worried that the proposed story was far too bleak. Yablans, though, “was enthusiastic and estimated that the film could gross a minimum of $30m.”4 Thirty million dollars at the box office would have made Star Trek one of the top ten highest grossing movies of 1973. Perhaps the bleak tone was what sold it—a number of dark science fiction movies had been released or were in production. Charlton Heston had rather cornered the market, appearing in Planet of the Apes (1968), The Omega Man (1971), where he was the last man left on Earth, and Soylent Green (1973), where the solution to overpopulation was problematic. Westworld (1973) saw androids run amok in a theme park (the movie had a small role for Majel Barrett), Silent Running (1972) was an eco-fable in which a lone astronaut tried to protect the Earth’s last surviving plants. Almost unnoticed, George Lucas had released his first movie, THX1138 (1971), set in a dystopian future police state. Whatever his thinking, Yablans gave the go-ahead on the spot. He wanted Roddenberry to write the script and Solow to produce.
Then Roddenberry blew it. He demanded to be the producer, and when Yablans refused, Roddenberry had Leonard Maizlish take over the negotiations. Maizlish demanded $100,000 for writing the script—as much as Roddenberry had received for writing and producing the Vadim movie. Yablans walked away. For his part, Herb Solow—who was more than happy with the terms being offered—was baffled by Roddenberry’s behavior. He never worked with him again.
Very soon after that, in March 1973, it was announced that a new Star Trek television series would be made, with the first episode airing in September. It would feature almost all the original regular cast, and many of the original writers. The twist was that this was a cartoon series—and that Roddenberry wasn’t involved.
The first Roddenberry heard about the animated series was when Lou Scheimer, the co-founder of Filmation, approached him. One biographer claims that Scheimer approached Paramount because he was a fan of the series.5 Everyone agrees that rival animation studio Hanna-Barbera were also pitching to make a Star Trek show. Whether anyone at either studio was a Trekkie or not, adapting Star Trek fit their business model: around this time, many old shows from the Sixties that had done well in syndication were being resurrected as animated series. In 1973 alone, Filmation produced Saturday morning cartoons of Lassie, Gilligan’s Island, and My Favorite Martian, and Hanna-Barbera made versions of The Addams Family and I Dream of Jeannie.
Roddenberry told Scheimer that he could not make Star Trek without Paramount’s cooperation and Paramount could not make it without his. (Contractually, Paramount had every right to make Star Trek without him, but Roddenberry sincerely thought otherwise, and Paramount felt that he should be involved in any revival.) Roddenberry and Paramount quickly came to a deal, one where Roddenberry had, or at least believed himself to have, complete creative control of the show.
Roddenberry had no interest in running the series on a day-to-day basis but wanted to ensure the new show stuck closely to the original Star Trek format. He did not like one early idea, which was that Kirk, Spock, and the other officers would each be assigned a teenage cadet to mentor. William Shatner was approached to reprise his role as Kirk. He, too, made it clear he wasn’t interested in making a “kiddified” version, and would only return if the ethos of the original show was retained. In similar circumstances, other animated shows had simply given the part to a different actor (none of the cast of the original My Favorite Martian, for example, returned for the cartoon), and perhaps it was here that the existence of a stubborn creator backed by a loyal and vociferous Star Trek fandom influenced Filmation’s plans.
In the Seventies, most cartoons were intended for very young viewers. Two decades before the premiere of The Simpsons, the idea of an animated show broadcast late in the evening on weekdays was extremely unusual but not unprecedented: The Flintstones, for example, had run for six seasons and 166 episodes in the Sixties. In 1973, there was fresh proof that primetime animation was possible: Wait Till Your Father Gets Home had debuted the year before, and would run for three seasons. Its 10:30 p.m. slot was actually later than Star Trek had ever been shown. Notably, it was a sitcom about a fairly ordinary suburban family—there were no talking animals, or other fantasy elements. The show was quite spiky, and the fact it was animated perhaps allowed the writers to get away with a little more than they would have if it had been live action—the same thing Roddenberry claimed he could do with science fiction. So it was just about plausible that the Star Trek animated series would get a similar timeslot to the original show. In actuality, virtually every other cartoon on television was firmly for children, and that had always been the plan for this incarnation of Star Trek—the new audience for the show created by syndication was skewed towards pre-teens, and it was this audience that NBC wished to tap into.
At Roddenberry’s suggestion, D.C. Fontana was hired as associate producer. She quickly corralled a group of writers from the live action show, including David Gerrold, Margaret Armen, and Marc Daniels, as well as writers who were also fans. One coup was commissioning a script from SF novelist Larry Niven, fresh from the publication of his masterpiece Ringworld (1971). She gave the writers copies of the original Star Trek series bible and her intention was that this was effectively to be the fourth year of the Enterprise’s five-year mission, as close to the original series as the format allowed. As she put it, “none of us ever said cartoon.”6
While this was to be a Saturday morning cartoon, the writers knew that there was a loyal, organized group of Star Trek fans, and they did plenty to cater to fandom. The original series had striven to be self-consistent—the show knew better than to cheat its audience by changing the rules of how transporters, warp engines, and so on worked—but had only made a few nods towards what fans now call “continuity.” On the whole, episodes were broadly self-contained and even the recurring threats didn’t recur half as often as you might think: the Romulans, for example, made a total of three appearances. The animated series was clearly set in a more coherent, consistent “Star Trek universe,” brought back characters from previous episodes, and—like the series of Star Trek novels written by science fiction author and critic James Blish—was happy to smooth gaps in the backstory. The opening script was by Sam Peeples, a deliberate act of self-mythologizing on Fontana’s part, as he’d written “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” the first episode to feature Captain Kirk. Many of the stories included references to familiar characters— they were often direct sequels, such as “Mudd’s Passion” by Stephen Kandel, or David Gerrold’s “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” The animated series featured appearances by the Klingons, Romulans, Andorians, Orion slave girls, Tellarites, and Sarek, and made reference to the Eugenics Wars and more.
Fontana was also keen to move the show forward and expand its horizons. It paid more than lip service to diversity, using the medium of animation to make the locations and aliens more elaborate and exotic. Two alien crew members, an exotic cat lady and a three-legged, three-armed navigator, were introduced, something that could never have been achieved in the live action show when Vulcan and Romulan extras had to wear helmets to disguise that the budget didn’t run to giving everyone pointy ears.
It was an ambitious show, and at $75,000 an episode Filmation’s most expensive to that point, but it was still a Saturday morning cartoon. It was made quickly, and relied on the reuse of stock sequences. Scenes set on the bridge of the Enterprise were noticeably repetitive, but the limitations of the form were most painfully obvious during action sequences, when every scene of characters running or fighting looked identical. Characters’ faces had a handful of standard expressions—surprised, angry, sad, happy. William Shatner had little room to improvise or find his signature twists on line readings, and so for perhaps the only time in his long and varied career there are places where he can be accused of sounding subdued.
A key indication that the animated series was authentic Star Trek was the plethora of jostling egos and behind-the-scenes shenanigans. At the first session, Gene Roddenberry was present, and gave a speech. William Shatner says now that Kirk had “been locked away inside me for almost four years, but as soon as I opened my mouth to read his first line he was back. Slipping back into that character was like putting on a comfortable old sweatshirt.”7 This spirit of bonhomie was not universally shared. The day was an uncomfortable one for Leonard Nimoy, who had been reluctant to take part. The makers saw Spock’s presence as vital to the show and bent over at least a little way backwards to accommodate him. It was agreed that rather than interrupt any filming schedule or theater run with a trip back to California, in future he would be allowed to record his lines at recording studios more convenient for him, and mail the tapes in. He was present for the first session, but was surprised that Nichelle Nichols, George Takei, and Walter Koenig weren’t, and confused when he saw that James Doohan and Majel Barrett were to play the roles of Sulu and Uhura, as well as Scotty and Chapel (between them, the two were slated to play the vast majority of guest roles).
With episodes half the length of the live action ones, it was felt extravagant to pay voice actors to deliver the sort of “business” dialogue Sulu, Chekov, and Uhura typically had in the original show. Nimoy understood this, but felt it was offensive that Roddenberry was allowing the parts to be played by other actors. He also felt he’d been conned into coming back—he’d been told the rest of the cast had agreed to do it, and had felt a little churlish to be the only holdout. Technically he hadn’t been lied to—he was the only member of the cast actually asked back who’d turned it down. Takei, Nichols, and Koenig had never been asked. Nimoy added this to what he saw as a growing pile of instances of Roddenberry’s unethical behavior.
He also doubted whether Roddenberry’s insistence that Majel Barrett, rather than Nichelle Nichols, be the one female voice in the cast had been purely based on merit. Nimoy told the producers he would only proceed if the missing cast members were involved. One happy consequence was that, once Nichols and Takei were hired, the writers gave Sulu and Uhura a little more to do than had been typical in the live action show. In “The Lorelei Signal,” Uhura takes charge of the Enterprise following a disaster and Nichols clearly relishes the line “I’m taking command.” Ironically, given that the character had been introduced to appeal to youngsters, the budget did not stretch to hiring Walter Koenig to play the youthful Chekov, but the actor was commissioned to write an episode, “The Infinite Vulcan.”
The series was put together fast: the voice tracks for the first three episodes were recorded in a single day at the beginning of June 1973 and the series began broadcast on September 8. At no point during the making of the animated series were Shatner, Nimoy, Kelley, Doohan, Nichols, Takei, and Barrett ever all in the same room as a group.
Roddenberry had a prominent credit, pocketed a total of $55,000 for reading the scripts, and offered many dialogue suggestions and other pieces of advice. For “The Infinite Vulcan,” Koenig reports, “Gene required a great many rewrites, the reason for which neither Dorothy or I could fathom, and I was quite weary of the whole thing by the time I was finally done with it. I was later invited to write a second episode but decided to pass on the opportunity.”8 The truth of the matter was that D.C. Fontana and the writers she hired understood what made for good Star Trek, possibly better than Roddenberry himself. Fontana and Gerrold in particular were in touch with the new Star Trek fan groups, and knew what made them tick. Gerrold’s book The World of Star Trek, in which he explored the lasting appeal of the show, had just been published. Fontana and her writers were certainly more invested than Roddenberry in the process of making the animated show. They knew the format and reveled in creations that simply wouldn’t have worked in live action—underwater cities, zero-gravity fights, plant people, an alien with detachable limbs, giant dragons—but they understood that the core of the show depended on the interaction of the familiar characters as they encountered seemingly all-powerful foes who personified ethical standpoints or seemingly intractable philosophical conundrums.
The show’s tight deadlines limited Roddenberry’s scope for involvement. Each episode took three months from a blank page to twenty-two minutes of completed animation. Scheimer recalls that some weeks, they would still be editing the film on Friday, the day before it was due to be shown. There came a point, early in the production process for each episode, where Roddenberry had to step back and let them get on with making it.
Roddenberry was not part of the production’s conveyor belt, and clearly had no strong emotional attachment to the series. He was genuinely busy with Genesis II and The Questor Tapes, and the “other two” shows he’d mentioned in his interview with Richard Skull. By the 1980s, he’d made it known that he didn’t consider the animated series “canon,” and references to events in the series were excised from books, comics, and games. His attitude infected fandom, and while—as was typical for cartoons—the animated series was frequently repeated by various stations over the years, fans tended to downplay it.
There are several candidates for the “two” live action shows Roddenberry told Skull he’d put aside. Roddenberry wrote down a number of his ideas for series, and in most cases they were little more than single-page summaries. So, for example, he wrote a half-page summary of a show called “Battleground Earth,” a series set after aliens have arrived on modern-day Earth. After his death, this note would be adapted and dramatically expanded upon until it became the series Gene Roddenberry’s Earth Final Conflict.
Some sources mention “Magna One” as a possible series. Roddenberry’s secretary Susan Sackett, though, says it was a rewrite of a movie 20th Century-Fox were working on: “set in the year 2111, the story concerned an underwater mining city. The eponymous ‘Magna One’ (were there to be others?) was a Stephen Kingesque sub-oceanic bulldozer gone amok.”9
The other two shows were Spectre and The Tribunes. The former was a horror series, pitched to CBS in January 1972. He wanted it to be a detective show where the ghosts were real, rather than “someone trying to drive the heiress mad so they can get her money.”10 It didn’t become a series, but he went on to co-write a Spectre TV movie with Samuel A. Peeples, which was made and shown in 1977.11
The Tribunes was a science fiction police procedural, also developed with Peeples (a fellow ex-cop). In The World of Star Trek it was described as:
a 90 minute pilot for NBC. It will be a police show unlike any on the air. It’s about an experimental police division of 40–50 men and women, equipped with the latest scientific and technological developments to aid them . . . these special officers will no longer carry guns, but weapons that are non-lethal, such as high intensity light which temporarily blinds a suspect or sprays of non-lethal chemicals. The officers would also be magistrates; they can take testimony, settle cases on the spot, issue subpoenas, and so on.12
At the end of his life Roddenberry said,
“I never had any doubt that one of the great problems of modern times was how to force people to obey the law. It seemed to me at one time in my life that the best way to do that was to have policemen that were justifiable—policemen that were very good . . . At one time I had decided that when I became Chief of Police . . . I would bring along with me new attitudes and new uniforms, and that the only weapon you carried was one with which you could choose to injure or kill someone . . . I believed that we should legalize drugs . . . I would have done something like I have done in Star Trek for law enforcement.”13
There were 4,730 LAPD officers when Roddenberry served on the force in the Fifties. He never rose above sergeant. Despite his claim to be “in line” to be chief of police, there were thousands of officers ahead of him in that line. It is possible that he is talking here about The Tribunes, rather than real life. Back in 1973, he’d said of the proposed show, “our hope is that some of these ideas will filter into actual police work.”14
It’s worth noting that before Star Trek, Roddenberry had pitched cop shows, military shows, and Westerns, but that as far as we know, everything he came up with in the Seventies was some form of science fiction or fantasy. He complained about this in a 1979 interview: “They said ‘you’re a science fiction type,’ I said, ‘hey wait a minute, I used to write Westerns, I wrote police stories,’ and they said, ‘No, you’re now science fiction.’ I don’t feel bitter about that. That’s the way Hollywood is, and that’s the way mediocre people think.”15
But this may be a rare instance where Roddenberry failed to see a more positive spin: writers for detective shows were a dime a dozen but very few could come up with workable science fiction formats. Roddenberry may have been a victim of typecasting but at least he was thought of as successful in a particular genre.
One idea that Roddenberry was clearly convinced would be a winner first emerged under the title Genesis II. It’s the show specifically mentioned in the Skull interview. Roddenberry worked on it for almost two years, from spring 1972, and it’s fair to say the series came as close as it possibly could to being made.
By the Seventies, networks still made pilot episodes of drama series, but now tended to offset the expense by running them as movies-of-the-week. If the network liked the result, and the ratings were good, they would commit to a full season. Genesis II was commissioned on those terms, filmed from November 1972 to January 1973, and shown in March.
The story begins in the twentieth century, deep in a cave system, where NASA astronaut Dylan Hunt is taking part in a test of suspended animation technology. There is a rockfall, and the sleeping Hunt is buried alive. He is revived 150 years in the future to discover that industrial civilization has collapsed and mankind now lives in isolated communities which dot a verdant planet. People face hardships that include the need to eke out a living without modern technology and cope with groups of marauding bandits. There are mutated animals and people, and vestiges of ancient machines and knowledge.
Hunt has been woken by a team from PAX, an organization that champions diversity and preserves technology and art that has survived the disaster, hoping to be a beacon of peace and progress. PAX hate “lust” in all forms. They are committed to non-violence to the point that their guns only fire stun darts. A number of them are “unisex” (asexual) including Harper-Smyth, a young woman who is assigned to help Dylan settle in. Hunt is wary, and easily swayed by a more conventionally beautiful woman, Lyra’a (Mariette Hartley, who’d played Zarabeth in the Star Trek episode “All Our Yesterdays”), who says she’s a spy from another city and PAX are actually intent on conquering the world. Hunt takes this at face value, even when she tells him her city is called Tyrania. He is only a little suspicious when Lyra’a shows no concern for a group of starving stragglers. When he learns that there’s a ruling elite of superhuman mutants who consider themselves superior to ordinary men, he seems more disturbed by the fact that this means Lyra’a has two bellybuttons (a Roddenberry in-joke). He is even accepting when he sees that while the Tyranians live in luxury, they operate work camps.
Hunt does come to see the error of his ways. To the horror of a team from PAX who help him escape (one of whom, the noble savage Isiah, is played by the giant actor Ted Cassidy, who’d appeared in Star Trek but was best known as Lurch, the butler for The Addams Family), Hunt reactivates an ancient nuclear device close to Tyrania and sets it to explode, so destroying the Tyranians.
Roddenberry had not stumbled across a wholly original idea. As long as humans have told stories, there have been tales about worldwide disasters and the struggles of survivors emerging from their shelters to rebuild—the biblical account of Noah’s Ark was building on an already ancient myth. After the first atomic bombs were dropped, there was a particular interest in new stories about the aftermath of a global holocaust. George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949) was a successful early example. Roddenberry read science fiction magazines, so he was probably familiar with Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1960), about a group of Catholic monks preserving artifacts and scientific knowledge that have survived an atomic holocaust millennia before.
The premise of Genesis II was a strong one: the idea would be that Hunt would lead a team from PAX who would explore the world, encountering different communities who’d learned to survive in unusual ways. It would transpire that Lyra’a had survived the nuclear explosion, and she would be a recurring adversary. Genesis II would be a vehicle for adventure stories that could include social commentary and satire, with each community embodying a particular issue.
As part of his pitch, Roddenberry came up with a number of story ideas, and even before the show was made, we can see him falling back on ideas from Star Trek. Hunt would meet super soldiers from the 1990s who’ve emerged from suspended animation, a “god” that turns out to be the priesthood using advanced technology to con their followers, and a space probe that has returned in search of its creator. The idea for one story, “Poodle Shop,” in which men are treated like pets by the domineering leaders of a matriarchal society, recycles an idea in the original Star Trek pitch document, where it was called “The Pet Shop.” The plan for Genesis II, though, was—like Star Trek—to open the series to many writers, who would bring their own ideas to the table.
Genesis II did well in its timeslot, and was given positive reviews. Afterwards, Roddenberry was prone to exaggeration on these points, claiming it was “the highest rated Thursday night Movie of the Week”16 and that he’d lost a bet with Majel because it had received no negative reviews whatsoever. In fact, the pilot had done well enough that, in the normal course of events, a series would have followed. CBS weren’t entirely convinced, and told Roddenberry they might commission it as a mid-season replacement. They paid for four scripts to be written. When they decided not to pick up the series that year, they took the unusual step—albeit one Roddenberry had encountered before— of ordering a second pilot. Changes were made, and from these we can infer where it was felt the problems with the original lay.
The biggest change was the recasting of Dylan Hunt. It’s clear Roddenberry wasn’t happy with Alex Cord’s performance in Genesis II, telling The Monster Times in 1976 he was “a very capable actor . . . but not for this series, as it turned out.” He’d wanted Lloyd Bridges (as he had for Star Trek) but this was vetoed by the network, as were, according to Roddenberry, “all twelve” of his choices. He didn’t get his way second time around either, with the network assigning John Saxon, who gives a far more physical, exuberant performance (one that seems consciously Shatneresque). The whole look and feel is less gloomy and faster-paced than Genesis II.
The second pilot had a peculiarly generic title: Planet Earth. It was shown a little more than a year after Genesis II, in April 1974. The makeover gave Roddenberry the opportunity to revamp a few aspects of the format. The story is a sequel to Genesis II, with Dylan Hunt now part of PAX, but it plays rather loosely with what was established before. Ted Cassidy returns as a more articulate Isiah; Harper-Smyth returns, though now played by Janet Margolin, not Lynne Marta. Majel Barrett also gets a small role as a PAX officer, but apparently not the same one she played in Genesis II. PAX no longer live in caves and wear drab overalls—now they have a futuristic city and dress in colorful, floaty William Ware Theiss creations.
The story is a meld of two ideas from the original Star Trek pitch: “Kongo,” where white men are taken into slavery, and “The Pet Shop,” the “women rule over men” plot. Planet Earth skips the introductions and setup, launching straight into an adventure where Dylan Hunt is captured and sold as a slave in a society of domineering women who drug their men and set them to work in the fields, the kitchen, and—inevitably, given who wrote it—the bedroom. The community is being menaced by Kreegs, mutants who have the same head ridges and bumps the Klingons end up with in the later Star Trek movies and television shows. Hunt realizes the male slaves are being drugged to keep them meek. He removes the drug from their food supply, and the men help the women fight off the Kreegs.
Roddenberry occasionally said that the reason Genesis II didn’t become a series was because CBS opted to make the Planet of the Apes TV series instead. It’s clearly not that simple. CBS did make Planet of the Apes for TV, but crucially it ran in the autumn of 1974. Genesis II was shown in March 1973, Planet Earth in April 1974. So CBS made Planet of the Apes after giving Genesis II its second chance. Twenty stories from various writers were commissioned, at least six scripts were completed and ready to be filmed. CBS invested time and money in the project, and clearly wanted it to work. So why didn’t it?
There’s no doubt that Planet of the Apes was, as it were, the gorilla in the room. The 1968 movie had led to a series of sequels, and the movies had thrust the concept of a bizarre post-apocalyptic Earth of the distant future into the heart of popular culture. Over at DC Comics, editor Carmine Infantino had failed to secure the rights for Planet of the Apes, but set legendary artist Jack Kirby—who’d recently left Marvel, where his creations and co-creations included the majority of the superheroes who made up the Avengers, the X-Men and the Fantastic Four—the task of coming up with a similar series. Kirby hadn’t seen Planet of the Apes, but he knew the premise, and created Kamandi, set in a lurid, densely packed world where all sorts of animals had been mutated following a “Great Disaster” long ago which had bathed the world in radiation. Kamandi started publication in autumn 1972, as Roddenberry was writing Genesis II. There’s no evidence Roddenberry was aware of the comic, and it’s virtually impossible Kirby knew anything about Roddenberry’s plans. They are very similar not because one influenced the other, but because many people who published or broadcast science fiction were looking for ideas like Planet of the Apes at the time.
Genesis II got good ratings, but when CBS showed the original Planet of the Apes movie in the same slot, the ratings were far higher. Genesis II had the same kind of setup as Planet of the Apes—a NASA scientist returns to Earth in the future to find a world settled after an apocalypse. The network executives thought the Genesis II series would be better if it was more like Planet of the Apes. Many producers in such a situation would have talked that through, tried to understand what the network was after, and come to some form of accommodation. Roddenberry’s belief that he shouldn’t compromise left both sides a little exasperated by the process. Roddenberry would go on to tell an anecdote silly enough that it may well have been completely true:
“At that time a junior executive came up with one of those great front office suggestions: he suggested that we consider the possibility that man’s best friend had evolved into a hind-legged species of talking dog, and intending to be sarcastic, I said ‘no, I have something much better. I have in mind a turtle-man creature and it may turn out to be even better than apes because it will give our show an underwater dimension.’ I knew it was all over when they were taking that suggestion seriously.”17
Having made two pilots and paid for twenty scripts, CBS were still not convinced. They pulled the plug on Genesis II/Planet Earth, and simply commissioned Planet of the Apes instead. As well as having a title audiences recognized, the show was a cheaper option than Roddenberry’s series, as many of the costumes and props from the movies could be reused. The series would star Mark Lenard, who’d played the first Romulan we saw in Star Trek, as well as Spock’s father Sarek, as the main antagonist, the gorilla General Urko. CBS expected great things when it debuted in September 1974, but the reviews and ratings were poor, and the show was ignominiously canceled after fourteen episodes.
With Planet of the Apes out of the way, a third attempt at the same basic concept was aired. Strange New World was broadcast on March 23, 1975. Despite lifting its name from Star Trek’s opening title voiceover, Gene Roddenberry was not involved. This version kept John Saxon as the lead, but made him a new character, Anthony Vico, one of three astronauts in orbit when Earth is hit by an asteroid. It’s easily the dullest of the three versions. Two months before the transmission, in January 1975, Roddenberry had already publicly declared that Genesis II was “dead.”18
Gene Roddenberry had spent two years working on some form of Genesis II. It came at an odd time for him: he’d failed to move into movies, but saw the renewed interest in Star Trek as proof he was great at making serial television. He’d remarried and was trying to start a new family, but Majel Barrett suffered a series of miscarriages. He was getting paid to develop television shows, but nothing like the number he’d become accustomed to while producing shows that were on the air. He told plenty of people that Star Trek had been “ahead of its time.” The corollary of that, surely, was that his hour had now come. Roddenberry saw the signs. The public were interested in science fiction, perhaps because of the moon landing, perhaps because they wanted escapism from the Vietnam War and the troubles of the Nixon era, or perhaps because it was a genre that could hold a satirical mirror up to confusing, uncertain times. Whatever the reason, Roddenberry looked to be on the right side of history. So what went wrong?
While Genesis II clearly meant a lot to Roddenberry on a number of professional and personal levels, it’s just not very good. Planet Earth is far more entertaining, but it’s endearingly terrible, rather than impressive. There’s some baffling storytelling in both pilots—elaborate explanations of details that aren’t important to the story while major characters and plotlines disappear for long stretches. Both are extraordinarily pompous. Genesis II is as airless as the tunnels of the subterranean travel tubes that allow our hero to propel himself around the world. Planet Earth has a very odd problem with tone—the serious stuff is brushed away, we dwell on trivia (it’s explained to us that the travel tubes move at 1,135 miles an hour) and the pacing is slow. The story beats are so obvious that you can set your watch to them and it’s almost impossible to make any emotional investment in Hunt, PAX or anything else that’s going on. The direction, performances and dull design work play their part, but it can’t be a coincidence that a lot of the faults are also evident in The Lieutenant, “The Cage,” Star Trek: The Motion Picture, or the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation—all of which were started from scratch by Roddenberry and laden with some fairly humorless worldbuilding.
Then there are the “issues.” There’s some interesting subversion—nowhere in the various societies we see in any of the proposed storylines was there anything resembling democracy, let alone capitalism. But, given two chances to put his money where his mouth is, and make a television movie that’s bold and political and has a clear message, Roddenberry blows it. Planet Earth’s depiction of a society run by women is clearly meant to be “about” feminism, but the treatment of gender politics—perhaps best summed up by John Saxon’s growled line “Women’s Lib . . . or Women’s Lib gone mad?”—is so bizarre that most modern viewers would probably be too busy being bewildered to remember to be offended. There’s some nuance: the women have various leadership styles from cruel dominatrix to more playful and forgiving. But Roddenberry wants to have his cake and eat it: to portray how humiliating it is for a man to be treated as a sex object, but also how hot it is when a man bends a babe to his will. Planet Earth’s killer flaw is that a description of TV listings length makes it sounds rather kinky and fun, but when he fleshes it out, Roddenberry manages to make it astonishingly dull.
Innovation Publishing, a company who produced a number of comic-book titles based on old TV shows and movies, such as Lost in Space, Dark Shadows, and Forbidden Planet, bought the rights to adapt Genesis II in the early Nineties, but the company folded before the series was developed.
Could it have worked? Yes. The idea’s perfectly good. It’s easy to see how a format about visiting different models for how to run a society could be a fascinating, smart show. Here, rather than in Star Trek, Roddenberry hit on the perfect template for a modern take on Gulliver’s Travels. Genesis II and Planet Earth are frustrating to watch mainly because, although it’s clearly a good idea for a television series, the episodes themselves somehow manage to be both heavy-handed and lightweight. It’s very hard not to place a lot of the blame on Roddenberry himself.
Roddenberry had a second series in the works at exactly the same time. This was Questor (retitled The Questor Tapes by the time it was shown). He delivered the first draft on November 29, 1972, and a revised draft by December 12,19 which fell during the filming of Genesis II. The pilot episode was broadcast in January 1974 (coming neatly between Genesis II and Planet Earth) with Robert Foxworth in the title role. Because Roddenberry was busy with Genesis II, much of the day-to-day work on Questor was done by Gene L. Coon, who’d been such an important force on Star Trek.
Questor was an android, one we see assembled by an international team of scientists at the beginning of the story. The scientists have not designed Questor, but are completing the work of the late Dr. Vaslovik, who was so far ahead of his field that the scientists don’t fully understand what they are building. In an attempt to keep some control over the experiment, they decide not to upload all of the tapes Vaslovik planned to program Questor with into the android’s brain. Questor activates anyway, and— after the scientists have gone home for the night—uses machines to adopt an appearance that’s indistinguishable from a human, even on quite close inspection. Questor escapes from the lab, quickly learning to speak and act like a person, barring a few mannerisms. We’re briefly led to think that the android might be hostile, but one of the scientists, Jerry Robinson (played by Mike Farrell, soon to end up as B.J. Hunnicutt in M*A*S*H), knows otherwise, and works with Questor as he travels the world trying to discover what was on the missing tapes—including a trip to a “London” that looks suspiciously Californian, complete with mountains in the background). In the last act of the pilot episode, Questor reaches a mysterious cave full of deactivated androids, and encounters Vaslovik, who reveals he is also an android. As he expires, Vaslovik explains that Questor is the last of a line of androids built by mysterious aliens to carefully guide and protect the progress of the human race. By the time Questor’s life ends, humanity will have either destroyed itself, or its civilization will have attained the next level of development.
Star Trek fans will spot that Questor is, as Questor himself might put it, 99.9997 percent identical to Data from The Next Generation, particularly in the early seasons of the latter show, when the android was preoccupied with exploring “the human equation”—the mysterious factor that makes humans unique. Data looks a little more artificial than Questor, but shares the same superior physical and mental abilities. They both say “humor is a quality which seems to elude me,” and assure a female acquaintance that they are “fully functional” lovers. As The Next Generation progressed, Data’s backstory was developed and we learn he was built by a human being, Dr. Soong, but according to the writers’ guide (and a couple of the early Next Generation books and comics) he was built by mysterious aliens. While the series took another direction, it’s entirely possible Roddenberry’s original plan was to reveal that Data was on an identical mission to Questor, shepherding the human race to its next stage of development. This was a recurring theme of the early episodes of The Next Generation, with the godlike Q being worried about the destiny of humanity in the pilot episode, and young Wesley Crusher singled out as important by the Traveler in “Where No One Has Gone Before.” It was a theme that faded away as The Next Generation settled in. Brent Spiner became popular with fans for his portrayal of Data, in part because he found a way to bring a lighter touch and a slightly arch quality to the character.
At the time it was made, the obvious parallel to Questor in Roddenberry’s other work was, of course, Mr. Spock, another logical being whose role was often to comment on the foibles of human beings. There was a good reason for this—it was intended as a vehicle for Leonard Nimoy. As Nimoy related it in I Am Spock,20 he’d left Mission: Impossible at the end of its fifth season, and the head of production at Universal told him, “we’ve just hired Gene Roddenberry to write a project for you.” Nimoy signed a one-year contract with Universal “with the understanding that I was to star in this new series.” Later, Nimoy was in makeup for another project, and saw people at work on an old life cast of his. After he hadn’t heard anything for a while, he spoke to Dick Colla, the director, who told him the part had gone to Robert Foxworth. Nimoy called Roddenberry, who insisted he’d had nothing to do with the decision, but Nimoy was secretly relieved, as he’d been getting a fair amount of work on stage, TV, and the movies, and preferred it to being a regular on a production-line TV show.
For Nimoy, the continuing success of Star Trek was a little irritating. While waiting to play Questor, he’d become aware just how closely identified with Spock he now was. He’d started to worry that playing another logical humanoid in a Gene Roddenberry science fiction show would hurt his career.21
At the beginning of 1972, Roddenberry had been able to write to Hal Clement that he knew Leonard Nimoy would return to Star Trek if it was revived, but that William Shatner may have moved on.22 Being passed over for Questor marked the point where Nimoy decided to have as little as possible to do with Roddenberry, something that would remain true for the rest of their lives.
The network wanted more Questor, and Roddenberry was commissioned to write a series bible. D.C. Fontana was involved in the process (and would write the novelization of the pilot episode). Roddenberry wanted to avoid the sort of stories that involved “monsters trying to conquer man,” and suggested one in which Questor calculated that a brilliant young scientist would go on to cure cancer as long as he wasn’t distracted by marriage, and so would plot to split him up with his fiancée. Having succeeded, he would then realize he’d miscalculated, that the man’s wife would have been very supportive, and would then try to get them back together. Questor and Robinson would run an international organization from a hi-tech base.
A number of scripts were written but Universal weren’t happy.23 They’d suggested a major change to the format: losing the Jerry Robinson human sidekick character and making the show more like The Fugitive, where the main character would be on the run from the authorities, arrive in a town or city, and struggle to solve a local difficulty before his pursuers caught up with him. It had become a tried and trusted format for a TV show. It’s not a bad suggestion for adding urgency and movement to the format—but it wasn’t the show Gene Roddenberry wanted to make. He saw the dynamic between Questor and Robinson as the whole point.
At conventions, it was part of Roddenberry’s schtick that the network bosses were too dumb to get his shows. When he replied to a letter from a nun, Sister Margaret Clarke, who’d written to say she enjoyed the exploration of the human condition in Star Trek, he talked about his new show, and seemed irritated at some of the network changes:
They wanted it to become a robot, Superman show which would draw its entertainment from Questor’s ability to leap tall buildings in a single bound, or something like that. They insisted on entirely deleting the back story of The Questor Tapes, more particularly Questor’s mission to help mankind and his computer-logic perspectives on mankind by which the weekly episodes would have aimed at seeing ourselves as others might see us.24
As with Genesis II, it’s easy to believe that a different producer might have found a way to persuade his bosses that the Jerry Robinson character was a vital cog in the series, or to navigate a course that created plenty of room for “Superman” antics and philosophical scenes. Questor might even have had that man in Gene L. Coon, but Coon had died in July 1973, from throat and lung cancer. He was forty-nine (younger than Roddenberry) and had continued to chain smoke even after he’d started using an oxygen tank to breathe. His death clearly cast a shadow over the project. Even by the time the pilot for The Questor Tapes aired in January 1974—to good ratings and reviews— it was extremely unlikely the show would ever be made.
As 1973 started, things must have looked incredibly bright for Gene Roddenberry. Star Trek now had the reputation as “the show that didn’t die,” and Roddenberry was getting the credit. The animated series was in the works and providing a useful income for very little effort. There was discussion about a Star Trek movie. Roddenberry had two pilots in production, both promising to build on the potential of Star Trek to deliver smart science-fiction action stories. In modern marketing parlance, a Roddenberry brand was developing. The Star Trek animated series was providing a useful income for very little work. Majel was pregnant—she would give birth to their son, Rod, in February 1974.
But by the start of 1974, his career was in tatters. Over and over again, Roddenberry had played “crazy Gene,” insisting to the network executives that it was his way or the highway, and they’d consistently chosen the highway. Genesis II and The Questor Tapes weren’t going forward. There wasn’t going to be a Star Trek movie, and the animated series was canceled. No one was interested in any of Roddenberry’s other ideas.
Meanwhile, Star Trek had only grown in popularity. When Roddenberry reconnected with Star Trek fandom, he would be amazed by what he found . . .