TL: Actually, some of the canon-stuff you were mentioning... One of the hordes of questions I'm sure that you're getting is "Exactly what is part of the canon at this point?"
RA: That's been stated so many times, including in Starlog, and that certainly got a few letters my way. To Gene, anything that he did was canon. Now, I know he did the animated series, but we've avoided that ever since this new series began, because he never really thought that there would be any more live Star Trek. He really didn't. He knew that the fan phenomenon was happening, but like everybody else, he thought it'd just sort of peter out and die, and quietly go away -- not that he wanted it to, certainly, because it was his income at the time, he was going to conventions and making speeches, you know, drawing twenty thousand people at different colleges around the country. But, it kept growing and getting bigger, and eventually, obviously, the new series, films, it was gonna happen. But this was in the early '70s, when it was -- he could have bought the property, at the time, for $150,000. And if he'd had the money, he probably would've, but he didn't think it would be a good investment at the time. [**phone break**] So aside from the original series--
TL: Is it all of the original series? I've been hearing just the first two seasons.
RA: Very firmly, except where it's contradicted and then we have to kind of play with it... see, people can easily catch us, and say "well, wait a minute, in 'Balance of Terror,' they knew that the Romulans had a cloaking device, and then in 'The Enterprise Incident,' they don't know anything about cloaking devices, but they're gonna steal this one because it's obviously just been developed, so how the hell do you explain that?" We can't. There are some things we just can't explain, especially when it comes from the third season. So, yes, third season is canon up to the point of contradiction, or where it's just so bad... you know, we kind of cringe when people ask us, "well, what happened in 'Plato's Stepchildren,' and 'And the Children Shall Lead,' and 'Spock's Brain,' and so on -- it's like, please, he wasn't even producing it at that point. But, generally, it's the original series, not really the animated, the first movie to a certain extent, the rest of the films in certain aspects but not in all... I know that it's very difficult to understand. It literally is point by point. I sometimes do not know how he's going to answer a question when I go into his office, I really do not always know, and -- and I know it better probably than anybody, what it is that Gene likes and doesn't like. And there've been times, for instance--
[knock on the door--scratch that subject]
TL: I think we've pretty much covered the canon stuff.
RA: Yeah. The novelization that Gene wrote himself, of Star Trek: the Motion Picture, he does not consider canon either, because he also went off on tangents, that he said that it's okay for individual writers to do that, and he certainly had some fun with it himself, filling in parts of the puzzle that he never would've been able to do on film, it would've been a ten-hour movie, but he doesn't want even that used for canon, because otherwise, where do you draw the line?
