“LET’S MAKE SURE THAT HISTORY NEVER FORGETS … THE NAME … ENTERPRISE.”
Star Trek is a unique pop-culture phenomena that is unlikely to ever be repeated. It represents the improbable story of a television series that—given the era in which it was birthed—should never have existed, let alone survived or ultimately flourished
The brainchild of World War II veteran and former police speechwriter Gene Roddenberry, the original incarnation of Star Trek was an expensive NBC television pilot called “The Cage.” Produced by Lucille Ball’s Desilu Studios, it was rejected by the network. However, intrigued enough by the show’s unique sci-fi premise that Roddenberry once dubbed “Wagon Train to the stars,” they took the unprecedented step of ordering a second pilot with an emphasis on action-adventure. This time NBC was interested, but the order was almost rejected by Desilu’s board of directors as being fiscally untenable. Then, giving us another reason why we love Lucy, Lucille Ball personally stepped in and greenlit the show. The resulting series, sold to the network as a sci-fi action-adventure drama, was also used by its creator as a soapbox to comment on the issues of the day by using metaphor and allegory … while selling, well, soap.
Battling network executives and censors whom he frequently antagonized, Gene Roddenberry had to deal with the fact that Star Trek was struggling in the ratings to the point where, in its second year, the show was on the verge of cancellation. Its voyage would have ended there if not for a massive letter-writing campaign initiated by the fans themselves. So impressive was this campaign that NBC changed its corporate mind and renewed Star Trek for a third—and ultimately final—year.
And that, as they say, should have been that.
Only it wasn’t.
Star Trek lived thanks to the fledgling business of television syndication, which introduced the show to an entirely new audience that had missed it the first time around. Many of those viewers—young and affluent—watched the sacred seventy-nine classic episodes over and over again, eventually passing them on to their children.
In 1973, Filmation produced two seasons of an Emmy Award–winning animated series based on the show for NBC. Unlike other kidvid of its time, it included the involvement of the series’ original creators and cast and dealt with surprisingly adult and heady themes for a Saturday-morning cartoon series.
But ultimately Star Trek, its blockbuster movie series, and the myriad spin-offs it later inspired—including its highly rated successor series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, which blasted off in 1987—have had a seismic cultural impact that extends and endures far beyond their television airings. Not only did the series inspire fervent fan conventions that continue to flourish decades after its original airing, but the show itself inspired numerous fans to become doctors, engineers, inventors, and showrunners. Its influence can be seen in the most cutting-edge of today’s technological gadgets, ranging from mobile phones to tablet computers and virtual reality.
The series also was one of the first to feature a multicultural and multiracial cast, and whose fans range from such legendary figures as Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama, Tom Hanks to Ben Stiller, Angelina Jolie to Eddie Murphy, and Bill Gates to Steve Jobs.
In addition, the series lexicon of Treknology is well known and often invoked in contemporary journalism, whether it be “beam me up, Scotty,” “warp speed,” or “resistance is futile.”
Today, Star Trek continues to live long and prosper after five decades of boldly going. Some are obsessed by it, others perplexed. For decades, critics and fans have attempted to dissect the unique alchemy that has ensured the franchise’s ongoing popularity as well as understand the man who created it, Gene Roddenberry. Here are a few more reasons why it still endures.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer, Star Trek)
“Trek” means walking, voyaging. And the name Star Trek really means voyaging from star to star. I knew it was the right title because when I first mentioned it to the network executives, they said, “We don’t like it.”
IRA STEVEN BEHR (executive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The theory I’ve always heard says that when the western died, science fiction filled the gap. We could not dream in the past anymore, so we started to dream in the future.
THOMAS DOHERTY (professor of American studies, Brandeis University)
The Frederick Jackson Turner notions of what defines Americans is the frontier; it’s not our Puritan past, but how the frontier is always rehabilitating and nurturing and reestablishing the American traits of individualism and freedom. It’s the frontier which makes us Americans, and we have to have initiative and inventiveness and youth and strength and canniness to survive on the frontier—and also we also have to kill the Indians. “Space, the final frontier” is really manifest destiny.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (consulting producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
Star Trek wasn’t a big hit in the sixties when it came out, but it hit in the seventies when there was this malaise and lack of trust in government and you had this iconic American hero at the center of it, and he’s surrounded by an international group. It really spoke to America as this great thing. For the British, James Bond is sort of patriotic. The British are still at the center of the world, even though historically they’re not. There’s a way in which Star Trek is the same thing for America.
THOMAS DOHERTY
The show is sort of both modest enough to respect the indigenous aliens of off-worlds, but at the same time, we know in the end we have to show them how to do things and our values are better. It has the arrogance of American exceptionalism, even though we say we have the noninterference prime directive, but basically we’re going into these places and showing them “how to live right,” which is very American, too.
JONATHAN LARSEN (executive producer, MSNBC)
The image we have of Star Trek’s politics changes with our own politics. It can be tricky trying to divine the political ideology of Trek’s creators and writers from the plotlines and story resolutions and the tics and arcs of individual characters. Yes, “James Tiberius Kirk” reads an awful lot like an analogue of “John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
MICHAEL PILLER (executive producer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
The early Star Trek original recipe was a very Kennedy-esque sort of mission to save the universe. Let’s get these guys out there and show them what democracy is and educate … and if they don’t do it the way we want to, we’ll hit a few and line them up and get them the way we want them.
JONATHAN LARSEN
Kennedy saw the exploration of space as an obligation, not necessarily in pursuit of a goal, but because he recognized space exploration as the inevitable next step if our society was to remain forward-looking and forward-moving. Similarly, Kennedy had little interest in looking back, in honoring old grudges and historical enmity.
BRANNON BRAGA (executive producer, cocreator, Star Trek: Enterprise)
There was something ineffable running through them all, which was Gene Roddenberry’s philosophy. And whether or not people were aware of Star Trek’s appeal because it presented a utopian future, what I think was critical to its appeal is that it’s a universe where everyone has a place. No matter how weird or perhaps even disabled you are, even if you’re blind, you have a role, and that’s attracted a lot of people.
JONATHAN LARSEN
Consider how jaw-droppingly radical and likely unacceptable the resolution of “The Devil in the Dark” would be today. The rock-like monster slaughters miners relentlessly. What is its punishment? A business deal. A contract to work with those miners it did not kill. There is no retribution. There is no vengeance. Moreover, denying the emotional need for retribution is portrayed not as weakness, but as manly maturity. It’s virtually impossible to imagine mainstream fiction in the post-Reagan, let alone post–9/11, era forswearing a violently punitive ending to a story such as this. But that was what mature, realistic, clearheaded, albeit idealized, government looked like back then. Mature leadership meant becoming the generation that finally severed the self-regenerating legacies of violence.
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
It’s based on the idea of IDIC, which was one of the backbones of the original series. It’s the philosophy that’s always really kind of resonated with me. I did not grow up watching Star Trek. I liked Knight Rider and The Dukes of Hazzard. It wasn’t until later in life, through the fans, that I got a different perspective of what Star Trek was, and then I went back and I’d start to get it. We all know the term “IDIC,” which means “infinite diversity in infinite combinations.” It’s the idea that it’s universal acceptance.
JONATHAN LARSEN
The same astonishing quality of mercy, or maturity, drives “Balance of Terror.” Kirk admonishes a crewman whose descendants were killed by Romulans that it was “their war … not yours.” Try to imagine a modern epic with the kind of in-the-moment self-reflection we see in “Arena.” “We could be in the wrong.” What political leader would ever dare utter publicly the words “that is something best decided by diplomats”? It’s an acknowledgment of and respect for nuance and expertise—and a rejection of essentialism and exceptionalism—that’s virtually unimaginable today.
BRYAN FULLER (coproducer, Star Trek: Voyager)
The Munsters and Star Trek were the shows I would watch when I got home from school. They both had a lot to do with creatures and also being inclusive worlds, in a way. Because the Munster family was very much an inclusive world. They allowed any kind of freak flag to fly. And we learned that in Star Trek there is an entire universe out there of different varieties of people—and all of them are okay. It was an early lesson in inclusivity. I was living in a household where my dad didn’t want me to watch The Jeffersons because it had black people in it. It was that level of small-town seventies suburban racism.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
Star Trek was at its finest when it was a morality play. It took decades for me to draw the correlation between “This Side of Paradise” and the Summer of Love. But of course, even as a kid, I knew that “Mudd’s Women” was about space hookers.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
I think that the multiculturalism was great because of the time; you had an African-American, an Asian, and this fake Russian on the bridge of the Enterprise.
ROD RODDENBERRY
There was a great quote that D. C. Fontana said about Nichelle Nichols and having a black officer on the bridge and what my father said to that. Apparently, he would get letters from the TV stations in the South saying they won’t show Star Trek because there is a black officer, and he’d say, “Fuck off, then.”
CHRIS PRATT (actor, Guardians of the Galaxy, Jurassic World)
It had all kinds of different races and various male and female characters from different alien races all around in power, in relationships with each other at a time when that wasn’t cool, you know? It was very progressive.
JONATHAN LARSEN
It’s interesting that no matter how sophisticated or advanced we imagine some work of fiction to be, the years almost always seem to reveal some element that was awkwardly, embarrassingly backward. Many early cartoons had their moments of racism—in both the depiction of people of color and the lack thereof. And Star Trek had its moments in that regard, too.
But its worst, most well-documented flaw can be found embodied in the output of the wardrobe department, courtesy of Mr. Roddenberry: the skirts. Maybe the creators of Star Trek believed that a true portrayal of an utterly gender-equal, let alone non-ageist, future would not fly on commercial television in the 1960s and so did as much as they could—giving women, albeit short in years and hemlines, “real” jobs and occasionally real authority. One would hope this was the case, given that the creators themselves were not all men.
Either way, the extent of gender equality that Star Trek did muster paved the way for public acceptance, not just of future female Federation captains … but actual, real-life female astronauts, too. As in so many other regards, even when it came to elements of our politics and our culture, in imagining our future, Star Trek made it possible.
SCOTT MANTZ
I will never forget in “Turnabout Intruder” when Kirk goes, “It’s better to be dead than to be alone in the body of a woman.” That makes the episode so dated, but there are others that are the absolute opposite. In “Metamorphosis,” Commissioner Hedford is going to stop a war. Commissioner Hedford is a woman. An attractive woman.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
There are plenty of roles for women in Star Trek; doctors, lawyers … and they all seem to have been somehow involved with Kirk. But at least they had their own careers.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Star Trek will always work as long as you have imagination. We have never had anyone in Trek who wasn’t into growth. During my first Trek, for instance, I didn’t pay any attention to women.
LEONARD NIMOY (actor, “Mr. Spock”)
His attitude toward women on Trek were miniskirted, big-boobed sex objects—toys for guys. He cleaned up that act gradually only because people pointed it out to him. He was a funny guy. At least, I find him funny.
ROD RODDENBERRY
First of all, he loved women. I love women. Women are the most beautiful creatures on the planet. And so that came out very clearly in all the Star Treks, but I think he was also of the belief that by women wearing short skirts and a woman choosing to do that, then she was empowering herself. Use your beauty, use your mind, use everything you have.
GENE RODDENBERRY
In the years I have grown into something of a strong feminist. I was the product of a Southern family background. My parents never spoke of any race with contempt. They encouraged me to try strange ideas and philosophies.
ROBERT H. JUSTMAN (associate producer, Star Trek)
Working with Gene Roddenberry, very often it was a lot of fun. He had great intellect. This was someone who came from a very poor background and made himself what he was.
FRED BRONSON (publicist, NBC Television)
I went to Cal State Northridge and the paper was the Daily Sundial and I walked in as a freshman and they started giving me stories to write. A lot of my stories were for the entertainment section. And one day I said I’d like to interview Gene Roddenberry and so I called his office and arranged an interview. I went over to Paramount in early 1967 and I’m sitting outside Gene’s office with the secretary. I hear this noise like a jackhammer and I seriously realized it was my heart pounding. It was a combination of nerves and excitement. When I went in and did the interview, the main thing he told me, which probably shouldn’t have been that big a revelation, was that the only purpose of TV was to sell toothpaste.
ED NAHA (producer, Inside Star Trek LP)
The Star Trek approach to life is all-inclusive and positive. When the TV show first was aired, the politics of America was anything but. It was a time of war, protests, race riots, and brutality—but also a time when a counterculture was emerging. The original show was sort of an intellectual and emotional refuge for people who believed in positive change. And cleavage.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I used to speak at colleges a lot because it was what kept me alive and paid the mortgage in the days when Star Trek was considered a gigantic failure. I have met some of these people. I remember one night someone called me over and said, “Can you possibly talk to this man?” And here was a fellow with some kind of nerve disorder who had an electronic box. He couldn’t speak, and by hitting the box he could make halfway intelligible sounds. He could only make grunting-like noises.
And finally I began to understand what he was saying, and he was asking me why I did a certain thing in a certain show, and why I had invented somebody who had something of his disorder. I said to him, “Someday when we become wise, we won’t look at those things. We will look at communication and knowledge, etc.” And I saw his hand rise up with great determination and he said loudly and clearly, “Yes!” Those are the high moments in my life.
LEONARD NIMOY
One of the large questions we have been asked time and time again is what is giving this thing its longevity? Why does it continue to survive, to touch people, to intrigue? I think one of the major reasons is that the whole structure of Trek is a moral one—it’s a moral society that people are attracted to. It really is a meritocracy.
If you do well, you advance. If you are good at what you do, you can have the job. It doesn’t matter who you are or what you are, what your origins are, your color or race. None of that matters. We need to get jobs done here, and if we have someone who can do the job, they have the job. Audiences recognize that. There’s a rightness about that. There’s a correctness, not a political correctness, about a meritocracy where performance is valued, where the reality of the truth is recognized and valued. Where things are right because they are right, because we need them to be right.
We had our flaws. We had certain political flaws, a certain kind of righteousness, to a degree that come from the humans that were making these shows. But given that, there is still a moral structure within Star Trek that makes sense.
MARIE JACQUEMETTON (story editor, Star Trek: Enterprise)
The fact that it was conceivable that man could go to another planet or even moonwalk was incredible. I had a scrapbook, like all kids from my generation do, of every astronaut and what they were doing. To our kids, James Cameron is what space is; Alien and Battlestar Galactica. It’s almost like a movie, it’s not even a real thing. They would not think of becoming an astronaut and going into space. It’s not even part of their concept of what the future is. Everything’s turned into the Internet. It’s all about being famous for a second and how can I get noticed. There’s no awareness of what’s out there beyond our little bubble. And when we were kids I think what was so exciting about Star Trek was the “what if” possibilities.
HANS BEIMLER (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
The best definition of science fiction I’d heard is this, that in 1900, at the turn of the century, pretty much anybody could tell you that the car was going to revolutionize the transportation industry. That’s not science fiction. But if you could predict in 1903 that it was going to change the sex lives of Americans by all the fucking that was going to be happening in the backseats of cars, that’s science fiction. In the sixties, the new technology was CB radios and being able to talk to people on the other side of the world. But my mother would say to me, “Yeah, but they don’t have anything to say to each other.” So it didn’t really matter.
RONALD D. MOORE (coexecutive producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
I discovered Trek because I was into the Apollo space program as a kid. I had seen the original moon landing and I was really taken with the space program, and that led me to Star Trek. Lost in Space was the first space show that I fell in love with, and then I started seeing Star Trek and that became the show for me. It was on five days a week at four in the afternoon, and after I got home from school I could watch Star Trek every day. I saw it as where NASA was going someday and where we could all go someday. I read it as a prophetic show, that this was what was going to happen. I remember thinking, “When are we going to have one world government and start building starships?”
DEAN DEVLIN (writer, producer, Independence Day, Stargate)
My mother played a role in the “Wolf in the Fold” episode of Star Trek. It’s a terrific episode with murder, intrigue, and spirits! But what I most remember about it was that they gave my mother a phaser to take home. I was a little boy at the time and my mom brought me an actual phaser from the TV show to play with. This was my “crack” that started my addiction to science fiction.
RENE ECHEVARRIA (supervising producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
My first memory of Star Trek is it being on the air … and being sent to bed. I remember hearing the theme song and seeing a spaceship unlike anything I had ever seen before. And it was nine o’clock on a Friday night and I was being told it was bedtime. I was six years old or something. Space was happening. Man was going to the moon. So, for me Star Trek is just woven right into that part of American history.
BRANNON BRAGA
When I was in middle school, there were cliques that I remember very specifically. There were the horror guys who were into Fangoria, which was me and my group. There were the fantasy Dungeons & Dragons, the Lord of the Rings dudes. And there were the Trek guys who were sitting reading Spock Must Die! And each group thought the others were nerds.
JONATHAN LARSEN
I wanted a show that I could watch with my seven-year-old son, Jeremy, that would be fun and exciting but also open doors for us to have conversations about ethics and big ideas. Important ideas. So we decided to watch the entire original series, in order. I went with unremastered, in part because I didn’t want spiffy special effects to take center stage. If special effects weren’t the main appeal, I thought Jeremy would focus more on the characters and their motivations and the underlying dynamics of each story. That said, Jeremy loved the aliens and the monsters and the spaceships.
But more than that, he came to know the characters—we argued over which were coolest—and when I’d pause the shows to explain some of the more subtle story elements, we often found ourselves in those big-idea conversations I had hoped for. Jeremy knows at least a bit about World War II and the Cold War, and mutually assured destruction, and Vietnam and the domino theory and on and on, primarily because of our conversations about what elements from our history Star Trek was addressing in individual episodes. We’ve watched lots of other movies and shows—none has opened the door so powerfully or insistently to that kind of exegesis about cultural and historical relevance. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that none has stayed with him as deeply as Star Trek has.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, story, Star Trek: The Motion Picture)
It’s fairly obvious that it represented, more than anything else, a sensible future. A future where people worked together and utilized science and reason and logic to try and solve problems, instead of just blowing things up.
BRANNON BRAGA
Star Trek isn’t just a shoot-’em-up laser show. There’s a certain expectation that you’re going to explore some aspect of humanity in an interesting way, which distinguishes this show from most sci-fi series. The different series seem to reflect the time in which they were created to some degree, but there’s always a humanistic philosophical core that seems unchanged, and I would hope that Star Trek would retain its essence going forward.
ROBERT LEWIN (coproducer, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
The old series endured because it is basically rooted in two elements. The first element is that the shows have ideas. Some are good, some are not so good. There is philosophy, extravagantly designed ideas with other planets that you can’t express in any other show. Some of the ideas are wild, but they’re always grounded in science-fiction reality. The other reason is that the affection the characters felt for each other was, in a sense, the same kind of affection you got in all the long-running series.
THOMAS DOHERTY
The show is also about the Freudian triad: the id, the ego, and the superego. That’s the core of the series.
FRANK SPOTNITZ (executive producer, The Man in the High Castle)
The original Star Trek and The Twilight Zone were the key things to my childhood. The good episodes of Star Trek—and most of them were really good—were about something. They were about ideas. To me, the genius of it was that Kirk was the character of action, Spock was the character of the mind, and McCoy was the character of emotion. You had mind and emotion, logic and conscience, arguing, and Kirk had to meditate and take action. It was a beautiful prism for storytelling, and it drove those episodes week after week. That’s what made that show so great. That and Twilight Zone were by far the most thought-provoking things on television in the 1960s and the 1970s. There was nothing else remotely as good.
SCOTT MANTZ
My love for Star Trek was fueled because of the characters. When I was a kid, I wanted to be James T. Kirk … and I still do.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
He could kick anybody’s ass.
SCOTT MANTZ
He was the James Bond of outer space.
RENE ECHEVARRIA
There are certain actors who just grab a role with such gusto that you can feel it. And he did. He believed. They all did remarkably when you think about the fact they were standing on these sets made of cardboard, practically, wearing these costumes and makeup, and how outlandish it all was. The way they committed to it was extraordinary. The perceived wisdom is that the show was this quirky show that was canceled that nobody watched, but Leonard Nimoy was nominated for an Emmy.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
There is a way in which Kirk is wish fulfillment for a lot of guys, in that he’s obviously an action hero, but he’s also smart. And then his best friend is the supernerd, Spock, and the supernerd can actually beat up the Kirk character, which is also is a bit of wish fulfillment. And that’s true going forward as well, Picard is the intellectual leader who leads by the weight of his intellect.
MARIE JACQUEMETTON
I remember lying on my living-room floor with my brothers and watching it, and it was just the excitement that they were in space, and there would always be a moment in every episode where their life was in jeopardy and “oh my God, are they gonna make it back?” And also, Captain Kirk was pretty cute.
HARVE BENNETT (executive producer, Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan)
Leonard was to Star Trek what David McCallum was to The Man from U.N.C.L.E. Bill is the centerpiece, but the thing that makes it work is this extraordinary oddball who makes the show unpredictable. I’ve always thought that. The fans validated that in Leonard’s first two years on the old series.
ADAM MALIN (cofounder, Creation Entertainment)
Mr. Spock was part of the cultural zeitgeist at the time. Spock was the biggest character in Star Trek, with all apologies to Captain Kirk. I don’t think you can top Spock for being the most intriguing, beloved Star Trek character of all time. He was Roddenberry’s and Leonard’s perfect creation. Leonard Nimoy really created that character—the writers did wonderful things to help define him, but it was Leonard who created this amazing multifaceted being, and it doesn’t surprise me that Leonard amassed worldwide fame and attention just off of that character.
KIM CATTRALL (actress, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country)
I loved the sixties show. When I was growing up I just thought Spock was the most amazing character. He was so smart and sexy. He was just the perfect man to me, maybe a little lacking in passion but underneath all that was this incredible passion.
RENE ECHEVARRIA
For any kid who was into Star Trek, it was, “Did you identify with Kirk or were you a Spock guy?” I was a Spock guy. There’s an age when you’re twelve or thirteen where logic seems like the answer to all the world’s problems. You’re like, “I can logic my way to anything.” The idea of logic appeals to the adolescent brain.
ROD RODDENBERRY
It’s interesting because I do have a unique perspective on it. I met the fans first and then watched Star Trek. I didn’t watch Star Trek as a kid. I didn’t watch Star Trek as a teenager except The Next Generation—barely—because I was a PA [production assistant] on the show. I still didn’t get it.
It wasn’t until after going to the conventions and talking to the fans after my father passed away that I pulled my head out of my ass long enough to start listening and asking questions like “Why do all you nutjobs dress up in these costumes and praise this show?” And they started telling their stories and it just fucking blew me away.
DOUG DREXLER (scenic artist, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
We had Rod [Roddenberry] as a PA in the art department for a couple of years. You know how cool it is to work and be able to yell, “Roddenberry, get in here!” Just by Rod, you knew that the parents were good people to raise a good kid like that.
ROD RODDENBERRY
It’s not like I hated it, but I just didn’t get it. I didn’t really consider something on television being so deep, and I was also a teenager. Things like Mötley Crüe were what spoke to me. I wasn’t thinking about the future. So it was going to the conventions and just hearing story after story about how it touched people or what their views on it were or how it made humanity a better humanity that interested me.
JESUS TREVINO (director, Star Trek: Voyager)
I went to Occidental College and every Friday night when it was broadcast the whole dorm would amass in the common room. In those days it was the boys’ dorms and the girls’ dorms. And in the boys’ dorms every Friday night, everybody would storm down and watch the episode. We were just huge fans of the series. I remember one of the fraternities made a huge replica of the Enterprise twenty-five or thirty feet long out of kegs and beer cans.
JOHN D. F. BLACK (executive story consultant, associate producer, Star Trek)
It’s very easy to look back now and say Gene Roddenberry knew what he was doing. He didn’t know, but the collective knew. Robert Justman, myself, and other people who were involved with the pieces as they came out. We were a collective “one.” And that one turned out to be in quotes “Gene Roddenberry.” We were all in that mix. It was a wonderful thing to be involved with—except when you were there and then it was terrible.
ED NAHA
I loved working with Gene. He was one of the smartest, most gracious and optimistic people I’ve ever met. Having said that, I also would not have wanted to get on his bad side. He had things he wanted to accomplish, and accomplish them he would.
Gene knew people. He’d been a civilian pilot who’d survived a nasty crash and helped save the crew, and he’d been an L.A. cop. He’d seen a lot of crap. Yet his vision for the near and distant future was one of optimism. For instance, he believed in equal rights. That was just a given with him. As someone who started marching for civil rights at the age of fourteen, I couldn’t believe a “grown-up” would just assume that it was the right thing to believe in.
ADAM MALIN
I’ll never forget his kindness, his mentorship, his positive outlook toward society and the future of society, considering what a screwed-up world it is in so many ways. His humanism and his optimism still remain inspiring. I think Gene’s optimism for the future of the human condition is a message that is just as vital today as it was fifty years ago; it’s part of what inspires new generations of Star Trek fans, and whatever Gene may have been as a business associate, a writer, a showrunner, a producer, he was a man with a very noble vision for society, and that has come through the spirit of Star Trek through all these years, and for me remains his greatest achievement. Simply saying to the world that in the future our society will be better, that’s a beautiful message, and I think it’s Gene’s greatest legacy.
FRED BRONSON
I found him funny; he loved to laugh. I don’t mean this as a pun, he was down-to-earth. He loved women, he loved many women, and somehow that was part of his charm, but he was generous and kind, and he would pick up the bill always.
ED NAHA
Gene also had a great sense of humor. I went over to his house for dinner one night, and I said I had to check in with my then girlfriend back in New York. He let me dial the number and then he got on the phone, identifying himself as an L.A. cop who had me in custody. My girlfriend gave him hell, saying that that was impossible. There must be some mistake. I was not the kind of guy who’d do anything illegal. “What if I told you he was caught exposing himself?” he said, grinning at me. My girlfriend hesitated. Gene laughed his ass off, identified himself to my girlfriend, and handed me the phone. She was not amused.
A few months later, Gene was in Manhattan and we invited him over to our apartment for dinner. He showed up and we opened the door. He hesitated before entering, looking above his head, expecting some booby trap. There was none. Later on, however, he discovered that his salad was filled with rubber and plastic toy insects. He got a kick out of that.
THOMAS DOHERTY
In the golden age of television, writers lived life. Today’s writers live television.
CHRIS GORE (founder, Film Threat magazine)
For me, Star Trek was always about Kirk, Spock, McCoy, the starship Enterprise, and a galaxy to explore. All the spin-offs just made me miss the adventures of the characters I loved originally.
BARRY SCHULMAN (vice-president of programming, Sci-Fi Channel)
No matter how successful The Next Generation was, this was still the granddaddy of them all. I think viewers today would be hard-pressed to think of any talent on Star Trek other than Shatner and Nimoy. Next Generation was a great-looking show and a great series, but you can’t ignore the fact that it’s much like with the original Star Wars. No matter how major all of these others are, and how spectacular the techniques and the effects are today, and the casting is brilliant, you’ll never forget the original, Mark Hamill, Harrison Ford and Carrie Fisher.
ED NAHA
It’s funny, because I was the A&R guy on both Inside Star Trek … and Born to Run. It’s very hard to summarize what was going on in the seventies. It’s almost an “it was the best of times, it was the worst of times” scenario. With the end of the Vietnam debacle, a lot of young people felt, rightly so, that they had played a pivotal role. There was a very optimistic attitude around. In a small way, this dovetailed into the Trek philosophy. But by the mid seventies, everything began to get co-opted and commercialized. It wasn’t obvious but it was happening. I think people who were aware, people who valued creativity sensed it coming.
Ironically, Born to Run was released during a time when live music was being delivered a body blow by disco, a genre of sound where the producer took precedence over the performer. Soon, it became as calculating and craven as any other assembly-line product. And, again, those with a creative nature smelled the decay. It’s no accident that Springsteen went from Born to Run to Darkness on the Edge of Town by 1978. He followed that up with The River and Nebraska before launching Born in the USA in ’84. Ironically, the song was about Vietnam, lost friends, and dreams either destroyed or deferred. A lot of the public embraced it as a nationalistic arena rock anthem. This, I think, shows that not only was optimism on the fast fade but intelligence as well.
It’s no mystery as to why Gene was shunted aside once the Star Trek movie series began. His brand of optimism couldn’t be packaged and sold in bulk. It had to be felt.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
Breaking Bad is dark, but it’s also light, it’s also really funny, and that’s also what Star Trek did really well. It walked that line, creatively, of always being dramatic, but also having a sense of humor about its characters.
VINCE GILLIGAN (creator, executive producer, Breaking Bad)
There probably is something to that. To be fair, as much as I love Star Trek, Star Trek was not the first dramatic story to levy its drama with humor. I can think of The Thing from Another World, which did that. A bunch of military guys in an installation at the North Pole in a very life-or-death situation and yet cracking wise whenever they had the chance.
Having said that, Star Trek did it very well indeed, and it’s a good lesson to any writer to not take your drama too seriously. In other words, the most dramatic moments in real life oftentimes have a bit of absurdity or humor contained within them. Gene Roddenberry and the writers of the original Star Trek knew that lesson and used little dollops of humor very well. We later learned that lesson on The X-Files, another show that was very dramatic but had a couple of outright hilarious episodes—which shows how elastic that dramatic form can be.
DAVID A. GOODMAN
J. J. Abrams kind of proves that despite all the changes and all the iterations, the Kirk–Spock dynamic is something people like to see. I watched a lot of TV from the sixties; the production value of TV, the writing—nothing approaches Star Trek. That’s what gets lost in the discussion of the Star Trek phenomenon. People talk about how it represents hope for the future and the stories are exciting and it was so far ahead of its time. But as a TV producer, I look at it and think about what else was being produced at that time, the endless westerns and the endless cop shows shot on the Universal backlot. Here you have this drama where you can’t get all the costumes at a rental house, they had to be handmade. You’re creating aliens and makeup, but also the writers are creating societies, they’re creating the Federation, they’re creating Vulcans, they’re creating the Andorians. They’re creating societies that live on their own, and it all works and it all comes together.
You can create these sequel series that can harken back without it feeling stupid, they connect because the work of those artisans, the writers, the producers, the actors was so far ahead of its time.
In a certain way, Next Generation, as big a fan as I am of it, pales in comparison to the original series, because it builds on something that someone had already created. By then TV had done plenty of things that were like it, very well-written shows, great casts, but in terms of the accomplishments of the original series, that’s what is lost in the discussion of Star Trek. The reason it’s a success is because it’s amazing.
VINCE GILLIGAN
There’s a lot of admirable writing and directing and acting in the subsequent Star Trek series, but the original series just has the most meaning for me emotionally.
PETER GOULD (cocreator, executive producer, Better Call Saul)
Nothing will ever replace the original sixties Star Trek. There was just something a little bit special about that one in terms of the storytelling and the cast, even the way it looked, that I always found very fascinating. The later incarnations in a lot of ways are more sophisticated and you might even say deeper science fiction, but I have to say my heart belongs to Kirk, Spock, and McCoy.
RICHARD ARNOLD (Star Trek archivist)
It’s been said time and again, but it’s worth repeating: Gene gave us a future where we survived our current immaturity and did so with dignity. We’re not out there empire-building, we’re out there exploring and learning. His vision has changed so many people’s lives, and will continue to do so for a long time.
NICHELLE NICHOLS (actress, “Nyota Uhura”)
The success of the show and the genius of Gene Roddenberry was in taking a message—as did Shakespeare so cleverly—and making it dramatically sound while adhering to the first law of show business—to entertain.
WILLIAM SHATNER (actor, “James Tiberius Kirk”)
I’m often asked why Star Trek has had such longevity and why people continue to be interested in the original series and who knows how many more manifestations of Star Trek. I think it has to do with mythology. Star Trek with its hearty band of followers, its heroes, its villains, and its tales of good and evil, provide modern culture with a mythology and also bespeaks of a future and the certainty that the future will exist.
ROXANN DAWSON (actress, “B’Elanna Torres,” Star Trek: Voyager)
I thought of Star Trek as more of a cartoon before I got involved, and then I realized, “My God, it’s almost like these are the myths of our times.” I realized there was all this depth here. It was really shocking to me.
IRA STEVEN BEHR
It was a quintessential sixties show, and the other thing that was great about it—which, unfortunately, has more or less disappeared off of the cultural landscape—is the fact that as far as we were concerned, it was our show, my sister and I. We found it, no one told us to watch it, no one said it was good, no one said it was must-see TV. There was no hype, there was no mass culture telling you that if you wanted to be a card-carrying member of the hip mass culture you have to watch it. So, that made it so special. It’s sad to have that kind of disappear. It’s much harder nowadays to own pop culture, because that ground has been covered by the hype machine.
JEROME BIXBY (writer, Star Trek)
Star Trek was a great vehicle for advancing social critique via paraphrase and allegory. You showed how the world sucks by showing another world so occupied. Also, for playing with serious scientific possibilities. No other show has come so close to the elbow room of literary science fiction. Those were the days.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I think that all serious writing is valuable. It is the duty of the writer to speculate on things of importance to us, and to give us new insights into ourselves, who we are, what our society is, what its pitfalls are—what its joys truly should be. In that sense I think Star Trek was valuable, and that all serious and entertaining writing is valuable.
HERBERT F. SOLOW (executive in charge of production, Star Trek)
I maintain all along that if it wasn’t for Gene being a genius at self-promotion and having a massive ego about his work and about Star Trek, it would have died. It would never have come back to life in syndication, it never would have made other series, other movies. It would have faded away.
DAVID WEDDLE (producer, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine)
It’s now the same amount of time talking to someone about the original Star Trek as it was somebody in the sixties talking to Buster Keaton about making silent movies and working with Fatty Arbuckle.
J. J. ABRAMS (producer, Star Trek Beyond)
I’m honored to have been the temporary captain of the show that Roddenberry built. I only hope that my involvement helped bring more people into this universe, so lovingly and wonderfully drawn by its creator.
DIANA MULDAUR (actress, Star Trek, “Return to Tomorrow”)
I just wish we could be around forever and ever, so we can see how long it lasts.