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by Billy Ingram
Though he made valiant efforts, he only got one series off the ground during that time, the Saturday morning cartoon version of Star Trek in 1973. A massive letter-writing campaign organized by fans (but secretly instigated by Roddenberry himself) got Star Trek renewed after NBC cancelled it in 1968. When the network moved the show to the Friday-night-at-ten death-slot, Roddenberry issued an ultimatum: restore the program to an appropriate timeslot or he would quit. Having just proven there was a vocal audience for his work, Roddenberry was surprised when the network didn’t back down and he was forced to walk away from the show he created and nurtured for two years. This resulted in a dreadful last season for Star Trek. For the 1968–69 season, Roddenberry hoped to move from the stars to the vines with a new version of Tarzan. The last TV Tarzan (Ron Ely) didn’t make much of an impression cavorting around NBC’s jungle just two years earlier, so Roddenberry intended instead to concentrate on the Lord Greystoke side of the apeman’s personality. This project made it to script but not to film. A pilot for another possible series, Assignment: Earth starring Robert Lansing and Terri Garr, was shot and incorporated into a second season episode of Star Trek. The series would have followed Gary Seven, a human raised and trained by aliens to prevent Earth from destroying itself, a common theme in Roddenberry’s work. NBC passed on Assignment: Earth, espionage and sci-fi angles weren’t drawing audiences like they were just a few years earlier, so Roddenberry released a book written with Stephen E. Whitfield in 1968. The Making of Star Trek was one of the most thorough and insightful books that had been written about the television industry but this did little to satiate Star Trek fans who searched the cathode-blue horizons for any sign of a new Roddenberry sci-fi project, a wait that stretched into years. Meanwhile, Roddenberry produced the motion picture bomb Pretty Maids All in a Row, starring Rock Hudson, Angie Dickinson, and Telly Savalas and wrote scripts for the hip western, Alias Smith and Jones. Entitled to half the profits from Star Trek, this amounted to very little in the early-'70s before the show had yet to fully catch on in syndication. Roddenberry confessed to an interviewer, "For a couple of years our only income was lecture fees I got from colleges where kids still loved Star Trek, even though it was not a commercial success." Every TV show that was dropped by the networks in the '60s had millions of faithful viewers, but no one had ever organized those fans before. In 1972, the first major Star Trek convention was held in New York City with Roddenberry and Majel Barrett (Nurse Chappell on Star Trek and Roddenberry's wife) as special guests. Organizers expected six hundred attendees, instead three thousand 'trekkies' showed up to worship the "Great Bird of the Galaxy." The LA Times soon dubbed Star Trek "the show that won't die," beginning a slow and quiet resurrection. Roddenberry started a mail-order firm called Lincoln Enterprises to provide hungry fanatics with Star Trek prop and costume recreations, script reproductions, keychains and Tribbles. NBC floated the idea of a Star Trek TV-movie in 1972, but it would be 1973 before Roddenberry got busy on his own projects again.
The Saturday morning version of Star Trek was more enjoyable, to me, than the first Trek series, somehow the aliens are more believable when everyone is a cartoon. Produced at Filmation, who were churning out the highly popular Archie cartoons in 1973, the refreshing series was headed by D.C. Fontana, story editor and script supervisor on the original Star Trek.
The animated Star Trek cost quite a bit more than other Saturday morning shows, so NBC ordered only sixteen episodes for the first season. Almost the entire original cast was brought back. Basically, no one was doing anything of real importance and most needed the work.
Limited animation was a hindrance at times, but the cartoon version allowed writers to expand on ideas that would have been too expensive to film for a live-action program. To cut down on production costs there were lots of narration sequences over stock animation of the Enterprise floating in space.
Star Trek was renewed for a second season but only six new episodes were produced that year.
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DID YOU KNOW: Gene Roddenberry was born August 19, 1921 in El Paso, Texas. He was a Los Angeles police officer when he sold his first scripts to TV. He was creator and producer of the original Star Trek TV series (1966-69). Roddenberry was married to Trek regular Majel Barret. His nickname was the "Great Bird of the Galaxy." Captain Kirk never actually said, "Beam me up Scotty" in any of the Star Trek episodes. In Gene Roddenberry's original script for Star Trek, the name of the Starship Enterprise was Yorktown. Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted in syndication in 1987.
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The
decade between the cancellation of the original Star Trek series
in 1969 and the debut of Star Trek, The Motion Picture in 1979
was a lean one for television producer, writer, and Trek creator
Gene Roddenberry.
That
summer the animated Star Trek got underway and Genesis II was
put into production for fall 1974 weekly prime time placement on CBS.
The
first episode was written by Samuel A. Peeples, who wrote the second pilot
for the original live-action series. Several plotlines were continued
over from the original series, including the return of Harry Mudd and
those troublesome Tribbles by script-writer David Gerrold. Science fiction
author Larry Niven, also contributed an excellent script, other stories
were provided by Star Trek scribes David P. Harmon, Paul Schneider,
Stephen Kandel, and Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Chekov during Trek’s
third season.
Joel
Eisner: "It is common knowledge that Ensign Chekov was cut from the
Trek cartoon series for budget reasons. To compensate Walter
Koenig, he was allowed to write one of the episodes. However, Chekov was
seen in the cartoon pilot episode "Beyond the Farthest Star"
in about three scenes which take place on the bridge - you can clearly
see for a few seconds Chekov sitting at the helm with Sulu, only to have
it cut away and come back with the three legged alien, Arex (voiced by
Jimmy Doohan) sitting in his place. I used to have 16mm film print of
this episode so I was able to examine it closely, but it is clearly visible
in the episode. Let's see if it is still intact when they release the
cartoons on DVD."
There
were some conflicts on the series. Nichelle Nichols’ and George
Takei’s cartoon likenesses were being used but they weren’t
originally hired to provide the character’s voices (Paramount owns
their younger faces, apparently). Hoping to save money, Roddenberry decided
to have Majel Barrett voice Uhura and James Doohan do his best Sulu imitation.
Only a promised work stoppage by Leonard Nimoy got them on board. Star
Trek won the Emmy in 1974 as "Outstanding Children’s Series"
and before long there was a flood of prime-time shows converted to cartoon
format starring the original cast members on Saturday mornings.
