Spoilers Let’s talk about the destruction of Trek utopia…

The '60s loved to cram as many words as possible into a movie title.

 

I prefer the 90s when the used movie quotes as part of end of the credit song lyrics.

 

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb

Fearless Vampire Killers, or Pardon Me But Your Teeth are in My Neck

Stop the World, I Want to Get Off

Taste the Blood of Dracula

Etc.

 

It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World

 

Wow. Those make "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky" look like a VOY/ENT title.

 

Those Brave Young Men in Their Jaunty Jalopies.

 

"Magic To Make The Sanest Man Go Mad"

"Wrongs Darker Than Death Or Night"

Wait, I'm doing it wrong.

 

Some '60s movie titles are long enough to make "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" sound like the Mr. Plow theme song.

 

Wow...referencing "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" and The Simpsons without referencing this scene?



That's meta brilliance.

 

I go the less-expected route with my references.

 

If we want to talk about Gene's Vision, let's look at the 1970s, shortly after TOS was cancelled. Without decades of revisionism inside and out of Star Trek since.

NYC Star Trek Convention, 1973: Isaac Asimov, Leonard Nimoy, and DC Fontana


Interview with Gene Roddenberry in 1973:


Gene Roddenberry lecturing at Wichita State University in 1974:


For anyone who actually listens to these, we can compare notes afterwards.

 

In 1973, Gene Roddenberry would've had ample opportunity to talk about His Vision in the second video. But he didn't. Not even once. He has some ideas that would -- in subsequent decades -- be blown up far beyond what it was in 1973. He mentions brotherhood at one point, but he never talks about Utopia. The word is not uttered. The concept is neither spoken of, nor implied. He talks about heroes, but that's not the same as saints. And he never talks about Earth or the Federation being an idealistic setting. But he does say that Humans are childlike beings compared to those who are more like Gods. I think he believed Humans could eventually evolve into something more God-like but that was as far as he took it at that point.

Likewise, in the Convention in 1973, in the first video, at no point does anyone talk about "Gene's Vision". They talk about how Vulcans are better than Humans and we have to get along with each other. But no one says, "Gene Roddenberry had a vision. He believed that ______" There's none of that. It all came later. I think later Star Trek and later fans began to confuse Humans in the future with Vulcans.

 

Meh.

 

[Robau] Walk with me. [/Robau]

 

I know it might be brosphamy but I've been a Robauite far longer.

 

1974 is a fault-line. This is the dividing point. Gene Roddenberry speaks at Wichita State University. He was in academic circles now. He had to up his game and keep up in intellectual circles. This is clearly his first time or one of his first times lecturing at a college. Aside from that, the convention circuit was only about two years old. Who knows how many conventions he'd actually been to before speaking at Wichita? Probably not many.

I say all this because it looks as if Gene Roddenberry hasn't perfected his talking points yet. Instead of talking about the show, he talks about what fans got out of the show. He then goes on to talk about the issues of the time. This was at the height of Watergate. Toward the end of an era of great social unrest in general that engulfed both the '60s and the first half of the '70s.

Here's what Gene Roddenberry says at key points in this lecture at Wichita State University on April 7th, 1974:

00:00 - Thank you very much. I should probably start with a confession. I use the blooper reels to gauge the level of the audience. I can see I'll be facing a group of intellectuals this morning. I'm being quite serious. Really. The greatest laughs we've gotten on the blooper reels have been enjoins for astronauts in space laboratories and in top colleges. The only place we showed them were we never got a laugh was in a showing for television executives. Which seems to indicate there is a correlation between sense of humor and intelligence.

06:00 - I think the question most often asked about Star Trek is: Why the incredible support of the fans? Why is this show, now in its 14th rerun across the nation, playing to more people now than on its original prime time network run? And how does a television show result in conventions that perhaps you've heard about in New York, Los Angeles, and around, that will bring out as many as 10,000 fans caravanning, flying, driving from around the country? It suggests to me that historians may look back on television today and see much of it, or most of it, as almost a criminal waste of an opportunity to reach and expand the minds of humanity.

I do not see Star Trek as a great work of art. I do not consider it to be all things to all people. But out of the thousands of letters generated by the show, out of the hundreds of personal contacts that I've been fortunate to make, I'd like to describe two occurrences that can tell us a little bit of what television could do.

[Gene Roddenberry discusses the two occurrences. One is about a high school graduate who originally hadn't planned on going to college but now, because of Star Trek, was graduating with honors with a degree in Engineering. The other is about a police officer who learned about tolerance from watching a Star Trek episode and that to be different is not necessarily to be ugly.]

08:40 - We received a copy of a Master's Thesis in Mass Psychology which suggested another reason for the show's popularity. It points out that while most television lead characters were anti-heroes, Star Trek had true hero figures. In fact, heroes were almost old-fashioned and their insistence on personal integrity, that their word was their oath and their bond. That there are more things in life than personal advantage and personal comfort. Indeed there may be things [worth] the life of danger or even dying for it. I think this explanation, like the past one, reflects credit more on the audience than on the show. Without any doubt, the greatest hunger in this world today is for images to admire and emulate.

Who would you pick as a model for your children today? As I grew up, it was quite simple. You picked the President of the United States. [laughter from the audience] Why hasn't the same phenomenon happened on other shows? Many of them have used equally skilled actors. I happen to think many of them at times have used better directors and writers, been skillfully produced. Again, I think the answer lies with the audience. The audience may enjoy the entertainment but it will refuse to admire television heroes whose goals in life is like cool million, to make a million dollars every week. Or with a half-mechanical man, another science-fiction show, who works for the CIA, protecting us from evil foreigners. Or with the greed shows who make it pornographically possible for a lady to climax on stage as she wins a new automobile. [laughter and clapping from the audience]

There very well may be truth in the theory that lacking human, real life images to admire and emulate, our television characters were adopted by many as surrogate images. Fictional images, temporary, weighed in the day that flesh and blood integrity appears on our screens.

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I'll leave it there for now. I have many thoughts.

 

We've all been had.

Listen to me. "Gene's Vision" is NOT Gene's Vision. Listen to me right now. He didn't think of any of this until years after the fact. And he thought of it because it was fed to him by fans. He took their input, he took that thesis, tapped into the convention and college circuit, took what he had before, and then blew it up into something else. The better he made it sound, the more he could do college and convention appearances.

He stumbled onto his "vision" by accident, then took advantage of it.

I don't think any less of the final product but his vision is not his vision. He was an opportunist. And I won't have people browbeat me over my enjoyment of Discovery and Picard because of a philosophy that wasn't motivated by sincerity but by making money.

I think that in TMP and especially in TNG, he saw a second (and third) chance to make a version of Star Trek that would cement his place in the annals of the intellectual elite. That's why he hated Harve Bennett's version of Star Trek so much. He thought Harve was ruining his chance to make a Star Trek that would be recognized by the wine and cheese crowd. He brought on Leonard Maizlish for TNG to make sure it wouldn't happen again. It was all about ego. It was all about saying, "Look at what I've put out!" All of it went straight to his head.

I've been looking for this for decades. The missing piece where it went from one (1966 Gene) to the other (1987 Gene). Now I have it. Now I've seen it. And I don't like what I just saw. It confirms all the worst things I didn't want to think. I would rather that it would've been personal growth, not this. This in and of itself isn't so bad. What's bad is that he subsequently tried to sell it as his vision and then brow-beat everyone else over the head with it afterwards. Even people who were trying to stay faithful to what TOS actually was as opposed what he wanted Star Trek to be from that point on.

Harve Bennett, Ira Behr, Ron Moore, JJ Abrams, Alex Kurtzman, Michael Chabon, they were and are being faithful to Star Trek. It's just that Latter-Day Gene Roddenberry would've thought they were being faithful to the "wrong" Star Trek. But it's not wrong. It's the original source material. It was the template for a TV show. Not the template for some pseudo "religion" that it's now been (unintentionally) turned into.

 

It's the best 12 minutes of Star Trek. It stands far above anything else in the franchise. The movement, pacing camera work and general cinematography are all there. It moves with real vision and purpose. And the pathos is genuine and weighty. We could only be so lucky if more of the franchise emulated it.

 

Killing Robau was a crime. That would have been an awesome series.