Would "Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek" still have been a success?

[Gotham Central]

Gene Roddenberry is usually credited with being the creator of Star Trek. However, I'm of the opinion that the Star Trek that we have all come to know is not really the Trek that GR envisioned.

I just recently finished watching the "The Cage" on DVD. from my perspective, The Cage represents Trek the way GR always envisioned the concept. In watching The Cage, i could not help but notice how much it feels like Star Trek: The Motion Picture visually, in tone and concept. Related to that is the fact that TMP (and the preceeding Phase II) served as the inspiration for Star Trek: The Next Generation (especially its first few seasons). Its worth noting that left to his own devices, GR kept moving away from the look and feel of the bulk of TOS and going back to the Trek he intially created in The Cage.

One might think of the bulk of Trek (I.e. the rest of TOS and its movies) as Trek interrupted. The look and feel of TOS was not actually GR's idea. It was forced on him by NBC. NBC wanted a captain that shot from the hip and got into fist fights...GR initially gave them one that needed a counselor. In TMP, captain Kirk was once again having something of an emotial crisis as a result of getting on in years and being somewhat bored in his new administrative position. By the time of TNG, GR placed a counselor right on the bridge.

The look and feel of TOS was compromise between GR's vision and the demands of NBC. TMP was the only one of the TOS films where GR had a significant amount of control. After that film, Paramount brought in outsiders to ramp up the energy in the film series (giving it the more military and adventure feel that dominated the rest of the film series). The same is really true of TNG. That was GR's baby....and he was gradually pushed out.

It seems to me that there are actually two strands of Trek. The Trek that GR wanted ad kept trying to produce, and the Trek that he was forced into making (or made without much input from him).

If GR had been like say J.M.S. and had complete creative control over his property, would Trek have been as popular.

Personally I think that Jeffrey Hunter was a more interesting captain (not to mention being better looking and a better actor) but "Cage" Trek would have been more like TNG overall. I suspect that it would have had good story telling but would not have been well received in the 1960s.

 

[jamestyler]

Thinking of it... all my favorite Trek, most of it DS9, would have been or was opposed by GR. But I like how it was a product created from various influences over the years and is more a collection of ideas and visions rather than that of one man.

 

[Lord Garth]

I can't say how ST, starring the cast from "The Cage", would've endured. I'm not fully sure about where or how the series would've come into focus.

Let's look at the Kirk/Spock dynamic. The equivalent in "The Cage" would've been Pike and Number One. The male/female dynamic would've made it different from Kirk/Spock by default, especially in the '60s. And Number One wasn't surpressing all emotion so much as she could be calculating and look at things dispassionately. I'd see the relationship between Pike and Number One as Pike's dilemma vs Number One's pragmatism. Except Pike was the one who was pragmatic at the beginning of "The Cage" when Number One said there could be survivors on Talos IV even after 18 years.

Now for Spock/McCoy. The equivalent is Number One and Doctor Boyce who both seemed agreeable in their observations and deductions in "The Cage". Boyce is nowhere near as emotional as McCoy and Number One, again, didn't seem to be repressing emotions so much as she was just not an emotional person either.

Then there's Kirk/McCoy. Tempered emotion versus unrestrained emotion. What I get from their counterparts, Pike/Boyce is more protagonist/sage.

In turn Kirk, Spock, and McCoy -- as has been pointed out before -- are the ego, id, and superego personified. You just don't get that with Pike, Number One, and Boyce. The dynamics from TOS aren't translatable to "The Cage".

I can't say the character dynamics from "The Cage" are similar to TMP or TNG either. I don't think Gene Roddenberry had fully thought out how the characters would relate to each other in the long term so much as he was just trying to show that space series was possible for television. Pike would've been the star, the rest would've been subordinate, period. Unless some sort of dynamic eventually shined, in which case more attention would be given to it.

And it's not like there were no battles in "The Cage" version of Star Trek. Pike and crew had just dealt with a major battle on Rigel VII and Pike was still smarting from the experience. Pike in turn decides to make it a point to show the Talosians how just primitive humanity is by being willing to blow himself up and -- irrationally -- being willing to allow Vina to run for cover with the Talosians just to prove his point.

Gene's idea for what Star Trek should be continually evolved.

 

[JNG]

Gene's idea for what Star Trek should be continually evolved.

Sure did, and anything else is a dramatic oversimplification. It's too easy to put people in a box in hindsight.

You ARE watching Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. TV is a collaborative medium, and he knew the score. He picked his battles and won enough to be forever remembered as the Great Bird of the Galaxy.

 

[Mistral]

Gene's idea for what Star Trek should be continually evolved.

Sure did, and anything else is a dramatic oversimplification. It's too easy to put people in a box in hindsight.

You ARE watching Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek. TV is a collaborative medium, and he knew the score. He picked his battles and won enough to be forever remembered as the Great Bird of the Galaxy.

Damn right! And he got good people around him, like Gene L. Coon. Justman, too. ANd the Feinberg sfx team, who would make the stuff that the creators wanted instead of saying, "You'll have to change that-we can't make that thingy." If they had said that, the look and feel would have been quite different. So the supporting people around GR helped influence the situation, too.

 

[trevanian]

I think ST endured and became loveable because of Coon, therefore, without him, you wouldn't have had anything except a short run SF show that failed.

GR alone could barely make trek work; there is great stuff in the pre-Coon era, but I think it owes to a lot of folks. To take it from being something odd/interesting and make it something that you wanted to see ... I see that as Coon.

 

[RandyS]

I think ST endured and became loveable because of Coon, therefore, without him, you wouldn't have had anything except a short run SF show that failed.

GR alone could barely make trek work; there is great stuff in the pre-Coon era, but I think it owes to a lot of folks. To take it from being something odd/interesting and make it something that you wanted to see ... I see that as Coon.

There is no "pre-Coon era". He produced the first two years of TOS, and before that, there was nothing but two pilots, which I honestly can't remember if he worked on them or not.

 

[Lord Garth]

There is a pre-Coon era even if it wasn't very long. He joined the staff mid-way through the first season.

 

[trekkerguy]

If this was the case, I would mostly prefer the non GR Trek.

 

[Biggshow]

And lest we forget, the NBC run of Star Trek WAS a failure in the minds of the numbers crunchers.

Also "ego, id, superego personified"? Who's who? Doesn't really hold up. What does is the analogy that the man of action (Kirk) cannot act until he first listens to his head (Spock) and his heart (McCoy). That dynamic doesn't really exist in "The Cage".

 

[xortex]

It was a socio-organism that was encompassed and perfected by the great bird's spirit. I could hear the grinding of teeth by the non believers but I don't give a crap.

 

[Lord Garth]

Also "ego, id, superego personified"? Who's who? Doesn't really hold up. What does is the analogy that the man of action (Kirk) cannot act until he first listens to his head (Spock) and his heart (McCoy). That dynamic doesn't really exist in "The Cage".

Yes it does because we're saying the same thing. I'd rather that we don't split hairs. For who's who, I messed up the order and didn't catch it until later. Kirk is the ego, McCoy is the id, Spock is the superego. The id and superego work directly against each other while the ego moderates between the two.

If this was the case, I would mostly prefer the non GR Trek.

Read either Star Trek Memories by William Shatner or Star Trek: The Real Story by Bob Justman and Herb Solow. There are other sources out there too. What they all have in common is that they say Gene Coon joined in the middle of the first season.

If you don't accept either of those as credible sources than look here and you'll find that Gene L. Coon's first writing credit is "Arena".

 

[Maurice]

First of all, let's be honest here. NBC didn't ask for a new Captain or a more action packed captain. They were okay with Jeffrey Hunter and his character. They didn't like the rest of The Cage cast, and while fine with Nimoy as an actor, didn't like the Spock character initially.

Let's also remember that Gene pitched the show as "Wagon Train to the stars", which meant he sold it as an action adventure show. If anything, once could argue that NBC was pushing him to stay true to the show he promised them.