Post #453137 by Cammo on Mon, May 11, 2009 1:36 PM

Lets get to it.

Star Trek was created by Roddenberry back in 1964.

He based it on the incredibly imaginative retro-noir Outer Limits’ episode “Nightmare”, about the international crew of a spaceship being held hostage by a pointy-eared alien and being tortured by unreal visions of personal horrors.

It turns out that the entire “Nightmare” episode was a training lesson. The pointy-eared alien turns out in the end to be more human and compassionate (he privately opposes the torture) than the actual U.S. military men in charge of it, a snap ending that still hits hard.

This aired on December 2, 1963. You can still get it and the entire Outer Limits series on DVD. It’s probably the most influential Sci-Fi show of all time; Harlan Ellison wrote 2 episodes he later sued James Cameron over, Cameron having used them as the obvious basis for “Terminator”. To this day Ellison’s name must legally appear on the Terminator movies as the creator of the characters, a little detail that the producers often overlook.

Roddenberry liked the episode so much he wrote a quick script about the international crew of a spaceship being held hostage by big headed aliens and being tortured by unreal visions of personal horrors, and started shopping it around. The script stank. Two years later he was given the green light, and hired the brilliant director and co-directors (Byron Haskin and Bob Justman) of Outer Limits, the makeup shop and even some of the stars of other Outer Limits episodes suggested by Justman for the pilot episode. (Shatner and Nimoy were Outer Limits alumni.) Byron Haskin was especially important to the pilot, with his special effects experience going back to the silent film days. It was he who invented the whole new idea of making a giant working spaceship, filming it against a bluescreen, and moving the camera around it, instead of moving the ship. In this way, incredibly detailed footage could be controlled carefully and smoothly, and reused over different backgrounds.

But it was Bob Justman who made Star Trek good. He was a sci-fi fan and beatnik, a talented, imaginative writer/director who took Roddenberry’s script and flipped it upside down, into a social statement. He also created the concept of Star Trek actually taking place in the future’s past; the adventures were being recounted from some future date as a series of log entries in the ship’s computer. The scripts would become ‘player pianos’; they were so easy to write they wrote themselves…

When the network saw the pilot show, they in fact LOVED it. Never had such a young, interesting and totally realistic crew ran what looked like a photo-real ship to the farthest reaches of the universe. They thought it was too good, in fact. They thought the show would get low ratings, as it would fly right over the heads of the young target audience they were aiming at. Their advice was to have more action, more gunfights, less talking.

They were right. Star Trek was a dismal failure, of course. It was trashed in TV Guide, got low ratings, the budget was cut and cut again, and was cancelled after three seasons. Five seasons was needed to successfully show in reruns, the thinking was. A three season show was basically thrown in the garbage now and forever.

It came back in reruns, and the long story of Star Trek emerging as an entertainment force has gone on to legend.

But they’ve never actually made a sequel, see.

All the later iterations of the series deleted the dayglo colors, the Vulcans, the cute red miniskirts, the action, the whole dynamic and the wonder of the original first season episodes. It just got worse and worse…