Star Trek and History

by Reagin, Nancy

  As one of the New York convention organizers, Winston was a, well, logical choice to link fandom and the TV industry. At age forty, she was involved in science fiction fan activities and was also employed by CBS as the coordinator of business affairs for its East Coast offices. From the perspective of Paramount executives this likely meant Winston was an experienced industry professional who could be counted on to give a polished interview and a clear introduction of the event to a trade journalist, which would not only benefit the convention but also advertise the studio’s ongoing syndication efforts. Indeed, she says Newgard phoned Variety editor Les Brown from her CBS office to propose the interview. The resulting front-page story prompted further media coverage on the convention’s eve, including a story in the New York Daily News, which also happened to own New York City’s Channel 11 (WPIX), the station then airing Star Trek in strip syndication. TV Guide ran a feature on the recent fan gathering in March. The show’s unexpected rise to a cultural phenomenon was in full swing.4

  Media interests could help publicize the convention on their own behalf, but they did not originate the idea or force thousands to attend this gathering or the many that followed. While hard-core fans might sometimes suffer media ridicule, producers and promoters of TV science fiction had now noted their impact and influence. Regularly asked to account for the popularity of his brainchild, Roddenberry prepared a standard response that he stuck to for years: optimism. On the occasion of the show’s twentieth anniversary the producer called it “a very optimistic view of the future, and it’s hard for young people to turn away from that.”5

  Actually, it hadn’t been so hard at all since the late 1960s, to judge from the box office success of a science fiction film cycle that saw little future in the future. The Star Trek cult arose soon after the critical and commercial success of 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Planet of the Apes (1968), which had revived the genre with major productions, although these films offer highly pessimistic visions of our most thorny social problems, which escalate into catastrophe. Roddenberry was nonetheless correct that Star Trek fandom tapped the vein of idealism blended with discontent with the status quo that had defined the 1960s, and the show’s following blossomed during the era of frustration and drift that characterized the 1970s.

  Set against major science fiction movies of the Vietnam era, Star Trek was singularly optimistic as it predicted the future neither as a post-Armageddon hell nor as the triumph of dehumanized totalitarianism. The outlook seemed bleak indeed in the Planet of the Apes series (1968–1973), A Clockwork Orange (1971), The Omega Man (1971), Silent Running (1972), Soylent Green (1973), Zardoz (1974), Logan’s Run (1976), and others. These films were downbeat, but many of them performed well at the box office, too. As such, the dystopian thrust came to define most TV science fiction in the 1970s as well, and not just the short-lived CBS adaptations of Planet of the Apes and Logan’s Run.

  Space: 1999 began by showing how the personnel of a moon base became helpless passengers when a nuclear explosion blasts the moon out of Earth’s orbit. Battlestar Galactica featured beleaguered remnants of the human race who were pursued through space by murderous robots. Indeed, either failing to follow his own instincts or trying to distance himself from Star Trek, Roddenberry also produced two different pilots for a new science fiction series in the pessimistic vein. Both his Genesis II (1973) and Planet Earth (1974) conveyed an ambivalent attitude toward the future of mankind, depicting a colony of scientists striving to rebuild human civilization after a nuclear holocaust.6 Amid such desolation, starship Enterprise flies high indeed.

  Science fiction was thriving, but the challenge was to convert some of these gloomy movies or like themes into an episodic format. The film Planet of the Apes had already yielded four sequels of varying scale and ambition, however, and all had done well, a promising record. For the weekly Planet of the Apes or Logan’s Run series, conceiving the postapocalyptic world as a “new frontier” could have worked. Such an approach would have mined the same indirect references to the Western, a powerful and popular genre that Star Trek had also relied on.7 Ratings failure wasn’t predestined with shows like Space: 1999 and Battlestar Galactica, which featured either proven concepts or an intriguing premise bolstered by a serious commitment to visual effects. Regardless, producers of these expensive shows tried to hedge their bets by tacitly courting Star Trek fans. The first convention had mediated between fans and the television industry through the circulation of Star Trek reruns; producers now crafted particular aspects of new shows to encourage fans to perceive them in relation to Roddenberry’s creation.

  Postbomb Fugitives

  The climactic moment of Twentieth Century-Fox’s Planet of the Apes ranks among the most vivid Hollywood images of the 1960s—stranded astronaut Taylor (Charlton Heston) sprawled in the surf, overcome by discovering the ruins of the Statue of Liberty, realizing the strange planet ruled by intelligent apes is really Earth of the distant future. Often parodied but never forgotten, this arresting tableau was conceived by writer-producer Rod Serling, creator of The Twilight Zone, the much-admired CBS fantasy anthology whose most memorable stories typically ended in just such ironic reversals or surprise. One might have thought there was no place to go from here, but coming just as the Hollywood box office was hitting the nadir of a twenty-five-year decline, this commercial bright spot sparked an immediate desire for sequels. Before the last Planet of the Apes installment appeared in 1973, the studio was already interested in a weekly series, and they wisely hired Serling to develop the show’s basic bible. The premise was borrowed from ABC’s The Fugitive, one of the most influential network shows of the 1960s, imagining a chimpanzee named Galen who goes on the run with two time-warping human astronauts, pursued by the orangutan theocrat Dr. Zaius and a gorilla soldier, General Urko.8

  Serling’s format promised that each week the characters could find “as wildly imaginative an alien civilization as Star Trek’s Enterprise ever encountered. . . . With one major difference—they will not consist of intellectually obscure life-forms that only the fanatic sci-fi buff can relate to . . . What we see will be a fascinating, terrifying, yet still recognizable world. It’s the flip side of ours.”9 A twenty-year veteran of battles with sponsors and network censors, Serling seemed keen to reassure them that this show would downplay “ideas”—meaning anything too cerebral or potentially controversial—in favor of action, something Star Trek had done much of the time anyway. Yet after this backhanded compliment, he also explained the function of Galen with regard to the astronauts, saying, “Their relationship is going to be . . . deeply supportive and yet . . . highly competitive. . . . In any given situation, [Galen] is going to try to explain and defend the ape culture using all the precise logic of Star Trek’s Mr. Spock.”10 Implicitly, then, Galen was planned as another “alien” outsider who comments on human foibles.

  Roddy McDowall, who played the chimpanzee scientist Cornelius and then the character’s son in four of the Apes movies, had emerged as the star of the franchise and would play Galen. However, the show had a key Star Trek connection in actor Mark Lenard as surly General Urko. Although his face was buried under ape makeup and a leather helmet, Lenard’s deep, resonant voice came through, one quite familiar to Star Trek fans. A busy character actor with numerous television credits, Lenard had two in particular that recommended him for the new series. He had played the sympathetic Romulan commander stalking Captain Kirk in “Balance of Terror,” the episode that introduced the pointy-eared cousins of the Vulcan race to the Star Trek universe; and the next season he entered the pantheon of Star Trek by being cast as Ambassador Sarek, Mr. Spock’s estranged father, in “Journey to Babel.” Lenard had appeared at the 1973 New York Star Trek convention, an invitation the actor accepted with some skepticism. “Do you think they’ll remember me?” he asked, according to Joan Winston, but clearly they did, greeting him with a standing ovation and keeping him busy signing autographs long after his talk.11 Some genre fan magazine
s noted Lenard’s Star Trek resumé in the coverage of the Planet of the Apes show, including an interview with the actor in Marvel Comics’ Planet of the Apes magazine, whose first page pictured him in makeup as Sarek.12

  Even so, the prime-time Planet of the Apes was ultimately aimed not at the more sophisticated viewers of The Twilight Zone but at juvenile audiences. This was hardly surprising, as the sale of Planet of the Apes toys, comic books, and other simian memorabilia had begun with the first movie and was accelerating by the time the television show debuted. While the series was costly due to the all-important makeup that had made the movies viable, its production values still looked modest, with stock shots of the ape city pulled from the first two feature films and General Urko sometimes leading an “army” of gorilla troops numbering no more than three or four costumed extras on horseback. What’s more, although practical considerations dictated that the native humans among the apes were going to have to talk, they were depicted as the cowed, second-class citizens living in thatched huts seen in the last movie, Battle for the Planet of the Apes (1973). Eric Greene draws a parallel between these downtrodden figures and the anguished Vietnamese peasantry with whom Americans had grown grimly familiar through years of TV news coverage of the war.13 Where Star Trek had allegorized ideals of John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier packaged as the triumphal manned space program he had championed, the hopeless, upside-down world of the Planet of the Apes series may have offered viewers unwelcome reminders of the recent Vietnam trauma. More concretely, faced with stiff competition from the NBC sitcoms Sanford and Son and Chico and the Man, Planet of the Apes lasted only half a season.

  In 1967, William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson published a dystopian science fiction novel called Logan’s Run, about a futuristic society whose youthful inhabitants live in pampered ease and comfort until age twenty-one, whereupon they are willingly euthanized. In the 1976 movie, set in a postapocalyptic domed city, they are executed in a public ritual when they turn thirty, which, it is promised, allows some of the most lucky or agile to be granted “renewal.” In fact, no one ever survives, and Logan, a member of the Sandmen—the police force that tracks down “runners” who want to live beyond their allotted time—manages to escape along with a woman named Jessica and to reach the world outside the dome. At the crest of the counterculture whose slogans included “Don’t trust anyone over thirty,” the writers, both nearing forty, ruminated on environmentalism and consumerist conformity alongside marked ambivalence about the youth rebellion. MGM’s version, starring Michael York and Jenny Agutter, proved only moderately successful with critics and audiences. Still, Logan’s Run marked an important transition for Hollywood science fiction because the protagonists ultimately free the city from its oppressive system, and the movie ends on a hopeful note, far different from most examples of the previous decade. Star Wars (1977) came soon after, banishing dystopian themes in favor of traditional heroes and familiar genre resolutions—the “optimistic” features Star Trek had long provided. Indeed, the enslaving world of the domed city is just the kind of false utopia that Captain Kirk would have similarly condemned and destroyed.

  As Logan and Jessica search for a possibly mythic refuge called Sanctuary while pursued by the Sandman Francis, Logan’s former friend, the novel opened opportunities for further episodic adventures. In fact, a movie or TV adaptation was in the authors’ minds from the start. While Nolan had published fiction extensively, Johnson was a successful TV writer with several sales to The Twilight Zone and a recent script, “The Man Trap,” that became Star Trek’s first aired episode. The Star Trek influence was apparent in the CBS series Logan’s Run in any case. Nolan backed away from the TV version early on, but not before creating the duo’s android companion Rem, played by Donald Moffat, an officious if friendly automaton the writer frankly described as “my metallic Mr. Spock.”14 Moreover, when veteran producers Ivan Goff and Ben Roberts began the TV version, they made a key hire in choosing D. C. (Dorothy) Fontana as their story editor. Fontana had been Star Trek’s story editor in the second season and wrote several of the show’s popular episodes, including the introduction of Spock’s parents in “Journey to Babel.” She had continued in a similar capacity on NBC’s animated Star Trek that aired on Saturday mornings from 1973 to 1974. Fontana, too, had made convention appearances, and among fans she was second only to Roddenberry in admiration and respect as a creative talent behind the show.

  The Logan’s Run series suffered backstage reshuffling and creative differences before it even went on the air, which suggests ongoing conflicts over the tone and approach of the show between producers, writers, and the network that were never satisfactorily resolved. Still, without the expensive makeup that hobbled the Planet of the Apes series, the show’s costumes, props, and sets created a distinctive look. Typical of prime time shows of the period, however, it was shot in a glossy, high-key style often at odds with the downbeat tone of its themes. Similarly, alongside the scene-stealing Donald Moffat, Gregory Harrison and Heather Menzies were bright-eyed, well-scrubbed innocents, which made the characters less complex or sexy than their big-screen counterparts. Even so, Fontana gamely solicited scripts from writers who had worked on Star Trek, including noted science fiction author Harlan Ellison and David Gerrold, creator of what most fans considered Star Trek’s most popular episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles.” Both Ellison and Gerrold came up with provocative stories for Logan’s Run, but they ultimately used pseudonyms due to their dissatisfaction with the final versions. In the era of superhero shows such as The Six Million Dollar Man, Wonder Woman, and Man from Atlantis, Logan’s Run was also aimed at a young audience, suggesting that network decision makers retained older, more circumscribed attitudes toward science fiction despite the genre’s proven range.

  Special Effects, Less Special Futures

  In the 1960s, British producers Gerry and Sylvia Anderson created several inventive children’s shows featuring marionette puppets in science fiction settings, including Supercar, Fireball XL5, and Stingray, which had played well in the United States. In 1973, Associated Television (ATV) chief Sir Lew Grade assigned Gerry Anderson to create a live-action science fiction series that would feature strong production values and appeal to this burgeoning market. Thus, Space: 1999 was born as a high-budget venture starring Martin Landau and Barbara Bain, lately starring in CBS’s Mission: Impossible, and featuring Barry Morse, best known as the detective pursuing David Janssen on The Fugitive. Although it immediately established its own identity, Space: 1999 would both benefit from Star Trek’s syndication success and be measured against it.

  Set in 1999, the show’s opening episode explains how the personnel of Moonbase Alpha, led by Landau’s commander John Koenig, become unwilling voyagers when nuclear waste stored on the moon explodes, hurling the satellite through space. Stories describe the Alphans’ attempts to survive as they encounter strange alien life-forms. While Space: 1999 has always drawn mixed reviews, the show’s visual effects, especially its accomplished miniature work depicting the base’s Eagle transport craft and assorted alien vessels, garnered near universal praise. Given science fiction’s traditionally low prestige, reviewers on a deadline could always get easy laughs by mocking cheap sci-fi with threadbare sets and effects. With the examples of 2001, Planet of the Apes, and others in mind, Space: 1999 seemed designed to circumvent this problem from the outset.

  Moreover, as Gerry Anderson explained, “You know straightaway . . . that [the series] is going to be costly. If it’s going to be costly it has to do well in America.”15 As the syndication market was becoming increasingly lucrative following the enactment of the FCC’s Financial Interest and Syndication (Fin-Syn) rules in 1971, the British producers made a strong, well-coordinated push to sell the show across the pond.16 ATV’s marketing subsidiary, Independent Television Corporation (ITC), blanketed U.S. stations with an oversized color brochure depicting an Eagle transporter flying over Moonbase Alpha, including assurance that the show wa
s “custom made for American television. From its very inception all the elements necessary for a successful American TV series have been incorporated . . . American stars, American directors, American writers, American talent of the very best.”17 It initially sold in 155 U.S. markets. ITC’s concerted previewing and marketing pitches positioned Space: 1999 as a network-quality show of such promise that in the fall of 1975, numerous affiliates of all three major networks preempted or delayed what they perceived as weak network programs in favor of the British series, a relatively rare occurrence that can put affiliation agreements at risk. Subsequently, station programmers that ITC committed sought to leverage a prevailing trend. Said Broadcasting:

  Some stations, such as KRON-TV San Francisco, are going after the Star Trek cult in particular. KRON-TV, an NBC affiliate, is doing a mailing to the 6,000-plus names on the mailing list of the Trading Post in Berkeley, Calif., a store dealing solely in Star Trek memorabilia, and is thinking of holding a special preview in Berkeley for the Trekkers. In Cleveland, WUAB is scheduling Star Trek as lead-in to Space: 1999.18

  The still-growing Star Trek fan base and the publicity and promotion around Space: 1999 meant that reviewers, fans, and general audiences inevitably compared the shows. Many press reviews claimed the British series would be just what Star Trek fans were waiting for; others predicted that same group might be disappointed. Both claims proved accurate. The two shows had been conceived only about a decade apart, but that period was a watershed. Where the Enterprise was envisioned as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” the active vanguard of civilization exploring a limitless frontier, Moonbase Alpha became a vulnerable island in space evoking the malaise of post-Imperial Britain and post-Vietnam America alike—cast adrift and lost, economies faltering. For American viewers, the principal cast of Space: 1999 would have been perceived against the backdrop to their earlier TV roles: as part of the original Mission: Impossible team, Landau and Bain had smugly celebrated the CIA intrigues and Cold War mind-set that laid the groundwork for the Vietnam debacle, and Barry Morse was the policeman who had obsessively hounded an innocent man on The Fugitive. In their Space: 1999 roles, these now-compromised guardians of the traditional order were left floating in space, with only limited control of their destiny.