Star Trek - Gene Roddenberry's Vision

Space...

"Space, the Final Frontier..." With this solemn voice-over began the television series that would ultimately become an empire.

When Star Trek first aired in 1966, it wasn't clear that anything of particular moment had occurred. Other sci-fi shows shared the airways; the Twilight Zone ran for years. Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, and a sitcom about astronauts trapped back in the stone age all were contemporaries of Star Trek. Who remembers "It's About Time" now?

Network execs were half-hearted both in the beginning and throughout the show's original run. Artwork in the press-packages showed Mr. Spock with ears airbrushed to roundness - the pointed ears, they thought, might be considered 'satanic'.

Roddenberry's Star Trek

But Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek universe was something new. Instead of transposing the 1960s onto 'futuristic' sets, he tried (with varied degrees of success) to imagine what life several hundred years hence would actually look like.

In the pilot, the First Officer was a woman; that, at least, the network forced Roddenberry to alter in subsequent episodes. People just weren't ready for women in positions of command, they said, so Number One was demoted (to nurse!) and Science Officer Spock was promoted to second-in-command of the Starship Enterprise. Better a satanic alien, apparently, than a woman.

The Roddenberry vision shone through in other ways, however. The crew was multi-national and multi-ethnic. It's easy now to look at the old episdoes and realize that Lt. Uhura was a glorified receptionist, but at the time, with her Bantu name, her African hair and her long legs, elegantly displayed, she was a revolutionary.

The Concept

Gene Roddenberry famously pitched his series concept as "Wagon Train to the Stars!" An ensemble show with three main characters - the Captain, First Officer and Doctor - and a number of secondary characters, Star Trek wasn't bound to one neighborhood, but could move through the universe, 'exploring strange new worlds', seeking out 'new life and new civilizations'. Along the way, little value-tales pertinent to life in the 1960s were played out. Some of these tales have aged better than others - some of them even outrage modern sensibilities with the inherent sexism of their underlying assumptions. (Turn-about Intruder comes to mind).

But Roddenberry's Star Trek gave us the United Federation of Planets, a meta-government that spanned human space. He envisioned humanity as ultimately perfectible. While perfection remained out of reach, the notion that it was even achievable seems, perhaps, hopelessly naive and idealistic. Yet Roddenberry was creating his vision during the 'hot' parts of the Cold War.

Franchise Evolution

Subsequent iterations of the Star Trek universe took darker looks at both humanity and other sentient life, which ultimately makes for much more interesting drama. Yet as one who is old enough to have watched Star Trek when it first aired, in the days in which three broadcast networks were the sum of all TV, I sometimes miss the hopeless romanticism inherent in the the goal 'to boldly go where no man has gone before'