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Authors: Brian J Robb
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watching the show in endless reruns throughout the 1970s. Rather than the oft-uttered ‘Hailing frequencies open, Captain’, Communications Officer Uhura gets ‘There’s Klingons on the starboard bow’, while Spock is represented by the classic ‘It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it’. McCoy gets a variation of a phrase he did often say on TV, ‘It’s worse than that – he’s dead, Jim’, while Chief Engineer Scotty is represented by the famous ‘Ye cannae change the laws of physics’. Kirk himself gets ‘We come in peace; shoot to kill’, a phrase that never appeared on the show, but summed up a popular impression of the trigger-happy captain’s approach to alien encounters (when he was not bedding alien women, of course). This approach would not necessarily work as well with the characters from
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, who were harder to sum up in such simple, iconic and memorable lines.
That these characters could be invoked in a novelty song made up of simple catchphrases twenty years after
Star Trek:The Original Series
was in production is astonishing and stands as a testament to the storytelling of Gene Roddenberry, the writers and producers and William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of
The Original Series
cast. It is this trio of characters that explains the lasting impact of
Star Trek
on pop culture worldwide.
With an order for an initial sixteen episodes of
Star Trek
delivered by NBC in February 1966, it was down to Gene Roddenberry to draw together the stories and scripts needed to feed Robert Justman’s weekly production machine if air dates were to be maintained. The two pilots had shown just what an uphill task it would be to bring the diverse and exotic worlds of
Star Trek
to the TV screen on a weekly basis. Jefferies and Theiss were central to the task, as was Fred Phillips, who would have to handle the make-up requirements of Spock and any visiting guest star aliens-of-the-week.
Roddenberry’s biggest and most immediate requirement by early March 1966 was for writers for the new series, with shooting due to begin at the start of June. The executive producer himself would function as an ideas and rewrite man, not an original writer, but he needed scripts he could rewrite to make them uniquely
Star Trek
. The TV writers who were to be involved in the creation of the show had to be comfortable with the fact that their work would always be subject to Roddenberry’s revisions – but not all were.
Talent agencies, independent agents and professional colleagues all got the call:
Star Trek
needed writers! Groups of aspiring episodic contributors were invited to a Desilu screening room, there to be shown the second pilot episode and to hear Roddenberry outline the premise of the series and the requirements the show had for scripts. The process was enough to turn off many established TV writers who just didn’t get the concept, didn’t think the show would last, or simply knew that ‘sci-fi’ was not for them. It was a disappointing process for Roddenberry, who realised he was going to have to put in muchmore one-on-one time with individually selected writers if he was going to succeed in generating the story ideas and finished scripts he urgently needed.
Roddenberry drafted a memo (largely based on his original 1964 series proposal) for aspiring
Star Trek
writers that outlined the series and included a collection of ‘springboard’ storylines as examples of the kind of thing the series required. The new ‘writer’s guide’ outlined the main characters, the series situation, the world of the future the characters inhabited and the science and sociology of the show. It was hoped this document would provide enough information for writers more comfortable with Western towns, courtrooms or hospital emergency rooms to write for a space-traversing ship and her diverse crew.
Roddenberry, however, had ambitions to reach beyond just TV writers: he wanted to
Star Trek: The Next Generation
, who were harder to sum up in such simple, iconic and memorable lines.
That these characters could be invoked in a novelty song made up of simple catchphrases twenty years after
Star Trek:The Original Series
was in production is astonishing and stands as a testament to the storytelling of Gene Roddenberry, the writers and producers and William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy, DeForest Kelley and the rest of
The Original Series
cast. It is this trio of characters that explains the lasting impact of
Star Trek
on pop culture worldwide.
With an order for an initial sixteen episodes of
Star Trek
delivered by NBC in February 1966, it was down to Gene Roddenberry to draw together the stories and scripts needed to feed Robert Justman’s weekly production machine if air dates were to be maintained. The two pilots had shown just what an uphill task it would be to bring the diverse and exotic worlds of
Star Trek
to the TV screen on a weekly basis. Jefferies and Theiss were central to the task, as was Fred Phillips, who would have to handle the make-up requirements of Spock and any visiting guest star aliens-of-the-week.
Roddenberry’s biggest and most immediate requirement by early March 1966 was for writers for the new series, with shooting due to begin at the start of June. The executive producer himself would function as an ideas and rewrite man, not an original writer, but he needed scripts he could rewrite to make them uniquely
Star Trek
. The TV writers who were to be involved in the creation of the show had to be comfortable with the fact that their work would always be subject to Roddenberry’s revisions – but not all were.
Talent agencies, independent agents and professional colleagues all got the call:
Star Trek
needed writers! Groups of aspiring episodic contributors were invited to a Desilu screening room, there to be shown the second pilot episode and to hear Roddenberry outline the premise of the series and the requirements the show had for scripts. The process was enough to turn off many established TV writers who just didn’t get the concept, didn’t think the show would last, or simply knew that ‘sci-fi’ was not for them. It was a disappointing process for Roddenberry, who realised he was going to have to put in muchmore one-on-one time with individually selected writers if he was going to succeed in generating the story ideas and finished scripts he urgently needed.
Roddenberry drafted a memo (largely based on his original 1964 series proposal) for aspiring
Star Trek
writers that outlined the series and included a collection of ‘springboard’ storylines as examples of the kind of thing the series required. The new ‘writer’s guide’ outlined the main characters, the series situation, the world of the future the characters inhabited and the science and sociology of the show. It was hoped this document would provide enough information for writers more comfortable with Western towns, courtrooms or hospital emergency rooms to write for a space-traversing ship and her diverse crew.
Roddenberry, however, had ambitions to reach beyond just TV writers: he wanted to
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