We have "A Private Little War" which is an allegory for Vietnam and has Kirk arming the hill people as a counter-balance to the Klingons arming of villagers. You might have 1991 Gene hating it, but I'm not so sure about the 1967 version.
If Gene Roddenberry had full creative control, completely unchecked, then the first Star Trek movie would've been The God Thing. That movie would've become infamous, both loved and hated at the same time. It also would've been the end of Star Trek. So the franchise would've died in the mid-1970s. No scrapped Phase II that would've led to TMP (and the movies that followed) or TNG. Paramount would've created another Space Franchise to compete with Star Wars because they'd view the Star Trek name as "toxic" and "tainted" after it would've directly taken on God.
Lot's of episodes that consist mostly/entirely or pretty women dancing around naked, lots of "playing at love" and every couple episodes the crew of the Enterprise would find god but then it turns out its an aliens. But if you look at a lot of popular/successful stuff you will find that there were usually people who kept the excesses of the primary creator at bay to create something watchable/readable. Like, I love Chris Claremont's run on X-Men...but when he didn't have an artist and/or editor who kept his excesses and attempts to put fetish stuff into the story at bay it ended cringeworthy (early Excalibur, the X-Men's Outback era, X-Men Forever...)
We should not be asking if Roddenberry would dislike episode like “In The Pale Moonlight”. He probably would not like the Dominion War arc at all. We should be wondering what he’d think about panned episodes like “Profit and Lace” “Threshold”, “A Night in Sickday”, & “Precious Cargo” - if he would agree that that should be panned or he sees positive attributes to them - , what he’d think about stuff like the decon chambers & catsuits, and if he’d prefer Lower Decks to the string of dark Trek shows from DS9 to PIC.
Or after The God Thing augered in at the box office, 20th century fox decided to pull the plug on that space opera George Lucas was working on and go all-in on Damnation Alley
<cracks knuckles> Hoo boy. Here comes the sledgehammer. Buy y'all asked for it. If Roddenberry had full creative control then either NBC would have: Approved the first pilot for fall 1965 or mid-season 1966, and Shatner's availability may not have allowed him to do it. He ended up doing For the People as a midseason replacement Jan 1966. Not picked up the show because of the problems we know they had with the first pilot. If NBC somehow still asked for a second pilot it's up in the air how much of the cast from the first pilot would have carried over anyway because their contracts didn't cover a second pilot, and either they or Gene might've reconsidered. This presumes the Roddenberry-controlled show would have been successful enough to have lasted long enough to be stripped for syndication and the same fandom would have resulted. That's not a given. I've read a lot of his memos to the writers. I don't agree with that assessment at all. The way he wanted to do the show was to write story springboards that freelance writers would develop into scripts, or have them bring ideas in. He really didn't want to be writing scripts. He wanted to sell other shows. Possibly, but Roddenberry of 1975 was a decade removed from Roddenberry of 1965–66, so it's difficult to judge his decade-earlier self based on that. Now his 1968 Tarzan script... Wrong. The Spock absorbs-energy thing is in a script we have and there's no metal plate, and it's more complicated than that. We're gonna cover this in Fact Trek sometime. And, seriously, MeTV as a source? Nope. Roddenberry invented it in his 2nd pilot script for "The Omega Glory", where it was already IDed as the number one order. Coon just named it. Reading the BTS memos, even Justman wrote sexist comments. We covered Lucy's supposed involvement with Star Trek's fate here (link) and here (link), and it's not as cut and dried as some would have you believe. And Lucy trusted Solow. I doubt she knew Justman from Adam, since he was just an A.D. during the pilots.
I have no idea what sites are good sources or not. Apologies if I chose a rotter. Fair enough if it’s wrong. Not the first time I’ve heard of Spock’s metal plate, but I look forward to the FactTrek as always. Also I don’t know where you’ve got me saying Roddenberry wanted to write scripts from? I was talking about ideas and I stand by what I said. For every great idea the man had then there’s Troi with extra boobs or Spock shooting JFK in a movie script where Amanda gets gang-raped by Klingons.
Basically, most so-called "history" on pop culture sites is a game of telephone. Like many, MeTV posts not-researched or vetted; merely stuff designed to stimulate engagement. My point was that Roddenberry with full creative control might not have yielded a Trek that's so different than what we got because he'd have preferred to be executive producing, not driving story and script content. The Spock shoots JFK thing is bollox.
@Maurice It's incredible how many urban myths have built up around Star Trek and I truly appreciate the efforts of you and your team to explore and sometimes explode those myths. Spock shoots JFK is bollox... That's another one gone... Seriously though, a massive thanks for the work you do.
Yeah I don't think TOS might have been a whole lot different, as this was before GR got all those notions that he shoehorned into his later Trek work; notions famously described by (I think) Maurice Hurley as a "wackydoodle vision of the future" in the TNG documentary Chaos on the Bridge. Kor
Considering the pilot's then-unheard of cost, it's no small wonder they opted to make another attempt. Definitely glad she trusted Justman and Solow! Roddenberry was great in some ways, but as with most things it's often been an ensemble effort.
StarTrek.com credits Gene Coon with the creation of the Prime Directive. Also, this is from David Gerrold ("The Trouble with Tribbles") on page 129 of The Fifty-Year Mission by Edward Gross and Mark A. Altman:
They're not authoritative, and they're mistaken in this case. Coon's script referencing the PD may have been the first to air, which is a different matter altogether.
Lost In Space's pilot, shot within weeks of the first Trek pilot cost in the same range. And the Shatner-Adam West pilot Alexander the Great cost waaaay more than either. And do you really think StarTrek.com has dug through the Roddenberry papers to verify this? I have the dated "Omega Glory" script pages right here, "interference with the evolvement of alien civilizations" is named as a major no-no in Roddenberry's April 25,1965 proposed second pilot story outline for "The Omega Glory" from 15 months before Coon was hired. Likewise that 2nd pilot version of "The Omega Glory" has Spock mention "Hodgeson's law of planetary evolution," so even that goes back to almost the beginning.
Of the top of my head, Troi with 3 boobs, Ferengi with enourmous cocks, orgies going on in the background of any scene happening on Earth. Love instuctors. You know, the usual.
How do we know Ferengi don't have enormous, uh, schwanzstuckers? And we already do have love instructors, but we have a much more accurate term for them: we call them sex therapists.