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50 Years since Star Trek premiered

The pilot was rejected and reviews were unkind, but Star Trek boldly traversed new frontiers in TV.

September 8th marks 50 years since Star Trek, created by Gene Roddenberry, first premiered in the US on NBC with “The Man Trap.”

In April 1964, Roddenberry presented the Star Trek draft to Desilu Productions which produced a pilot “The Cage” featuring Jeffrey Hunter. But NBC rejected the pilot and ordered a second. Only the character of Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, was retained, with William Shatner added as Captain Kirk.

NBC ordered 16 episodes of Star Trek but reviews were mixed. While The Philadelphia Inquirer and San Francisco Chronicle liked the new show, The New York Times and The Boston Globe were less favourable, and Variety predicted that it “won’t work”, calling it “an incredible and dreary mess of confusion and complexities.”

It would run for 3 seasons and 79 episodes before it was cancelled in 1969. An animated series followed in 1973 before hit sequels: The Next Generation (1987–94), Deep Space Nine (1993–99), Voyager (1995–2001) and Enterprise (2001–05). It spawned 13 feature films between 1979 – 2016 while a new series Discovery will debut in 2017, helmed by Bryan Fuller.

Over 5 decades Star Trek challenged stereotypes, winning legions of fans, triggered an industry of merchandise, comics, games, magazines, and won recognition from the Smithsonian Institution and NASA.

This Sunday SBS will screen the documentary Building Star Trek at 8:35pm.

Live long and prosper!

6 Responses

  1. I highly recommend checking out at least some episodes of the original series on the blu-ray remasters. What they’ve done to clean up, restore and insert new SFX is absolutely astonishing. It now looks and sounds almost completely contemporary. Sure, some of the scripts and episodes dragged out so watching every episode won’t be for everyone, but it is the best example I’ve seen to date of what the remastering process can accomplish.

  2. It has been a constant presence on TV here for almost all of that time-I remember at one point in the ’90s various iterations were on 7 times a week on 2 networks when there were only 6 stations in total!

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