Author: Jesse MacKinnon

The people who turned their television sets to NBC at 8:30pm on Thursday, September 8, 1966 were greeted with a show that flummoxed the critics, the censors, and even the network that was airing it. But the younger generation, coming of age in a time of cultural revolution, took this genre-defining television show to heart. While it conveyed messages that some of the old guard were unprepared for, it did not come to fruition in a cultural vacuum. Star Trek was the aesthetic product of a long literary tradition, other film and television, and of 1960s social politics—all reappropriated to send Captain Kirk and his crew where no man had gone before.

Star Trek’s distant ancestors arose with the adventure novel. Jonathan Swift’s Captain Gulliver traversed a decidedly fantasy world, populated with giants, homonculi and immortals. Political satire was the most important component of these tales, as the fantasy served as a direct metaphor for contemporaneous political events. Science Fiction took an important early turn with Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, which cemented the role of naval parlance within Science Fiction. Indeed, later writers took direct inspiration from the iconography of the Nautilus, placing similar tales of adventure in outer space.

These literary trends were galvanized with the Golden Age of Science Fiction. Amongst these were colorful action-adventure stories of interstellar conflict, often directed at children. They were further distilled in 1941, when Wilson Tucker proposed “space opera” as the appropriate term for the “hacky, grinding, stinking, outworn, spaceship yarn.” Although the term was originally pejorative, it is now frequently used with nostalgic affection, applying to large scale space adventure stories.

During the 1940s some of the naive charm of literary space opera was lost as standards of writing rose. Plots became more complicated, and the trend shifted towards a more vivid and lush romanticism. Most notable were the works of A.E. van Vogt, a master of intricate, metaphysical space opera. His tales were populated with the monsters, time paradoxes and quasimessianic supermen which would later inform Star Trek. Yet van Vogt was hardly the sole influence from this period that Trek would later draw from. The canon of Robert Heinlein contrasted militaristic themes and a free sex attitude. And by the time Isaac Asimov wrote his Foundation series using the theme of the “Galactic Empire,” the impression of vast scale so important to space opera was no longer the sole prerogative of straightforward adventure stories; it could now be used in a more serious context.

As Science Fiction literature was experiencing its Renaissance, it found an explosion of creativity in the medium of film. At the apogee of this trend was Forbidden Planet, which served as the text that most directly influenced Star Trek. In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest, a regimented, military space vessel filled with male crewmen visits a planet; they encounter an unstable scientist; the captain romances his daughter; and in the end the narrative communicates an existential lesson. The plot, mixing the tawdry and the potent, is very sophisticated for its time—astonishingly so for a film ostensibly designed for a juvenile audience.

Television’s contribution to the genre of science fiction was largely postponed until the beginning of the 1960s. What the small screen did offer were serials that parroted Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. From Captain Video to Space Patrol, these kiddie serials were lacking in storytelling and character development. To be sure, the spirit of these entries in the genre continued with the collected works of Irwin Allen; yet they were eclipsed by a more mature piece of television programming.

American science fiction television changed forever in 1959. The Twilight Zone, the half-hour CBS series hosted by Rod Serling (with his trademark cigarette, thin black tie and rasping voice) was perhaps the most famous anthology series to ever grace television. Though most of the episodes were pure Fantasy, a number of them were science fiction, including the pilot episode “Where is Everybody?” Soon after, ABC premiered The Outer Limits, their hour long answer to the speculative fiction anthology format. Though leaning more towards the monster-movie end of the science fiction spectrum, the series was often innovative in both style and subject matter; indeed, many of its writers were literary science fiction professionals and expanded the conventions of the genre.

These circumstances led Desilu and NBC to investigate the possibility of a new series. The space opera serial was a proven television format, albeit for a younger audience; and the speculative fiction anthology had proven to be moderately successful at rival networks.  Therefore writer Gene Roddenberry’s pitch for Star Trek operated as a nexus between two successful genres: the iconography and conventions of the kiddie space shows, and the format of the anthology programs. The spaceship would travel to a new planet each week and find a different array of challenges.

Roddenberry had pitched his show as “Wagon Train to the Stars,” expounding on the dearth of Westerns currently enjoying wild success on television. These shows drew on a diverse literary tradition. The ideology they espoused had found perfect expression in Fredrick Jackson Turner’s Frontier thesis, which optimistically viewed society as an organism evolving inexorably from “simple” to “complex.” While this characterization is ultimately an inadequate representation of profound transformations, several of the important films of the Western genre—notably Howard Hawks’ Red River and George Stevens’ Shane—propagated an erroneous perception of land on the Frontier and its “evolving” use, namely in their presentation of it as an unspoiled wilderness.

This American folklore was concurrently being redeployed in American politics, this time to serve a moderately liberal agenda. In 1960, John F. Kennedy stated that “We stand on the edge of a New Frontier—the frontier of unfulfilled hopes and dreams, a frontier of unknown opportunities and beliefs in peril. Beyond that frontier are uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war, unconquered problems of ignorance and prejudice, unanswered questions of poverty and surplus.” In the minds of its creators, Star Trek would represent the natural fulfillment of Kennedy’s promises centuries hence; what would be termed “The Final Frontier.”

Of course, NBC and Desilu remained for-profit corporations more interested in pleasing stockholders and advertisers than communicating any overtly political message. Yet Kennedy’s message was not a radical proposal; the “New Frontier” represented a moderate strain of American political thought. And with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, progressive trends of inclusivity were codified in American law and began to work their way into the cultural mainstream. Therefore there was enough advertiser interest in a series that would cater to a broad audience, with special appeal to a youth demographic. And if the political talk remained coded and within the larger pluralist center, all the better.