re: Star Trek: TOS

It created the blueprint for solid morality stories. TNG followed that path. DS9 followed that path. Voyager got a bit silly with some of the characters (looking at you Neelix & Kess) but followed the path as well. Never got around to watching Enterprise nor Upper Deck.

Discovery and Academy said "frick your path" and just rolled around in a used litter box.

BNW has tried to follow the path at times but devolves into silliness and personal drama rather than sticking with the larger focus on moral dilemmas from the earlier series.

well, this thread is about the original series so what the frick does that have to do with anything?

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Roddenberry always stated that his show was “Wagon Train to the stars”.

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That was his sales pitch to the network, since Westerns were the main TV genre of the time. He thought he could sneak his "cerebral" sci-fi by them if he touted it as a take on Westerns.

Battlestar Galactica turned out to be the actual Wagon Train to the stars.

Apparently, you failed at paint by numbers because clearly my point has to do with the overall condition of the franchise, which starts with TOS.

What was truly great in its origin is being a unmistakably damaged, so you can stop pretending to not see that

Space seed is the easy answer. Of course it’s been a while since I’ve seen the full series… Doomsday Machine & The city on the edge of forever are up there.

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I’ve always thought that the way they re-used the unaired pilot to weave in and out of the 2 part “menagerie” episode and make a completely different story out of it was brilliant TV.

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Not only brilliant, it was very deliberate and strategically timed. Gene knew there would come a crunch that first season. He knew that - not only did they have that footage that wouldn't have to be re-shot - he knew that the wraparound, "current time" script would actually be easier than usual to write. It was an easy shoot, with just a couple of short isolated scenes and then the courtroom framing for the wraparound.

Guests were minimized in The Menagerie, but even more, Malachi Thorne who had voiced The Keeper in the original pilot (The Cage) was brought in to play Commodore Mendez. It was a Corman-esque move as it saved a residual check, although they did have to electronically raise the pitch of The Keeper's voice to conceal that it was the same actor.

Ultimately they were able to leverage 1 week of work into 2 hours of television and it was Gene's reserve/backup plan for the entire Season 1 (and it would have been saved until Season 2 if it hadn't been needed).

my favorite thing about episode 1 is that they go straight into a backstory with McCoy, and we’d never met him before. Deforest Kelly as McCoy wasn’t even a “starring” credit all thru season one, yet he’s fleshed out as a character right out the gate.

We also get an immediate sense of the scale of galactic colonization which was pretty fricking cool in 1966. Finally the tone is set that not only is this “wagon train to the stars”, the enterprise is a capital ship of line of the future navy, where it stays in orbit and serves as both a home for the crew and the tip of the spear of the exploration of the cosmos

And we get a monster

That’s a lot to pack in to episode one

Factoids about ST's creation, from Gross & Altman's oral history of the show:

The show’s creators have various accounts and theories of what previous science fiction Star Trek cribbed ideas from, including the movie Forbidden Planet.

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES

I was one of the first people to see the Star Trek series proposal. Gene Roddenberry and I had known each other from writing Have Gun—Will Travel. He was trying to start a science-fiction series and he knew that I had one of the largest science-fiction collections in the world. At first, I remember he borrowed a copy of Odd John by Olaf Stapledon. Then, to research the show, he asked if he could go through my magazines and get some ideas for the Enterprise. Gene went through all the covers, and that’s really how the Enterprise was born.

GEORGE CLAYTON JOHNSON (writer, “The Man Trap”)

One influence on the creation of Star Trek was Captain Future, which was a pulp magazine which ran for indeterminable damned issues, and was about this guy called Captain Future who was in this spaceship. [He] had this android named Otho, a robot named Grag, and a brain in a glass cage called Simon Wright, and Simon was the Mr. Spock character, and these other characters interchangeably played the other aspects of what was a four-man ship, which then became the great starship Enterprise. Basically any single Captain Future is Star Trek. Read one, read the other, and you can see that one is the direct linear descendant of the other, and merely rethought into a wide screen or video kind of format as opposed [to] a pulp format, but the act of creation is minimal.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN (author/journalist)

I don’t think you can talk about [1956’s] Forbidden Planet’s influence without also talking about the concept of the U.S. Navy in outer space, and I think that obviously Star Trek is a military picture, because even though we’re on a peaceful voyage, this is an armored ship with firepower. Forbidden Planet introduced a crew of spacemen who were essentially a military operation. These guys were armed and they had the ability to fight back, so they were an armed navy cruiser in the twenty-third century.

STEVEN JAY RUBIN

Forbidden Planet gives kind of a military hierarchy to the crew: there’s a captain, there’s a second-in-command, a medic, there are essentially the “blaster” men. The whole concept of a naval ship applied to outer space begins heavily with Forbidden Planet and, to me, is a direct influence on Star Trek. Then there was the use of the uniforms in the film. Of course uniforms for spacemen wasn’t that novel, but I think there was this kind of military aura among the Forbidden Planet crew that, of course, exists in Star Trek as well. Add to that Cruiser C-57D was part of the United Planets, which is similar to the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek.

DOUG DREXLER

The other interesting thing is that [Have Gun—Will Travel’s] Sam Rolfe went and did The Man From U.N.C.L.E. and there are so many elements from The Man From U.N.C.L.E in Star Trek. For instance, Roddenberry was impressed by the U.N.C.L.E. Special, the pistol that goes together and makes a rifle. It was a huge hit on the show and the gun used to get its own fan mail. Gene hired the guy who built that gun to make the laser rifle from “The Cage.” The Kirk–Spock thing is also very much like Illya and Napoleon Solo. In the mid sixties, the idea of teaming up with a Russian was pretty out there.

JOSE TREVINO (director, Star Trek: Voyager)

When I first saw Star Trek, I thought it was like A. E. van Vogt’s The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The similarities were so strong between the two because basically the Space Beagle is a ship traveling through space to find different races. Even the captain is very similar. It was a series of short stories put together in novel form told from different points of view. So the narrative voice keeps changing from one chapter to another. I don’t know if Gene Roddenberry ever acknowledged that or not.

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NBC chose the hardest, most expensive story concept for the first pilot just to test Desilu’s capabilities

OSCAR KATZ

When we brought the show to the networks, we told them there were four kinds of stories that would represent the Star Trek concept. First, you have to remember that the spaceship is five stories high, it has five hundred people on it. One of the girls, who’s a female yeoman in the crew, it turns out has signed on because she’s having trouble back at home in Boston with either her boyfriend or her parents. She’s getting away from them and she has an emotional relationship problem. Our two leads, unspecified, are the catalytic agents who help her face her problem and solve it. You never see her again, because she’s just one of the crew people. I said, “In that respect, what you have is Wagon Train.” Wagon Train had two leads, the wagon train traveled through the West, although it never got where it was going, and a guest star who was in wagon number twenty-three had an emotional problem which the two leads had to help solve.

The second kind of story is you have to remember that they’re out for five years at a clip. They get a message from Earth that there’s a planet on which there are Earth people doing mining, and there is claim jumping. They have to go to the planet and do a police action. In that respect, it’s Gunsmoke.

The third thing that happens is they go to a planet where everything is pretty much like Earth, and subsequently the people on this planet look and have developed very much like us, except that their Chicago, their Al Capone, is in the future; or their Civil War is about to break out. They’re either ahead of us or behind us. So it’s people that look like us that are going through what we went through or what we will go through.

The fourth type is where they go to a planet where the atmospheric conditions are different than on Earth. Everything is different. The people don’t look like us, they don’t behave like us. They’re fierce-looking animals or whatever.

When we went to NBC, we brought those four story types and they picked number four. They did so because it was the hardest to do. With the Desilu reputation, they wanted to make it as hard as possible, so we could prove ourselves. I tried to talk them out of it, because I knew it was going to be expensive and, even more, I felt that it might not be representative of the series. But they couldn’t be talked out of it. That’s how the first pilot, “The Cage,” came into being.

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Spock was originally going to be a dwarf or a “red-tailed devil”?

SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Where No Man Has Gone Before”)

In the beginning, Mr. Spock as we know him now didn’t exist. He was a red-tailed devil who didn’t eat. He absorbed energy through a red plate in his stomach. This is the way he was laid out in the original concept. I argued with Gene that it should be a humanized character, because I was adamant that it should be straight science fiction without fantasy.

GENE RODDENBERRY

Series are a process of refining ideas. I’d like to say that all the ideas that I get are bright and eternal and right for all time, but they’re not. You do evolve things.

With Spock, originally, I also thought that there were such few choices in doing someone who was of average height. You can do a little with the ears and fake eyes and so on, but actors tend to come in roughly the same size. So I was thinking of making Spock a “little person,” which would at least break some of those things, and make him stand out. Then, it also fit into the feelings I had that size should not be that important.

35 year old Starship captain is trying to get in the panties of a 19 year old ingenue
---Hey, he was 34 and 19 is perfectly legal. Especially when she's a crazed murderer. LINK. LINK