The most apparent contrasts between Star Trek and Space: 1999 lay in their divergent tones. Well beyond stiff upper lip, the British show was sometimes low key to the point of somnambulance. (Here the most negative reviews couldn’t resist comparing the cast to the wooden puppets Gerry Anderson had previously created.) The climax of the episode “The Black Sun,” for example, finds Commander Koenig and Professor Victor Bergman (Morse) sitting around passively awaiting death and exchanging philosophical insights amid engagingly abstract visuals that suggest LSD hallucinations, as the crisis threatening the base more or less resolves itself. Clearly this approach was a deliberate choice of the producers, a stylistic departure from the overwrought space operas that had started with Flash Gordon and led to Star Trek, where old-fashioned fistfights carried the day as often as high-tech solutions. Yet it’s worth recalling that the Enterprise crew’s often witty exchanges contributed to its appeal, and that Star Trek’s “most popular episode” was a comedy—something seemingly beyond the Alpha team. Small wonder the lively, off-kilter Doctor Who was already a long-running hit in Britain and had earned a cult following in the United States by the 1970s.
Yet while the judgment of critics and inconsistent ratings alike showed that Space: 1999’s visual effects and basic premise were successful, the producers decided that some retooling might invigorate the expensive show. Not surprisingly, a familiar influence appeared throughout its revamped second season after Anderson brought in American producer Fred Freiberger, who had run Star Trek’s final season. Freiberger’s analysis of the show echoed the reaction of many reviewers: “Doesn’t anybody know how to smile in 1999?”19 Besides brightening the white-on-gray color scheme of the uniforms and the interior sets that reinforced the subdued feel, he introduced new characters, including a shape-shifting alien named Maya (Catherine Schell). Although another variation of Mr. Spock, Maya actively sought to grasp human emotions and was paired romantically with Tony Verdeschi (Tony Anholt), a young crewman meant as a more traditional action hero.
Freiberger also sought more action-oriented, less elliptical stories in the new format, which Anderson optimistically claimed marked “the best of both worlds,” in comparison to Star Trek.20 Still, the show fared no better and ended in 1977. Soon after, NBC’s jokey Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979–1981), starring Gil Gerard, got bumpy ratings in its first season and also readjusted its format to place Buck and his friends on a space vessel actively engaging the enemies of twenty-fifth-century Earth, another attempt to channel the Star Trek verve that only proved again that the past would be hard to recapture.
Battlestar Galactica reflected less influence from Star Trek than from the amazingly successful Star Wars, although it stayed in the realm of space opera and the military-based exploration that Roddenberry used. It managed the high-quality visual effects of Star Wars (courtesy of John Dykstra, whose team created the miniatures for Lucas) but retained the fatalistic tone of pre-Jedi science fiction. In an unspecified century, twelve human Colonies (planets) are about to conclude a peace treaty with the robot Cylon Empire, which is actually using negotiation as a ruse to wipe out humanity. The Cylons’ sneak attack destroys the entire Colonial fleet of powerful warships, except Galactica, led by wise Commander Adama (Lorne Greene), who manages to escape, leading a ragtag fleet of human survivors in search of a mythic refuge called Earth. Where Star Wars thrived on populist feel-good themes, with underdogs taking down an arrogant dictatorship, Battlestar Galactica portrayed a dispiriting war of attrition in which humans were steadily disadvantaged. Each episode depicts numerous Cylon ships and Colonial fighter craft destroyed in combat, the spectacle that was the show’s main appeal, yet while the robotic enemy can implicitly manufacture weapons continuously, the retreating human fleet can only replace dwindling supplies of people and machines very slowly, if at all. It’s an inverted Vietnam War, and “America” is the peasant guerrilla army this time.
Indeed, Battlestar Galactica began with versions of the twin symbols of World War II disaster that shadowed official thought and action throughout the Cold War: the foolish appeasement of Nazi aggression by the western Allies at the 1938 Munich conference and the “stab in the back” at Pearl Harbor.21 Moreover, Lorne Greene, the show’s only real star, was well known to Americans as Ben Cartwright, patriarch of the sprawling Ponderosa ranch on the long-running TV Western Bonanza (NBC, 1959–1973), a noted instance of a suddenly extinct genre that had long been a popular expression of American confidence. Now he was on the run and losing the war. Still, during a period when Star Wars had ideologically realigned American popular culture toward the neoconservative stance that prefigured the Reagan 1980s, Battlestar Galactica was nearly out of sync with its moment. Add weak writing and uncertain performances, and the series struggled through less than two seasons just as Star Trek itself was about to reappear on the big screen. The instincts of TV producers in the 1970s to create evocative science fiction around a dystopian premise had seemed correct and the results were sometimes impressive, but as the decade ended, their assumptions had been overturned by the preference for triumphant narratives reflected in Star Trek.
Postscript: “Not Your Father’s Star Trek”
In assorted fan discourse of the 1970s and 1980s, the romantic narrative of Gene the Visionary versus all of the hacks and philistines was a prominent feature, a scenario in which Fred Freiberger was unfairly cast as a villain, the clod from outside who had “killed” Star Trek. Yet as executive producer of the show, Roddenberry had hired Freiberger to oversee the third season. Moreover, as the former Desilu executive Herbert F. Solow and the producer Robert H. Justman (who worked on all three seasons) contend, Roddenberry began pulling away from the show after a dispute with NBC over what he correctly perceived as a fatal time-slot assignment for the show’s third season.22 Considering Star Trek’s growing success after its cancellation both with and without Roddenberry’s direct involvement, the fan narrative tells us more about the show’s subsequent reception than its production history. A simplified tale of Roddenberry’s uncompromising battles to realize his dream was reflected in the struggles of the heroic characters he created and in the embrace of those characters by fans who drew inspiration from both for their own personal struggles—another function of the show’s aura of “optimism.”
The vagaries of Hollywood arising from the clash of talent, time, and (above all) money were far more complicated than the romantic synopsis. To wit, after many delays, Roddenberry produced Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), which reunited the original cast in a big-budget feature that bored critics and divided fans. It performed well regardless and inspired a much stronger sequel from which the show’s creator was largely excluded. Yet if the immediate results were unsatisfying, Roddenberry’s perseverance had relaunched the Enterprise. He died in 1991, but by 2005, ten movies and four new TV series had been produced.
At this point though, Star Trek’s long run in various formats had led to complete saturation. Moreover, although the title had grossed hundreds of millions of dollars, younger viewers were increasingly likely to perceive Star Trek as something campy and outdated. Enter producer J.J. Abrams, whose strong track record with youthful audiences in both movies and television made him a prime candidate to reboot the franchise. Before it debuted, trailers teased audiences with the line “This is not your father’s Star Trek.” Not so promisingly, this phrasing, which had entered the popular vernacular, derived from a 1988 GM campaign to sell the venerable Oldsmobile brand to younger buyers. “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile,” declared clever commercials that paired boomer celebrities with their young adult children. In fact, William Shatner and daughter Melanie appeared in one that began with her explaining, “My father drove a starship, so it’s only natural I’d fly around in something Space Age,” the ad portraying the lumbering sedan as a sexy spacecraft.
For the 2009 movie, the approach courted the reliable twelve-to-twenty-four-year-old moviegoing demographic and signaled, o
r possibly provoked, older fans with a cheeky implication that their beloved show was going to be radically reimagined, its middle-aged adherents ignored or even ridiculed—a new version, perhaps, of the famous Saturday Night Live sketch in which Shatner appeared at a convention and admonished Trekkies to “Get a life!” In fact, Abrams’s Star Trek became a substantial hit by carefully addressing both of these disparate audiences.
In the spirit of starting anew but acknowledging the past, the plot describes how young Kirk, Spock, and the others meet at the Starfleet Academy and details the first mission of the original Enterprise crew, involving them in a complicated time-travel scenario that had been a regular feature of every version of Star Trek. The producers made shrewd decisions through scripting, visual effects, and production design to recall the original series while still departing from it. Famously amorous James T. Kirk (Chris Pine) would appear in a dorm room hookup with a fellow student, for example, although she would be a green-skinned alien familiar to older fans from the show’s original 1964 pilot episode. For the starship Kelvin seen in the movie’s opening, production designer Scott Chambliss said he wanted to evoke “the feeling of combining Flash Gordon with a Corvette commercial from 1965,” before revealing the updated Enterprise design.23 Another risky but successful choice was the decision to have the actors deftly refer to the performances and characterizations of the original 1960s cast without doing painful, extended impressions of them. Perhaps the film’s most resonant collision of past and present lay in the audacious destruction of the planet Vulcan by the time-traveling Romulan, Nero (Eric Bana), and the resulting third-act appearance of Leonard Nimoy as the elder Mr. Spock, emphasizing once again that the character NBC urged dropping at the start was the format’s indispensable icon.
When, near the end, Zachary Quinto’s young Spock and the septuagenarian Nimoy’s original incarnation meet face-to-face, the script ingeniously reconciles old and new. Boomer fans were assured that the old, familiar world of Star Trek still exists, with Nimoy’s Spock off to another new frontier, starting to rebuild a Vulcan colony on a deserted planet (a satisfying and vital “second career” after retirement?) while young Spock will presumably take part in subsequent adventures in the new timeline. Given Star Trek’s vast money-making record and its capacity for regeneration, perhaps twenty years hence there will be some new account of how young Jean-Luc Picard (with a full head of hair) came to command Enterprise-D. But that’s a rerun for another day.
Notes
1. Joan Winston, The Making of the Trek Conventions (New York: Doubleday/Playboy Press, 1979), 17–29.
2. Herbert F. Solow and Robert H. Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story (New York: Pocket Books, 1996), 417–418.
3. “Star Trek Is Out of This World,” Broadcasting, August 4, 1969, 31. The copy indicates that syndication had begun in spring 1968. “Star Trek’s 100th Success Story,” Broadcasting, January 18, 1971 (back cover). Thanks to my colleague Derek Kompare for generously sharing his research here.
4. Joan Winston, “I Should Never Have Answered the Phone,” in Jacqueline Lichtenberg, Sondra Marshak, and Joan Winston, Star Trek Lives! (New York: Bantam, 1975), 52–70.
5. Lewis Beale, “Endless Trek,” Daily News (Los Angeles), September 5, 1986, 10, 11. “Gene Roddenberry will nearly always begin [a talk to fans] by saying, ‘I think it was the optimism—because Star Trek was saying, It’s not all over. There will be a future, and it will be as exciting, as challenging as anything we can imagine.’” Lichtenberg et al., Star Trek Lives!, 107.
6. Genesis II and Planet Earth aired on CBS as made-for-television movies and were seen in syndication for several years afterward. The premise was fairly similar to the 1930s comic strip and serial Buck Rogers in the 25th Century.
7. For analysis of Star Trek’s mediation of the Frontier Myth in the Cold War context, see Rick Worland, “From the New Frontier to the Final Frontier: Star Trek from Kennedy to Gorbachev,” Film and History 24, nos. 1–2 (1994): 19–35.
8. Joe Russo and Larry Landsman with Edward Gross, Planet of the Apes Revisited: The Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Classic Science Fiction Saga (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001). See chapter 7, “Television Goes Ape,” 225–239.
9. Quoted in ibid., 226.
10. Ibid., 228. The final development of the series format was credited to Anthony Wilson and Art Wallace; the latter had written scripts for Star Trek.
11. Winston, The Making of the Trek Conventions, 64–65.
12. In the interview Lenard talked about the 1973 Star Trek convention and the enthusiasm of its fans but without stating specifically that he thought this recognition had helped him be cast in the Apes series. Chris Claremont, “Urko Unleashed,” Planet of the Apes, no. 6 (March 1975): 10–25. See also “Apes Invade!”, Monster Times, no. 37 (December 1974): 12–13.
13. Eric Greene, Planet of the Apes as American Myth: Race, Politics, and Popular Culture (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 158–159.
14. Nolan quoted in John Kenneth Muir’s Retro TV Files: Logan’s Run: The Series [1977], A Retrospective by John Kenneth Muir, www.johnkennethmuir.com. This is a longer version of an article that originally appeared in Cinescape 7, no. 1 (January–February 2001). For background on the novel and movie, see Wallace A. Wyss, “Conception,” Cinefantastique 5, no. 2 (1976): 6–9. Nolan discusses the TV series in David Houston, “An Interview with the ‘Logan’ Man, William F. Nolan,” Future, no. 4 (August 1978): 20–25.
15. Tim Heald, The Making of Space: 1999: A Gerry Anderson Production (New York: Ballantine, 1976), 15.
16. For a thorough history and analysis of U.S. syndication, see Derek Kompare, Rerun Nation: How Repeats Invented American Television (New York: Routledge, 2005). Kompare argues, however, that Fin-Syn coupled with the Prime Time Access Rule intended to promote program diversity and localism, but it actually worked to solidify the primacy of off-network shows rather than first-run series like Space: 1999. Kompare, Rerun Nation, 84–91.
17. Heald, The Making of Space: 1999, 21–22.
18. “Huge Promotional Push to Get ITC’s Space: 1999 into Orbit,” Broadcasting, August 18, 1975, 19–20. Broadcasting put the initial sales at 148 markets, including 48 of the top 50.
19. Quoted in Heald, The Making of Space: 1999, 97–98.
20. Ibid., 187.
21. As Galactica is depicted as a space-faring combination of battleship and aircraft carrier, icons of America’s Pacific victory in World War II, we can contrast the show to the 1970s Japanese anime series Space Cruiser Yamato, which was premised on a sunken Imperial battleship resurrected and converted into a powerful space vessel. This, too, tapped into some national fantasy symbols but appeared as an optimistic allegory of postwar Japan moving from total defeat to renewed economic and technological leadership as the U.S. economy stagnated.
22. Solow and Justman, Inside Star Trek: The Real Story, 388–398.
23. Jon D. Witmer, “A Bold, New Enterprise,” American Cinematographer, June 2009, 29.
Starfleet Academy Instructors
Amy Carney has very fond memories of growing up watching The Next Generation and maintains that it is the best series. While she does admit that Kirk, and even Sisko, are much better captains to have at your side in a scuffle, she insists that Picard is the best captain overall. As a historian, she also wonders how the city of St. Petersburg got renamed Leningrad again in the future. When she is not pondering this great mystery, she serves as an assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University, the Behrend College, where she teaches modern European history. She also has several forthcoming publications on the Nazi SS.
Christian Domenig has been a Star Trek fan since he first saw the original series in the 1980s. Because Starfleet Academy had not yet been founded, he studied history and media studies and is now assistant professor at the University of Klagenfurt in Austria, where he teaches medieval history and auxiliary sciences of history. His research interests are on noble famili
es and cultural history.
M. G. DuPree is a freelance writer and classicist who has taught at the Westminster Schools and Pace Academy in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been a devoted linguist ever since she discovered that the more languages you know, the more you can curse without anyone knowing what you are saying; this is a knowledge she applies with some frequency to recalcitrant students. She is fascinated by the alien languages and cultures shown in Star Trek, and she is particularly fond of Lursa and B’Etor Duras, those daring Klingon entrepreneurs.
H. Bruce Franklin is the author or editor of nineteen books on American history and culture, including Vietnam and Other American Fantasies and War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination. His writings and classes opened the door for science fiction to be taken seriously and taught in American colleges and schools. He persuaded the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum to put on the major exhibit “Star Trek and the Sixties”; that 1992 show, for which he was the advisory curator, turned out to be the most popular exhibit in the museum’s history. He is currently the John Cotton Dana Professor of English and American Studies at Rutgers University in Newark.
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