by Edward Gross
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
The World Science Fiction Convention was held on Labor Day weekend in 1967, about two weeks before Star Trek’s second season debut, “Amok Time.” There was a benefit auction to bring a Japanese science-fiction fan named Takumi Shibano to the United States for a visit and tour. We were head of the auction committee and had asked Gene to donate some Star Trek memorabilia to include in the auction. Those items made the auction the biggest draw at the convention outside of the Hugo Awards. We packed the room. The needed five thousand dollars was raised in two and a half hours. That auction also became a galvanizing moment in Star Trek history. It was when Star Trek fandom first came together and became a force in and of itself. People who met each other at the convention went off and started producing fanzines and formed clubs.
GENE RODDENBERRY (creator, executive producer Star Trek)
We had Paramount pretty well convinced that fanzines are the lifeblood of the movement, and they always have been. I said, “The day we start sending cops in to arrest a junior-high-school student because he’s using Star Trek on a mimeographed thing he circulates to fifty friends, that’s the day I walk out of the studio.”
A primary reason that many of the show’s fans supported the letter-writing campaign to save Star Trek for a third season was that they were cognizant of the fact that without enough episodes, the show would quite simply disappear forever. The elusive goal of syndication—a situation where independent stations would air reruns of a network show—would never materialize, and Star Trek would be little more than a minor footnote in television history.
But they weren’t the only ones who recognized the significance of Star Trek. Richard Block, vice president and general manager of Kaiser Broadcasting Corp., a company that owned and operated broadcast television and radio stations in the United States from 1958 to 1977, saw the potential of the series early on and presciently secured the syndication rights during the show’s third season. This unsung hero in Trek lore may truly be the man who saved Star Trek.
RICHARD BLOCK (vice president, general manager, Kaiser Broadcasting Corp.)
At that time we were developing independent stations, and UHF was viewed negatively, with the preference being VHF, and it wasn’t helped by the fact that, at the time, there wasn’t much cable. The FCC limit in terms of owning stations at the time was seven, and we owned six.
Back then network affiliates couldn’t air reruns. It was outrageous that the government was involved like that and telling people what they could air from seven to eight p.m. at night, but the thought was to develop more diversity and more producers. Of course, this was to our advantage, because the network affiliates in the top fifty markets were struggling. That’s tantamount to 80 percent of television households.
So we bought a lot of syndicated programming, and Bob Newgard, who was VP and sales manager of worldwide television at Paramount, knew that I had an interest in Star Trek, but he kept telling me that the company wanted to quit doing the show. It cost too much money, Gene Roddenberry was tough to deal with, and so on. I do have to say that Gene was great with me. I taught at Stanford at the time and I’d invite Gene to talk to the kids. One time he couldn’t do it, and one of my students asked, “Could I design costumes?” He was working on a new episode. I asked him and he said, “Yes, tell her to design them and come down and watch it being shot.” I thought that was pretty amazing.
Anyway, NBC was kind of doddering over the whole thing and stopped production after seventy-nine episodes.
I kept pushing Bob, saying, “I want to buy Star Trek,” and he would say, “We don’t even know if we’re going to syndicate it.” I still pushed, and eventually we scribbled the deal out on a napkin or menu for us to play the show in Boston, Detroit, Cleveland, and Philadelphia. From there he went back to Paramount and said, “Why don’t we launch it?” There was also interest from San Francisco’s KTVU and, afterward, WPIX in New York entered the situation.
SCOTT MANTZ (film critic, Access Hollywood)
I believe Philly was the first city to broadcast Trek reruns as early as 1969. I was barely a year old when that happened, so I don’t remember which station it was on. But when I started watching Trek in 1974, I was six years old. The episode that popped my Trek cherry was “Mirror Mirror,” and I was instantly hooked! Interesting how that was the episode that did it, since it was such an atypical episode (it was set in the evil universe most of the time).
But of course Trek made a huge impact on my life, because A) it was on five nights a week, B) it was on early enough so I could watch it before my bedtime, and C) I caught it while they were running it in its production order (not the broadcast order)—and I was watching so many classic episodes from the first half of the second season (“Amok Time,” “Doomsday Machine,” “Metamorphosis”), when Star Trek really hit its stride.
Also worth mentioning is that they showed Trek complete and uncut! No edits were made, so I saw all fifty minutes of each and every episode! I didn’t realize that Trek was edited for syndication until a few years later, when I was visiting relatives in New York and caught a few edited Treks on Channel 11.
RICHARD BLOCK
Star Trek did great on independent stations at eleven o’clock at night, because it ran against the news. The news skews old, and Star Trek got younger viewers. I remember the guy from the Cleveland station was really angry at me—as angry as you can be with your boss—saying, “Why are you cramming that down our throat?” But that’s how it started. Then we ran it from six to seven and killed CBS News in Philadelphia.
We had to run the show five nights a week. The network could do one night a week, but we didn’t have the circulation to get that to work. Stripping, as far as we were concerned from a marketing standpoint, was the only way to go so that people would know six o’clock to seven o’clock was the time for Star Trek.
We were so successful with Star Trek, and many other independent stations started airing the show the same way.
DAREN DOCHTERMAN (visual-effects supervisor, Star Trek: The Motion Picture—Director’s Edition)
When I was a kid, the first Star Trek I saw was a 1973 animated show. That first episode, “Beyond the Farthest Star,” with the creepy alien message and the strange bug-like ship with the exploded pods, was creepy as hell and scared me to death. And that is what drew me to it, because I wanted to know why. I watched the whole show and then I started watching the live-action show on WPIX. It seemed funny to watch the opening titles and hear different music, because I was used to the Saturday-morning show. But of course immediately I started loving the live-action show and started tape-recording them off of TV.
BRYAN FULLER (executive producer, Hannibal)
My first discovery of Star Trek came when I was very small. I wasn’t in school yet and I wasn’t old enough to go to church. So I would be left alone sometimes with my older brother when everybody went out to church. I remember one time he had built a Klingon battleship and had rigged it with lights. He turned off all the lights in the house and he was flying it around. I was, like, “What is this ship? What does it belong to?” So my first exposure to Star Trek was through a Klingon battle cruiser.
It was probably the mid seventies that I was exposed to the animated series and rerun after rerun of the original show. I was always dazzled by the brightness of the world that we were transported to, and as I got older I really started appreciating the level of the storytelling. I was old enough to know that there were adventures that they were having in space with aliens. That was very exciting in a way that westerns were a little dusty for me. It took science fiction for me to appreciate western storytelling.
ANDRE BORMANIS (science consultant, Star Trek: The Next Generation)
I was too young to really comprehend it, but when I was in high school in the seventies, I began watching the reruns in syndication and I became fairly addicted, as my mother would say.
RICHARD BLOCK
Our success with Star Trek
legitimatized the stations. Initially we were dismissed; the feeling was that UHF was for kids’ programming. There was also a feeling that airing Star Trek five nights a week—because there were only seventy-nine episodes—would wear it out quickly. That didn’t happen.
In 1966, AMT/Aurora released a model kit of the Enterprise, which would be the first of several such kits, including the “Galileo Seven” shuttlecraft. The deal came about originally when AMT agreed to build a miniature model of the starship, as well as a full-size shuttlecraft mock-up that could be used for filming in exchange for the license to sell the model.
The following year saw the start of Western Publishing’s Gold Key comic-book series; Bantam’s twelve-volume series of episode adaptations by James Blish, beginning in January 1967 (which culminated with the 1970 original, Spock Must Die!); Bjo and John Trimble’s creation (with the help of Gene Roddenberry) of Lincoln Enterprises, a mail-order business that was part of Roddenberry’s Norway Productions and sold episodic film clips from the cutting-room floor mounted as slides, copies of the show’s scripts, and other forms of merchandise. (Today that company still exists in the form of Roddenberry.com.) And September 1968 marked the publication date of Stephen E. Whitfield and Gene Roddenberry’s seminal The Making of Star Trek, the first-ever behind-the-scenes account on the making of a television series.
GENE RODDENBERRY
Merchandising was a very big part of our concern. It’s become a big business since those early days, when we used to send out five-by-seven black-and-whites of the stars in the days when Lincoln [Enterprises] slowly got into it. I don’t have a great deal of control over it, except the control of the fact that they kind of feel like they have to listen to me, because I might get mad and say nasty things to people. I’ve tried to use that without being an ass about it as best I can. I’ve said to them a number of times that whatever we do, we must see that the fans get a square deal for their money. I would not stand for putting out toys, as they did once, with box labels of Mr. Spock killing some monster with a zap gun, because it happened to look ugly.
LEN WEIN (writer, Star Trek Gold Key Comics)
I started writing for Gold Key on a regular basis early in my career, doing stories for the various anthology books like Twilight Zone, Boris Karloff Tales of Mystery, and Grimm’s Ghost Stories, and quickly graduated to series books like Mod Wheels and Microbots.
I had been annoyed for a while by the inaccuracies and flat-out mistakes I was seeing in the Star Trek book, so one day I mustered up my courage; went to see my editor, the wonderful Wally Green, and said, “Your Star Trek comic is a mess. I don’t think your writer has ever even watched an episode of the series.” Wally replied, “Probably not.” I said, “Well, you know, I’ve watched every episode of the series so far. I know it front to back. Maybe you should let me take a crack at it.” Wally mused for a moment, then said, “Y’know, maybe I should.” And that’s how I got the gig.
First thing I did when I got the book was to send a letter to the brilliant Alberto Gioletti, who was drawing the book, to bring him up to speed on what had to be fixed in the art. First, those long tubes at the rear of the Enterprise were not rocket engines; they were impulse engines, so there should not be fiery exhaust coming from the engines. Second, our heroes did not carry backpacks. They transported down to the planets they visited and had anything they needed transported down to them.
The first Star Trek novel was a hardcover novel for kids, Mission To Horatius, by Mack Reynolds, a popular pulp sci-fi author of the time. While fans at the time loved it, the producers were less sanguine.“Mack Reynolds’ novelization of Star Trek is not technically in bad taste,” noted producer John Meredyth Lucas in a memo in November of 1967, “but it is extremely dull and badly written.”
Even at the time, Lucas was deeply concerned about violations of Trek canon including the fact that “the Romulans have nothing to do with the Organian Peace Treaty.” He was even more concerned, however, with the fact that Sulu is described as “a bland faced, small Oriental; to Uhura as a Negress and compounds this by having her break into a spiritual chant. We run a totally integrated crew and it would seem we should avoid these particular stereotypes for a juvenile market.”
More successful were the James Blish episodic adaptations, which also had their fair share of inaccuracies, however.
JEFF AYERS (author, Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion)
The short-story adaptations by James Blish were extremely popular. The editor at Bantam, the publisher that owned the Trek license at that time, was Frederik Pohl, and while nobody can remember how Blish was asked to write the stories, he had the dubious task of writing the stories based on the scripts sent to him by the studio. That’s why you see all of the various discrepancies and attempts to write logical explanations for some of the wilder stuff. His wife, Judith Lawrence, ended up helping him with the later books, and when he passed away, she finished the series. Blish wrote almost all of the stories without actually seeing the episodes first.
The first novel, Spock Must Die!, came about due to Pohl asking Blish to write one. According to Judy, James was fascinated by Spock’s character, and wanted to delve deeper into his psyche. Fans were clamoring for more and more stories at this point, so Pohl arranged for the two anthologies, Star Trek: New Voyages and its sequel almost two years later. More novels followed, but Pohl admitted he didn’t pay much attention to Star Trek.
BJO & JOHN TRIMBLE
Lincoln Enterprises was very innovative and unprecedented for the time, especially in Hollywood. We didn’t help build Lincoln Enterprises; we built it entirely from the ground up. I know that revisionist history says that LE sprang full-blown from Gene’s brow, and that several others had a great deal to do with setting the business up, but the realities are that not one person ever had the mail-order experience that we Trimbles had. We’d run several small but successful mail-order companies. We talked GR into the idea, and put LE together entirely on our own. We eventually hired a fan to help sort mail, and found out later she was claiming that she’d originated LE and we were actually working for her! She was fired later by Gene.
Once we had a going concern, Majel wanted to run the business, which was Gene’s idea all along. So we were fired on trumped-up charges. This broke our hearts, because we saw it as a long-term business that would benefit Gene and us, too. But then, nobody in Hollywood has ever been accused of gratitude, have they? Oh well!
ROD RODDENBERRY (son of Gene Roddenberry)
The Making of Star Trek was actually a great book, and that’s where I learned a great deal about how my father and the other people on the production staff would contact JPL and Caltech. And I think one story that’s in there is simply about the phaser, where my father sort of said, “We need a weapon.” The response was, “Well, right now we’re working on lasers.” My father said, “So what’s the next step?” And it was the phasing laser, which is where the phaser came from. So the believability was a very important part. In fact, in the show bible, the writing document for the original series, there’s a whole paragraph on believability, where my father talks about how important it is to make things believable.
BRANNON BRAGA (executive producer, cocreator, Star Trek: Enterprise)
That may be the most groundbreaking behind-the-scenes book ever written.
DAVID A. GOODMAN (executive producer, Family Guy)
I became a TV writer because of that book. Before that book, I didn’t even know the job existed. Like, you’re watching television and you don’t stop to think about the fact that somebody wrote every word that’s coming out of Hawkeye Pierce’s mouth, and it’s not just Kirk—it’s somebody sitting down and writing. That book opened my mind. “Oh my God, this is a job … I can do this as a job.”
MANNY COTO (executive producer, Star Trek: Enterprise)
It led me to the decision that this was what I wanted to do, because I realized that people could actually do this for a living. I had
a dog-eared copy, and it was actually a really good book. I look at it every once in a while; it was really detailed with memos and was very sophisticated. It was The Making of Star Trek and The Making of 2001, the Kubrick movie, which was a great favorite. Also The Jaws Log, which I devoured as well.
PETER GOULD (cocreator, executive producer, Better Call Saul)
It was the first behind-the-scenes book that I ever read, and I just consumed it. I didn’t just want to watch Star Trek, I wanted to be involved in the production of Star Trek. So that’s something that was always fascinating to me, and it certainly was one of the things that sparked my interest in television.
ANDRE BORMANIS
I was in high school and some friends of mine and I discovered the book The Making of Star Trek. It was like my bible, you know? I just thought it was the coolest thing, because I knew nothing about making a TV show. Nobody did if you didn’t work in the business back then. I found it fascinating. The set layouts, the tech memos, the development of the characters, the story ideas, the production schedule, the budgets, and so on. I just thought, “Wow, this is the coolest thing ever.”
Aside from the comic books themselves published by Gold Key (and later Marvel, DC, and IDW), there were also two distinct eras of Star Trek comic strips that ran in newspapers in the United States and across the Atlantic. There was a weekly U.K. strip that ran from January 1969 to December 1973. The second ran a decade later in the United States as a daily newspaper strip, from December 1979 to December 1983, following the release of Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
RICH HANDLEY (Star Trek comics historian)
Concurrent with the Gold Key series, British readers were treated to weekly Star Trek comic strips that were not reproduced for American audiences. In 1969, six months prior to the TV series airing in the United Kingdom, the strips debuted in the pages of Joe 90: Top Secret, a British comic magazine featuring serialized strips based on Gerry Anderson’s Supermarionation puppet TV series and other adventure titles. Joe 90 lasted for thirty-four issues, with Star Trek featured throughout as a two-page spread.