Whence Robert April?

[A beaker full of death]

It turns out that Noonian Singh/Sung wasn't the only name GR repeated. He used Robert April in an episode of Have Gun Will Travel:

The Return of Roy Carter
Roy Carter sends for Paladin to help search for Chaplain Robert April, who saved Roys' life. Chaplain April was up in the mountains searching for an escaped prisoner when a blizzard hit.

 

[Hober Mallow]

The middle initial T popped up quite a bit, too. James T. Kirk. William T. Riker. Leland T. Lynch. And it seemed to be the custom of every one with a middle name that began with T to announce his first name, middle initial, and last name to everyone within earshot every thrity seconds or so. But only if his middle name began with T.

 

[scotpens]

That's interesting. Every writer has idiosyncracies and stylistic touches like that. For example, Samuel Fuller used the name Griff in many of his films. It was Fuller's way of remembering an Army buddy who died in World War II.

Good thing Roddenberry decided to go with a different name for his starship captain. Somehow, “Robert T. April” just seems a bit, well, you know . . . GAY!

(Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

 

[Christopher]

The middle initial T popped up quite a bit, too. James T. Kirk. William T. Riker. Leland T. Lynch.

The lead character in Roddenberry's first series The Lieutenant (played by Gary Lockwood) was Marine Lieutenant William Tiberius Rice.

And it seemed to be the custom of every one with a middle name that began with T to announce his first name, middle initial, and last name to everyone within earshot every thrity seconds or so. But only if his middle name began with T.

Not really. As I posted two months ago, the "T." in Kirk's name was referenced in only six episodes in the entire first season, and in only three of those did Kirk himself use it. He usually just went by "James Kirk" or "Jim" initially, and it was only later that "James T. Kirk" emerged as a commonplace meme.

(A quick-and-dirty domain search of Chakoteya's transcript site turns up about twice as many entries for "James Kirk" as there are for "James T. Kirk." I get listings for "James T." plus "Kirk" in 18 TOS episodes, 5 TAS episodes, 7 movies, and "Trials and Tribble-ations.")

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

The use of Soong on Enterprise was anything but subtle except in a single respect: without commenting on it, the portrayal of Noonien Soong's father (or grandfather?) as an admirer of the Augments suggested how other than by coincidence Data's father might have come to share a name with Khan.

 

[T'Girl]

Not Star Trek, but Gene Roddenberry used the name Dylan Hunt with three different actors on three different shows.

 

[Christopher]

Not Star Trek, but Gene Roddenberry used the name Dylan Hunt with three different actors on three different shows.

No, only two. The third Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo in Andromeda) was in a show that wasn't created until well after Roddenberry died.

And the first two Dylan Hunts were in two different pilots for what was basically the same series (despite a title change), so they were essentially playing the same character.

 

[Captain Robert April]

^ And Andromeda was essentially a mashup of Genesis II/Planet Earth and the never-produced Starship concept.

So, in a way, it's still the same character.

 

[Amaris]

That's interesting. Every writer has idiosyncracies and stylistic touches like that. For example, Samuel Fuller used the name Griff in many of his films. It was Fuller's way of remembering an Army buddy who died in World War II.

Good thing Roddenberry decided to go with a different name for his starship captain. Somehow, “Robert T. April” just seems a bit, well, you know . . . GAY!

(Not that there's anything wrong with that!)

Ha! I just finished watching "The Baron of Arizona", remember one of the supporting characters was Griff, and sure enough!

 

[Maurice]

And "The Long Hunt of April Savage". Another April.

 

[FormerLurker]

Not Star Trek, but Gene Roddenberry used the name Dylan Hunt with three different actors on three different shows.

No, only two. The third Dylan Hunt (Kevin Sorbo in Andromeda) was in a show that wasn't created until well after Roddenberry died.

And the first two Dylan Hunts were in two different pilots for what was basically the same series (despite a title change), so they were essentially playing the same character.

^ And Andromeda was essentially a mashup of Genesis II/Planet Earth and the never-produced Starship concept.

So, in a way, it's still the same character.

QFT.

 

[Christopher]

^ And Andromeda was essentially a mashup of Genesis II/Planet Earth and the never-produced Starship concept.

Plus a whole lot of original concepts from Robert Hewitt Wolfe and his staff. The Roddenberry material was actually a pretty small part of the whole creation. And the only element that came from Starship was the concept of a sentient ship being a main character.

So, in a way, it's still the same character.

Not in the sense I'm talking about. When I say "the same character," I don't mean like the Adam West Batman and the Kevin Conroy Batman, who are variations of a character existing in separate and incompatible realities, but in the sense of the Kirstie Alley Saavik and the Robin Curtis Saavik, who are meant to be literally the same person in the same continuous reality. My point is that despite the reworking and recasting, Planet Earth is a direct enough continuation of Genesis II that it can be considered the same reality, so that the Dylan Hunt played by John Saxon was the same person with the same life history as the Dylan Hunt played by Alex Cord. That obviously doesn't apply to the Dylan Hunt played by Kevin Sorbo, who was born 3000 years and 3 million light-years apart from the Dylan Hunt played by Cord and Saxon, and in a reality where Earth history was radically different.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

^ And Andromeda was essentially a mashup of Genesis II/Planet Earth and the never-produced Starship concept.

Arrant nonsense. Wolfe did little more than cherrypick a couple of names (Hunt, Harper) and bits of premise from old and unsuccessful Roddenberry material and paste them into the television series that he conceived and wanted to do.

But hey, if you attach Roddenberry's name to something the fanboise will surely genuflect for at least a bit...

 

[Kelso]

It turns out that Noonian Singh/Sung wasn't the only name GR repeated. He used Robert April in an episode of Have Gun Will Travel:

GR also used to write under the pen name Robert Wesley, for whatever that is worth.

 

[Chaos Descending]

Bob Wesley? Like COMMODORE BOB WESLEY!?!?!??!

 

[Christopher]

Well, Wesley was GR's middle name.

 

[Christopher]

^ And Andromeda was essentially a mashup of Genesis II/Planet Earth and the never-produced Starship concept.

Arrant nonsense. Wolfe did little more than cherrypick a couple of names (Hunt, Harper) and bits of premise from old and unsuccessful Roddenberry material and paste them into the television series that he conceived and wanted to do.

The truth lies between those extremes. According to Sailing the Slipstream by Jill Sherwin (TrekBBS's own js), who was Robert Hewitt Wolfe's assistant on DS9 and Andromeda, Majel Barrett Roddenberry, working with Tribune Entertainment, developed two possible series based on Genesis II/Planet Earth, one planetbound and one space-based. Robert was hired to develop the space-based one and given access to GR's notes. What he came up with included a lot of his own ideas, including elements of a hypothetical Star Trek idea he'd had about a Han Solo type discovering the sentient Enterprise-K a thousand years after the fall of the Federation, but was shaped by input from his employers and collaborators, such as Kevin Sorbo's desire to play a starship captain and Tribune's imperative that the show had to include a part for Keith Hamilton Cobb.

 

[Admiral Buzzkill]

What he came up with included a lot of his own ideas, including elements of a hypothetical Star Trek idea he'd had about a Han Solo type discovering the sentient Enterprise-K a thousand years after the fall of the Federation, but was shaped by input from his employers and collaborators, such as Kevin Sorbo's desire to play a starship captain and Tribune's imperative that the show had to include a part for Keith Hamilton Cobb.

And that's being polite. What's described there is all that's ever described in this context: Wolfe had a lot of ideas about a space-based series, the examples of input incorporated there have not a thing to do with Roddenberry's ideas but with Tribune's business imperatives regarding casting, and the connection between Andromeda and Roddenberry's shows still consists basically of the names "Dylan Hunt" and "Harper."

I'm sure fannish (ahem) creativity can stretch the available material to "discover" other similarities, but it's quite apparent that the correspondence between Wolfe's desire to do an After-The-Fall type of space show and Roddenberry's 1970s rewrite of "Buck Rogers" was useful synchronicity at most.

 

[Christopher]

^But you're getting the emphasis wrong. Robert didn't initiate the project, he was hired to create something to the specifications of Majel Roddenberry, Tribune, and others. And Jill's book suggests that the premise of Genesis II transposed into space -- a man named Dylan Hunt waking up after 300 years and finding the Commonwealth fallen -- was already present in what Majel had before Robert was hired. And Robert's Enterprise-K idea was never something he seriously developed, just an idle daydream he thought up at one point, that happened to prove a useful starting point when he was hired to create something along similar lines.

So it's certainly true that Gene Roddenberry's contributions to Andromeda were minimal, but you're talking as though Robert initiated the whole project and dressed it up in a bit of camouflage to make it seem Roddenberry-related, and that's just not accurate. It's not fair to him, because the way you're phrasing it makes him sound like a self-serving credit thief, and it's not fair to Majel Roddenberry and her role as the initiator of the project.

 

[Captain Robert April]

Well, Wesley was GR's middle name.

And Robert was his older brother's name.