New 40th anniversary edition of ST:TMP novelisation?

Yup. Dude seemed to have the sexual maturity of a teenaged boy.

 

I was in sixth grade when I read the TMP novel, and a mere passing mention of the word "genitals" didn't traumatize me or turn me into a juvenile delinquent or whatever. I don't think I even understood what the phrase meant at the time, so it just went over my head. It was hardly graphic.

 

You misunderstood. It didn't "traumatize" me either. But parents and teachers (at least in the 20th Century, I don't know about now), made a big deal about those things.

 

Then there's the story about the time Roddenberry phoned one of the TNG writers and delivered a drunken rant about happiness, listing all the things people say makes them happy and finishing off with "but none of that makes me happy. You know what makes me happy? A river of cum flowing through my penis."

 

Tracy Torme was the person called. That story is in Joel Engel's biography.

 

Instead of the novelization, they released a "rewritten" version by Joe Devito and Brad Strickland a couple months before the Peter Jackson version came out. I actually stumbled across this one a few months ago when I was looking to see if there were any King Kong books to add to my Google Play wishlist. Once I realized what it was I did a bit more searching and found the original version instead.

One of my sister's either high school or junior high english teachers included Clan of the Cave Bear on a list of books they could pick to read. I've never read, but my mom has and according to her it has practically pornographic sex scenes, and is definitely not the kind of thing you'd want on a school reading list.

 

In Clan of the Cave Bear it's basically all rape, and if I remember right, it's not as explicit as Auel gets later. The Valley of Horses onward is when we get all the pages-long descriptions of Ayla's slippery folds enveloping Jondalar's massive throbbing manhood over and over and over.

 

The novelization of Forbidden Planet had a reprint in 1990. Doesn't beat-out King Kong as has been mentioned elsewhere in the thread, but it's gotta be a close second place.

 

And the visual inspiration for Sliders was born...

 

Asimov's novelization of FANTASTIC VOYAGE has possibly stayed in print all this time, to the extent that I occasionally run into people who think that the movie was based on Asimov's book and not the other way around.

(Clarke's "2001" is, of course, a special case where the book and the movie were kinda a collaborative project.)

 

Well, the hardcover edition was released 6 months before the film came out (and the paperback coincided with the film's release), so it's understandable why people would get that impression. Sometimes back then they'd release novelizations ahead of time to generate hype for the films. I think Star Wars did that.

 

Yep. Both the Star Wars novelization AND the Marvel comics adaption debuted before the movie opened.

In fact, it used to be routine for novelizations to debut a month or so before the movie opened. It's only since the internet turned spoilers into a clickable commodity that this has changed.

 

Harrumph.
I have the publisher hardcover of the ST:TMP novelization. And while I remember some sexual references that were alluded to (or quoted outright) here, I don't recall finding them the least bit shocking.

I read David Gerrold's When HARLIE Was One in my freshman or sophomore year of high school (circa 1977, before TMP). Between the marijuana refereces (legal and commercialized; a leading brand was "Highmasters") and the sexuality (". . . He was a chip of flesh tossed on a splashing sea of laughter and wet eyes and love. A pink sea, with foamy waves and giggling billows. Red nipple-topped pink seas. 'Oh, Annie, Annie, I can't let go of you, I can't—' "), that shocked me. Rather remarkable how the march of technology rendered the original version obsolete, then rendered the "Release 2.0" version even more obsolete than the original.

 

This wasn't Roddenberry writing it, was it ?

 

^ scandalous. Someone call the firemen.

I think we should be less hung up on Roddenberry’s sex-life and more focused on the unknown possibilities of existence, which include, gasp, sex and intimacy.

 

"You cannot write in science fiction (...) without realizing that sexual equality is as basic as any other kind of equality. This does not mean that in future pictures I will ever stop using women as sex objects, as I will not, but to be fair we have always used and will be continuing to use males as sex objects, too. As a matter of fact, when I was younger and much more agile I've been used as a sex object myself; I think it's great fun."
-- Gene Roddenberry, Inside Star Trek (vinyl LP)

 

Nice idea in principle, but it only works if there's already genuine equality and balance of power between men and women. If there is a power imbalance, then it means something very different for the less powerful group than it does for the more powerful one. So that was a disingenuous thing to say at the time, and sadly it still would be today. Hopefully in the future, though, it won't be.

Roddenberry was an executive with power over the careers of the women who worked for him or auditioned for him, so seducing them was undoubtedly predatory. He was a product of a time when that was seen as a basic entitlement of men in power. So his privilege blinded him to the inequality that he benefited from and made him imagine it was equal, as is so often the case with people in positions of privilege. He flattered himself that it was fully consensual and as fun for the women as it was for him. But since there was a power imbalance, there's no way to trust that that was always the case.

Still, the man and the idea are separate things. Roddenberry was a very problematical messenger for the idea of sex-positivity, but that doesn't invalidate the message that sex is not intrinsically a bad thing and can be engaged in without fear or shame -- at least in a context where full equality is real rather than just a pretense of the powerful.

 

I agree entirely. My point in quoting Roddenberry was simply that the last part of the quote could be construed as a frank admission that he was rather obsessed with being, as he put it, "used as a sex object."