The Birth Of Star Trek, A Brief History

Since the release of the new Star Trek movie I've seen a plethora of articles and posts all over the internet and found a lot of folks seem confused about the origins of this piece of Americana. And I'll have to admit it's a smidgen self indulging as well. I've been a huge fan of Star Trek ever since I watched my first episode at the ripe old age of 8. So I did a little research and here it is.

In 1960 former police officer Gene Roddenberry put together a proposal for a science fiction television series that would become Star Trek. He marketed it as a Western in outer space. But secretly he was actually modeling it on Swift's Gulliver's Travels, mixing a morality play with adventure.

During this pre-production period Roddenberry along with others brain stormed things like captains names. They came up with names like April, Pike, Kirk, Janeway, Piccard, and Cisco which were all eventually used in the different series. Another interesting story involved how the design of the ship was accomplished. With advice from some guys from NASA, they came up with an engineering module with a separate saucer for the crew and 2 nacelles positioned below the engineering module. For some time the design team studied the drawing but something was just not right. That was until a low grade assistant simply turned the drawing over positioning the saucer and nacelles above the engineering module and voila, the Star Ship Enterprise was born.

The original pilot called "The Cage" was filmed in 1964 and starred Jeffrey Hunter as Captain Pike but wasn't seen until 2 years later inside a later, 2-part episode in November of 1966 called "Menagerie". This original pilot included a female 1^st officer played by Majel Barrett who later married Roddenberry and took the role of nurse Chapel in the regular series. And Leonard Nimoy as a pointed eared red skinned "Martian" delivering his lines like he was playing a Marine drill instructor. Unfortunately the big wigs at NBC didn't like it telling Roddenberry that people weren't ready for a woman 1^st officer and they told him to scrap the "Martian" too.

Roddenberry relented on the woman bridge officer but after mellowing out Nimoy's character and making him a green "Vulcanian," he became just "Vulcan" later, convinced NBC executives to let him stay. All ready to shoot a new pilot it turned out Jeffrey Hunter wasn't available so they went with Canadian born actor William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk. This second pilot lacked the character Dr. McCoy. Instead the ships surgeon was played by Paul Fix, the actor who played Micah, the town sheriff in the old TV series "The Rifleman" with Chuck Connors. George Takei was there as Hikaru Sulu but instead of being at the helm, he played an obscure department head. And this was the first time we get introduced to James Doohan as Scotty, the cantankerous ships engineer. This second pilot was called "Where No Man Has Gone Before."

NBC executives were sold and Star Trek went into regular production after adding DeForest Kelly as Dr. McCoy and Nichelle Nichols as Uhura. Walter Koenig as Chekov was added to the cast later. And thus was born Star Trek.

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