GR's Biggest Inspiration for Star Trek

This poll is pretty straightforward. You can choose up to three answers. I've never started a poll before, so bear with me if I'm doing it wrong.

 

I think aliens beamed transmissions directly into his brain.

 

My signature for this forum gives away my opinion.

Nuff said!

 

I think the biggest inspiration was dollar signs, to rake in the cash with what basically amounted to a TV version of Forbidden Planet, one of the big hits of 1956. Since television production has long tended to be about a decade behind feature films, by the mid sixties it was finally feasible to produce something comparable for TV.

Kor

 

I have first hand knowledge that GR wore one of these for his inspiration.

 

Whip it good!

 

TOS' 3rd season was so bad at times, I'm really surprised that the Enterprise didn't encounter a parallel planet whose culture was based on De-Evolution.

 

The main inspirations:

• Forbidden Planet
• Horatio Hornower
• Gulliver's Travels

"Wagon Train to the stars" was just the pitch, not the inspiration.

 

Watch Forbidden Planet. Watch The Cage.

All becomes clear.

 

I only came to Forbidden Planet a couple of years ago. I came away from it realising my favourite TV show is just an unofficial TV adaptation.

Did GR ever comment on the similarity between the two?

 

All the basic concepts -- faster-than-light travel, military or quasi-military space explorers, an age of space exploration and colonization analogous to Earth in the 18th and 19th centuries -- were well established in written sci-fi by the time Forbidden Planet was made. So it's more like FP's writers and Gene Roddenberry were both drawing on the same source material.

 

Unless I recall the wrong source for this, Inside Star Trek has GR and Herb Solow borrowing a print of Forbidden Planet and screening it while they were roughing out the series premise. Supposedly they wanted to ensure they weren't accidentally copying a film that neither man was very familiar with. So they viewed it and were satisfied that it was nothing like their ideas for Star Trek.

But I still picked FP as my top choice in this poll. You don't always realize what you're borrowing.

And I think Lost in Space took everything from FP that Star Trek didn't: the robot and the idea that humans would fly a simple saucer shaped craft, which elsewhere was usually a shape for alien ships. Irwin Allen wanted Robby himself to play the LIS robot, but he found that getting Robby would be way more expensive than creating his own robot from scratch.

 

Not to mention it was a comment on format not genre.

 

Also, both the C-57D and the Jupiter 2 had astrogator consoles in the center of the main deck, with a large clear bubble and a miniature saucer to indicate the ship's attitude!

 

I had seen Forbidden Planet on TV a few times when my parents would have it on, when I was little. We also had TOS in reruns on (we're talking late 1970's, early 1980's).

I never truly picked up on the similarities until I read Allan Asherman's Star Trek Compendium, which discusses numerous similarities. After that, I looked at Forbidden Planet as kind of a pre-Federation mission.

I think someone out there that has a Starfleet uniform database lists the uniforms in Forbidden Planet as part of the Starfleet evolution.

 

I'm annoyed that the C-57D doesn't have a name, seems like an oversight. So when wanting to name a ship with a Forbidden Planet reference you have to go with Bellerophon. Which is a cool name, but we never got to see it in the movie.

 

I always liked that as a ship's name. Shame there was nothing left of the ship itself, as far as when it was a ship. Morbius said he took parts to make his house, didn't he?

 

I voted for Forbidden Planet, Horatio Hornblower novels, and old pulp/sci-fi magazines. In that order.

 

"You wanna know what my vision is? Dollar signs! Money! I didn't build this ship to usher in a new era for humanity. You think I wanna see the stars? I don't even like to fly! I take trains! I built this ship so I could retire to some tropical island... filled with naked women. THAT'S Zefram Cochrane. THAT'S his vision. This other guy you keep talking about, this historical figure? I never met him. I can't imagine I ever will."