Star Trek and History (52 page)

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
.

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, or 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.
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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 families and cultural history.