Star Trek and History (50 page)

Yet this challenge was not new. In the decade following the cancellation of the original series while Paramount and producer Gene Roddenberry engaged in a wary dance to revive
Star Trek
as either a weekly series or in feature films, other producers and networks delving into science fiction had to contend with the burgeoning popularity of the old show. Creators of new episodic series such as
Planet of the Apes
(CBS, 1974),
Logan's Run
(CBS, 1977),
Space: 1999
(syndicated, 1975–1977), and
Battlestar Galactica
(ABC, 1978–1979) clearly hoped to attract devotees of the starship
Enterprise
as their basic formats, production history, and exchanges with fan-targeted media all demonstrated. Despite increasingly impressive visual effects, these series were generally unsuccessful, in part, as I will argue, because they all resembled the more downbeat science fiction movies of the early 1970s, in contrast to the confident, heroic tradition of space opera that
Star Trek
continued.

That first fan convention was significant in itself and for what it augured. Before it opened in Manhattan in late January 1972, the organizers hoped it might attract five hundred people, but the convention ended up drawing more than three thousand. It also attracted significant press attention through a combination of the as-yet-unrecognized devotion of fans and a dexterous nudge of publicity by interested media companies. According to Joan Winston,
Star Trek
fan extraordinaire and the convention's publicity chairman, shortly before its opening, Bob Newgard, “a Paramount Vice President,” arranged an interview for her with
Variety.
1
She had already parlayed industry connections to commit Gene Roddenberry, actors including Leonard Nimoy, science fiction author Isaac Asimov, and others associated with the show to appear over the weekend. Paramount was also supplying film prints of
Star Trek
episodes, and NASA was sending a large space program exhibit.

In fact, Newgard was not just any executive; he was the head of Paramount Domestic Syndication, and while
Star Trek
was still in production, he had negotiated the first important deal for the reruns with Kaiser Broadcasting, the owner of five major market UHF stations.
2
Kaiser's skillful handling of
Star Trek
demonstrated its commercial potential to other independent stations so that only weeks after its last NBC airing, Paramount boasted in trade ads that the show was already running nationally on sixty-one stations. By January 1971, a year before the convention, the studio announced that
Star Trek
had cracked its one-hundredth domestic market.
3

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.

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 magazines 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.