Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry would be 100 years old – culture

To become one of the greatest humanists in television history, Gene Roddenberry had to be quite a rascal. It is said that Nichelle Nichols, who played Uhura in the original series, once said that all he wrote was moral stories. Roddenberry replied, “Pssst! You know that, I know that, the receptionist knows that. Only the studio has no idea.”

With “Star Trek” Roddenberry (born 1921 in Texas, died 1991) not only created an incredibly successful TV franchise, from which new series and movies are still emerging. He made a better world. When the original series started in 1966, a Scot, a Japanese, a Russian, a diabolical-looking Vulcan and a black woman stood on the bridge of the first Enterprise. The captain, James Tiberius Kirk, was a classic white Iowa adventurer hero, but there was no such ethnic equality anywhere else on Cold War television in the USA. But to get his vision of a bright future on television, Gene Roddenberry had to resort to a few tricks.

First of all, at the beginning of the 1960s, he sold the NBC TV network a concept that the gentlemen there already knew: a western, just in space. Roddenberry, who was a bomber pilot in World War II, then flew commercially, and later worked as a motorcycle cop in LA, knew his way around. He has been writing for western and police series since the fifties.

At first it was all too intellectual for the studio

What the NBC then got, in a pilot episode that quickly disappeared in a drawer, was too few space wests and too much modernity. “The Cage” was the name of the pilot in front of the pilot, the most expensive episode in TV history to date. The captain’s name wasn’t Kirk yet, but Christopher Pike, and his first officer was a woman played by Roddenberry’s wife, Majel Barrett. Spock already existed. Both went too far for NBC, everything was too intellectual for them. Roddenberry had to give in. Barrett got a role anyway – as a nurse.

You can see from the fact that Gene Roddenberry was allowed to shoot another start episode that it must have been a bit more comfortable times in the television business back then. The new version has been accepted. Although Spock stayed and the woman on the bridge was no longer deputy chief, but black. From then on it was Roddenberry’s task to package his extremely progressive thinking on topics such as capitalism, racism, violence, sexism and the influence of culture in space adventures so skillfully that he was allowed to go on.

Some authors complained that they lacked any material for conflict

The real success story of “Star Trek” only began after the end of the original series. In the 1970s, the episodes were repeated on all NBC channels and sold overseas so many times that the number of fans grew. “Star Trek” came back, first, for cost reasons, as an animated series and in 1979 as the first of meanwhile 13 films. In 1987 “Star Trek: The Next Generation” started a new enterprise under the intellectual diplomat Captain Jean-Luc Picard, whose crew consisted of such nice, cooperative figures that some authors complained that they lacked any material for conflict. Roddenberry had written a narrow “Bible” with rules for his universe. In addition to a lot of technical stuff and explanations about such things as the sexuality of the Ferengi species, it said that the Starfleet figures should always be a little better than real people.

Open detailed view

“Star Trek” has always been more than just entertainment for its creator. In one of his rare interviews, Roddenberry said he was leading a kind of crusade with his series “to show that television doesn’t have to be violent to be exciting. We emphasize humanity and pay a heavy price for it. Much of the drama, that other shows work with – promiscuity, greed, jealousy. There is none of that on ‘Star Trek’ “.

There is great television happiness in the clever dialogues

His concept did not last. Anyone who watches “Starship Enterprise: The Next Century” again today, in the television age of the antihero, may be alienated by all the highly intelligent, rational, kind-hearted Starfleet officers in their pajamas. But there is also great television happiness in the clever dialogues, in Picard’s Shakespeare quotes and the quiet focus on questions of interculturality. The most recent “Star Trek” series, “Discovery” and “Picard”, often seem like desperate attempts at resuscitation that no longer dare to be “boring” and thus utopian in Roddenberry’s sense.

Or maybe space has lost its power of fascination. When billionaires fly into space for fun, shoot advertisements into orbit and the private sector plans to exploit the natural resources of the moon and Mars, then the great dream of increasing knowledge for the benefit of all in space is over. Gene Roddenberry’s own end is fittingly a symbol of both the dream and its loss: in 2014 parts of himself and his wife’s ashes were to be sent into orbit around the sun by rocket. This service can be booked with Celestis, Inc., based in Houston, Texas.