Star Trek (1964) [pdf]

http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Star_Trek/1_Original_Series/Star_Trek_Pitch.pdf

by spking • 4 years ago

273 129 4 years ago

leethomson.myzen.co.uk

MPSimmons• 4 years ago

Tons of echoes of things that happened later in the various series. This was a fun read. Thanks!

It’s amazing how far ahead this was, compared to everything else on TV at the time. And that last scenario kinda reminds me of…

CamperBob2• 4 years ago

Yeah, that last idea has legs. Or at least eggs.

cheschire• 4 years ago

Ronald D Moores “series bible” for battlestar galactica is also quite a fun read for fans. A copy is available from the same site, so clearly this person enjoys their sci fi.

http://leethomson.myzen.co.uk/Battlestar_Galactica/Battlesta...

njharman• 4 years ago

"We take the Opera out of Space Opera"?

I quit watching after several episodes because it devolved into High School level drama of who is fucking you and totally unwarrented flip-flops every episode of people being loyal, betraying, hating someone then in love with them etc. And (mostly) starbuck screaming, crying then totally forgetting she was overacting in the next scene. It was simplistic, base, boring and not sci-fi. It was "drama" aka soap-opera.

cwillu• 4 years ago

The cylons did not, in fact, have a plan.

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

I watched "Beverly Hills 90210" for a while (shame on me), and eventually realized that all the plots were "given X cast members, how many episodes can one create that revolves around one member of the cast hooking up with another"?

hitekker• 4 years ago

Are there articles or reviews that mirror your view on Battlestar Galactica?

I only watched bits and pieces and it never quite connected with me.

_tom_3• 4 years ago

unwarrented flip-flops every episode of people being loyal, betraying, hating someone then in love with them etc.

This is what I hate about most TV series these days, the writers value conflict over character. This basically prevents any actual character development, or even any character identity at all, as the character changes from episode to episode. This is what makes a series forgettable.

Roddenberry forbade intra crew conflict as a plot device, so Star Trek has identifiable character that people still remember. BSGs characters are already forgotten, because they lacked identity.

DonHopkins2• 4 years ago

“series bible” for battlestar galactica

You mean the Book of Mormon?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolob#Kolob_as_the_inspiration...

https://www.beliefnet.com/entertainment/movies/2005/05/born-...

https://www.deseret.com/2014/11/22/20553208/mormon-creator-o...

https://www.millennialstar.org/battlestar-galactica-and-morm...

http://www.mormonthink.com/glossary/battlestargalactica.htm

https://www.quora.com/What-are-some-Mormon-themes-in-Battles...

midasuni2• 4 years ago

That came out after the BSG reboot

simonh• 4 years ago

Just because I'm an Atheist, that doesn't mean I can't appreciate Tolkien, or C. S. Lewis. What matters to me is the quality of the material. Sure I found the metaphysics in the last season a bit much, I know plenty of people that didn't enjoy it on it's merits and that's fine it's just personal taste, but there was still plenty for me to enjoy so that's fine.

ArtWomb2• 4 years ago

Awesome collection! Pitch bible from He-Man Masters of the Universe is solid gold ;)

"Beyond the farthest galaxies viewed by the greatest telescopes on Earth. Beyond the limits of our universe lies another place - a place of magic, myth, sorcery and science. Through the cosmic clouds spins a solar system with a type three star twinkling in the ether of interstellar space. About the star rotate worlds inconceivable to mere mortal minds. They are populated by deities and demigods, sorcerers and sybils, men and women imbued with the powers of good and evil!"

shadowgovt2• 4 years ago

The D&D "Deities and Demigods" supplement was published in 1980; first ep of He-Man was '83.

I can't help but wonder if that phrasing was an instance of simple alliterative coincidence or if the He-Man showrunners were tabletop nerds.

omnibrain• 4 years ago

You could ask @straczynski on twitter. He might know an he is usually quite happy to answer questions about past productions.

lisper• 4 years ago

The "president Capone" episode idea has turned out to be frighteningly prescient.

aidenn0• 4 years ago

A Piece of the Action was probably the fruit of that idea.

sgt• 4 years ago

Will Don Capone make a comeback in 2024?

firecall• 4 years ago

Even if you are not a fan, the PDF is a very enlightening read!

"...blonde with a shape even a uniform could not hide"

It's shockingly misogynistic!

ourmandave• 4 years ago

Young Kirk was pretty buff.

temporallobe3• 4 years ago

Sexist maybe, not misogynistic.

bee_rider• 4 years ago

I think the end of that paragraph is more interesting.

She is not dumb; she is very female, disturbingly so.

It is interesting how things change over time. The undercurrent in the character description for both of the women has big "she's real competent for a woman" vibes. I'm sure they were trying to be progressive and just stumbled over the attitudes of the era. Hey, we'll all be there some day, right?

WillPostForFood• 4 years ago

Give some credit for the female Executive Officer.

bigDinosaur• 4 years ago

Chauvinistic? Misogynistic traditionally meant hatred, and the way it has been redefined is genuinely bad for communication.

xwkd• 4 years ago

Is it misogynistic to revel in the female form?

todorus3• 4 years ago

If it exists for males to revel in?

Yes, the male gaze is misogynist. I don't think that still requires explaining, it has been written about a lot.

wongarsu• 4 years ago

The unaired pilot episode features characters very close to those described here. There's a "secretary has crush on her superior, he doesn't notice or doesn't care" cliche going on which would have been a feature over the whole series. Obviously making her physically attractive helps that plot point.

Of course that got axed after the unaired pilot episode, but in return the gender ratio took a hot with both the yeoman and Number One gone.

AuryGlenz2• 4 years ago

Heh, if you are a fan then you’ll realize women being sexy is integral to a good portion of the original Star Trek’s plots…of of course, Kirk being Kirk.

TeMPOraL5• 4 years ago

Then you actually watch TOS and start to wonder where did people get the idea wrt. Kirk from. He wasn't anywhere near the womanizer people accuse him of being - this seems to be one of those commonly widespread misconceptions about the show, up there with "beam me up, Scotty" (never actually said on the show), or "redshirts" being the ones to always die (someone did the math of casualties by uniform color, and red wasn't first).

If you want to find a womanizer in Star Trek, try commander Riker from TNG.

ThrowawayR2• 4 years ago

Remember who the audience of the document is: powerful studio executives steeped heavily in the sexism that was the social norm for the era. They may not understand the philosophy of the series (and probably wouldn't have cared for it if they had) but they do understand that having pretty faces can improve viewer counts (not so different from today really) and they want to be certain that there's going to be ROI before doling out funds.

What you should be marveling at is that, for the 1960s, Star Trek TOS had highly progressive aspects, such as having women about a warship at all, let alone as officers and even the first officer. For comparison, in the United States Navy, women were not allowed to serve on combatant ships until 1994[1] and having the first woman to be assigned to command a combatant ship didn't happen until 1998[2]. Even I'm a bit surprised to discover that it was that recent.

[1] https://www.history.navy.mil/content/history/nhhc/browse-by-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_United_States_Nav...

TeMPOraL5• 4 years ago

in the United States Navy, women were not allowed to serve on combatant ships until 1994

Meanwhile, the audience had pleasure of dealing with a Starfleet fleet admiral Nechayev in 1992, and then rear admiral Rollman in 1993.

having the first woman to be assigned to command a combatant ship didn't happen until 1998

By that time, captain Janeway was in the middle of the delta quadrant, stirring up trouble.

I wonder if the shows had any influence on the US Navy letting in women earlier.

joshspankit• 4 years ago

In fact, many of the plots were used as a way to “sneak” progressive ideas past the network execs. Gene would have had to make them think he was a certain kind of person pushing a certain kind of narrative instead of who he was, pushing those progressive ideas.

flomo3• 4 years ago

Eh, the bigger issue was Roddenberry was a Weinstein-type producer who hired women who he was sleeping with. "Free Love" guy who signed the checks. He's describing a particular actress who has been open with the star trek community about her issues. He is almost bragging that he could put her into a major role. (Even back in 1960s, this point in the proposal was creepy and barely appeared in the tv show.)

concordDance4• 4 years ago

How is pitching a sexy women a women-hating thing to do?

pjc50• 4 years ago

As others have said, while this looks exploitative to modern eyes it was in the context where having a women serve in the quasi-military context of Trek was almost absurdly progressive. At the time, NASA refused to contemplate putting women in space, despite the efforts of a shadow training programme (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercury_13) - far more misogynistic.

Trek also featured an interracial kiss (not quite the first, but nearly) at a time when interracial marriage was still illegal in several states. It was very much the SJW show of its time.

akamaka2• 4 years ago

Not a Star Trek related question, but I noticed that the title is printed in a special cursive font, while the rest of the document is typewritten. What kind of machine would have been used in 1964 to print a custom font for a one-off document?

zeckalpha2• 4 years ago

A pen, perhaps? Inksmanship, drafting, lettering all were much more common skills.

Could also be stickers, hot metal typesetting (unlikely), or even phototypesetting.

gumby2• 4 years ago

I don't think there was phototype in 1964. Probably Letraset.

I think phototypesetters arrived around 1974

jcrawfordor2• 4 years ago

In '64, this might have been reproduced on a Xerographic photocopier, although it's also possible it was reproduced photographically (to produce offset plates) if they were making a large number. Either way I suspect it's most likely the "Star Trek" lettering was done by hand, but another possibility would be pressure transfer lettering.

akamaka2• 4 years ago

I think you’re right about the pressure transfer lettering. Letraset was introduced in 1961, and it looks like their “Brush Script” font. This would have been cutting edge graphic design when Roddenberry wrote it!

temporallobe3• 4 years ago

It could have been created the old fashioned way, with a stencil and ink. After being photocopied, it would look indistinguishable.

msisk6• 4 years ago

Back then there were several ways to do this sort of thing.

Rub-off dry transfer lettering like those from Letraset or mechanical pantographs like the Leroy were commonly used for technical lettering.

But it was probably hand drawn -- "draftsman" and graphic artists were found in all sorts of office settings that you don't see today.

masswerk2• 4 years ago

To me, this looks like the Brush Script font [1]. Probably Letraset [2] or a similar system. (Display lettering was the actual purpose of Letraset.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brush_Script

[2] Compare: https://www.pinterest.at/pin/brush-script-24pt60pt-letraset-...

Maursault2• 4 years ago

Though I doubt the document was typeset (because it appears typed by a typewriter), before desktop publishing, and before typesetting computer systems, there was phototypesetting.[1] Because this is only a minor element on one page, I doubt it was phototypeset and instead merely pasted up with type tape... literally rolls of clear tape for every font with one letter on it repeated over and over in all point sizes. Lots and lots of these rolls of tape in production art areas. You cut off the letter from that roll of tape, stick it to the paste up, get the next letter from the next roll, stick it next to the first letter, find the roll for the lower case "a," cut it, trim it with an exacto knife, and place it, find the roll with the lowercase "r" in that font and point size, and so on and so forth. The tape was mostly used for last minute corrections, typos in the photostat type, wasn't really for typesetting a lot of copy, but using 8 letters or more of type tape wasn't out of the ordinary.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phototypesetting

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

The main text surely was typed on a typewriter. Computer printed letters didn't really start happening until 1980 or so. Around then I bought a Diablo 630 daisywheel printer. That would produce beautiful typed pages, but monospaced. The printer paper had sprocket holes which were torn off after printing, but if you ran your finger over the edges you could tell.

Proportional computer fonts weren't printed much until laser printers appeared, which revolutionized everything.

jakzurr3• 4 years ago

This is almost certainly custom stationary; we called it Letterhead. Even before computers. You get it from a print shop, you roll it into your typewriter, and start typing. And try not to waste it, it's expensive!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letterhead

RichardCA• 4 years ago

The way it worked in the old days is you would have a graphic designer make your logo, then you take it to an offset printing shop and they would make your stationery for you. Same with business cards, as made famous in that scene from American Psycho.

soferio• 4 years ago

The very last plot idea, “infestation“, seems to predate and be kinda similar to the Alien franchise.

shadowgovt2• 4 years ago

It ended up manifested, sort of, in "Lights of Zetar" (or, you could make the argument, slumbered in the concept space all the way to Strange New Worlds' "All Who Wander").

jakzurr3• 4 years ago

"Lights of Zetar" - first episode I ever saw; don't think I was even a teenager. (Didn't always get to stay up that late.) Scared the heck out of me...

Not sure if it was really that great. Maybe because it was so dark outside that night? But yeah, wonderful memories.

skerit• 4 years ago

Seems like that's what eventually turned into the episode "The Child" of TNG. Which was earlier to be used in the never-made "Star Trek Phase 2" series a good decade earlier.

And even then, the episode only got made because there was a writers strike and they had to use scripts that were mostly finished already.

And even then the episode still sucked! It's currently ranked as the 170th episode out of a total of 176

temporallobe3• 4 years ago

This is pure gold. The basic premise of many of those episode ideas at the top turned into actual episodes.

dmix2• 4 years ago

This is why they always tell startup founders to study how Hollywood pitches are done.

Putting together a good collection of these would be valuable to founders.

Not just for tech startups by anyone selling ideas... Writers selling novels, governments pitching policy ideas, lawyers defending clients, corporate workers pitching new ideas internally, etc etc

gsatic• 4 years ago

Thats all startup founders (and for that matter most Americans who want to succeed) end up studying. Beyond being great salespeople with great stories there is nothing else interesting going on in the mind.

techdragon2• 4 years ago

I'm surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels.

It really feels reflective of a different era, coming from a modern perspective Id never dare include something like that, with a big "scary looking formula" that needed explanation text, in the first half dozen pages. I wouldn't trust the reader to care enough to keep reading one word past the formula if I didn't already have them reasonably invested in the concept. These days there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money for all fields artistic, scientific, and financial ... Statistically your odds of making it past their initial selection process gets worse and worse and you’ve even seen some push back against this with more "shotgun" approaches to funding strategies, but this isn't as common outside the startup world. With risk appetites falling we get ever more obsessed with having the initial pitch be hyper-polished to the point I've seen people reference eye tracking studies while designing a slide deck layout, the last hope of "thoughtful consideration" having been extinguished as they try to ensure that the first few glances at their pitch deck slides might entice the viewer to look beyond the thumbnail.

So yeah living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment we have today, page two was a real whiplash moment for me... really just adds to how interesting it is to read this.

nelox• 4 years ago

I wonder, how has the calculation changed based on current knowledge?

techdragon2• 4 years ago

Well given how much we have learned about exoplanets, I'd say that at least one number of the assumptions are rather moot. The "how many stars even have planets" can be assumed to be basically "all of them" statistically speaking. ( https://www.nature.com/articles/nature10684 ) and while we can't yet say much about the specifics of their composition (a spectroscopy of the light passing through earth sized exoplanet atmospheres is at the cutting edge of research, with people mostly still working on new instruments, and trying to find lucky candidates where we can get any reading at all with current instruments) but we can definitely impact the lower bounds a bit here since based on current data, about 1 in 5 stars is suspected to have an earth sized planet. ( https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.6806 )

So the "... if only one in a billion of these stars is a sun with a planet... ... and only one in a billion of these is of earth size--" is now " 1 in every 5 stars has an earth sized planet and if only X% are earth like"

morder• 4 years ago

If i recall right (from a documentary or interview with roddenberry) is that he made up the equation (though he knew of the drake equation) to justify that aliens exist to the people he was pitching to. I guess they just didn't believe that many aliens would exist.

dottrap• 4 years ago

Not only that, they wrote part of this math into a monologue for Dr. McCoy, where McCoy was advising Kirk.

    In this galaxy, there's a mathematical probability of three million Earth-type planets. And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this. And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us.

    Don't destroy the one named Kirk.

From the episode Balance of Terror:

https://youtu.be/2237SaR75iw?t=83

bryanrasmussen• 4 years ago

should have countered with Level 1: An extension of our Universe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiverse#Level_I:_An_extensi... there's an infinity of Kirk

djmips• 4 years ago

I read that and Carl Sagan's voice comes to mind.

kubanczyk• 4 years ago

And in all of the universe, three million million galaxies like this.
And in all of that... and perhaps more, only one of each of us.

It doesn't follow.

The bigger the universe, the more it contains exact duplicates of you. If the universe is literally infinite, it is obvious there exists an infinite number of you. We can see only a limited slice of it, but it's not a proof there are no duplicates of you in that slice.

fuzzfactor• 4 years ago

surprised at how jarring the math and background on page 2 feels.
there is an endless firehose of pitches in-front of people with the money
living in the hyper-optimised pitch environment

This does seem to be a pitch that worked wonders in such an environment.

On page 1 it says what they want to do, and page 2 its almost like exaggerating the upside of their market to seem mathematically infinite during a startup pitch.

Everyone involved already knew the finite (but huge) size of their (highly lucrative) market at the time, no need to elaborate about it.

Let science turn fiction into reality instead.

rkagerer• 4 years ago

I never knew... the USS Enterprise was almost named the S.S. Yorktown.

https://www.cbr.com/star-trek-why-enterprise-yorktown/

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

"eliminating the need to encumber our stories with tiresome scientific explanations"

Sigh.

flomo3• 4 years ago

Maybe you are assuming it would be actually "scientific". IMO, TNG Technobabble was one of the worst elements of the later shows and inspired a legion of lukewarm nerd bullshit.

WalterBright6• 4 years ago

I agree with you about the technobabble in TNG and how awful it was. But I've read enough scifi that did have reasonable scientific explanations for things like a warp drive, they just didn't want to make the effort. I'm also annoyed by characterizing it as "tiresome", I don't find reasonable explanations tiresome at all.

TeMPOraL5• 4 years ago

Strong disagree. Technobabble inspired a generation of STEM people, and at least early TNG, when the show had proper scientific consultation, it was a delight. Problem came with the witers' attitudes and production cheapening out - ignoring internal reference works, treating exposition as something you can stub out with a "[TECH]" placeholder, to be substituted by some word salad after the episode is already written.

In fact, I think technobabble was critical to the effect of the show getting people into science and engineering, and its omission would kill that effect - it's because it delivered a message: any problem faced can be overcome with help of science and technology. Sure, the terms were bullshit, but all this talk about nadion particle counts and how many cochranes does the subspace field measure, etc. reads as "this is all things we can investigate, understand, measure, build machines around".

This overall feeling - that there's nothing out of scope for science and engineering - is a major theme of all Trek shows, and pretty unique to Star Trek. In other works of sci-fi on TV, the writers tend to be too busy writing character stories and focusing on people to the exclusion of everything else.

(I may be biased about this, because TNG and its technobabble are what got me interested in the sciences, and is indirectly why I ended up working in software.)

ilaksh• 4 years ago

In some ways I really love Star Trek. But you can see (like many things these days) that the initial paradigm has been carried through over the decades and it shows it's age and limitations.

For example, stereotyping (each "alien race" has its own predominant substantive characteristics) and glorification of the military are core parts of the structure.

TeMPOraL5• 4 years ago

It's interesting to see how the show ended up being both similar and completely different from this original pitch. Having grown up on TNG-era Star Trek, my first reaction to this document was, "WTF" and "no way in hell a person who wrote this should be let anywhere near the writers' room"[0]. I take this as a demonstration that one shouldn't be too attached to their first / original ideas.

stereotyping (each "alien race" has its own predominant substantive characteristics)

Yeah, the so-called "planet of hats" trope is integral to the show, and spilled to many others (Stargate franchise being a good example). They did try to subvert it a couple of times, most notably and to great effect with the Cardassians and the Bajorans in DS9, and to a lesser extent with the Klingons in ENT. I wish they'd do it some more[1].

glorification of the military

It doesn't sound that bad in context of the show itself, because the people are different. Starfleet may be a military, but (at least in TNG-era shows) it's one that's philosophically focused on everything else other than fighting and killing. For proper glorification of the military, nothing beats the Stargate series, SG-1 in particular.

Still, I'd argue that it makes sense in context. Even with the science fantasy of the franchise, by the shows' own numbers, every starship in Star Trek is a mobile, FTL-capable WMD platform. A single TNG-era photon torpedo is given a yield 30% larger than that of a Tsar Bomba[2]; TNG's Enterprise-D carried a standard complement of 250. Phasers are capable of (and shown to be used for) impromptu geoengineering. Impulse engines can speed things up to double-digit percentage of the speed of light. There's no way in hell a future with tech like this isn't thoroughly militarized - not because of potential of conflicts, but because of the need to control the tech that can casually wipe out life on planets.

----

[0] - My second reaction was, my God, Roddenberry knew how to pitch a studio.

[1] - I generally wish the new shows would work more with what they have. There's decades of continuous worldbuilding to take from, there is no need to introduce new strange aliens and situations every other episode.

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba - 50 MT for the nuke, ~64 MT for a Starfleet photon torpedo, based on its stated 1.5 kg antimatter payload and E=mc².

makach• 4 years ago

Robert M. April :-o

gustavorg• 4 years ago

I wonder how Jose Ortega(s) becomes Hikaru Sulu or Pavel Chekov.

TeMPOraL5• 4 years ago

Apparently he became José Tyler in the series pilot[0]. And, of course, nearly 60 years later, we now have Erica Ortegas[1] named after that original character.

----

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Tyler

[1] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Erica_Ortegas

usrusr• 4 years ago

Does that robot planet episode exist? It clearly exists in Futurama, just wondering wether that was inspired by Star Trek, or rather by that Star Trek pitch document?

_joel• 4 years ago

It travels around in a cube instead :)

xsmasher• 4 years ago

Parts of it sound like "What Are Little Girls Made Of"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Are_Little_Girls_Made_Of%...

trebligdivad• 4 years ago

Fascinating! Bones is just as described. I'd realised a while ago that the 'ship' is the structure; the fact it's a 'spaceship' is a detail but it's very naval in organisation.

stevenalowe• 4 years ago

Fascinating

chkaloon• 4 years ago

Great find. Tyrannosaurus in 1,000,000 BC though? More like 65,000,000

peter303• 4 years ago

Lucille Ball's best or second best decision in television history was to greenlight Star Trek. It was not a straightforward process, requiring an unusual 2nd pilot.

_tom_3• 4 years ago

It was fun to look for hints of actual episodes in the episode suggestions.

"Mirror" and "Charlie" for examples, and many others.

Star Trek (1964) [pdf]

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