IIRC Peeples said in interviews Roddenberry came to his house and looked through his stuff and photographed some scifi covers.
The Influence of Stingray on Star Trek?
- Thread starter jeffamm
- Start date
Newspaper television listings are a good place to start. I haven't done this research, so I'm not sure if and when Stingray may have aired in the Los Angeles market.
Roddenberry went to the Peeples collection and took several photos of covers for design inspiration. This factors into the article I'm writing (the Polaroids that Roddenberry took, mentioned in various sources, are in the UCLA papers).
Edit: Beat to the punch by @Maurice !
At the time we're talking about -- the time that Star Trek was conceived and developed in 1960-64 and the bridge set was designed in 1964 -- Stingray aired in zero markets, because it didn't premiere in the US until 1965. There's no wiggle room here.
For a syndicated show that would be an enormous job, checking every market in the country.
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Except all you need to know is if it was played on any stations in LA, since that's where Roddenberry was.
BAM.
The earliest reference I can find in a cursory scan of TV listings in LA newspapers is on channel 5,where Stingray first appears on Saturday, October 30, 1965, so, as I suspected, most U.S. syndication is bought for the following fall season, so Stingray doesn't appear to have hit L.A. til 7 weeks after I Spy hit the air and well after "Where No Man Has Gone Before" had wrapped. The show was aired early evening on Saturdays.
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Addendum: I suppose it's possible Roddenberry or other members (more likely if they had kids) of the production could have bumped into the show whilst Trek was in series preproduction and starting production, but, as they were aiming for an "adult" sci-fi show I doubt they'd pay much mind to such kiddie fare if they saw it at all. I remain of the opinion that the so called similarities are pretty much nothing.
Interesting to note how many of the shows in that TV listing are ones I've never heard of, and probably that most of us have never heard of, except maybe for the TV historians among us. People always assume that TV today is so much worse than it was when they were young, but that's just because we only remember the most notable shows and forget the tons of shows that were quickly cancelled (some of which were gems, but most of which were probably mediocre to terrible).
I didn't know, for instance, that there was a show based on the Terry and the Pirates comic strip. If we're talking about inspirations, Wikipedia says that Terry and the Pirates (the strip) was the main inspiration for Jonny Quest and a significant influence on I Spy.
And whatever newspaper employee typed up that schedule misspelled the title of the very bad kaiju movie Varan the Unbelievable.
Oh, good point. If they'd been aware of it, they would probably have seen it as an example of what to avoid.
I didn't know, for instance, that there was a show based on the Terry and the Pirates comic strip. If we're talking about inspirations, Wikipedia says that Terry and the Pirates (the strip) was the main inspiration for Jonny Quest and a significant influence on I Spy.
And whatever newspaper employee typed up that schedule misspelled the title of the very bad kaiju movie Varan the Unbelievable.
Oh, good point. If they'd been aware of it, they would probably have seen it as an example of what to avoid.
I have only the vaguest recollection of Stingray, or of Thunderbirds. (In the case of the latter, why on Earth did they name a children's TV series after a cheap wine?) They weren't exactly my taste at the time.
- The Ford Thunderbird came out Sept. 1954
- The USAF aerobatics team predated that in 1953
- The Thunderbird Hotel and Casino opened in 1948
" Early in his career, he [artist Millard Sheets] was commissioned to design an airfield for the Army Air Corps in the middle of the desert in Arizona. Sheets' chose to design the campus (buildings, landscape, and walkways) in the shape of the mythological Native American “Thunderbird,” as seen in an aerial photo:" (quote source)
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OK, but the question you're answering is not the question I asked.
When I said "in which markets Stingray aired then," the "then" meant "beginning on and subsequent to the January 2 1965 date which you cited in your post," and not some other period during which it had already been established in this thread that the show didn't air anywhere in the US.
Fortunately, @Harvey and @Maurice were able to provide the answers. It looks like Stingray did air in the Los Angeles market, but on a station we didn't get in the Santa Maria area at that time.
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(I also have trouble understanding why USC named their athletic teams and marching band after a popular brand of . . . )
Guess which was named first.
But why would you ask about that date? The original question that started the thread was whether Stingray could have influenced the original concept of Star Trek or the design of the bridge. All of that was already settled before 1965, so what happened after has no bearing on the matter.
The only specific thing mentioned in the original post that was initially conceived after that date was the design of the Klingons, and as I said, that was just based in generic '60s Orientalism. Fred Phillips and John Colicos improvised the Klingon makeup on the first day of shooting and went for a "space Mongol" theme.
I have heard of a lot of those shows. I haven't seen 90% of them, but in my obsessive absorbtion of anything television in the 80's and 90's, I ran across series names and synopses. Every generation says their era of TV is crap (except maybe the 50's which was "The Goden Age of Television"). They didn't call TV the "idiot box" for nothing. The 60's leaned really hard on escapism, so a lot of shows were dismissed as crap with a few gems well received. Mostly, though, TV critics were a cranky lot, probably because they reviewed everything after the fact and couldn't make any real difference unless you were on the fence about watching a show and were wating for Cleveland Amory to shoot it down. Most TV critics hated the shows I liked.
Televison today is exceptional. It's also balanced with a healthy dose of crap. Depends on where you look. For every person who enjoys today's TV, you have a dozen old grouchy people who say "Hazel was the best! Today's shows suck!" I think it's always been that way but with thousands of options, the volume of cheaply produced "unscriped" televsion has increased and the sensationalist shows get the press more than the well written, deeper shows. When you only have three networks in 1966 and most of the programming is fantasy/spy or SF related, critics are gonna call it a "vast wasteland." Yet, TV was aimed at keeping people happy during a turbulent time. If I were a kid in the mid-60's, I would have appreciated the entertainment just as I did in the 70's.
Televison today is exceptional. It's also balanced with a healthy dose of crap. Depends on where you look. For every person who enjoys today's TV, you have a dozen old grouchy people who say "Hazel was the best! Today's shows suck!" I think it's always been that way but with thousands of options, the volume of cheaply produced "unscriped" televsion has increased and the sensationalist shows get the press more than the well written, deeper shows. When you only have three networks in 1966 and most of the programming is fantasy/spy or SF related, critics are gonna call it a "vast wasteland." Yet, TV was aimed at keeping people happy during a turbulent time. If I were a kid in the mid-60's, I would have appreciated the entertainment just as I did in the 70's.
The '60s equivalent of "reality TV" was stuff like Candid Camera, Art Linkletter's House Party, and the like, plus plenty of game shows and talent shows. Then there were the musical/sketch comedy variety shows, which don't have many modern counterparts other than Saturday Night Live and Whose Line is it Anyway?
There were far more Westerns, cop/detective shows, courtroom dramas, medical dramas, and Fugitive knockoffs at the time than SF/fantasy shows. Newton Minow's 1961 "vast wasteland" speech never even mentioned SF/fantasy or spy shows, not specifially, anyway.
If anything, many TV producers took his speech as an imperative to do better, so TV by the later '60s may have been less of a "wasteland" than it had been at the time of the speech, or when John Bartlow Martin had coined the phrase "a vast wasteland of junk" that Minow reused and toned down a bit.
Yes, that's true, but people quoted that line for years after (TV Guild was happy to quote it). I was thinking primarily the mid-60's as programming tipped toward fantasy and the spy boom. Those were the shows that played most in my market during rerun hours. We didn't get a lot of the westerns and real life based stuff. It was all the fun programs. 1966 had, I believe, the largest number of current SF/Fantasy/episonage shows in history. The spy craze touched everything, even the Westerns. There were genies, witches, time travelers, monsters and spies galore. Even Hanna Barbera, which specialzed in funny animals and spoofs, did a lot of adventure and fantasy cartoons for Saturday morning. While we still got the odd straightforward western, like Bonanza and The Cisco Kid, the daytime schedule was populated with fantasy. So that was my exposure to the 60's after the fact. The early 60's felt more like late 50's run-off.
Well, let's see. Here's the 1966-7 prime time schedule:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1966–67_United_States_network_television_schedule
SF/fantasy shows (non-spy): 12 (6 dramas: Star Trek, three Irwin Allen shows, The Invaders, The Green Hornet; 6 sitcoms: Batman, Captain Nice, Mr. Terrific, It's About Time, Bewitched, I Dream of Jeannie)
Spy shows: 10 (The Saint, The Man and The Girl from UNCLE, The Man Who Never Was, I Spy, Jericho, Coronet Blue, The Wild Wild West, Mission: Impossible, Get Smart)
Westerns (non-spy): 14 (Bonanza, The Iron Horse, The Big Valley, The Rounders, The Monroes, The Virginian, F Troop, Daniel Boone, The Hero*, Rango, Laredo, Shane, Pistols 'n' Petticoats, Gunsmoke)
*actually a sitcom about an actor starring in a Western
Crime dramas (non-SF): 5 (The F.B.I., Felony Squad, Hawk, T.H.E. Cat, Dragnet 1967)
War dramas: 3 (The Rat Patrol, Combat!, 12 O'Clock High)
Misc. dramas: 5 (Lassie, Peyton Place, Run for Your Life, Daktari, The Fugitive)
Misc. sitcoms: c. 16 (too many to list)
Variety shows/game shows/specials: c. 30
So okay, certainly SF/F and spy shows made up an unprecedentedly large fraction of the total, but they were still far from the majority, and Westerns still took the prize as the single most prominent scripted genre. Though I am surprised at the lack of courtroom and medical dramas.
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