by Edward Gross
MARGARET ARMEN (writer, “The Ambergris Element,” “The Lorelei Signal”)
I didn’t see how the show could work, but they had marvelous artists over at Filmation. Dorothy Fontana was the story editor and she approached me. I thought it would be fun and she said, “The main difference, Margaret, is that for the artists’ sake you have to describe every scene and every action in great detail so that the artists will know what to draw.”
For “The Ambergris Element,” I thought it would be interesting, since the artists were going to do it, to go to a water planet, with water covering nine-tenths of the surface The only exception is an occasional little island not covered in water. I thought the artists could do interesting underwater scenes and so forth.
“The Lorelei Signal” is an idea I’d had about an Amazonian civilization where women were dominant and men were weaker. From that seed I came up with the idea of a planet which drained men of their youth and vitality very quickly, so that they aged within a month, yet the women were healthy and vivacious and beautiful. The key to it was that the women drew their vitality from the males. They were like black widows. They were always sending out the Lorelei Signal to space so that they could attract males to their planet. Both episodes were fun to write.
WALTER KOENIG
This was the one script I wrote for the show, and it was incredibly frustrating. Gene decided early on this is animation so we can do anything we want, so let’s have talking plants. And I put in the talking plants and did ten drafts of the script and, at that time, I didn’t know what writers were going through on Star Trek. I stuck with it and we finally got it done. They did, in fact, offer me another script and I said no; I passed. I couldn’t go along with all the arbitrary decisions that didn’t make the script any better, not that it was extraordinary to begin with. So to an extent it was an interesting learning experience, but it was painful. I was also still upset about not being part of the series.
DAVID GERROLD
We had very little troubles with “More Tribbles, More Troubles.” When we did “Bem,” Gene started to fuck around with the script, so it was like they had two scripts left over at the end of the season and they didn’t shoot “Bem.” When Filmation ordered six more episodes, Dorothy wasn’t there, so they bought Howard Weinstein’s episode, and they had “Bem” already there. “Bem” got made, but it was a silly script.
LARRY BRODY (writer, “The Magicks of Megas-Tu”)
Taking my lead from the themes of the early Star Trek episodes, I figured that Dorothy and Gene would go for a story about the Enterprise encountering God in space. The “real” Christian God, not just one of the Greek myth gods. A couple of days after Dorothy and I talked about my God show, she called me back to say that Gene loved it and she was going to make a deal. I went back to her office the next week and, first, learned that NBC wouldn’t approve the God idea, but that Gene had presented them with a counter they’d accepted—the Devil. As long as it wasn’t the “real” Devil. So at that meeting Dorothy and I came up with an other-dimensional alien race that might have been the inspiration for devils and demons in ours. Then she took me into Gene’s office so I could shake hands with the Great Bird of the Galaxy—yes, she called him that—and go home to write.
The show ends with Kirk defending the human race to a courtroom of devils and, of course, proving that humanity, and specifically the Enterprise crew, deserves to live. That particular idea had been part of my original pitch, because my favorite episodes of Star Trek had been the ones where Kirk had to do other variations of the same thing. Another thing I’d been sure that Roddenberry would love.
After the first draft was finished, I was done. A couple of weeks later I got the final draft and saw that although the story was the same, scene by scene, every line of dialogue had been changed. I called to ask her if I’d failed that badly, and Dorothy just laughed and said, “No, no, no. Gene loved what you wrote. He just made changes because that’s what he does.”
STEPHEN KANDEL (writer, “Mudd’s Passion,” “The Jihad”)
“Mudd’s Passion” was an opportunity to bring Harry Mudd back, which was great fun. Dorothy Fontana just called me for a script. It was as simple as that. Animation is great because you direct as well as write. You could go anywhere and do anything.
“The Jihad,” in which Kirk and Spock are enlisted to prevent a holy war, was an idea I’d had for a long time. It was a message story and difficult to sell on network television. Network executives would have said, “My God, what are you doing? That’s a message story!” I jumped at the opportunity to drop it into a Star Trek format and it worked very well. In fact, I won a humanitarian award for it.
PAUL SCHNEIDER (writer, “The Terratin Incident”)
This was based on a one-paragraph story idea that Gene Roddenberry had. I took it from there with Dorothy Fontana. I just loved the concept of doing something related to Gulliver’s Travels. I enjoyed that as well as watching the process of the animation develop.
SAMUEL A. PEEPLES (writer, “Beyond the Farthest Star”)
Dorothy called me and said, “Gene suggested that since you had done the pilot for the original Star Trek, maybe you’d like to do the pilot for the animated Star Trek.” That’s what I did. It was the pilot, but it aired later. The Variety review was absolutely incredible. As far as inspiration for the story, I don’t have the vaguest idea. It seems to me that I was trying to say that it would be interesting if there was a spaceship which was actually a living creature. It’s alive, but it is used to going from one planet to another. They did great animated stories and they didn’t write down to children, by and large. There were a couple that were, obviously, designed for the younger market, but most of them were quite mature.
JOYCE PERRY (writer, “The Time Trap”)
I had this idea that a Klingon ship and the Enterprise would get trapped in a Sargasso Sea of space and be forced to cooperate to escape. I remember telling Gene this bizarre notion that two ships could combine engines and became more powerful as one than they were separately. I explained it with a straight face, but was afraid he might laugh me out of his office. Instead, he was quiet for about thirty seconds, then he said, “That’s pretty good. Do it.” And in the finest tradition, a story about cooperation was forged.
HOWARD WEINSTEIN (writer, “The Pirates of Orion”)
I had an agent who submitted the script to Lou Scheimer at Filmation. When I was told they were buying it, I was supposed to call Filmation. Here I was, this nineteen-year-old college kid in my dorm room, and I was talking to Lou Scheimer on the phone. At one point he stops and asks, “What else have you written? Have you written a lot of stuff and we just don’t know your name?” That’s when I told him I was nineteen and a junior in college. They asked me to make a few changes and they bought the script, and that’s how I became a professional writer at the age of nineteen.
FRED BRONSON (writer, “The Counter-Clock Incident”)
There was literally one episode left to be produced, the sixth of six for the second season, so I came up with this story line. Filmation bought it and NBC approved it, but I didn’t put my name on it. I went to my boss to get permission, and he said I couldn’t write for an NBC show. So, since I grew up in Culver City, I became John Culver, who I didn’t know was a senator from Iowa at the time. No Google. I found out later. So they bought it and they made it.
The idea that there was a captain of the Enterprise before Pike was my idea, and when I thought of it I looked in the Making of Star Trek book, and there’s a list of names that Gene considered: Pike, Kirk, and one of the names was Robert April. I liked that name, so that’s what I named the character in this script. I made up the wife, Sarah April, and that she was the first doctor on the Enterprise and that was that.
While everyone had high aspirations for the new series, the real question was how the fans—who had proven vociferous in their opinions—would respond to Star Trek in cartoon form.
HAL SUTHERLAND
Lou took a hit from the fans. They had no concept of the agony or effort that went into that show.
LOU SCHEIMER
Let’s just say the fans were very … concerned.
DAVID GERROLD
Originally there was a lot of skepticism, but the folks at Filmation were very serious about doing a good job, and when we saw their first artwork, we began to think that maybe there was a chance to do something special. And it was Star Trek, of course, so our enthusiasm began to grow as we got into the job. There were still lots of stories we wanted to tell.
DOROTHY FONTANA
I went to the World Science Fiction Convention in Toronto and I had a reel of the opening of the Enterprise flyby. There were skeptics, but when we ran the reel, the fans cheered. From that little clip, they realized it was really going to be Star Trek. It was a triumphant moment after months of hearing it wouldn’t be any good.
HAL SUTHERLAND
Eventually we had Trekkie invaders at the studio all the time. Trekkies showed up pretending to be fire inspectors or janitors, and we’d discover them searching through our wastebaskets.
DOROTHY FONTANA
In animation, they order a set number to begin with, like sixteen, and that’s your first year. If you’re going to do more, it is in increments of six, and then they rerun the life out of the earlier episodes. That’s because of the time lag. Animation takes longer than live action, and you have to write a year ahead.
FRED BRONSON
The series was set for a premiere date of, ironically, September 8, 1973—the anniversary of Star Trek’s debut. But since George Takei was running for city council in Los Angeles and there were equal-time provisions from the FCC, his opponent said, “If you put this episode on, I will want equal time.” Now, what did that mean? That he was going to do a voice-over in another animated show? It was kind of ridiculous, but it had an impact enough that KNBC Channel 4 pulled the episode in L.A. only, because it was a local race. And so Star Trek: The Animated Series premiered in L.A. on September 15 with “Yesteryear,” the second episode. I made a big deal out of that … anything I could do to get attention from the press.
LOU SCHEIMER
If it aired today with the same ratings, it would be considered a whopping hit. But little kids didn’t watch it. They weren’t our audiences. I always hoped it would air at night. But Star Trek was difficult because it had limited budgets, loads of story, and several characters to juggle in twenty-two minutes.
MAJEL BARRETT
We wanted characters on the order of Disney rather than what we got, but the show featured some of the best stories of any Star Trek series.
LARRY BRODY
It was a grown-up show that talked about important topics without compromise. I appreciate that, because I work in animation and it’s not that way. Most kid shows are infomercials for toys.
HOWARD WEINSTEIN
Obviously it was a simplified version of Star Trek, because with twenty-two minutes of story there’s only so much you can do. But at the same time it wasn’t Saturday-morning kiddie television. I was impressed enough with it that I thought, “Who am I to sniff at this and say it’s not live-action Star Trek?” At that time, for all I knew, it might be the only chance I ever got to write for Star Trek, and I was going to grab it.
DAVID GERROLD
Arguments about “canon” are silly. I always felt that Star Trek animated was part of Star Trek because Gene Roddenberry accepted the paycheck for it and put his name on the credits. And D. C. Fontana—and all the other writers involved—busted their butts to make it the best Star Trek they could.
“Bem” did establish that Kirk’s middle name was Tiberius. We were at a Star Trek convention and somebody asked Dorothy and I what was Kirk’s middle name. I had just finished a book on Roman history and was still thinking Tiberius, and so it popped out of my head, “Tiberius.” And the audience loved it, so later on when we were doing the animated show, which was a few months later, we passed it in front of Gene and he said, “Okay.” When I did my Star Trek novel The Galactic Whirlpool, I explained how Kirk got that middle name, which was more of a nickname than a real middle name. You do things for the fun of it sometimes.
JEFF AYERS (author, Voyages of Imagination: The Star Trek Fiction Companion)
The success of the James Blish book series, in which he novelized episodes from the original show, paved the way for something similar for the animated series. Alan Dean Foster was asked to adapt the episodes into book form—the Star Trek Log series—and like Blish, he worked from the scripts instead of watching the episodes. He quickly realized that a twenty-minute cartoon would not translate well to a novel, so he convinced his editor at Ballantine, Judy-Lynn del Rey, to let him pursue a similar route of putting three scripts into each volume.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER (author, Star Trek Log series)
Besides adapting three scripts in each book, I realized what I would have to do was expand each of them into novella length and link a couple of them together in some fashion to make it flow as a book as best I could.
JEFF AYERS
The sales skyrocketed, and the end result was that his editor wanted four books out of the last four scripts. That’s why the last ones are full-length stories. One of the ones he added in utilized a screenplay he had written for the fourth season of the original series that never happened.
ALAN DEAN FOSTER
When Judy-Lynn said I needed to adapt one script into each of the last four Log books, I said, “Look, if I could have done it, I would have done that in the first place.” She wrote back and said, “You don’t understand. We’re going through multiple printings of these as fast as we can print them.” Judy-Lynn was very persuasive. The only thing I could do was adapt those scripts as I had been doing, and then make the last two-thirds of each of those last four books original material.
For Log six, I had actually done a two-hour screenplay for the original TV series and submitted it to Roddenberry at Norway Productions. I got a very nice letter back from someone saying, “Thank you very much for your submission. We really like your teleplay. Please resubmit for the fourth season.” Of course, there was no fourth season. That story was basically Run Silent, Run Deep in space. There was a lot of mental stuff going on between the crew of the Enterprise and the crew of the other ship. That’s one of the places you have to work hard as a novelizer. It’s very easy to novelize battles in space or a chase in space or a confrontation with an alien. But when you’re dealing with people’s thought processes, to get that down in a way that involves the reader can be more difficult, and that requires more work on the part of the writer. There was a great deal of that in that particular book. But because it wasn’t technologically heavy, I didn’t have to worry about updating that from the original script I’d written.
So when Judy told me about the last four books, I had this 120-page screenplay sitting around and she wanted these things as fast as possible. I said, “What can I do for the first one where I have to adapt one teleplay for that book?” For the last two-thirds, I used that screenplay. That helped me get into the proper writing frame of mind, using one teleplay for two-thirds original material.
The only one I had any real concern about was the Larry Niven script, “The Slaver Weapon.” The reason for that is that I view all of my novelizations as collaborations between myself and the original writers, and I’m very respectful of the original writing. This was different, because Larry had used some of his own characters from his own prose in the teleplay for Star Trek. So it wasn’t just a case of adapting a Larry Niven teleplay, it was the case of adapting Larry Niven’s actual original material and working with it myself. Kind of like with a “shared world” anthology, except that Larry, just like David Gerrold and D. C. Fontana and everybody else, didn’t have a say in what I was going to do. I was very, very careful not to mess around with the original material.
It hit me at that point that if adaptations of the animated series wer
e selling that well to prompt that kind of reaction from a New York publisher, that there was something going on here beyond mere casual spin-offs of an old TV show. That was kind of the realization point for me that there was a lot more happening here in terms of Star Trek than maybe was obvious to a lot of people.
DOROTHY FONTANA
There is this tendency to put down animated work as kids’ stuff, but you have to consider the artistry that went into it; not just the writer but the actors who made themselves available. And the artists who drew the show were really good. Animation is a way to do the original series without worrying about how old the actors are, or what they look like.
GENE RODDENBERRY
I think one can always wish something was done better, but within the limits of how animation is done—the speed it’s done, the dollars they’re able to put into it, and so on—it was a fairly good job. I think the best proof of that is the Emmy it won. Star Trek has a spectacular record of getting awards and special attention either while it’s on or after it’s been canceled.
The animated series was not a compromise. NBC wanted a strong show in their morning cartoon time slot and they were willing to go along with my demand that it not be written down to the kiddie level. I believe children are much more intelligent than people give them credit for, so we used Star Trek writers and had standard stories. It wasn’t a pacifier, it was just an effort to do something a little better on Saturday mornings.
ROD RODDENBERRY
I’d love to redo the animated episodes. I mean, not me, but it would be so easy to redo them because of the talent available to do the CG. I think the animated series needs to be reborn and brought back out. That’s one of the last things that my dad didn’t do.
LOU SCHEIMER
I called Gene a few months before his death and said, “Gene, it’s time. How about another animated Star Trek?” He agreed it was time and was very enthusiastic. But that’s as far as it went.