A Brief Guide to Star Trek

Man and the Challenge
, produced by an ex-Ziv-TV creative, Ivan Tors (later respon -sible for Florida-based sea adventure series
Sea Hunt
and
Flipper
). That series took a similar tone, following a team of scientists as they tested human endurance on behalf of the US government in order to prepare astronauts for their travels into space.
    Many early television science fiction dramas drew on the fantastic movie serials of the 1930s and 1940s for inspiration in their heavily serialised format and melodramatic approach to action. From the earliest days of film in the late 1890s, the medium was used to depict the fantastic. French surrealist Georges Méliès developed trick photographic effects, testing the limits of the new medium, and discovered that fantasy stories were most suitable to these explorations. From 1902’s
A Trip to the Moon
through 1912’s
Conquest of the Pole
, Méliès’ films were tales of the fantastic that also dramatically developed film techniques and technology. Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
(1927) and
Woman in the Moon
(1929) saw out the silent science fiction era.
    Episodic serials dominated the 1930s through to the 1950s, spurred by comic strip-inspired characters like Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, who also fuelled the early science fiction TV shows of the 1950s. Universal horror films of the 1930s, featuring supernatural creatures like Frankenstein’s monster, Dracula, the Wolf Man and the Invisible Man, led to the 1950s’ science fiction boom that was dominated by creature features in which post-war atomic fears inspired pulp thrills. Monster-dominated films included
Them!
(1954),
20 Million Miles to Earth
(1957) and
The Blob
. Aliens arrived on Earth – often set on domination of mankind – in
The Day the Earth Stood Still
(1951),
The Thing from Another World
(1951) and
The War of the Worlds
(1952). Another strand of science fiction film was based upon exploration of the unknown, whether it be
20,000 Leagues Under the Sea
(1954) or
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
(1959). Prime among the films that took the outward-looking exploration of deep space as their focus was
Forbidden Planet
(1956).
    Easily the biggest influence on the development of the look and feel of
Star Trek
,
Forbidden Planet
featured many elements that would become standardised by the three-year run of the original
Star Trek
TV show. Creator Gene Roddenberry freely admitted to the influence of the film in an early memo to production executive Herb Solow in which he discussed the design of his proposed TV series’ starship: ‘You may recall we saw MGM’s
Forbidden Planet
some weeks ago,’ wrote Roddenberry on 10 August 1964. ‘I think it would be interesting to take another very hard look at the spaceship, its configurations, controls, instrumentations, etc, while planning our own. We have no intention of copying that ship, but a detailed look at it again would do much to stimulate our own thinking.’
    It wasn’t only the ship from
Forbidden Planet
that would be echoed in
Star Trek
: much of the overall approach of the movie to its story, characters and setting would find a place on television in Roddenberry’s space adventure series. Like
Forbidden Planet
,
Star Trek
would also be set around 200 years in the future; the ship would have an alpha-numeric designation (C57D in
Forbidden Planet
, NCC-1701 in
Star Trek
, both Navy-inspired); and
Star Trek
’s central trio of Kirk, Spock and McCoy would reflect the core triumvirate of the earlier film’s crew: the captain, chief science officer and chief medical officer. These influences, while confessed to by Roddenberry in his memo, are more due to the creative people behind both
Forbidden Planet
and
Star Trek
looking to the American military, and in particular the Navy, for inspiration for their space exploration ships and crews. Even the uniforms, down to the departmental colour coding and insignia, on both the film and the later TV series, are uncannily similar. It should be noted, too, that as a space-set partial retelling of Shakespeare’s
The Tempest
,
Forbidden Planet
was itself far from original.
    Also of interest is a now little-remembered 1963 Czech movie
Ikarie XB-1
(released in an English-dubbed version as
Voyage to the End of the Universe
). The film follows the journey of the Ikarus XB-1 starship, whose multi-national crew must cope with the rigours of deep space travel. The episodic film has the crew encounter a derelict twentieth-century space