The Fifty-Year Mission

Although Gene Roddenberry had floated the idea of a Star Trek motion picture as early as 1969 (while the original series was still in production), the first serious possibility of such a film actually being produced dates back to 1973, when Paramount began negotiations with Roddenberry and former Desilu exec Herbert F. Solow, who was then at MGM, on The Cattlemen, which was intended to be the first Star Trek movie.

Roddenberry’s oddest notion to date was derived from an original pitch of his called “A Question of Cannibalism.” In it, the Enterprise encounters a race of intelligent “cowlike creatures” being raised and slaughtered by ranchers for food. It wrestles with the moral quandary inherent in such a high-concept allegorical scenario. Despite Paramount and Solow’s avowed enthusiasm for the project, Roddenberry ultimately balked at the comparatively modest writer’s fees being offered by the studio and walked away from this strange little project with an aggrieved Roddenberry and Solow never talking again.

However, with the unprecedented success of Star Trek in syndication as well as the ever-growing runaway success of the conventions receiving increasing media attention, NBC was revisiting the possibility of bringing back Star Trek. The hitch: they wanted to repilot the show, but with the expensive sets long razed, Paramount wasn’t interested in producing a new pilot and incurring the massive construction costs without a full season order.

As Roddenberry once put it, “They had seventy-nine pilots already.” He elaborated on the situation to Circus, a popular music magazine at the time: “Right after the show was canceled by the network in America, Paramount, who owned the show fifty-fifty with me, decided they needed the studio space. So they tore down and broke up the sets. The costumes were sold or broken up! All that was left was seventy-nine cans of film … and memories … and fans … hundreds of thousands of them. There were rounds and rounds of meetings about reviving Star Trek. You would think that after laying an egg the size of Jupiter, the network would accept any offer … No! They wanted another pilot show. Paramount refused because the sets would cost seven hundred fifty thousand dollars to replace, too much of an investment for anything short of a whole season’s worth of new episodes. That was the stalemate.”

But Star Trek would, in fact, return to television, this time as an animated series produced by Filmation, the company responsible for such popular shows at the time as Archie’s Funhouse, Groovie Goolies, The Brady Kids, and Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids. Invoking a refrain that would become familiar in subsequent years, Roddenberry told SHOW Magazine, “I just didn’t want space cadets running all over the Enterprise saying things like, ‘Golly gee whiz, Captain Kirk!’ You know, like Archie and Jughead going to the moon. There are enough limitations just being on Saturday morning.”

As William Shatner observed in his book Star Trek Movie Memories, “Story editor Dorothy Fontana would assign scripts, shepherd them through a rewrite or two, and pass the completed manuscripts along to Gene, who had assumed the title of executive consultant. Gene would then read each script, perhaps make a suggestion or two, and sign off. It was that simple. Roddenberry had found the perfect vehicle. The animated Star Trek required almost none of his time, it kept his most durable brand name alive, and it served as a lightning rod, rallying the forces to cry, ‘Bring back Star Trek!’ In their minds, and this was carefully groomed by Gene at countless conventions, they won their first battle. The animated Star Trek should be seen not as a reward in and of itself, but as the first step back toward new and improved live-action Treks, be they on television or the silver screen. Over and over again, fans were urged to keep fighting.”

LOU SCHEIMER (president, Filmation)

It was 1972 or 1973 and I thought it would be a great time to do an animated Star Trek. Gene loved the idea, but there had been some problems between Roddenberry, Paramount, and NBC, and basically they weren’t speaking to each other. The root of the problem was creative control. In those days, it was difficult to deal with networks on Saturday-morning shows without them getting involved creatively.

HAL SUTHERLAND (director, Filmation)

Roddenberry was victorious and he was given carte blanche creative control.

GENE RODDENBERRY (executive consultant, Star Trek: The Animated Series)

A number of production companies approached me about an animated series, but it was important to me that I have complete creative control so that we were sure the show was done properly. That was the reason I wanted control. We had to eliminate some of the violence we might have had on in the evening shows, and there was no sex element at all. But the idea was that it would be Star Trek and not a stereotypical kids’ cartoon show.

DEFOREST KELLEY (actor, “Dr. Leonard ‘Bones’ McCoy”)

I questioned it at the time when Gene said he was going to do it. I thought it was the death blow. Gene said, “No, I don’t feel that way at all. I think it’s important to keep some form of Star Trek alive and in the minds of people.”

DOROTHY FONTANA (associate producer, Star Trek: The Animated Series)

When Gene approached me to do the show, he asked me if I would like to come on as story editor and producer. Since I wasn’t a part of another regular staff at the time, I decided to do it. I had not worked in animation, which I do enjoy, so I had a good time on the show. I left after the first season because I wanted to move on to something else and not get stuck in animation. The business is funny. If you stay too long in one thing, people start to buttonhole you there and say, “You can’t do anything else,” regardless of all your other credits.

FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)

We would announce the fall schedule in May, so I knew in September of 1973 we would debut the animated series. That whole summer I was in touch with Filmation and Lou Scheimer and [his partner] Norm Prescott. Dorothy had an office at Filmation. She was the showrunner. Gene would read the scripts, but she was running the show.

DOROTHY FONTANA

It takes three months to do an animated half hour, which is not a half hour, it’s twenty-one minutes, and that’s a lot of time. That is far more time than an active production company will be spending. If you’re hurrying with live action, it would take—at minimum—six weeks. We’d like to have more time, but you can do it in six weeks. Three months is different. It’s twice that, and it has to be done by hand. Everything was done by hand, except that they could Xerox the cells’ backgrounds and some of the animated pieces. If allowed, we could draw any type of alien we wanted, because we didn’t have to worry about whether the makeup looked right, just does it look right on a cell? We could have any kind of background we wanted, which was nice because we didn’t have to worry about the cost of the set. You could say Rome burned and they could draw it.

HAL SUTHERLAND

Filmation was extremely busy and Roddenberry never knew when to quit. At one point on the first episode, we had just three days to start production and meet our deadline, and Gene kept pushing for improvements. I finally said, “Gene, we’re locked into the deadline, we’ve got to do this!” To his credit, he stepped back and said, “Okay, we’re done.”

DOROTHY FONTANA

I had an office at Filmation, and I was in the same building where the animation was done. Unlike many companies, they didn’t farm out their work to foreign countries. Everything was done in-house, and the artists and recording studio were all together.

FRED BRONSON

I went over to Filmation a lot. We would go and watch each episode, and Lou was just the best. I was a network publicist, but I was a kid. I was twenty-four years old. But he treated me like an equal, which I really appreciated. I set up interviews with him and Norm. They took great care of us when the Broadcast Standards guy, Ted Cortez, and I would go have lunch at Filmation and watch an episode.

I’ll never forget, we were watching an episode and there’s this scene with McCoy with his back to camera, and you can see a yellow stream coming out of the lower part of his body. We’re onto the next thing, and I said, “Wait, what did we just see?” And Ted says, “I don’t know.” I said, “I think we should go back.” And, sure enough, McCoy’s peeing. This is animated, this is not a blooper, this was put in on purpose. Then they all cracked up and said, “We just put it in for you to see if you would catch it.” But Ted was really concerned it would end up on the air, so he made sure it did not. It was very funny.

LOU SCHEIMER

Dorothy and her writers wrote the scripts, Gene would offer his input, and then it was storyboarded.

DAVID GERROLD (writer, “More Tribbles, More Troubles,” “Bem”)

Roddenberry started out by saying he was going to be personally involved in every script, but as time wore on, he didn’t have the strength to continue. Gene didn’t write any of the scripts himself. The real problem was that Gene was having some difficulties at the time and he couldn’t always remember what he’d previously said about a story; so from one draft to the next, he was always changing direction. His notes on “Bem” were very confusing, and he added elements that I felt pulled the story way off its original premise. When in doubt, Gene always had Kirk get into a fight with God.

HAL SUTHERLAND

After reading the scripts, I’d create instructions for the animators, working from storyboards. More often than not, I’d work well into the night, sometimes at my office, sometimes in my dining room at three a.m.

FRED BRONSON

I wrote a lot of press releases, I did a lot of interviews, I wrote feature stories that went out to the press. I gave this show a lot of attention, which obviously I thought it deserved.

DOROTHY FONTANA

We did not write our scripts as kiddie shows. We were writing for the Star Trek audience, and we did not think they were twelve-year-olds, so we tried to keep the quality of the show in the first year. Second year, I didn’t have anything to do with it, so I don’t know. I do know that they did most of the scripts we rejected in the first year, but, again, I had no say in this.

FRED BRONSON

I went to the first recording session where the cast showed up. I was there with an NBC photographer and wrote a story about it. I treated the animated Star Trek like it was a prime-time series.

LOU SCHEIMER

People are surprised that you record the actors’ voices before you start animating. Everyone thinks the voices are added later, but the animator wouldn’t know how to do it. He needs to hear the voices before he knows what the emotion is. So we’d record the voices from the storyboards, which are basically illustrated bibles. Then we’d do the full animation. And everything was done by hand. There were no computer graphics, and we did a lot of stock scenes of the characters walking and talking. We reutilized that material in different settings and different combinations.

In her autobiography, Beyond Uhura, actress Nichelle Nichols said of the animated series, “Far from a ‘kiddie’ show, the animated series was quite good, with many of the scripts written by the same writers who had worked on the original series, all under the supervision of Gene and D. C. Fontana. The producers immediately signed up Bill and Leonard to voice their characters, but planned to hire other voice-over actors to provide everyone else’s. This was not intended as a slight to any of us; it was just cheaper and made the most business sense. Bill saw nothing wrong with this plan and agreed to it. Leonard, however, asked, ‘Where are George and Nichelle and the others?’ When he was told that they did not have us, he replied, ‘Well, then you don’t get me.’ It was only Leonard’s deep sense of fairness that kept the classic crew together for that show. In June 1973 we reunited once again, and it was great to be working together as a team. I thought some of the scripts were quite good and in one—at last—Uhura got to take command of the ship.”

LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)

We started to read through two or three scripts and I said, “Where are George and Nichelle?” You know, just out of curiosity. I thought, “Maybe they’re out of town and they’re doing what I was promised I could do later, if necessary, which was to record from out of town.” I would go to a local recording studio in Boise or anyplace, wherever it was, and record my dialogue and send the tape back by mail. Then I found out they were not being hired. That’s when I took my stand. Not only had they not been hired, but their characters were written in the show and were being played by other people. Their images would be on the screen and you would see an image of Nichelle and you would see an image of George Takei, but other people would be hired to play the voices. I was appalled. How could they do this?

FRED BRONSON

That’s true. Leonard did come to their rescue. It’s Saturday morning. It’s a half-hour show and I don’t think it was meant to be cruel or malicious. They had a budget. But he stood up and they got them.

WALTER KOENIG (writer, “The Infinite Vulcan”)

I was upset with the way I found out that I wasn’t a part of the show—at a convention. Everybody thought someone else had told me apparently. Dorothy thought Gene had, Gene thought Dorothy had. To save money, Filmation wanted Majel to do Uhura’s voice also and Jimmy to do Sulu’s voice since in cartoons at the time you got paid one check to do two characters’ voices. To Leonard’s credit, he said he would not do the series unless they hired George and Nichelle since they had been there from the beginning.

JAMES DOOHAN (actor, “Montgomery ‘Scotty’ Scott)

I think the show was ordinary. It was ordinarily drawn. It was kind of fun doing it because I did three characters and in ten of them I did four, and I pushed for that because once you did more than three, they had to double your pay. Strangely enough, I didn’t use any accents. I just changed the tone of my voice. It was kind of like being back in radio again, and we made a little money. We certainly hadn’t made any on the live-action series, because the residuals ran out in April 1971. The unions remedied it because of Star Trek, absolutely. They never thought any show would run like Star Trek has run.

LOU SCHEIMER

De Kelley was one of the sweetest human begins I ever met, and Jimmy Doohan was highly versatile. Jimmy worked with Filmation again on Jason of Star Command. On Star Trek, Jimmy and Majel Barrett did a lot of voices for us.

MAJEL BARRETT (actress, “Christine Chapel”)

It’s like seeing a caricature of yourself. I was the wind, the trees, a mountaintop, and anything that spoke. It was very imaginative. You almost couldn’t give a bad performance.

LEONARD NIMOY

Frankly, I never really felt any sense of gratification doing it or a real sense of the communion that we had when we did the show in the flesh. For me, it was rather an exercise. Reporting to a recording studio during an occasional free moment in L.A., or in some Midwestern recording studio, doing your lines on tape and saying, “Thanks, fellow!” and walking out to the car was nowhere near as gratifying as acting in three dimensions. There were moments, but nothing spectacular.

One of the strengths of the series—which ran for only twenty-two episodes from 1973 to 1974—is the fact that the scripts were far more literate than anything else on Saturday morning, many of them having been created by writers from the live-action series. Helping in this area was the fact that there was a Writers Guild strike at the time, thus freeing many live-action writers to work on the animated show, which wasn’t covered by a WGA contract. The series was honored with an Emmy in 1973 for Best Children’s Program.

ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)

I had never watched the animated series; I dismissed it as nonsense without ever seeing it. But the caliber of the stories was on par and even better than a number of TOS episodes. The animation, of course, was terrible. But storywise, for what they had to work with, it was phenomenal. I like to think of it as the fourth and fifth year of the voyage.

DOROTHY FONTANA (writer, “Yesteryear”)

“Yesteryear” resulted from my looking back at the things we had done on the series and remembering the time portal from “The City on the Edge of Forever.” I thought we could use that for a legitimate trip, but then have something happen so that Spock has to return to Vulcan to his childhood. We could probe into these characters and see the beginning of some of the trouble with Spock and Sarek, Amanda’s problems back then, and part of what made Spock Spock. I had wanted to see Vulcan in “Journey to Babel” with a matte shot, but it got cut out. So with the script for “Yesteryear,” I went back to the description from that script and said, “Let’s do this now.” I wanted to see a city with parkways and trees with growing things, and with unique spires. And we achieved that with animation.

LOU SCHEIMER

A pet’s death had never been done on a children’s program, but it was in “Yesteryear,” and it was touching and provocative. Dorothy was instrumental in making it so creative.

DOROTHY FONTANA

I felt strongly about dealing with the death of a pet, in this case Spock’s sehlat [a large teddy bear with fangs, as it was described in the show]. It was a very serious thing for kids. We were trying to put across a lesson to children, that when it comes time for an animal to die, if he must go, it should be with dignity.

MARC DANIELS (writer, “One of Our Planets Is Missing”)

Gene Roddenberry encouraged me to write this episode of the animated series. I have to admit that it was fun to do some writing rather than just directing.

DAVID GERROLD

My two script ideas had been pitched to the third season of the original series. Surprisingly, nothing was cut. In fact, the animated scripts were almost as long as the live-action scripts, but they played faster as animation, which provided the chance to do the stories in depth. The only thing we didn’t do was give Kirk a love affair in every episode. That gave us an extra twenty minutes per episode for more story and more action.

During third season of the original series, I went to Fred Freiberger and had been developing a thing called “Bem.” When Freiberger said he didn’t like “Tribbles,” I said, “Well, Gene said he wanted a sequel,” and he said that he had no interest in it. So I offered “Bem,” which had to do with a practical joker, which he also didn’t like. We did do the animated version of “Bem,” but it was nowhere where we wanted it to be because, again, Gene kept rewriting it. He’d read something and say, “No, I don’t think so,” and he’d give Dorothy a memo saying, “Change it,” because he wouldn’t let you write the story you wanted to write. You had to write the story that he wanted you to write. Yet here’s a guy who says, “I’m doing a show where you can write any story that you want to write.” That’s a great deal of frustration.

MARGARET ARMEN (writer, “The Ambergris Element,” “The Lorelei Signal”)

I didn’t see how the show could work, but they had marvelous artists over at Filmation. Dorothy Fontana was the story editor and she approached me. I thought it would be fun and she said, “The main difference, Margaret, is that for the artists’ sake you have to describe every scene and every action in great detail so that the artists will know what to draw.”

For “The Ambergris Element,” I thought it would be interesting, since the artists were going to do it, to go to a water planet, with water covering nine-tenths of the surface The only exception is an occasional little island not covered in water. I thought the artists could do interesting underwater scenes and so forth.

“The Lorelei Signal” is an idea I’d had about an Amazonian civilization where women were dominant and men were weaker. From that seed I came up with the idea of a planet which drained men of their youth and vitality very quickly, so that they aged within a month, yet the women were healthy and vivacious and beautiful. The key to it was that the women drew their vitality from the males. They were like black widows. They were always sending out the Lorelei Signal to space so that they could attract males to their planet. Both episodes were fun to write.

WALTER KOENIG

This was the one script I wrote for the show, and it was incredibly frustrating. Gene decided early on this is animation so we can do anything we want, so let’s have talking plants. And I put in the talking plants and did ten drafts of the script and, at that time, I didn’t know what writers were going through on Star Trek. I stuck with it and we finally got it done. They did, in fact, offer me another script and I said no; I passed. I couldn’t go along with all the arbitrary decisions that didn’t make the script any better, not that it was extraordinary to begin with. So to an extent it was an interesting learning experience, but it was painful. I was also still upset about not being part of the series.

DAVID GERROLD

We had very little troubles with “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” When we did “Bem,” Gene started to fuck around with the script, so it was like they had two scripts left over at the end of the season and they didn’t shoot “Bem.” When Filmation ordered six more episodes, Dorothy wasn’t there, so they bought Howard Weinstein’s episode, and they had “Bem” already there. “Bem” got made, but it was a silly script.

LARRY BRODY (writer, “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”)

Taking my lead from the themes of the early Star Trek episodes, I figured that Dorothy and Gene would go for a story about the Enterprise encountering God in space. The “real” Christian God, not just one of the Greek myth gods. A couple of days after Dorothy and I talked about my God show, she called me back to say that Gene loved it and she was going to make a deal. I went back to her office the next week and, first, learned that NBC wouldn’t approve the God idea, but that Gene had presented them with a counter they’d accepted—the Devil. As long as it wasn’t the “real” Devil. So at that meeting Dorothy and I came up with an other-dimensional alien race that might have been the inspiration for devils and demons in ours. Then she took me into Gene’s office so I could shake hands with the Great Bird of the Galaxy—yes, she called him that—and go home to write.

The show ends with Kirk defending the human race to a courtroom of devils and, of course, proving that humanity, and specifically the Enterprise crew, deserves to live. That particular idea had been part of my original pitch, because my favorite episodes of Star Trek had been the ones where Kirk had to do other variations of the same thing. Another thing I’d been sure that Roddenberry would love.

After the first draft was finished, I was done. A couple of weeks later I got the final draft and saw that although the story was the same, scene by scene, every line of dialogue had been changed. I called to ask her if I’d failed that badly, and Dorothy just laughed and said, “No, no, no. Gene loved what you wrote. He just made changes because that’s what he does.”

STEPHEN KANDEL (writer, “Mudd’s Passion,” “The Jihad”)

“Mudd’s Passion” was an opportunity to bring Harry Mudd back, which was great fun. Dorothy Fontana just called me for a script. It was as simple as that. Animation is great because you direct as well as write. You could go anywhere and do anything.

“The Jihad,” in which Kirk and Spock are enlisted to prevent a holy war, was an idea I’d had for a long time. It was a message story and difficult to sell on network television. Network executives would have said, “My God, what are you doing? That’s a message story!” I jumped at the opportunity to drop it into a Star Trek format and it worked very well. In fact, I won a humanitarian award for it.

PAUL SCHNEIDER (writer, “The Terratin Incident”)

This was based on a one-paragraph story idea that Gene Roddenberry had. I took it from there with Dorothy Fontana. I just loved the concept of doing something related to Gulliver’s Travels. I enjoyed that as well as watching the process of the animation develop.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Beyond the Farthest Star”)

Dorothy called me and said, “Gene suggested that since you had done the pilot for the original Star Trek, maybe you’d like to do the pilot for the animated Star Trek.” That’s what I did. It was the pilot, but it aired later. The Variety review was absolutely incredible. As far as inspiration for the story, I don’t have the vaguest idea. It seems to me that I was trying to say that it would be interesting if there was a spaceship which was actually a living creature. It’s alive, but it is used to going from one planet to another. They did great animated stories and they didn’t write down to children, by and large. There were a couple that were, obviously, designed for the younger market, but most of them were quite mature.

JOYCE PERRY (writer, “The Time Trap”)

I had this idea that a Klingon ship and the Enterprise would get trapped in a Sargasso Sea of space and be forced to cooperate to escape. I remember telling Gene this bizarre notion that two ships could combine engines and became more powerful as one than they were separately. I explained it with a straight face, but was afraid he might laugh me out of his office. Instead, he was quiet for about thirty seconds, then he said, “That’s pretty good. Do it.” And in the finest tradition, a story about cooperation was forged.

HOWARD WEINSTEIN (writer, “The Pirates of Orion”)

I had an agent who submitted the script to Lou Scheimer at Filmation. When I was told they were buying it, I was supposed to call Filmation. Here I was, this nineteen-year-old college kid in my dorm room, and I was talking to Lou Scheimer on the phone. At one point he stops and asks, “What else have you written? Have you written a lot of stuff and we just don’t know your name?” That’s when I told him I was nineteen and a junior in college. They asked me to make a few changes and they bought the script, and that’s how I became a professional writer at the age of nineteen.

FRED BRONSON (writer, “The Counter-Clock Incident”)

There was literally one episode left to be produced, the sixth of six for the second season, so I came up with this story line. Filmation bought it and NBC approved it, but I didn’t put my name on it. I went to my boss to get permission, and he said I couldn’t write for an NBC show. So, since I grew up in Culver City, I became John Culver, who I didn’t know was a senator from Iowa at the time. No Google. I found out later. So they bought it and they made it.

The idea that there was a captain of the Enterprise before Pike was my idea, and when I thought of it I looked in the Making of Star Trek book, and there’s a list of names that Gene considered: Pike, Kirk, and one of the names was Robert April. I liked that name, so that’s what I named the character in this script. I made up the wife, Sarah April, and that she was the first doctor on the Enterprise and that was that.

While everyone had high aspirations for the new series, the real question was how the fans—who had proven vociferous in their opinions—would respond to Star Trek in cartoon form.

HAL SUTHERLAND

Lou took a hit from the fans. They had no concept of the agony or effort that went into that show.

LOU SCHEIMER

Let’s just say the fans were very … concerned.

DAVID GERROLD

Originally there was a lot of skepticism, but the folks at Filmation were very serious about doing a good job, and when we saw their first artwork, we began to think that maybe there was a chance to do something special. And it was Star Trek, of course, so our enthusiasm began to grow as we got into the job. There were still lots of stories we wanted to tell.

DOROTHY FONTANA

I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto and I had a reel of the opening of the Enterprise flyby. There were skeptics, but when we ran the reel, the fans cheered. From that little clip, they realized it was really going to be Star Trek. It was a triumphant moment after months of hearing it wouldn’t be any good.

HAL SUTHERLAND

Eventually we had Trekkie invaders at the studio all the time. Trekkies showed up pretending to be fire inspectors or janitors, and we’d discover them searching through our wastebaskets.

DOROTHY FONTANA

In animation, they order a set number to begin with, like sixteen, and that’s your first year. If you’re going to do more, it is in increments of six, and then they rerun the life out of the earlier episodes. That’s because of the time lag. Animation takes longer than live action, and you have to write a year ahead.

FRED BRONSON

The series was set for a premiere date of, ironically, September 8, 1973—the anniversary of Star Trek’s debut. But since George Takei was running for city council in Los Angeles and there were equal-time provisions from the FCC, his opponent said, “If you put this episode on, I will want equal time.” Now, what did that mean? That he was going to do a voice-over in another animated show? It was kind of ridiculous, but it had an impact enough that KNBC Channel 4 pulled the episode in L.A. only, because it was a local race. And so Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered in L.A. on September 15 with “Yesteryear,” the second episode. I made a big deal out of that … anything I could do to get attention from the press.

LOU SCHEIMER

If it aired today with the same ratings, it would be considered a whopping hit. But little kids didn’t watch it. They weren’t our audiences. I always hoped it would air at night. But Star Trek was difficult because it had limited budgets, loads of story, and several characters to juggle in twenty-two minutes.

MAJEL BARRETT

We wanted characters on the order of Disney rather than what we got, but the show featured some of the best stories of any Star Trek series.

LARRY BRODY

It was a grown-up show that talked about important topics without compromise. I appreciate that, because I work in animation and it’s not that way. Most kid shows are infomercials for toys.

HOWARD WEINSTEIN

Obviously it was a simplified version of Star Trek, because with twenty-two minutes of story there’s only so much you can do. But at the same time it wasn’t Saturday-morning kiddie television. I was impressed enough with it that I thought, “Who am I to sniff at this and say it’s not live-action Star Trek?” At that time, for all I knew, it might be the only chance I ever got to write for Star Trek, and I was going to grab it.

DAVID GERROLD

Arguments about “canon” are silly. I always felt that Star Trek animated was part of Star Trek because Gene Roddenberry accepted the paycheck for it and put his name on the credits. And D. C. Fontana—and all the other writers involved—busted their butts to make it the best Star Trek they could.

“Bem” did establish that Kirk’s middle name was Tiberius. We were at a Star Trek convention and somebody asked Dorothy and I what was Kirk’s middle name. I had just finished a book on Roman history and was still thinking Tiberius, and so it popped out of my head, “Tiberius.” And the audience loved it, so later on when we were doing the animated show, which was a few months later, we passed it in front of Gene and he said, “Okay.” When I did my Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool, I explained how Kirk got that middle name, which was more of a nickname than a real middle name. You do things for the fun of it sometimes.

JEFF AYERS (author, Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion)

The success of the James Blish book series, in which he novelized episodes from the original show, paved the way for something similar for the animated series. Alan Dean Foster was asked to adapt the episodes into book form—the Star Trek Log series—and like Blish, he worked from the scripts instead of watching the episodes. He quickly realized that a twenty-minute cartoon would not translate well to a novel, so he convinced his editor at Ballantine, Judy-Lynn del Rey, to let him pursue a similar route of putting three scripts into each volume.

ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, Star Trek Log series)

Besides adapting three scripts in each book, I realized what I would have to do was expand each of them into novella length and link a couple of them together in some fashion to make it flow as a book as best I could.

JEFF AYERS

The sales skyrocketed, and the end result was that his editor wanted four books out of the last four scripts. That’s why the last ones are full-length stories. One of the ones he added in utilized a screenplay he had written for the fourth season of the original series that never happened.

ALAN DEAN FOSTER

When Judy-Lynn said I needed to adapt one script into each of the last four Log books, I said, “Look, if I could have done it, I would have done that in the first place.” She wrote back and said, “You don’t understand. We’re going through multiple printings of these as fast as we can print them.” Judy-Lynn was very persuasive. The only thing I could do was adapt those scripts as I had been doing, and then make the last two-thirds of each of those last four books original material.

For Log six, I had actually done a two-hour screenplay for the original TV series and submitted it to Roddenberry at Norway Productions. I got a very nice letter back from someone saying, “Thank you very much for your submission. We really like your teleplay. Please resubmit for the fourth season.” Of course, there was no fourth season. That story was basically Run Silent, Run Deep in space. There was a lot of mental stuff going on between the crew of the Enterprise and the crew of the other ship. That’s one of the places you have to work hard as a novelizer. It’s very easy to novelize battles in space or a chase in space or a confrontation with an alien. But when you’re dealing with people’s thought processes, to get that down in a way that involves the reader can be more difficult, and that requires more work on the part of the writer. There was a great deal of that in that particular book. But because it wasn’t technologically heavy, I didn’t have to worry about updating that from the original script I’d written.

So when Judy told me about the last four books, I had this 120-page screenplay sitting around and she wanted these things as fast as possible. I said, “What can I do for the first one where I have to adapt one teleplay for that book?” For the last two-thirds, I used that screenplay. That helped me get into the proper writing frame of mind, using one teleplay for two-thirds original material.

The only one I had any real concern about was the Larry Niven script, “The Slaver Weapon.” The reason for that is that I view all of my novelizations as collaborations between myself and the original writers, and I’m very respectful of the original writing. This was different, because Larry had used some of his own characters from his own prose in the teleplay for Star Trek. So it wasn’t just a case of adapting a Larry Niven teleplay, it was the case of adapting Larry Niven’s actual original material and working with it myself. Kind of like with a “shared world” anthology, except that Larry, just like David Gerrold and D. C. Fontana and everybody else, didn’t have a say in what I was going to do. I was very, very careful not to mess around with the original material.

It hit me at that point that if adaptations of the animated series were selling that well to prompt that kind of reaction from a New York publisher, that there was something going on here beyond mere casual spin-offs of an old TV show. That was kind of the realization point for me that there was a lot more happening here in terms of Star Trek than maybe was obvious to a lot of people.

DOROTHY FONTANA

There is this tendency to put down animated work as kids’ stuff, but you have to consider the artistry that went into it; not just the writer but the actors who made themselves available. And the artists who drew the show were really good. Animation is a way to do the original series without worrying about how old the actors are, or what they look like.

GENE RODDENBERRY

I think one can always wish something was done better, but within the limits of how animation is done—the speed it’s done, the dollars they’re able to put into it, and so on—it was a fairly good job. I think the best proof of that is the Emmy it won. Star Trek has a spectacular record of getting awards and special attention either while it’s on or after it’s been canceled.

The animated series was not a compromise. NBC wanted a strong show in their morning cartoon time slot and they were willing to go along with my demand that it not be written down to the kiddie level. I believe children are much more intelligent than people give them credit for, so we used Star Trek writers and had standard stories. It wasn’t a pacifier, it was just an effort to do something a little better on Saturday mornings.

ROD RODDENBERRY

I’d love to redo the animated episodes. I mean, not me, but it would be so easy to redo them because of the talent available to do the CG. I think the animated series needs to be reborn and brought back out. That’s one of the last things that my dad didn’t do.

LOU SCHEIMER

I called Gene a few months before his death and said, “Gene, it’s time. How about another animated Star Trek?” He agreed it was time and was very enthusiastic. But that’s as far as it went.