'Wagon Train to the Stars'? Really?
- Thread starter Michael
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Did I say that Star Trek turned out to be exactly as he intended, that it was very realistic? No, I didn't. And referencing "Lost In Space" in the same consideration is absolutely ridiculous. It was a farcical family show. Sarcastic snide remarks aren't a civilized way to have a discussion. You're prodding for a fight, hell if I know why. Well, I'm not biting.
Still, at least they consulted with NASA and Rand when starting up, so they knew where they were fudging things for the sake of dramatic license. Could Irwin Allen say the same?
number6
Vice Admiral
You might want to check this out:
http://www.tombsofkobol.com/tv/LIS-tos-01.html
Scroll down a bit for this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_in_Space
To be fair, NASA later distanced themselves from the show because they thought the series was taking too many liberties with the "science" part.
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Well, I tend not to believe the hooplah that the execs rejected "The Cage" because they felt it was "too cerebral." I tend to think they rejected it because they thought it was bad, plain and simple.
number6
Vice Admiral
Not according to Solow and Justman's book, or the interviews in the companion video. They also resented GR casting his girlfriend in the leading female role. Their objection had very little to do with sexism. There were a few prominent leading ladies at the time: Barbara Stanwick comes immediately to mind..
There are loads of stories that have been distorted over time. My cousin used to work as a lawyer for Harold Livingston while he was working on Star Trek's return in the the seventies and I had heard a few these rumours back then. Justman and Solow's book really confirms a lot of what really went on and what GR was really like.
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^I would point out that Lost in Space was set in 1999, and I'm pretty sure we've been there.
Well, yes and no. The Jupiter 2 blasted off on October 16, 1997, but I guess that means that parts of the 2nd and 3rd seasons took place in 1999.
Which means that they left before the Moon was blasted out of orbit...
No, they thought it was fantastic. It just didn't serve their needs as a pilot. A TV network is a business, so they need to know about budget and logistics, not just the abstract quality of a story. A pilot is supposed to give a network some indication of what the typical financial and production requirements of a series will be, so they can budget and schedule it accordingly. But "The Cage" was designed with a different intent; Desilu needed to prove it was capable of mounting an elaborate SF production, so they pulled out all the stops and made a feature-quality pilot film. That proved Desilu could do it, but it didn't give the network the information they needed to calculate a budget. So they asked for a second pilot which would represent a more typical episode. Essentially, "The Cage" was made to sell Desilu Studios, and "Where No Man Has Gone Before" was made to sell Star Trek.
Although it's true that they were disappointed by the cast. The characters were a bland bunch overall, and Roddenberry had failed to deliver on his promise of an ethnically diverse crew (something which, contrary to Roddenberry's later claims, the network actively wanted, because recent studies had demonstrated the spending power of minority viewers). And of course Jeffrey Hunter refused to come back, and the network didn't want Roddenberry's mistress playing the first officer. They didn't want Spock either, but that was the one character GR fought to keep.
This is very interesting! I hadn't heard it explained this way before.
^Then you ought to read Inside Star Trek, which is where the explanation comes from. It's a terrific book with a lot of insights into TV production in general as well as ST in particular.
I'm saying that there's no real evidence that he ever thought it was going to be "realistic" in some more essential way than, say, the TV western version of Wyatt Earp's life. As far as being sarcastic is concerned, "we won't know whether it was realistic until we get to the future" is a flippant response, not a serious one contributing to the conversation, and I simply replied in kind. If responding in kind strikes you as looking for a "fight" that's your look-out.
As time goes on, I imagine a lot of people probably are thinking Roddenberry meant a literal wagon train in space rather than a reference to a now barely remembered TV series from the late 50's / early 60's. I've read the phrase in more than a few publications where they don't capitalize or italicize the title of the TV series.
Then why order a second pilot?
That's a tremendously good point that I would never think of, because I'm geezerly enough to get the reference. Yeah, the description of Trek as "Wagon Train" was not misdirection or simplification, it was a direct reference to the format of that series, which used the "guest star settler of the week" as a means of telling stories which met the dramatic test of being transformative experiences for the guest starring characters while leaving the continuing cast pretty much as they were week after week. The earliest episodes of Trek do this: "Corbomite Manuever" is about Bailey, "Balance Of Terror" is about Stiles, "Mudd's Women" is about Eve and the miner she eventually weds, and so on.
Nobody's claiming he did. You've put the goalposts in the wrong place. He wanted it to be more realistic than other SF shows of the day (basically meaning Irwin Allen's body of work, or earlier kidvid like Tom Corbett and Rocky Jones), and comparably realistic to adult television dramas in other genres. Not more realistic than anything else, just as realistic. He wanted to do the same kind of adult drama as any Western or cop or lawyer or medical show, just in an SF setting for a change. In addition to the Wagon Train example used in his pitch line, the ST writers' bible specifically referenced Naked City and Gunsmoke as exemplars for the kind of character writing the show's scripters should emulate.
Interesting you should say that, since the earliest episodes of Mission: Impossible, ST's sister show premiering in the same year, were the same way: each one revolving around a featured guest star, usually a one-time team member. The pilot focused on Martin Landau (who was originally intended as a guest star and was billed as a "special guest" throughout the first season despite becoming the de facto lead character) and Wally Cox's safecracker character; the second episode focused on Albert Paulsen as a washed-up alcoholic who had to overcome his addiction to do his job for the team; the third episode revolved around Fritz Weaver as the bad guy the team was at odds with; and the fourth and fifth episodes revolved around Mary Ann Mobley as an acrobat who was an old friend and potential romantic interest for team leader Dan Briggs (Steven Hill). After that, though, the format shifted to focus more on the main characters and their adversaries, and the "special guest agent of the week" approach fell by the wayside (though it made a brief resurgence with Eartha Kitt's guest spot near the end of the first season).
Hmm, I wonder if Bruce Geller pitched M:I as "Wagon Train as a spy show."
(Just kidding; I know it was essentially based on Topkapi.)Aside from shows like Wagon Train the format had been used by The Man From U.N.C.L.E as well.
Yep. These days, we're so smug in our conviction that a show needs heavy serialization in order to be any good, but back then, serialization was the stuff of daytime soaps and was considered rather lowbrow. The classy shows of the '50s and '60s were the anthologies, as an extension of the early days of television when shows like Playhouse 90 and Westinghouse Theater broadcast plays each week. If you wanted to be taken seriously as a smart, literate show, you aspired to anthologize. But on the other hand, a regular cast created audience loyalty, and you saved money if you could reuse sets, props, costumes, stock footage, etc. So we had all sorts of shows that were essentially anthologies with continuing characters -- "case of the week" shows for doctors, lawyers, and cops, shows like The Fugitive where a single lead was travelling around getting involved with different people's stories every week, etc.
A number of the most successful and popular TV franchises of the last decade or so have completely ignored serialization in any significant way - Law & Order and CSI, for example.
Well, CSI shows can be pretty serialized where the character arcs are concerned, and they often have "serial killer of the year" arcs spread across multiple episodes. But yeah, they pretty much operate in the middle ground between episodic and serial approaches, a middle ground that I think is far too often overlooked in fan debates that assume there has to be a black-and-white choice between the extremes.
L&O, meanwhile, is generally more in the old-fashioned episodic vein, even to the point of having so little continuity among episodes that it's hard to fit them all into the same reality at all. (I doubt that most ADAs prosecute two dozen high-profile homicides a year, and if they did, I doubt that every single case they prosecuted would've been investigated by the same two cops from the same precinct.) But the L&O shows have had varying degrees of character serialization, particularly on SVU, and increasingly on CI in its later seasons.
L&O, meanwhile, is generally more in the old-fashioned episodic vein, even to the point of having so little continuity among episodes that it's hard to fit them all into the same reality at all. (I doubt that most ADAs prosecute two dozen high-profile homicides a year, and if they did, I doubt that every single case they prosecuted would've been investigated by the same two cops from the same precinct.) But the L&O shows have had varying degrees of character serialization, particularly on SVU, and increasingly on CI in its later seasons.
While an interesting read, the article cites no sources, which means it's difficult to assess if it's accurate or not.
I remember reading a Starlog interview with Donald Bellisario back when Quantum Leap was on the air. He stated that he created the show when he wanted to take a shot at an anthology series, but he realized that audiences (and networks) wouldn't go for a show without any continuing characters. So he came up with the time-travel premise and the characters of Sam and Al.
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